The ruins of Eldena in the Giant Mountains

Friedrich built this landscape from two places that never actually met. The broken Gothic arches are the real ruins of Eldena Abbey, a medieval monastery near Greifswald on the Baltic coast, where he was born and which he drew many times. The mountains behind them are the Riesengebirge, the range on the Bohemian border he had hiked and sketched years earlier, hundreds of kilometres to the south. He set the flat-country ruin among peaks it could never stand near, a scene assembled in the studio rather than found in the world. A small figure and a cottage nestle among the fallen stones, so the ruin reads less as a monument than as a place people still quietly live around.