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Secessionist Beginnings: the background of Rudolf’s procession with various fictive frescoes,
The Brotherhood of St. Luke most prominently five scenes from the life of Joseph (Genesis 37).
The Old Testament figure functions as a biblical type and moral role
It all began once upon a time in Vienna, where two recently enrolled model for the venerable Christian ruler, who, himself stylized as the
art students met in 1806. It was a meeting of kindred spirits. archetype of the rex pious, appears on horseback below (Fig. 2).
The seventeen-old Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869) had At the same time, this interspersal of biblical and profane history
just arrived from Lübeck and Franz Pforr (1788–1812), an eighteen- asserts that history is never secular, at least not fully, but always
year-old orphan, from Frankfurt am Main. Both had come with high guided by divine intervention. Down to the conscious choice of a
hopes, bright eyed and idealistic. Both had found their aspirations brown horse, rather than Napoleon's white stallion, Pforr’s canvas
quickly crushed by the daily grind of their education. They wanted was a thinly veiled commentary on contemporary politics. However,
their imagination to take flight. Instead, endless hours of copying and if it was a thunderous battle cry, then not for content alone. Style,
suffocating technical drill bogged down their creativity and weighed too, was at stake, and the young man boldly broke with academic
on their soul. Maybe they would have coped if the matter had merely conventions. In a gesture of political opposition, Pforr renounced a
been a stifling curriculum. But it was not, not in their eyes. French-style Neoclassicism and defied contemporary expectations:
They sensed decadence, just like Schadow at the same time in gone are ideal nude bodies or accurately observed uniforms, gone are
far-away Berlin. At the Vienna Academy, they fumed, art lacked a trompe l’oeil depictions of figures in the round or the evocation of
higher purpose. Professors were all too busy courting pleasure-seeking three-dimensional space. All this yielded to an emphatically two-
patrons, reducing Art (which a capital A) to mere decoration and dimensional design woven together from individual shapes, which
mindless entertainment. Like true modernists, they thus declared are set apart by hard, decisive contours and a brazen juxtaposition
war on the Academy and their false Gods: on empty virtuosity and of heraldic local colors. Filled with a rich assembly of colorful
aesthetic straightjackets, on French Neoclassicism and Vienna’s late protagonists, the composition nonetheless refuses to provide a life-
Baroque sensibility, and, most critically, on society’s debauchery and like stage on which the narrative could play out. Instead, it inscribes
the dark forces of secularization. On their quest for the art of the everything and everybody into an arabesque pattern reminiscent of
future, the Romantic rebels soon fell in love with the simplicity, purity mosaics or medieval tapestries. What Pforr thus delivered was at
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and heartfelt piety of medieval art. From then on, their clarion call once emphatically anachronistic and radically modern: a self-conscious
was the rebirth of modern art from the spirit of the old masters. archaism that, for all its historicist flavor, embodies the signifiers of
modernity in art—flatness, abstract coloring and anti-illusionism.
In 1808, Franz Pforr delivered on this idea with a powerful
counterimage to the propagandistic celebrations of Napoleon For all its uniqueness, Pforr’s primitivism also reflected the zeitgeist.
(Fig. 2). Having just arrived in 1805, the Frankfurt native had It had its roots in a broader, pan-European yearning for reform that
immediately volunteered as a guard in the Viennese militia, with in the arts, fueled by a rebellion against Rococo excess, had fostered
disastrous results for his mental health. He suffered a nervous the search for archaic forms of expression. Archeology played a key
breakdown and remained prone to depression for the rest of his life. 4 role in the dramatic shift in taste that would ensue. The unearthing of
When he envisioned his first major history painting, it had to be a Pompeii and Herculaneum had fired up a craze for Greek vase painting,
counter image to Napoleon, the modern Anti-Christ. His choice fell which artists like John Flaxman (1755–1826) or Asmus Jacob Carstens

Fig.. 2 upon a thirteenth-century count, Rudolf I of Habsburg, who, later (1754–1798), ironically both sculptors most famous for their works on
elected King of the Germans and the founding-father of the Habsburg paper, would translate into a refined style of outline drawing and pure
dynasty, was legendary for his exceptional Christian piety and firm contour. When Overbeck and his cohort finally encountered Carstens’
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belief in the power of the holy cross. To assert the scene’s religious creations, they immediately felt a strong affinity to this “sentimental
underpinnings, Pforr placed a pictorial metalevel and introduced an classicism,” not only for its “primitivism” but anti-academic
image-within-an image: To that end, he decorated the townhouses in inflections. After all, when requested to resume his professorship after

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