How do you paint loneliness?
How do you paint sadness and loneliness with no face and no symbol? From Bruegel’s Icarus to Picasso’s blue and Friedrich’s ship, and why every viewer finishes a painting with their own life.
Brussels, December 1938. The English poet W. H. Auden has been in the city for a few weeks, and one day he walks into the Royal Museums of Fine Arts. He stops in front of a painting about a meter wide: a sunny coast, a ploughman bent over his plough, a shepherd staring at the sky, a big ship under full sail going about its business. It’s called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. So where’s Icarus? Let’s look for him: bottom right, next to the ship, two small legs sticking out of the water. The boy who flew too close to the sun on wax wings is drowning, and nobody in the whole painting has turned their head.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
A tragedy the size of two legs
Look at the whole painting first. Can you find Icarus?
That same month Auden wrote a poem about this painting. His point was that the old masters understood exactly where suffering happens: in the middle of other people’s ordinary day, while the world is busy with its own business. The painting has a story of its own, too. Technical tests in 1996 showed that the Brussels canvas is most likely not by Pieter Bruegel’s hand but an early copy of his lost original by an unknown painter. The composition, though, the arrangement that hides the disaster in a corner of the frame, is certainly Bruegel’s, according to the museum itself.
For me this question started the moment I picked up a brush to begin a new painting. One of the first things I wanted to paint was a feeling: sadness and loneliness. But with no one’s face and no symbol. I wanted to show people what I felt without saying it outright. And every time I picked up the brush, the first thing that came to mind was familiar: autumn trees, an empty bench, rain. Some feelings were even harder. How do you paint hope? Or longing? For those it seemed you couldn’t make any picture at all without a scenario: either a story or a cliché people are used to.
The trouble with a cliché is that it works. Everyone knows the code, and that’s exactly why it tells the feeling instead of showing it; you might as well write “loneliness” under the painting. The Icarus painter did something else: he showed a disaster without a single sad face. But Icarus is at least an event: a boy has fallen into the sea and is drowning. What if you want to paint the feeling itself, with no event?
In 1897, in What Is Art?, Leo Tolstoy gave a definition of art that sounds simple and familiar:
Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.
Like an infection. That’s the intention I started with, too. The question was what those signs are. The simplest answer is color.
Is blue sad?
Between 1901 and 1904, almost everything Pablo Picasso painted was blue: beggars, stooped figures, a blind old man with a guitar. Those years are called his Blue Period. Where did the blue come from?
Paris, February 17, 1901. Carles Casagemas, a 20-year-old Catalan painter and close friend of Picasso, who was 19 at the time, is hosting a farewell dinner at the Café de l’Hippodrome. The woman he loves has turned him down. In the middle of dinner he pulls out a gun, fires at her, misses, and shoots himself in the temple. He dies in the hospital a little later. Picasso painted his friend’s death, but not in blue at first: The Death of Casagemas is all hot, bright colors. The blue came gradually and stayed until 1904. Picasso later told the critic Pierre Daix that it was thinking of Casagemas’s death that started him painting in blue. Some art historians, such as Hélène Seckel, doubt the direct link because the dates don’t quite fit. But Picasso himself remembered the grief of those years as blue.
But the same blue feels different elsewhere: a clear sky, a calm sea. So is blue sad or calm?
Domicele Jonauskaite and her colleagues at the University of Lausanne put that question to thousands of people and published the results in 2020: 4,598 people from 30 countries, speaking 22 languages. Each person saw the names of 12 colors and was asked which of 20 emotions went with each color, and how strongly. The answers were strikingly alike. The average similarity of the patterns between countries was 0.88, where 1 would be identical; people in these 30 countries carry roughly the same map of color and feeling in their heads. But the countries differed too: the closer two countries were in language or geography, the more alike their answers. (These people saw color names, not the colors themselves or a painting.)
One of those differences is clearer than the rest. In 2019 the same team looked at yellow alone, with 6,625 people in 55 countries, and asked: does yellow mean joy? Across all countries, about 48 percent said yes. But in Egypt only 5.7 percent linked yellow with joy, and in Finland 87.7 percent! The farther a country was from the equator and the rainier it was, the happier yellow got. The researchers’ best guess is that yellow reminds people of sunshine, and where sunshine is rare it means a good day. Where the sun burns every day, yellow is just a color.
Is yellow joyful?
Where the sun is rare, yellow is happier
That “reminding” might be half the story. In 2010, at Berkeley, Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss tested a simple theory: we like a color about as much as we like the things it reminds us of. Blue is a clear sky and clean water; olive brown is rotting things. They asked one group to list what each color brought to mind and another group to rate how pleasant those things were. The average of those ratings explained 80 percent of the differences in how much people liked the colors. The study was about liking colors, not about joy or sadness, and it was done with American students; still, the point is plain: each color borrows its feeling from the things it reminds us of.
So why do Picasso’s blue and the sky’s blue feel so different? In 1994 Patricia Valdez and Albert Mehrabian, an Iranian-born UCLA psychologist, broke colors down into three dimensions: hue (red, blue, yellow…), saturation, and brightness. Brightness turned out to have by far the strongest effect on how people felt, and hue much less. In the equation they derived, the weight of brightness for pleasantness was 0.69 and the weight of saturation 0.22; brightness mattered more than three times as much. The Blue Period blue is gloomy because it’s dark; it seems to have black in it, like the sky before a storm. The same study showed something else: darker colors also feel more powerful and dominant. Dark doesn’t always come out as sadness, but it almost never comes out as joy.
Same hue, different lightness
Blue isn’t sad. Dark blue is.
A clear sky, clean water, a brand’s logo. Calm, and competent.
Color borrows its feeling from each viewer’s world, from the sun in Helsinki to the sun in Cairo. Most of the map of colors is shared, but its edges belong to the person looking. I assumed shapes worked the same way, that soft and sharp edges meant something different in every culture. The evidence says otherwise.
Round and sharp
Picture two shapes: one round and soft like an ink blot, one sharp and jagged like a shard of glass. One is called “bouba” and the other “kiki.” Which is which?
A test done in 25 languages
One of these is called “bouba”. Which one?
Tap a shape.
Most people call the round one bouba without a second thought. In 2022 Aleksandra Ćwiek and her colleagues tested this with speakers of 25 languages, from 9 language families and 10 writing systems, and it held almost everywhere, whether or not people had grown up with the Latin alphabet.
One step further: in 2006 Moshe Bar and Maital Neta showed people pairs of pictures that differed only in their edges, one rounded and one sharp. People liked the rounded version more. Bar and Neta guessed that sharp edges remind the brain of danger. Later research suggests it’s probably more a liking for curves than a fear of angles. Either way, shape seems to depend far less on geography than color does.
But when shape and color meet, the story changes. Weimar, 1923. In the wall-painting workshop of the Bauhaus school, Wassily Kandinsky hands out a questionnaire: an empty triangle, square and circle, and the three colors yellow, red and blue. “Fill each shape with the color you feel belongs to it.” Before reading on, try it yourself:
Kandinsky’s Bauhaus questionnaire, 1923
Give each shape the colour that feels like it
Kandinsky already had his answer and believed it was a universal law: yellow triangle, red square, blue circle. Those three later became one of the emblems of the Bauhaus.
Decades later, when researchers gave the same questionnaire to ordinary people, Kandinsky’s law didn’t hold up. In 2002 Thomas Jacobsen gave it to 200 students who weren’t artists. About half of them made the triangle red, the square blue and the circle yellow. Their reasons were simple: a red triangle looks like a warning sign, and a yellow circle looks like the sun. Kandinsky’s combination was the least popular of all. Shapes are more universal than colors, but the moment they take on a color, they end up in the street and in the sky.
Color and shape set a mood. But loneliness is, more than anything, about people. So the people have to come back into the painting, without letting their faces do the talking. The first question is where to put them.
Empty space
In 1822 Caspar David Friedrich painted his wife Caroline at the window of their apartment in Dresden, looking out over the Elbe. It’s a small picture, 44 by 37 centimeters. We see her from behind, and most of the canvas is bare brown wall. Apart from two small bottles on the sill, the room holds nothing. The only bright thing in the painting is the window. Through its upper panes we see only sky and a ship’s mast; what she’s looking at, the river and the poplars on the far bank, we glimpse only through one small open casement.
Friedrich painted no symbol for this loneliness. He only divided the space: a person in a large, empty room, and a world outside of which we see a small piece. The proportion between a figure and the space around it is one of the painter’s oldest tools for loneliness: a small person in a vast expanse, someone at the edge of the frame, a wall with nothing on it.
But one person alone in an empty room is only one kind of loneliness. The harder kind finds you among other people, and Persian has a word just for it: ghorbat. To show it, you have to sit two people side by side and see what their bodies say.
The face isn’t enough
In 2012 three researchers, Hillel Aviezer, Yaacov Trope and Alexander Todorov, collected photos of professional tennis players at the exact moment of winning or losing a big point and showed them to Princeton students. When the students saw only a player’s face, they couldn’t tell whether the player had won or lost; at the peak of emotion, the winner’s face and the loser’s look almost the same. When they saw only the body, they guessed right. And when the researchers put a winner’s face on a loser’s body, people saw that same face as unhappy! According to Science’s news report, interviews after the study showed the researchers that whether a hand was open or clenched mattered more than the face; the paper itself didn’t test the hands separately. These were photos of very intense moments; for quieter feelings the face probably helps more. But for a painter who doesn’t want the face to speak, it’s good news: between people, too, it’s usually body language that gives everything away.
Persian miniature painters took another road centuries ago. In Persian painting, faces are calm and nearly alike; feeling is carried by gesture, by the colors of the clothes and by where people stand in the scene. A finger held to the mouth means astonishment. But these are conventions more than body language, and the viewer has to know the code, just like the clichés.
A hundred and fifty years ago in Paris, Edgar Degas painted a picture that speaks only through bodies. It was called In a Café, but it’s better known as L’Absinthe. Two people sit side by side at a table in the Nouvelle-Athènes café on Place Pigalle, though Degas painted it in his studio. His models were two of his friends: the actress Ellen Andrée and the engraver Marcellin Desboutin. The man looks out of the frame to the right; the woman looks down, at nothing. Their shoulders almost touch, but their eyes never meet. There are no tears in the painting and no symbols; only the distance between two gazes tells us what’s passing between them.
Edgar Degas, In a Café (L’Absinthe), 1875–1876
Two people side by side, two gazes that never meet
First the whole painting: empty tables, a bottle, two people. Now see where each of them is looking.
The body gives the truth away. But Degas’s café is dark and grey. What if we sat the same two people in the sun?
Bad news on a sunny day
Many of the bitterest things in life don’t happen under a grey sky. They happen on a sunny day, in a smart café, while everyone else is drinking their coffee. That’s what the Icarus painter painted: sunshine, ploughing, a ship, and a disaster in progress of which only two legs show. Film even has a name for it. The French film theorist Michel Chion calls sound that ignores what’s happening on screen “anempathetic”: a radio that keeps playing a cheerful song while someone dies, and whose indifference makes the tragedy more bitter than any sad music could.
Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (around 1907–1909) is a painting you’ve probably seen many times on posters and postcards: gold, flowers, a man holding a woman in his arms. The first feeling it gives is calm. But I always felt a bitterness in it, a kind of separation and loneliness, and for a long time I didn’t know where it came from. Look at the bottom of the painting: the woman kneels at the edge of a meadow full of flowers, and the meadow ends right under her bare feet; below it there’s only gold. The Belvedere, which owns the painting, says Klimt deliberately lengthened her lower legs so they break through that edge. Some critics read the edge as a love on the verge of falling; others say it was just a way to close off the bottom of the frame. Maybe my eye saw that edge long before my mind did.
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, around 1907–1909
An embrace on the edge
Gold, flowers, an embrace. The first feeling is calm. Now look at the bottom of the painting.
Now add one more person to Degas’s café: a waiter passing with a tray, who turns his head for a moment and listens to that table in surprise. In 1435, in his treatise on painting, the Italian architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti asked for exactly this person: someone in the scene who draws our attention and shows us what’s going on there, who beckons us to look or invites us to weep or laugh along with the people in the picture. Our curious waiter is Alberti’s narrator, only silent. From his surprise, the viewer guesses that something is wrong. In the Icarus painting there’s no one like him. No one turns their head, and the only one who sees the boy go under is you.
The more clues the painter adds, the more in control they feel. But one thing slips out of their hands: the viewer.
The beholder’s share
Nuenen, the Netherlands, April 1885. Vincent van Gogh is finishing The Potato Eaters: a peasant family around a table in a dark room, under the light of a small lamp. In front of this painting I feel a heaviness: poverty, exhaustion. But on April 30 van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo:
I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour and — that they have thus honestly earned their food.
He added that he wanted to give the idea of a way of life wholly different from that of us “civilized people.” So van Gogh, too, was looking with an outsider’s eye, and I, 140 years later, with a city dweller’s. His intention was dignity, and what I see is heaviness. Maybe a farmer who has sat at a table like that all his life would see neither, only his dinner.
How is it that two people in front of one painting see two different paintings?
Before I answer, try it yourself. Here are five paintings. For each one, say whether it feels happy or sad to you. Then you’ll see what other readers said.
A small experiment
Is this painting happy or sad?
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872
This question isn’t new. Two art historians in Vienna, Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich, gave the answer a name: “the beholder’s share.” In Art and Illusion (1960), Gombrich explained that the painter only gives cues, and the viewer completes the rest of the picture from memory and expectation. Look at a Rembrandt or a Velázquez up close: where from a distance you see a lace cuff or the glint of a ring, up close there are a few quick strokes of the brush. The eye doesn’t see those details; the brain builds them.
Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656 (detail)
Silk from afar, brushstrokes up close
From a distance the dresses shine like silk. Now look closer.
But brains don’t all build the same thing. In 2025 Celia Durkin and her colleagues at Columbia University put this to the test. Eric Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, was on the team. They turned to abstract expressionists who had painted figuratively early in their careers and gathered 164 paintings, half abstract and half figurative, by the same painters. Twenty-nine people viewed the paintings in an fMRI scanner, and another 30 wrote a short description of each one. Then the researchers measured how alike different people’s brains and words were in front of the same painting. In the early visual areas, where lines and colors are processed, brains responded almost identically; everyone “saw” the same thing. The difference was in a network called the default mode network, which is active when we think about ourselves, our memories and the future. And that difference was larger in front of the abstract paintings. The sample was small, but this is where the Columbia lab meets Gombrich, 65 years later. They even titled their paper “The Beholder’s Share.” the eyes see one thing, and each mind builds its own on top of it, out of its own life.
Even the painter doesn’t always know what he painted. Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) is a diner late at night: three customers and a server behind a lit window. In 1962 Hopper told the critic Katharine Kuh that he didn’t see the scene as particularly lonely. Then he added:
Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.
If viewers add this much of themselves to a painting, how far can one image stretch? Maybe all the way to its opposite.
One painting, two feelings
In 1822, the same year Friedrich painted his wife at the window, a Berlin banker commissioned a pair of pictures from him, one of morning and one of evening. The evening picture is Moonrise over the Sea. Three people sit on a large boulder by the shore: two women side by side and a man a little apart. They’re watching two sailing ships heading straight for the shore; one is furling its sails, the other still comes on under full sail. The moon is half hidden behind cloud.
We see all three from behind, and there isn’t a single face in the painting. Figures seen from behind turn up often in Friedrich’s work; Germans call them the Rückenfigur. Many art historians read them as stand-ins for the viewer: we stand behind them and give them our own faces, and our own feelings too. Are these three happy or anxious? The painting doesn’t say. The answer depends on what you know about those ships.
Caspar David Friedrich, Moonrise over the Sea, 1822
The painting doesn’t change. Only what you know does.
Who is on the shore, and what are they waiting for?
The first guess is usually hope. Maybe the fishermen are coming home, and the wait is ending. Now set another piece of news beside the painting, from nearly five hundred years earlier. In January 1348, ships that had sailed from Kaffa in Crimea reached Venice. No one in the harbor knew they were carrying the plague too, the Black Death that over the next few years killed between a third and half of Europe. Friedrich drew no line between the two; your mind draws it. Look at the painting again with that news in mind. The same ships, the same moon, the same three people. They are still hopeful, but you know something they don’t. On the shore there is hope; in front of the painting, fear.
Philosophers noticed long ago how close hope and fear sit. In his Ethics, Baruch Spinoza writes that hope and fear both come from thinking about something whose outcome we don’t yet know; and so:
There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.
Loneliness can be seen two ways too, just like those ships. In 1963 the German-American theologian Paul Tillich wrote that English has made two words for the two sides of being alone: “loneliness” for its pain and “solitude” for its glory. Persian, my first language, has even more, each with its own color. Bikasi is the pain of having no one; ghorbat is being alone among people; ʿozlat is withdrawal; and khalvat is chosen solitude, which Persian poetry has praised for centuries. In a recording that survives under the title “In praise of solitude,” Abbas Kiarostami says:
Just as a tree is more of a tree in solitude, I think a person is more of a person in solitude.
So what should the painter do? Push the viewer toward the “right” feeling?
Unfinished
Tolstoy’s answer was clear. The more sincerely and clearly the artist passes on his feeling, the better the art, and if the viewer isn’t infected by it, there’s no art at all. By that standard, if someone stands in front of my painting of loneliness and feels calm, I’ve failed.
But Tolstoy treats three things as one: the feeling the painter had, the feeling the painting seems to have, and the feeling the viewer ends up with. In 1938, in The Principles of Art, the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood went a step further. For him, the artist at first only knows he feels something, not what, and finds out what it was by making the work. Hopper said something similar: he had been painting loneliness without knowing it. Arousing a feeling decided in advance is, for Collingwood, craft, and when it serves a practical end he calls it “magic.”
Paris, December 1995, the centenary of cinema. At the Odéon theater, a text by Kiarostami is handed around under the title “An Unfinished Cinema.” He writes that what he’s after is
an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience.
That way, he says, one film becomes hundreds of films. A story, to him, needs gaps, like a crossword puzzle, for the audience to fill in. And flawless stories have one big flaw: they work so well that they leave the audience no room to step in.
I can’t make people think the way I think or see the world the way I see it. If a painting tells the viewer that the people on that ship are good, or bad, it starts to look like propaganda, Collingwood’s “magic,” a kind of tampering with people’s imagination. Viewers should be able to imagine something, even wrongly, even against everything I believe. This ambiguity is different from carelessness. The painter still chooses how dark the blue is, the clenched fists, the gazes that never meet, the waiter who turns his head. Those take the viewer by the hand and lead them part of the way; only the last word isn’t the painter’s to write.
There’s one more thing in the Icarus painting. On the left, in the bushes beside the ploughman, lies the head of a man who has died.
Many historians read it as a nod to a Flemish proverb: no plough stops for a dying man. Auden stood in front of this painting and then wrote his poem. He never mentions this man.
Sources and notes
- Auden in Brussels: W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” December 1938; first published as “Palais des beaux arts” in New Writing, spring 1939; later in Another Time (1940). Wikipedia.
- Landscape with the Fall of Icarus: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; oil on canvas, 73.5 × 112 cm. After technical tests in 1996, considered an early copy (probably 1560s) of a composition by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Wikipedia.
- Tolstoy’s definition: Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (1897), chapter 5, translated by Aylmer Maude. Text.
- Casagemas and the Blue Period: Carles Casagemas shot himself at the Café de l’Hippodrome, Boulevard de Clichy, on February 17, 1901, and died a little later at the Hôpital Bichat: Museu Picasso Barcelona. Picasso to Pierre Daix, in French: “C’est en pensant que Casagemas était mort que je me suis mis à peindre en bleu.” Wikipedia: Picasso’s Blue Period. The Death of Casagemas is painted in hot colors, and Hélène Seckel doubts a direct link between the death and the start of the blue (same source).
- Color and emotion in 30 countries: Jonauskaite D. et al., “Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity,” Psychological Science 31(10), 2020, pp. 1245–1260. Text.
- Yellow and sunshine: Jonauskaite D. et al., “The sun is no fun without rain: Physical environments affect how we feel about yellow across 55 countries,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 66, 101350, 2019 (PDF). ScienceDirect.
- Colors and what they remind us of: Palmer S. E., Schloss K. B., “An ecological valence theory of human color preference,” PNAS 107(19), 2010, pp. 8877–8882. PNAS.
- Brightness, saturation, hue: Valdez P., Mehrabian A., “Effects of color on emotions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 123(4), 1994, pp. 394–409. PubMed. On Albert Mehrabian: Wikipedia.
- Bouba and kiki in 25 languages: Ćwiek A. et al., “The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems,” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377(1841), 2022. Royal Society.
- A preference for curves: Bar M., Neta M., “Humans prefer curved visual objects,” Psychological Science 17(8), 2006, pp. 645–648 (SAGE); another view: Bertamini M. et al., “Do observers like curvature or do they dislike angularity?”, British Journal of Psychology, 2016 (Wiley).
- Kandinsky’s questionnaire: Jacobsen T., “Kandinsky’s questionnaire revisited: fundamental correspondence of basic colors and forms?”, Perceptual and Motor Skills 95(3), 2002, pp. 903–913 (PubMed).
- Woman at a Window: Caspar David Friedrich, Frau am Fenster, 1822, oil on canvas, 44 × 37 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Wikipedia. Image from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
- Tennis players’ faces and bodies: Aviezer H., Trope Y., Todorov A., “Body Cues, Not Facial Expressions, Discriminate Between Intense Positive and Negative Emotions,” Science 338(6111), 2012, pp. 1225–1229. Science. The hands come only from the journal’s news story: Read My Hips.
- In a Café (L’Absinthe): Edgar Degas, Dans un café, 1875–1876, Musée d’Orsay. Musée d’Orsay.
- Anempathetic sound: Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994). Wikipedia.
- The Kiss: Gustav Klimt, Liebespaar (Der Kuss), around 1907–1909, Upper Belvedere, Vienna. Belvedere.
- A narrator in the scene: Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura (1435), book 2; English translation by John R. Spencer (Yale, 1956). Text.
- The Potato Eaters: Van Gogh to Theo, Nuenen, April 30, 1885 (letter 497). Van Gogh Letters.
- The beholder’s share: Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960); Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight (2012).
- Brains and abstract paintings: Durkin C., Apicella M., Baldassano C., Kandel E., Shohamy D., “The Beholder’s Share: Bridging art and neuroscience to study individual differences in subjective experience,” PNAS 122(15), e2413871122, 2025. PNAS; full text on PMC.
- Hopper and loneliness: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, Art Institute of Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago); interview with Katharine Kuh in The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (1962).
- Las Meninas up close: Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid. High-resolution image from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
- Moonrise over the Sea: Caspar David Friedrich, Mondaufgang am Meer, 1822, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Wikipedia.
- The poll paintings: Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant (1872), Musée Marmottan Monet; Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows (1890), Van Gogh Museum; Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor (1901), SMK, National Gallery of Denmark; J. M. W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire (1839), National Gallery, London; Caspar David Friedrich, Der Mönch am Meer (1808–1810), Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Images from Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Answers are anonymous and stored only as counts; this is a poll of readers, not a scientific sample.
- The plague and Venice: Galleys from Kaffa reached Genoa and Venice in January 1348; the Black Death killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. Wikipedia: Black Death.
- The man in the bushes: the dead man’s head on the left of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and the Flemish proverb “no plough stops for a dying man” (Google Arts & Culture, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium; Alberti’s Window). Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” doesn’t mention him.
- Hope and fear: Spinoza, Ethics (1677), part 3, definitions of the affects 12 and 13, translated by R. H. M. Elwes (Gutenberg).
- Loneliness and solitude: Paul Tillich, “Loneliness and Solitude,” in The Eternal Now (1963).
- The tree in solitude: Abbas Kiarostami, «در ستایش تنهایی» (“In praise of solitude”), a recording first played by Mohammad-Reza Delpak at Kiarostami’s 79th-birthday event at the Khaneh-ye Cinema, Tehran, June 22, 2019. Persian transcript at Tajasomi Online; ISNA. The English is my translation.
- An unfinished cinema: Abbas Kiarostami, “An Unfinished Cinema,” Paris, December 1995, for the centenary of cinema (text; e-flux).
- Expression versus arousal: R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938) (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
