Il mago e il drago

When Spitzweg painted this around 1875, a real fairytale castle was rising in the Bavarian Alps. Neuschwanstein had been under construction since 1869, King Ludwig II's dream palace, built in homage to the operas of Richard Wagner. Look past the sorcerer with his raised staff and his ring of skulls, and a sunlit castle floats in the smoke behind him, its silhouette not far from Neuschwanstein's. Some writers have read the whole scene as a gentle dig at the Bavarian king's Wagner obsession, the dragon standing in for Fafnir from the Norse legends Wagner set to music. Spitzweg was by then an old man of Munich, known for small, wry pictures of eccentrics and dreamers.