Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

A man in a dark frock coat stands on a rocky summit with his back to us, leaning on a cane, gazing out over a vast sea of swirling fog from which distant peaks emerge. Caspar David Friedrich makes the lone figure a stand-in for the viewer, contemplating the immensity and mystery of nature. Now in Hamburg, the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog has become the defining image of Romanticism - the solitary soul before the sublime, dwarfed yet exalted, poised between mastery and humility at the edge of the infinite.