The Nazarenes

In 1809, the young German painters Franz Pforr (1788-1812) and Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869) founded the Brotherhood of St Luke in Vienna.

They settled in Rome a year later, where they lived and worked with new recruits in the convent of Sant'Isidoro del Pincio. Because of their flowing hair and monk-like appearance, they were called the Nazarenes.

Within the confines of the Brotherhood, their daily life was based on fraternity and ascetic poverty. As artists, the members set out to revive the art of painting by following an ideal of simplicity and sincerity, in conflict with the academic principles of their time. Their reworking of ancient sacred an was based on a sobriety of colour and line that had many sources of inspiration, including Fra Angelico, the early works of Raphael, and older northern masters from van Eyck to Durer.

For the Nazarenes, art was a divine mission, elevated to the level of true faith. The celestial origin of sacred art was celebrated by Philipp Veit (1793-1877) in his frescos in the Villa Massimo of Rome (1819), where he represented the three great Italian poets - Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso -alongside the saints and fathers of the church.

Between 1826 and 1839, Peter von Cornelius (1783-1867) gave artists sacred status in the loggias of the Munich Pinakothek (1826-30) and the Stadel Institute of Frankfurt with his Triumph of Religion in the Arts(1829).

In portraits, there was a mood of contemplation. In the intimate portrayal of friends, pictures reveal subtle nuances of character, in a style far removed from the canons of official portraiture. The original spirit, derived from the masters of the 15th century that had brought the Nazarenes together, lasted only for a short time.

The fresco cycles that decorated the home of the German consul Bartholdy (1816-17) and the Villa Massimo already showed affinities with the style of the Renaissance of the early 16th century.

Pforr died before the age of 25 and Cornelius was summoned, together with Heinrich von Olivier (1785-1841) and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872), to Munich by Ludwig.

The king encouraged a popular, educational style of painting and commissioned them to adorn the city's public buildings with patriotic, humanistic frescos. The art of the Nazarenes assumed an official role with Cornelius' paintings - which formed part of the Glyptothek (1819-30), the museum of ancient art designed in a Greek style by Leo von Klenze. Thanks, too, to Carolsfeld's cycle of the Nibelungen (1827) for the Konigsbau (the royal residence in Munich open to visitors), an artistic interpretation of national mythology assumed an educational function.

The artistic achievement of the Nazarenes is difficult to evaluate; their finished paintings appear less impressive with the perspective of history than they did to their contemporaries. Awkward composition, weak colouring and derivative themes detract from the challenge of their work in its time. However, the programme of the Nazarenes—the adoption of honest expression in art and the inspiration of artists before Raphael—was to exert considerable influence in Germany, and in England upon the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In their abandonment of the academy and their rejection of much of the artistic legacy of western art, the Nazarenes can be seen as pioneers of an avant-garde tendency in art which would dominate the late nineteenth century.

Franz Pforr

Born Frankfurt am Main, 5 April 1788 - Died Albano, Albano Laziale near Rome, 16 June 1812.

Franz Pforr was a German painter and draughtsman. His work evokes a fairy-tale type of medievalism, with bright colours and picturesque details. It is best represented in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut of his native Frankfort. He received his earliest training from his father, the painter Johann Georg Pforr (1745–98), and his uncle, the art professor and first inspector of the painting gallery in Kassel, Johann Heinrich Tischbein the younger (1742–1808).

In 1805 he became a student at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, which was dominated by the severe Neo-classicism of its director, Heinrich Füger; he was taught by Hubert Maurer (1738–1818), Franz Cauzig (1762–1828) and Johann Martin Fischer.

During the war with France in 1805, Pforr volunteered as a guard in the Vienna militia. He suffered a nervous breakdown, brought on by the conflict between his passionate longing for a contemplative life and a desire to see military action. He probably turned to religion to help sustain his mental equilibrium.

In 1806 he resumed his academic studies and, believing himself destined to become a battle painter, made numerous drawings of historical battles, for example his still schoolish and baroquely composed Wallenstein in the Battle of Lützen (1806; Frankfurt am Main, Städel. Kstinst. & Städt. Gal.).

However, it was not until 1807, with Drawing with Twelve Travel Sketches (Frankfurt am Main, Stadt- & Ubib.), that he first began to overcome his beginner’s style and to develop his own. This resulted in reduced detail, simplified continuous contours, a structuring by means of planar rather than illusionistic criteria, a new clarity of vision and a chastened balance between nature and artistic conception.

"The Entry of Emperor Rudolf of Habsburg into Basle, 1273" is the first large medieval subject painted in a deliberately historicist manner. Its flattened perspectives, awkward figures and bright colours are all calculated to achieve an effect of child-like innocence and naiveté. The work reflects the artist's nostalgia for a proud period of Germanic unity under the Holy Roman Empire and his admiration for the first monarch of the Habsburg dynasty to be elected Emperor.

Pforr's short life was overshadowed by illness and depression and this is evident in "St George and the Dragon". The combatants are self-sufficient, in a way that is quite out of keeping with a struggle; only the large and penetrating eye of the horse takes up contact with the viewer. This is a fight without effort, as if the knight were dreaming his own experience in a lethargy remote from time.

In the painting "Shulamit and Maria" Pforr separates the Italian and the German worlds, the Old and the New Testament. Pforr also wrote a novel on this theme.

Pforr didn't have the chance to live long enough to see his art acknowledged. He died of tuberculosis at age 24.

Paintings by Franz Pforr

Peter Von Cornelius

Born Sept. 23rd 1783, Düsseldorf, Palatinate - Died March 6th, 1867, Berlin.

Peter Von Cornelius is a painter notable for his part in the German revival of fresco painting in the 19th century. His early works are unremarkable examples of Neoclassicism. But his style gradually changed under the influence of German Gothic art, German Romantic writers, and Durer's marginal drawings for the prayer book of Emperor Maximilian.

In 1811 Cornelius went to Rome, where he joined a group of young German painters, the Nazarenes, or Lucas Brotherhood (Lukasbund), led by Franz Pforr and J.F. Overbeck. In 1819 Cornelius was invited to Munich by the Bavarian crown prince, later King Ludwig I, to decorate the new museum of classical sculpture (Glyptothek). In 1824 he became director of the Munich Academy. His “Last Judgment” (1829–40), filling the whole east wall of the Ludwigskirche in Munich, is notable for its clarity and didactic purpose. In 1841 Frederick William IV called Cornelius to Berlin, where his main occupation was the planning of a vast cycle of frescoes (never executed) for the walls of a cemetery, modelled on the Campo Santo in Pisa.

At heart Cornelius was always an academic artist, even if his outlook was shaped by Romantic philosophy. But he remainsa notable artist by virtue of his penetrating intellect, which gave substance to his large dogmatic pictures and order to their composition.

Paintings by Peter Von Cornelius