Page 26 - Gallery 19C Nazarenes Catalogues

Fig. 18
Fig. 16

Fig. 17

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The allegorical references leave no doubt: the dream of the diasporic Jew.” The painting’s powerful emotional effect might also explain why Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Not that there hadn’t been plenty of attempts to lure him back! But
Jew to return to the homeland opens up to an eschatological vision Bendemann’s invention accomplished the unlikely feat to establish, the Elvis of Religious Romanticism he resisted even the most prestigious, the most tempting offers, as he
of the heavenly Jerusalem and with it a promise that destiny will almost overnight, a new iconography. Only a few years later, when clearly felt that he could live nowhere a more radical version of the
lead the Jews to enter God’s economy of salvation. The Christian Eugène Delacroix set out in 1842 to decorate the ceiling of the library If Düsseldorf, as a unified school, carried forth the Lukasbund’s torch Lukasbund’s original aesthetic than in the Eternal city. On Sundays he
God’s, that is. Searching for spiritual depth, Bendemann imbued in the Palais Bourbon, he chose Bendemann’s motif, the Captive Jews insofar as its collective spirit came closest to the original workshop invited the world in, and as the years progressed, his studio became
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Düsseldorf’s soul-painting with a theological subtlety worthy of an in Babylon, as one of his own. Virtually overnight, the 1832 canvas ideal, Overbeck and Cornelius, the fraternity’s priest and master, something of a tourist mecca. On those days, the atelier was always
Overbeck. This was important for the artist, who rejected renaming had made the twenty-one-year-old Bendamann a shooting star on the continued to stand out as the movement’s most prominent figureheads, jam-packed, the crowd always colorful, and not everybody paid
his picture Mourning Jews. His refusal of classical pictorial rules came European art scene. Fate and the vagaries of taste have eclipsed his whom, the previously mentioned Reverend J.M. Sherwood, like endless attention. Serious art lovers brushed shoulders with “blasé … idlers
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with a wealth of narrative pictorial motifs, and in this, his pictorial fame, and yet, his art lives on as a powerful presence that still speaks to art historians before and after, idealized as complementary opposites. from all nations,” young German artists mingled with old French
system went clearly beyond Lessing’s. Each detail is significant, an the modern viewer. Cornelius is celebrated as a reincarnation of Michelangelo, a mighty generals, “ponderous Russians ogled large-footed English ladies,”
allegorical gesture that must be recognized and its meaning decoded. painter-hero and the most Germanic among the Nazarenes, whose while clergymen and even the Pope tried to avoid “the unavoidable of
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The elegiac mood thus served a very different purpose than in true nature is captured in bold outline in his Apocalypse, as a series of Italy, purse-jangling Englishmen and inquisitive blondes.” Amidst
Lessing’s depiction of his grieving Royal couple. It was less “effect” cartoons for a Campo Santo in Berlin which was never executed (Fig. the chaos, Overbeck stood unfazed and patiently explicated his work.
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than rhetorical device, a means to address the viewer directly and 17). Overbeck, in contrast, is hailed as a modern-day Fra Angelico, His unflinching beliefs and proselytizing fervor, however, split his
thereby challenge him to reflect upon the picture’s deeper meaning. an ascetic painter-monk, whose pictorial language was unrivalled in its audience. His admirers saw in him a painter-prophet, who, when he
purity, piety and true Christian spirit. Tellingly, when Sherwood had walked in solitude along the silent cloister, had “thought pictures”
Not least the long-lasting afterlife of Bendemann’s vision testifies to pick but one illustration, he chose a print after Overbeck’s Christ flooding his mind, “and, as with the prophet of old, so with the
to the emotional pull of his Captive Jews in Babylon. Despite its overt Blessing Little Children (Fig. 18). By the time, the American monthly prophet-painter in our day, would the exclamation arise, ‘Speak, Lord,
conversion rhetoric, it quickly became an icon of Jewish identity until published its series on German art, the painter had only four more years for thy servant heareth.’” His detractors, in contrast, decried the
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today, featured at the Fifth Zionist congress in 1901 or evoked in 2020 to live. But then, in 1865, he was already a living legend. Of the originary artist’s monk-persona as a travesty, as the masquerade of an untimely
when calling for “Ending Exile with the Prophetic Voice of the Diasporic cohort, only Overbeck had remained in Rome. reactionary, who, hardened to the point of physical incorporeality,

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