The Starry Night
Art historian Sven Loevgren expands on Schapiro's approach, again calling "The Starry Night" a "visionary painting" which "was conceived in a state of great agitation." He writes of the "hallucinatory character of the painting and its violently expressive form," although he takes pains to note that the painting was not executed during one of Van Gogh's incapacitating breakdowns. Loevgren compares Van Gogh's "religiously inclined longing for the beyond" to the poetry of Walt Whitman. He calls "The Starry Night" "an infinitely expressive picture which symbolizes the final absorption of the artist by the cosmos" and which "gives a never-to-be-forgotten sensation of standing on the threshold of eternity." Loevgren praises Schapiro's "eloquent interpretation" of the painting as an apocalyptic vision and advances his own symbolist theory with reference to the eleven stars in one of Joseph's dreams in the Old Testament book of Genesis. Loevgren asserts that the pictorial elements of "The Starry Night" "are visualized in purely symbolic terms" and notes that "the cypress is the tree of death in the Mediterranean countries."