La catedral

Friedrich left this one unfinished, around 1818, and it comes out of a very particular mood in the German lands. The Napoleonic wars had just ended, and for Friedrich's generation a Gothic cathedral was not only a church. It stood for a hoped-for spiritual and national renewal after years of French occupation, in a Germany still broken into dozens of separate states. So the great spire here rises out of the trees almost like a vision, more an ideal than any building you could name. Scholars still argue over whether he had Meissen cathedral in mind or something wholly imagined. He never resolved the picture, which is partly why the stonework seems to dissolve upward into bare, unpainted sky.