by Peter Watson
In 1824 Schinkel made another visit to Italy, this time accompanied by the art historian Gustav Waagen. His aim was to inspect the display of art collections there; two years later he went to England to inspect the new British Museum. In London Schinkel was more impressed by the works of art themselves than by the buildings which housed them, and he was less impressed by English architecture pure and simple than he was by the engineering structures—the tunnels and bridges (iron once more)—erected by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Telford. This was a time when churches were giving way to museums, theaters, and even factories as the focus of architecture.28 On his return, Schinkel introduced iron staircases into many of his new buildings.29
Late in life, Schinkel envisaged a “Higher Architecture,” a less utilitarian form of building, though this was never realized. One might call it an ideal, almost Kantian, form of architecture. After his death in 1841, he fell from favor but was rediscovered by the generation of Loos, Peter Behrens, and the young Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, after about a century.30
The passion for Greek architecture in Berlin and the other cities of Germany (for example, Munich) achieved remarkable proportions, so much so that in 1835 Leo von Klenze journeyed to Greece, where he succeeded not only in having a law passed to protect the Acropolis and other Classical sites, but he also designed an entire district of Athens and a palace for Otto I, son of Ludwig I of Bavaria, who became king of Greece in 1832. The neoclassicists had finally returned whence they came. 31
THE FIRST ARTISTIC SECESSION
The world of the Romantics was a small world, and the same point may be made about the neoclassical world, even about Prussia/Germany herself, so far as the arts were concerned. For the most part, the luminaries all knew each other, and painted or sculpted or translated each other. Georg Friedrich Kersting, Mengs, and Tischbein painted Goethe; Heinrich Keller, Martin Klauer, and Traugott Major sculpted him. Joseph Anton Koch and Gottlieb Schick painted Humboldt, and Klauer, Christian Rauch, and Christian Friedrich Tieck sculpted him. Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli) translated Winckelmann and painted Bodmer, Joseph Koch painted August Wilhelm Schlegel, Mengs painted Winckelmann. Schadow sculpted Klopstock and Gilly; Tieck sculpted Lessing, Karl Wickmann sculpted Hegel, and Albert Wolff sculpted Friedrich Schadow. It was a world that was conscious of itself as a talented age, much as the Italian Renaissance had been.32
After Mengs and Winckelmann, the most notable German presence in Rome was a group of painters variously known as the Brotherhood of St. Luke, the Düreristen, and the Nazarenes. They began as a small knot of like-minded souls at the Academy in Vienna, where Mengs’s pupil, Friedrich Heinrich Füger, was director. Füger was a good director—David himself was an admirer—but Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, and Johann David Passavant grew irritated with the routine of the Vienna Academy. What they had in common, over and above a dislike of routine and Vienna itself, which wasn’t religious enough for them, was a preference for earlier Italian old masters—Perugino, Raphael, and Michelangelo—rather than later painters such as Correggio, Titian, and the Bolognese school then so much in vogue, and especially for the so-called Italian primitives of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. This, the Gothic Revival, ran parallel with Romanticism.33
Their views were reinforced by the publication in 1797 of an anonymous short booklet, Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Effusions of an Art-Loving Monk), which, in Keith Andrews’s words, “made an impact in inverse proportion to its modest size.”34 Written by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, appearing on the eve of his death at the age of twenty-five and put together by his friend, the poet Ludwig Tieck, it was not really art history as much as a series of art stories, vivid incidents taken from the lives of the great painters, together with intimate details of how early German artists used to live, based chiefly on Joachim Sandrart’s biography of Dürer. In full Romantic mode, Wackenroder and Tieck explained art as divine inspiration.
It was against this background that four apprentice painters at the Vienna Academy joined the triangle of Oberbeck, Pforr, and Passavant. They were Ludwig Vogel and Johann Konrad Hottinger from Switzerland, Joseph Wintergerst from Swabia, and Joseph Sutter from Austria itself. These seven painters now met regularly to critique each other’s work and were soon united as a band opposed to the policies of the Academy. Taking a lead from Wackenroder’s book, they called themselves a “brotherhood,” the other name being relatively easy to decide on: the Evangelist St. Luke, the patron saint of painters. In line with their religious, monkish aims, Fra Angelico, the painter-monk, was their ideal. “The artist,” said Overbeck in a letter, “must transport us through Nature to a higher idealised world…”35
Because of their continual conflicts with the Vienna Academy, they planned a move south, to “Raphael’s town” and when their own Academy was forced to close in May 1809 because of the French occupation, and was then allowed to reopen only as a much smaller entity, the rebels—not included among the smaller chosen few—used the opportunity to decamp. It was May 1810 when the first artistic secession of modern times came into being.
They set up shop in Rome, in the monastery of S. Isidoro, an Irish Franciscan church and college founded in the sixteenth century. Each painter had his own cell in which to live and work. At night they ate together, then they read and drew in the refectory. Drawing—like prayer—became a ritual. In the Vatican they could dwell on the frescoes by Pinturicchio and Raphael to their heart’s content. “Wackenroder’s art-loving monk had become a reality.”
Overbeck assumed the leadership, but more than anything it was the friendship between him and Pforr that “laid the foundation for the rebirth of German art.”36 They painted for each other and in a very similar style, as a comparison of Pforr’s Friendship and Overbeck’s Italia and Germania will show. Before the collaboration could go very much further, however, in July 1812 Pforr died of consumption at the age of twenty-four. While Pforr had been sinking, some among the group had begun meeting at the house of Abbate Pietro Ostini, a professor of theology at the Collegium Romanum, and after Pforr’s death the monastic isolation of the “Fratelli di S. Isidoro” was ended and the building itself given up. The members of the Brotherhood of St. Luke changed their name to “Düreristen,” but because of their emphasis on Catholicism, and because of their monastic mode of life, not to mention the flowing cloaks and hair that they affected, they were given the nickname “the Nazarenes.” Like many such satirical soubriquets in the history of art, it stuck.37
Despite these mixed fortunes, the Brotherhood’s works were becoming known farther north, and other young painters began to head over the Alps, among them Rudolf and Wilhelm Schadow, sons of Johann Gottfried Schadow, the famous Berlin sculptor, and Johann and Philipp Veit, sons of Dorothea Veit and stepsons of Friedrich Schlegel. But the most serious new talent was Peter von Cornelius.38
Headstrong, single-minded, and much influenced by Goethe’s Faust, Cornelius had produced a series of illustrations for Goethe’s drama. Goethe liked the drawings well enough but encouraged Cornelius to study his Italian contemporaries. In Italy, Cornelius joined Overbeck and took Pforr’s place. In fact, his arrival marked a new direction for the Nazarenes. Less overawed by Raphael, Cornelius persuaded the brotherhood to work less for their own narrow circle and instinctively grasped that if there really were to be a national artistic regeneration, a new monumental art was needed, an art that would occupy churches, monasteries, and important public buildings. He convinced himself and the others that fresco painting had that monumental quality lacking in easel paintings and so persuaded the Prussian Consul General in Rome, Salomon Bartholdy, who occupied the Palazzo Zuccari (now the Biblioteca Hertziana), to allow four of the Nazarenes a commission. As a theme they chose the Old Testament story of Joseph in Egypt.39
The frescoes were a great success (they were removed to Berlin in 1887). All of the artists—Overbeck, Cornelius, Philipp Veit, and Friedrich Schadow—were at thei
r lyrical best, their figures strong and rhythmic, with an intense sense of atmosphere. “It was a collective break with what had gone before—away from Mengs, the Baroque, the Neoclassical; the vividness and striking purity and harmony of the colours was a revelation.”40 Fellow artists of all nationalities flocked to Rome to see the new frescoes. Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen were unstinting in their praise, and the Nazarenes became the firm center of attention in the Rome art world. Among those 500 German artists mentioned earlier who either visited or actually lived in Rome full-time, one, Baron Friedrich von Rumohr (1785–1842), became the first art historian in the modern sense. He made it his business to discover how the ideas of the Nazarenes had evolved and in doing so was among the first to explore the archives and to make a first-hand examination of the early masters, “in the flesh,” so to speak (this was the age of engravings, remember, before photographs). Rumohr was largely responsible for the history of art becoming an academic discipline, and his Italienische Forschungen (1827–32), setting out systematically the results of his inquiries, was an early sighting of the word “Forschung”—research.41
In the early 1820s the brotherhood began to fragment.42 Cornelius, Overbeck, and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld were enticed to Munich by King Ludwig I. The new king turned into one of the greatest anachronisms of history, convincing himself that he could initiate a national artistic renaissance through commissions that strove to re-create previous glories—he built Greek temples, Byzantine and Romanesque churches, Gothic houses. The techniques of antiquity, such as mosaic and the encaustic method of painting, were revived.
To begin with, Cornelius enjoyed himself. His first commission was for the decoration of the Glyptothek, the museum that was to house the antique sculptures Ludwig had collected.43 However, Cornelius had a post-Kantian, overintellectual view that paintings should consist of vast pictorial schemes, in which each part had to be understood individually before the purpose of the whole could be grasped. This (exhausting) stress on didactic was even more in evidence in his next great commission. In the new Ludwigskirche, in the center of Munich, Cornelius conceived yet another grandiose epic of the Christian religion—an ambitious scheme designed to fill the entire building and based entirely on the Bible. Even the king was put off and he reduced the commission, confining Cornelius to the apse and the choir.
That was not all. The king had by then come under the influence of his architects, Leo von Klenze and Friedrich von Gärtner, and they hated what Cornelius was trying to do (they thought Cornelius’s paintings were designed to outshine the buildings they were in). As a result, Cornelius and the prince argued and, in 1840, the painter offered his services to a new patron, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who immediately invited the artist to Berlin. There, Cornelius set about the crowning task of his career, which was to occupy him for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. The king had set his heart on rebuilding Berlin’s great cathedral, and Cornelius was put in charge. The size of the project suited his ambitions, but even before the foundations of the cathedral had been laid, the political turbulence of 1848 overtook the entire scheme. Cornelius continued doggedly to produce design after design, huge cartoons for a scheme that he must have known would never happen, a fresco cycle in which the subject was the divine grace in face of man’s sin, culminating in redemption. When Lady Eastlake, wife of the director of Britain’s National Gallery and a great traveler and writer, saw the cartoons in Cornelius’s studio, she was horrified by “the acres” of space they took up and concluded Cornelius was not the “great gun” of German art but “a mere popgun.” Despite this, many of his fellow artists abroad—Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, François-Pascal-Simon Gérard, and Eugène Delacroix, for example—admired him, for his intentions, at least. Delacroix praised “his courage even to commit big mistakes if the energy of expression demanded it.”44
Ludwig behaved in much the same way toward Schnorr after he arrived in Munich in 1827 to join Cornelius. His first commission was to be a fresco cycle based on the Odyssey but Ludwig soon tired of that, preferring instead the Nibelungenlied for the newly built Royal Palace in Munich, modeled on the Palazzo Pitti. These frescoes took almost forty years before they were finished, mainly because Schnorr could not get enthusiastic about a nonreligious commission. But other schemes took almost as long, and when Cornelius abandoned Munich for Berlin, Schnorr became the target of the same critics who had attacked his friend. And so, when Schnorr visited Dresden in 1841 and was offered the directorship of the academy there, Ludwig made no attempt to keep him.
Schnorr produced one very successful work in Dresden, a series of 240 wood blocks—a Picture Bible. “If the Nazarenes left a testament, a justification of all they had wanted to accomplish, it could not have been more aptly demonstrated than in these Bible pictures…yet they were not a communal work but the work of one man who was not even of their immediate circle.”45 The Nazarenes never quite made it. Possibly, they were simply too theoretical.
A NEW VOCABULARY FOR PAINTING
Many of the ideas and themes raised in the first section of this book come together in the work of the painter Caspar David Friedrich, who arrived in Dresden in 1798. His symbolism, his nationalism, his concern with the sublime, his Romanticism, his inner battle over the Christian faith…all these are reflected in his very distinctive form of art. “He painted mysteries and has remained something of a mystery himself.”46
Born in the Baltic harbor town of Greifswald, in Pomerania, in 1774, Friedrich was the son of a candle maker and soap boiler.47 After studying at the Copenhagen Academy he visited several conspicuous beauty spots in Germany, choosing eventually to settle in Dresden, and remaining there until his death. His highly distinctive style may be partly explained in personal terms: his mother died when he was seven and the brother he was closest to drowned while the two boys were ice-skating. Caspar suffered a lifelong sense of guilt.
At Copenhagen his teachers were exponents of Danish neoclassicism. Their emphasis on drawing from nature, combined with Friedrich’s early love of travel, seems to have bred in him a fascination with landscape. No-tably, his landscapes are populated by small isolated figures and megaliths or “heroic ruins.” In time he evolved his own iconological vocabulary. “He painted Nordic images with an apocalyptic dimension, his landscapes rarely depict daylight or sunlight, rather they show dawn, dusk, fog or mist.”48 His contemporaries assumed this was his portrayal of the German “mood” as a result of the French invasion—politically weak but intellectually strong. Either way, Friedrich became convinced that the contemplation of nature leads us to a deeper appreciation of the way things are. His clear technique, mysterious scenes, and lighting effects (in this he was a forerunner of Salvador Dalí, in particular) ensured that his reputation grew quickly. He secured patrons and prizes equally and formed friendships with the main figures of German Romanticism.
One of his most typical—and most controversial—paintings was Cross on the Mountains, 1808, also known as the Tetschen Altarpiece. The crucified Christ is shown in profile, at the top of a mountain. Christ is alone, surrounded only by nature. In terms of size, the Cross is an insignificant element in the composition, which is dominated by the rays of the setting sun, symbolizing the old pre-Christian world, as Friedrich admitted.49 By the same token, the mountain represented immovable faith, with the many fir trees being an allegory of hope. This was the first time anyone had produced a landscape intended as an altarpiece, and not everyone liked it. But Friedrich produced several other paintings in which crosses dominate a landscape, and whether occupied by Christian symbols or not, his landscapes are all spiritual entities first and foremost, “rife with mystical atmosphere.” His friendships with Romantic writers had convinced him, he said, that “art must have its source in man’s inner being; yet, it must be dependent on a moral or religious value.”50
His other famous painting is The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, showing the back of a man standing on top of a mountai
n, looking down on other mountaintops and clouds. Mysterious, but still technically faultless, this impressed Schinkel so much, it is said, that he gave up painting and turned to architecture.
Contemporary political events also lent themselves to Friedrich’s style. Thanks to the Napoleonic Wars he developed a fierce loathing of France and an intense passion for his own country. His support for the various German liberation movements was expressed in scenes showing French soldiers lost among inhospitable German mountains. In general, though, his aim was to depict “the experience of divinity in a secular world” and this is what he tried to show in his melancholy renderings of the ruins of Gothic churches or dramatic forest landscapes. In his work, humans are more often than not helpless against the forces of overwhelming nature—Kant’s idea of the sublime.
Friedrich’s fame peaked in 1820 when the Russian tsarevitch, Alexandra Feodorovna (born Princess Charlotte of Prussia), bought several of his pictures. In the wake of the Prussian restoration, his political attitudes brought about increasing official attacks on his art and, like Cornelius, he became an anachronism. He died in 1837, forgotten by all but a few.
His emotional style of painting was rediscovered in the early twentieth century when the German Expressionists, Max Ernst, and other surrealists saw him as a similar visionary. Many painters in America were influenced by him, including the artists of the Hudson River school, the Rocky Mountain school, and the New England Luminists. Together with other Romantic painters—like J. M. W. Turner or John Constable—he helped to make landscape painting a major genre in Western art.
