241 3 Caspar David Friedrich Marienkirche Stralsund, Design for an Altarpiece (design for an altarpiece on The Cross in the Mountains) 1817/1818 | CAT 138 4 Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Müller after Raphael The Sistine Madonna 1809–1816 | CAT 298 belonged to the Catholic Bohemian aristocracy. However, Friedrich probably sympathised with the politics of von Thun-Hohenstein, who had fought against Napoleon in the Imperial Austrian army12 before his marriage. Meanwhile, for her part as a practiced pastel painter and copyist, Theresia would have fully appreciated that the painting represented a revolutionary break with art-historical convention. At Christmas 1808 – probably at the suggestion of his circle of friends – Friedrich put the work on public display in his studio. He placed it on a table draped with a black cloth and curtained off a window to recreate the “twilight of a chapel lit by lamps”13 and thus heighten the mysterious glow of the painting and its frame.14 Helene Marie von Kügelgen reported: “Everyone who entered the room was moved as if they were entering a temple.”15 This presentation transformed the artist’s studio into a devotional space, artistic practice into an act of worship16 – and did so not long after Napoleon had severely curtailed the power of the Church, with the dissolution of the monasteries in conquered territories in 1803. This was another reason for the indignant reaction of the art critic Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr, who took exception to Caspar David Friedrich’s “arrant presumption” and denounced The Cross in the Mountains as a landscape painting trying “to sneak into the church and creep onto the altar.”17 Friedrich’s solemn staging of his altarpiece was entirely in keeping with early Romantic ideas about the interpenetration of the arts in a Gesamtkunstwerk (even though that term would only be coined some years later).18 A similar vision was shared by Friedrich’s friend Philipp Otto Runge for his cycle devoted to the Times of Day (fig. 7, p. 323). Another link between The Cross in the Mountains and Runge’s Times of Day is the relationship between frame and image. In Friedrich’s work, these follow different semantics: traditional Christian imagery in the frame and allegorical landscape painting on the canvas. In a watercolour (fig. 3) with a comparable compositional arrangement that evidently draws from The Cross in the Mountains, Friedrich laid greater stress on the overall symmetry of the piece. But in that watercolour, the landscape appears more ornamental and less convincing, which underscores its purely allegorical function.19 Looking to create programmatic images of the new religiosity of the age of Romanticism, both Runge and Friedrich drew on Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (fig. 4), with its light-flushed divine sky populated
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