If you have a chance to get to New York, in the next few weeks, I highly recommend an exhibition that just opened at the Metropolitan Museum called Caspar David Friedrich the Soul of Nature. Friedrich is probably the best known exponent of German Romanticism. Now I won't give a lecture, but suffice to say that romanticism reacting against neo classical insistence on intellect, reason and order trumpeted instead the supremacy of feeling and spontaneity gave us our default understanding of what art is and honed a modern sensibility regarding nature, namely that when we contemplate it, the mystery and wonder that natural beauty evokes in us speaks not merely to the material reality.