negotiating history: german art and the past || german romanticism: the search for "a quiet...

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German Romanticism: The Search for "A Quiet Place"Author(s): Marsha MortonSource: Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1, Negotiating History: GermanArt and the Past (2002), pp. 8-23+106-107Published by: The Art Institute of ChicagoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4113048 .

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GERMAN ROMANTICISM: THE SEARCH FOR "A QUIET PLACE"

MARSHA MORTON

PRATT INSTITUTE

My youth fell in those times when not only in

Germany, but in the greater part of the civilized

world, the sense for the beautiful, the sublime, and the mysterious seemed to have sunk to sleep or to be dead. A shallow enlightenment, to which the divine appeared as an empty dream, ruled the day; indifference toward religion was called freedom of thought, indifference to country, cosmopolitan- ism.... In the struggle against these predominant views, I sought to win myself a quiet place, where

nature, art, and faith might again be cultivated.

Ludwig Tieck, The Story of William Lovell (1795)1

During the 179os, while the French were

constructing barricades in the streets of

Paris, Germans seemed lost in thought, wan-

dering through medieval villages and down forest paths. Both peoples, however, were

engaged in the business of building nations, a task whose urgency was intensified by the

prospect of a new century. For the Germans this goal resembled an elusive mirage, since

"Germany" was not a single political state, but was fragmented into more than three hundred

separate territories within the sprawling Holy Roman Empire. The desire for political unifi- cation and cultural self-definition increased in

response to Napoleonic invasions and the sub-

sequent Wars of Liberation, which stretched from the mid-I790os until 1814, when Germans were forced to endure the occupation of their

lands and the pillaging of art treasures by victo- rious French troops. The Treaty of Basel, which ceded the left bank of the Rhine to France in

I795, was followed by the dissolution of the

empire and the defeat of Prussia in i8o6; in I8I1 geographic boundaries were redrawn to form

thirty-nine states. With the future tenuous, Ger- mans had good reason to formulate and nurture a sense of self based on shared history, lan-

guage, and customs. Following the advice of the

philosopher and playwright Johann Gottfried

Herder, who viewed culture as a unique expression of native spirit, authors and visual artists

sought to construct a virtual nation through art,

drawing on past traditions that they believed defined their collective nature.2 The result would be Romanticism, a flourishing of innovative art unknown in Germany since the Renaissance

and, like that previous age, characterized by excellence in printmaking.

Young intellectuals and artists uncovered traditions and beliefs rooted in pagan and Chris- tian eras that, as Ludwig Tieck noted in the

epigraph above, defined a heritage rich in mysticism and faith, and diametrically opposed to the Enlightenment, now tainted because of its French associations. That philosophy, which celebrated the virtues of reason and secularism, came to be regarded as the antithesis of Ger- man values. The basic tenets of the Romantic movement were formulated during the 790os in literature that subsequently served as a repos- itory of attitudes and themes for visual artists. Wilhelm Wackenroder's Heartfelt Effusions of an Art-loving Friar (I797) and Tieck's Franz

Sternbald's Travels: An Old German Story (1798), as well as writings by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis (the pen name of Friedrich von

Hardenberg), reversed conventional academic

priorities, such as the supremacy of history

Figure 1

Caspar David Friedrich

(German; 1774-1840).

Woman with Spider's Web between Bare

Trees, 1803 (detail). Woodcut on ivory wove

paper; image 17.1 x

11.9 cm (6 3/4 x 4"•6 in.), sheet 24.4 x 19.3 cm

(95/8 x 75/8 in.). Alfred E.

Hamill Collection

(I955.1033).

9



4*4

f p

4?




Figure 2

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe

(German; 1759-1835)-

Bathing Girl, i8oo.

Etching on ivory wove

paper; plate 26.3 x

33 cm (o103/8 x 13 in.), sheet 26.3 x 33.3 cm

(io3/8 x 13 8 in.). Promised gift of

Dorothy Braude

Edinburg to the

Harry B. and Bessie K.

Braude Memorial

Collection (25.1997)-

painting and the classical world, to estab- lish a new and uniquely German movement. This aesthetic, inspired by the Middle Ages, regarded art as a product of emotion akin to

religious devotion, and valued states of solitude and introspection, together with qualities of mystery, intangibility, and the unattainable.

Knowledge and understanding, the Roman- tics believed, were acquired not from a mastery of facts, but through imagination and revelation, and they chose to convey meaning through symbols, allegories, and hieroglyphs, referents that are indirect and endlessly suggestive. They came to admire landscape not merely as a repro- duction of the material world, but as a genre infused with the highest spiritual content. These artists venerated the Middle Ages, which

they regarded as extending into the early sixteenth century and including the seminal figure of Albrecht Diirer. Diirer, they thought, had been able to retain his German character through a realist style and local subject matter, and at the same time achieve a status

rivaling that of Italian Renaissance masters.

Eighteenth-century Germans belonged to a fractured country whose culture followed French and Italian precedents; the medieval

period offered them a native model of artistic

accomplishment, religious unity, political strength, and heroic deeds.

Despite common literary points of ori-

gin, Romantic art in Germany was diverse in both style and content, the product of inde-

pendent visions that resist easy categoriza- tion. Two general directions, however, can be

distinguished. Many artists concentrated on

landscape, especially those working in Dresden and Berlin, which were centers of Romantic

activity. At the same time, several German

artists, who studied in Vienna and subse-

quently lived in Rome, formed a group that came to be known as the Nazarenes. They shifted their focus from nature mysticism to revealed religion, and, using Diirer and Raphael as sources of inspiration, drew themes from biblical and historical scenes important to both Catholic and Protestant faiths. Despite their considerable differences, Romantic artists

10




shared similar attitudes toward nationalism and religious renewal, and conveyed them

through a symbolic visual language; these commonalities unite Romantic art, informing images as diverse as Caspar David Friedrich's Statue of the Madonna in the Mountains (fig. 5) and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld's Hagen Carrying Siegfried's Body from the Forest

(fig. 9).

The term "Romanticism," which origi- nated in the seventeenth century, was used with

increasing frequency during the eighteenth. Then, it was often employed to describe natural vistas, especially those that evoked distance from everyday reality, and whose scenery was

wild, fantastic, and luxuriant or, alternatively, mysterious, gloomy, solitary, and stamped with the remains of past cultures. A seismic

shift, however, occurred at the end of the

eighteenth century, when the critic and writer Friedrich Schlegel published a definition of

romantic poetry in his journal the Athendium, an event that is now seen to mark the inception of the German Romantic movement. In opposition to the codified strictures of Neoclassi-

cism, Schlegel proclaimed the "romantic genre" to be in a state of "eternally becoming." "It can be exhausted by no theory...it alone is

infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recog- nizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself."3

Romanticism's new meanings can be

glimpsed pictorially in two prints-Bathing Girl(fig. 2), an etching by Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, and Caspar David Friedrich's woodcut Woman with Spider's Web between Bare Trees (fig. i). While each artist portrayed a female figure amidst profuse vegetation, subtle differences reflect generational changes that distinguish the Romantic Friedrich from Kolbe, who influenced him. Bathing Girl displays the

stylistic fusion of classicism and scientific naturalism that dominated landscape art in

Figures 3-4

Philipp Otto Runge (German; I777-I8IO). Morning and Night, from the Times of the

Day, i803-18o5. Etching and engraving on cream wove paper;

plate 69.2 x 46.2 cm

(27 4 x i8/4 in.), sheet

76.2 x 58 cm (30o

x

227/ in.). Clarence

Buckingham Collec-

tion (i989.27).

11




Figure 5

Caspar David

Friedrich. Statue of the Madonna in the Mountains, 1804.

Brush and black

ink and gray wash with

graphite on cream

wove paper; 24.5 x

38.5 cm (95/8 x 15v8 in.). Margaret Day Blake

Fund (1976.22).

the later eighteenth century. Here, the artist rendered giant burdocks, reeds, and oak trees with a botanical precision that lends a magical, primal quality to the classical idyll. The nude bather, based on the Capitoline Venus, a Roman copy of an original Greek statue

(300-200 B.c.; Rome, Musei Capitolini), nes- tles comfortably within the rich foliage in a harmonious relationship that brings to mind a lost Eden, a Greek arcadia, or the recently explored paradise of Tahiti.'

Friedrich's Woman with Spider's Web presents similar images in innovative ways, exem-

plifying the transformations that signaled the dawn of Romanticism. In his arrangement of

space, for example, the artist juxtaposed near- ness and distance as metaphors for moments of confrontation with the divine. Isolating individual objects such as the tree, spider web, and

thistles, Friedrich gave them a heightened clar-

ity that destabilizes the familiar and suggests a hidden, sacred significance within organic

form. The viewer's own interpretive dilemma- that of deciding upon a single correct mean-

ing-is echoed in the tension of the woman

herself, who gazes upward, her head aligned with the illuminated evening sky. Unlike Kolbe's

figure, this woman's pose and gesture convey a searching awareness that evokes absence and

suspended resolution; thoughts of mortality surround her in the setting of barren trees, thistles, caught fly, and sinking sun. Friedrich

depicted in this work, for one of the first times in his career, what art historians Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner called "the drama of the self

facing the universe."5 For Friedrich and his fellow Roman-

tics, nature was, as the philosopher Friedrich

Schelling remarked, "visible spirit."6 Schelling described art as the miracle "by which the finite should be elevated to the infinite," and it is in this sense that both Friedrich's art and Novalis's definition of Romanticism should be under- stood. Novalis proclaimed:

12




The world must be romanticized. That way one finds again the original meaning. Romanticizing is

nothing but a qualitative potentializing... .When I confer upon the commonplace a higher meaning, upon the ordinary an enigmatic appearance, upon the known the nobility of the unknown...I roman- ticize it. The operation is reversed for the higher, unknown, mystical, infinite.'

Such notions of "spirit-matter" dualism are in the tradition of Neoplatonic thought, in which all existence is believed to have derived from a

single source with which individual souls can be

mystically reunited. However, these ideas also drew upon a specific national legacy of nature

mysticism inherited from the Renaissance phy- sician Paracelsus and the seventeenth-century visionary Jakob B6hme, whom Georg Wilhelm

Hegel described as "the first German philosopher."8 B6hme, a self-educated shoemaker who defied religious authorities to publish his

visions, regarded nature as the Book of God written in the language of "signatures," and saw "the entire visible world with all its beings ... [as] a sign or figure of the inner, spiritual realm."9 BOhme's revelations of a sacralized nature were embraced by the Pietist move-

ment, which arose in the late seventeenth cen-

tury and sought to return the Reformation to its founding principles. Religion, Pietists imag- ined, might be practiced not through the obser- vance of institutionalized ritual, but through private, emotional, introspective devotion.

Worldly luxuries were spurned and charitable

"good works" encouraged." Pietism, which enjoyed a rebirth in the late

eighteenth century in response to the secular-

ism of the Enlightenment, infused nearly every aspect of Romanticism, from Friedrich's austere studio space to the monastic seclusion of the Nazarene painters in Rome. Both Friedrich and his contemporary Philipp Otto Runge were introduced to Pietist beliefs as young men

by their friend and mentor, the poet-pastor Gotthard Ludwig Kosegarten. Famous for his "shore sermons" delivered to local fisher- men on the beaches of the island of Rfigen, Kosegarten used natural settings to illustrate

theological principles. The mood of Woman with Spider's Web has been frequently com-

pared to Kosegarten's book of poetry, Melan- cholien (I777), and the figure's attitude reflects the Pietist moment of meditation which, for

Friedrich, became essential to the creative act. Of his creative process, the artist wrote: "I must remain alone and know that I am alone, in order to see and feel nature fully.""

Runge, like Friedrich, believed that reli-

gious expression was the foundation for art

Figure 6

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

(German; 178i-184i). Gothic Church behind a

Tree, i8io. Lithograph with white heightening on brown wove

paper; image 48.4 x

34.2 cm (i9 x 13 Y2 in.), sheet 52.7 x 38.2

(203/4 X 15 in.). Harold

Joachim Endowment

(1997.422).

13




Figure 7

Friedrich Overbeck

(German; 1789-1869). Monk Praying, 1826.

Etching on chine collk, laid down on ivory laid paper; plate ii.6 x

7.7 cm (45/8 x 3 in.), sheet 14.1 x 10.1 cm

(5/2 x 4 in.). Promised

gift of Dorothy Braude Edinburg to

the Harry B. and

Bessie K. Braude

Memorial Collection

(76.1995)-

whose purpose was to elevate spiritual aware-

ness. Through his friendship with Tieck, whose book Franz Sternbald's Travels he had admired,

Runge acquired an appreciation for the work of Diirer and B6hme. The latter's writings reinforced Kosegarten's lessons, helping to

inspire both the ideology and symbolic lan-

guage of Runge's most ambitious undertaking, the four Times of Day (see figs. 3-4). Begun in

late 1802 as studies for decorations in a music

room, these works soon evolved into sets of

drawings, engravings, and paintings.12 Runge's early death in i8io precluded the comple- tion of the project, which he envisioned as a

sequence of murals installed in a Gothic build-

ing and viewed with choral accompaniment. Thematically, the artist's goal was noth-

ing less than an allegorical depiction of the

cosmos and "our kinship with the whole uni-

verse.""13 For Runge, who documented his

thoughts extensively in letters, cosmic unity resulted from the divine presence, or "living force," which was immanent in all creation, "and of which our living soul is the image."14 Not since the Garden of Eden, Runge imag- ined, had mankind existed completely as "God's

likeness," and he believed that art's purpose was to facilitate a reconnection with the divine

spirit--manifested as love-within." Runge compared this state of grace to childhood or the

"childlike" in each person, "the ancient longing for childhood, for ourselves, for paradise, for God."'6

Runge, like B6hme, regarded nature as the gateway to spiritual knowledge. Both

men, along with Tieck and Novalis, believed that plants and flowers not only represented the cyclical process of growth and decay, but spoke an original "nature language" and

embodied, together with children, a state of innocence retained from paradise. B6hme compared angels in paradise to "little children who walk in the fields of May among the flow-

ers.""17 Through a kind of empathetic bonding with flowers, it was thought, people could

recognize their better selves; "in flowers," maintained Runge, "our heart still feels the love and unity of all contradictions in this

world; to contemplate a flower rightly, to enter into its depth . . . we come to under- stand ourselves ever more.""18 Runge had himself undergone a visionary experience--similar to that of his hero, Tieck's fictional Franz Sternbald-that helped inspire the Times

of Day. Runge described to his brother the moment when "the earth comes to life and

stirs beneath me, and everything harmonizes in one great chord: then my soul rejoices and soars in the immeasurable space around me. There is no high or low, no time, no begin- ning or end."19

14




Through the Times of Day Runge hoped to induce in viewers a similar state of mystical oneness, providing them with children and flowers as spiritual guides. He depicted cosmic connections associatively by referring to the times of day, the seasons, the ages of man, the

merger of heaven and earth, and, in the borders, to the life of Christ and humanity's search for

redemption. In Morning (fig. 3), for example, the lily of light, accompanied by child musi-

cians, rises above the darkened, mist-shrouded

globe of earth toward Venus, the morning star.

Roses, symbolizing both physical love and the color of dawn, are scattered below. In the lower

frame, reversed torches, signifying B6hme's

"primal fires," the originating state of all mat-

ter, are encircled by a serpent biting his tail, the

Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for eternity. While male and female souls are born out of the smoke of the spark of life, children ascend and

pay homage to the glory of God, who is represented by Hebrew letters spelling "Jehovah."

The repetitive patterns of these designs rise and fall like percussive accompaniment to solar and lunar rhythms, and it is no wonder that the analytical Johann Wilhelm von Goethe found himself "well-nigh giddy" with this

"labyrinth of obscure associations."20 Runge rooted his cosmology in the beliefs and symbols of ancient mystical, alchemical, and

astrological wisdom. These same arcane traditions informed, in part, his visual language of hieroglyphs, arabesques, and emblems. Such images, whose flat outlines and associa- tive meanings rejected the academic illusion- ism and narrative methods of Neoclassicism, were viewed as pictorial correspondents to

the "primitive" and "original" time period of

paradise. The Romantics treasured the con-

cept of the hieroglyph, comparing it to the sacred languages of nature and art, which they believed to be capable of fusing the "spiritual and supersensual."21

Hieroglyphs, as vestiges of an ancient

world, symbolized for the Romantics a secret

knowledge that was impenetrable to modern-

day, educated people except during states when the faculties of imagination and intu- ition dominated reason, as in childhood and

during dreams. The Romantic celebration of

night as the time of poetic revelation occurs

throughout the literature of Novalis, Tieck, and Wackenroder, in which dreams provide access to a "mythical primeval age" contain-

ing wisdom indecipherable to the waking mind.22 In Night (fig. 4), Runge evoked the

fantastic, visionary quality of dreams through his depiction of a magical garden-paradise where children slumber peacefully, at home in a world from which adults are estranged. Small genii, seated above on poppy stems, resemble infant high priests, and sign cryptic gestures whose meanings remain as enigmatic as the hieroglyph. Romantics admired the same quality of enchantment in fairy tales,

Figure 8

Friedrich Overbeck.

Old Man Praying, c. 1812. Graphite on

ivory wove paper;

30 x 20.5 cm (113/4 x

8 Y8 in.). Harold

Joachim Purchase

Fund (1968.462).

15




which many of them, including Runge and

Friedrich, authored. In their form, Runge's designs for the Times

of Day reflect medieval manuscript illumi- nations and the legacy of the decorative ara-

besque in Raphael's murals and Diirer's mar-

ginal drawings for the Prayerbook of Emperor Maximilian, which became a Romantic icon when reproduced as lithographs in i8o8 by Johann Nepomuk Strixner.23 The composi- tional centrality and hierarchy of the Times of Day also recall emblems and altarpieces by medieval artists, for whom mathematics and

geometry signified divine order. For Runge, "strong regularity" was "the hallmark of those works that spring directly from our imagina- tions and the mysticism of our souls."24 These

retrospective stylistic mannerisms can be com-

pared to the symmetry in Friedrich's work and to the archaisms of Nazarene figural drawing (see fig. ii).

Like the Times of Day, Friedrich's seminal ink drawing Statue of the Madonna in the Mountains (fig. 5) pictures the conflation of the earthly and heavenly. In this work, how-

ever, unlike Runge's prints and his own earlier efforts (see fig. i), Friedrich jettisoned individual allegorical objects in favor of a land-

scape view in which nature itself has become a

"hieroglyph" whose transcendental meaning he conveyed through the dramatic juxtaposi- tions of spatial setting (near and far) and illu- mination (dark to light). Friedrich echoed the traditional religious symbol of the Madonna, whose statue was placed in roadside shrines

throughout the regions around Dresden, in the pine trees that parallel its vertical posture. Although the artist had previously depicted craggy vistas, he adopted here, for the first

time, the viewpoint of a cropped mountain

range spread out against a distant sky in front of which the viewer is suspended, "detached and poised over emptiness."25 The twilight

moment seems genuinely iiberirdisch (supra- terrestrial); like Runge's depictions of chil-

dren, it is pervaded by a stillness whose mystery is accentuated through the distant haze. In this drawing, Friedrich, like the contemporary philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher,

equated religious experience with a feeling for the sublime. Wackenroder expressed this notion in his Heartfelt Effusions of an

Art-loving Friar: "infinite nature draws us

up through the wide spaces of air directly to God."26

In the wake of major defeats to the French at Jena (i8o6) and Wagram (I809), German artists began to express more overtly national- ist themes, and philosophers and theologians gauged religious conviction by patriotic com- mitment. Schleiermacher proclaimed, for

example, that "to be a nation, to have one feel-

ing for one cause, to come together with the

bloody sword of revenge, is the religion of our times."27 It was in this supercharged political atmosphere that the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel created and exhibited the

lithograph Gothic Church behind a Tree (fig. 6), which depicts a congregation ascending the

steps of a cathedral under the sheltering protec- tion of a massive oak. The patriotic significance of both the Gothic style and the oak tree was established in the eighteenth century, when

they came to represent the German people's special affinity with nature, and a national character that evinced strength and spirituality.28

The Gothic also had long been viewed as the architectural style that most resembled

organic, arboreal forms; in this lithograph, the fusion of foliage and cathedral is complete, extending even to a visual correspondence between the roses and the rose tracery win- dow. Conversely, the German forest itself was

regarded as a natural cathedral or "holy tem-

ple," as Tieck described it in a passage from Franz Sternbald's Travels that may have served

16




as a source of inspiration for Schinkel's print.29 While oak groves recalled ancient German traditions of nature worship, the Roman historian Tacitus described an oak forest as the setting of his countrymen's legendary defeat by the Teutonic chieftan Hermann in 9 A.D. This

story, which offered encouragement during the Wars of Liberation, was further popularized in Heinrich von Kleist's contemporary play Hermann's Battle (i8o8; see D'Alessandro,

fig. 7)." Gothic Church behind a Tree evokes an

elegiac mood that is underscored by the

graveyard scene and the poetic inscription beneath the image, in which Schinkel explains the work as "an attempt to express the sweet

melancholy, replete with yearning, that fills the heart upon hearing the sounds of worship ringing out from the church." In their interior-

ity and pensive tone, such sentiments allude to the Pietist tradition, often described as the

religion of the heart, and to the many Ger- man patriots who died during the Wars of Liberation. These feelings are balanced against the message of regeneration and hope con-

veyed through the soaring Gothic spire, the luxuriant vegetation, and the sunflowers, whose

presence amidst the tombstones suggests not

only life's renewal through divine benevo-

lence, but also the rebirth of German artistic tradition. In Heartfelt Effusions of an Art-lov-

ing Friar, Wackenroder described a visit to a

Nuremberg cemetery in a way that suggests the plant's use as a symbol of national renewal: "Between the graves tall sunflowers spring up in multitudes.... In this setting rest the forgotten bones of our old Albrecht Diirer, on account of

whom I am glad that I am a German.""31 Gothic Church behind a Tree is itself indebted stylistically to Diirer's woodcuts, which Schinkel had copied; printed at the recently opened firm of Georg Decker, it was the first litho-

graph produced in the Prussian capital.32

At nearly the same time as Schinkel's print was on exhibition in Berlin, another branch of German Romanticism was formed in Vienna. The Nazarenes, as they would later be called, expanded the parameters of the movement

beyond images of spiritualized landscapes. These young artists committed themselves to the revival of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German and Italian art through themes derived from historical and religious sources; they also relied stylistically on earlier traditions of line engraving and mural painting, and

adopted an attitude of piety that, in some

cases, extended to conversions to Catholicism. The group was initiated by six students, led

by Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr, who

were dissatisfied with the Viennese academy's

Figure 9

Julius Schnorr von

Carolsfeld (German;

1794-1872). Hagen

Carrying Siegfried's

Body from the Forest,

1846. Lithograph on

tan wove paper; image

12.3 x 7.5 cm (47/ x

3 in.), sheet 12.5 x

8.3 cm (47/ x 3/4 in.). Promised gift of

Dorothy Braude

Edinburg to the

Harry B. and Bessie K.

Braude Memorial

Collection (1.2002).

17




CO 1olAn m l

o I

Figure 10

Samuel Amsler

(Swiss; 179I-I849) after a drawing by Carl Barth (German;

1787-1853). Carl

Philipp Fohr, 1818.

Engraving on white

wove paper; plate 15 x

11.5 cm (57/8 x 42 in.), sheet 20.6 x 16.i cm

(8 s x 63/s in.). Gift of Mr. and Mrs.

Carl O. Schniewind

(I952. 206b).

Neoclassical orientation and the royal painting gallery's predominantly Baroque collections. Conditioned by readings of Schlegel, Tieck, and Wackenroder, they favored works by artists such as Diirer and Perugino, and became

increasingly convinced that such early Ren- aissance art offered an artistic paradigm worth

pursuing. These paintings' stylistic simplicity combined truth to nature with a devotional content that spoke to their "hearts" and left them with a feeling of "reverence."" On io July

I809-four days after the Austrian defeat at

Wagram-they established the first modern

secession, forming the Brotherhood of Saint Luke and leaving the academy. This organi- zation, complete with a letter of incorpora- tion, coat of arms, motto, and members' code of

ethics, emulated medieval student societies and

painter's guilds, whose patron was Saint Luke.

Through a revival of "Old German" figural

painting, its members hoped to foster national consciousness and spiritual renewal.

The original group of Nazarenes was

initially indebted to the aesthetic views of Friedrich Schlegel, who championed North- ern Renaissance art as the best model for modern German artistic greatness.34 Schlegel went further than previous writers in asserting the superiority of "the old German school" over the Italian in technical craftsmanship and religious content. It should, he opined, "inspire with a vision of the future anyone who has grasped the spirit of the past." Prais-

ing artists such as van Eyck, Memling, and Diirer for their craftsmanship, pious, naive

spirit, and ability to impart "deep feeling,"" Schlegel applauded works that exhibited "a few isolated figures" and "severe forms, con- tained in sharp and clearly defined contours." He associated this style, as did Runge, with

"that childlike, kindly simplicity which I am inclined to regard as the original character of mankind."36

Schlegel envisioned a German art whose content would be "the symbolical manifesta- tion of God's secrets," conveyed through hiero-

glyphics that were not, like Runge's, freely invented and "drawn from feelings, insights, or intuitions about nature, arbitrarily put together," but that instead employed "the old [Christian- Catholic] symbols, supplied and sanctified by

tradition.""7 While Schlegel distinguished the Nazarenes' work from that of the Romantic

"landscape" painters Runge and Friedrich, he also established a common purpose (sacred revelation) and methodology (hieroglyphics). All of these artists should be seen as different

branches of the same tree, some following the "book of nature" and the others the bibli-

cal "book of scripture." Like the philosopher Friedrich Schiller, they could "converse with the Infinite through the instrument of nature

[or] through the history of man."38

18




Somewhat paradoxically, given their devotion to German art, the Nazarenes' first deci-

sion was to move to Rome, where they planned to live the life of Tieck's fictional hero Franz

Sternbald, who went to Italy, like Diirer, in search of his artistic voice only to discover his native roots. Despite Rome's fame as a desti- nation on the classically oriented Grand Tour, the group conceived of their sojourn as a pil- grimage on which they might reconnect with the medieval Christian spirit they found lack-

ing in Enlightenment Germany. In Rome from I8io to 1812, they resided in the former Franciscan monastery of San Isodora, where their lifestyle itself became an art form: don-

ning pseudo-medieval robes, they grew their hair long in emulation of Renaissance por- traits and biblical figures (thus earning the epi- thet "Nazarenes"), and pursued an existence

initially devoted to quiet contemplation. "Har-

monious cloister life," Overbeck mused, offered a "sweetness of solitude and seclusion from the

world"; "only in such circumstances," he said,

"can true art flourish today.""9 The Nazarenes also found Italy allur-

ing because they venerated Raphael, in whose

early paintings they perceived a sacred spirit and a sober, primitivizing style that resonated with Diirer's work. They shared this enthu- siasm with Friedrich and Runge, who were also inspired by Raphael's Sistine Madonna

(1512-13; Dresden, Gemdildegalerie).40 Like Wackenroder's art-loving friar, who had a vision of Raphael and Diirer walking hand in

hand, the Nazarenes regarded the art of both Renaissance masters as their lodestar. For most of these painters, however, Italy existed

as a training ground for careers back home, and Italian art was useful largely as a way of

revitalizing the German. Julius Schnorr von

Carolsfeld, for example, who joined the group in 1818, described Rome as a source of artistic truth whose flame "would soon warm all of

Germany"; Peter Cornelius, in residence since

1811, believed that while Italy's age was past, "ours is to come."41 During their years in Italy, the Nazarenes gained renown as fresco painters and graphic artists, specialties they employed to reach a broad public and that they contin- ued to pursue after most of them returned to

Germany in the i820s.42 Nazarene art was based on a dialectic

in which the real world was used to evoke the ideal. The group's efforts to avoid creat-

ing "empty masks," as Friedrich Schelling described the rote imitation of the empirical world, can be seen in their drawings, whose linear essence underlies their work in all

mediums.43 Overbeck's etching Monk Pray- ing (fig. 7) and his graphite drawing Old Man

Praying (fig. 8) reveal the two stylistic charac- teristics most associated with Nazarene art: the

precise, factual recording of minute details, and a preference for pronounced contours and reduced interior modeling, which work

together to flatten form.44 While these traits of

hyper-real detail and outlining appear contra-

dictory, both are devices that produce abstrac- tions from reality, and are associated with a fifteenth-century manner of drawing and

printmaking. Indeed, Diirer's presence hovers over the motif of folded hands and the tactile

rendering of flesh and thinning hair on the

elderly man, as well as Overbeck's use of deli- cate cross-hatching and parallel lines to shade the monk's cloak, whose heavy folds recall those of Diirer's painted apostles. The Naza- rene aesthetic was achieved by drawing on

smooth, white paper with a sharp pencil or

pen capable of recording isolated individual strokes and recreating the visual sensibility of

Renaissance engravings.45 The Nazarenes shared with Friedrich the

goal of using visible form to suggest, in the words of Schnorr von Carolsfeld, "a higher spiritual life."46 Nazarene compositions, like

19




Figure 11

Ferdinand Olivier

(German; 1785-1841).

Thursday: Berch-

tesgaden and the Watz-

mann, Plate 6 from

the series Seven Views

in Salzburg and

Berchtesgaden, 1823.

Lithograph with

tint-stone on ivory wove paper; image 20.8 X 27.9 cm (8 /4 X

11 in.), sheet 37.2 x

52.8 cm (14s/8 x 203/4 in.). Clarence Buckingham Collection (1996.341.6).

Friedrich's paintings, convey states of sus-

pended silence in which movement is arrested and figures seem caught in a dreamlike trance

(see figs. 11-12). The stylistic difference between the illusionistic sketch of Old Man Praying and the expressive simplification of Monk

Praying illustrates this abstracting process, and echoes the larger way in which Roman- tic art distances both its subjects and viewers from what Novalis termed the "commonplace." Through formal style and pious content, more-

over, Overbeck's images illustrate his desire to

"release feelings" of solitude and contemplation, and to render "something mysterious and stimulate reflection."47 Despite the artist's conversion to Catholicism, these sentiments reflect currents of Pietist belief that are inter- twined with the art of the Nazarenes, and can be also traced in their ascetic life style, self-

discipline, and missionary goal of bringing art to the people.48

For the Nazarenes, religious faith was interwoven with the love of a homeland that

they perceived as being deeply spiritual-at least during the Middle Ages, when German art and society were thought to have been united

by shared Christian values. Pforr expressed the views of most when he described that era as a time when "the dignity of man was still fully apparent." "It showed itself clearly," claimed

Pforr, "on the battlefield as well as in the coun-

cil chamber, on the market place as well as in the family circle."49 For that reason, events

from German literature and history were admired as sources of national spirit and moral conduct. During the Wars of Liberation, medieval tales of brave and virtuous knights became

increasingly popular because of their contem-

porary relevance.'" The epic that most embodied the myth

of a powerful Germany was the thirteenth-

century Nibelungenlied, which told the story of Siegfried, Kriemhild, Brunhild, and Hagen, and provided the Nazarenes with the kind of

populist subject matter they desired, instilling a sense of shared culture and identification with ancient Teutonic virtues. Scenes from the Nibelungenlied were sketched by Pforr, Carl Philipp Fohr, and engraved as a series after drawings by Cornelius.1 The artist most involved with the Nibelungenlied throughout his career, however, was Schnorr von Carolsfeld,

20




who was commissioned during the mid-i820s to paint murals depicting the saga in the Munich Residenz for Ludwig I. He did not finish them until 1867, by which time he had also illustrated two editions of the text (1842

and 1867). His 1846 lithograph Hagen Carry- ing Siegfried's Body from the Forest (fig. 9) is related to three drawings of that scene which he completed independently of commissions. The artist composed an arched form, which recalls an altar, to enclose the pagan events within a Christianized framework; he also

employed the arch in the published illustra-

tions, which he shaped like medieval retables.52 The Nibelungenlied first came into vogue

during the second decade of the nineteenth

century, a period of heightened political activ- ism engendered by the reactionary deci- sions of the Congress of Vienna, which was convened in i81 in order to reconfigure post- Napoleonic Europe. Instead of a unified, demo- cratic country, Germany became a confederation known as the German League, comprising thirty-nine member states. These divisions reinforced the territorial interests and author-

ity of the aristocratic rulers whose regions had

survived under Napoleon's previous reshaping of German lands. University students mounted an opposition, forming associations (Burschen- schaften) that served as platforms for protest. They demonstrated their patriotism by adopt- ing the clothing of their ancestors, an "old Ger- man costume" of black coat, long hair, and soft hat that the journalist Ernst Moritz Arndt created in emulation of medieval garb."

The Nazarenes' own political consciousness was on the rise, and culminated in I819 with a group exhibition at the Palazzo Caf- farelli in Rome, the first ever in which Ger- man artists were shown on the basis of their

nationality. One of the display's highlights was the portrait of the Nazarene artist Carl

Philipp Fohr (fig. io). The sitter's altdeutsch attire and intense, thoughtful gaze-as well as the work's revivalist graphic style, complete with Diireresque monogram-made it a symbol of the Romantic, "new German patriotic religious art" discussed by Goethe and Johann Heinrich Meyer in an article published that

year.54 The work held deeper meaning, how-

ever, as a testament to German artistic brotherhood. Engraved by Samuel Amsler after a

Figure 12

Ferdinand Olivier.

Friday: Meadow before

Aigen near Salzburg, Plate 7 from the series

Seven Views in Salzburg and Berchtesgaden, i823. Lithograph with

tint-stone on ivory wove paper; image 20.8 x 27.9 cm (8 V4 X

II in.), sheet 37.2 x 52.8 cm (I4 /s x 203/4 in.). Clarence Buckingham Collection (I996.341.7)

21




Figure 13

Ferdinand Olivier.

Dedication, Plate i from the series Seven

Views in Salzburg and Berchtesgaden, 1823.

Lithograph on ivory wove paper; image 28.2

x 35.6 (II'/8 X 14 in.), sheet 37.I x 52.9 cm

(145/8 x 207/ in.). Clarence Buckingham Collection (I996.34I.I).

iN

towt

A-0- VIA. saw

)Y 't

KIi

r ,

sketch by Carl Barth, it was a memorial to Fohr: both artists were Fohr's friends, and had witnessed his death in a swimming acci- dent on the Tiber River.

The various threads of German Roman- tic art-spritualized landscape, medievalism, and religious imagery-were, to a great degree, woven together by the Nazarene Ferdinand Olivier in his lithographic series Seven Views in

Salzburg and Berchtesgaden (I823)."5 Olivier's career was shaped through his contacts with a

variety of artists and critics, including Friedrich, Kolbe, Schlegel, and Schnorr von Carolsfeld. He joined the Nazarenes in 1817, but he never visited Italy and chose to specialize in land-

scape, a subject they eschewed. Given these diverse influences, it is not surprising that Olivier's prints recapitulate Romanticism, read-

ing from both the "book of nature" and "the book of scripture," and employing Runge's ser- ial format and cyclical themes to explore divine immanence in both human activities and the natural environment.

Olivier based the lithographs on sketches he made during two trips (in 1815 and 1817) to the Tyrolean Alps, a region filled with natural

beauty and decaying Baroque and medieval

monuments, largely forgotten at that time. To the urban Olivier, the area represented a primitive, rural paradise populated by devout peas- ants. The prints, which he arranged according to the days of the week and located within

topographically precise settings, evoke a sacred

atmosphere through figures whose activities and dress suggest the continuity of the biblical and medieval past within the present. Amidst a mood of legendary remoteness, the week unfolds in scenes of Christian fellow-

ship-from the church christening on Sun-

day to a funeral the following Saturday-that include symbols alluding to cycles of growth and decay, the stages of human life, and the Passion of Christ. In Thursday: Berchtes-

gaden and the Watzmann (fig. ii), for exam-

ple, a child holds a cross-shaped stick signifying Christ's martyrdom, while the solace of nature's bounty and human industry are

explored through the image of the garden, with its potted plants and tree-grafting activ-

ity. In this print Oliver used landscape itself to suggest the cycles of history: the spatial becomes a metaphor for the temporal as the

22




viewer moves from a scene of present life in the

foreground to the medieval village of Berchtes-

gaden, and on to the primeval granite of the

towering mountain, the Watzmann, in the distance. The seasonal harvesting of crops in Fri-

day: Meadow before Aigen near Salzburg (fig. 12) resonates with religious meaning through the presence of a country shrine containing a

sculpted crucifixion, which alludes to Good

Friday and the funeral in Saturday: Graveyard of St. Peter's in Salzburg.

In these works Olivier realized the Naz- arene goal of negotiating the borders of the

"real" and the "ideal" by incorporating historical figures into a contemporary land-

scape, and using a technique appropriated from Diirer's draftsmanship and printmaking. The precise delineation and separation of each individual leaf and petal are equivalent to the detachment and suspension of the figures. The avoidance of unifying factors such as atmosphere or movement imparts a styl- ized abstraction that suggests parallels with Friedrich's symmetry. However, in contrast to those paintings, in which the known is rendered enigmatic, Olivier reverses the process, as Novalis also recommended in his definition of Romanticism, embedding the "infinite" in a mood of domestic, if remote, Gemiitlich-

keit (cozy familiarity). Olivier included in the series two "alle-

gorical sheets," the introductory Dedication

(fig. 13) and a concluding Keystone."5 In these

prints, the artist imitated the look of stone reliefs in the Gothic style, using them to estab- lish a sacred context for the enclosed scenes,

comparable to the experience of entering a

medieval cathedral or opening a polyptych altarpiece. The plates also interject within the series larger themes regarding the history and

identity of German Romanticism. Dedication, for example, presents the family tree of Ger- man Romanticism as nourished through Diirer,

whose monogram and carved Resurrection of Christ hang on the oak. Olivier, proclaiming himself a historical genealogist, fulfilled this role in the subsequent landscape images by combin-

ing numerous references to the Romantic. The collective movement is displayed through mul-

tiple branches: the plaques on the tree's right side are inscribed with names of the Nazarenes, and to the left appear those of other artistic kindred

spirits (landscape painters such as Friedrich,

sculptors, and precursors like Kolbe). Person- ifications of the four arts decorate the corner

niches, while below sits the Archangel Gabriel, who is approached by, among others, the artist's brothers Friedrich and Heinrich Olivier. To the left is Saint Michael confronting a toga- clad Satan and two bespectacled art critics, who

personify the analytic spirit of classicism and the Enlightenment. These critics, as art historian Peter Marker noted, mechanically "see" the outer world but miss the inner meaning, which is dependent on feeling and faith.7

Olivier's landscape scenes are visual real- izations of Tieck's quest for "a quiet place." Their mood of enchantment reflects the entire Romantic project, as defined by Novalis, of

transforming the "ordinary" through imagi- native thought. Romantic artists chose to deal with unpleasant political realities by providing images of sanctuary that offered escape from the daily world. They also, however, created a sense of hope for the future through references to an invented German identity, which they authenticated by incorporating past traditions. Locating "Germanness" in

specific attitudes and practices--spiritual belief, nature worship, introspection, and imagination-thought to run especially deep in the Middle Ages, the Romantics launched the first "revival" in German cultural history, and offered a model for future generations embarking on similar journeys of national self-discovery through art.

23



NOTES

INTRODUCTION, PP. 4-7

i. For more oo early collecting habits io Chicago, see Sue Ann Prioce, ed., The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940 (Chicago, 199o);

and Neil Harris, Chicago's Dream, A World's Treasure: The Art Institute of Chicago, -r893-1993 (Chicago, 1993). 2. Regardiog the issue of Nolde's relatiooship to Natiooal Socialism, see Peter

Vergo, "Emil Nolde: Myth aod Reality," io Peter Vergo aod Felicity Lunn, Emil

Nolde, exh. cat. (Loodoo, 1995), pp. 38-64. On Nolde's complex relationship to "Primitivism," see Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven, 1991), pp. 213-34. On Liiperrz's use of so-called "German motifs," see Dorothea Dietrich, "Allegories of Power: Markus Liipertz's 'German Motifs'," ArtJournal 48 (1989), pp. 164-70.

MORTON, "GERMAN ROMANTICISM: THE SEARCH FOR 'A QUIET

PLACE,'" PP. 9-23.

My thanks go to Cordula Grewe for her insightful comments on this essay, and to

Jay A. Clarke for her generous support and assistance.

i. Ludwig Tieck, "Vorrede zur Zweiten Auflage" (1813), repr. in idem, Schriften (Berlin, 1828), vol. 6, pp. 3-4. 2. For more information on Herder see E M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political

Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford, 1965). 3. Friedrich Schlegel, "Fragmence and ss6,"Atheniium 1 (1798), in Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, 1970), p. 175. The linguistic roots of the term Romanticism derive from the fictional forms of medieval chivalric poetry and the French word for novel (roman). See Hans Eichner, ed., "Romantih" and Its Cognates: The European History ofa Word (Toronto, 1972).

4. For a discussion of Kolbe's images within the context of contemporary opinions about classical Greece, see Timothy F Mitchell, Art and Science in German Land-

scape Painting, 1770-1840 (Oxford, 1993), p. 35; the Capitoline Venus is reproduced in Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, Hellenistic Sculpture I: The Styles of ca. 33 i-2oo B. C.

(Madison, Wisc., 1990), pl. 181. The Tahitian connection was noted by Ulf Martens, Der Zeichner und Radierer Carl Wilhelm Kolhe d. A. (Berlin, 1976), p. 27.

5. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York, 1984), p. 6o. 6. Friedrich Schelling, Ideas to a Philosophy ofNature (I797), quoted in Kristin

Pfefferkorn, Novalis: A Romantic's Theory of Language and Poetry (New Haven, 1988), P- 85-

7. Novalis, "Logologisthe Fragmente" no. io5, in Richard Samuel, ed., Novalis:

Schriften (Stuttgart, 1960), vol. 2, p. 545. Tieck remarked that Friedrich's art visual- ized Novalis's ideas. See Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Sub-

ject ofLandscape (New Haven, 1990), p. 23. 8. David Walsh, The Mysticism o/Innerworldly Fulfillment: A Study o/Jacoh Boehme (Gainesville, Fla., 1983), p. 6. Tieck introduced Bihme's philosophy to Novalis,

Runge, Schelling, and Wackenroder. 9. Jakob Bijhme, De Signarura Rerum oder von der Gehurt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen (1622), repr. in Will-Erich Peuckert, ed., Sdmtliche Schri/ten (Stuttgart, 1957), vol. 6; quoted in translation in Pfefferkorn (note 6), p. go. io. For mote on Pietism see Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 153-55; and K. S. Pinson, Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (New York, 1934). ii. Caspar David Friedrich to V. A. Zhukovsky, quoted in Klaus Lankheit, Das

Freundschaftsbild der Romantih (Heidelberg, 1952), p. 94. Friedrich's response reflects the doctrines of the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, who located the essence of religion in "neither thinking nor doing but seeing and feeling." This issue is discussed in Werner Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich, trans. Mary Whittall

(New York, 2000), p. I. 12. Engravings were printed in i8o0 and i8o0; Runge painted two versions of Morn-

ing in i8o8 (both in the Hamburger Kuosthalle). For illustrations of all four prints, as well as related drawings and paintings, see Werner Hofmann, Runge in seiner Zeit, exh. cat. (Hamburg, 1977), cat. nos. 65-68. Other sources include Jdrg Traeger, PhiliPp Otto Runge undsein Werh (Munich, 1975); Rudolf M. Bisanz, German Romanticism and Philipp Otto Runge (DeKalb, Ill., 1970); and Andreas Bliihm, ed., Philipp Otto

Runge, Caspar David Friedrich: The Passage of Time, exh. cat. (Amsterdam, 1996), trans. Rachel Eisner.

13. Philipp Otto Runge to Daniel Runge, Mar. 9, 1802; in Lorenz Eirner, ed. and trans., Neoclassicism and Romanticism, 175o-185o: An Anthology of Sources and Docu- ments (New York, ig89), p. 148.

14. Philipp Otto Runge, letter dated i8oi; in ibid., p. 145.

i1. Philipp Otto Runge to Daniel Runge, Nov. 7, 1802; in Philipp Otto Runge, Hincerlassene Schriften, ed. Daniel Runge (Hamburg, 1841; reprint, Gdttingen, 1965), vol. I, p. 22.

16. Philipp Otto Runge to Pauline Bassenge, Apr. 1803; in ibid., vol. 2, p. 209.

17. Jakob Bi1hme, quoted and translated in Albert Boime, Arc in an Age of Bonapartism, r8oo-i8i5 (Chicago, 1990), p. 456. 18. Philipp Otto Runge to Magdalena Runge, June i1, 1803, in Runge (note i1), vol. 2, p. 220.

19. Philipp Otto Runge to Daniel Runge, Mar. 9, 1802, in Bitner (note W3), p. 147. For a discussion of Franz Scerobald's epiphany compared to Runge's, see Christa Franke, Philipp Otto Runge und die Kunstansichten Wackenroders und Tiechs (Marburg, 1974), PP. 72-73- 20. Cited in Hofmann (note 12), p. 258.

21. Wilhelm Wackenroder, "Concerning TWO WONDERFUL LANGUAGES and their mysterious power," in Heartfelt Effusions of an Art-loving Friar (1797), rept. in idem., Confessions and Fantasies, ed. and trans. Mary Hurst Schubert

(University Park, Penn., 1970), p. II9. For excellent discussions and histories of the

hieroglyph and arabesque in relation to the Romantics, consult Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep ofReason: Primitivism in Modern European Art andAesthetics, 1725-1907 (University Park, Penn., 1995), pp. 1-54; and Liselotte Dieckmann, Hieroglyphics: The History ofa Literary Symbol (St. Louis, 1970). 22. Novalis, Henry von Ofrerdingen, trans. P Hilty (New York, 1978), p. 77. 23. Diiter conceived his fantastic animal-plant hybrids, derived from the Egyptian Horopollo's text Hieroglyphica, for a patron whose court was at the center of the Renaissance revival of hieroglyphs. See Antony Griffiths and Frances Carey, German

Printmaking in the Age of Goethe, exh. cat. (London, 1994), fig. 125, and pp. 188-9o. Griffiths's and Carey's text is an excellent reference for nearly all of the artists discussed in this essay. 24. Translated in William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (New Haven, 1980), p. 52.

25. Rosen and Zerner (note 5), p. -5. See Rudolf M. Bisanz, "Andacht als Kunster-

lebois," Das Miinster 44, 2 (i99I), pp. 89-90. 26. Wilhelm Wackenroder, Heartfelt Effusions ofan Art-loving Friar (797); quoted in Boime (note I7), p. 545. 27. Friedrich Schleiermacher, quoted in translation by James J. Sheehan, German His-

tory, i77o-i866 (Oxford, 1989), p. 381. 28. Since Goethe's 1772 essay "On German Architecture," the Gothic was regarded with pride as a native tradition created during a devout age in which Germany was dominant within a united northern Europe. In Goethe's francophobic text, he decried rules and celebrated feelings, praised the "manly" Diirer, and characterized the German soul as "strong and rugged" in contrast to the "frivolous Frenchman." See

John Gage, ed. and trans., Goethe on Art (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 104-12.

29. For this reference see Roland Marz, "The Cathedral of Romanticism," in Keith

Hartley, ed., The Romantic Spirit in German Art 179o-1ggo, exh. cat. (London, 1994), p. I66. The trope of forest as sacred space is discussed in Rainer Gratfe, "Baum, Wald, Kirche," in Bernd Weyergraf et al., Waldungen: Die Deutschen und ihr Wald, exh. cat. (Berlin, 1987), pp. 86-94. 30. See Annemarie Hiirlemann, "Die Eiche, heiligere Baum deutscher Nation," in

Weyergraf et al. (note 29), pp. 62-68.

31. Wilhelm Wackenroder, "A Memorial to our venerable ancestor ALBRECHT DURER By an art-loving friar," in Heartfelt Effusions ofan Art-loving Friar (note 21),

p. 113.

32. Lithography, invented in the late 1790o by the Bavarian Alois Senefelder, was itself a recent addition to the distinguished German graphic tradition.

33. Franz Pforr to Schdff Sarasin-Chiron, 18io, in Henri Dorra et al., Die Nazarener, exh. cat. (Frankfurt, 1977), p. 31-

34. The first Nazarenes included the German artists Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, and Joseph Wintergerst; the Swiss Ludwig Vogel; and Austrians Konrad Hottinger and

Johann Sutter.

35. Friedrich Schlegel, "Descriptions of Paintings from Paris and the Netherlands in the Years 1802 to 1804," "Second Supplement of Old Paintings, Spring 1804," and "Third Supplement of Old Paintings, Summer 1804"; in Gert Schiff, ed., German

Essays on Art History, trans. Peter Wortsman and Gert Schiff (New York, 1988), pp. 6o, 69. The "Third Supplement" concludes with the rousing cry: "May the painters of today heed and adopt the well-considered creed of the old Diirer, who said: 'No, I don't want to paint in the antique manner, or the Italian manner, what I want is to

paint like a German!"' (p. 72).

36. Friedrich Schlegel, "Descriptions of Paintings from Paris and the Netherlands in the Years 1802 to 1804," in Eitner (note 13), P. 187. 27. Ibid., pp. 189-90. 38. Friedrich Schiller, Theosophie des Julius in Reinhold Netolitzsky, ed., Gesam- melte Werhte infiin/Bdinde (Munich, 1960), vol. S, p. 14.

39. Johann Friedrich Overbeck, cited in Pia Mfiller-Tamm, Nazarenische Zeichenhunsc, exh. cat. (Manoheim, 1993), p. 17. For Pforr's description of his new monastic life, see Eitner (note 13), p. 194. See also Mitchell Benjamin Frank, German Romantic Paint- ing Redefined: Nazarene Tradition and che Narratives n/Romanticism (Aldershot, England, 2001), pp. 58-79. 40. The Sistine Madonna is illustrated and discussed in relation to Friedrich's art in Koerner (note 7), p. 52.

106

NOTES






NOTES







PLACE,'" PP. 9-23.























PLACE,'" PP. 9-23.




































p. 113.




Johann Sutter.




















p. 113.




Johann Sutter.






106 106



NOTES

41. Julius Schnorr von Caroisfeld, in Miiller-Tamm (note 39), p. 18; and Peter Cornelius, quoted by William Vaughan, "Longing for the South," in Hartley (note 29), p. 302. For more on the Nazarenes' appretiation of Raphael, see Jane Van Nimmen, "Friedrich Schlegel's Response to Raphael in Paris," in Gabriel P. Weisberg and Laurinda S. Dixon, eds., The Documented Image: Visions in Art History (Syracuse, 1987), PP. 319-33.- 42. They executed notable fresco projects in the aasa Bareholdy from 1816 and the Casino Massimo from 1818; see Vaughan (note 24), PP. 178-81. 43. Friedrich Schelling, On the Relation of the Creative Arts to Nature (1807), in Eitner (note 13), p. 204.

44. For a description of this precise style, see Ludwig Richter, Lehenserinnerungen eines deutschen Malers (Frankfurt, 1885), translated in Heinrich Sieveking, Fuseli to Menzel: Drawings and Watercolors in the Age of Goethe, exh. cat. (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), p. 24.

45. Diirer's Four Apostles are illustrated in Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Alhrecht Diirer, 4th ed. (Princeton, 1971), figs. 294-95. My interpretation of Nazarene

drawing techniques is indebted to Peter Mdrker and Margret Stuffmann, "Zu den

Zeichnungen der Nazarener," in Dorra et al. (note 33), esp. PP. 182-84; and Mudller- Tamm (note 39), pp. 21-23. The Nazarenes used a pencil that was invented in 1795 by Jacques Louis Cont6. It consisted of graphite powder and clay instead of a lead point, and was closer to the modern-day pencil, enabling artists to work with greater precision. See Sieveking (note 44), p. 24.

46. Schnorr von Carolafeld, quoted by Mdrker and Stuffmann (note 45), p. 181. 47. Friedrich Overbeck, quoted in Miiller-Tamm (note 39), pp. 14, 23. Overbeck wrote that only certain biblical subjects were suitable for his purposes, consciously rejecting any stories that involved large crowds and dramatic action.

48. A related print, Saint Philipp Neri, was based on Diirer's 1526 engraving Saint

Philipp. These two prints, together with two others from 1826, were the only etch-

ings Overbeck ever made. For an illustration of the Dsirer, see Panofsky (note 45), fig. 291; for Saint Philipp Neri see Griffiths and Carey (note 23), p. I86. 49. Franz Pforr to his guardian, Johann David Passavant, quoted in Keith Andrews, The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome (Oxford, 1964), p. 25.

5o. Goethe's earlier play Gdtz von Berlichingen (1773), which recreated the age of Luther and Diirer through the deeds of a heroic sixteenth-century knight, became a favorite text among the Romantics and was illustrated by Pforr. 5i. For illustrations of Cornelius's engravings (1817-21) see Griffiths and Carey (note 23), PP. 178-79; a good general source for discussions of the Nihelungenlied in German art is Ulrich Schulte Wiilwer, Das Nihelungenlied in dec deutschen Kunst des 19. und20. Jarhhunderts (Giessen, 1980).

52. Inken Nowald suggested that since no illustrated manuscripts of the Nihelun-

genlied existed, many artists used a repertoire of Christian motifs and poses, thereby "sacralizing" the myth. See Inken Nowald, Die Nihelungen/reshen von Julius Schnorr von Carols/eld im Kdnigshau der Miinchener Residenz 1827-1867 (Kiel, 1978), p. i1. Nowald also discussed and reproduced the drawings related to the Art Institute's print; see ibid., pp. 276-77. 53. In his tract Oiber Sitte, Mode und Kleidertrachc (Frankfurt 1814), Arndt pro- posed this costume as an anti-French statement that proclaimed the ideals of German unity and liberty. By 1820 the cloak was outlawed in several states; Friedrich, who was a friend of Arndt, defiantly included it in most of his paintings following the Napoleonic defeat in 1814.

54. "New German Religious Patriotic Art" criticized the Nazarenes and Friedrich, and appeared in the Allgemeine Zeicung, July 23, 1819. An article in Kunstblatt (Oct. 5, 1820) compared the Fohr print to Diirer's engraved portrait of his best friend, Willibald Pirckheimer, which is reproduced in Panofsky (note 45), fig. 303. See Griffiths and Carey (note 23), pp. 181-84, for more information about this portrait and the work of Amsler and Carl Barth. Fohr had moved to Italy in 1816 from

Heidelberg, where he was a member of the university student society, the Teuconen, and a keen medievalist.

55. Illustrations for the complete series can be found in Renate Langenfelder, "Soon-

tagsspaziergang durchs Salzburgische," WeltKunsc 6o, 7 (Apr. I, 1990), pp. 1044-49- Griffiths and Carey (note 23) reproduced every lithograph except for Monday and

Thursday on pp. 209-13.

56. The titles are Olivier's; see Griffiths and Carey (note 23), p. 209. For an illustration of the Keystone, see ibid., fig. i35i. 57. Peter Mlrker, "'Selig sind die niche sehen und doch glauben': zur nazarenischen

Landscahftsauffassung Ferdinand Oliviers," Stddel-Jahrhuch 7 (1979), P. 194. Ludwig Grote identified the figures in the Dedication in Die Briider Olivier und die deutsche Romancik (Berlin, 1938), pp. 217-18.

CLARKE, "NEO-IDEALISM, EXPRESSIONISM, AND THE WRITING

OF ART HISTORY," PP. 25-37.

A portion of this essay was presented at the February, 1999 College Are Association conference in Los Angeles. Research for the article was funded in part by a German Academic Exchange (DAAD) Post-Doctoral Research Grant. My thanks go to Jenny Anger, Marcia Brennan, Charles W Haxehausen, Maria Makela, and Greg

Nosan for their insightful comments and suggestions. While I am indebted to Carols

Kupfer for her assistance with particularly thorny phrases, all translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

i. The Nazis confiscated the painted version of Winter Night in Moonlight (igi9) as "degenerate are" from the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Magdeburg. It is now in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and is reproduced in Horst Uhr, Masterpieces of German Expressionism at the Detroit Institute of Arts (New York, 1982), p. 103. 2. For example, Peter Selz, the eminent are historian and curator who was forced to flee Nazi Germany, described the Expressionist artist in his seminal book German

Expressionist Painting as one who "rejects tradition, especially that of the most immedi- ate past." See Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley, 1957), p. vi. For more on Selz's significant scholarly contributions, see Dore Asheon, "Homage to Peter Selz," in Paul J. Karlstrom and Dore Ashton, Cross-Currents in Modern Arc: A Tribute to Peter Selz (New York, 2000), p. 14.

3. See Robin Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany, 1850-1914 (Manchester, 1997), p. 94; Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape ofEuropa: The Fate ofEurope's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York, 1994), p. 32; Jonathan Peeropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Arc World in Nazi Germany (New York, 2000), pp. 30-33, 96-97; and Franz Zelger, Arnold Bdchlin, Die Toceninsel (Frank- furt, 1991), pp. 8-io.

4. Although beyond the scope of this essay, German Impressionism also shared

important connections with Germany's idealist and Romantic past. See Jay A. Clarke, "The Construction of Artistic Identity in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin: The Prints of

Klinger, Kollwiez, and Liebermano" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1999), chap. 3. 5. Naturalism, broadly speaking, is a style of are that depicts its subjects in a realistic manner, and tends to favor scenes from the everyday lives of working people. While

Impressionism emerged from Naturalism, it represented nature and modern life in a far less precise manner, taking liberties with color and facture. 6. Jules Laforgue, "Le Salon de Berlin," Gazette des beaux-arts 28 (1883), p. 172.

7. Vom Herausgeber [Friedrich Peche], "Uber den heucigens franzijsischen Impres- sionismus," Die Kunst/iir Ale 2 (1887), p. 33 8. 8. Fritz Bley, "Ednuard Manee," Zeitschrift/iir hildende Kunst 19 (1883-84), pp. 241-52, as quoted in Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Sifcle Europe (Prince- ton, 1994), p. 202

9. Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting, rev. ed., trans. A. C. Hillier (London, 1896), vol. 3, p. 546. io. Ibid., p. 551. ii. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 235.

13. GeorgVofi, "Ausseellungen, Ssmmlungen, etc.," Die KunstfiirAlle 3 (1887-88), p. 96. 14. For more on the iconographic connections between Bdcklin and von Schwind, see Andrea Linnebach, Arnold Bdchlin und die Antihe: Mythos, Geschichce, Gegen- wart (Munich, 1990), pp. 42-54.

i1. For more on the issue of Bijcklin and antiquity, see ibid. Regarding the uneasy relationship between Wagner and Bdcklin, consult Elizabeth Tumasonis, "Biicklin and Wagner: The Dragon Slain," Pantheon 44 (1986), pp. 87-91. 16. Klinger began working consistently on printmaking in the early i88os and was soon considered the originator of the German etching revival. For more on Klinger's reception see Clarke (note 4), chap. I; and Elizabeth Pendleton Streicher, "'Zwischen Klingers Ruhm und seiner Leiseung': Max Klingers Kunse im Spiegel dec Kritik, 1877-1920," in Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Tilman Falk, edo., Max Klinger: Zeich- nungen, Zuscandodruche, Zyhlen (Munich, 1996), pp. 45-55. 17. Alfred Lichewark, "Die akademioche Kunseausstellung IV," Gegenwart 26

(1884), p. 238. For other criticisms see Max Klinger, Brie/e von Max Klinger aus den

Jahren 1874 his 1919, ed. Hand Wolfgang Singer (Leipzig, 1924), p. 57. Friedrich's Monk by the Sea is reproduced in Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Suhject ofLandscape (New Haven, 1990), p. 168. 18. Franz Hermann Meissner, Max Klinger (Berlin, 1899), pp. 92-93.

ig. Wilhelm von Bode, "Berliner Malerradirer: Max Klinger, Ernst Moritz Geyger, Stauffer-Bern," Die graphischen Kiinste 12 (1890), pp. 45-60. 20. E[riedrich] PEeche], "Miinchen," Die Kunst/iirAlle 6 (1891), p. 207. 21. Max Klinger, Malerei und Zeichnung (Leipzig, 1891). For two recent articles on this treatise, see Marsha Morton, "'Mslerei und Zeichnung': The History and Context of Tlinger's Guide en the Arts," Zeischrz//iir Ku.ns-geschiche

I 8

I pp. 542-69;

and Elizabeth Streiker, "Max Klinger's 'Malerti und Zeichnung': The Critical Reception of the Prints and Their Text," in Frantoise Forseer-Haho, ed., Imagining Modem German Culture, 1889-1910 (Washington, D.C., 1996), pp. 229-46. 22. Klinger (note 21), p. 9. 23. Brahms ~Fantasies is reproduced in Danzker and Falk (note i6), pp. 142-43.

24. The previous year Meier-Graefe, who was a tireless supporter of French Impressionist are, published his important book Modern Arc (1904). Here he claimed that Bijcklin "lies like a log in the way of the fumure ... he hangs upon our wings like a heavy colossus and threatens en drag us down lower than we have ever been." A few

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