An artist for our times

If faith can be said to have fashions, then it has been worn loosely for several seasons. The Christian belief that underlies the great religious paintings of the Renaissance is for many people an alien concept: it can appear, to modern eyes, too structured, too certain, too sentimental. At this time of year in particular, surrounded by painted-by-the-yard Nativities, the faith that brought them into being seems as distant as the age in which they were created.

The German painter Caspar David Friedrich, 1774-1840, is perhaps a type of artist more suited to our times. His Christianity is not insistent but comes wrapped in another – more widely practiced – religion: Nature. He offers the consolations and beauties of both.

Take, for instance, his ‘Winter Landscape’ (1811), which hangs in the National Gallery. At first sight this bizarre little work is hardly a religious picture at all: a simple depiction of a bare, snow-covered landscape, dotted with rocks and pines, with the incongruous sight of a fantastical church – its spires, which echo the shape of the trees, more Disney than Gothic – just visible through the mist. It is only when you see a pair of crutches lying in the snow and then the figure of a man praying at the foot of a wayside cross, hidden among the trees, that it becomes clear that the painting has a message.

On the face of it the symbolism is clunking: a diagonal line runs across the painting, follow it and the discarded crutches lead to the praying cripple and on to the ghostly church – so adversity through prayer equals salvation, QED.

‘Winter Landscape’, however, is a more complicated picture than it initially appears: into this small canvas Friedrich has packed in a wide range of concerns and references.