Gothic cathedral on the water
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| Gothic cathedral on the water |
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| Karl Friedrich Schinkel , 1813 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 80 × 106.5 cm |
| Old National Gallery, Berlin |
Gothic Cathedral on the Water is the title of a painting by Karl Friedrich Schinkel from 1813. It shows a theatrically composed and illuminated view of a monumental Gothic cathedral that was never built, but already indicates Schinkel's later architectural designs in the neo-Gothic style. The painting belongs to the Romantic era and was highly valued for its patriotic and programmatic content shortly after its creation. It was therefore copied several times. Today the picture is shown in Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie .
Image content and interpretation
The painting is carried out using the technique of oil on canvas and is 80 × 106.5 cm in landscape format. From 1842 to 1923 it was exhibited in the former Schinkel Museum (later Beuth Schinkel Museum), Berlin. Since then it has belonged to the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie and has the inventory number A III 842.
It shows a four-tower Gothic cathedral , which rises on a rocky island above a medieval town with a small antique prostyle temple on the right edge of the picture, and a classical building with a vestibule. Further elements of the city can be assigned to the Gothic and Renaissance periods in northern European latitudes. The depicted cathedral is a monumental architecture which, in its filigree form of an idealized Gothic, lets a theatrical evening light shine through.
The viewer's low point of view, facing west towards the soon-to-set sun, enables the painter to use light that enhances the glare effect. The choir of the cathedral, like the east towers and the transept, are in the shade and only reveal the silhouette of the building at first glance. Only gradually do the details of the cathedral become apparent to the viewer. The tracery of the west towers receives as much light thanks to its translucent design is that the smallest details are visible. The double spiral staircases leading up to the west towers are remarkable , as are the two bundles of light that shine between the towers, through a lancet window and the space between the towers, and the crucifixion group under the arch of a porch on the south west tower. The unreal theatrical representation is enhanced by the color of the sky with its clear blue and the dramatic cloud structure, partly painted in pink, which recedes above the cathedral to reinforce the effect of the upward striving of Gothic architecture. The figures in the foreground on the harbor quay and the group of people in front of the symmetrical staircase to the Domplateau also illustrate the proportions and proportions that Schinkel intended. According to the art historian Rüdiger Becksmann, motifs of this first picture of several of a Schinkel cathedral were influenced by the cathedral of Orléans . But also elements of the cathedrals of Milan , Prague , the Strasbourg Cathedral and St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna can be found in the picture.
In the foreground, directly on the quay, is an octagonal Gothic statue with iron rings for fastening boats. The people positioned around this column by Schinkel do everyday work, rest and communicate with one another. They are all related in different ways to this column, which is to be understood as a symbol for the bundling of human efforts and forces, which make it possible to build such a cathedral that strives boldly into the infinite of heaven. The point points exactly upwards to the crossing , i.e. the point of the cathedral where the transept and the main nave cross.
Schinkel's painting Gothic Cathedral on the Water should be understood on the one hand patriotic with regard to the expected wars of liberation from Napoleonic domination, but also religious. The artist himself writes about the ancient art of vaulted construction : ... the Germans, however, seize it with the originality and freedom of their nature and soon understood how to use it to express that world of ideas that came from both the original spirit of the people and the views of Christianity pushed for external realization. The painting Gothic Cathedral on the Water thus has a visionary character , which is underlined by the distinction between the here and now, in the foreground in the everyday activities of people, and the other world, recognizable by the sacred architecture. This effect is reinforced by a genre-like scene on the harbor quay in which a well-dressed couple is about to board a boat to be transferred to the cathedral. The picture also contains allusions to Schinkel's conception of architecture. The filigree design of the tracery between the west towers is a reference to Schinkel's cast iron work, in which the desired filigree was realized. The Gothic red brick building to the left of the west towers of the cathedral, with its little pinnacle towers on the almost flat roof, already points to his Friedrichswerder Church in Berlin from 1824 to 1831. The small temple on the right bank of the picture indicates Schinkel's classicist architectural conception, which contrasts with his Gothic-style political stance on the wars of freedom; it is based on his Pomona temple near Potsdam, built in 1801 .
Copies
Since Schinkel's original was not for sale, copies of the painting were made by various artists. August Wilhelm Julius Ahlborn created a copy for the Berlin banker and Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener in 1823, which later formed the basis of the National Gallery with Wagener's collection. This work came to the Moscow Pushkin Museum after 1945 . The Berlin painter Karl Eduard Biermann made a second copy with the title Dom over a City around 1830, which is shown today in Munich's Neue Pinakothek . The landscape painter Gustav Adolf Boenisch also made a copy, which was shown in Königsberg in 1833, but whose further fate could no longer be clarified. In 1931 a copy of the picture, of which it is not known whether it was the version by Bönisch acquired by the Nationalgalerie in 1888 or another picture, fell victim to the fire in the Munich Glass Palace .
Exhibitions and literature
A detailed list of the exhibitions of the picture and the literature published on the subject can be found on the database page of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
Web links
- The gothic cathedral on the water on karlfriedrichschinkel.de
- Abstract plants, precise architecture - on the infrared investigations of Schinkel's paintings at the Nationalgalerie at smb.museum
Individual evidence
- ↑ R. Becksmann: Schinkel and the Gothic. Deutscher Kunstverlag 1967, OCLC 888551349 , p. 263ff.
- ^ Website of the Mahagoni magazine (accessed November 3, 2014)
- ^ Dieter Honisch: Paintings of the German Romanticism from the National Gallery Berlin, State Museums of Prussian Cultural Heritage. Caspar David Friedrich, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Carl Blechen. Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-88725-202-0 , p. 78.
- ^ Hannelore Gärtner: Schinkel studies. (= Seemann contributions to art history. ) EA Seemann, Leipzig 1984, OCLC 12149418 , p. 195ff.
- ↑ Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen: Masterpieces in Detail , Volume 2, Taschen, Cologne 2011, p. 528
- ^ Website of the Neue Pinakothek, Munich
- ^ Online database of the National Museums in Berlin - Prussian Cultural Heritage