Rome as a city (and as history) represented the geographical fact of a place where the unity of art and life, of nature and the spirit (which was the focus of romanticism’s and particularly German romanticism’s, dream) seemed manifest. While the German enthusiasm for Rome was not without parallel in the minds of artists of other lands, the more obsessional aspects remained uniquely German—so much so that it would hardly be an exaggeration to propose that, for most of the nineteenth century, Rome was artistically a German colony. — Kermit S. Champa
Even before the death of Pforr on 16 June 1812, the Brotherhood were developing in new directions. Their presence in the Roman community had forced a division between classicists and medievalists. It was probably one of the former, the landscape painter Johann Christian Reinhart, who dubbed them ‘Nazarenes’ in the first place. They found themselves turned into the leaders of a movement enthusiastically supported by Koch, the Riepenhausens and several apologists for the Catholic revival, Rumohr, Schlosser and Count Stolberg. Overbeck’s admission to the Catholic Church on Palm Sunday, 1813, further emphasized the movement’s involvement with religious dogmatism. — William Vaughan
Commentary
- The Nazarenes as Art Revolutionaries
- The Nazarenes in Rome (Kermit S. Champa)
- The Nazarenes in Rome (Lionel Gossman)
- The Religions of the Nazarenes and the Conflict of Faiths (Cordula Crewe)
- The Nazarenes and male friendship
Reception, reputation, and influence
- Critical Reception of the Nazarenes
- Ideological Criteria in German Judgments of the Nazarenes
- The nineteenth-century interchange of artists between Germany and the United States
Cultural Contexts
- The Cultural Context of Nazarene Art
- The Nazarenes and Germanic nationalism
- Goethe, Medieval Revivalism, and the Nazarene
- The Nazarenes and the Caffè Greco
Artists
- Peter von Cornelius (1784-1867)
- Carl Philipp Fohr
- Josef von Führich (1800-1876)
- Joseph Anton Koch
- Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869)
- Franz Pforr (1778-1812)
- Wilhelm von Schadow (1789–1862)
- Gottlieb Schick
- Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872)
- Philipp Veit
Bibliography
Andrews, Keith. The Nazarenes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
Champa, Kermit S., and Kate H. Champa. German Paintings of the 19th Century. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1970.
Gossman, Lionel. Unwilling Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century. Victorian Web [Complete text in the Victorian Web].
Grewe, Cordula. Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2009.
Vaughan, William. German Romantic Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
von Wörndle, Heinrich. Josef Führichs Werke. Vienna: Verlag von Artaria, 1914,
Witemeyer, High. George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. [especially chapter 6.]
Last modified 26 September 2016