Caspar David Friedrich and Visual Romanticism

By Tore Boeckmann

The romantic school of art, wrote Ayn Rand, “is concerned—in the words of Aristotle—not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.”¹ In her esthetic writings, Ayn Rand elaborated on this idea relative to her own field, the novel. But she said little about how it applies to the visual arts; and, when asked, she commented, “…