German Romantic Landscape

In Friedrich's "Monk By The Sea" (1820) we see a lone monk looking out to sea. His size is very important to the piece (he is tiny in comparison to the world around him). The emphasis of this piece is to give the viewer an awaking to his or her sizes in relation to the world they live in. If you really think about it people of today don't really understand it either, we do the same things everyday (almost) go to the grocery, hang with friends, etc. By doing this we make a micro world for ourselves in which we lose understanding of the macro world. In effect we have made our world smaller and ourselves larger. What is happening in Africa is not as important as the subjective day struggles of your or my existence. The harsh reality is that we find what is in front of us or is happening to us immediately to be of more important than something we may never experience. We go through life seeing it through our own two eyes and no-one else's, and in that sense what we see becomes more important than what someone else sees, thus causing confrontation between people. And as the painting is trying to show we are only a speck in this world with little individual influence.