Page 17 - Gallery 19C Nazarenes Catalogues

Creating an International Sensation: The Casa Bartholdy (1816/1817)
The Lukasbund’s Revival of Fresco Painting
The driving force behind the Lukasbund’s preoccupation with this
“I am convinced,” Schnorr von Carolsfeld declared in the foreword of challenging medium was Peter Cornelius (Fig. 6). Filled with patriotic
his Bible in Pictures, “that the fine arts have the vocation and the means pride in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, he had singled out fresco
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to participate in the education and formation of Man.” This statement painting as “the most powerful—I would like to say—the infallible
succinctly summarizes a driving principle of the Lukasbund and the remedy to give German art the basis for its direction to a new great age,
Nazarene movement at large. Its primary target was none other than worthy of the spirit of the nation.” New schools would blossom across
das Volk (the people), and, inspired by an idealized vision of the Middle the German states, Cornelius predicted, and “pour their truly exulted
Ages, they wanted to embed art again in the fabric of society. Art should art with effective power into the heart of the nation, into the full life of
once more take its rightful place as the teacher of the people, praying to man.” They would “tell the new generation in sweet color language of
them once more from the pages of their Bibles and, as Peter Cornelius that old love, old faith,” and thus “the old strength of our forefathers
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put it in 1814, “from the walls of our high cathedrals, our peaceful would be reborn, and the Lord … again reconciled with his people.”
chapels and solitary cloisters, from our town halls and warehouses Of course, Franz Pforr had already realized a similar vision in his
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and markets.” Although painting was central to the Nazarenes’ Entry of Rudolf I of Habsburg, and now, in 1816, the brethren had a
production, they wanted to reach beyond the confines of aristocratic chance to realize this vision in plaster and on a large scale. Despite
patronage or the bourgeois world of Salon and art unions. Painting, they technical inexperience and financial hardship, they took on the daunting
believed, offered only limited resources for the dissemination of ideas with a dogged dedication, a dedication fueled not least by a belief in
and images. Thus, they explored other media, pursuing two directions the medium’s innate moral qualities as a communal effort painted
of strikingly different character: the monumentality of fresco painting for the people and untainted by the logic of Salon and art market.
and the intimacy of the book. The Nazarenes’ successful conquest of The subject matter of the group’s first collaborative mural project was
th
19 -century visual culture thus sprang from a twofold engagement with entirely their own, and retold the biblical story of Joseph, and one
a programmatic revival of mural decoration as public art, on the one of twelve tribes of Israel and known as “the righteous one” (Fig. 7).
hand, and the systematic exploration of modern print culture, on the Originally, the patron, Jakob Ludwig Salomon Bartholdy (1779–1825),
Fig. 6 other. If the artists treasured printed matter for its capacity to supply had had a much simpler decoration in mind, perhaps a mixture of
affordable images in high quantities for mass dissemination, they hailed arabesques and landscapes, when he had offered the sitting room
mural decoration for its resistance to circulation. When the Third of his apartments in the Palazzo Zuccari, then better known as the
Republic launched an initiative in 1874 to finally complete the interior Casa Bartholdy, to the artists. But the Prussian envoy in Rome was
decoration of the Pantheon, these arguments took center stage once easily convinced otherwise, and the success proved him right. Much
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again. “Reuniting in a single location production and consumption,” could be said about the cycle’s complex structure and quintessentially
Marc Gotlieb has summed up the debates surrounding the Pantheon Romantic translation of text into image, including the innovative
project, “mural painting presented itself as an ancient, pre-circulatory, use of allegorical lunettes; but it might suffice here to point out the
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immobile format that was essentially and naturally public.” The commission’s political implications and artistic legacy. Both Bartholdy
French did not like to admit it, but the genealogy of the murals thus and the artists were in a difficult position, if for utterly different reasons.
painted, like L’Éducation et La Vie Pastorale de Saint Geneviève by Puvis As a converted Jew, who had been sent by the Prussian government
de Chevannes (1824–1898), leads us straight back to Rome, where to the Eternal city with a clear political-economic mission but no
the Lukasbund achieved its international breakthrough with a much- official diplomatic status, Bartholdy needed to assert himself via the
discussed fresco cycle dedicated to the Old Testament figure of Joseph.
establishment back home and the diplomatic corps in Rome.

Fig. 7
Image to be replaced
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