Faust Painting Analysis

Since the very beginnings of the tale of Faust the story has been incredibly open to artistic interpretation. The story of Faust can be seen as far back as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and from that point onward the story has taken on an innumerable amount of differing thoughts and interpretations. However, in observation of three separate paintings from three completely different time periods one can see how the three paintings share very similar aspects. These three paintings, all depicting Faust, were made by three completely individual artists. One from the seventeenth century was painted by Rembrandt, another painted by Eugene Delacroix in the 19th century, and a third during the 20th century by the artist Salvador Dali. Now, …show more content…
However, there are other examples of paintings depicting the same exact story in an entirely different light that would be completely unrecognizable as a Faust piece of artwork. To begin, the painting, created by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, is much more colorful in comparison to the other three faust paintings. And a detail of particular interest is the fact that the character of Faust is no where to be found in the painting. The three previous paintings used the character of Faust as one of, if not the only, main focal points of the painting. It is curious that Schinkel would decide to emit Faust from a painting which was dedicated to the very story that is all about him. It creates a sense of wonder in anyone who sees it because, put plainly, they struggle to figure out just exactly how this has to do with Faust in the first place. It is largely possible that the reasoning for this fact is that Karl Friedrich Schinkel was largely an architect rather than a painter. His main focus was on expressing through architecture. This would account for the lack of a human representation of Faust, moving the entire focus of the painting towards the