A geographical pilgrimage permitted a pilgrimage within the self. Wanderlust, to them, was inherently existential: new physical pathways opened new pathways within the mind. The Prussian natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt, the English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and, later, the French Realist Gustave Courbet and his compatriot symbolist Paul Gauguin were all central to philosophizing, writing, or painting about travel as a way of opening up the soul. It is a historical guidepost that acts as the hinge between the late eighteenth-century German Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) movement, which manifested in visual art as scenes of storms and shipwrecks representing the awesome power of nature’s irrational destruction, and the later Romantic depiction, which, as in Friedrich’s painting, with a silhouetted figure allowed the viewer to read the natural scene as representative of a subjective internal human state. Instead, it functions as a symbolic stand-in for European Romanticism and ideals of wanderlust at large. It has been so distilled to its narrative essence of soul-searching and travel that the actual strokes, the artistic style, cease to matter. Today, Friedrich’s painting has a postcard feel about it. The man is at once a master of the universe and entirely subservient to it: even from high above, he can only see a challenging sliver of what he might otherwise think he controls. The fog parts for him, but only just so, revealing not verdant hills and lush forests but dense mountainsides and jagged rocks. The image shows a moment of ultimate self-reflection in the vein of Immanuel Kant-a privileged man working out his interior feelings through exterior Romantic symbolism. In Caspar David Friedrich’s most famous painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), the German Romantic artist depicts a young, aristocratic-looking man in a green overcoat as he stands atop a jagged rock, taking in a misty, high-altitude scene of mountains and cliffs. Casper David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1817
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