by If, apart from Friedrich’s nostalgic seascapes, we look at The sea of ice either The shipwreck of La Esperanza, We will see that the sea was no longer a melancholic reflection of human life for the romantics, but rather a dangerous, perhaps exterminating, horizon. The wreckage of the sunken ship has been turned upside down, almost imperceptible, as its surface has been flooded by annihilating blocks of ice, at the end of the voyage in which nothing seems to have survived a cold death.
In any case, the fascination of romanticism artists with nature has precisely to do with its double soul, clearly present in the German’s painting: they are attracted by its promise of totality and what is at the root of human life, but also -and no less- its promise of destruction, violent and fatal. For these authors, there was no better material expression of the adverse powers (of life, the planet, destiny) than the unstoppable phenomena of the natural environment: lightning, storms, hurricanes or shipwrecks like this one become symbols of destiny, transience of time or the mortal condition of the individual, and although they did not stop showing us peaceful landscapes, they did not avoid the most cruel, devastating ones. In view of The sea of ice We can have the sensation of finding ourselves facing a non-human moment, before or after men: a universe in the chaos of its formation or in that of its annihilation.
In a painting that was not preserved after the fire of the Glaspalast in Munich, by Karl Blechen, another representation of an apotheotic nature could be seen: Lightning It housed a winter landscape, full of darkness, in which that lightning strikes a vehicle, engulfing the driver in fire. It was the last composition that this author made before dementia and death struck him, and for the writer Marcel Brion, the most romantic of romantic paintings.
Blechen is also closely linked to German poetry: he was one of the decorators of the Königstädtisches Theater, where the dramas of the Sturm und Drang. With the macabre sarcasm that other creators of this trend also cultivated, he came to paint in The gallows under the storm a scaffold on the top of a hill subjected to an intense storm, associating the destruction of individual life with cosmic destruction.
Who was also inspired by literature to pictorially display the destructive power of nature was Joseph Anton Koch, who in Macbeth and the witches, allowing himself to be guided by Füssli, made the strength of human passions coincide with the fury of the elements: the tragic premonition of the witches, who direct their arms towards Macbeth himself and his friend Banquo, is complemented by the whirlwind of the storm. The furious sea, the wind that is also furious, the ruins on the cliff and the lightning are the framework that the painter understood to be appropriate for the destiny of the Scottish nobleman: the terror and greatness of this man merge with those of the forest. .
Other terrible Koch’s Schmadribach waterfall: the high peaks of its mountains discharge rivers of avalanches towards the gorges, making nature the sole protagonist of the composition.
Like Friedrich in the aforementioned The sea of iceCh. C. Dahl reflects on After the storm how the power of this phenomenon falls, once again, on humanity: a ship is thrown by the waves against the rocks, turning it, once again, into a symbol of extermination. That romantic ship as an emblem, and the destructive sea associated with the wrath of Poseidon, are not only present in the plastic arts, by the way; also in literature and music: they handled it from Liszt to Berlioz, from Allan Poe (Maelstrom) to Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner).
That obsession did not only occur among the German romantics, but also among the French: two centuries before the first romantics were born, landscapes were painted here that anticipated their interests: those of Poussin. The identification between nature and destination was addressed in Christ in the Sea of Galilee of Delacroix and The Medusa Raft by Géricault. In the first, Peter’s boat, with Christ asleep, is left at the mercy of the waters, and the pathos of the scene is underlined by the clash of tones: three bright colors (red, blue and ocher) are delimited by the sky and the sea somber. The iconography of The raft It is even more dramatic: as happens in some works by Goya, for example in the confusion of faces of The pilgrimage of San Isidro, the human group becomes phantasmagoria. The mass of skin that makes up the castaways seems to anticipate their destruction.
But perhaps it is Turner who managed to find the style most appropriate to the destructive potential of nature in general, and the sea in particular. He knew how to understand that the violence, creative and destructive, of this force could only be appropriately represented if he provided painting with a new formal spirit and an alternative treatment of color. He focused on the Renaissance and Mannerism, and Venice was the subject of many of his images and the homeland of many of his references: from Bellini to Canaletto, through Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.
John Ruskin, the great theorist of the Pre-Raphaelites, pointed out that he knew how to recapture the importance in that Venetian school of color over drawing, over form, primacy in the Florentine school; In any case, we can say that he merged the importance of both, because in his production the formal violence generated by color does not give rise to uncontrolled tones, but rather remains nuanced, regulated. The Briton did not just want to expose the light and discover its essence, but also to capture its flows, offering a terrifying spectacle along the way. And like Byron or Poe in literature, Schumann and Beethoven in music, he bases the relationship between nature and art on that terror and that sublime character.
We can look at half a dozen of his seascapes: in Fishermen at sea (1796), the fight between man and sea is surrounded by a tenebrism close to German romanticism and chromatic contrasts close to French; in The shipwreck either Wreck of a transport ship (1805-1810), already resorts to blurring and revitalizing contours; and in The slave ship (1839), Steam trapped by a snow storm (1842) or fire in the sea (1842) it is not apparent nature that is represented, but its previously hidden flows; not the light, but its essence. Despite the chromatic pallor, the violence of the colors is greater than that which more vivid tones could provide.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rafael Argullol. The attraction of the abyss. An itinerary through the romantic landscape. Cliff, 2006
Alfredo de Paz. The romantic revolution: poetics, aesthetics, ideologies. Tecnos, 2003
