Resumen de 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 derivate 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: "Ortssinn", characterized by a heightened ability to remember places and to measure distance and perspective. I argue that Friedrich's drawing is a self-portrait "as landscape painter", where the signifiers of identity are no longer conventional artistic or sartorial attributes but rather the contours of the cranium and, by implication, the fabric of the artist's mind.
