Caspar David Friedrich, “Abbey in the Oakwood” (1809-10)
“The British writer William Gilpin, who played a major role in defining the term picturesque in several late eighteenth-century treatises, wrote that a Gothic castle would be infinitely more interesting and picturesque if it were in a state of decay a crumbling ruin covered with vegetation. […] and it would be sublime if it were enormous, dark, and foreboding, seeming to harbor unseen dangers. The picturesque, in contrast to the sublime, generated visual interest, not fright or awe.”
[…] a Gothic revival was also taking place. An interest in Gothic architecture — which was then perceived as a national architecture because it was believed to have originated in Britain — was sparked in part by the appearance of some of the first literature on the style, which until then had been so little studied that no one knew when the buildings were made […] After midcentury, books began to identify the major buildings and their dates, and to define a development of Gothic architecture. But the Gothic style appeal in large part lay in its sublime qualities. The cathedrals were cold, dark, and gloomy and contained vast overwhelming spaces, ruins, which could be seen everywhere, evoked associations of death, melancholy and even horror. In 1764, the Gothic novel emerged as a genre with the publication of Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story”, which was set in a haunted castle. The book started a medieval craze that peaked with Victor Hugo’s 1831 “Notre-Dame de Paris”, in which the dark, foreboding cathedral is the home of the terrifying hunchbacked recluse Quasimodo.”
— Penelope J. E. Davies, Walter B. Denny, Frima Fox Hofrichter, Joseph Jacobs, Ann M. Roberts, David L. Simon; “Janson’s History of Art - Western Tradition” (2011)
Caspar David Friedrich, “Hutten’s Tomb” (1823-24) // Arthur Willmore, “Melrose Abbey” (in “Picturesque Europe. The British Isles”) (1875)
