The Painter 192 impact some of the paintings in the collection had on him, those visits are also mentioned in written sources. The Russian poet and imperial court tutor Vasily Zhukovsky, for example, described visits to the picture gallery with Friedrich in April 1821. To his surprise, Friedrich “could not name the painters” of many of the works, “but he found beauty or defects in numerous paintings that only those who have looked into the textbook of nature would ever notice.”8 He also reported on Friedrich’s assessment of three religious works in the gallery – Titian’s The Tribute Money,9 Carlo Dolci’s Christ Blessing the Sacraments,10 and Ercole de’ Roberti’s painting of The Ascent to Calvary11 – all of which revolved around the question of the truth of feeling,12 a topic that Friedrich would later address in his own written work of art criticism.13 STAFFAGE Friedrich’s struggles with the human figure and his alleged inability to render it convincingly has become something of a trope among Friedrich scholars and is based primarily on the elongated figures in his Schiller illustrations of 1801.14 In 1811, it was even claimed that some of the figures in Friedrich’s landscape paintings had in fact been painted by his friend, the artist Georg Friedrich Kersting.15 Friedrich’s engagement with the figures that enliven his landscapes runs through his entire oeuvre – from the figure studies on a sketchbook sheet of 1799/1800 (fig. 1) to the abbreviated marks he used to indicate the size of people in his landscape studies and the two unrealised wanderers in The Large Enclosure near Dresden of 1832 (fig. 15, p. 289).16 3 Adriaen Fransz. Boudewijns and Peeter Bout Well on the Lake Shore Not dated | CAT 216 4 Adriaen Fransz. Boudewijns, Peeter Bout Well on the Lake Shore Not dated | CAT 261 Detail from fig. 3 5 Caspar David Friedrich Figure Studies. Drawings after Staffage in Netherlandish Paintings in the Dresden Picture Gallery | 1800 | CAT 30 Detail from fig. 1
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTMyNjA1