Nazarene Movement

The Nazarene movement refers to a group of German, Austrian, and Swiss artists in the early nineteenth century who turned to Gothic and early Renaissance art in an effort to infuse their work with emotional impact. The Nazarene movement had its roots in the Art Academy of Vienna, when six students formed the Brotherhood of St. Luke (Lukasbund) in reaction to academic adherence to neoclassicism and technical facility. They became known as the Nazarenes, or men from Nazareth, when four of them moved to Rome, where they occupied an abandoned monastery and adopted biblically inspired appearance and attire. Following the example of late medieval and early Renaissance art, they employed linear outlines, bright colors, and flattened planes. The Nazarenes did not express this philosophy in a manifesto. Their artistic focus and independent spirit, though, set a standard for future artists to pursue their own artistic paths.

Brief History

Neoclassicism dominated the Art Academy of Vienna’s program at the turn of the nineteenth century. Instructors encouraged the study of rational proportions and classicizing sources in the pursuit of images of ideal beauty. These ideas had spread through the German-speaking world via the Enlightenment era writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768). Neoclassicism had become further entrenched in Vienna and other Germanic academies by the end of the eighteenth century through the exhortations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), particularly his neoclassical artistic competitions (1799–1805) and his journal Die Propyläen (1798–1800).

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the more personal and expressive ideas of German romantic writers inspired some artists to pursue different paths. In 1808, several students at the Academy in Vienna began to meet in the rooms of Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869) where they discussed artistic ideas and practiced drawing from life, using each other as models. The following year, six of them—Overbeck, Franz Pforr (1788–1812), Johann Konrad Hottinger (1788–1828), Joseph Sutter (1781–1866), Ludwig Vogel (1788–1879), and Joseph Wintergerst (1783–1867)—became so dissatisfied with the repetitive pattern of academic instruction that they formed the Brotherhood of St. Luke (Lukasbund), a group named after the patron saint of medieval and Renaissance artists. They shared a desire to create emotionally direct Christian paintings by relying on Gothic and early Renaissance models. Franz Pforr spoke specifically of looking to their "noble simplicity and definite character" as opposed to Winckelmann’s praise of classicizing artists "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur." The Lukasbund admired Fra Angelico and Perugino in Italy, for example, and Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach, and other German artists of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. The reliance on the latter also reflected new notions of German identity.

This rising cultural awareness was partly a response to the seemingly unstoppable threat of Napoleon. Writers and artists retreated into nostalgia, focusing on a more simple, noble medieval and early Renaissance past when the Holy Roman Empire under German rule dominated Europe. For the Lukasbund, this came to a head when Napoleon captured Vienna after the Battle of Wagram in 1809. Four of them—Overbeck, his best friend Pforr, Vogel and Hottinger—moved to Rome in response to the changed artistic environment. The antagonistic French regime had first temporarily closed the Academy and then limited admission only to Austrian students when they reopened it in February 1810. The French invaders were also not interested in buying medievalizing works celebrating the past of a culture they had just subjugated.

The four friends arrived in Rome in 1810 and became known as the Nazarenes, or "men from Nazareth," when they occupied the abandoned monastery of Saint Isidoro a Copelcase. They chose to live like monks, working in their cells by day, and sharing communal meals as well as artistic discussion at night. They also wore loose robes and grew their hair to emulate biblical figures. They drew inspiration for this pseudomonastic life from their surroundings and from German romantic writings such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings from the Heart of an Art Loving Monk; 1797). Wackenroder believed masters of the Middle Ages strove to unify art, nature, and religion, and that emulation of them would restore vitality to the Christian artistic tradition.

Impact

The Nazarenes attracted the attention of German artists traveling through Italy. Peter Cornelius (1783–1867) and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794–1872), for instance, visited the monastery and took up the group’s style and ideas. The Nazarenes lived in the monastery of Saint Isidoro only until 1812 when the lease expired. Although some members remained in Rome, others returned home, and the Nazarene movement’s style thereby spread northward. Those who left Italy also began to turn away from religious subjects and instead looked increasingly to local folklore to create works that would appeal to new patrons.

King Ludwig I of Bavaria (r. 1825–1848), for example, supported members of the group as he sought to restore greatness to German art and culture by reviving its medieval roots. As part of this effort, he hired Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld among others to decorate the newly renovated royal palace (the Residenz) in Munich.

The Nazarene’s self-conscious lifestyle and reliance on late medieval and early Renaissance models also influenced artists from other land. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England followed the Nazarenes’ example when they founded their own group devoted to pursuing artistic sincerity by relying on similar artistic models. Although realism had begun to dominate European painting by the middle of the nineteenth century, the Nazarene movement provided an early example of how artists with shared goals could forge a path different from the one dominated by art academies and their annual exhibitions. They thus laid the groundwork for future artists to develop increasingly individual styles.

Bibliography

Andrews, Keith. The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1964. Print.

Frank, Mitchell Benjamin. German Romantic Painting Redefined: Nazarene Tradition and the Narratives of Romanticism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Print.

Gossman, Lionel. "Unwilling Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century." Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture 2.3 (Autumn 2003). Web. 1 June 2015.

McVaugh, Robert E. "Nazarenes." Grove Art Online. Web. 2 June 2015.

Schiff, Gert, and Stephan Waetzoldt. German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1981. Print.

Suhr, Norbert, and Nico Kirchberger. Die Nazarener—vom Tiber an den Rhein: Drei Malerschulen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Regensburg: Schnell, 2012. Print.

Thimann, Michael. Friedrich Overbeck und die Bildkonzepte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Regensburg: Schnell, 2014. Print.

"The Nazarenes." Egidi, 17 Sept. 2021, egidimadeinitaly.com/en/the-nazarenes/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.

Vaughan, William. German Romantic Painting. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Print.