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Unwilling
Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century |
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Introduction |
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Critical
Reception of the Nazarenes After achieving celebrity in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Nazarenes were already falling into disfavor in Germany by the early 1840s. Jacob Burckhardt, for one, judged them severely. Like Goethe before him, he disliked what he saw as their subordination of the visual to the conceptual, notably their placing of art in the service of religion, their cult of the Italian "Primitives" and of German and Netherlandish art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and their rejection of the direction in which painting had evolved since Raphael. The Nazarenes and their principal advocates, notably Friedrich Schlegel, had denounced the great Venetian colorists as marking the first step in a steady degradation of art in modern times, whereas Burckhardt deeply admired the Venetians' "Existenzbilder" (as he called them) for their sensuous celebration, even in paintings on ostensibly religious themes, of the beauty of worldly existence and for the contribution this represented, in his view, to the emancipation of both humanity and art.2 In the early 1840s, Burckhardt was still young and enthusiastic enough to have been put out, above all, by the Nazarenes' turning their backs on the dynamic processes of history. Their relative distance from the optimistic progressivism of their own tumultuous time was expressed artistically in the still symmetry of their compositions, the flatness of their paint application, and, more generally, their resolve to break with the artistic tradition of the baroque and the rococo and seek inspiration instead in the art of the high Renaissance (Michelangelo and the young Raphael on the one hand, Albrecht Dürer on the other) and in the Italian "Primitives"—although their actual debt to the latter was less than their frequently professed admiration for these artists' simplicity and authenticity might lead one to expect.3 In practical terms, their critical distance from the passions of their time was reflected in their decision, at the height of the political and social upheavals provoked by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, to leave Germany for Rome—"eternal" and universal despite (or because of) its loss of worldly power. Their support of German nationhood, though sincere, had a distinctly anachronistic flavor and was, in any case, embraced more fervently by some than by others.4 To Burckhardt, as to many in the Vormärz period—among them, Burckhardt's teacher and friend, the Berlin art historian Franz Kugler, and his future colleague at Zurich, Friedrich Theodor Vischer—the Nazarenes' work (fig. 1) compared unfavorably with the lively and patriotic history paintings of the Belgian romantic school, which created a sensation on being exhibited in Germany in 1842 (fig. 2).5 In particular, Burckhardt claimed, the Nazarenes' paintings, drawings, and frescoes on themes from classical and old German history and legend, notably those being produced for Ludwig I of Bavaria by Peter Cornelius and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, were pedantic and bookish. |
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| Even later detractors of the Nazarenes were nonplussed by the enthusiasm the Belgian romantics aroused in Germany in the 1840s. Richard Muther, for instance, a judicious and responsible art historian writing at the end of the nineteenth century, who favored modern French art, found little of value in the the works of Louis Gallait and Edmond Bièfve, whom Burckhardt had praised unreservedly, and deplored their influence on German painting. The "unsophisticated and unpretentious works" being turned out by native German artists at the time were at least as good as the work of the Belgians, he declared, and "in any event reflected intentions far superior to the overworked, pasty trivialities produced later under Belgian influence." The Belgians' vaunted painterly technique, he argued, in no way merited the praise heaped upon it.6 | |||||||
| It is not easy to form an independent opinion in the matter, since the Nazarenes are, to say the least, poorly represented in our great public collections. One must either travel to Germany to see them or content oneself with reproductions in books and exhibition catalogues. In fact, the virtual absence of paintings and drawings by the Nazarenes from public collections in the United States, Great Britain, and France, the dearth of any courses about them or, for that matter, about nineteenth-century German art in general, in our college and university art history programs, and the resulting public ignorance of this body of work constitute in themselves a curious problem of historiography as well as esthetics. Were Burckhardt and Kugler, Heinrich Heine and Vischer right, in the end, when they spurned the Nazarenes as insipid and uninspired? | |||||||
| The question is the more puzzling as, in their time, these now almost forgotten painters enjoyed a favorable European reputation.7 From about 1830 on, they were much admired in France. Ingres is alleged to have frequented them during his first stay in Rome (1806–24). He certainly shared their keen interest in the Italian "Primitives," and yet, like them, was most influenced by Raphael. Ingres's Jesus Giving the Keys to St. Peter, painted in Rome some time between 1815 and 1820, draws on a cartoon by Raphael on the same theme (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London), but also shows strong affinities with works by the Nazarenes (fig. 3). His Entry of the Dauphin, the Future Charles V, into Paris is said to have been influenced by Friedrich Overbeck's Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, which he almost certainly saw in Rome (figs. 4, 5). But it was among the students and followers of Ingres—himself accused by some contemporary critics of being regressive or "gothique"—and especially among the painters of the Ecole de Lyon, that the impact of the Nazarenes was particularly strong. And through the work of their leader, Paul Chenavard, this impact reached all the way to Puvis de Chavannes and his followers at the end of the nineteenth century (figs. 6, 8; fig. 7).8 One student of Ingres' from Lyons, the gifted but now forgotten Louis Janmot, acknowledged this affinity with the Nazarenes when he adopted the characteristic Nazarene garb, as represented in Overbeck's portraits of Pforr and Cornelius, for his own self-portrait (figs. 9, 10). | |||||||
| By the mid-1830s, a conscious effort was being made in France to revive the Christian inspiration of art. After a slow start, Alexis-François Rio's De la Poésie chrétienne (1836), which underscored the Christian roots of art down to the late Renaissance, began to wield considerable influence. 9 It was around this time that in the liberal Catholic circles around Hugues-Félicité de Lamennais and Henri-Dominique Lacordaire the Nazarenes were adopted as models of the modern Christian artist. As early as 1832 Overbeck had been hailed as "le Pérugin ressuscité" by Lacordaire's friend, the politician and publicist Charles-René Forbes, comte de Montalembert, who had visited the artist's studio in Rome, 10 and, in an open letter to Victor Hugo the following year, Montalembert sang the praises of the "new German school…of painting, which, under the dual direction of Overbeck and Cornelius, shines every day more brightly." Thanks to these artists, he declared, Germany was set to become the home of a new renaissance of art—"la patrie de l'art régénéré, la seconde Italie de l'Europe moderne." 11 Steel engravings and lithographs of works by Overbeck on religious themes continued in fact to circulate widely in France until quite late in the century (fig. 11).12 | |||||||
| The popularity of the Nazarene artists was not confined, however, to Christian revivalist milieux, though it was probably strongest there. Heine tells of running into Victor Cousin in 1840 gazing enraptured at some Overbeck prints in a Paris gallery window. 13 One of Ingres's students, deploring the hostile reception of his master's work by the salon critics, claimed in 1846 that Ingres was the only artist in France "qui puisse tenir tête aux Overbeck et aux Cornelius." Such was the prestige of the Nazarenes that Baudelaire felt it necessary to attack what he called "l'école néo-chrétienne d'Overbeck" in the name of "l'art pur."14 | |||||||
| Across the Channel, in the land of Constable and Turner, but also of Flaxman, Blake, and Samuel Palmer, the Art Journal in 1839 declared the Germans "assuredly the greatest artists of Europe." There was hardly a number of the Art Journal, Quentin Bell noted in his lectures on Victorian art in the mid-1960s, that did not carry some account of the life and works of the Nazarenes. Friedrich Overbeck, in particular, their spiritual leader over six decades, was described in it as "a truly great man, whose works have elevated his country."15 Pugin's pronouncement in his Contrasts (1841) that Overbeck was "the prince of painters" doubtless reflected shared religious convictions and a shared view of the function of art.16 However, the admiration of Sir Thomas Lawrence, the portrait painter, then at the peak of his European fame, is unlikely to have been motivated by any but artistic considerations.17 At any rate, it is easy to document the influence of the Nazarenes on such nineteenth-century English artists as William Dyce and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery in London and a president of the Royal Academy (fig. 12, fig. 13, fig. 14), as well as on various members of the future Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, notably Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown (figs. 15, 16).18 Dyce, Eastlake, and Hunt all sought out the Nazarenes in Rome and were personally acquainted with several of them; Brown went to Munich in 1840 hoping to study with Peter Cornelius.19 As the artist chiefly responsible, along with the architect Leo von Klenze, for executing the grandiose artistic projects by which Ludwig I of Bavaria hoped to transform his undistinguished capital into a new Athens and at the same time create a sense of Bavarian and German nationality, Cornelius was consulted by the British Parliamentary select committee charged with making recommendations for the decoration of Charles Barry's newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament and may even have been sounded out about undertaking the work himself.20 In Théophile Gautier's words, Cornelius "enjoyed a celebrity such as few artists enjoy in their lifetime," being admired, as Gautier put it rather caustically in 1855, "as if he were already dead."21 When Ruskin's father offered the manuscript of the first volume of Modern Painters to the prominent London publisher John Murray in the early 1840s, the latter is said to have turned it down with the remark that he might have been more interested if Ruskin had offered him a manuscript on the Nazarenes.22 The painter Adolf Naumann in George Eliot's Middlemarch (Book II, chapter 22), from whom Will Ladislaw has been taking lessons—one of the "long-haired German artists at Rome"—is generally taken to be modeled on Overbeck. Like many travelers to Italy, Eliot, in 1860, had visited Overbeck's studio in Rome.23 Speaking before an Oxford audience in 1965, Quentin Bell wondered, understandably enough, "Who were these painters and why did they attract so much attention at a time when Ingres and Delacroix, Géricault, Corot, and Daumier were so little regarded by Englishmen?"24 | |||||||
| Unlike their French, British, and American counterparts, German art historians have naturally always had something to say about the Nazarenes, though in the hundred years from the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, what they said was usually negative. Often their judgments appear to have resulted from ideological preferences rather than close attention to the paintings. Even the National Socialist art historian Kurt Karl Eberlein, who might have been expected to promote a major national school of painters, preferred the bolder and more "virile" North German romantics (especially Caspar David Friedrich) to the "softer," Italianate Nazarenes.25 The Nazarenes' use of traditional Christian topoi from the Old and New Testaments (explicitly defended by Friedrich Schlegel, who in his later years denounced attempts to invent new myths as arbitrary and subjective26 ) and their return, formally, to Fra Angelico and Perugino, but above all, the young Raphael and Michelangelo—was contrasted with the bold and original use of Christian and "old German" symbols by the Northern Protestant artists to create a new romantic imagery and mythology and with the vigor of the Renaissance artists themselves. In general, the Nazarenes came to be seen as lacking vitality and energy—"devoid of warmth and life," as a French critic repeated quite recently27 —qualities highly prized in all European countries in an age of rapid social change and industrialization, and not least in the Germany of the Gründerzeit, by liberals and conservatives alike (see Appendix). To many, the Nazarenes did not have the courage to be truly modern, truly of their time. Caspar David Friedrich criticized them on this score as early as 1830. "The works of *** remind me of playing cards," he wrote in his journal. "Shuffled now this way, now that, the cards always remain the same. And so I recall having seen all these figures many times before; even the backgrounds are familiar to me from old pictures and engravings. One picture smacks of Raphael, another of Michelangelo and the predecessors of both. Would it not be better if they all carried on their brow the stamp of their creator? But perhaps he has no stamp of his own?"28 | |||||||
| Likewise it seemed to Heine in 1829 that Peter Cornelius was like a ghost from the age of Raphael who had risen from the dead to create a few more works—"ein toter Schöpfer" (a dead creator), whose pictures "look out at us with eyes from the fifteenth century. The draperies are ghostly, as if rustling past us at midnight; the bodies are magically powerful, drawn with dream-like accuracy; except that they are bloodless, colorless, devoid of the pulsing of life." According to Heine, it was as though Cornelius's works "did not have long to live and had all been born an hour before their death."29 Visiting Overbeck's studio in Rome in 1854, the historian Ferdinand Gregorovius found everything muted and lifeless, "motionless and noiseless…human beings who have drained the life out of themselves, art that has drained the life out of itself, speech devoid of words, images devoid of color."30 Still in the same vein, at the end of the nineteenth century, Richard Muther, while acknowledging "a certain authenticity and sincerity of sentiment" in their work, faulted the Nazarenes for having "deprived their figures of blood and being, in order to lend them only the abstract beauty of line."31 Finally, in the early years of the twentieth century, Burckhardt's student Heinrich Wölfflin distinguished between "a primitivism of the beginning" and "a primitivism of the end," marked by "the childishness of old age" and "the simplicity that comes from exhaustion." The famous frescoes of the Casa Bartholdy in Rome, usually considered a major achievement of the young Nazarenes, had none of the freshness of Spring, he declared, but were rather faded and lifeless, like sparkling water gone flat.32 | |||||||
| The late nineteenth century in particular was the heyday of "Renaissancismus," and the Nazarenes had rejected precisely those aspects of the Renaissance that the Age of Nietzsche most admired. Liberal art historians like Muther, Cornelius Gurlitt, Julius Meier-Graefe, and Karl Scheffler all subscribed—as many art historians still do, whether consciously or not33 —to a modernist narrative that began with Vasari, was consecrated by the historical arrangement of the collections in the new art museums founded at the end of the eighteenth century, such as the Louvre in Paris or the Belvedere in Vienna, and finally acquired philosophical authority, thanks to Hegel, in the early nineteenth century.34 According to this narrative, the development of painting since Giotto was inexorably in the direction of ever greater psychological or visual realism and "painterliness," that is, emphasis on the qualities—such as color, movement, light and atmospheric effects, paint texture, and so forth—that distinguish painting from sculpture and drawing.35 In this "Entwicklungsgeschichte" of art, those artists who contributed to the development of "modernity" and the fulfillment of the telos of painting received high marks, those who were perceived as having obstructed or opposed it (not only the Nazarenes, but radically neoclassical artists like Asmus Jacob Carstens) got low marks. Even Jacques-Louis David came in for a good deal of criticism. His ideas were all wrong and his influence bad, it was said, and he was saved as an artist despite himself, as it were, by his innate painterly instincts, his involvement in the momentous events of his time, and the strength of the painterly tradition in France.36 | |||||||
| Since the 1970s, such progressivist "Whig" histories have been challenged, in almost all areas of the humanities.37 Correspondingly, English and French art histories have begun to recognize the existence of the Nazarenes and a small number have been remarkably sympathetic.38 Monographic studies have also begun to make an appearance. The groundbreaking monograph of Keith Andrews has become something of a classic in German art-historical scholarship. Also since the 1970s, there have been exhibitions of German romantic or nineteenth-century art in New Haven, Cleveland, and Chicago (1970–71), Paris (Orangerie des Tuileries, 1976–77), New York (Metropolitan Museum, 1981; Pierpoint Morgan Library, 1988), and most recently London (National Gallery, 2001) and Washington, D.C. (National Gallery, 2001).39 There have even been some recent acquisitions of Nazarene paintings by public galleries in the United Kingdom and the United States.40 | |||||||
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Of course, it is not only the Nazarenes, it is German art of the nineteenth century as a whole that was sidelined by the enormous success of impressionism and the canonical Paris-centered history of modern art that grew up around it—not only in France, Great Britain, and America, but in Germany itself, as nationalist art critics complained and modern scholars acknowledge.41 In the halting process of rediscovery and rehabilitation, however, it has been chiefly those nineteenth-century German artists who "speak" in some degree to our modern sensibility that have achieved modest recognition: Friedrich, startlingly but persuasively compared by Robert Rosenblum to Rothko,42 or Menzel in whose work the critics of the New York Times and the Washington Post recently perceived and inevitably admired an anticipation of impressionism (fig. 17, fig. 18).43 In fact, that was already the reading of Menzel proposed by Meier-Graefe on the occasion of the great national exhibition of "German Art 1775–1875" in Berlin in 1906,44 as well as by some nationalist art historians, who apparently decided that instead of attacking impressionism as un-German, they would serve their ends better by demonstrating that it was actually a German "discovery" that the French had stolen, elaborated, and presented as their own!45 That perverse variant of the history of modern painting accorded well with the standard nationalist view of the Germans as free, inventive, individual geniuses, unspoiled creators of Kultur, and of the French, in contrast, as disciplined producers of Zivilisation, with a particular talent for institutionalizing and disseminating the insights of those more inspired than they.46 All in all, one should not exaggerate the impact of the recent exhibitions or their success in bringing German art, let alone the art of the Nazarenes, into the general public perception of the history of art. There were no lines outside the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. for the Nineteenth-Century German Art exhibition when I visited it at the end of June 2001, and I have not come across any new insights on the part of the newspaper reviewers (whose line, unsurprisingly, was to look for signs of "modernity"). Beyond Germany and Scandinavia, the average gallery-goer still knows very little, if anything at all, of Asmus Jacob Carstens, Otto Runge, Carl Blechen, Hans von Marées, Wilhelm Leibl, Max Slevogt or even Anselm Feuerbach and Lovis Corinth. The Swiss Arnold Böcklin was long the best-known "German" artist of the nineteenth century, largely on account of one work, the celebrated "Isle of the Dead," which achieved popularity through kitschy reproductions. As for the Nazarenes—Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Friedrich and Ferdinand Olivier, Peter Cornelius, Philipp Veit (the step-son of Friedrich Schlegel), to mention only a few—they have still not come back into favor to this day. What they produced, according to the New York Times reviewer of the recent show in Washington. D.C., was "dreadful, fancy calendar art" that might at best have a certain "kooky glamor."47 | ||||||
| Even an experienced and reputed art historian could hardly expect to initiate a significant revival of interest or a review of such judgments. Tellingly, Andrews' gracefully written and judicious monograph has long been out of print. Our experience as viewers of art and the way our sensibility has been shaped almost guarantee a tepid response to the Nazarenes' conscientious, beautifully balanced, but undramatic compositions, in which movement, physical and psychological, often seems either held in suspension or highly conventionalized.48 With their use of flat local colors and their eschewing of all dramatic light and color effects, the Nazarenes seem to want to deny the materiality of the painting and to direct the viewer's attention instead to more abstract and "spiritual" qualities like line, composition, color harmonies, and, ultimately, moral and religious meaning. This is vividly illustrated by Overbeck's and Johann Anton Ramboux's versions of the Noli me Tangere theme, when compared with those by two of the post-Raphaelite artists whose rich painterly manner the Nazarenes consciously rejected—Titian and Correggio (figs. 19–21).49 Ramboux in particular appears to have modeled his work on the early German master Martin Schongauer (fig. 22). To Franz Pforr, the painter's brushstrokes were "a necessary evil, no more than a means to an end," and he considered it "nonsense to praise an artist's audacity in this area or find something to brag about in it."50 Peter Cornelius, a champion of the flat colors and forms of fresco, declared that "the brush has become the ruin of [the painter's] art. It has led from nature to mannerism."51 | |||||||
| In contrast, by the 1840s and 1850s, there was already a considerable emphasis, notably with Menzel, on materiality—both of the texture of the work itself and of what is represented in it—and this tendency continued to gain strength over the course of the century. It is a far cry from the Nazarenes to the stimulating and exciting work of Lovis Corinth, for example, with its intense psychological realism and bold, nervous brushstrokes. In a recent study of the role of Rembrandt as a model for modern German painters, the powerful renditions of biblical themes by Corinth and his contemporary Max Slevogt in the early twentieth century—such as the Return of the Prodigal Son, the Capture of Samson, or the Seduction of Joseph by Potiphar's Wife—are seen as close in spirit and manner to Rembrandt and are contrasted favorably with the formally elegant, more conventional versions of the same themes for a popular Bible in Pictures by the Nazarene artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.52 Where Schnorr, using conventional figures, gestures, and composition, directs the viewer's attention to the spiritual "meaning" of the scenes, the focus of Corinth and Slevogt is on the reality of human experience. The father in Schnorr's Return of the Prodigal Son, for instance (fig. 23), is clearly God the Father, not a "real" human father, as in Slevogt's work (fig. 24). Similarly, Schnorr's Joseph conforms completely to the Bible narrative; there is no sign that his virtue was ever shaken by the feminine charms of Potiphar's wife (fig. 25). Corinth, in contrast, tries to communicate the disturbing tumultuousness of a seduction scene (fig. 26). Like Philipp Veit, in his fresco on the same subject at the Casa Bartholdy (fig. 27), Schnorr allows the viewer to look on the image from the safe distance, as it were, of its meaning. In contrast, Corinth and Slevogt clearly want to draw the viewer into the world of the picture. Schnorr's and Veit's images signify an attempted seduction but do not aim to represent it or recreate in the viewer feelings equivalent to the experience of it. In this important respect, the art of the Nazarenes may now appear prim and insipid to the modern viewer. |
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| In addition, it should not be overlooked that Nazarene art was not intended for exhibition in museums and galleries. It was part of the program of the founders of the movement, the original Lukasbrüder or Brothers of St. Luke, to combat the modern transformation of art into a commodity to be enjoyed and displayed by private individuals in their homes or put up for sale in galleries. Art for them was not a de luxe product of consummate artistic technique, it was not an investment or an object of exchange to be bought and sold and transferred at will from one owner and one location to another, nor was it simply a source of pleasure. Like some of the neoclassical artists and theorists of the time—notably Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy in France, who was bold enough to attack Napoleon's policy of pillaging the churches and palaces of Europe in order to build up the Louvre into a repository of world art53 —they believed art at its best had been and should once again become part of the fabric of a community's daily life and an expression of its highest values, inseparably linked to the public building—church, town hall, palace—or the private purpose, such as prayer or remembrance, for which it had been commissioned. Their belief that art is inseparable from the context for which it is designed led them to initiate a revival of fresco painting. Indeed, it was the frescoes they created for the residence of the Prussian consul in Rome, Jacob Salomon Bartholdy, and for the Casino Massimo, the Roman residence of an Italian nobleman, that put them on the map of the art world. In an often quoted letter to Joseph Görres in 1814, Cornelius speculated that through a revival of fresco painting it might be possible to restore the old (and in his view far healthier) relation between art and the people that had obtained in the Middle Ages, so that art, instead of adorning the private chambers of the well-to-do, would once again speak to the German people "from the walls of our high cathedrals, our peaceful chapels and solitary cloisters, from our town halls and warehouses and markets."54 The Nazarenes' work is thus not "at home" in the abstract space of a gallery or museum where it must compete for the viewer's attention with works in many different styles. | |||||||
| As they were not at first overwhelmed by public and ecclesiastical commissions, the Nazarenes also cultivated a quite different genre from fresco and history painting. Though they produced a relatively small number of commissioned portraits—in line with their view of the proper function of art—they made innumerable drawings (as well as occasional oil paintings) of and for each other, offering them to each other and to their friends as gifts. These small-scale, intimate, and unassuming works testify to a tension between the Nazarenes' goal of restoring art to the people, their desire to create a great public art, on the one hand, and, on the other, given the elusiveness of that goal, an inclination to reconceive the public world as an ideal community of friends and artists—a Malerrepublik, as the poet Friedrich Rückert put it—of which the Lukasbund or Brotherhood of St. Luke, the original nucleus of the Nazarene movement, was no doubt the model.55 What was common to both the "public" and the "private" art of the Nazarenes, however, was the demand for absolute authenticity of feeling in the artist and it may well be that this emphasis on inner feeling was better suited to their private than to their public art. In the view of some critics at least, their best work is to be found not in the ambitious, full-scale paintings of scenes from the Old and New Testaments for which they are (and wanted to be) best known, but in innumerable smaller, finely contoured portraits, with minimum modeling, which they drew of and for each other, group portraits of two or more friends (fig. 28, fig. 29, fig. 30, fig. 31, fig. 32, fig. 33, fig. 34, fig. 35), and pen and pencil sketches of places they liked to frequent, such as Olevano, a little town in the Alban hills just beyond Palestrina, that seem almost cubist in their stripped down essentiality (fig. 36).56 Like the domestic memorials or Zimmerkenotaphe that were popular in Germany at the turn of the century, these small-scale works have nonetheless an important feature in common with the Nazarenes' larger, more obviously public works: they were not made to be exhibited or offered for sale at art salons and galleries.57 | |||||||
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| Their opposition to the appropriation of the artist's work as the private property of wealthy or powerful individuals also led the Nazarenes seemingly in the opposite direction from that just described, that is, toward the role of illustrators, purveyors of easily reproduced, relatively inexpensive Bilderbibel (Bibles in pictures) and religious images that could be reproduced cheaply for distribution among the people. Modern art lovers, ill-disposed to the use of art in the service of anything, be it a religion or a political cause, suspicious of popular art (except in the sophisticated, avant-garde form of "pop art"), and more likely than not to be put off by conservative Saint-Sulpice-style Catholicism, tend to view these works as kitsch, and there seems not much doubt that the very success of the Nazarenes in this area aggravated the disfavor into which they fell around the middle of the nineteenth century.58 A similar fate befell the many nineteenth-century French artists who devoted their talents to religious painting. As they are hard to accommodate within the canonical evolutionary history of art, they are simply ignored and the question of the artistic quality of their work is not even raised.59 Thus one of the issues the Nazarenes force us to think about is how we are predisposed—by our own culture in general, by the conditions in which we get to view artworks, and by our artistic experience and education—to respond more vigorously and intensely to certain styles than to others. As Charles Eastlake put it in an article in the London Magazine in 1820: "For simplicity, holiness and purity, qualities which are the characteristics of scriptural scenes, no style was better adapted than that of the Germans. This style has little or nothing to do with reality. It diffuses a sort of calm and sacred dream. To censure it for being destitute of colour and light and shade would be ridiculous; such merits would, in fact, destroy its character."60 | |||||||
| I hope to show that the Nazarenes were intensely serious artists, who made highly self-conscious choices and thought a great deal about what they were doing and about what they wanted the place of art to be in the modern world. According to our still essentially developmental version of the history of European art, the path they chose proved be a cul-de-sac, at best a by-road in art as it evolved throughout Europe in an age that was more and more avid for new experiences and new sensations and less and less willing, until the revival of symbolism at the end of the century, to look for the "spiritual meaning" traditionally held to lie "behind" appearances. The essential question raised by the Nazarenes is this: Do they, as artists, deserve the fate they have suffered as a result of their refusal to swim with what, in retrospect, has been perceived as the tide? Were they simply bad or mediocre artists, as is quite often suggested? If not, what qualities will a sympathetic viewing allow us to discover and still respect, admire, perhaps even respond to; and what qualities, if any, could conceivably prove significant to living artists, if not now, then at some other time? In grouping them together in a single category as "the Nazarenes," I shall inevitably pay insufficient attention to the differences among them: Overbeck and Pforr, for instance, though they were joined in an intense friendship and shared common purposes and goals, differ significantly in their artistic production,61 as do Overbeck and Cornelius, who were sometimes seen by contemporaries as the Raphael and the Michelangelo of the movement. In general, each of the Nazarene artists—pace Caspar David Friedrich—has distinctive stylistic features, no less than Monet and Sisley, for instance, among the Impressionists. | |||||||
| The Cultural Context of Nazarene
Art In the brief factual account that follows, I shall focus on the cultural (artistic, ideological, social) context in which the Nazarenes developed as young artists, the challenges to which their work was a response, and the goals they hoped to achieve. For a time at least, despite their Christian orientation and their association with the conservative Restoration, the Nazarenes were part of a broader anti-traditional movement in art in the Age of Revolution—a movement that aimed to break radically with the continuity of art since the Renaissance and that was in fact launched by neoclassical artists such as Asmus Jacob Carstens, John Flaxman, and Antonio Canova, not to mention Jacques-Louis David, the most famous.62 In his History of the French Revolution, Jules Michelet makes much of what he calls the "religion" of the Revolution, emphasizing that it required something like an act of conversion on the part of its adherents. In the Nazarenes' case, revolutionary impulse and impulse toward conversion are similarly connected as a desire to transform the individual and to transform culture itself, to begin anew—in their case, as in that of the neoclassical artists, by reconnecting with an earlier past. The role conversion played in the lives of many of them, including Friedrich Overbeck, Wilhelm Schadow, Franz and Johannes Riepenhausen, Johannes and Philipp Veit (the two sons of Dorothea Schlegel), and Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel themselves, all of whom converted to Catholicism, is well documented. Rebirth, resurrection, being reawakened from deathly sleep are likewise recurrent themes of their art (for example, the story of Lazarus or the daughter of Jairus).63 In contrast, their slightly older contemporary Benjamin Constant, writing from the point of view of liberal progressivism, denounced the futility of attempts—such as were made by the Jacobins during the Revolution or proposed by Novalis in his Christenheit oder Europa—to reverse the flow of history and resurrect a political order that may have been appropriate to another, remote time but, according to Constant, was anachronistic or "unzeitgemäss" (to borrow the term made famous by Nietzsche) in the thoroughly altered conditions of modern Europe. |
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| Though the order they wished to revive in place of the ancien régime was certainly different from that of the Jacobins and their emphasis was, in any case, far more on inner conversion than on institutional change—in that regard they resembled many other, often mutually competing groups in Germany, including neohumanists and Pietists64 —the Nazarenes were similarly faulted for being unmodern. A genuine work of art, according to Caspar David Friedrich, must carry "das Gepräge seiner Zeit" ("the imprint of its time"). In Friedrich's view, this ruled out the use of traditional religious images and forms from an earlier time, since it was the character of the new age to be "am Rande aller Religionen" ("at the outer boundary of all religions"). The days of the glory of the Temple and its servants had passed, Friedrich insisted, and from the fragments of that shattered whole, a new time and a new demand for clarity and truth had emerged.65 | |||||||
| The archaism of the Nazarenes was nevertheless itself a response to the very historical fissure Friedrich was evoking, for the deliberate choice of a style that is no longer a living tradition can only be an acutely modern gesture, in that it asserts the artist's refusal to be determined by history and tradition, as well as his freedom (whether desired, struggled for, and won; or imposed and suffered) to select and define the style he wants. That is the real root of the much-decried intellectualism of the Nazarenes. If their art was Gedankenmalerei ("painting of ideas"), that was in part because the artistic tradition as it had evolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was no longer accepted by them unthinkingly as natural, an inheritance to be assumed and enhanced. When Overbeck claimed that "it is no less impossible to conceive of a fully developed artist who is unphilosophical than it is to conceive of one who lacks poetic imagination,"66 what he meant was not simply that the artist aspires to convey religious or moral or political ideas but that, at a time when so much that had once appeared to be "natural" was being called into question, an authentic modern artist could not afford not to reflect on the form and function of his work. In the words of a modern Italian scholar: "The Nazarenes are the first manifestation of a historical disorientation, in which reference to a style from the past, albeit in the illusory conviction of fidelity to it, exposes, by its arbitrariness, a historical fissure, a radical a-historicity."67 In this respect, the Nazarenes may well have been far more modern than the Belgian school of history painters, whose enormous success in Germany in the early 1840s precipitated the Nazarene's fall into disfavor. Indeed, insofar as "modern" signifies a certain relation to the past—its transcendence, but also its culmination—the historical situation of the Nazarenes might even be more usefully viewed as analogous to the post-modern. | |||||||
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The Early Nazarenes and the Vienna
Academy First, then, who were the Nazarenes? The nucleus of the movement was a group of six young men, students at the Vienna Academy of Art in the years 1805–10. Dissatisfied with the teaching they were receiving there, they dreamed of a reform of art based on a return to the older models—notably Dürer and the early Raphael—lauded by Wilhelm Wackenroder in his enormously influential Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797). They also envisioned a new relation between art and the community, in which the artist would express the highest values of his people, serving it as a guide and educator, instead of prostituting his God-given talents, as the young rebels saw it, by pandering to the pleasures and vanities of wealthy individuals or a cosmopolitan court aristocracy. It is worth recalling that similar speculations about the role of the artist and the place of art in society—admittedly with a more Enlightenment-humanitarian than romantic-popular emphasis—had characterized the neohumanist generation preceding the Nazarenes, achieving memorable literary expression in Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795). Schiller's vision of the educative and harmonizing function of art had, in turn, been given pictorial representation in one of the most popular paintings of the age, Apollo among the Shepherds (1806–08) (fig. 37), by the poet's fellow Württemberger, the neoclassical painter Gottlieb Schick, who was among the first artists to befriend the young Nazarenes on their arrival in Rome in 1810.68 |
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| The two founders of the Vienna student group were Johann Friedrich Overbeck, son of a senator from the old Hanseatic free city of Lübeck and later its Bürgermeister, and Franz Pforr, a member of a family of painters, from the imperial free city of Frankfurt am Main. (His father had been a respected animal painter; his mother was the sister of Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Younger.) On the basis of their common view of art—as well as intimate conversations about the ideal female partner each envisaged—the two extremely moral and chaste young men formed an intense friendship of a kind not uncommon in Germany at the time. (One thinks of Wilhelm Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Heinrich Füssli and Johann Kaspar Lavater, Johannes von Müller and Charles-Victor de Bonstetten, Ferdinand Olivier and Wilhelm von Gerlach or Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.69 ) In contravention of the rules of the academy, which required a long period of copying established works in a variety of genres before the student was permitted to undertake original work, the two youthful enthusiasts worked together privately at developing their own ideas for paintings, mostly Biblical scenes in Overbeck's case, scenes from history, legend, Shakespeare, and Goethe in Pforr's. In long, nocturnal discussions, they critiqued each other's work and exchanged ideas about art and modern life, as well as about more personal matters. Both stated explicitly that it was never their intention to proselytize among the students of the academy but only to extend the hand of friendship to any who might approach them of their own free will. This ideal of unregimented cooperation—in the sense that in the pursuit of common goals, each individual could retain his or her autonomy—would remain important to the Nazarenes and is expressed formally in their work. |
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| Four others at the Vienna Academy soon associated themselves with Pforr and Overbeck. They were: Joseph Wintergerst, a Swabian; Joseph Sutter, an Austrian; Ludwig Vogel, the son of a master baker in Zurich; and his friend, Johann Konrad Hottinger, with whose family, citizens of Zurich settled in Vienna, Vogel had taken lodgings. The group thus represented a cross section of German youth from various cities and states. Sutter and Wintergerst, aged twenty-seven and twenty-five respectively, were the oldest. The other four were very young when all six first began to gather for regular drawing sessions and discussions in Overbeck's lodgings in the summer of 1808. Overbeck had just turned nineteen; Pforr, Vogel, and Hottinger were a year older. In 1809, on the first anniversary of their meetings, the six agreed to regularize their association by solemnly swearing an oath of brotherhood and forming a Bund, to which they gave the name of Luke, the patron saint of painting. They thereby affirmed an essential, at once conservative and revolutionary axiom of their program: namely, that art must serve only the highest of ends, which, in their case, meant religion, and not the vanity of courts or wealthy individuals. In forming an egalitarian, non-hierarchical society, whose members were bound together by the swearing of an oath rather than by the invisible bonds of tradition and history, they also executed a revolutionary gesture. For oath swearing, whether by medieval Swiss heroes or members of the French Revolutionary Assembly, whether in favor of a return to the old or of an advance toward the new, inevitably implied rejection of established ways.70 At the same time, by modeling their society on a medieval guild or even a monastic order, they affirmed a specific relation to history, viewing it not as a continuous evolution but as discontinuous, marked by breaks and repetitions. The simultaneously revolutionary and backward-looking character of their artistic principles was thus reflected in the institutional form of their new association. | |||||||
| A few months later, in October 1809, when Wintergerst had to move to Bavaria and thus became the group's first "apostle," Overbeck created a diploma for him as well as for the five other members of the Bund. It bore the signature, brief motto, and particular symbol of each one (an owl for Wintergerst, an eye for Sutter, a skull topped by a cross for Pforr, a palm branch for Overbeck, and so on), together with a stamp depicting St. Luke (to whom Overbeck gave the features associated with Dante) at work and inscribed with the initials of the six founding members in its border, which had the form of an arch. At the top of the arch stood the letter W, for Wahrheit, the fundamental principle of any art worthy of the name, according to the Brotherhood. Canvases by individual members that won the approval of the entire group were to be stamped on the back with this seal (fig. 38). | |||||||
| Meantime, the occupation of Vienna by the French in early 1809 led to the closing of the academy. When it reopened in February 1810, financial constraints and a shortage of wood for heating prevented the readmission of all foreign—that is, non-Austrian—students. This provided a good excuse for Overbeck and Pforr to realize a plan they had been mulling over for some time: namely, withdrawing from the academy, with its highly regulated instruction in current artistic practices, and pursuing their artistic vocation freely, according to their own lights in Rome, where, as they saw it, the fashions and customs of the day paled before the enduring truths of art and religion. Vogel and Hottinger joined them in the move to Rome; Sutter, as a native Austrian the only one of the group to be readmitted to the academy, did not have the funds to go along. | |||||||
| The departure of the Lukasbrüder for Rome has been referred to as the first Sezession in the history of German art.71 In fact, the leave-taking was carried out politely, courtesy visits being paid to most of the professors. But a year later in 1811, Sutter had a bitter run-in with his teachers, in which he accused them of having turned down a work he had submitted for a prize (he badly needed the money) not on the basis of the merits of the work but out of hostility to the artistic goals of the Brotherhood.72 | |||||||
| The goals of the academy and those of the Lukasbrüder were in fact radically opposed. The Vienna Academy, it should be noted, was one of the most highly regarded in Germany at the time. Its director, Heinrich Füger, enjoyed a considerable reputation and had been commissioned to paint a portrait of Admiral Nelson. Füger followed an eclectic line, inclining toward the classicizing manner of Anton Raphael Mengs or Gavin Hamilton in his history paintings, mostly on subjects from Greek and Roman antiquity, while favoring a highly painterly, still visibly rococo handling of color and light in his portraits. The method of instruction at the academy was traditional: a long period of training in drawing and copying from other artists was required before students could undertake independent original compositions. In Füger's words, the student "must first practice his hand and appropriate the techniques of several graphic styles before he can pass on to painting and the higher branches of the painter's art" and "these preliminary exercises may occupy him for several years."73 Two decades of political, social, and cultural upheaval had had their effect, however, and Overbeck and Pforr rejected Director Füger's academic ancien régime. | |||||||
| As early as 1805, when still a sixteen-year-old living at home in Lübeck, Overbeck already had misgivings about the instruction he was receiving from his art teacher at the time, Joseph Nikolaus Peroux. Though Peroux had great talent, the young Overbeck confided to the writer and critic August Kestner—a family friend who had introduced him to the Riepenhausen brothers' drawings of works by Giotto, Masaccio, and Perugino—he concentrated so much on brilliance of execution that he was incapable of imagining anything artistically serious. "His manner appears thoroughly false to me," Overbeck wrote, adding that he feared having to follow this "kleinliche Manier" ("trivializing manner") and becoming in turn enslaved to it.74 | |||||||
| It had been fifteen years since Kant had argued for the autonomy of art and, by implication, the artist.75 In 1796, the unconventional neoclassical artist, Asmus Jacob Carstens—to whom Overbeck's father, a poet as well as a Lübeck notable, had lent a helping hand at a difficult time in the artist's life in the 1780s—had proclaimed the freedom of the artist in a stinging letter to the director of the Berlin Academy: "I must inform your Excellency that I do not belong to the Berlin Academy but to humanity. It never occurred to me, nor did I ever promise, to debase myself into becoming the bondsman of an academy for the sake of a few years' financial support that would enable me to develop my talents."76 A few years before, in 1791, another neoclassical artist, Joseph Anton Koch, had fled the art academy of the famous Ducal Hohe Carlsschule in Stuttgart after the discovery of some caricatures in which he exposed the professors as cruel tyrants and lampooned the content of their instruction. One of the drawings depicts the artist, like Hercules at the Crossroads, having to choose between the extravagance of the rococo and the simplicity of the classical (fig. 39). Koch, a fiery champion of freedom and the French Revolution, later became a good friend and collaborator of the Nazarenes in Rome and Vienna. The young Overbeck, whose birth in 1789 coincided with the outbreak of the Revolution, was no less inspired by the idea of freedom than Carstens, Koch, or, for that matter, Caspar David Friedrich. "The most important thing for a painter," he wrote to Kestner, "is to have a free hand."77 | |||||||
| As a student at the Vienna Academy, Overbeck had not lost his taste for freedom. Here is how he justified to his father his and Pforr's breaking of the academy's rules by embarking on compositions of their own in oil as early as their second year: "Must it really be so harmful to test one's capabilities, even when one undertakes tasks that are beyond one's capabilities? And in the event that one stumbles and falls, so what? One picks oneself up again. One doesn't break one's neck; and at least one will have taken the measure of one's capabilities." The aim of his and Pforr's experiments with work of their own was "not to produce masterpieces, just to push ourselves to the limit and do the best we can." For one "learns more from working on a single picture of one's own, however much one has to suffer before achieving something acceptable, than from copying twenty pictures, even pictures by Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Van Dyck, et al." Besides, "by exercising one's own talent, one arrives at a fuller appreciation of the achievement of the great masters, and discovers ten times more in them than if one had spent all one's time slavishly copying them." Most important, the student who experiments with compositions of his own will develop his own individual talent. Speaking for himself, Overbeck insisted, even if he doesn't "learn to use paint like a Titian, or become as expert in chiaroscuro as a Correggio, the most important thing is that he become an Overbeck" and "that would be worth far more, by Heaven, than being able to call oneself a second Raphael or a second Correggio or such like." The example of Giulio Romano "who cannot be placed in the top rank of painters because he always more or less imitated the style of Raphael" demonstrated the inadequacy of imitation as a method of instruction. These words of Overbeck's are worth emphasizing in view of the later criticism from Caspar David Friedrich, Vischer, Heine, and others, that the Nazarenes had no character or style of their own but simply copied earlier masters like Raphael and Dürer. Overbeck conceded that sustained study and indeed copying of the masters developed both the student's taste and his skills. "One would need to be a fool not to exploit this advantage, which we artists of the present time enjoy with respect to our predecessors." Still, the true model, he told his father, is nature. "Just think how much time is lost learning the 'tricks of the trade,' to quote your own expression, since these are unique to each great master."78 | |||||||
| Above all, the eclecticism of the academies "is a complete misunderstanding of art. Anyone who expects a young artist to make every effort to learn to compose like Raphael, because Raphael was greatest of all in composition, to learn to paint like Titian, because Titian was the greatest master of paint, to learn to use light and shade like Correggio, because Correggio was unrivaled in the use of chiaroscuro, to appropriate Michelangelo's style, because of its grandeur and power, and furthermore, to combine all of those qualities in himself, shows that he understands nothing about art, since he has not understood that those qualities so contradict each other that it is not possible to think of them all together…Take a figure from Michelangelo, paint it in the manner of Titian, and you will no longer have a Buonarotti. The external contour would not work with the inner flesh tones that Titian would have to introduce if he were to paint like Titian."79 | |||||||
| Two months later, in another letter to his father, dated 27 April 1808, Overbeck generalized his critique of art academies: "The slavish kind of study required at our art academies leads to nothing of any value. If—as I believe is the case—there has not been a history painter since the time of Raphael who has found the right road, that is nobody's fault but that of our leading academies; they teach you to paint wonderful draperies, to draw figures correctly, to use perspective, they teach you the styles of architecture; and yet all this produces no great painters."80 The Lukasbund did not intend to repeat the errors of the ancien régime at the Vienna Academy. No single style was imposed, both Overbeck and Pforr insisted, no one was urged to imitate another's manner: instead, each individual was encouraged to follow his own bent and talent in the pursuit of their common goals. What these young artists dreamed of founding in Rome, two decades after the French Revolution, was a free community of artists, "eine Künstlerrepublik," in Overbeck's words.81 | |||||||
| For his part, Franz Pforr explained to his guardian, the Frankfurt merchant Sarasin, that technical skill was not enough to make a good artist. "We get together every evening," he wrote, describing the close friendship he had established with Overbeck, "and discuss art. To my friend's concern with virtue and morality I owe my conviction that, to achieve greatness, a painter must be not only an artist but a human being…We found that our [earlier] approach to art no longer seemed satisfactory to us, and that the work we had been producing no longer gave us the pleasure our innermost being now demanded of a work of art." At the reopened Imperial art collection in the Belvedere Palace, the two friends noted a similar revolution in their judgments of earlier works of art. "As we entered, I can truly say that we were stunned. Everything now seemed different. We hurried past a large number of paintings, which we had previously admired, with a feeling of dissatisfaction; other works, in contrast, which had formerly left us cold, now drew us irresistibly. Neither of us dared to reveal his thoughts to the other for fear that his judgment had been affected by vanity or pretentiousness. Finally, we opened our hearts and discovered to our amazement that we had been thinking the same thoughts. Works by Tintoretto, Veronese, Maratti, even many by the Caracci, Correggio, Guido, and Titian that had once filled us with admiration, now made a feeble impression on us. It seemed to us that a cold heart lay behind their bold brushstrokes and striking color effects and that the painter's highest aim had been to excite a voluptuous sensibility. In contrast, we could hardly tear ourselves away from a…Pordenone, some works by Michelangelo and Perugino and a painting from the school of Raphael…. The painters of the Dutch school seemed to us to have chosen unworthy subjects or to have treated noble ones in a vulgar way. What we once took to be nature in them, now seemed like caricature. As we hurried from there to the German school, how pleasantly surprised we were; with what purity and charm the latter seemed to speak to us! Much here had once struck us as stiff and forced, but now we had to recognize that our judgment had been distorted by familiarity with paintings in which every artistic technique, however common, had been exaggerated to the point of ridiculous affectation, and that as a result we had taken gestures, which were drawn from nature as she truly is, to be stiff and lacking in appropriate movement. Their noble simplicity ['edle Einfalt'] spoke directly to our hearts."82 | |||||||
| The unmistakable allusion here to Johann Joachim Winckelmann in connection with fifteenth century German painting, an allusion that turns up again in a letter from Pforr to David Passavant— painter, apprentice banker, future art historian, and close childhood friend of Pforr's—is remarkable as a sign not only of the Nazarenes' reinterpretation of Winckelmann's neoclassical ideal, but also, and perhaps more important, as a sign of the common ground shared by the seemingly opposed positions of late eighteenth-century neoclassicism and early nineteenth-century German PreRaphaelism.83 Both were sharply critical of the painting practices of the baroque and the rococo. "There were no bravura brushstrokes here," Pforr continued, "there was no attempt on the artist's part to impress the viewer with the boldness of his technique; everything was simply there as though it had not been painted but had simply grown."84 | |||||||
| In 1820, twelve years after Pforr's death, his and Overbeck's critique of academies was taken up in a long section of the vigorous defense of the Nazarenes' goals and achievements with which David Passavant responded to the highly publicized critique by Goethe and his friend Heinrich Meyer of what they dubbed dismissively "neudeutsche religiös-patriotische Kunst" (1817).85 It was only much later—after most of the rebellious energy of the early Lukasbrüder had been spent and their idealizing art had achieved a kind of official status—that they themselves became directors of the institutions—academies and museums—they had once derided. In sum, to speak in connection with the Lukasbrüder of a Sezession is somewhat dramatic, but not essentially false.86 | |||||||
| There were differences, of course, between the neoclassical artists and the Nazarenes. The former tended to accept the Kantian view of the autonomy of art. Beauty, for them (as, still, for Burckhardt), was its own end, and the work of art served no purpose other than itself. Following Schiller's lead, many did, however, look to art as a means of reconciling philosophical oppositions, harmonizing social and psychological conflicts, rehumanizing men at a time of increasing specialization and division of labor, and bringing peace and order to society. The Nazarenes wanted the artist to be freed from subservience to courts and powerful patrons. But they did not argue for the total autonomy of art. Perhaps they suspected that the autonomy of art might not be unrelated to the rising influence of the art market, on which Denis Diderot had commented astutely in the decades before the French Revolution.87 The decline of traditional sources of patronage, accelerated by the Revolution, had certainly given artists greater freedom but it had also made their social situation acutely problematical by depriving them both of whatever economic security they had once enjoyed and of a clear function and direction for their work88 —save perhaps in France, where the revolutionary state awarded commissions and prescribed programs. The early Nazarenes responded to this crisis by trying, in the Lukasbund, to constitute an artistic community similar to the artist guilds of the Middle Ages. The aim of the community was twofold: first, to provide support for artists who would otherwise find themselves isolated, insecure, and at the mercy of unfavorable circumstances; and second, to restore art to its proper high place in the world by ascribing to it the mission of transforming culture and society.89 Art, it was hoped, would once again become a vital part of the life, not of a court, nor of an abstract humanity (epitomized by the universal norms of classical art), but of a particular, concrete, historical community (epitomized by the Christian art of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance), articulating and disseminating the highest values of that community—its morality and its religion. In the event, of course, the German artists in Rome did not succeed in escaping the destiny of the modern artist as "free" agent. By withdrawing from the world in order, as Overbeck put it, to save their art—"Oh, the sweetness of solitude and seclusion from the world; only in such conditions is it possible for art to thrive nowadays," he noted in his journal90 —the Nazarenes created, in the end, not an artists' guild but something much closer to an artistic Bohemia, the center of which, in the Eternal City, was no church or convent, but the crowded, smoke-filled Caffè Greco on the via Condotti. | |||||||
| The Nazarene Sezession in Artistic Context
It is necessary to say a word about the artistic context in which Overbeck and Pforr led their quiet mutiny at the Vienna Academy in 1806. The young Germans' rejection of academic norms was part of a revolutionary Europe-wide break with the ancien régime baroque style, which subordinated all the elements of a picture to the production of an overriding and overpowering illusionist effect. The break began somewhat hesitantly with Winckelmann, Mengs, and the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton in Rome in the middle decades of the eighteenth century and became more radical with Flaxman in England and David and his school in France. In his wonderful New York University doctoral dissertation of a half-century ago, "The International Style 1800," Robert Rosenblum showed how an entire generation of artists aimed to get back to fundamentals by re-emphasizing the maker's unmediated vision in the creation of a work rather than the technical skill with which the academically trained artist recreated and confirmed conventional empirical perceptions of the world. Technique even came to be regarded with suspicion as the handmaid of illusionist painting and the mark of the artist's subservience to powerful clients, who dictated his subjects to him and used him to represent the world as they wanted it to be seen. Sometimes, as with Asmus Carstens, a virtue was even made of the lack of it. No sensible person, Blake wrote, "ever supposes that copying from Nature is the Art of Painting; if Art is no more than this, it is no more than any other Manual Labour; anybody may do it and the fool often will do it best as it is a work of no Mind."91 Likewise, Caspar David Friedrich: "A painter should paint not only what he sees in front of him, but what he sees within. If he sees nothing within himself, he should desist from painting what he sees in front of him."92 To the Nazarenes, purity of mind and soul were essential prerequisites for the production of any art that aimed to be more than pleasing or flattering ornament. |
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Many artists chose to demonstrate their contention that the artist's vision and not painterly technique in the service of illusionist effect is the essential element in a work of art by placing the subject parallel to the surface of the painting and thus provocatively signaling their refusal to produce the illusion of depth and therefore of reality that was the crowning achievement of painterly technique. In drawing, contour and line were emphasized—that is to say, the most abstract and ideal aspects of art—with a minimum of modeling. The Nazarenes, in particular, preferred hard pencil to chalk. Color was considered secondary and was always subordinate to line. In the painting of the Nazarenes, color is always local color. Though Pforr and Overbeck developed a theory of color symbolism and used color as an integral element of their compositions, a few, like Carstens and, in his later life, Cornelius, tended to avoid color altogether. The goal was to reveal the essential truth of things as perceived by the artist's imagination—Wahrheit, it will be remembered was the Nazarenes' motto—rather than to reproduce or enhance the sensuous pleasure produced by external appearance. Even where elements of depth are retained, there is a clear effort to represent the essential forms of things rather than their passing appearances, as in the almost cubist landscapes and townscapes of Ferdinand and Friedrich Olivier (fig. 40). As a modern scholar noted, it was the "rejection of traditionally life-like drawing" in the stylized, stripped-down illustrations of the English artist and sculptor John Flaxman that had appealed to the philosophical mentor of the Nazarenes, Friedrich Schlegel.93 In this idealizing emphasis on line and surface, in opposition to the illusion of depth produced by modeling, chiaroscuro, and subtle paint transitions, neoclassical artists and Nazarenes were at one. It was Winckelmann, after all, who had declared, "in the figures of the ancient Greeks, the noblest outline embraces or circumscribes all aspects of natural and ideal beauty."94 | ||||||
| To this movement in art corresponded a similar movement in music. In the debate about the relative value of melody and harmony in the second half of the eighteenth century—the Querelle des Bouffons or Querelle de la musique française et de la musique italienne—the defenders of harmony explicitly compared harmony in music to color and chiaroscuro in the visual arts,95 while the champions of melody, foremost among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau, saw in melody, the pure succession of simple notes, the very essence of music—music as it was before its corruption by the ever greater refinements of harmony. To Diderot—consistently materialist—harmony was an i |
