Landscape with Forest Chapel

"Art... stands as a uniting link between the soul and nature, and can be apprehended only in the living center of both," wrote philosopher Friedrich von Schelling in 1807. Artists such as Heinrich Johann Gärtner, who used landscape to evoke religious and spiritual ideas, eagerly took up this tenet of Romanticism.

With a fine-nibbed pen and a virtuoso technique, Gärtner painstakingly differentiated species while creating an ornamental forest of dense yet delicate layers of plants. But he portrayed more than plants: his diminutive humans express a contemplative spirituality in which humanity is both immersed in and one with nature. The shepherd tending his flock and the religious procession approaching a chapel with a graveyard also allude to earlier religions, both pagan and medieval. In a manner reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich, whose Christian art was similarly based in nature, the forest is hushed and waiting.

Digital image and text courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.