Gothic Church on a Rock by the Sea

Schinkel painted this in 1815, the year Napoleon was finally beaten at Waterloo. For Prussians coming out of the Wars of Liberation, Gothic architecture had turned political, because it was widely believed at the time to be a German invention, and Schinkel, an architect by training, answered with a series of imaginary Gothic cathedrals. This one grows straight out of a rock above the sea. It goes back to something he had seen 12 years earlier, the church at Piran on the Istrian coast, standing on a rocky point over the water. The low sun is hidden behind the building, which rises dark against a glowing sky. On the road below, riders in medieval dress head down toward the harbour, passing a Gothic wayside column modelled on a real one from 1455. The Berlin banker Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener bought the canvas in the year it was painted. It was the first purchase of the collection he later left to the Prussian king, and that bequest became the founding core of the Nationalgalerie.