Le Tombeau de Hutten

Friedrich painted this in 1823, three hundred years after the death of Ulrich von Hutten, a Renaissance humanist who had railed against foreign power over the German lands. The timing was deliberate. It was also about ten years after Napoleon's armies had swept through, and the figure standing at the ruined tomb wears the old-German dress adopted by the volunteers who had fought the French, a costume any viewer then would have read as a statement. Into the stone of the tomb Friedrich cut names, contemporaries of his own who argued for a united Germany, so the grave of a long-dead man is quietly filled with the living. Friedrich, who usually kept his politics to himself, inscribed among them the writers Jahn and Arndt.