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The wanderer looming above the sea of fog is actually an exception in Friedrich’s work, most of whose human figures are small enough to emphasize “the vastness of the terrain” - a sublime-evoking technique that we can still feel working two centuries later, Puschak points out, in Villeneuve’s Dune. This is the essence of the sublime,” which took on special urgency in an era “when secularism was threatening the core of Christianity.” More than religion, the Romantics thus began to regard nature as awesome ( in the original sense), humbling themselves before the greatness of landscapes real and imagined. Completed around 1818, it has become a familiar image even to those who know nothing of Friedrich’s work - work to which they can receive an introduction from the new video above by Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter.įriedrich, he explains, was “associated with German Romanticism, a rising intellectual and artistic movement” of the late 18th and early 19th centuries “that sought to reconnect humanity with feeling and spirituality” after the Enlightenment so destabilized humanity’s Weltanschauung.įriedrich’s landscapes, realistically painted if not necessarily faithful to real places, “represent the pinnacle of this movement.” They do this by conveying “the feeling he has in the presence of the landscape, the staggering encounter with the divinity he sees in it. That quote comes straight from the Wikipedia page on “Sublime (philosophy),” which also prominently features Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, or Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. The sublime can be beautiful, but it must also be in some way fearsome, possessed of “a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.” Though long since vulgarized to mean little more than “highly enjoyable,” sublime has historically denoted a richer, more complex set of qualities. The blasted sand planet of Arrakis, with its storms and worms, demands a sense of the sublime to a unique degree among filmmakers working today, the auteur behind Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 seemed to possess it. When Denis Villeneuve was announced as the director of the latest cinematic adaptation of Dune, few could have objected on aesthetic grounds.

Wanderer above the sea of fog meaning