Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer above the sea of fog

The ''Rückenfigur'' (literally "back-figure") is a compositional device in

painting Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

graphic art A category of fine art, graphic art covers a broad range of visual artistic expression, typically two-dimensional graphics, i.e. produced on a flat surface,photography Photography is the visual arts, art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is empl ...

, and

film A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, sinc ...

. A person is seen from behind in the foreground of the image, contemplating the view before them, and is a means by which the viewer can identify with the image's figure and then recreate the space to be conveyed. It is commonly associated with German Romantic painting and particularly the landscape painter

Caspar David Friedrich Caspar David Friedrich (; 5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a German Romanticism, German Romantic Landscape painting, landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation, whose often symbolic, and anti ...

. In art historical research, it is debated whether the ''Rückenfigur'' actually invites identification or rather encourages second-order observation. The ''Rückenfigur'' motif dates to antiquity and has since been employed in many different eras and styles of art. Before Friedrich, such figures were not generally the subject of the work.

Giotto Giotto di Bondone (; – January 8, 1337), known mononymously as Giotto, was an List of Italian painters, Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the International Gothic, Gothic and Italian Ren ...

's ''Lamentation of Christ'' (1300s) is an early example of non-subject figures turned from the viewer. The ''Rückenfigur'' may also take the form of

staffage In painting, staffage () are the human and animal figures depicted in a scene, especially a landscape A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or human-made features, often c ...

Gallery

File:Giotto - Scrovegni - -36- - Lamentation (The Mourning of Christ) adj.jpg, Giotto's ''Lamentation of Christ'' (1300s) fresco at the Cappella degli Scrovegni (Padova) has figures with their backs to the viewer. File:Jan Vermeer - The Art of Painting - Google Art Project.jpg, Vermeer's '' The Art of Painting'' (1660s) File:Carl Gustav Carus - Erinnerung an Rom (1839).jpg,

Carl Gustav Carus Carl Gustav Carus (3 January 1789 – 28 July 1869) was a German physiologist and painter, born in Leipzig, who played various roles during the Romanticism, Romantic era. A friend of the writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe, he was a many-sided man: a ...

, ''Raphael and Michelangelo'' (1830s): " heyemblematize the contemporary viewer's belatedness ... they belonged precisely to an earlier epoch, one before the advent of landscape; and thus their portrayal as Romantic ''Rückenfiguren'' represents less a continuity with Rome than a rift between present and past"Koerner, 278–79 File:Durieu 1.jpg, Early photograph by Jean Louis Marie Eugène Durieu

References

Artistic techniques Composition in visual art {{Art-technique-stub