Friederich (also sometimes spelled Friederich) uses intense contrasts of color and value structure. Color was quite important to Friederich and he has a tendency to use intense and saturated hues.  Often the colors he used are the ones associated with sunset effects in the atmosphere and he plays these colors against his use of dark, earth toned silhouetted forms such as the trees and the gravestones. 

Friederich also often used a symmetrical and centrally oriented composition.  The symmetrical composition serves to draw the eye and he uses linear perspective and atmospheric perspective to create a sense of deep continuous space.  He also does this with the size scale relationships of the human figures to the buildings and the relationship if the building's size to the trees in the foreground.

All of these formal elements are linked to his iconography.

Iconography:  Many of the themes of the Romantic movement revolve around images in which the unseen forces of death, decay, time and the power of the spiritual world are made palpable.

The intense colors and value shifts that occur at dusk and dawn are part of the iconography of this image.  The light that bursts through the missing window frames might be representative of the light of heaven or God which is in sharp contrast to the outlines of the building, trees and figures in the mysterious processional in the snow. 

The time of day is also symbolic.  Dusk is a sleepy and mysterious time of the day.  For some, sunsets are symbolic of decline and decay.  Decay and nostalgia are echoed in the architectonic trees and the decaying monastery or Gothic style church.  The themes of death and decay are further taken up by the tombstones and the snow which highlights them.  In fact the reference to the decaying Gothic style building may be a reference to the Gothic Revival style that was advocated by Sir John Ruskin who according to the Brittanica was an "English writer, critic, and artist who championed the Gothic Revival movement in architecture and had a large influence upon public taste in art in Victorian England."

Context:  This image utilizes many of the standard kinds of images that we are used to seeing in film and specifically films dealing with horror, but for Friederich, these images didn't exist and he is the source of this kind of imagery for cinematographers today.

Three great movies that "quote" Friederich's paintings are "Bram Stoker's Dracula" starring Gary Oldman and Winona Rider, "Frankenstein" starring Robert Deniro, and "Gothic" directed by Ken Russell.

Blake's invention of what he called "illuminated printing," in which, by a special technique of relief etching, each page of the book was printed in monochrome from an engraved plate containing both text and illustration: an invention foreshadowed by his friend, George Cumberland. The pages were then usually coloured with watercolour or printed in colour by Blake and his wife, bound together in paper covers, and sold for prices ranging from a few shillings to 10 guineas.

The forms that Blake works with are almost naive.  In some ways, his rendering of the human anatomy is awkward and his depiction of chiaroscuro and color are almost unsophisticated.  Nevertheless, the composition of many of Blake's images and the interaction of the texts with the illustration is very similar in design to Gothic manuscripts from the 13th century.

"God as the Divine Geometer" is a symmetrically placed image.  Surrounding the well muscled figure is a kind of nimbus or he could be placed within the sun.  In his left hand he holds a compass used for geometry and measurement.  Blake would have drawn this as God's right but it would have been reversed.  The figure is surrounded by clouds and a black void.

Iconography:  Everything about this image is designed to create a humanistic, intelligent, and wise image of God as a philosopher and scientific creator.  God is represented in the uncreated black void, he is surrounded by an aura of light and he is using an enlightened and scientific instrument to design the world.  Blake has modeled his image of God as the creator from a similar source as the Gothic manuscript shown here with a similar device.  God is then a scientific and logical designer but God is also a humanistic "superman/philospher" in his appearance.  He is bearded and well muscled as in  Michelangelo's depictions of God from the Sistine Chapel.

Context: Look in Stokstad for more context on Blake.

Just like Caravaggio and some of the Neoclassic artists, Fuseli creates a stage like setting in which the figures are pushed up to the front of the picture plane.  Tenebrism is used to highlight the nightmarish creatures that emerge out of the darkness.

Iconography:  The titles of the painting express quite a bit about the spiritual system of beliefs and social beliefs that Fuseli and many individuals held about women, sexuality, and spirituality.  Here is an image of the "weaker sex" being preyed on by the incubus which really symbolizes the weakness of the female and her inability to control her sexual nature.

These paintings are literally rebuses.  The painting takes place at night and in the background is a horse.  A female horse is referred to as a "mare."  The combination of the two terms adds up to the title of the painting.

In the foreground of each painting is a table with a small bottle on it which contains a drug called laudanum.  According to the Brittanica, "laudanum, for example, was an alcoholic tincture (dilute solution) of opium that was used in European medical practice as an analgesic and sedative."  This drug was widely prescribed for females during this era because of the widely held belief that women were prone to attacks of nerves and that it was necessary to sedate women because they often became hysterical.

Opium drugs can cause hallucinations and often when women would fall asleep they were prone to nightmares caused by the drugs in their systems.

Context: Stokstad discusses the link between Fuseli and his own desires that are expressed in this painting.

The Brittanica provides some biographical information you may find useful.

When Pugin and Barry began the reconstruction of the buildings, for them the use of the Gothic Revival style was a return to England's noble and feudal past.  According to Ruskin (a popular critic and scholar) and the architects, the Gothic style was a representation of history and a less complex more spiritually clear time.
 
 

According to the Brittanica, The earliest manifestations of an interest in the medieval era were in the private domain, but by the 1820s public buildings in England were also being designed in the Gothic mode. Perhaps no example is more familiar than the new Houses of Parliament (1840), designed by Sir Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin. In that large cluster of buildings, the haphazard picturesque quality of the early revival was replaced by a more conscientious adaptation of the medieval English style. Other structures built around mid-century were within this basic pattern. Later, the desire for more elegant and sumptuous landmarks created the last flowering of the style.

A fire in 1834 destroyed the whole palace except the historic Westminster Hall, the Jewel Tower, the cloisters, and the crypt of St. Stephen's Chapel.

Sir Charles Barry, assisted by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, designed the present buildings in the Gothic Revival style. Construction was begun in 1837, the cornerstone was laid in 1840, and work was finished in 1860. The Commons Chamber was burned out in one of the numerous air raids that targeted London during World War II, but it was restored and reopened in 1950. The House of Lords is an ornate chamber 97 feet (29.5 metres) in length; the Commons is 70 feet (21 metres) long. The southwestern Victoria Tower is 336 feet (102 metres) high. St. Stephen's Tower, 320 feet (97.5 metres) in height, contains the famous tower clock Big Ben. Along with Westminster Abbey and St. Margaret's Church, the Houses of Parliament were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.

JMW Turner The Slave Ship 1840 35"x48"
 
 

GERICAULT,Theodore 1791-1824 
Raft of the Medusa 1819 
Paris,Louvre French, Romanticism

The theme these three paintings seem to share deals with men and the sea.  Overtly all three paintings show the attempt of men to navigate their way through the oceans and the natural forces they may encounter in doing so. 

Turner and Friederich do this by also using electric saturated hues and shifts of color to demonstrate how man is in his twilight.  Both deal with the destruction of ships and man's attempt to navigate through the natural world.  In both cases it seams that "Mother Nature" is winning the battle.

Both images deal with death as an unalterable fact.  In the case of Friederich, he is showing you a failure of man to get to the forbidden arctic poles but it may represent a kind of journey to the forbidden underworld.  The arctic circle is then a symbol of Hades.  This may be further fleshed out by the suggestion that this painting may also be inspired in some way by the death of the artist's brother.

Turner and Gericault are showing man's battle with nature but may also be showing the eventual judgment of man.  The men in Turner's painting in particular were slave traders.   In Gericault's painting the men are merchant marines who are "wage slaves."  In Turner's image perhaps they are being delivered to a different sort of "Last Judgment" again delivered by Nature herself.
 

Turner's painting in part represents nature about to punish guilty human beings. The full title of the picture is Slavers Overthrowing the Dead and Dying-­ Typho[on]n Coming On, and in the left distance the beholder observes the guilty vessel about to meet its deserved end, while in the right and central foreground he encounters thrust upon him slaves being devoured by the sea and its creatures. Although Turner's painting presents images of fanciful ocean predators, his image of Gothic [196/197] horror is not the product of his imagination. In fact, he was portraying what had become sound business practice: since insurance on slave-cargoes covered only those drowned at sea and not slaves who perished from brutality, disease, and the dreadful conditions on board, profit-minded captains cast the dead and dying into the ocean. As John McCoubrey has demonstrated the artist painted his picture specifically for an anti-slavery campaign, and one may add that he has succeeded in creating a particularly effective image of these horrors. Works as different as Heinrich Heine's 'Das Sklavenschiff', Robert Hayden's 'Middle Passage', and Norman Mailer's Of A Fire on the Moon have elaborated upon the situation and paradigm of the slave-ship, but few, if any, have done so more powerfully than this painting. The closing lines of Turner's epigraph -- 'Hope, Hope, fanacious Hope!/Where is thy market now?' -- further suggest that he was attacking not only the specific horror s of the slave-trade but also the situation of an men in a society whose basic bond had become the cash nexus. [On Turner's politico-economic beliefs, see See Jack Lindsay's edition of Turner's poems. The Sunset Ship (London, I966), pp. 46-9; http://65.107.211.206/victorian/art/crisis/crisis4e.html

The depiction of human anatomy and light and shadow in this work, as in others by Goya tends to look a bit cartoonish caricaturish and even at times the anatomy and light are so contrived that they look inaccurate.

The process used to create this print is called aquatint.  According to the Brittanica, aquatint is,

a variety of etching widely used by printmakers to achieve a broad range of tonal values. The process is called aquatint because finished prints often resemble watercolour drawings or wash drawings. The technique consists of exposing a copperplate to acid through a layer of granulated resin or sugar. The acid bites away the plate only in the interstices between the resin or sugar grains, leaving an evenly pitted surface that yields broad areas of tone when the grains are removed and the plate is printed. An infinite number of tones can be achieved by exposing various parts of the plate to acid baths of different strengths for different periods of time. Etched or engraved lines are often used with aquatint to achieve greater definition of form.

In the 17th century a number of attempts were made at producing what later became known as aquatint prints. None of the efforts was successful, however, until 1768, when the French printmaker Jean-Baptiste Le Prince discovered that granulated resin gave satisfactory results. Aquatint became the most popular method of producing toned prints in the late 18th century, especially among illustrators. Its textural subtleties, however, remained largely unexplored by well-known artists except for Francisco de Goya. Most of his prints are aquatints, and he is considered the greatest master of the technique.

Iconography: The formal elements are also iconographic.  The local colors are drab and dark as is the subject.  The tenebristic flair of the soldiers spot light focuses on the central figure whose pose is reminiscent of a crucifixion.  This literally highlights the role of the rebels as martyrs.  The arrangement of the soldiers with their backs to the viewers creates a symbolic representation as faceless soldiers who are inhuman.

Context: According to the Brittanica,

On the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814, after the expulsion of the invaders, Goya was pardoned for having served the French king and reinstated as first court painter. "The 2nd of May 1808: The Charge of the Mamelukes" and "The 3rd of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid" were painted to commemorate the popular insurrection in Madrid. Like "Los desastres," they are compositions of dramatic realism, and their monumental scale makes them even more moving. The impressionistic style in which they are painted foreshadowed and influenced later 19th-century French artists, particularly Manet, who was also inspired by the composition of "The 3rd of May." In several portraits of Ferdinand VII, painted after his restoration, Goya evoked--more forcefully than any description--the personality of the cruel tyrant, whose oppressive rule drove most of his friends and eventually Goya himself into exile.