‘The Death of the Chavalier Bayard’, painted by Benjamin
West in 1772, illustrates what, for many people, constitutes a history
painting. It commemorates an event in history such as, here, the death of a
famous person or a battle. Another American painter, but this time working in
England, was John Singleton Copley. His painting, ‘The Death of Major Peirson’,
of 1783, extends the definition to include the painting of a contemporary event
of historical significance. This is perhaps a slight misconception of history
painting, but one that forms a significant volume of painting normally dealt
with under the title of history.
Turner’s work throughout his lifetime showed an interest in
dramatic, sometimes catastrophic, historical events. ‘The Decline of the
Carthiginian Empire’ of 1817, though poorly received by the critics, and even
by Ruskin, nevertheless serves to show that subject matter need not necessarily
be taken from recent history. A lot of Turner’s architectural studies tended
towards the medieval and Gothic rather than the contemporary as there was a
general cultural appetite for historical style. Architecture in England had,
for some time, plundered historical styles; one of the most celebrated examples
was Horace Walpole’s ‘Strawberry Hill’, of 1748, which he built with the help
of Bentley and Chute.
In France, at the end of the eighteenth century, David was
championing the new style of neo-classicism. The French Revolution had given a
fresh impulse to the painting of heroic subjects. The French Revolutionaries,
of which David was an official artist, aspired to the idea of Roman grandeur.
David’s ‘The Dead Marat’ of 1793 combines this classical ideal with an austere
humanity. The neo-classicists felt that they were replacing the Rococo falsity
and light-heartedness with classical truth and moral fervour. Ingres’ ‘Romulus
victorious over Acron’, painted in 1812, displays something of this love of the
classical. David’s ‘The Dead Marat’ however was a subject from contemporary
history imbued with classical heroism and human feeling; some of the same human
pathos can be seen in Delacroix’s painting in 1824 of a recent atrocity in the
Greek Wars of Independence, called ‘The Massacre of Chios’.
In Germany the arts were influenced by similar sentiments
about the past. The Grimm brothers were collecting old fairy tales. The poet
Novalis, in 1999, in his ‘Die Christenheit oder Europa’ looked back to medieval
times and wrote: “These were beautiful and glittering times when Europe was a
Christian country…With what serenity did the people emerge from these beautiful
assemblies in the mysterious churches, decorated with edifying pictures.”
This was at a time when Ferdinand Wallraf, in Cologne, and
the brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée began their collections of early
German and Netherlandish paintings which now form the bases of the galleries at
Cologne and Munich respectively. The Boisserée brothers, who had sponsored
the completion of Cologne cathedral, exhibited their collection publicly at
Heidelberg in 1810. Their friend Goethe had published his ‘Von deutscher baukunst’
earlier in 1772 with its emotional praise of Strasbourg’s medieval cathedral
increasing the interest in aesthetic history.
This kind of revelation of the past is probably closer to
the spirit of historical atmosphere in painting. In that sense
‘Strawberry Hill’ may be more relevant than much of the painting of the period;
in that this building is obviously devoid of historical events but, rather,
utilises an historical style and sentiment to create an historical atmosphere.
Some of the paintings already mentioned utilise historical style and sentiment
but, to clarify the subject, it may be helpful to study a group of German
painters who take Old Testament stories and classical Italian poetry for much
of their subject matter.
The anonymously published ‘Herzensergiessungen eines
kunstliebenden klosterbruders’ of 1797 was one of the more direct influences
upon the new German painters of this time. It demanded a reappraisal of early
masters and the establishment of a specifically Christian art. He cited Dürer
and Raphael as examples to follow. In fact the author was not a ‘klosterbruder’
but Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, an art lover and intellectual who was
familiar with the latest compositions of Haydn and Mozart rather than living
the sheltered life of a monastery.
Friedrich Johann Overbeck and Franz Pforr had already
formulated their opinions in revolt to the accepted academic traditions, but
the impact of ‘Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden klosterbruders’ in its
attack on rationalistic art criticism confirmed their preference of ‘Kunstgefühl’, as
opposed to the ‘Kunstverstand’ of Winckelmann and Mengs’ classicism. In fact
Goethe became associated with Weimar classicism but the breadth of his interests
and influence led some people to believe that he had written ‘Herzensergiessungen
eines kunstliebenden klosterbruders’. Goethe must have been perplexed to
receive a letter from Bury in 1798 saying, “I am to give you all thanks in the
name of many artists for your ‘Klosterbruder’…How singular you are in your
judgements on art, where is there another man who combines so many conceptions
like you?”
The artists to give thanks, such as Pforr, showed their
interest in historical and medieval themes in works like ‘Emperor Henry II’s
Dream’ of 1808. Overbeck’s portrait of Pforr in 1810 shows him in a Gothic
interior with a Gothic background.
With other art students of the Vienna circle, Ludwig Vogel,
Johann Konrad Hottinger, Joseph Wintergerst and Joseph Sutter, Overbeck and
Pforr founded the Order or Brotherhood of St. Luke. It was on the anniversary
of their first meeting, 10th July 1809, that they solemnly vowed to
form a group to revitalise the enfeebled art of painting. They chose the name
of St Luke the evangelist because, according to legend, he had been a painter,
and had also been the patron saint of the medieval artists’ guilds.
Encouraged by Eberhard Wӓchter and by the examples of
older German painters like Schick and Tischbein, the brotherhood decided to
settle in Rome. The brotherhood did not think of Rome in terms of classical
antiquities but as the central holy city of Christendom with its churches and
devotional images. They lived out their idealised notion of the artist monk, in
the manner of Fra Angelico, by operating from the monastery of S. Isidoro, an
Irish Franciscan church and college founded in the sixteenth century. Regular visits to the Vatican lead them to
revere frescoes, such as the work of Raphael and Pinturicchio.
Pforr had taken his ‘Entry of Rudolf of Hapsburg into Basle’
with him, which was then in progress during 1808 to 1810. Pforr had said that “My
inclination tends towards the Middle Ages, when the dignity of man was still
fully apparent. It showed itself clearly and distinctly on the battlefield as
well as in the council chamber, on the market place as well as in the family
circle. The spirit of these times is so beautiful and so little used by
artists.” The ‘Entry of Rudolf’ shows this reverence of the medieval, as well
as using the spirit of early German woodcuts. The depictions of tournaments and
processions of Sebastian Munster’s Cosmography, some of the woodcuts from ‘Der
Weisskunig’, Ambrosius Holbein’s decorations for title pages, and particularly
Dürer’s
‘Maximillian meeting Henry VIII’ have something of the same hard, divisive
outlines and heraldic design. The costumes in the ‘Entry of Rudolf’ are those
of the sixteenth century, confirming the inspiration as well as showing the
preference for historical atmosphere rather than historical truth. Passavant
had sent Pforr, on request, a sketch of what he thought Basle would have looked
like at the time of Emperor Rudolf. Pforr decided not to use it because it did
not fit in with his romantic idea of a medieval town. Having said that though,
the ‘Entry of Rudolf’ is much more realistic than his early sketches of knights
and damsels set against vaguely Gothic backgrounds.
Pforr’s next major work, ‘Sulamith and Maria’, an allegory
of friendship, was conceived in the manner of a medieval domestic altarpiece.
The diptych shows Sulamith as an idealised noble lady in an Italianate landscape
suffused with Mediterranean light; while Maria is shown more in the northern
fashion and indoors. Overbeck also did a version of ‘Sulamith and Maria’ and
called it ‘Italia and Germania’; despite its title and the fact that it depends
heavily upon Pforr’s preliminary sketches, the artistic synthesis of northern
and southern art of the past is less obvious in this picture.
‘Sulamith and Maria’ was Pforr’s last major work. In July
1812 he died of consumption, aged twenty four. The brotherhood left the
monastery. Ceasing to be te ‘Fratelli de S. Isidoro’, they became known as the ‘Düreristen’
to distinguish their adherence to early German art from that of the
‘Carracisti’ who worked in the academic tradition. But their religious ideals
and lifestyle, plus their wide cloaks and long hair, gave rise to the popular
nickname of ‘Nazerenes’ and looked back to Old Testament times more than early
German art. There were also several changes of membership at this time:
Hottinger had already left and Giovanni Columbo, Rudolf and Wilhelm Schadow,
Johann and Philip Veit, and Peter Cornelius joined.
Peter Cornelius looked upon Italy as displaying “primaeval
splendour, the era of Gods and Heroes.” Cornelius was the son of the
superintendent of the Düsseldorf Gallery and it is said that Peter Cornelius’ mother
“carried the shrieking unruly child, even in the middle of night, into the room
with the antique statues where the old Gods then showed their soothing powers.”
Certainly it is true that his upbringing gave him a reverence for the past.
Neither was his interest confined to classical and Italian art. He produced
illustrations for Goethe’s ‘Faust’ and ‘Gӧtz von Berlinchingen’ based on Dürer’s
marginal drawings for the Emperor Maximillian’s prayer book. The influence of Dürer’s
drawings and engravings can also be seen as a device to increase historical
atmosphere in Cornelius’ illustrations for ‘Die Nibelungen’ in 1817. On the other
hand his painting ‘The Wise and Foolish Virgins’ might be said to be more
influenced by Italian classical tradition and is vaguely Raphaelesque.
It was Cornelius’ idea for the Nazarenes to revive the art
of fresco painting. “At last I came to what according to my innermost
conviction would, I feel, be the most powerful, I would say the infallible,
means of giving German art a new direction compatible with the great era of the
nation and with its spirit: this would be nothing less that the revival of
Fresco-Painting as it was practised from the great Giotto to the divine Raphael.”
In 1815 Jacob Solomon Bartholdy, the Prussian Consul General in Rome, had the
idea of having some rooms of the Palazzo Zuccari decorated to use for social
occasions. (Bartholdy was the uncle of the composer Mendelssohn, who took his
second name from him, and was thus distantly related to Friedrich Schlegel’s
wife Dorothea.) He chose to commission the Nazarenes who decided to depict the
Old Testament story of Joseph in Egypt.
The frescoes were completed in 1817, ‘Joseph and Potiphar’s
wife’ being the first fresco to be done. Philip Veit, in this work, sets the
figures against Italian architecture and landscape. Showing glimpses of the
landscape through an architectural framework is a particularly Renaissance perspective
device; this includes to a lesser extent the northern Renaissance, such as Jan van
Eyck’s ‘Madonna of Chancellor Rolin’ but their inspiration is more likely to
have come from things seen in the south. However Ulrich Finke relates ‘Joseph
and Potiphar’s wife’, along with Veit’s other work in the Casa Bartholdy called
‘Seven Rich Years’ to the Gothic style.
Overbeck’s ‘Joseph being sold by his brothers’ was uses
Raphaelesque formulas, postures and groupings and is set against an Italianate
landscape; but the sentiment and human feeling with which he has imbued the
figure of Joseph and the faces of the onlookers is largely Overbeck’s own
creation. His ‘Seven Lean Years’ contains a mother figure with the same
muscularity and severity as Michaelangelo’s sibyl next to the ‘Ancestors of
Christ’ on the Sistine ceiling and is also pervaded by the same melancholy as
some of the figures in that building.
Wilhelm Schadow’s work, especially ‘The Blood-stained
Cloak’, has a theatricality reminiscent of the Baroque. But it lacks Baroque
and rococo gaiety which, say, the ‘Seven rich years’ might be said to have. Peter
Cornelius’ ‘The Interpretation of the dreams of Joseph’ and Luca Signorelli’s
fifteenth century altarpiece, ‘The Circumcision’, share a similar focussing of
figures upon a throne and the presence of floor patterning. But the connection
may be slight, the floor patterning of Signorelli might be better compared with
‘Joseph Recognised’ by Cornelius. The similarity is again one of feeling,
rather than there being a case of wanton plagiarism. As such, the frescoes give
an overall impression of similarity to those of Raphael. The Nazarenes came
into contact with, and greatly praised, Raphael’s frescoes at the Villa
Farnesina and particularly in the Vatican. The frescoes in the Vatican had recently been
reopened to the public after the Pope’s return from France. The vividness and
striking purity of colour in the Casa Bartholdy frescoes must be Italian in
inspiration: both from Renaissance frescoes and in their common source – the
light and landscape of Italian scenery.
At this time Johann Scheffer von Leonhardschoff, Carl
Phillip Fohr, Franz Horny and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld joined the
Nazarenes. The Casa Bartholdy frescoes brought a wave of admiration and
recruits, as well of course, as criticism and enemies. Goethe’s attitude was
ambivalent, but in the main he condemned the Nazarenes as ‘klosterbrudisierende,
sternbaldisierende Unwesen’. The Nazarenes were in good company, composers like
Beethoven and Schubert also earned the epithet of ‘nonsense’ from Goethe. Yet
on the positive side, albeit slightly sarcastic in tone, Goethe stated, when
handed drawings by Cornelius and Overbeck, that “this is the first time in the
history of art that important talents have formed themselves backwards, by
returning into the mother’s womb and thus founding a new artistic epoch.”
Inevitably an overstatement but it encapsulates the approach of the Nazarenes
more precisely than anything written by their championing critic Schlegel.
Another product of the success in the Casa Bartholdy was the
encouragement of the Marchese Carlo Massimo to commission the Nazarenes in 1817
to paint the walls of his garden house. The themes were to be from Dante, Tasso
and Ariosto. The idea for a room based on Petrarch was dropped. Cornelius chose
Franz Horny to collaborate with him on the Dante room. According to Keith
Andrews, “Dante’s Divina Commedia had been rediscovered, particularly in
Germany, as part of the medieval Renaissance and had been reinterpreted as a
cornerstone of the Romantic edifice.” Cornelius embarked on a design for the
Dante ceiling, which shows a complex linearity reminiscent of his work for
‘Faust’, ‘Gӧtz
von Berlichingen’ and ‘Nibelungen’ though this is partly an illusion created by
its unfinished state.
He left the Casino Massimo project in order to decorate the
Glyptothek in Munich. Ludwig, who had visited and stayed with the Nazarenes in
Rome, had become King and ordered buildings to be built in the style of Greek
temples, Byzantine and Romanesque churches, and Gothic houses, as they were
thought to represent the moral superiority of past civilisations. Old
techniques like mosaic and the encaustic method of wall painting were revivied.
The Glyptothek, which Cornelius had been called away to decorate, was to house
Ludwig’s collection of antique sculpture.
Meanwhile Philip Veit undertook the ceiling of the Dante
room. Veit, spurred on by his stepfather, Schlegel, succeeded, however, only in
producing a stiffer and less ambitious design in the manner of Fra Angelico.
Plagued with doubts about his ability, Veit then, too, abdicated from the
project. Finally Joseph Anton Koch was persuaded to finish the room. Although
primarily a landscape painter, he knew the Dante poems well and had designed a
‘Dante and three beasts’ as early as 1805 or 1806. The finished article, ‘Dante
asleep, threatened by wild beasts and rescued by Virgil’ was a variation on the
same design. His ‘Inferno’ and ‘Purgatory’ took on a distinctly medieval
northern style when one compares them with his landscapes, which are almost
invariably in the classical mould; for example his ‘Heroic Landscape with
Rainbow’.
In the room at the opposite end of the garden house Overbeck
was to illustrate Tasso’s ‘Gerusalemne Liberata’. He chose the historical
events of the beginning and end of the crusade for the two end walls. ‘The
Preparation for the Siege of Jerusalem’, in particular, has an authentic feel
and necessitates a knowledge of construction of mobile siege towers. But the window
wall, inner wall and four ceiling panels show idealised fantasies; for example
the allegorical figure of Jerusalem, modelled by his wife, which is conceived
within a Gothic framework. One of the surrounding panels even has knights
fighting a medieval dragon in the manner of Pforr’s early ‘St. George’
sketches. The picture of ‘The archangel Gabriel ordering Godfrey de Bouillon’
also carries idealised figures and landscape, like that of the ceiling. It is
an idealisation which has an honourable historical heritage, the most directly
applicable example must be the then recently restored Pinturicchio frescoes in
the Vatican. Though these frescoes lack the vivid, sometimes strident, Arcadian
clarity of Overbeck’s landscapes. When the Marchese Carlo Massimo died early in
1827, Overbeck felt released from his contract and Joseph von Führich had
to complete the frescoes. His ‘Rinaldo and Armida on the Battlefield’ was a
completion of Overbeck’s design, but his ‘Rinaldo’s Disenchantment of the Magic
Forest’ and ‘The Crusaders at the Holy Sepulchre’ add little except a slightly
more theatrical approach and a limited use of historical architecture in the
latter piece. The preparatory drawings of Führich, however, show painstaking
planning and include some excellent portrait drawings of the new Principe
Massimo and his family.
The middle and largest room, to illustrate scenes form Ariosto’s
‘Orlando Furioso’, was finally assigned to Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.
Schnorr had not originally intended to stay log in Rome. He looked forward to
the day “when we shall have established a German ‘Rome’ in our own
country.” Yet he acknowledged that the German artists were never felt more
German than when they were in Rome. Schnorr was the only Nazarene to remain Protestant.
According to Finke: “Overbeck had executed his frescoes in the early German
style. Cornelius had achieved in his a synthesis of late Gothic and Italian
Renaissance, but Schnorr was the only one to succeed in reformulating in a
personal and convincing manner the formal doctrine of the Renaissance.” The
battle scene on the ceiling, for example, combines foreshortened figures with
echoes from Uccello to Raphael and Tintoretto. But the arrangement of the
panels on the ceiling gives an illusionistic sense of depth in the Baroque
manner. Both in the ceiling, and in ‘The Army of Charlemagne in Paris’, battle
costume, shields and flags increase the historical atmosphere. In ‘The Army of
Charlemagne in Paris’ there is also the architectural element, giving a sense
of historical buildings. A figure of a lady carrying a bundle on her head seems
to be derived from a similar figure carrying a vase in Raphael’s ‘Burning of
the Borgo’. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, when he saw the room, thought of Schnorr’s
frescoes in direct comparison with ‘old pictures’: “The Schnorr frescoes
in the Villa Massimo are by far the finest; the colour, if not finer or more
stylish, is even stronger than in any of the old pictures of the best period as
they appear to us today.” David Scott, a Scottish painter, visiting the rooms
ten years later, concluded that the two rooms “from Tasso and Ariosto, by
Schnorr and Overbeck, are quite a treat – they are perfectly old romance.” The
atmosphere of ‘old romance’ in Schnorr’s room was thought to be the most
effective of the three rooms because it is the only one which has the artistic
unity of a single creator.
The frescoes in the Casino Massimo are traditional in very much
the same way that the frescoes are at the Casa Bartoldy. They are vaguely
Raphaelesque and influences can be seen from other fresco artists, notably
Pinturicchio. But the Nazarenes’ influences run from Medieval to Baroque and
from North to South. This was, in a conscious effort, to revive the art of the
present by using its past. David and the Neo-Classicists were attempting a
similar, and probably more effective, reform in painting at this time. But
there is a fundamental difference between the two. David, as did artists like
West and Copely, took historical events, often contemporary ones of historical
significance. David, especially, revived art by using classical maxims, such as
the removal of any unnecessary background detail and decoration. The historical
content is in the subject only. Few artists, other than the Nazarenes, took
conventional subject matter from religious texts, such as Old Testament
stories, and gave them historical atmosphere in their aesthetic or art
historical style. In ‘history pictures’ there is often a conflation between
historical subject matter and historical atmosphere. The Nazarenes were
indifferent to the former but the latter, “the intermingling of the old forms”
(Herder), was crucial to them. This utilisation (not plagiarism) of aesthetic
history is why Overbeck considered himself a history painter, why Führich ends
his sketch book with a list of ‘history groups’: and how the Nazarenes
attempted to revive “the enfeebled art of painting”, in short, by the use of
historical atmosphere.
Copyright Adrian Annabel 1981
