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Caspar David Friedrich noted of his painting The Cross in the Mountains: “The Cross stands raised on a rock, unshakably firm, as our faith in Jesus Christ. Around the Cross stand the pines, evergreen through all the years, like our hope in Him, the Crucified.”

At that time, The Cross in the Mountains was a revolutionary work. It is also known as the Tetschen Altar since, for many years, it was kept in Tetschen Castle in Bohemia. Moreover, it is designed as an altar with steps, a base with Christian symbols, and a gilded wooden frame decorated with angels’ heads. Friedrich designed the frame himself and had it made by a friend who was a sculptor.

But his altarpiece does not show a biblical scene or holy figures – just a tall, slim crucifix angled away from the viewer, with rocks, pine trees and the sky, lit by the rays of the setting sun. Giving a landscape pride of place in an altarpiece was not just radically new, it left some viewers puzzled and annoyed – for instance, Friedrich’s contemporary Basilius von Ramdohr wrote in Zeitung für die elegante Welt – “A newspaper for the elegant world”: “A veritable presumption if landscape painting wants to sneak into the church and creep onto the altars”

Others, though, supported Friedrich’s new Romantic approach. For several months, the art-loving public talked of nothing but the dispute over this work. This may have led Theresia von Brühl, Countess of Thun and Hohenstein, to become interested in the painting. With her husband, she then bought it for their castle in Tetschen. But the painting was not put in the chapel; it was placed in the Countess’s bedroom next to a copy of the Sistine Madonna.