Carl Spitzweg
The Bookworm is typical of Spitzweg's humorous, anecdotal style and it is characteristic of Biedermeier art in general. The painting is representative of the introspective and conservative mood in Europe during the period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the revolutions of 1848, but at the same time pokes fun at those attitudes by embodying them in the fusty old scholar unconcerned with the affairs of the mundane world.
The picture shows an untidily dressed elderly bibliophile standing on top of a library ladder with several large volumes jammed under his arms and between his legs as he peers shortsightedly at a book. Unaware of his apparently princely or abbatial Baroque surroundings, he is totally absorbed in his researches. The intensity with which he stares at his book in the dusty old once-glorious library with its frescoed ceiling mirrors the inward-looking attitudes and return to conservative values that affected Europe during the period. The painting was executed two years after the revolutions of 1848 provided a shock to the stable world embodied in the dusty solitude of the library. In the lower-left corner of the painting, an old faded globe can be seen; the bookworm is not interested in the outside world, but in the knowledge of the past.
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