Cross and cathedral in the mountains

Friedrich painted this around 1812, while much of Germany lay under Napoleon's control and the year the French army marched on Russia. For Friedrich, who was quietly patriotic and deeply religious, a landscape was rarely just scenery. Here a roadside crucifix stands among firs on a rocky height, and behind it, half-dissolved in mist, rises the outline of a Gothic cathedral that was never built in stone. He liked to set the sign of faith out in the raw open air, away from any church, so that the mountain itself becomes the place of worship. It is a small panel, not much larger than a sheet of writing paper. The cathedral floats at the top like a thought rather than a building.