Valle rocciosa

Friedrich painted this in the fighting years of 1813 and 1814, while French troops held Dresden and he had taken himself off to the sandstone hills upriver. The Kunsthalle in Bremen keeps his old title, Felsental, with the explanation attached, the grave of Arminius. Arminius was the Cheruscan commander who destroyed three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in the year 9, and by 1813 German writers had turned him into a standing figure for resistance to an occupying army. The ravine itself is nowhere. Friedrich built it out of separate rock studies he had drawn from nature, which is why no one has ever matched it to a real place. At the open stone sarcophagus stands a single soldier, read by the museum as a Frenchman at a German grave.