A Self-Portrait as Landscape Painter: Caspar David Friedrich and Phrenology
The article explores a precocious moment of interest in how the brain mediates aesthetic perception. Around 1810, Caspar David Friedrich drew himself with several features that deviate from his earlier self-portraits, including two bumps between the brows at the root of the nose. These cranial protuberances were associated with a cognitive faculty that the phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall insisted is common among landscape painters: