Page 18 - Gallery 19C Nazarenes Catalogues

Fig. 9

Fig. 8
Fig. 10

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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