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A fact from The Sea of Ice appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 25 November 2008, and was viewed approximately 11,810 times (disclaimer) (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that Caspar David Friedrich's 1824 painting The Sea of Ice(pictured) was seen as too radical in composition, and went unsold until after his death in 1840?
Under the heading "Description, the second paragraph states "In the foreground of the painting there are small icebergs layered on top of each other, which makes them almost look like steps. In the background, however, the icebergs are crushed together to form a tower of ice. These icebergs are very large and suggest something terrible has happened. Right next to this massive ice tower is a minuscule detail that is not the subject of the painting. It is a shipwreck." This is a deeply unsatisfying and erroneous description. First an "iceberg" (from the literally-translated German for "ice mountain") is a discrete object that floats separately from other objects. Morphologically it usually has a submerged portion that is significantly larger than the exposed portion. But what is depicted in the foreground of the painting is unequivocally not ice bergs, but ice sheet. Sheet ice is formed while floating atop water, is flat, smooth, and subject to compression distortion, and calving, as seen here. Second, the shipwreck is far from a "minuscule detail" in the painting; it comprises about 1/8th of the height of the canvas. Its blue-black hull conspicuously contrasts with the white and pale blue of ice and sky, and the rust-colored ice of the foreground. I would advocate for rewriting the "Description" section to be more accurate. Bricology (talk) 02:16, 15 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
