The German Genius

history as much as a series of art stories, vivid incidents taken from the lives of the great painters, together with intimate details of how early German artists used to live, based chiefly on Joachim Sandrart’s biography of Dürer. In full Romantic mode, Wackenroder and Tieck explained art as divine inspiration.
    It was against this background that four apprentice painters at the Vienna Academy joined the triangle of Oberbeck, Pforr, and Passavant. They were Ludwig Vogel and Johann Konrad Hottinger from Switzerland, Joseph Wintergerst from Swabia, and Joseph Sutter from Austria itself. These seven painters now met regularly to critique each other’s work and were soon united as a band opposed to the policies of the Academy. Taking a lead from Wackenroder’s book, they called themselves a “brotherhood,” the other name being relatively easy to decide on: the Evangelist St. Luke, the patron saint of painters. In line with their religious, monkish aims, Fra Angelico, the painter-monk, was their ideal. “The artist,” said Overbeck in a letter, “must transport us through Nature to a higher idealised world…” 35
    Because of their continual conflicts with the Vienna Academy, they planned a move south, to “Raphael’s town” and when their own Academy was forced to close in May 1809 because of the French occupation, and was then allowed to reopen only as a much smaller entity, the rebels—not included among the smaller chosen few—used the opportunity to decamp. It was May 1810 when the first artistic secession of modern times came into being.
    They set up shop in Rome, in the monastery of S. Isidoro, an Irish Franciscan church and college founded in the sixteenth century. Each painter had his own cell in which to live and work. At night they ate together, then they read and drew in the refectory. Drawing—like prayer—became a ritual. In the Vatican they could dwell on the frescoes by Pinturicchio and Raphael to their heart’s content. “Wackenroder’s art-loving monk had become a reality.”
    Overbeck assumed the leadership, but more than anything it was the friendship between him and Pforr that “laid the foundation for the rebirth of German art.” 36 They painted for each other and in a very similar style, as a comparison of Pforr’s Friendship and Overbeck’s Italia and Germania will show. Before the collaboration could go very much further, however, in July 1812 Pforr died of consumption at the age of twenty-four. While Pforr had been sinking, some among the group had begun meeting at the house of Abbate Pietro Ostini, a professor of theology at the Collegium Romanum, and after Pforr’s death the monastic isolation of the “Fratelli di S. Isidoro” was ended and the building itself given up. The members of the Brotherhood of St. Luke changed their name to “Düreristen,” but because of their emphasis on Catholicism, and because of their monastic mode of life, not to mention the flowing cloaks and hair that they affected, they were given the nickname “the Nazarenes.” Like many such satirical soubriquets in the history of art, it stuck. 37
    Despite these mixed fortunes, the Brotherhood’s works were becoming known farther north, and other young painters began to head over the Alps, among them Rudolf and Wilhelm Schadow, sons of Johann Gottfried Schadow, the famous Berlin sculptor, and Johann and Philipp Veit, sons of Dorothea Veit and stepsons of Friedrich Schlegel. But the most serious new talent was Peter von Cornelius. 38
    Headstrong, single-minded, and much influenced by Goethe’s Faust , Cornelius had produced a series of illustrations for Goethe’s drama. Goethe liked the drawings well enough but encouraged Cornelius to study his Italian contemporaries. In Italy, Cornelius joined Overbeck and took Pforr’s place. In fact, his arrival marked a new direction for the Nazarenes. Less overawed by Raphael, Cornelius persuaded the brotherhood to work less for their own narrow circle and instinctively grasped that if there really were to be a national artistic regeneration, a new monumental art was needed, an art that would occupy churches, monasteries, and important public buildings. He convinced himself and the others that fresco painting had that monumental quality lacking in easel paintings and so persuaded the Prussian Consul General in Rome, Salomon Bartholdy, who occupied the Palazzo Zuccari (now the Biblioteca Hertziana), to allow four of the Nazarenes a commission. As a