tour 27 of 28
Dürer and his legacy
The woman with the spider's web Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)
This print is related to other compositions by
Friedrich showing scenes of mourning. It is taken from a number of
drawings by the artist that were cut onto blocks by his brother
Christian, who was a furniture maker by trade. In a letter to his
brother of 2 April 1816, Caspar recommends that his brother should
study Dürer's woodcuts as a model from which to work, and
mentions somewhere else that Dürer was one of the great artists who
had undertaken a craftsman's
apprenticeship.
This print
is often called
Melancholy: its
connection with Dürer's
Melancholia is
essentially one of mood. There is a similarity of pose and a
suggestion of the passage of time in each: the setting sun in the
background of Dürer's print is indicated by the fall of
light across the woman's face in Friedrich's work,
although her lament seems to relate more specifically to the
brevity of life and its ephemeral nature, suggested by the flowers
and the spider's web, than the woman in Dürer's
print, whose inertia and numerous attributes indicate the more
complex iconography that was so typical of Dürer's art. The
ease with which Friedrich could transform such well-known images
into his own Romantic idiom emphasizes the total familiarity that
he had with Dürer's work.