Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, painted around 1818, is arguably the most famous silhouette in art history, yet it went missing for a century and did not reach a public museum until 1970. This episode uses the painting as a biographical lens on Friedrich himself: a devout Lutheran who believed nature was his cathedral, a liberal nationalist in a censored Germany, and a landscape painter who stitched together sketches from three different locations into one impossible panorama.

We unpack the rear-facing figure technique that pulls viewers into the wanderer's shoes, the red-haired self-portrait painted in the happiest year of his life, and the dark green altdeutsch coat that scholars read as a banned political statement about German unification. We also explore his friendship with scientist Carl Gustav Carus, whose rea ...