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„A painter shall not only paint what he sees in front of him but also what he sees inside of him”

This sentence by Caspar David Friedrich went down in art history. Surprisingly the romantic artists found their ideal landscapes in reality during their rambles across Saxon Switzerland; the bizarre shapes of the rock formations fulfilled all their needs. Their drawings and paintings are filled with allegories: ruins as symbols for the return to antiquity, the river as the stream of life, rocky gates as points of transition into another existence, precipices ….
In 1813 Caspar David Friedrich, in his disgust and despair about the misery caused by the war of liberation, took refuge in Krippen for months. Nearby, opposite the Zirkelstein, the first sketches for one of his most famous works, “Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog) were created.