One of the clichés of Romantic and Gothic literature is the castle high in the mountains. They’re usually traced back to Salvator Rosa and his travellers’ horrors, in which those crossing the mountains of Europe were robbed and abandoned to die at the roadside.

Awe-inspiring mountains and lonely castles actually date further back, as landscape backdrops to paintings of the Renaissance. They make a cameo appearance in Sofonisba Anguissola’s Portrait of the Artist’s Family of 1557-58. This shows the artist’s younger sister Minerva, father Amilcare, and young brother Asdrubale, with a fantasy landscape of classical ruins and the rising towers of distant castles, receding to a dramatic mountain. Given that the artist and her family lived on the plain of the River Po in Cremona, Lombardy, that landscape could only have been wishful thinking.

Early faithful depictions are less awe-inspiring. This is Caspar Wolf’s view of the castle of Schloss Neu Bechburg at Önsingen (1778), which was built in the foothills of the Jura massif in central northern Switzerland, in about 1250.

It was Carl Friedrich Lessing, a follower of Caspar David Friedrich, who became the exponent of the Romantic castle in the mountains.

Lessing’s early paintings often featured castles with vertiginous walls set in rugged terrain, of which this Knight’s Castle from 1828 is a good example. These share the remote and sombre atmosphere of many of Friedrich’s paintings, but have a distinctly mediaeval flavour. Figures are small and generally few in number.

Lessing’s Romantic Landscape with Monastery from 1834 continues this theme of remote communities in rugged country, as two of the inhabitants of this monastery walk down this small track. One is carrying a lantern, a feature of some of Friedrich’s paintings.

Riflemen Defending a Pass from 1851 has a more military theme. Soldiers are lining the edge of crags overlooking a pass, seen at the lower left corner, through which their enemy is travelling. One casualty is already draped against a rock at the right. In the distance a high fortress is under attack, and smoke billows from both its towers.

This portrait of the famous Eltz Castle in the Eifel ‘mountains’ was painted by Lessing in about 1855. It is one of only three such castles on that bank of the River Rhine which have survived unscathed, and is still occupied by descendants of the same family who had it built there in the twelfth century. Before you rush off to climb this range, be aware that they’re hardly mountainous, their highest peak being the Hohe Acht, at an elevation of 747 metres (2,451 feet).

Lessing’s undated view of a Rocky Landscape, Gorge with Ruin, shows the burned-out ruins of an old castle beside an icefall, in higher ground towards Alpine peaks.

Thomas Cole’s painting of the cliffs and crags of The Fountain of Vaucluse, made in 1841 during his Grand Tour of Europe, is unashamedly Romantic. From the cloud-capped 240 metre high vertical wall in the distance, through the dizzying towers and walls of the ruined castle of the Bishop of Cavaillon perched above the river, to that river rushing past haggard trees in the foreground, it’s sublime in every aspect.

When Gustave Courbet was driven into exile in Switzerland, following his involvement in the Paris Commune of 1871, he developed an obsession with a picturesque castellated château on a lake.

He painted the island château of Chillon Castle at the eastern end of Lake Geneva, here in 1875. This picturesque château dates back to a Roman outpost, and for much of its recorded history from about 1050 has controlled the road from Burgundy to the Great Saint Bernard Pass, a point of strategic significance. It has since been extensively restored, and is now one of the most visited mediaeval castles in Europe.

Courbet’s Chillon Castle from 1874-77 is another of the views he painted of his castle on the lake.

In Arnold Böcklin’s Mountain Castle with a Train of Warriors from 1871, a small band of warriors clad in scarlet are making their way up a track towards an ancient castle overlooking a valley. Down below them, amid a stand of cypress trees, is a villa.