Moonlit Scene with Castle Ruins, Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885)

Throughout his career, Carl Spitzweg transformed the streets and buildings of his native Munich into stages where histories, fantasies, and comedies could be enacted. In this painting, Spitzweg imagines a dapper figure dressed in 17th-century fashions standing amid overgrown ruins. Rising stone walls and turrets of buildings dwarf the figure. The moonlight that bathes the scene falls upon the recumbent heads of two monumental tomb sculptures.