Overbeck was to become in the succeeding years the principal exponent of revivalist painting in Rome. However, it was another artist, a new arrival from Germany, who was to provide the Nazarenes with a prestigious secular role. When Peter Cornelius (1783-1867) reached Rome in the autumn of 1811 he was already fully trained as an artist. From the time of his apprenticeship from 1795 to 1800 at the Düsseldorf Academy where his father was a teacher, his primary ambition had been to become a monumental painter. When he first came to Rome he was uncertain as to whether this aim would be best served by aligning himself with the classicists or with the ‘Christian Romantics’. However, he soon fell under the spell of the medieval camp, and in September 1812 he was formally received into the Brotherhood. — William Vaughan

Paintings

Drawings

Bibliography

Gossman, Lionel. Unwilling Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century. Victorian Web [Complete text in the Victorian Web].

Grewe, Cordula. Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2009.

Vaughan, William. German Romantic Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.


Last modified 27 September 2016