Nazarenes (art)
As Nazarene art a romantic-religious art direction is referred, the German-speaking artists at the beginning of the 19th century in Vienna and Rome justified. Representatives of this style, the Nazarenes , were mostly close to Catholicism , and not a few converted to it. The background to their departure were the socio-political upheavals of the Napoleonic era and the repressive Metternich system , which were reflected in art and teaching at the art academies. The goal of the Nazarenes was the renewal of art in the spirit of Christianity, using old Italian and German masters as models. They influenced the art of the entire Romantic period .
The name Nazarenes
The name Nazarenes is initially of biblical origin. This term was used to designate the followers of Jesus after his death on the cross. In the 17th century, alla nazarena was known in Rome as the name of a hairstyle in which the hair was worn long and parted in the middle. “They let their head hair and beard grow long and uncombed. For them, pale complexion is a sign of beauty that they also know how to produce artificially. You like to roll your eyes and lower your head towards your shoulders. "
Both Raphael and Albrecht Dürer wore such hairstyles, and the artists who lived in Rome, later referred to as the Nazarenes, are said to have wore them for at least a while. One theory says that the name i Nazareni for the followers of this art movement can be traced back to the ridiculous Romans who wanted to caricature the artists with it. There is evidence that Goethe used this term in his correspondence with Johann Heinrich Meyer . He also appears in the letters of the art agent and sculptor Johann Martin Wagner , who also referred to the artists as long-haired old Catholics . It was precisely this designation that reflected the ideal, preformational point of connection between the artists. This in turn was documented in the many conversions to Catholicism.
The name Nazarenes in the historical sense was probably coined only afterwards. For the first time in writing it can be found in this sense in 1891 in the memories of the youth of the painter Wilhelm von Schadow . The founding members of the Lukasbund, the nucleus of this art movement, did not call themselves that. In terms of art history, it has become common practice to apply the term Nazarenes to painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries who dealt with religious content in altarpieces and church frescoes and were close to the conception of art of the original Luke brothers.
history
The Vienna Art Academy
The art movement was brought into being by students who had studied at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 1804 . Both the Lübeck patrician son Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr , son of a Frankfurt painter, began their training at the art academy in Vienna , as the institution had an excellent reputation throughout Europe at that time.
The training at the academy shaped by Friedrich Heinrich Füger followed a strict curriculum. The technical aspects of artistic skill took precedence over artistic expression. The main residence of the students was the Antikensaal with casts of ancient statues and reliefs , after which the students had to draw. In the further painting classes, the subjects were based strictly on ancient models, following the classicist view of the time . Painters like Albrecht Dürer , Hans Holbein the Younger or Hans Baldung Grien were considered primitive by Classicism .
The foundation of the Lukasbund
Some academy students missed something they felt was essential in this training:
“You learn to paint excellent folds, draw a real figure, learn perspective, architecture, in short everything - and yet no real painter comes out. One thing is missing ... heart, soul and sensation ... "
Pforr, who was particularly enthusiastic about the old German painters and saw in them that emotional expression that he missed during his training, was already friends with Overbeck at that time. Both shared their critical view of the training at the Vienna Art Academy. During the summer of 1808, the circle of friends expanded to include Joseph Sutter , Josef Wintergerst , Johann Konrad Hottinger and Ludwig Vogel . From July 1808 the six artists met regularly to talk about an artistic topic. A year later, when the friends celebrated the one-year anniversary of their meeting, they decided to constitute the Order of the St. Luke Covenant . They chose the name because the evangelist Luke is considered the patron saint of painters. In literature, the group of artists is also referred to as the Lukasbrüder .
Although technically shaped by the academy training, these artists quickly moved away from the topics given by the academy. In harmony with the romantic and pietistic ideals of the time, they found the expression they sought in romantic and especially religious subjects. They took their religiously motivated ideal of renewal for art and society from the art theories of the German romantics Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder , Friedrich Schlegel , Novalis and Ludwig Tieck .
Schlegel saw the original purpose of art in glorifying religion and making its secrets even more beautiful and clear . In addition to the biblical themes, from his point of view only the subjects of poets such as Shakespeare and Dante were suitable as pictorial content. Tieck influenced the Lukasbrüder through his artist novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderings , published in 1798 , whose main character Franz dedicated his life to religious art and modestly, faithfully and honestly carried out his craft. Like him, the brothers in Luke wanted to devote themselves primarily to religious art. They looked for their role models in the Renaissance, for example in Albrecht Dürer , and in Italian painters from the time before Raphael , such as Fra Angelico and Giotto .
The artistic contrast to the academy training ultimately led to open conflict. When the Academy had to reduce the number of its students in 1809, the Luke Brothers were not accepted again.
The artists' colony in Rome
Sant'Isidoro Monastery
In 1810 Franz Pforr, Friedrich Overbeck, Ludwig Vogel and Johann Konrad Hottinger left Vienna to move to Rome and study their Italian role models there. They moved into quarters in the vacant Franciscan monastery of Sant'Isidoro at the foot of the Pincio (near the Spanish Steps ) and led an artistic outsider experience apart from the world (Overbeck: "To rework the ancient sacred art among themselves").
In contrast to the " German Romans ", who had made pilgrimages to Italy and especially to Rome earlier, the Nazarenes did not seek ancient Rome, but that of the medieval churches and monasteries, the "Christian" Rome.
For more than half a century, Rome had attracted artists and art theorists such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann , Raphael Mengs , Jacques-Louis David , Antonio Canova, and Bertel Thorvaldsen , who wanted to revive the ancient ideal of beauty. Artistic stagnation prevailed in Rome at this time. There was a lack of both a liberal middle class and a progressive upper class that could have stimulated new art movements. After the French occupation of Rome ended in 1814, the city was dominated politically and artistically, especially by the Vatican . Against this background, the members of the Lukasbund soon saw themselves as the true successors of Rome's spiritual and artistic heritage and were convinced that the union of classical beauty, German intimacy and true Christianity would lead to a new renaissance . This view is reflected in Overbeck's paintings Italia and Germania , in which two female figures symbolize the art of their respective countries. The picture, which shows a Roman basilica and a German medieval town in the background , is therefore occasionally referred to as the program picture of the Lukasbrüder: The blond-haired Germania leans forward to Italia and instructs the patient listener.
Almost all artists who were close to the St. Luke League converted to Catholicism . At Overbeck, the decisive experience that caused him to step over in the early summer of 1813 was the early death of his friend Franz Pforr, who died of tuberculosis on June 12, 1812 .
The group of the Luke Brothers in Rome attracted numerous other young painters from Germany from 1811 onwards. They were all received amicably. In the years 1811–1816, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld , Philipp Veit , Peter von Cornelius , Franz Ludwig Catel , Joseph Anton Koch , Wilhelm von Schadow and Carl Philipp Fohr joined her. Some of these men, however, preferred a looser artistic connection to the monastic life in Sant'Isidoro. Johann Konrad Hottinger, on the other hand, left the Lukasbund - above all, he did not feel up to the moral demands of this religious life. Ludwig Vogel also had to part with his friends in 1812 because family obligations ordered him back to Zurich. Both were later no longer active as artists.
Among the new members of the St. Luke League, Peter von Cornelius was particularly influential. He rejected the romantic reference to Old German as too faithful. He also expanded the subject areas in which the Luke Brothers found their motifs. Thanks to its influence, antiquity was no longer seen as a mythology opposed to Christianity, but as a forerunner of Christianity. The landscape painting was an accepted image issue for Lukas brothers. In the latter, above all Carl Philipp Fohr and Schnorr von Carolsfeld stood out.
The new art movement achieved its breakthrough and public recognition through two major orders: the fresco cycle for Casa Bartholdy and the fresco cycle for Casa Massimo . These two major commissions are the most important works the Nazarenes performed as a group during their early years in Rome.
The frescoes for Casa Bartholdy
The frescoes of the Casa Bartholdy was born 1815 to 1817 on behalf of the Prussian General Consul Jakob Salomon Bartholdy . At the time, Bartholdy lived in an apartment in Palazzo Zuccari , not far from the Sant'Isidoro monastery. The frescoes were intended for the reception room of this apartment. The Palazzo Zuccari was later renamed Casa Bartholdy and is now the Bibliotheca Hertziana . In terms of art history, these paintings are therefore referred to as "frescoes of Casa Bartholdy ".
The brothers in Luke were not practiced in fresco painting , as it had gone out of fashion in favor of panel painting for several decades. They therefore had no knowledge of the technical requirements of this painting technique, which included lime that had been soaked in for several years , the application of the plaster in finer layers and a wet-on-wet technique in various, carefully planned steps. However, after some searching, they came across a Roman craftsman who had prepared plaster walls for fresco painting for Raphael Mengs, who died in 1779 . Without this craftsman, the four artists involved in the frescoes would probably not have been able to carry out the commission.
The frescoes show scenes from the Old Testament story of Joseph . Friedrich Overbeck, Philipp Veit, Wilhelm von Schadow and Peter von Cornelius were involved in the execution. In favor of this first major order, Cornelius had even given up work on his painting The Wise and Foolish Virgins , which he had been working on since 1813 and which he had already described as his best painting in 1814.
In terms of style and quality, the frescoes by the four artists are inconsistent. Art historians today rate the works of Cornelius and Overbeck as the artistically more interesting of the frescoes executed. In Joseph Interpreting the Dreams of Pharaoh , Cornelius contrasts the calm figure of Joseph with a group of courtiers expressing doubt, envy, amazement and admiration. The landscape in the background is reminiscent of early Renaissance paintings. In the fresco Joseph is recognized by his brothers , Cornelius portrayed the commissioner of the work, the consul Salomon Bartholdy, as an elegantly dressed spectator.
Overbeck's Lunette The Seven Lean Years, however, shows a depressing picture of hunger and need. The desperate mother he painted is reminiscent of Michelangelo's Sibylle von Cumae . The sale of Joseph to the Egyptian merchants , also by Overbeck, is painted in a balanced composition reminiscent of Raphael with a harmonious color scheme, predominantly made of earth tones, and a fine perspective of light.
The three frescoes The Blessing of Jacob , Joseph's Interpretation of Dreams in Prison and Jakob recognizes Joseph's blood-stained robe , which is the strongest link to the classicist historical picture, are by Wilhelm von Schadow . The works of Veit, who painted the fresco Joseph and Potiphar's wife next to the lunette The Seven Fat Years , do not come close to the quality of his colleagues.
In 1886–1887 the frescoes were removed from Casa Bartholdy and added to the collection of the National Gallery in Berlin. Today they are in the building of the Alte Nationalgalerie , together with a watercolor copy. The acceptance was possible because the outer layer had bonded to a solid sintered bowl. Therefore, erected upright in a train from Rome to Berlin, it could be transferred to the National Gallery without much damage.
The frescoes for the Casa Massimo
Despite the varying quality, the frescoes attracted a lot of attention. It is said that when it was completed, onlookers stood in line in front of Casa Bartholdy to view the work.
Consul General Bartholdy even sent copies of the work to the Prussian Chancellor Prince Karl August von Hardenberg . The copies were watercolors that each of the individual artists made after completing his part of the work on the frescoes for Casa Bartholdy . Five watercolors were then drawn up on a shared canvas and connected to one another with painted architectural motifs. This work was shown publicly for the first time at the autumn exhibition of the Berlin Art Academy in 1818. The aim of both Bartholdy and the artists was to advertise the works of the artists in Rome and to be commissioned with similar large-scale orders in Germany. The next big follow-up order for the artists of the St. Luke League came again from Rome.
As early as 1817, the Marchese Massimo, a member of the Roman nobility , commissioned members of the St. Luke League to design three rooms in his Casa Massimo near the Lateran , based on the stories of Dante , Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto . Cornelius, however, broke off his work on the Dante frescoes after he had been appointed to the royal Munich academy by Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria in 1819 . Overbeck did not complete his work on the Tasso frescoes either, because he decided to only paint religious motifs. Philipp Veit and Joseph Anton Koch carried out this work. Only Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld completed his Ariosto cycle as planned.
Christ cycle
The patron and councilor of the collegiate government, Immanuel Christian Leberecht von Ampach , canon in Naumburg and Wurzen , commissioned another joint project from the Nazarenes in Rome in 1820. The painter friends Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld , Friedrich von Olivier and Theodor Rehbenitz lived since 1819 in the building of the Prussian legation at the Holy See , in the Palazzo Caffarelli on the Capitol hill; therefore they were called the three Capitoliner . The nine paintings on the life of Jesus were made under the project management of Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld by nine artists personally selected by Ampach, including the other Capitolians Olivier and Rehbenitz, for his private chapel in Naumburg. On his death, Ampach bequeathed the cycle to Naumburg Cathedral , where eight of them are still shown in the Three Kings Chapel today. Julius Schnorr von Carolsfelds Let the Children Come to Me, burned in 1931 in the Munich Glass Palace . Ampach gave the cardboard boxes for the paintings to St. Mary's Cathedral in Wurzen.
Further development in Vienna
In Vienna, their starting point, the new artistic movement found it more difficult to assert itself. In 1812 the German-Roman Joseph Anton Koch moved from Rome to Vienna. He was accepted into a circle of romantically minded citizens and artists, among them Wilhelm von Humboldt and his wife Karoline, Joseph von Eichendorff , Clemens and Bettina Brentano , and a group of young painters who met in the house of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel . Supported by commissions from this environment, a series of landscape paintings with religious themes was created, in particular by Ferdinand Olivier and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld .
Despite the support of the romantically minded bourgeoisie, the movement met with sharp rejection in the official, state-dominated art scene. In 1812 Prince Metternich was appointed curator of the Vienna Academy. The latter was still committed to the ideals of classicist art, and Metternich, who was politically thinking in all things, saw art as a domain of the state and, in any deviation from the official line, already the beginnings of secret bundles.
As early as 1815, the Vienna Brothers Luke began to disperse again. Ferdinand Olivier failed with an exhibition in 1816 because of the sharp criticism on the part of the Academy: his conception of art was called ruthless, and he himself was called an eccentric, a Don Quixote, a mannerist who deviated from nature. In 1818, after Friedrich Heinrich Füger's death, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld applied for the director's position at the academy and failed with this application.
It was not until 1830, when romantic nationalism prevailed as a political stance in the entire German-speaking area, that Nazarene art, starting from Bavaria and Prussia, was able to gain a foothold again in Vienna, where it originated.
The party in the Villa Schultheiss
The Nazarenes' breakthrough to public recognition in Germany began in 1818 with a visit by the Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig to Rome. The Crown Prince had visited Sicily and part of Greece during his arduous journey and arrived in Rome on January 21, 1818. He was considered to be inclined to the new art, and it was known that he wanted to make Munich the new center of romantic art in Germany and Italy.
In his honor, the numerous German artists staying in Rome held a farewell party on April 29, 1818 in the Villa Schultheiss , located in front of the Porta del Popolo on Monte Parioli , in which the entire decoration reflected the Nazarene conception of the role of artists and patrons had the motto.
The idea for this had evidently come from Cornelius, and the participating artists hurriedly created suitable banners and decorations. The large paintings that greeted the Crown Prince in the main room of the Villa Schultheiss were by Cornelius, Fohr, Veit and Overbeck as well as Wilhelm von Schadow and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. One of the paintings was an allegory of poetry sitting on a throne under a German oak; a painting The Ark of True Art, carried by Raphael and Dürer ; a painting by Overbeck, on which the greatest artists of all time and on which, among others, Emperor Maximilian, a Doge of Venice and the art-promoting Popes Leo X and Julius II could be recognized, as well as a painting with the most distinguished poets and artists. On this were among others Raphael, Dürer, Michelangelo, Wolfram von Eschenbach , Erwin von Steinbach , Homer and King David.
Some representations were meant to be critical and satirical. The collapsing walls of Jericho represented the collapsing walls of false art that would collapse under the trumpets of the romantic painters. In a similar direction, the representation of the targeted Hercules , which in cleaning up the stables of Augeas was shown.
Crown Prince Ludwig was deeply impressed by the festival held in his honor. It is said that when he said goodbye to the festival his voice failed with emotion and he only managed to say the words: Goodbye in Germany . As a thank you for the festival, he sent a poem from Munich to the German artists in Rome , in which he once again expressed his conviction that this art would prevail in Germany. In 1819 he consequently appointed Peter von Cornelius to an apprenticeship at the Royal Munich Academy .
Breakthrough in Germany
The Munich success
A few years after the party at the Villa Schultheiss, the directorships at the academies in Düsseldorf, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main were occupied by Nazarenes. This is thanks to the successful work of Cornelius as well as the protection of the Bavarian king and the emerging romantic nationalism.
The first significant commission that Cornelius received from Ludwig I were the frescoes in the Glyptothek , which were created between 1820 and 1830. The building, a design by Leo von Klenze , was to serve as a sculpture museum, in which mainly ancient statues could be seen. The frescoes should show matching individual representations from Greek mythology. As in Raphael's time, not only Cornelius was involved in the execution, but also his students. Already after the completion of the Hall of Gods in 1824 Cornelius was appointed director of the academy.
- I wish the art in Bavaria luck, I see a warm bright day. Since the Cinquecentis there has not been a painter like my Cornelius
wrote the Bavarian king on the certificate of appointment. The frescoes that were destroyed in World War II attracted widespread attention. With the success it was possible for Cornelius to bring a number of other Nazarenes to the Munich Academy. These included Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld as well as Heinrich Hess and Friedrich and Ferdinand Olivier . In 1830 the Munich Academy was dominated by the Nazarenes. Friedrich Overbeck had always turned down a call to the Munich Academy, but during his four-week visit to Munich in 1831 he was honored in an unusual way. Artists and art lovers received him at the gates of the city, unhitched his carriage horses and pulled him to Cornelius' apartment. Ludwig I also received the artist.
Thanks to Ludwig I's protection, numerous Nazarene works of art were created in Munich. This included works such as the river allegories created by Wilhelm von Kaulbach on the front sides of the Hofgarten arcades in Munich and church paintings such as that of the All Saints Court Church , which were carried out by Heinrich Maria Hess, and which art historians have described as the most important monumental achievement of the Nazarene movement. It was destroyed in the Second World War, as was the Boniface Basilica , which was also painted in the Nazarene style. The so-called Bavaria Windows in Cologne Cathedral by Joseph Anton Fischer and the Nazarene painting of the Speyer Cathedral from 1844 to 1853, which Johann von Schraudolph carried out together with his brother Claudius and a large group of assistants, can also be traced back to Munich's success.
The Swiss church painter Melchior Paul von Deschwanden from Stans also studied at the Munich Academy .
The effect in the rest of Germany
Frankfurt am Main in particular established itself as the second capital of the Nazarene movement . Philipp Veit was appointed head of the painting school and director of the gallery in Frankfurt in 1830 . Johann David Passavant became the Städel's inspector and played a key role in ensuring that this museum now has such an extensive collection of medieval art. The purchase of the Lucca Madonna by Jan van Eyck can also be traced back to him.
Increasingly, the Nazarenes also received orders outside of Munich. Philipp Veit created frescoes for the Städel and later worked on those for the Mainz Cathedral . Of these, only the New Testament Bible scenes in the arches of the nave are preserved today.
The sculptor Christian Mohr equipped the southern front with sculptures based on drawings by Ludwig Schwanthaler .
Eduard von Steinle created frescoes for the Cologne Cathedral , the Ägidienkirche in Munster , the Imperial Hall and the Imperial Cathedral in Frankfurt and St. Mary's Church in Aachen . After Cornelius had estranged himself from the Bavarian King Ludwig I in 1839, he went to Berlin and was also supposed to paint frescoes there for the Campo Santo planned near the rebuilt Berlin Cathedral . In the aftermath of the revolution of 1848 , Friedrich Wilhelm IV gave up the plans for the construction of the Campo Santo. Cornelius, who had been working on the preliminary studies since 1843, continued to work on them until his death almost twenty years later. He was aware that they would probably never be carried out, as no other location than the planned Campo Santo was possible due to their size. The charcoal drawings, which Cornelius regarded as his most important artistic works, are now kept in the storage rooms of the National Gallery in Berlin. Particularly impressive among them is the 472 centimeter high and 588 centimeter wide charcoal drawing Die Apokalyptischen Reiter .
St. Apollinaris in Remagen was designed as a total work of art. The Cologne cathedral builder Ernst Friedrich Zwirner designed the building for the planned interior painting, which was then carried out in 1843–1853 by Ernst Deger , Andreas and Karl Müller and Franz Ittenbach .
The end of the movement
From secularization to the Kulturkampf
The end of the Nazarene art was caused by external and internal reasons. Romanticism polarized itself between religiosity and political Sturm und Drang . An external reason for the Nazarenes' concentration on religion was the revolutions of 1830 and 1848/49 and the repression that followed them. Prussian political dominance gradually emerged from 1848.
After a short phase of the arrangement with the Catholic Church, this was linked to an aggressive cultural policy by Prussia : The Prussian culture war followed local church disputes , for example in the Duchy of Nassau . It was directed against all currents associated with Roman Catholic attitudes, because an anti-Prussian attitude was suspected behind them (→ “ Must Prussia ”). The Prussian struggle against ultramontanism was accompanied by the transformation of the area-wide state of the Vatican into an ideal 'state' structure, the territorial definition of which was not to take place until the following century. The loss of territory of the Vatican - as the supposedly 'favorable opportunity' for Prussian politics to also enforce idealistic-hegemonic claims against the Catholics in Prussia and Germany - did not go hand in hand with the abandonment of its spiritual and religious leadership role, rather it changed from a state in the true sense of the word an institution of spiritual teaching and leadership of the church. It manifested itself in pictorial works, the distribution of which through modern printing methods made them known also in private. The craft ideal of the early Nazarenes found its way into technical reproducibility. At the same time, the Catholic milieu was left because the longing for the reliable ideal or idyll was not specific to religion. An art emerged for the politically no longer or not yet represented masses. At the same time, the Prussian anti-Catholic attitude pushed Nazarene artists out of public institutions in many places. After Metternich's repression, this was a second time an existential threat to this art movement and its protagonists. If one did not want to or could not follow the prevailing political taste, only the Catholic Church or its well-balanced circles remained as clients. Against this background, some of the artists created images with hidden content critical of Prussia. Bishops persecuted by the Prussian judiciary were shown in pictures with a Christian theme. These pictures could be shown publicly, although the portrayed were legally convicted under Prussian law, were on the run or lived in exile. Artists also portrayed themselves as supporters of the Catholic cause in pictures of the Passion of Christ. In the church of Koblenz-Arenberg, for example, the Schadow student Peter Joseph Molitor figured as the bearer of the cross of Christ to Golgotha. Another variant can be found in stone carving. At the crossroads in Kiedrich are Otto von Bismarck and the Prussian minister Adalbert Falk represented as spectators of the Passion of Christ.
As a result of this repression, the artistic horizons of many Nazarenes narrowed to religious themes as the only way to earn a living, while historical themes and landscapes previously had an important part in the overall work. At the same time, the solution from the Italianized background limited the display horizon. If one had previously sought or constructed common roots, for example in the picture Italia and Germania , the formation of the nations brought mutual delimitation.
The religious renewal looked for an appropriate visual language between secularization and the culture war . Biblical topics were originally linked to rural living conditions and were also depicted. In contrast, there was increasing industrialization. The double homelessness - factual and spiritual - found its alternative in the idealized rural past, which found itself as a background foil for the clear instructions of the church. The Nazarenes met this need with their religious seriousness.
The Catholic Church was able to give orders on a broad scale. At the same time, due to the development of reproduction techniques, she was able to transport contemporary art with the content she wanted into every household. In this context, the Association for the Dissemination of Religious Images, which was founded in 1841 , had devotional pictures made by engravers of the Düsseldorf school and distributed internationally. Countless new neo-Gothic church buildings were adorned with works by second and third generation Nazarenes in the second half of the 19th century. These numerous commissions contributed to the popularization of the Nazarene art.
The work of the professor of religious painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Martin von Feuerstein (1856–1931) , gave a final boost .
The trivialization of an ideal of art
While Impressionism gained in importance in the second half of the 19th century, the content of the Nazarenes' ideal of art had been used up and had become a stencil. The entire art movement was increasingly disregarded by art connoisseurs and was forgotten.
“In the parlance of non-experts, Nazarene denotes an anemic and sentimental religious imagination that was alive until the Second World War and can still be grasped today in its last branches. It is roughly understood as the German equivalent of the ecclesiastical arts and crafts that were located in Paris around the Saint-Sulpice church and whose standardized series production is the epitome of bad taste. ”This is how Sigrid Metken summed up the effects of the effects that began in the second half of the 19th century Popularization together. This verdict also included early protagonists who were brilliant painters and courageous innovators in their day.
This judgment was largely due to the abundance of sweetish, poor quality and pious pictures, which found their imitation in cheap wall picture prints and which gained popularity in broad layers in the second half of the 19th century. This trivial art was produced industrially and sold at fairs. In reproductions of works by the main representatives of the Nazarenes, such as Overbeck and Steinle, the originals were sentimentally simplified. This was compounded when color printing came along . In her investigation, Sigrid Metken has shown how motifs by Schnorr , Overbeck and Steinle were taken up and kitsched up for the production of saints and devotional pictures in order to meet a broad public taste.
The rediscovery of the Nazarenes
The first art-historical works on the painters belonging to the Nazarenes, which were more than a mere collection of sources and materials, were published in the 1920s and 1930s. They were monographs that dealt primarily with the main characters among the brothers in Luke. In the 1930s this was expanded to include more extensive work on the frescoes in Casa Massimo.
The detailed examination of the Nazarene art did not begin until the second half of the 20th century. In 1964 The Nazarenes - A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome by Keith Andrews was published , a book which, as well as several small exhibitions, including one in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, introduced a more detailed and factual examination of the Nazarenes' conception of art. From the 1970s onwards, there was a re-evaluation of artistic historicism of the 19th century and, in this context, a renewed interest in Nazarene art. In 1977 a large exhibition in the Städel in Frankfurt am Main was devoted to the Nazarenes and brought together fundamental articles on this art form in the exhibition catalog. This was followed in 1981 by a similarly large exhibition in Rome, as a result of which the frescoes in Casa Massimo were extensively restored. In the first half of 2005, the Schirn in Frankfurt am Main again showed works by the Nazarenes in an exhibition dedicated to them.
One of the centers of Nazarene art today is the Behnhaus / Drägerhaus Museum in Lübeck, Overbeck's hometown. The museum has owned his artistic estate since 1914.
Features of Nazarene art
In one respect, the Nazarene art resembles the classical school from which it developed: the clear, contoured form takes precedence over color, the drawing takes precedence over the painterly. The predominant compositional element is the human figure.
The protagonist of this direction was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the leading theoretician of Sturm und Drang. He turned against some of the central teachings of the Enlightenment (classicism) and emphasized the beauty of irregular, primeval things, the antiquity (Middle Ages).
This development had already started in the 17th century, but more in elite circles and with few technical possibilities. In the 18th and especially in the 19th century these efforts were considerably intensified. Now books appeared that were supposed to reproduce works of art from this era. For reproduction, these works were converted into wood engravings or woodcuts - and in this form the works of the so-called "primitives" became popular. The emphasis on the linear element - as the main characteristic of the woodcut - in the art of the Nazarenes thus stems from a technically misunderstood view of medieval art. The preponderance of drawing and contouring in older painting, which was undoubtedly already present, was further emphasized by the requirements of the book printing of the time.
Overbeck got to know and love this version of “pre-Raphael” painting as works of pious simplicity and monastic devotion to work before he saw the originals in Rome. The sweetness and bloodlessness of Nazarene art, which can sometimes be felt today, is based on these limited possibilities of technical reproduction.
The main function of the colors is to internalize and spiritualize the scene. Figures and landscape are connected to one another in warm, pastel enamel. Special emphasis is placed on the lighting that leads to the central figures. In many Nazarene pictures, it is the only dramatic element in a picture composition that is otherwise determined by deep calm, inwardness and seriousness. This solemnity transports scenes which thematically seem very everyday into the unearthly. The airy, transparent blue tones of baroque classicism , which move the scene into allegorical distance, are taboo. The lack of spatial depth and the avoidance of bright color contrasts support the celebration. They are external features that connect the Nazarenes with their medieval models.
The facial expressions of the characters depicted are serious and internalized; you don't see a single cheerful or even laughing face. The soft, smoothly shaved facial features of the men are striking. In this respect, too, Nazarene art is similar to medieval models. This also applies to the Nazarene portrait art. An example is a painting by Overbeck, a so-called friendship picture , as the Lukas brothers called the portraits they painted of each other. Franz Pforr looks at the viewer with serious, wide eyes in the painting from 1810. Pforr wears “old German” clothes and leans over the parapet of a window surrounded by wine. Behind him is his imaginary future wife, who knits and reads a religious book at the same time. A Madonna lily , a medieval symbol of Mary , equates her with a Madonna . The opposite window offers a view of a medieval northern European street, but in the background of which one can see an Italian coastal landscape.
The erotic is almost completely excluded as a theme in Nazarene painting. The people in Nazarene pictures are mostly fully clothed, often in flowing robes with strong folds and a classicistic look. Representations of almost naked bodies, such as in Friedrich Overbeck's monumental Roman fresco Olindo and Sophronia at the stake , completed in 1820 , as well as the nudes by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld , are exceptions.
Influence of Nazarene art on other styles
The artistic influence of the Nazarenes was far-reaching and long-lasting.
Italy: The Nazarenes had their first successes in Italy, where they lived for a long time, even in the Vatican and Assisi (Overbeck in the Porciuncula Chapel in Santa Maria degli Angeli ). Tommaso Minardi in particular followed her style, who abandoned his Caravaggesque early style around 1820 and became the spokesman for the “Il Purismo” movement, which introduced the Nazarene principles into religious Italian painting.
France: In France, her influence led to a renewal of religious art in the Lyon school and shaped the painter Maurice Denis . There are Nazarene elements in the church painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres . His student Hippolyte Flandrin created a large wall painting in St. Germain-des-Prés in 1846. The center of German influence in France was Lyon , where Paul Chenavard designed huge wall paintings on complex philosophical subjects.
Holland: The Dutch Ary Scheffer introduced Nazarene simplicity into his salon painting.
England: Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld's 240 Bible illustrations published in 1860 were particularly influential in Great Britain. The Pre-Raphaelites , an English artists' association founded by the painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Everett Millais in 1848, had already taken up the ideas of the Nazarenes. Ford Madox Brown had established contact with the Nazarenes. The Pre-Raphaelites also strived for a deeper religious and spiritual deepening of art and regarded the Italian art of the early Renaissance as a model. A tradition in history painting was sorely missed. And when the House of Parliament was to be decorated with wall paintings in 1840 , it was done in German fashion.
Germany: In Germany it was above all the Beuron School that took up the ideas of the Nazarenes in the second half of the 19th century. The Beuron direction was founded by the builder, sculptor and painter Peter Lenz as well as Jakob Wüger and Lukas Steiner in the Benedictine monastery of Beuron with the aim of reviving religious art.
Nazarene artists
Exhibitions
- The Nazarenes: Religion Makes Art Exhibition April 15 - July 24, 2005 in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
- The Nazarenes - from the Tiber to the Rhine. Three painting schools from the 19th century . Exhibition June 10 - November 25, 2012 in the Landesmuseum Mainz
literature
- Keith Andrews : The Nazarenes . Munich 1974.
- Rudolf Bachleitner: The Nazarenes. Heyne, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-453-41182-X .
- Klaus Gallwitz : The Nazarenes. Catalog. Städel'sches Kunstinstitut and Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main 1977, OCLC 164955391 .
- Klaus Gallwitz: The Nazarenes in Rome . Exhibition catalog. Prestel, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-7913-0555-7 .
- Bradford D. Kelleher (Ed.): German Masters of the Nineteenth Century. Exhibition catalog of The Metropolitan Museum of Art . New York 1981, ISBN 0-87099-263-5 .
- Landesmuseum Mainz (ed.): The Nazarenes. From the Tiber to the Rhine. Three painting schools from the 19th century. edited by Norbert Suhr, Nico Kirchberger (catalog for the Nazarenes exhibition in the Landesmuseum Mainz from June 10 to November 25, 2012). Schnell + Steiner, Regensburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-7954-2602-6 .
- Herbert Schindler : Nazarenes - Romantic Spirit and Christian Art in the 19th Century. Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1982, ISBN 3-7917-0745-0 .
- Christa Steinle, Max Hollein : Religion makes art. The Nazarenes. Catalog for the exhibition in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Walther König, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-88375-940-6 .
- William Vaughan: European Art in the 19th Century . Volume 1: 1750-1850. From Classicism to Biedermeier Herder, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-451-21144-0 .
- Bettina Vaupel: Every picture is a service. In: Monuments 23/1 (2013). ISSN 0941-7125 , pp. 75-81.
Web links
- The Nazarenes in Rome
- The Nazarenes in Rhineland-Palatinate (PDF; 315 kB)
References and comments
- ↑ Otto Baisch: Johann Christian Reinhart and his circles. An image of life and culture. Leipzig 1882, p. 315 f.
- ^ Letter from 19-year-old Friedrich Overbeck to his father on April 27, 1808.
- ↑ letter of Karl Ludwig Roecks to his childhood friend Overbeck: s: Karl Ludwig Roeck Friedrich Overbeck, 1810
- ^ Christian Lebrecht von Ampach. In: New Nekrolog der Deutschen. 9 (1831), I. Theil, Ilmenau 1833, p. 501.
- ↑ Schindler, p. 47.
- ^ "According to the program designed by Sulpiz Boisserée and decided by the Mainz Cathedral Chapter , the highly respected Munich sculptor made pencil drawings for all the figures as early as 1847. After his death, Christian Mohr from Andernach was commissioned with the execution. It was his merit to have translated Schwanthaler's still classicistic designs into a neo-Gothic formal language, which was based on the work of the German painters living in Rome, above all Friedrich Overbeck. His sculptures are considered the pinnacle of romantic-Nazarene sculpture in Germany ”(Arnold Wolff).
- ↑ Vaupel, p. 79.
- ↑ Gallwitz, p. 365 ff.
- ↑ a b Vaughan, p. 53.
