Two publications show how in Caspar David Friedrich’s world mankind is puny against nature’s power and glory
While field, meadow and trees seem to descend towards the viewer, that left-to-right diagonal is powerfully offset, in the painting’s upper half, by the sheer weight of the evening sky, a mass of lavender-tinged clouds parting to reveal horizontal bands of yellowish-orange produced by the setting sun, a fading glimpse of a world beyond.