The German Genius

theme they chose the Old Testament story of Joseph in Egypt. 39
    The frescoes were a great success (they were removed to Berlin in 1887). All of the artists—Overbeck, Cornelius, Philipp Veit, and Friedrich Schadow—were at their lyrical best, their figures strong and rhythmic, with an intense sense of atmosphere. “It was a collective break with what had gone before—away from Mengs, the Baroque, the Neoclassical; the vividness and striking purity and harmony of the colours was a revelation.” 40 Fellow artists of all nationalities flocked to Rome to see the new frescoes. Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen were unstinting in their praise, and the Nazarenes became the firm center of attention in the Rome art world. Among those 500 German artists mentioned earlier who either visited or actually lived in Rome full-time, one, Baron Friedrich von Rumohr (1785–1842), became the first art historian in the modern sense. He made it his business to discover how the ideas of the Nazarenes had evolved and in doing so was among the first to explore the archives and to make a first-hand examination of the early masters, “in the flesh,” so to speak (this was the age of engravings, remember, before photographs). Rumohr was largely responsible for the history of art becoming an academic discipline, and his Italienische Forschungen (1827–32), setting out systematically the results of his inquiries, was an early sighting of the word “ Forschung” —research. 41
    In the early 1820s the brotherhood began to fragment. 42 Cornelius, Overbeck, and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld were enticed to Munich by King Ludwig I. The new king turned into one of the greatest anachronisms of history, convincing himself that he could initiate a national artistic renaissance through commissions that strove to re-create previous glories—he built Greek temples, Byzantine and Romanesque churches, Gothic houses. The techniques of antiquity, such as mosaic and the encaustic method of painting, were revived.
    To begin with, Cornelius enjoyed himself. His first commission was for the decoration of the Glyptothek, the museum that was to house the antique sculptures Ludwig had collected. 43 However, Cornelius had a post-Kantian, overintellectual view that paintings should consist of vast pictorial schemes, in which each part had to be understood individually before the purpose of the whole could be grasped. This (exhausting) stress on didactic was even more in evidence in his next great commission. In the new Ludwigskirche, in the center of Munich, Cornelius conceived yet another grandiose epic of the Christian religion—an ambitious scheme designed to fill the entire building and based entirely on the Bible. Even the king was put off and he reduced the commission, confining Cornelius to the apse and the choir.
    That was not all. The king had by then come under the influence of his architects, Leo von Klenze and Friedrich von Gärtner, and they hated what Cornelius was trying to do (they thought Cornelius’s paintings were designed to outshine the buildings they were in). As a result, Cornelius and the prince argued and, in 1840, the painter offered his services to a new patron, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who immediately invited the artist to Berlin. There, Cornelius set about the crowning task of his career, which was to occupy him for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. The king had set his heart on rebuilding Berlin’s great cathedral, and Cornelius was put in charge. The size of the project suited his ambitions, but even before the foundations of the cathedral had been laid, the political turbulence of 1848 overtook the entire scheme. Cornelius continued doggedly to produce design after design, huge cartoons for a scheme that he must have known would never happen, a fresco cycle in which the subject was the divine grace in face of man’s sin, culminating in redemption. When Lady Eastlake, wife of the director of Britain’s National Gallery and a great traveler and writer, saw the cartoons in Cornelius’s studio, she was horrified by “the acres” of space they took up and concluded Cornelius was not the “great gun” of German art but “a mere popgun.” Despite this, many of his fellow artists abroad—Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, François-Pascal-Simon Gérard, and Eugène Delacroix, for example—admired him, for his intentions, at least. Delacroix praised “his courage even to commit big mistakes if