The Cathedral

~FRIEDRICH is recognized today as the supreme German painter of the Romantic era, but in his own time his genius was not so widely acknowledged. This was not because the aims of his art were foreign to the interests of his generation. On the contrary, his allusions to the spiritual in nature, his close study of local landscape and his emphasis on the need...

In the bitter turn-of-the-century struggle between science and religion, contradictory positions became firmly entrenched. Spiritual values were both drastically weakened and rigidly reinforced, while bodily functions were both privately investigated and publicly tabooed...