Caspar David Friedrich and the Catachthonic Cultures of Romantic Science and Technology

• Main Author: Clinger, Catherine L.
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2007
• Subjects: 708
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.498373

My thesis, `Caspar David Friedrich and the Catachthonic Cultures of Romantic Science and Technology, ' investigates the work of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) in relation to subterranean worlds, the vernacular of the mining profession, and certain text-based representations found in scientific, technological, and popular culture publications concerned with speleological explorations and the mining industry. The purpose of this thesis is to re-describe key works within the oeuvre of Caspar David Friedrich as belonging to the culture of Bergwesen, and in so doing, provide evidence to support the claim that these works contribute to the symbolic, allegorical and technological cultures of the subterranean world in Germany. Arguing that before we know what something in a painting means, we first have to know what it is, I recover the original identity of particular features within individual paintings by Friedrich. I situate this work in a cultural context that has yet to be explored in the scholarship. The images within the rarely studied technological volumes which I examine were `practically embedded artworks' that served as important role in the visual culture of the Romantic Age although they might not have qualified as meaningful art in Hegelian terms. Further to this, relevant artefacts to the enquiry may be found in an archaeology of human intervention in the domain of the mountain -a location usually reserved in scholarship for theoretical enquiries into notions of spectatorship, human and nature interface, and interpretative subjectivities; not as a site for the excavation of legible matter of a technological nature.