Moonlit Scene with Castle Ruins

Carl Spitzweg, artist

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 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

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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.