Caspar David Friedrich's Unity of Thought and Vision
Looking at Caspar David Friedrich's paintings I am awed by his ability to embody abstract thought in a visual expression. In The Stages of Life Friedrich contemplates how human beings can mentally project the course of our lives in the form of the concepts of "future" and "distance." In order to embody these concepts visually, he integrates them with the physical attributes of distance: the diminution of size and fading away of detail. In contrast to the detailed description and dark tonality of the foreground, Friedrich's ships sink away into a dreamy atmosphere of orange and blue. To integrate his projection of distance with its thematic meaning, Friedrich devised the method of echoing the arc created by the overall grouping of the ship's masts with the arced shape of the group of figures in the foreground. By presenting these characters at different ages Friedrich is telling the viewer outright that his projection of ships into the distance is