Winterlandschaft, Middlesex County, 2006. 19th Century painter Caspar David Friedrich's symbolic landscapes were part of a German idealism that had an affinity for nature, especially its wild and mysterious aspects, and melancholic, melodramatic subjects. Skies, storms, mist, ruins, scattered tracks bore witness to the manifestation of the divine in nature. Later, German Nazisappropriated the notion of the symbolic landscape and directly tied German land and its forests to German (Aryan) identity.
