Ciudad medieval junto a un río

Schinkel painted this in 1815, the year Napoleon was finally beaten at Waterloo and the German lands began imagining what they might build once the wars were over. He was trained as an architect, and it shows. The whole picture is organised around a great Gothic cathedral rising over the rooftops, its spires cutting into a stormy sky broken by a rainbow. Below, citizens stream toward the city gates after the passing storm. There was no such city. Schinkel invented it as a vision of a medieval golden age, the kind of ordered, prosperous town German Romantics liked to picture. Within months he was named Prussia's state architect and would spend the next decades rebuilding the centre of Berlin.