Painting a portrait of a nation

The National Gallery's new show suggests that a sense of cultural inferiority lurked in Germany's Romantics, writes Aidan Dunne.

There are several strands to Romanticism in German painting, some of them slightly contradictory. All are convincingly represented in A German Dream, a substantial exhibition that marshals 59 works from Berlin's Old National Gallery. The show includes, for example, six paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, whose name is synonymous with German Romanticism and whose extraordinary, symbolically charged landscapes, infused with spiritual meaning, rank among the finest achievements of German art. Friedrich, though, is but part of the story.

As Bernhard Maaz points out in his illuminating catalogue essay, in Germany specifically the term Romanticism has wider and more diverse connotations than we might expect. Locally, there is a temptation to view Romanticism primarily in relation to Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime, associated with dramatic views of yawning alpine gorges, of nature red in tooth and claw, both beautiful and terrible, of overwhelming vistas dwarfing the human presence. In a broader sense Goethe's identification of Gothic architecture with the German spirit, and his appeal to instinctive, unconscious motives in artistic creation, helped mobilise a generation of writers and artists.

As it happened, Goethe's first-hand experience of the classical civilisation of Italy engendered second thoughts and prompted him to warn against the excesses of Romantic subjectivity. Yet the standard polarisation of classical and romantic values is, as Maaz argues, an oversimplification. Even post-Italy, Goethe happily endorsed the work of several German Romantic painters, including Friedrich.

The anti-Enlightenment bias of the Romantic movement was, Isaiah Berlin has argued strongly, inextricably bound up with the roots of German nationalism. Critics of the Enlightenment were motivated partly by a sense of cultural inferiority, specifically in relation to France, and looked for an alternative in factors that defined an intrinsically Germanic character. They scorned the universality of Enlightenment values, denounced what they saw as the superficiality of French culture and looked broodingly inwards, to deep questions of the soul, of brotherhood, identity - to things not particularly amenable to rational analysis: the mysterious essence of selfhood rather than mere fact was the arbiter of action in the real world.

The first room of A German Dream is given over to a residual classicism, with landscapes echoing Claude and Poussin and several fine portraits reflecting an eclectic breadth of influence. Friedrich Georg Weitsch's lively portrait of the scientist and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt underlines the primacy of scientific method as a way of understanding the world. Nothing could illustrate the impact of France more clearly than Christian Gottlieb Schick's beautiful portrait of Heinrike Dannecker, a poised, classical figure seated on a stone bench. Schick, from Stuttgart, had studied with the great Jacques-Louis David in Paris. Dannecker's confidence and self-assurance, and even the red, white and blue of her clothing, embody David's classicism and the ideas emanating from revolutionary France.

Part of the soul searching associated with German Romanticism consisted of a turning away from the classical in favour of indigenous histories and mythologies, a yearning for an earlier golden age. A particularly intense brand of nature mysticism was central to this process. The oak tree had a special symbolism, and it turns up again and again. It towers high in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's bizarre, symbol-laden Harvest Festival Procession, a distinctly odd painting, essentially a commissioned propaganda piece. In Friedrich's superb Oak Tree In The Snow the venerable oak, though battered and broken, looks forward to spring and rebirth. We can view the picture as an allegory of nature, nationalism or both. On any level it is a powerful, iconic work.

An identification with nature took a more singular form in the idiosyncratic symbolism of the relatively short-lived Otto Runge, who was widely admired. He is represented in the exhibition by just one, unfinished work, a portrait of his wife and baby son, with characteristically Gothic echoes. Goethe's enthusiasm for Gothic architecture was taken up by Schinkel, who was an architect and set designer as well as a painter. His idealised, obsessively detailed images of soaring cathedrals are startling, impassioned monuments to nation building. They are undeniably impressive, but they are also overwhelming. Perhaps their labyrinthine, lacy detail derives in part from his architectural frustrations.

It's hard to believe that the same Schinkel painted such superb naturalistic works as the panoramic The Rugard On Rügen, which seems to prefigure another, incomparably more modern age of plein-air painting. The same holds for the brilliant architectural, topographic paintings of Eduard Gaertner and for Johann Erdmann Hummel's breathtaking study of a vast polished granite bowl, which is alone worth a visit to the show.

Another group of painters, the Nazarenes, somewhat like the Pre-Raphaelites in England, embraced the methods and appearance of medieval and renaissance religious painting, marrying Raphael with Dürer to come up with a strangely anachronistic style. In fact the Nazarenes, including Friedrich Overbeck, moved lock, stock and barrel to Rome and established a community there.

Romantic might also mean "fantastic", and the nostalgic fascination with things medieval continues in the work of the late Romantics Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, Ludwig Richter and Moritz von Schwind. Though shrouded in night and shadow, Oehme's studies of castles, with their rich narrative trappings, have a mysterious, storybook quality and are well worth close examination.

Richter's untypical Lake In The Riesengbrige, though, is an outstanding work in which tiny figures try to outpace a looming mountain storm. By contrast, Ferdinand Georg Wald-müller's portrait The Mother Of Captain Von Stierle-Holzmeister (the captain's portrait is there as well) is a terrifically fresh piece of painting with the clarity and precision of early Lucian Freud.

Largely thanks to Friedrich, the window occupies a special place in Romantic painting, and there are several fine examples, including Georg Friedrich Kersting's often-reproduced study of the artist at work in his studio before his window. And Carl Gustav Carus's view of his Naples balcony is a gem.

Maaz writes that most German Romantic paintings remain little known outside Germany. This show is an impressive introduction.

A German Dream: Masterpieces Of Romanticism From The Nationalgalerie Berlin is at the National Gallery of Ireland until January 30th. Admission is €10 (concessions €6)