Page 18 - Gallery 19C Nazarenes Catalogues
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Fig. 9












            Fig. 8
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            The artists, on the other hand, were in dire need of work and a   Prussian politics aside, the cycle is most noteworthy for its remarkable   The Casino Massimo (1817–1827)             With the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, current
            greater visibility. Hence, the envoy couched the decoration of his   international influence. Seen across Europe as the rebirth of fresco                                               fears about a rapidly expanding Islamic empire bestowed further (if
            residency as a patriotic gesture. The penniless expatriates should be   painting, the Casa Bartholdy created a sensation when first unveiled,   The plaster of the Joseph murals was not even fully dry, when a second   unexpected) contemporary relevance to the cycle’s focus on the
            given an opportunity to show off their skills and, drawing attention   setting a key precedent for the pan-European obsession with murals   commission materialized, no less political but for different reasons (Fig.   medieval crusades.
            to themselves in Prussia, finally attract the official commissions   so characteristic of the later 19  century. And the attraction lasted.   9). In contrast to the upstart Bartholdy, the new patron, Carlo Massimo
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            they deserved. To that end, Bartholdy asked the artists in the winter   Until its dramatic transfer to the newly opened National Gallery   (1766–1827), was the head of one of Rome’s oldest aristocratic families.   Looking back, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld mused about the
            of 1816/1817, while in the middle of their project, to produce small-  in Berlin in 1886–87, the cycle remained an irresistible magnet for   Caught up in the excitement surrounding the Casa Bartholdy, the   significant challenge to compress entire Renaissance poems, and
            scale repetitions of their respective designs in watercolor (Fig. 8).   artists of all nationalities and all backgrounds. Smitten, the French   Marchese had decided to have the garden casino of his own city villa,   not just a single scene, into the space of four walls and a ceiling,
            In a second step, he then had the individual contributions mounted   writer Stendhal (1783–1842), himself one of the early and foremost   located near San Giovanni in Laterano, decorated as well, and in   moreover giving the many doors and windows that interrupted a
            together on one sheet and, for greater finish, surrounded by a trompe   practitioners of realism, remarked enthusiastically, “One of the   January 1817, he commissioned the young Germans to create three   harmonious flow. In the end, however, he successfully entwined the
            l’oil stone-frame with arabesque ornamentation. The handsome result   shortcomings of Parisian conceit is not to know this school.”  22  interconnected yet independent fresco cycles, one for each of the   “main idea”—which, in the case of Orlando furioso, meant the triumph
            was sent to the biannual exhibition of the Berlin academy, where it                                                               casino’s vaulted ground-floor rooms and each dedicated to a different   of Christianity—in the sumptuous design “like the thread in a lush
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            became an unexpected sensation. In fact, the reception exceeded                                                                   Italian poet: Dante, Tasso, Ariosto.   The subject matter catered to the   garland of flowers.”   In the end, the Renaissance epics, with their
            in enthusiasm and intensity anything patron or painters could have                                                                patriotism of a Roman aristocrat as much as it suited a group of   fusion of adventure narrative and Christian symbolism, proved an ideal
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            imagined.   Overnight, the Lukasbrüder had become a sought-after                                                                  religious revivalists.   The dominant motif of a campaign against   and inspiring source for the new kind of Romantic history painting
            household name, and Bartholdy, too, saw his hopes realized. His                                                                   unbelief—so forcefully personified in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and   the Nazarenes had envisaged. Stepping into the casino’s intimate
            costly art patronage paid off, furthered his social advancement,                                                                  Ariosto’s Orlando furioso by the crusaders’ battle against their Islamic   spaces, visitors find themselves propelled into the Nazarenes’ medieval
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            and even served as a nimble instrument of assimilation.   Leaving                                                                 adversary, the Saracens—spoke vividly to the Lukasbrüder’s own   vision with an unexpected physical intensity that, for once, privileges
                                                                                                                                              antirevolutionary, anti-Napoleonic agenda (Fig. 10).    an embodied experience over the all-seeing, transcendent eye.  26

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