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In the fifth room, we are focusing on Friedrich’s religious paintings.

A panoramic view and silence. Rugged rocks and mountain ridges. A series culminating in the highest ridge against a cloudless sky, transcendent, yet tangibly close – the Watzmann, the highest mountain in the Berchtesgaden Alps, with its snow-covered peak. There are no human figures – not even an animal – nothing to distract from the mountain’s majestic presence. Friedrich often included religious symbols in his works, such as crosses on paths or summits, but here you will look for them in vain. Instead, for him, this depiction of the overwhelming vastness of nature is itself sufficient to evoke the divine.

In fact, Friedrich never saw the Watzmann himself. He hiked the mountains of Saxon Switzerland, the Harz and Bohemia, but never went to the Alps. For this painting, he used a study made on site by his student Johann August Heinrich, and added some features from his own sketches. Friedrich’s rock formation in the central foreground, for instance, is based on his sketch of the Trudelstein, a granite formation in the Harz Mountains. Moreover, Friedrich did not set out to copy the landscape perfectly. “Landscape copyists” was his rather disparaging term for artists who just precisely reproduced the landscapes they saw. In contrast, he called himself a “landscape painter”. His paintings are art works, based on precise studies of nature yet freely composed after his inner vision of beauty and the sublimity of nature with the aim of conveying an idea of the divine.