The author and editors wish to acknowledge The Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Princeton University and the Cultural Department of the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. for contributing to the cost of producing this essay. For generously making images of works in their possession available at no charge, they also express their gratitude to the administrators of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels; Keble College, Oxford, England; Musée Ingres de Montauban, France; Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt; and Fondazione Canova, Possagno. The staff at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main, and the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, were also exceptionally helpful.

In addition, the author wishes to thank Michele Wijegoonaratna for carrying out the difficult task of procuring the necessary images with patience and ingenuity, and Elizabeth Allen for copy-editing a long and complicated article with forbearance, understanding, and good humor.

Notes

1. The judgment of a French art historian, writing in 1900—"pastiches partiels et oeuvres de bonne foi"—is characteristic. See Léon Rosenthal, La Peinture romantique. Essai sur l'évolution de la peinture française de 1815 à 1830 (Paris: L. Henry May, 1900), p. 305.

2. On Jacob Burckhardt's concept of the "Existenzbild," see Lionel Gossman, "The Existenzbild in Burckhardt's Art-Historical Writing," MLN 114 (1999), pp. 878–929; Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), pp. 375–81. The Venetians had proclaimed that the production of pleasure was the chief object of painting and that even its moral and religious effect derived from that source (Luzio Dolci, Dialogo della pittura, 1557). To Sperone Speroni (Dialoghi, 1558), who was himself portrayed by the master, Titian's painting represented "il paradiso del corpo"; see Daniel Arasse, "Le Corps fictif de Sébastien et le coup d'oeil d'Antonello," in Claude Reichler ed., Le Corps et ses fictions (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983), pp. 55–72.

3. The term "Primitives" was rare at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In French writing on art, "gothique" was used to convey a pejorative judgment, while "naïf" conveyed a more neutral or even positive judgment. In German writing, the favored terms were "altdeutsch," "altniederländisch," etc. The term "Primitives" was applied first to Italian art and only later to French or Flemish art. See Suzanne Sulzberger, La Réhabilitation des Primitifs Flamands 1802-1867 (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1961), pp. 14–16 (Académie Royale de Belgique, Classe des Beaux-Arts. Mémoires, XIII, 3.) See also note 100 below.

4. Some recent studies may overemphasize the nationalist, "Germanic" tendency of the Nazarenes. The latter were certainly aware of being "Teutsche," they sought out and gave encouragement to other "Teutsche," and they generally supported some kind of German national unity (Napoleon had disbanded the old Reich in 1806). Philipp Veit, Friedrich Olivier, and Johann Scheffer von Leonhardshoff took an active part in the Befreiungskriege. But there was nothing narrow or chauvinist about the Nazarene's patriotism. The fact that so many of them converted to Catholicism is a sign that their patriotism bore no resemblance to modern demagogic nationalism. So is the frequent association, in their imagery, of figures representing the union in friendship of Germany and Italy, Nuremberg and Rome, Dürer and Raphael, and even—in the case of Joseph Anton Koch, who hoped to complement his Landscape with St. Martin of 1815 with a St. Bonifatius Demolishing the Temple of Jupiter, thus representing both the patron saint of France and the "apostle" to the Germans—Germany and France. See Die Nazarener, exh. cat., Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, p. 63. Above all, the decision to settle in Rome marks a striving toward what was believed to be fundamental, enduring, and universal and an opting out of the dramatic turmoil of contemporary history, which may well have seemed to these ardent and idealistic young men as ephemeral and superficial as the representations of the immediate experience of things on canvas that they rejected in art. To Wilhelm Wackenroder, whose Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797) was one of the chief sources of inspiration of the Nazarene movement, the fact that Odin and Thor were "vaterländische Götter" seemed an odd justification for the current interest in Germanic mythology. "Was will man denn in unsern Zeiten mit dieser Vaterlandsliebe?" he scoffed. "Doch scheint jetzt eine gewisse Mode hierin zu herrschen. Gemeine Schullehrer scheinen wirklich zu glauben, dass sie wer weiss wie grosse Fortschritte in der Pädagogik gemacht haben, wenn sie ihren 8-jährigen Knaben jetzt die Brandenburg[ische] Gesch[ichte] d[es] Vaterlands recht weitläufig erzählen. Ein Bürger…braucht doch in unseren Zeiten im Grunde die vaterl[ändische ] Gesch[ichte] so wenig als eine andre, und es würde, nach meiner Meynung, also zweckmässiger seyn, wenn man irgend eine interessante Gesch[ichte], ohne Rücksicht ob dieses oder jenes alten oder neuen Volks, in unteren Schulen vorträge." See his letter to Ludwig Tieck, 5 May 1792, in Silvio Vietta and Richard Littlejohns, eds., Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1991), vol. 2, p. 30. Seventy years later, in 1865, with nationalist sentiment growing ever stronger in Germany, Overbeck, still resident in Rome, reaffirmed that he was a Christian first and only "demnach Deutscher" and that, without any diminution of his affection for his homeland, he considered that "the heavenly fatherland was incomparably higher than the earthly one." See Margaret Howitt, Friedrich Overbeck. Sein Leben und Schaffen. Nach seinen Briefen und andern Documenten des handschriftlichen Nachlass geschildert, 2 vols., ed. Franz Binder (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1886; reprint Bern: Herbert Lang, 1971), vol. 2, p. 385. The liberal art historian Karl Scheffler even claimed that the Nazarenes had no "lebendiges nationales Empfinden," and that "Es tritt eine nicht eben liebenswürdige Gleichgültigkeit gegen die politischen Schicksale Deutschlands zutage." Scheffler's claim that "nicht einer der Nazarener hat an den Freiheitskriegen teilzunehmen den Drang gehabt" is, however, false. See Karl Scheffler, Deutsche Maler und Zeichner im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1920; 1st ed. 1909), pp. 16–17; and notes 69 and 140 below.

5. See Leonore Koschuik, "Franz Kugler (1808–1858) als Kunsthistoriker und Kunstpolitiker" (Ph.D. diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 1985), pp. 121–35; Jacob Burckhardt, "Bericht über die Kunstausstellung zu Berlin im Herbst 1842," Kunstblatt, 12 January 1843; Jacob Burckhardt, "Overbeck (Friedr.)," in the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 10th ed., 1853), vol. 11, p. 570; Friedrich Theodor Vischer, critiques of Overbeck's The Triumph of Religion in Art in Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 (3, 4, 5, 6, 7 August 1841), pp. 109–28, passim; Friedrich Theodor Vischer in Aesthetik, ed. Robert Vischer (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1923, 2d ed.), vol. 4 ("Kunstlehre: Bildnerkunst/Malerei"), no. 739, pp. 481–85.

6. See Richard Muther, La Peinture belge au XIXème siècle, trans. Jean de Mot (Brussels: Misch et Thron, 1904), pp. 12–23. The original German text was unfortunately not available to me. (All translations from French and German are by the present author, unless otherwise indicated.)

7. For a brief overview of their influence on the Italian "Puristi," the students of Ingres in France, and the English Pre-Raphaelites, see Herbert Schindler, Die Nazarener: romantischer Geist und christliche Kunst im 19. Jahrhundert (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1982), pp. 68–72. On the Nazarene influence in Italy, England, and France respectively, see the contributions by Günther Metken and Henri Dorra in Die Nazarener 1977, pp. 327–36 (Metken), 355–64 (Metken), 337–54 (Dorra).

8. On Ingres as "gothique," see Robert Rosenblum, "The International Style of 1800. A Study in Linear Abstraction" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1956; New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1976), pp. 178–79; Uwe Fleckner, Abbild und Abstraktion. Die Kunst des Porträts im Werke von Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1995), pp. 55-57. On Ingres and the Nazarenes, see Rachel Esner, "Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit: Überlegungen zu Overbeck und Ingres," in Andreas Blühm and Gerhard Gerkens eds., Johann Friedrich Overbeck 1789–1869. Ausstellungskatalog zur 200ten Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages, exh. cat., Museen für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte der Hansestadt, Lübeck, 1989, pp. 54–62. Jean Alazard rejected the view that the Nazarenes may have exerted an influence on Ingres, claiming instead that it was the French artist who, as a longtime admirer of the Italian Quattrocento and a champion of "la ligne sensible" and "le contour expressif," was the instigator of the movement that led to German and then English Pre-Raphaelism; see Jean Alazard, Ingres et l'ingrisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1950), pp. 69, 129. In a similar vein, Bruno Foucart recalled that after his visit to Overbeck's studio in 1833, Hippolyte Flandrin expressed both admiration and criticism. Overbeck, in Flandrin's view, "se sert de la peinture, il ne tient qu'à rendre ses idées, à les écrire."Quoted in Bruno Foucart, "Saint Hippolyte Flandrin," in Hippolyte, Auguste et Paul Flandrin. Une fraternité picturale au XIXe siècle, exh. cat., Musée du Luxembourg, Paris (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1984), pp. 35–46. In Foucart's reading, Flandrin followed French art critics and historians, such as Delaborde and Delécluze (both themselves also painters, the former a student of Delaroche, the latter of David), in rejecting what they saw as the Nazarenes' subordination of painting to philosophy, theology, and archaizing archaeology, while at the same time by picking up the religious tradition of early Italian painting in his own way, he neutralized Nazarene influence in France (p. 41). On the general question of the relation between Ingres and his students and the Nazarenes, see Michel Callort, "De la séduction nazaréenne, ou Note sur Ingres et Signol (Rome, 1835)," Bulletin du Musée Ingres 51/52 (December 1983), pp. 53–73; Maurice Denis, "Les élèves d'Ingres" (first published in L'Occident, 1902) in his Théories 1890–1910: Du Symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique (Paris: C. Renart and J. Watelin, 1920, 4th ed.), pp. 94–95; Henri Dorra, "Die französischen 'Nazarener'," in Die Nazarener 1977, pp. 337–54; Henri Dorra, "Montalembert, Orsel, les Nazaréens et 'l'art abstrait'," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 85, ser. 6 (1975), pp. 137–47; Bruno Foucart, Le Renouveau de la peinture religieuse en France (1800–1860) (Paris: Arthéna, 1987), pp. 27–28, 202–04, and passim; M. Lamy, "L'Italie vue par les élèves d'Ingres, précurseurs de Puvis de Chavannes," Revue de l'Art Ancien et Moderne 42 (1922), pp. 219–25; Daniel Ternois, "Le Préraphaélisme français," in his modern edition of Eugène Emmanuel Amaury-Duval, L'Atelier d'Ingres (Paris: Arthéna, 1993), pp. 385–406. On Chenavard and the Nazarenes, see Marie-Claude Chaudonneret ed., Paul Chenavard: le peintre et le prophète, exh. cat., Musée de Lyon, Lyon (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2000). It was still a Nazarene line of thought that Maurice Denis was developing in 1902, when he contrasted Delacroix, continuing the tradition of Titian and Veronese, "mais qui portait en soi, à cause même de sa perfection, des germes de décadence," with Ingres, who went back to the art of an earlier time to find "les principes éternels de notre goût occidental" and who "conciliait le style selon les Grecs et la sincérité, la naïveté des Primitifs" ("Les Elèves d'Ingres" in Denis 1920, p. 92).

9. The full title is: De la poésie chrétienne dans son principe, dans sa matière et dans ses formes. Formes de l'art. Peinture (Paris: Debécourt, 1836). The second volume, published in 1851, bore the revised title: De l'art chrétien (Paris: A. Bray). An English translation appeared as The Poetry of Christian Art (London: T. Bosworth, 1854). A new and revised edition in 4 volumes was published by Hachette in 1861–67 and reprinted in 1874.

10. Quoted in Dorra 1975, p. 137. See also Ternois 1993, p. 388. On the growing vogue of the Nazarenes in liberal Catholic circles, see also Callort 1983, p. 59.

11. Charles-René Forbes, Comte de Montalembert, "Du Vandalisme en France: lettre à M. Victor Hugo," Revue des Deux Mondes, 2d ser., 1 (1833), pp. 421–68, quote on p. 425.

12. See Sigrid Metken, "Nazarener und 'nazarenisch' —Popularisierung und Trivialisierung eines Kunstideals," in Die Nazarener 1977, pp. 365–88, quote on p. 373; see also Jens Christian Jensen, "Bemerkungen zu Friedrich Overbeck," in Blühm and Gerkens eds. 1989, pp. 12–19, quote on p. 13.

13. Lutezia: Berichte über Politik, Kunst und Volksleben 35, 19 May 1841, in Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, 12 vols., ed. Paul Beyer et al. (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, n. d.), vol. 10, p. 141. Heine, as one might expect, did not much appreciate the Nazarenes. Christian material, he objected, did not have to be represented in spindly contours and as "abgehärmt und farblos" as possible; see Lutezia 43, ibid., p. 166.

14. Ingres's student was Eugène Emmanuel Amaury-Duval; the passage quoted is from his review, "L'Exposition du Bazar Bonne Nouvelle en 1846," Revue Nouvelle 7 (February 1846), pp. 77–94, and is reprinted in Ternois 1993, pp. 410–15, quote on p. 412. In the final version, this was modified to read that France should be proud to be able to "opposer un grand nom français aux Overbeck et aux Cornelius" (p. 415). Likewise, Gautier praised Ingres for having found "ce que cherchait si laborieusement Overbeck" in his Christ with the Doctors of the Church; see the Moniteur universel, 10 April 1862, quoted in Théophile Gautier, Correspondance générale, 12 vols., ed. Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre (Geneva: Droz, 1985–2000), vol. 8, p. 29. Gautier devoted four articles in the feuilleton section of the Moniteur universel (10 and 12 August, 6 and 13 September 1854) to "L'Ecole moderne allemande." Though by no means uncritical of what he saw as its idealistic and intellectual character and its indifference to sensuous nature, Gautier seems to have accepted the art of the Nazarenes as a model against which French religious art—that of Ingres, Chenavard, Lehmann, and his friend Gabriel Tyr—might be measured. Thus Lehmann's vision of Italy "n'est pas moins poétique que celle de M. Overbeck dans le célèbre tableau de ce maître à la pinacothèque moderne de Munich" [that is, Overbeck's Italia and Germania] (Moniteur universel, 10 June 1864, quoted in Correspondance générale, vol. 8, p. 463), while Tyr, "une espèce d'Overbeck français" (Moniteur universel, 8 November 1855, in Correspondance générale, vol. 6, p. 126), is said to have understood and appropriated "bien mieux et plus profondément qu'Overbeck…la naïve poésie des peintres primitifs" (Moniteur universel, 24 February 1868, quoted in Correspondance générale, vol. 10, pp. 45–46). Commenting on Baudelaire's attacks on "l'école néo-chrétienne d'Overbeck" (see "Salon de 1846" in Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques: L'Art romantique; et autres oeuvres critiques, ed. Henri Lemaître [Paris: Garnier, 1962], pp. 170–71) and in general on "l'erreur de l'art philosophique"—rejected by Baudelaire as "un retour vers l'imagerie nécessaire à l'enfance des peuples," and a misguided attempt to "rivaliser avec l'imprimerie pour enseigner l'histoire, la morale et la philosophie"("L'Art philosophique," ibid., pp. 504–05)—Henri Lemaître explains that "l'école allemande suscita un grand intérêt en France à l'époque de Baudelaire" (ibid., p. 37). In fact, Baudelaire conceded that the "philosophical" artists "dessinent très bien, très spirituellement" and occasionally display great talent "dans un genre faux," so that he was sometimes forced to admire them despite his conviction that they were "hérétiques," unfaithful to the true vocation of art (ibid., p. 512).

15. Quoted in Quentin Bell, Victorian Artists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 15–16.

16. "The great Overbeck, that prince of Christian painters…." Augustus Welby Pugin, Contrasts, or A parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day, shewing the Present Decay of Taste (London: Charles Dolman, 1841), p. 18. In a footnote, Pugin recommended that "all those who are interested in the revival of Christian art should prepare engravings from the work of this great artist." On Overbeck's influence on Pugin's drawing and decoration, see Phoebe Stanton, Pugin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), p. 140.

17. William Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 21.

18. Ruskin was a notable exception with his claim that there was nothing of artistic value in the "muddy struggles of the unhappy Germans." John Ruskin, Modern Painters, in Complete Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols., ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–1904), vol. 3, p. 350. They lack not only "mechanical means and technical knowledge" (ibid.) but insight and imagination, with the result that Overbeck, for one, "degrades the subjects he intends to honour." Modern Painters, in Complete Works, vol. 5, p. 50. In "Notes on German Galleries" (1859), a Virgin by Overbeck in Cologne Cathedral is judged "execrable beyond all contempt" and an obvious plagiarism of a Titian. Complete Works, vol. 7, p. 488. The model for the Jacob and Rachel of Naecke and Führich, which in turn inspired Dyce, was probably the painting by Palma Vecchio in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

19. David Brown, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Marcia Pointon, William Dyce 1806–1864. A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); G.H. Fleming, Rosetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967), p. 75 (on Brown and the Nazarenes); Teresa Newman and Roy Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991), pp. 33 ff.

20. Vaughan 1979, pp. 5–7; Günter Metken, "Ein nationaler Stil? England und das nazarenische Beispiel," in Die Nazarener 1977, pp. 355–63; Cornelius Gurlitt, Die deutsche Kunst des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1900), pp. 302–03.

21. Quoted from "Les Beaux-Arts en Europe" (1855), in Die Nazarener 1977, p. 413.

22. As reported in Tim Holton, John Ruskin: The Early Years 1819–1859 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 72. See also on Ruskin and the Nazarenes, ibid., pp. 237, 277. It is noteworthy that Overbeck's widow selected Margaret Howitt to write the artist's biography, and that the text was originally written in English and intended for publication in Great Britain.

23. George Eliot had already encountered the Nazarenes on her visits to Germany in 1854 and 1858. In the novel, Naumann is said to have projected a work to be entitled "Saints Drawing the Car of the Church" —probably an ironical reference to Overbeck's celebrated, but also much criticized The Triumph of Religion in Art (1833–40). See Hugh Witemayer, "George Eliot, Naumann and the Nazarenes," Victorian Studies 18 (1974), pp. 145–58.

24. Bell 1967, p. 16.

25. Kurt Karl Eberlein, Caspar David Friedrich, der Landschaftsmaler: Ein Volksbuch Deutscher Kunst (Bielefeld and Leipzig: Velhagen und Klasing, 1939), p. 6: "Es gab weibisch-feige Romantiker, die in das Universale und Internationale flohen, kurz gesagt: Literaten; und es gab männlich-tapfere Romantiker, die in das Nationale und Deutsche stürmten, kurz gesagt: Künstler." This "true German" romanticism is "deutsche Kampfkunst, ist Opferkunst." What Eberlein admired in Friedrich and the Northern romantics was "Lichtliebe, Steinliebe, Grabliebe…Naturkult," together with a "Greek" element: "kämpferisches Wesen,…Untergangswillen,…Schicksals- und Todesliebe." Ibid., p. 2. It would have been impossible for Eberlein to find those features in the work of the Nazarenes.

26. On Schlegel's rejection of a new romantic mythology and on the difference between the Northern romantics (Novalis, Runge, Friedrich) and the Nazarenes in this regard, see Käthe Brodnitz, Nazarener und Romantiker: Eine Studie zu Friedrich Overbeck (Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1914), pp. 31–33.

27. Pierre Cabanne, L'Art du XIXème siècle (Paris: Somargy, 1989), p. 86.

28. Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen, ed. Sigrid Hinz (Berlin: Henschel, 1968), p. 85. Likewise, on pp. 113–14: "Sollte denn das wohl der hochgepriesene Kunstsinn unserer Zeit sein, sich in knechtischer Nachäffung einer früheren, wenngleich schönen Kunstzeit zu gefallen…Ist es aber nicht, wenn wir aufrichtig sein wollen, etwas Widriges, ja oft Ekelhaftes, vertrocknete Marien mit einem verhungerten Jesuskind im Arme zu sehen, und mit papierenen Gewändern bekleidet. Oft auch wohl mit Absicht verzeichnet und geflissentlich Verstösse gegen die Linien- und Luftperspkective gemacht? Alle Fehler jener Zeit äfft man täuschend nach, aber das Gute jener Bildwerke, das tiefe, fromme, kindliche Gemüt, was diese Bilder so eigentlich beseelt, lässt sich freilich nicht mit den Fingern nachahmen…Was unsere Vorfahren in kindlicher Einfalt taten, das dürfen wir bei besserer Erkenntnis nicht mehr tun." Likewise, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, on the romantic school, in his review of Overbeck's Triumph of Religion: "Ein neues Mittelalter trat auf, aber kein wirkliches, ein in einem fremdartigen Geiste, dem modernen, reflectirtes, künstliches Mittelalter." Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst 31 (6 August 1841), p. 123. As for Overbeck's madonna, she has none of the naiveté of early Italian art: "Ja, sie ist schön, diese Madonna, diese reine Taube sonder Galle. Und doch—es ist etwas darin, ich weiss nicht was, etwas Almanach, etwas Vielliebchen und Vergissmeinnicht. Es ist ein Zug der in allen neueren Madonnen unverkennbar ist: man sieht ihnen eben eine Zeit an, wo es Stammbücher, viele Spiegel, Modejournal und Titelkupfer von Taschenbüchern giebt. Wie soll es auch anders möglich sein! Wie kann ein Mensch seine Zeit verläugnen!…Nein, Eure Madonnen sind nicht Madonnen der alten Kirche: sie haben in den Stunden der Andacht gelesen, sie sind in einer Pension, in einer Töchterschule aufgewachsen…ja sie trinken Thee, wenig, aber etwas." Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst 32, 7 August 1841, p. 126. The point was repeated succinctly at the end of the century by Cornelius Gurlitt (1900, p. 222): "Man wollte nicht einsehen, wie gewaltig sich die Lebensverhältnisse geändert hatten."

29. Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder (1829), quoted in Die Nazarener 1977, pp. 409–10. See also Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr, 16 vols. (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1975–1997), vol. 7, pp. 77–78.

30. From Wanderjahre in Italien (1870), quoted by Jens Christian Jensen, "Bemerkungen zu Friedrich Overbeck," in Blühm and Gerkens eds. 1989, p. 12: "…still und tonlos…entleibte Menschen, entleibte Kunst, Rede ohne Worte, Bilder ohne Farbe."

31. Richard Muther, History of Modern Painting, 4 vols. (London and New York: J. M. Dent and E.P. Dutton, 1907; orig. German, Geschichte der Malerei im XIX Jahrhundert, 3 vols., 1893), p. 133.

32. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Munich: Hugo Bruckmann, 1923; 1st ed. 1915), p. 250; Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Akademische Vorlesung, ed. Norbert Schmitz (Alfter: VDG Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 1993), p. 9. Likewise, Gurlitt (1900, p. 219) held that the painstaking efforts at fresco of the Nazarenes are in such stark contrast with the free and lively handling of this technique by the Tiepolos (Giovanni Battista and his son Giovanni Domenico) that if they were all to be rediscovered in an archaeological dig, the researcher would find it impossible to believe the Nazarenes came later: "Es ist für den Nachlebenden ganz ausserordentlich schwer, bei den Unbeholfenheiten nicht zu lächeln." For an illuminating account of the marginalization of the Nazarenes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany and the identification of the Northern German romantic school (Runge, Friedrich) with authentic German romanticism, see Mitchell Benjamin Frank, German Romantic Painting Redefined: Nazarene Tradition and the Narratives of Romanticism (Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001). Unfortunately this work appeared too late for me to make us of its rich documentation and many shrewd insights and observations.

33. See the persuasive article on the hidden Hegelianism of art history by Keith Moxey in "Art History's Hegelian Unconscious: Naturalism as Nationalism in the Study of Early Netherlandish Painting," in his The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 8–41. Moxey illustrates his case by following the varying fortunes of Memling and Van Eyck.

34. On the historical arrangement of the paintings on exhibition at the Louvre under Vivant Denon and the Belvedere under Christian Mechel, see Andrew McClellan, "Nationalism and the Origins of the Museum in France," in The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology, ed. Gwendolyn Wright (Washington: National Gallery of Art; Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1996), pp. 29–39; James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World from the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 39–41. Hegel's brilliant and richly informed chapter on painting is in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 797–887.

35. Reviewing the new Musée Napoléon in Paris, the ancestor of the Louvre, in 1791, the Décade Philosophique recommended a "progressive" arrangement so that the visitor would observe the evolution of painting "du style froid et roide de Jean de Bruges aux sublimes conceptions de Rubens." See Sulzberger 1961, p. 30.

36. See, for instance, Muther 1907, vol. 1, p. 112, Muther saw an "archaeologist" in the neoclassical David, but also a "naturalist," whose work was enlivened by his involvement in the tumultuous events of his time and society. On the one hand, "Simplicity beneath his hands became dryness, nobility formal…painting a sort of abstact geometry for which there existed hard-and-fast forms. There was something mathematical in his effort after dry correctness and erudite accuracy. The infinite variety of life with its eternal changes was hidden from his sight." Much of David's work on themes from classical antiquity is characterized by "a mixture of dryness and declamatory pathos; diligence without imagination;…careful arrangement without the slightest trace of that gift of the inner vision whereby the whole is brought complete and finished before the eye" (ibid., vol. 1, p. 193). David's pupil Gros "stands far above David and all his rivals in his power of perception…Gros remains ever fresh, because he painted under the impulse given by real events, and not under the ban of empty theories" (ibid., vol. 1, p. 210). In David, "all is calculation; in Gros fire" (ibid., vol. 1, p. 212). In the end, however, Gros accepted his teacher's criticism of him "for having taken the trouble to paint the battles of the Empire, 'worthless occasional pieces,' instead of venturing upon those of Alexander the Great and thus producing genuine historical works." As a result, when he took over David's studio, "the incubus of David's antique manner" began once more to press upon him" and destroyed his original talent (ibid., vol. 1, p. 213). On the other hand, however, when David gave "himself up entirely to the delineation of what came under his direct observation in his own life and experience…he became not only a rhetorician, a revolutionary agitator, but a really great painter." Lepelletier on his Deathbed (destroyed), Death of Marat (Musées Royaux, Brussels) and Death of Bara (Musée Calvet, Avignon) are "works of a mighty naturalist" (ibid., vol. 1, pp. 105–106). Similarly, in his portraits, David "is neither rhetorical nor cold, but full of fire and the freshness of youth….The best painters have never treated flesh better….The relief-tones of blue and light rose seem almost to anticipate the delicate, toned-down tints of modern Impressionism" (ibid., vol. 1, pp. 106, 109). The essential thing is that technique itself was never an object of scorn in France. The academic tradition was never broken. "David, the great painter of the Revolution, who cast the pictures of Boucher out of the Louvre, and whose pupils used to shoot breadcrumbs at Watteau's masterpiece, the 'Voyage à Cythère,' yet conveyed with him into the new age, as an inheritance from rococo, its prodigious knowledge.…This art…at no time lost its touch, technically, with the acquisitions of former epochs, but evolved in its various directions from one center…Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet, widely as they differ from one another, are links in one chain of evolution" (ibid., vol. 1, p. 113).

37. Robert Rosenblum has been a consistent critic of "evolutionism" in the history of art and an effective champion of a less blinkered, less teleological approach, vividly exemplified by the bold eclecticism of the exhibition, 1900: Art at the Crossroads, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. "The nineteenth century was often viewed as a kind of Darwinian evolution that vindicated and explained later forms of art," Rosenblum wrote. "Turner and Constable, especially in their sketches, might be admired because they prefigured Impressionism; and Impressionism might be esteemed because it destroyed those Renaissance perspective systems which shackled painting to imitation and prevented it from being itself…In the late twentieth century, such evangelical visions of nineteenth century art have almost a quaintly nostalgic period flavor." Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Jansen, 19th-Century Art (New York: Harry Abrams, 1984), Preface and Acknowledgments. The critique of art histories written from the perspective of a triumphant modernism is probably not unrelated to the suspicion with which all "metahistories" (Jean-François Lyotard) have come to be regarded.

38. Pierre Cabanne (1989, pp. 85–86) repeats the usual condescending judgments ("touchant de sincérité, mais esthétiquement assez plat"), but at least acknowledges the Nazarenes' celebrity in their own time: "Si leur spiritualité candide fait sourire, et si leur technique lisse et impersonnelle paraît dénuée de chaleur et de vie, ils furent salués dans toute l'Europe comme les précurseurs d'un nouvel art monumental et…eurent une influence sensible sur Ingres et sur Puvis de Chavannes." In contrast, Michel Le Bris, in his Romantics and Romanticism (Geneva: Skira, 1981), demonstrates real sympathy and understanding. The essence of his judgment deserves to be quoted: "Giving up black crayon and red chalk for the hardest graphite pencils, which almost tore the drawing paper with their hard silver line; trying thereby to match not only the contours of Perugino or Raphael but also the transparency of Dürer's silver-point drawings, they thus carried further the fondness of Flaxman and Carstens for the outline, conceived as the precise delineation of the artist's idea, a pure shaft of the mind, free of all shadow, of all matter which might encumber or enfeeble; but in conceiving it…as the expression of a spiritual asceticism they carried it to a hitherto unknown degree of intensity, where the plastic power of the imagination seems transmuted into almost musical expressiveness, …rhythmic, sometimes almost abstract, whose near-hypnotic, if not magical power of suggestion was to remain unparalleled"(ibid., p. 96). Likewise Colin Bailey, reviewing the groundbreaking exhibition of Nazarene art at the Städelsches Institut in Frankfurt in 1977, was impressed by Nazarene's portraits and drawings: "There are some so exquisite that they take one's breath away. Particularly compelling are the superb portraits by Overbeck of Pforr, Wintergerst and Sutter…Masterful in technique and composition alike, and consistently subtle, despite the keenness of their psychological penetration, they make one regret that Overbeck did not devote more of his energy to portraiture and less to the insipid and repetitive religious pictures which he produced in such quantity in later life and which mar his reputation." Review in Burlington Magazine 119 (May-August 1977), pp. 523–24.

39. Michel Laclotte notes in La Peinture allemande à l'époque du Romantisme (exh. cat., Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris [Paris: Editions des musées nationaux, 1976], 1976–77, p. ix) that "l'histoire de l'art est faite…d'incessantes résurrections et remises en cause. La première moitié du XIXème siècle allemand en offre un spectaculaire exemple. Ses héros, Friedrich et Runge, ne furent-ils pas totalement oubliés jusqu'au début de notre siècle et n'assistons-nous pas aujourd'hui en revanche au juste retour des Nazaréens, longtemps encensés puis mis à l'index à leur tour?"

40. The National Gallery in London acquired a Schnorr von Carolsfeld (Ruth in Boaz's Field, 1828) in 1998; the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York both acquired canvases by Caspar David Friedrich in the 1980s and 1990s. Though the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. obtained a large number of prints by Ferdinand Olivier through the Rosenwald Collection in 1950, active acquisition of prints and drawings (by Cornelius, Pforr, Overbeck, and Schnorr von Carolsfeld) has occurred only since the 1980s and 1990s. In England, the Queen's collection contains a number of Nazarene works, largely as a result of Prince Albert's interest, as does the British Museum. In the United States, the most substantial public collections of nineteenth-century German art appear to be the Frye Collection in Seattle (acquired by Charles Frye, the son of a German immigrant, from the estate of Josef Stransky, a conductor of the New York Philharmonic and a collector of German art, in the second or third decade of the twentieth century), the Renée von Schleinitz Collection at the Milwaukee Art Center, and, for drawings and prints, the collection bequeathed to Harvard University by John Witt Randall of the class of 1834, now in the Fogg Museum. However, there was no direct purchasing of German romantic prints and drawings by the Fogg until 1985.

41. There had been frequent coming and going of artists between Germany and America in the first six or seven decades of the nineteenth century (Katharina Bott, Vice Versa: Deutsche Maler in Amerika/ Amerikanische Maler in Deutschland 1813–1913, exh. cat. [Munich: Hirmer, 1996], pp. 11–16). The editor of the American edition of Wilhelm Lübke's two-volume Outlines of the History of Art (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1878) could even claim that German art was "better known to our people than the art of England" (vol. 2, p. 641). In the closing decades of the century, however, French impressionism had such an immediate and strong appeal to American collectors that in the public at large there was soon a "virtual identification of 19th century art with Paris" and German art of the time slipped largely from view (Françoise Forster-Hahn, "German Painting: The Forgotten Century," Art News 69 [1970], pp. 50–55). On the marginalization of German art, see also Introduction to the 1952 catalogue of the Charles and Emma Frye Collection in Seattle; Kermit and Kate Champa, German Painting of the 19th Century, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1970), p. 5; Philippe de Montebello, Introduction to German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), p. 6; Peter Betthausen, Introduction to The Romantic Spirit: German Drawings 1780–1850 from the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Kupeferstichkabinett, Dresden, exh. cat., Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, pp. 20–21. For many years the English Pre-Raphaelites suffered similar neglect or disdain, as acknowledged in a publication marking the acquisition by the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart of a major work of Burne-Jones: "People have become accustomed to looking at nineteenth century painting with eyes trained by frequenting painters like Matisse or Picasso and have hacked a pathway back,…on which the chief stops bear the names Cézanne and Manet, Courbet, Delacroix and Géricault. Only now …is the painting of the late nineteenth century, at once sensual and symbolically encoded, beginning to come back into our field of vision. If the interest of the Naturalists and Impressionists was focused entirely on the object and its appearance, Burne-Jones explores the meaning that is reflected in them." Kurt Löcker, Der Perseus-Zyklus von Edward Burne-Jones (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1973), p. 19. By the end of the nineteenth century, some German art historians were complaining that a francocentric perspective had taken hold in Germany itself. Unfortunately, much of the criticism of the "evolutionary view" of art and its assumption of a natural and inevitable evolution toward impressionism seems to have been motivated by an anti-Western and anti-modern chauvinist ideology—as in Henry Thode's Böcklin und Thoma: Acht Vorträge über neudeutsche Malerei (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1905), pp. 3–5—that did little to awaken greater interest in or understanding of nineteenth-century German art in broader, international circles.

42. Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

43. In similar vein, see Sarah Kent's review of the same exhibition at the National Gallery in London in the British weekly Time Out (28 February–7 March 2001, pp. 20–21): "German painters like Adolph von Menzel blasted a path for French Impressionists like Degas—yet hardly anyone knows anything about them"; the "robust images" of Wilhelm Trübner and Hans Thoma may "lack the charm that often takes French Impressionism perilously close to sentimentality," but "it's possible that this show will provoke a radical reappraisal of the merits of German over French Impressionism."

44. Schmoll noted that the basic idea of the exhibition can be traced to Meier-Graefe himself. Since, as a champion of modern French art, he was looked on as an enemy in the circles of Wilhelm II, however, he agreed to remain in the background behind the museum directors Hugo von Tschudi (Berlin) and Alfred Lichtwark (Hamburg). "Meier-Graefe übernahm jedoch in Wahrheit die Hauptlast der Auswahl und der Katalogbearbeitung, auf dessen Titelblatt er aber um der Sache willen nicht erscheinen durfte…Aber die Meier-Graefesche Linie einer Entwicklung auch der deutschen Malerei, die schlussendlich zum Impressionismus hinführt, war deutlich herausgearbeitet." Josef Adolf Schmoll, "Deutsche Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts in heutiger Sicht," Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 1978, p. 127. The descriptions of individual paintings in the catalogue focus in fact strikingly on color and painterly qualities.

45. See, for instance, Paul Friedrich Schmidt, Biedermeier-Malerei (Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1923), pp. 83–85: "Everywhere in Germany, around 1830, there was a turn, in visual perception, toward the purely painterly. This cannot be described as anything less than an anticipation of early impressionism. That a form of visual perception corresponding to the nineteenth-century materialist view of the world had to come is beyond doubt. Thanks to their brilliant gift for sharp formulations and the concentration of talent in Paris, the French were able to conceptualize the new way of seeing and present it to the world as impressionism. But it was the Germans who discovered it thirty years earlier." Thus it was by taking over German ideas, Schmidt alleged, fitting them out with slogans, and presenting them as they would the latest fashions, that the French acquired the undeserved reputation of being pathbreakers in art and literature in the nineteenth century, whereas "even in places where the possibility of creating a tradition existed, such as Dresden or Munich, the Germans never knew what to do with the golden seed they had discovered. They remain the pioneers of the materialist principle, in painting as in other areas, for together with Constable—but more radically than he—they were the first to capture light and atmosphere and to achieve a purely optical representation of surfaces." And in a somewhat similar vein, Hans Weigert, Geschichte der deutschen Kunst (Berlin: Propyläer Verlag, 1942), p. 496: "Whereas impressionism entered Germany—where Adolf Menzel had been overtaken by the idealism of the Deutschrömer [i.e. Anselm Feuerbach and Hans von Marées—L.G.] and by the efforts of Wilhelm Leibl and his circle to capture the totality of the object—with great suddenness and revolutionary pronouncements, it developed in France gradually and continuously. Here we observe, as in the sculpture of the Gothic cathedrals, the capacity of the French to build on previous work and to transmit tasks from one generation to the next."

46. A distressingly common view often presented in seemingly non-ideological, purely factual guise. Here, for example, is an art historian writing about the painter Friedrich Wasmann: "Wasmann's example demonstrates how native talents can develop in the German with great success, despite counteractive training, when he is isolated in some remote corner of the country. Our strength, unlike that of the French, does not lie in belonging to a school." (Schmidt 1923, p. 44).

47. Holland Cotter, "Ach, Such Industrious Romantics," New York Times, 15 June 2001. In 1978, a German scholar, arguing that German painting of the first half of the nineteenth century, especially that of early romanticism (notably Caspar David Friedrich), was at last winning international recognition, conceded that there is still much disagreement about "an adequate appreciation of the Nazarenes." See Schmoll 1978, pp. 127–34, quote on p. 133. In 1989, another German scholar made the same observation: there was renewed interest in Runge, Friedrich, Menzel, Hans von Marées, Anselm Feuerbach, but not in Friedrich Overbeck. See Jens Christian Jensen, "Bemerkungen zu Friedrich Overbeck," in Blühm and Gerkens eds. 1989, p. 12. By 1999, nothing had apparently changed. According to Brigitte Heise, the ranks of German romantic painters are filled, in the minds of today's viewers, by the names of Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. But in their own time, in contrast to Overbeck, they were hardly known to a broad general public. Overbeck's fame had certainly faded, Heise concedes, by the end of his long life. But in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, she argues, he was central to all theoretical discussion of art. Today, however, the non-professional viewer has little familiarity with or access to Overbeck's work. "Ein Blick auf die Geschichte der Rezeption Overbecks im Rahmen musealer Präsentation des 20. Jahrhunderts wirft ein deutliches Licht auf die Tatsache, dass selbst die Fachleute sich schwer taten mit der Vermittlung des Werkes eines so bekannten Künstlers…Bei jeder Ausstellung der Werke Overbecks und in den begleitenden Publikationen klingt an, dass es zur 'Ehrenrettung' des Künstlers geschehe, dass sein Werk in seiner eigentlichen Bedeutung wieder in das Bewusstsein der Öffentlichkeit gerückt werden müsse." Brigitte Heise, Johann Friedrich Overbeck: Das künstlerische Werk und seine literarischen und autobiographischen Quellen (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 1999), p. I.

48. In the case of Overbeck, Heise (1999, p. 3) has summarized deftly and with understanding the obstacles that make it difficult for the ordinary modern viewer to appreciate his art. "Die Kunst Overbecks ist entstanden aus tiefer, christlicher Überzeugung und auf der Grundlage streng gelebten katholischen Glaubens, in einer Haltung also, die heute…schwer nachzuvollziehen ist. Damit wird das Werk als überholt oder nicht tradierenswert beurteilt….Seit dem Realismus und Impressionismus haben sich die Sehgewohnheiten des Betrachters entschieden verändert. Eine Kunst wie die Overbecks, die vor allem den Bildinhalt in den Mittelpunkt rückt…ist dem heutigen Betrachter fremd geworden…. Der Betrachter erwartet von einem Werk der Malerei Genuss und sinnlichen Reiz, keine Erbauung und Erweckung…. Die bildnerischen Mittel, mit denen der Maler die christlichen Inhalte seiner Werke formt, basieren auf einem Ästhetikbegriff , der ohne kunsthistorische und philosophische Quellen in seiner eigentlichen Bedeutung nicht erfahrbar ist. Ohne diese Grundlagen erscheinen die Gemälde dem Betrachter oft steril, unsinnlich und ohne technische Bravour…. Overbecks Gemälde und Zeichnungen sind durch Reproduktionstechniken vielfach popularisiert und trivialisiert worden. Sie wurden zum Teil zu frömmelnden Heiligenbildern…verunstaltet, die dem ursprünglichen Werk nicht mehr entsprechen…So wird das Urteil 'Kitsch' eilfertig auf das originale Werk übertragen…. Dem heutigen Betrachter, der mit romantischer Kunst in erster Linie die Landschaftsmalerei verbindet, erscheint Overbeck als Vertreter der religiösen Figurenmalerei oft ale ein rückwärtsgewandter Aussenseiter. Nicht gesehen wird, dass in seinem Werk wesentliche Aspekte der Geistesgeschichte seiner Zeit manifestieren."

49. See the catalogue entry in Blühm and Gerkens eds. 1989, p. 126: "Jede emotionale Beteiligung, jede Spannung und Bewegung, wie sie etwa bei Tizian und Correggio einfliessen, werden hier bewusst vermieden. Der formstrenge Aufbau und die betonte Linearität, die zeichenhafte Auffassung Christi und die zurückhaltende Farbgebung lassen das Werk in seiner idealtypisch formulierten Bildsprache als ein Hauptwerk des Meisters ansehen." Overbeck's work shows some affinity with the Martin Schongauer version of the theme (fig. 22), though compared to a drawing by his friend Joseph Anton Ramboux (fig. 20), which is vividly evocative of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century German art, Overbeck's treatment is distinctly and typically more Raphaelesque.

50. Herbert Lehr, Die Blütezeit Romantischer Bildkunst: Franz Pforr der Meister des Lukasbundes (Marburg an der Lahn: Verlag des kunstgeschichtlichen Seminars, 1924), p. 38; Sabine Fastert, Die Entdeckung des Mittelalters. Geschichtsrezeption in der nazarenischen Malerei des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2000), p. 56.

51. Quote in Muther 1907, vol. 1, p. 115. Later German painters, including the "Deutschrömer"—Feuerbach, Böcklin, Marées—learned from the French and, to some extent, the Belgians a different approach to paint. Thus Feuerbach wrote: "Nicht genug danken kann ich dem Meister [Couture], welcher mich von der deutschen Sptizpinselei zu breiter, pastoser Behandlung, von der akademischen Schablonenkomposition zu grosser Anschaffung und Auffassung führte." Reported in Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Akademische Vorlesung, ed. Norbert Schmitz (Alfter: VDG Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaftern, 1993; original lecture, Berlin, 1911), p. 10.

52. Johannes Stückelberger, Rembrand und die Moderne (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996), pp. 170–80.

53. R. Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son intervention dans les arts (Paris: Hachette, 1910), pp. 179–97. See also Sheehan 2000, p. 51.

54. Cited in Die Nazarener 1977, p. 402. The ideas expressed in this letter quickly became part of the standard language of critics, both Christian and non-Christian, of the ever-expanding economy and culture of capitalism, from Pugin to William Morris.

55. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 421. See also Klaus Lankheit, Das Freundschaftsbild der Romantik (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1952), pp. 90-92; Nikolaus Pevsner, "Gemeinschaftsideale unter den bildenden Künstlern des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 9 (1931), pp.124–54; Hans-Joachim Mähl, "Der poetische Staat: Utopie und Utopiereflexion bei den Frühromantikern," in Wilhelm Vosskamp, ed., Utopieforschung: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1982), vol. 3, pp. 273–302. According to Mähl (p. 290), it is unmistakable, "dass sich die Gesellschaftsutopie [Friedrich] Schlegels zunächst einmal auf die kleinen Zirkel des privaten Lebens bezieht (auf die 'Eingeweihten' also, die wie der Kreis der Jenaer Romantiker selbst, als neue 'Gemeinde' betrachtet werden konnten). Die 'unsichtbare Kirche,' von der Schlegel, wie so viele andere in dieser Zeit, spricht, versteht sich als Opposition gegen die herrschenden Formen der Gesellschaft und sollte zunächst durch einen 'Bund der Künstler' verwirklicht werden, da von ihnen…das Heil der Welt zu erwarten sei."

56. See, for instance, Scheffler 1909, p. 36. Christoph Heilmann (The Conoisseur, 195 [August 1977], p. 315) has written that the Nazarenes "expressed their artistic intentions in the most pure and characteristic way" in their drawings, with portrait and landscape as the most striking, since here "the abnegation of both artistic individuality and apprehension of the actual 'sujet' are generalised to the utmost degree. This can be seen also in the so-called 'Freundschaftsbilder'... Equally, the landscapes, drawn in thin, pointed pencil apply a highly sensitive linear technique and have nothing to do with 'Naturgefühl.'" In a similar vein, Georg Poensgen (C. Ph. Fohr und das Café Greco: Die Künstlerbildnisse des Heidelberger Romantikers [Heidelberg: F.H. Kerle Verlag, 1957], p. 29) has emphasized "das stark Stiliesirende, dem Reiz der Linien-, Licht- und Flächenbehandlung den Vorrang gegenüber psychologischen Akzenten Einräumende" in the portraits of Carl Philipp Fohr.

57. See the handsome book of Hans Geller, Die Bildnisse der deutschen Künstler in Rom 1800–1830 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1952); Heribert Hutter and Wanda Lhotsky, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld: Römisches Porträtbuch (Vienna: Kupferstichkabinett der Akademie der bildenden Künste, 1973); and Klaus Lankheit's classic Das Freundschaftsbild der Romantik (1952). On the Zimmerkenotaph (1801–1809) made for Friedrich of Württemberg to commemorate his close friend Count Johann Carl von Zeppelin by Philipp Jakob Scheffauer, the neoclassical Württemberg sculptor, see Christian von Holst, ed., Schwäbischer Klassizismus: zwischen Ideal und Wirklichkeit, 1770–1830, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 275–76. A similar Zimmerkenotaph for the brothers Carl and August Ruoff, by Scheffauer's colleague in Stuttgart, Johann Heinrich Dannecker, is described and illustrated ibid., vol. 2, pp. 180–81. In 1796, Dannecker made medallions of himself and his friend, the poet Schiller; he kept the one of Schiller for himself and gave Schiller the one of him (ibid., vol. 2, pp. 218–19).

58. Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld's hugely successful Bilderbibel (1855) was published in many countries and many languages. On its success, especially in Great Britain, see Keith Andrews, The Nazarenes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 66; and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld 1796-1872, exh. cat., Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, 1994 (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1994), pp. 237–39. The Bilderbibel has recently been reprinted by Dover Press in its Pictorial Archive series and is currently advertised on the website of the "Hollywood Jesus Store," which purports to offer "Pop Culture from a Spiritual Point of View." New editions also appeared in Russian and German in 1991 and an abbreviated version is available on the internet at www.bilderbibel.de. A typical judgment of the Bilderbibel is that of Hans Weigert (1942, p. 474): "Die Hauptschuld der Nazarener ist die Banalisierung des Heiligen, das seiner Ferne und seines Geheimnisses entkleidet sich nur durch Sinnigkeit und eine fade Lieblichkeit vom Alltäglichen unterscheidet. In des Schnorr von Carolsfeld Holzschnitten zur Bibel wurde der Schöpfergott zum lieben Grossvater. Von dieser Kunst stammt geradenwegs der heutige Devotionalienkitsch ab, und unser aller Vorstellung von den Gestalten der christlichen Mythologie ist von dieser Kunst verniedlich und verdorben worden." See also Sigrid Merken's informative essay, "Nazarener und 'nazarenisch'— Popularisierung und Trivialisierung eines Kunstideals," in Die Nazarener 1977, pp. 365–88.

59. See the rich study of Bruno Foucart, Le Renouveau de la peinture religieuse en France, 1800–1860 (Paris: Arthéna, 1987).

60. Quoted in Vaughan 1979, p. 183. In an essay on Overbeck's drawings, Gerhard Gerkens makes a similar point. "Veränderungen der Wirkichkeit, Verkürzung und selbst eine gewisse Entleerung der Zeichnung von allen Zügen, die sie mit dem Leben verbinden, sind nicht Unvermögen," he noted, "sondern willentliche Entscheidung." Gerhard Gerkens "Overbeck als Zeichner," in Blühm and Gerkens eds. 1989, pp. 34–41, quote on p. 39. See likewise, Christoph Heilmann's review of the 1977 exhibition of the Nazarenes in Frankfurt in Connoisseur 195 (August 1977), p. 315: "The Nazarenes… were devoted to a renewal of Art on a religious basis and saw their ideal in the purity of life and art, such as had been realised, in their opinion, by Dürer and Raphael. Naturally, the means of expressing their …feelings underwent a continuous process of repressing reality in every range, which consequently also meant renouncing colour, in the sense of light and atmosphere, in favour of the contour. Colour became an additional ingredient, supplementary to the disegno of the subject."

61. In his fine monograph on Pforr, Herbert Lehr (1924) tried to make the case that Pforr was a truly gifted artist whose work suffered to the degree that it was influenced by the considerably less talented Overbeck. The philosopher and the theologian far outweighed the artist in Overbeck, according to Lehr. Lehr's thesis may well reflect a modern formalist bias in the writer himself.

62. Thus Scheffler (1909, p. 10): "Insofern ist der Hellenismus dieser Männer [Winckelmann and Lessing] dem Raffaelitentum der Nazarener keineswegs entgegengesetzt. Der Gegensatz dieser sich dort hellenistisch und hier christlich organisierenden Gedankenkunst liegt in den gleichzeitig versiegenden ursprünglichen Schöpfungskräften des Barock und Rokoko. Diese aristokratischen Schöpfungskräfte wollten zu dem beginnenden demokratischen Zeitalter nicht passen; darum wurden sie als dekadent von den über neue bürgerliche Kultur Reflektierenden abgelehnt und gingen in der Traditionenblidung verloren." Compare Heinrich Wölfflin's characterization (1893) of Wackenroder's Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders—a main source of inspiration for the Nazarenes—as "ein Protest gegen den zeitgenössischen Betrieb der Kunst, gegen das blosse Hantieren mit erlernten Kunstrezepten, wo ein blindendes Kolorit, eine geistreiche Ausstreuung von Lichtern und Schatten, eine überraschende Komposition und kunstreiche Verschränkung der Gruppen die einzige Absicht des Malers bilde." Heinrich Wölfflin, Kleine Schriften (1886–1933), ed. Joseph Gantner (Basel: Schwabe, 1946), p. 206.

63. Both subjects were treated by Overbeck, the first in a painting (Museen für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Lübeck), the other of a drawing enhanced by watercolor (1815; Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin); see Die Nazarener 1977, pp. 60, 70, 201, 236.

64. See the comments of Rosenblum (1956, p. 97) on Carstens (in contrast to David): "Like French art of the time, [Carstens's] drawing finds its inspiration in antique history, yet it is an interpretation of antiquity which has no public ramifications, no lessons of virtue to teach to a new bourgeois audience. Rather, it is a private, highly personal approach to antiquity." In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, Schiller likewise focused on the transformation, harmonization, and emancipation of the individual, not on institutional or political change in itself.

65. Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen 1968, pp. 9, 85. See also, ibid., p. 106: "Dieses Bild von — erinnert mich wieder an das oft schon Gesagte: dass, wenn auch in unserer Zeit wiederum ein Raffael oder sonst ein ausgezeichneter Künstler wie die der Vorzeit aufstünde mit ebenso grossen Naturanlagen und Fähigkeiten wie seine Vorgänger, er würde dennoch nicht wie jene malen. Seine Werke würden und müssten immer das Gepräge seiner Zeit an sich tragen."

66. Letter to Sutter, 10 October 1810, quoted in Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 162: "…ein vollkommener Künstler nicht ohne Philosophie gedacht werden kann, so wenig wie ohne Poesie."

67. Maria Teresa Benedetti, "Nazareni e Preraffaeliti: Un Nodo della Cultura del XIX Siglo," Bollettino d'Arte 67, ser. 6 (1982), pp. 121–42, quote on p. 122; see also Alfred Neumeyer, "Zum Problem des Manierismus in der bildenden Kunst der Romantik," Zeitschruft für bildende Kunst 62 (1928–29), pp. 184–88. On the radical "modernity" of Ingres's deliberate flouting of pictorial tradition, see Fleckner 1995, esp. chap. 2, "Porträt und Autonomie—Die Frühen Gemälde"; The locus classicus of all reflection on the crisis of modernity in art is Hegel's Introduction in Aesthetics 1975, vol. 1, pp. 10–11: "The beautiful days of Greek art, like the golden age of the later Middle Ages, are gone. The development of reflection in our life today has made it a need of ours, in relation both to our will and judgment, to cling to general considerations and to regulate the particular by them, with the result that universal forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims, prevail as determining reasons and are the chief regulator…Consequently the conditions of our present time are not favourable to art. It is not…merely that the practicing artist himself is infected by the loud voice of reflection all around him and by the opinions and judgments on art that have become customary everywhere, so that he is misled into introducing more thoughts into his work: the point is that our whole spiritual culture is of such a kind that he himself stands within the world of reflection and its relations, and could not by any act of will and decision abstract himself from it." The writer E.T.A. Hoffmann explores the potentially tragic consequence of this situation for the artist in the tale Die Jesuitenkirche in G, written between 1815 and 1816.

68. On Schick's work and its relation to Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, see Gudrun Körner in Von Holst ed. 1993, vol. 1, pp. 311–19; and also vol. 2, pp. 58–60, 358–59. The theme of Apollo Among the Shepherds also inspired Schick's friend Joseph Anton Koch in a work currently in the Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen.

69. Much of the literature on these friendships emphasizes their alleged homoerotic character. See, for instance, Robert Tobin, Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); and Joachim Pfeiffer, "Männerfreundschaften in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts" (www.vib-bw.de/tp8/home_pfeiffer/maenner.htm). The language in which affection was expressed in correspondences and occasional poems is sometimes—especially in the circle of the poet Gleim—playfully based on the conventional language of love; in several important cases, however, such as Wackenroder and Tieck, there seems to be no ironical or artistic distance. The language of friendship borrows the language of love because the sentiments are no less fervent. Nevertheless, while homoeroticism may always be a factor in such intense relationships (how much is usually unverifiable), one is struck by the deep spiritual and sometimes overtly religious tone of the correspondences of the Nazarene artists with their closest friends. A strong Pietistic strain seems to run through the writing (and feeling) of Protestants and Catholic converts alike. This aspect is noted by Hans Dietrich, Die Freundschaftsliebe in der deutschen Literatur (Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winckel, 1996; orig. Leipzig, 1931), pp. 34–35; and by Hans Joachim Kreutzer, "Freundschaftsbünde-Künstlerfreunde," in Eva Badura-Skoda et al., eds., Schubert und seine Freunde (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 1999), pp. 59–74. In addition, the socio-political implications of the cult of friendship—thoroughly documented by Michael Kohlhäufl in his rich study, Poetisches Vaterland: Dichtung und politisches Denken im Freundeskreis Franz Schuberts (Kassel, Basel, London, New York, Prague: Bärenreiter, 1999)—should not be overlooked. Like the circle around Schubert, the Lukasbrüder and the Nazarenes were not unmoved by German "patriotism." For the Nazarenes, however, friendship was not a bond, in the antique—or Jacobin manner—among citizens whose equality was predicated on identity, but an association of private, autonomous individuals. The political model it implied was most plausibly not the ancient polis, but a moderate liberal society on a Christian foundation. The representation of friendship (as sisterly love) in the full-length double portrait of Princess Luise and Princess Friederike of Prussia (1795–1797)—one of the most celebrated of European neoclassical sculptures—by Johann Gottfried von Schadow, father of the Nazarene painter Wilhelm von Schadow, appears strikingly close in this respect to that of one of the best known works by the Nazarenes, Overbeck's Italia and Germania. See note 140 below.

70. As the sign of a consciously founded, sometimes conspiratorial community, rather than a traditional one, whose origins, as Rousseau put it, are lost in the mist of antiquity, the oath topos was popular in the revolutionary climate of the last third of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth and was taken up by a number of artists, for example, Gavin Hamilton in his Oath of Brutus (1767), Fuseli in his Rütli Oath (1779-81), David in his Oath of the Horatii (1785) and the unfinished Tennis Court Oath (1791–), and Joseph Anton Koch in his Oath of the 1500 Republicans at Montenesimo (1797).

71. Heinrich Wölfflin, commenting on a work by Overbeck in his 1911 Berlin University lectures on the history of painting in the nineteenth century, may have been the first to apply the term to the Nazarenes: "Er trat jener Sezession bei, die sich nach Rom aufmachte." Wölfflin 1993, p. 38.

72. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, pp. 109–14; Ludwig Grote, Joseph Sutter und der Nazarensiche Gedanke (Munich: Prestel, 1972), pp. 98–113.

73. The student "muss erst seine Hand üben und den Mechanismus mehrerer Zeichnungsarten sich eigen machen, ehe er zur Malerei und den höheren Theilen derselben übergehen kann. Diese Vorübungen können wohl einige Jahre dauern." Letter from Füger to a friend of the Overbeck family who had encouraged Senator Overbeck to send his son to Vienna to study, quoted in Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 44.

74. "Seine Manier scheint mir ganz und gar falsch zu seyn." The danger is "meine Hand auf diese Weise in Fesseln legen, aus denen es ihr leider sehr schwer werden wird sich nachher wieder zu befreien." Quoted in Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 29.

75. On the topic of ideas of artistic freedom and the autonomy of the work of art in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Fleckner 1995, pp. 47–55.

76. This letter was published in 1806, as Overbeck arrived in Vienna, in the biography of Carstens by his friend Carl Ludwig Fernow. Reprinted in Friedmar Apel, ed., Romantische Kunstlehre. Poesie und Poetik des Blicks in der deutschen Romantik (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), pp. 395–99.

77. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, pp. 28–29; cf. Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen 1968, p. 113. On the relation of the critique of academies and the formation of Freundschaftsbünde, see Lankheit 1952, pp. 90–92.

78. Letter dated 5 February 1808. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, pp. 64–69.

79. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, pp. 68–69.

80. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 71.

81. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 421; cf. Lankheit 1952, pp. 90–92; Pevsner 1939, "Gemeinschaftsideale unter den bildenden Künstlern."

82. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, pp. 82–83.

83. See Sabine Fastert, Die Entdeckung des Mittelalters. Geschichtsrezeption in der nazarenischen Malerei des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2000), p. 55. Winckelmann himself, in the very text where he first defined "edle Einfalt und stille Grösse" as the essential characteristic of the art of the Ancients (Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, 1755), repeatedly evoked the "Ruhe und Stille" ("tranquility and calm") of Raphael in contrast with the manner of later painters like Caravaggio or the Dutch. To many people those qualities appear "leblos" ("lifeless"), he acknowledged, but to the practiced eye they are "bedeutend und erhaben" ("noble and meaningful"). Winckelmann singled out the Dresden Madonna with Child for special praise: "Sehet die Madonna, mit einem Gesichte voll Unschuld und zugleich einer mehr als weiblichen Grösse, in einer selig ruhigen Stellung, in derjenigen Stille, welche die Alten in den Bildern der Gottheiten herschen liessen. Wie gross und edel is ihr ganzer Kontur! " ("Look at the Madonna, with her face full of innocence and her more than merely womanly grandeur, in a posture of blessed calm, characterized by that tranquillity that the Ancients imparted to the images of their divinities. How grand and noble is her entire contour!") J.J. Winckelmann, Ewiges Griechentum: Auswahl aus seinen Schriften und Briefen, ed. Fritz Forschepiepe (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1943), pp. 15–16, 23–25.\

84. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 83. The young Lukasbrüder may well have been aware of the similar criticism of painterly technique and "bravura brushstrokes" in Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764). In antiquity itself, Winckelmann noted, the sculptor Myron was censured by some later writers for his "hardness." In this, "the ancient writers have very often judged of art in the same manner as the moderns; for the firmness of drawing, the correctly and severely rendered figures of Raphael, have appeared hard and stiff to many, when compared with the tenderness of the outlines and the round and softly treated forms of Correggio." However, "as in learning music and speech, it is essential to produce the tones of the one and the syllables and words of the other with sharp clarity in order to achieve purity, harmony, and fluency of expression, drawing leads to truth and beauty of form in art not through vague, fluid, suggestive strokes of the pen or brush, but through manly and exactly delimited outlines, even when these are somewhat hard." Quoted from English translation by G. Henry Lodge, The History of Ancient Art, 4 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872), vol. 3, pp. 199–200; cf. J. J. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Vienna: Phaidon Verlag, 1934), pp. 216–18.

85. The Goethe-Meyer text, drafts of which go back to 1813–14, appeared in the first volume of Über Kunst und Altertum in 1817. Reprinted in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke, 22 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1965-1978), vol. 20, pp. 58-82. Passavant's reply, entitled Ansichten über die bildenden Künste, und Darstellung des Ganges derselben in Toscana…von einem deutschen Künstler in Rom, was published by Oswald in Heidelberg in 1820.

86. Jensen offers an excellent summary of Nazarene artistic practice: "das Primat der Linie über die Farbe, die Entthronung der pastosen Pinselschrift und die Einsetzung lasurartig glatter Farbschichten; strenge Lokalfarbe statt aus der Farbe entwicklelte Komposition; Abwendung vom Raum und Wiederentdeckung der Fläche; die abstrahierende Idealität der Bildgestalt, die das Unverrückbare sucht, das einzig wahre Lineament der Gegenstände, die im Gegensatz steht zu den realistischen Tendenzen der Zeit." Jens Christian Jensen, "I Nazareni – das Wort, der Stil," in Klassizismus und Romantik in Deutschland. Gemälde und Zeichnungen aus der Sammlung Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt, exh. cat., Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1966), p. 51.

87. Diderot's opposition to the rococo was inseparable from his conviction that the market was degrading art. He defended public exhibitions and public criticism of art because he saw in them a counterweight to the influence of the market. "Salon of 1767," in Salons, ed. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar, 4 vols. (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1957–67), vol. 3, pp. 55–56. His critiques of Boucher and Baudouin in particular focus on the influence of the petit goût of well-to-do private clients. When artists become the servants of wealth and luxury, he argued, "great talents are degraded and made to produce works of no consequence, and the subject matter of art is diminished to insignificant bambochades." "Salon of 1769," in Salons, vol. 4, pp. 65–66. Thus he feared that a sketch by Greuze for a painting on the topic of "the punished son" may never be worked over into a finished painting because of the "wretched taste of the times," and even if it is, "Boucher will have sold fifty of his indecent, stale marionettes before Greuze sells two magnificent paintings." "Salon of 1765," in Salons, vol. 2, pp. 158–59. Diderot himself, however, occasionally recommended works he considered of enduring value to his readers, on the grounds that they were a wise long-term investment of capital.

88. On the transformation of the artist's status, see "Kommentar: Die Romantische Schule des Sehens," in Apel ed. 1992, pp. 747–48.

89. Such a community of artists had been suggested by the youthful Friedrich Schlegel: "Ob dann das Heil der Welt von den Gelehrten zu erwarten sei? Ich weiss es nicht. Aber Zeit ist es, dass alle Künstler zusammentreten als Eidgenossen zu ewigem Bündniss." "Wie die Kaufleute im Mittelalter so sollten die Künstler jetzt zusammentreten zu einer Hanse, um sich einigermassen gegenseitig zu schützen." See his "Ideen," in Athenäum 32, p. 143, reprinted in Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, J.J. Anstett, Hans Eichner, 35 vols. (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh; Zurich: Thomas, 1958–), vol. 2 (1967), pp. 259, 271.

90. "Süssigkeit der Einsamkeit und Abgeschiedenheit von der Welt; nur so kann heut zu Tage die wahre Kunst gedeihn." Journal entry for 21 October 1811, quoted in Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 186.

91. Poetry and Prose, ed. G. Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1927), p. 816. Interestingly, a large exhibition of Blake at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001 elicited from the New York Times reviewer an ambivalent and uncertain reaction comparable to that produced a few months later by the Nineteenth-Century German Art exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington. See Michael Kimmelman, "A Visionary whose Odd Images still burn bright," New York Times, 30 March 2001.

92. Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen 1968, p. 128: "Der Maler soll nicht bloss malen, was er vor sich sieht, sondern auch was er in sich sieht. Sieht er aber nichts in sich, so unterlasse er auch zu malen, was er vor sich sieht."

93. Sarah Symmons, Flaxman and Europe. The Outline Illustrations and their Influence (Ph.D. diss., Courtauld Institute, 1979; New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984), p. 205. Compare Overbeck's typically neoclassical and anti-realist definition of beauty in his journal (7 October 1811): "Schönheit! d.h. Reinheit von allen zufälligen oder ausserwesentlichen Mängeln, die die Formen kleinlich unterbrechen und den Eindruck stören oder schwächen." Quoted in Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 182.

94. Kleine Schriften zur Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, ed. Hermann Uhde-Bernays (Leipzig, 1913), pp. 22–23: "Der edelste Kontour vereinigt oder umschreibt alle Teile der schönsten Natur und der idealischen Schönheiten in den Figuren der Griechen." See also Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke (1755): "der meisterhafte Kontour ist die Hauptabsicht des Künstlers" (Ewiges Griechentum, 1943, p. 17) and Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764): "The patriarchs of modern art, even in its infancy, have done what Raphael did in its greatest bloom; they sketched the outlines of their figures with accuracy and precision, and were not so easily satisfied as those who…rapidly execute large works, sketching their figures in the coarsest manner, and trusting for the rest to the good luck of their brush. The former, through their severe drawing, finally attained to correctness; and character is manifest in the firm, spare strokes even of the smallest figure." Quoted from the G. Henry Lodge translation, Winckelmann 1872, vol. 3, p. 176. Kant too had maintained that for all the visual arts "ist die Zeichnung das Wesentliche, in welcher nicht, was in der Empfindung vergnügt, sondern bloss durch seine Form gefällt, den Grund aller Anlage für den Geschmack ausmacht. Die Farben, welche den Abriss illuminieren, gehören zum Reiz, den Gegenstand an sich können sie zwar für die Empfindung beliebt aber nicht anschauungswürdig und schön machen." Quoted in Rosenblum 1956, pp. 97. The historical significance of the emphasis on contour and line has been pointed out by a French scholar: "On sait quel est l'enjeu du débat: la proclamation de la supériorité, non plus du dessin mais du simple contour, sur toutes les autres parties de l'art, position extrêmiste qui surgit de plusieurs côtés en ces années cruciales, était grosse d'avenir. A court terme, ce sont les 'primitifs', c'est le David des Sabines et out Ingres qui en développent les consequences. A plus longue échéance elle porte en germe les audaces de Gauguin et de Matisse…." Sylvain Laveissière, "Le Trait" in Bénigne Gagneraux (1756–1795), un peintre bourguignon dans la Rome néo-classique, exh. cat. (Rome: De Luca, 1983), p. 53.

95. Charles Blainville, Histoire générale critique et philologique de la musique (1767) (Geneva: Minkoff reprints, 1972), p. 100; Denis Diderot, Leçons de clavecin et principes d'harmonie par M. Bemetzrieder (1771), in his Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Hermann, 1983), vol. 19, pp. 196, 354. The relation of musical harmony to color in painting is discussed in Andrew Clark, "Fibers, Organs, Lines, and Strings: A Study of Physiology and Aesthetics in the Works of Denis Diderot" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2003).

96. Anatole France was later to make the same criticism of Barante that some artists made of Overbeck and the Nazarenes: that the reader, in the end, would rather read the medieval chroniclers themselves than the synthetic text that Barante constructed by taking them as his model. See "La Jeunesse de M. de Barante," in Oeuvres complètes, 25 vols. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1925–35), vol. 7, p. 418.

97. Rosenblum 1956, pp. 1–3. Ingres's Paolo and Francesca may well owe something to John Flaxman's illustrations for Dante's Inferno, which also inspired a drawing on the same theme by Joseph Anton Koch, an artist close to the Nazarenes. On Flaxman and his influence, see David Irwin, John Flaxman, 1755–1826. Sculptor, Illustrator, Designer (London: Studio Vista / Christie's, 1979) and the outstanding study of Flaxman by Symmons (1984).

98. When it was first published in Paris in 1808 (2d ed. 1811), Artaud de Montor's study of early Italian painting bore the title Considérations sur l'état de la peinture en Italie dans les quatre siècles qui ont précédé celui de Raphael. For a new edition with a different publisher in 1843, however, the title was changed to Peintres primitifs: Collection de tableaux rapportée d'Italie.

99. See André Chastel, "Le Goût des 'Préraphaélites en France" (1956), in his Fables, Formes, Figures, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 227–39, Denon quote on p. 228; also Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 43–44.

100. On the revival of interest in early Italian painting, see, in addition to the work of Artaud de Montor, Jean-Nicolas Paillot de Montabert, Traité de peinture (Paris: Bossange père, 1829) and, above all, Histoire de l'art par les monuments, depuis sa décadence au IVème siècle jusqu'à son renouvellement au XVIème siècle, 6 vols. (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz,1811–23) by Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Georges Seroux d'Agincourt, a wealthy French amateur, who was the companion of Angelica Kauffmann in Rome. (Italian, German, and English translations of this work appeared in 1825, 1840, and 1847 respectively.) Seroux's stated aim was to be "the Winckelmann of the Middle Ages." He also had high regard for Dürer (see vol. 2, part 2, p. 138), then still outside the accepted academic canon, though by no means neglected. Dürer's influence is visible, for instance, in the work of the mid-eighteenth century Scottish artist John Runciman (1744–1768); see David and Francina Irwin, Scottish Painters at Home and Abroad, 1700–1900 (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 111–12. Carstens expressed admiration for Dürer before the appearance of Wackenroder's Herzensergiessungen; see Hans Eichner and Norma Lelless, "Nachwort," in their edition of Friedrich Schlegel's Gemälde alter Meister (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), p. 213. Secondary sources on the revival of interest in early Italian painting include: André Chastel 1978, vol. 2, pp. 227–39; M. Lamy, "La Découverte des primitifs italiens au XIXème siècle: Seroux d'Agincourt, 1730–1814," Revue de l'art ancien et moderne 39 (1921) pp. 69–81; and 40, pp. 182–90; H. Loyrette, "Seroux d'Agincourt et les origines de l'art médiéval," Revue d'art 48 (1980), pp. 40–56; Lionello Venturi, Il Gusto dei Primitivi (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1926), especially p. 166 ff.; also Rosenblum 1956, pp. 59–62.

101. See J. W. Goethe, "Über Kunst und Altertum in den Rhein- und Main-Gegenden" (1816) in in Goethe1965–1978, vol. 20, pp. 44–55, and nn. 531 ff.

102. Rosenblum 1956, pp. 59, 61; see also p. 116, on Flaxman. See also Rosenblum in Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 163–67. Quentin Bell has emphasized that the turn to the early Italian painters was part of the same quest as the turn to ancient models: "While the great majority of pupils of David were content to follow their master in the pursuit of classical antiquity, there was one pupil—and the most gifted—who for a time strayed into another path and sought excellence in the earlier manifestations of Italian art. Ingres could look back beyond Raphael and in his 'Paolo and Francesca' produces something that seems much closer to the Quattrocento than to the classical prototypes of his master." See Quentin Bell, "The Life Room as a Battlefield," in his Bad Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989), pp. 115–63, quote on p. 131.

103. Quoted in Rosenblum 1956, p. 162.

104. On the Primitifs or Barbus, see E.J. Delécluze, David, son école et son temps, ed. J.P. Mouilleseaux (Paris: Macula, 1983; orig. ed. 1855), chap. 3; and the articles by Delécluze (1832) and Charles Nodier (1832) reproduced in this volume, pp. 419–47. See also the modern study by George Levitine, The Dawn of Bohemianism: The Barbu Rebellion and Primitivism in Neo-classical France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978).

105. See Ulrich Hiesinger, "Canova and the Frescoes of the Galleria Chiaramonte," Burlington Magazine 907 (October 1978), pp. 655–65.

106. Wächter, a fervent disciple of the neoclassical Asmus Carstens, had already taken an interest in the young Lukasbrüder in Vienna; see Lehr 1924, pp. 171–72.

107. Otto R. von Lutterotti, Joseph Anton Koch 1768–1839. Leben und Werke, mit einem vollständigen Werkverzeichnis (Vienna and Munich: Herold-Verlag, 1985), repr. on p. 152. Théophile Gautier reports that the artist Gabriel Tyr, a student of Orsel's and thus close to the esthetic ideals of the Nazarenes, used to say "qu'il fallait baptiser l'art grec et le faire agenouiller sous l'arceau byzantin ou l'ogive gothique." Gautier in Moniteur universel, 24 February 1868, quoted in his Correspondance générale, vol. 10, pp. 45–46.

108. In his three-volume Histoire de l'art moderne en Allemagne, which appeared simultaneously in French (Paris: Jules Renouard) and in a German translation (Geschichte der neueren deutschen Kunst [Berlin: Auf Kosten des Verfassers]) between 1836 and 1841, Count Athanesius Raczyncki professed belief in "das positive Schöne und…die ewigen Wahrheiten." There is, he claimed, "etwas Höheres als die Mode und ihre Lehren: es sind die unveränderlichen Gesetze und die Erscheinungen der Natur, welche uns in die Absichten des Schöpfers einweihen.…" (vol. 1, p. 3). According to Raczyncki, the two main strains in modern German art, the classical and the Christian, both aspire toward "truth" and are essentially idealist rather than realist in inspiration and character. Later art historians have upheld Raczyncki's implicit association of neoclassical and Nazarene art, despite Goethe's emphasis on what separates them. Thus Hans Hildebrandt in Die Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Wildpark-Potsdam: Athenaion, 1924), pp. 77–78: "Ohne es zu ahnen, übertrug der Nazarener [i.e. Overbeck] viel von den Grundsätzen des heidnischen Klassizismus in seine Auffassung des Christentums, das ihm nur mildes Dulden und sanfte Verklärung in Schönheit war. Dieser Kompromiss prägt sich augenfällig in der formalen Durchbildung seiner Werke aus. Eine andere Lösung als die rein harmonische des Bildaufbaues um eine Symmetrieachse fiel Overbeck niemals ein." See also Scheffler 1909, pp. 9–10; Weigert 1942, p. 467; Rosenblum 1956, pp. 59–62. Most recently, Klaus Lankheit has argued that the old ideal of classical and romantic as polar opposites (as in the art history of Georg Dehio and Gustav Pauli) is no longer acceptable. Classicism and romanticism are now seen as "verschiedene Lösungsversuchen für dieselbe geschichtliche Situation am Beginn der Moderne. Unbeschadet der Tatsache, dass sie in historischen Ablauf nacheinander wirksam geworden sind, entsprangen sie beide derselben Wurzel und waren eher Parallelerscheinungen als Gegensätze." "Klassizismus und Romantik," in Klassizismus und Romantik in Deutschland 1966, pp. 17-20, quote on p. 17.

109. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 157; see also vol. 1, p. 143.

110. Overbeck's journal for 31 October 1811, quoted in Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 188.

111. See Jensen in Klassizismus und Romantik in Deutschland 1966, pp. 47–48.

112. Quoted in Poensgen 1957, p. 15.

113. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, pp. 382–87. Salomon Bartholdy's relation to the Nazarenes appears to have been somewhat ambivalent. In one letter to his niece, Fanny Mendelssohn, sister of the composer and wife of the artist Wilhelm Hensel, he expressed considerable impatience with them and their work; see Felix Gilbert, ed., Bankiers, Künstler und Gelehrte: Unveröffentlichte Briefe der Familie Mendelssohn aus dem 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1975), pp. 55–56. Bartholdy's ambivalence probably reflects in part the tension in the large Mendelssohn family between those who converted to Protestantism and those who, like Dorothea Schlegel and her two sons, converted to Catholicism.

114. Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 436.

115. Quoted in Fastert 2000, pp. 89, 293.

116. "Ein Maler soll aber malen können." Quoted in Michael Dirrigl, Ludwig I König von Bayern, 1825–1848 (Munich: Hugendubel, 1980), p. 182 (vol. 1 of a 4 volume-study, Das Kulturkönigtum der Wittelsbacher).

117. For instance, Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow was named director of the Düsseldorf Academy (1826), Philipp Veit took over the leadership of the Städelsches Institut in Frankfurt am Main (1830) and later became director of the Art Gallery in Mainz (1854), Ferdinand Olivier was appointed secretary-general of the Academy and professor of art history in Munich (1833), Johann Anton Ramboux became curator of the Wallraf collection in Cologne (1843), Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld became director of the Art Gallery and professor at the Dresden Academy (1846). See Apel ed. 1992, p. 757 ("Kommentar: Die Romantische Schule des Sehens").

118. "I hardly ever go there [i.e., to the Caffè Greco], for I dread both them [i.e. the Nazarene artists] and their favorite place of resort. It is a small dark room, about twenty-five feet wide, where you may smoke on one side but not on the other. They sit round it on benches, with their wide-brimmed hats on their heads and huge mastiffs beside them; their throats and cheeks and their entire faces sprout hair, and they puff fearful clouds of smoke (on one side of the room only) and hurl abuse at one another, while the mastiffs see to it that vermin will be well spread around. A suit or tie would be quite an innovation here. Spectacles conceal any part of the face left visible by the beard. And so they drink their coffee and talk of Titian and Pordenone as if the latter were sitting next to them and wearing beards and storm hats like theirs." Reisebriefe an die Familie, 11 December 1830; English trans. in Wilfrid Blunt, On Wings of Song: A Biography of Felix Mendelssohn (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), p. 128. Though he repeats the usual judgments of those who did not like the Nazarenes' work—the letter continues: "Moreover they paint such sickly Madonnas, such feeble saints, and such milksop heroes that I long to have a go at them"—Mendelssohn does appear to have distinguished between the "hangers-on of the movement" and "the more distinguished Nazarenes such as Cornelius, Koch and Overbeck," whose studios he did not fail to visit (Blunt, p.128). The painter Alfred Rethel gave a similar unflattering account of the German artists' colony in Rome in a letter to his mother, written some time in fall 1844, and reproduced in Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter, Alfred Rethel: Blätter der Erinnerung (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1861), pp. 127–28. Over 500 artists were then active in Rome, Rethel recounted— "ohne Dilettanten" —without an art-loving public to support them. The vast majority "huldigt der modernen Kunst und speculirt demnach auf den Fremden und mit Glück, ist aber bei diesem Manöver so verachtungswürdig, so aller Würde bar, und leider stehen da die Deutschen obenan, dass es ein Jammer ist. Wie ihr Sinn, so ihr Machwerk; raisonnirt, schlecht gemacht, gelobhudelt, kritisirt wird untereinander, wie vielleicht beim Thurmbau zu Babel. Im Gegensatz zu diesen, ganz extrem sind diejenigen, so der rechten Kunst, der religiösen oder historischen, anzuhangen vorgeben, sind aber nicht viel besser, stellen sich auf einen ungeheuern moralischen Kothurn, sind bis obenan mit Gehässigkeit…vollgestopft, leidenschaftlich in ihrem Benehmen und benehmen sich wirklich lächerlich.…

119. On the interest among the "second generation" of Nazarene painters in psychological realism, at the expense of narrative meaning, and the resulting stylistic modifications, see Cordula Grewe, "The Invention of the Secular Devotional Picture," Word and Image 16 (2000), pp. 45–57. On Oppenheim, see Georg Heuberger and Anton Merk eds., Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, exh. cat., Jüdisches Museum der Stadt, Frankfurt am Main, and Jewish Historical Society, New York, 1999–2000 (Frankfurt am Main: Wienand Verlag, 1999).

120. Jacob Burckhardt, Recollections of Rubens, trans. Mary Hottinger (London: Phaidon, 1950), p. 116. On the prevalence of complex programmatic descriptions of history paintings in the salon livrets of early nineteenth-century France and opposition to this practice, see Beth Wright, Painting and History during the French Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 118–19, and passim.

121. See Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 196.

122. Pforr included Passavant in the bond of friendship with Overbeck. The initials of the three friends—POP—are inscribed in a circle in the lower left section of the sketch.

123. See the excellent discussion in Heise 1999, pp. 87–88.

124. See especially E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 150–77, and Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 273–74, 289–350.

125. At the time of Pforr's illness, as he lay close to death, Overbeck noted in his journal (26 April 1812): "Ach, meine Natur ist allzu fest an ihn gewachsen! Mit ihm und durch ihn habe ich den wahren Mai meines Lebens genossen! Pforr! Mein Bruder! Deine Liebe war mir sonderlicher denn Frauenliebe! Und nun! Muss ich mit dem Gedanken vertraut zu werden versuchen, durch das Grab von dir getrennt zu werden!" Quoted in Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 231. In Overbeck's Entry of Christ into Jerusalem (completed in 1824), Pforr is represented with the other Lukasbrüder and Overbeck himself walking behind the Apostles. In 1834–35, Overbeck persuaded the Frankfurt Kunstverein to publish a series of engravings and lithographs after drawings by Pforr (Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 539); and in 1865, not long before his own death, he ordered a marble plaque for Pforr's tomb and represented Pforr as the bridegroom with the ideal "Maria" of their youthful fantasies in a series of illustrations on the theme of Christian Family Life. Howitt 1886, vol. 2, p. 388. His last thoughts, on his deathbed, were of Pforr.

126. See, for instance, the portrait of a fair-haired boy, by Ambrosius Holbein (brother of Hans Holbein the Younger), in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Basel.

127. "…ein Mädchen jung und schön, blond, zart und äusserst liebenswürdig, in einfacher doch geschmackvoller Kleidung;…kurz ein Mädchen, wie es Deutschland im Mittelalter hätte hervorbringen können." Quoted in Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 65.

128. "…ein Mädchen jung und schön, blond, zart und äusserst liebenswürdig, in einfacher doch geschmackvoller Kleidung;…kurz ein Mädchen, wie es Deutschland im Mittelalter hätte hervorbringen können." And "…ob ich es Weib oder Mann nennen sollte. Ein Wesen, war alles was ich sagen konnte, ernst doch sanft…mit dunkeln Haaren, nur Kopf und Hände sichtbar…; in der Mitte etwas Heiliges, Ueberirdisches; in Stellung und Geberde etwas Geheimnisvolles — kurz ein Wesen, das man nicht bloss lieben, sondern das man anbeten könnte; dessen Anblick einen hinreissen könnte zu den heiligsten Gefühlen." Quoted in Howitt 1886, vol. 1, p. 65.

129. "Ich möchte den, der sich der Kunst weihen will, fragen, wie man einen, der Mönch werden will, fragt: kannst Du das Gelübde der Armut, der Keuschheit und des Gehorsams ablegen und halten, so tritt ein." Letter of 15 December 1810, quoted in Fastert 2000, p. 38.

130. See Lehr 1924, pp. 275–77.

131. Quoted in Lehr 1924, p. 275; Fastert 2000, p. 56.

132. See Elisabeth Foucart-Walter and Pierre Rosenberg, Le Chat et la Palette. Le Chat dans la peinture occidentale du XVe au XXe siècle (Paris: Adam Biro, 1987), p. 172. The cat resembles the falcon in that both are symbols of wildness tamed and restrained. The falcon is usually taken to represent the Gentile converted to Christiantiy, the cat to represent the devil overcome by the Virgin as in Giulio Romano's Raphael-inspired Madonna with the Cat, now in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.

133. Other possible references that have been suggested include the "kämpferischer Künstlerwille" of the painter of battle scenes (Pforr's earliest ambition) and self-sacrificing love, as in some medieval texts. The falcon would thus be the symbol of Pforr's love of art. Heise 1999, pp. 81–82.

134. On Pforr's Entry of Rudolf of Habsburg as a "deliberate provocation aimed at the painting of the period," see Le Bris 1981, p. 96.

135. Rosenblum 1956, p. 96.

136. "Es ging aber wegen der Bauarth nicht gut an, es gebrauchen zu können." Quoted in Lehr 1924, p. 108; Fastert 2000, p. 74.

137. See Fastert 2000, pp. 73–74. For a brief overview of the political significance of the figure of Rudolf of Habsburg in the years of the struggle for German freedom and national unity, see Kohlhäufl 1999, pp. 122–23.

138. See Wilhelm Schlink, "Heilsgeschichte in der Malerei der Nazarener," Aurora, forthcoming.

139. Die Nazarener 1977, pp. 152–53, 201; Blühm and Gerkens eds. 1989, pp. 205, 208.

140. The use of female figures to represent friendship or brotherhood may also have signaled a less militarist ideal than might have been evoked by the use of a traditional masculine couple such as David and Jonathan. In Pietist writing, the Braut or Betrothed, as the symbol of the soul faithfully awaiting its lover, the Savior, transcended the distinction of masculine and feminine. By choosing to represent their friendship through two female figures, Overbeck and Pforr may well therefore have intended to emphasize its spiritual and religious aspect rather than the martial and political character that friendship often had in Germany at the time of the national struggle for freedom and national unity. Correspondingly, their idea of national unity is likely to have been different both from that of republicans, whose models were the heroic citizens of antiquity, and from that of a new breed of nationalists inspired by the Prussian education reformer, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, whose popular gymnastics clubs for young German men of all classes were meant to serve simultaneously as a training ground in the patriotic struggle against the French and as the model of a post-liberation social and political order free from outmoded ancien régime distinctions and territorial divisions. In contrast to the disciplined, muscular, male body celebrated at Jahn's Turnfeste or Gymnastics Festivals, the first of which was held in Berlin in 1811, Pforr's and Overbeck's female figures and the somewhat androgynous male figure of Overbeck's portrait of Pforr suggest a less regimented, more spiritual and religious idea of unity and fraternity.

141. In the Freundschaftsbild, a form specially favored by the Nazarenes and executed by them with great delicacy and charm, the head only is represented; multiple figures are most often arranged in parallel, indicating independence, almost never with arms around each other. On this, see Lankheit 1952; also Die Nazarener 1977, pp. 169, 174.

142. On mariological interpretations of the Song of Solomon, see Fulton 2002, chap. 6; and Max Engammare, Qu'il me baise des baisers de sa bouche: Le Cantique des Cantiques à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1993), pp. 26–66. Curiously, the name Sulamith was chosen as the title of the first important Jewish periodical in Germany. As the subtitle spelled out, the aim of the periodical, which began publication with the Leipzig firm of A.L. Reinicke in 1806 and survived until around the time of the 1848 revolutions, was "Beförderung der Cultur und Humanität der jüdischen Nation"—i.e., in the spirit of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, raising the cultural level of the Jews, developing their Humanität, and thus reconciling Christians and Jews in an enlightened German society, without requiring that the Jews cease to be Jews. Most of Moses Mendelssohn's children and grandchildren, however, sought to achieve an even closer association with German society and culture by taking the further step of converting to Christianity, albeit without losing sight of and pride in their Jewish origins. Several of these individuals (the Veit brothers, Dorothea Schlegel, Jacob Salomon Bartholdy) were well acquainted with the Lukasbrüder and shared their goals. The use of the Shulamite figure by Overbeck and Pforr in association with the figure of Mary may thus reflect in some measure the less strictly Enlightenment conception of the relations of Germans and Jews developed by the romantic generation following Moses Mendelssohn. As the Shulamite was "black," yet "comely," and in Christian thought both the bride of Solomon and the bride of Christ, the converted German Jews were Christian, yet in some measure Jewish at the same time—united with their fellow Christian Germans, yet distinguished by their own past and traditions.

143. Cotter 2001 (review of exhibition of paintings from the National Gallery, Berlin, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Overbeck himself was probably inspired by it when he chose the diptych form for a particularly fine drawing (1814) combining the Annunciation and the Visitation (Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum, Basel), the first panel of which bears the title Ave Maria and the second Benedicta in Mulieribus. Conceivably this drawing was made in preparation for a painting that either was not executed or has disappeared.

144. See the description of Pforr's Self-Portrait by Thea Vignau-Wilberg in Deutsche Romantiker: Bildthemen der Zeit von 1800 bis 1850, exh. cat., Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 1985), p. 30. Compare Robert Rosenblum's commentary on Ingres's Madame Aymon, also known as La Belle Zélie of 1806 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen): "In order to emphasize the flat picture surface, Ingres, much like Picasso, seems to see the same object from multiple viewpoints, although his ostensible adherence to the data of the objective world creates a perhaps even more disturbing image than that of the twentieth-century artist. Thus the chin and the left side of the face are seen frontally, whereas the mouth, the right side of the face, and the part in the hair are seen obliquely…. The nose appears to be seen both frontally and from the side, thus helping to bridge the gap between the two diverse points of view." Similarly, "the eyes appear to have been observed separately," so that the sitter has a slightly wall-eyed look. Rosenblum 1956, pp. 175–76.

145. Muther 1907, vol. 1, pp. 133.

146. See the comment on Overbeck's Familienbildnis (1820–22; Museen für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Lübeck) in Blühm and Gerkens eds. 1989, p. 132: "Vater, Mutter und Kind sind eng verbunden und als Einheit verstanden. Dennoch ist jede Person durch eine dominante Farbe des Gewandes deutlich unterschieden und jeder ist ein eigener Bereich zugewiesen…Ihre Blicke streben zwar in verschiedene Richtung aber durch die Körperhaltungen sind sie wieder aufeinander bezogen." A similar, more detailed comment on this work in Jens Christian Jensen, Malerei der Romantik in Deutschland (Cologne: DuMont, 1985), p. 100, and on the drawing entitled "Jakob wirbt um Rahel" (1808; Museen für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Lübeck) in Die Nazarener 1977, p. 200.

147. Michel Le Bris (1981) made this same point with reference to Pforr's Entry of Rudolf of Habsburg. In "the sharpness of the contours, the vivacity of the colours, laid on in flat tints almost without nuances within clearly divided surfaces" and "the composition of the scene itself, splintered into a multitude of animated groups, each independent of the others and drawn with extreme preciseness of detail, yet without detracting from the overall unity," Le Bris (1981, p. 96) saw the striking originality of Pforr's work and "a deliberate provocation aimed at the painting of the period." In contrast, according to Heinrich Wölfflin in his Berlin lectures of 1911, what characterized French Romantic painting, notably Delacroix, was precisely the opposite: Delacroix admired Rembrandt as the greatest of all painters, "because in his work everything is dominated by a grandiose unity of the parts…. Everything is grasped in a single visual perception and experienced in a single emotion. No one part of the picture can be isolated from the whole. The massing of the paint provides the ground on which battle is joined with the classicistic principle of the unity of the many." The same point—essentially that romanticism and the baroque share a significant commitment to the dominance of the whole over the part—is restated in Wölfflin's comments on The Massacre at Chios: "Clarity of outline had hitherto ensured the clarity of the painting; now it is not so easy to release figures from the mass. An unmistakable principle is at work here: namely, that the artist is not obligated to provide a clear articulation of bodies. Truth lies in the appearance of the whole as such, not in the elaboration of each individual part. Everything has to be seen together, as a single whole, not as groups of particular parts, not as a mosaic of particular parts." Wölfflin 1993, pp. 66–67.

148. Scheffler 1909, p. 17.

149. "Report on the Paintings in Paris and the Netherlands in the Years 1802–1804" in The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Friedrich von Schlegel, trans., E.J. Millington (London: Herny G. Bohn, 1849), p. 6. To Schlegel's younger contemporary, the Hegelian art historian Carl Schnaase, the same combination of autonomy and association was the supreme characteristic of Greek art and culture: "Darin eben lag der Keim ihrer Grösse, dass…jedes Einzelne sich rein und gesondert darstellte, alle diese Gestaltungen aber in naher Berührung blieben." Carl Schnaase, Geschichte der bildenden Künste, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Düsseldorf: Julius Buddeus, 1866), vol. 2, p. 104.