Moonlit Scene with Castle Ruins, Carl Spitzweg

Artwork Overview

Carl Spitzweg, Moonlit Scene with Castle Ruins
Carl Spitzweg, Moonlit Scene with Castle Ruins
Carl Spitzweg
Moonlit Scene with Castle Ruins
mid-late 1800s
Carl Spitzweg
1808–1885
Moonlit Scene with Castle Ruins, mid-late 1800s
Where object was made: Germany
Material/technique: canvas; oil
Dimensions:
Canvas/Support (Height x Width x Depth): 27.9 x 21.6 cm
Canvas/Support (Height x Width x Depth): 11 0.9843 x 8 1/2 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 21 1/2 x 18 3/4 x 3 1/2 in
Credit line: Gift of the Max Kade Foundation
Accession number: 1975.0056
On display: Kress Gallery
Add to portfolio

If you wish to reproduce this image, please submit an image request

Images

Label texts

Exhibition Label: "Empire of Things," 2013, Kate Meyer 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- a starched ruff and pantaloons-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. Spitzweg imbues the traces of history with quiet drama, alluding to both the compression and expansion of time by depicting medieval tomb effigies exposed by the crumbling ruins and a figure whose own costume would have identified him as a specter of the past for 19th-century viewers. The archaically foppish nighttime stroller and silent artifacts of the distant past inhabit a space that functions as a persistent fulcrum around which the viewer, gentleman, and entombed couple orbit from different points on a temporal spectrum.

Resources

Audio

Audio Tour – Bulldog Podcast
Audio Tour – Bulldog Podcast
Hear a SWMS student's perspective.
Audio Tour – Bulldog Art Tour
Hear a SWMS student's perspective.
Audio Tour – Bulldog Art Tour