Okay SO? This is actually a lot more than even the superficial comparison, which bless you, OP, for making.
I’m an art history professor so bear with my nerdgasm.
The title of the painting is Wanderer Above A Sea of Mist/Fog. It was painted by Caspar David Friedrich in 1818. Friedrich was a German Romantic painter and it’s crucial to understand the landscape painting movement for which he was famous, to grasp what the cinematographer shooting this scene of the Doctor was trying to imply.
The title itself is indicative of the Whovian genre: “I’m just a traveler,” the Doctor claims, when her newfound friends laud her for her aid and efforts. This is actually extremely compatible with the Romanticist genre, which encompassed writing, philosophy, and art in the late 18th and early 19th century, from which other movements, such as Transcendentalism, sprang. It’s a response and a foil to the Enlightenment, generally agreed to have been fathered by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that self-governance and individual, Reason-guided moral compass should take precedence over institutionalized thought (both church and state). Romanticism as a foil to the Enlightenment posits all of the strange, unique/baroque, eccentric, uncontrollable, ineffably powerful and sometimes terrifying qualities of the human experience (largely emotion-driven) are crucial to a fully enriched life. This lended itself well to landscape painting, which served as a metaphor for the human psyche, and the full gamut of human emotion (including the bad stuff–rage, fear, grief, loss) in the form of untamable natural phenomena like storms, oceans, fires, earthquakes, waterfalls, etc.
A particular subgenre of Romantic landscape (and of Romanticism) is the Sublime: that which cannot be categorized or fully understood when experienced, that which is awesome and unknowable, simultaneously beautiful and overwhelming (even frightening). Think Niagara Falls. It’s beautiful, but huge and very loud, and if you tipped over into it, you could drown. Now translate that feeling to a painting, and you have a Sublime Romantic landscape.
Which brings us to Friedrich, who often married Christian religious ideology with the worship of the Sublime in nature. Here he is showing us an anonymous man, unknowable, his back turned to us, having climbed a mountain to view the mighty range, partially obscured by fog. He BEARS WITNESS AS THE VIEWER BY PROXY to nature’s–to the world’s, to LIFE’S–amazingness. In the ACT OF LOOKING, he provides us with a CONDUIT for our own wonder.
Have you ever heard of anything MORE Doctor-y?
