horse, unknown maker from the Republic of Venice

Throughout his career, 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 costume would have identified him as a specter of the past for 19th-century viewers.