Page 8 - Gallery 19C Nazarenes Catalogues

THE NAZARENES, A BRIEF HISTORY (1809–1850)

CORDULA GREWE

The Nazarene Resurrection: Dürer and, above all, Jesus Christ and dressed up in the old German
The Birth of Romanticism in a Time of War and Crisis cloak as a sign of their patriotism. Who would have guessed in those
months, seeing the six pale teens roam the academy’s hallways, that
Europe was in flames. Napoleon had set his mind on conquering the within merely two decades this Romantic avant-garde would blossom
world, and nothing and nobody seemed able to stop him. In 1806, into a momentous movement with international reach: The Nazarenes.
Berlin had fallen, in 1809 Vienna, and in the decades to come French
painters would commemorate the victorious general and self-crowned
emperor riding, like a modern messiah, into the conquered cities
on a gleaming white stallion. Yet like all propaganda, those images
lied. Napoleon’s arrival had unleashed not jubilant excitement but
apocalyptic anxieties, not least among the young, who found themselves
haunted by a profound sense of a spiritual malaise. It certainly affected
Wilhelm Schadow (1788–1862), then but a burgeoning art student
recently enrolled at the Berlin Academy. In his memoirs, the famous
painter would look back at these years as a period of crisis and shudder
at “the hollow conception of life, the restless addiction to pleasure”
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that had ruled the Berlin of his youth. What had been even worse,
he remembered, had been the defamation of any kind of faith as
superstition, and Schadow went so far to see the devastation brought
upon Germany by the French as divine punishment for its Babylonian
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decadence. Art, the young art student became convinced, was a crucial
weapon in the necessary fight against such cultural decay; but for that
to happen art itself had to rise anew from the era’s amoral morass, like
a phoenix from the ashes. He was not the only one who felt that way.
Unbeknownst to the Berlin painter, a group of art students in Vienna
had also heard the divine calling to be the Vorkämpfer, the vanguard,
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of artistic rebirth and cultural regeneration. Like all youth culture
they dreamed big. In 1808, unperturbed by their lack of training and
outsider status, the small coterie began to meet three times every
fortnight, eager to leave behind the academic prison on their path to Fig. 1
a new art. Soon their appearance reflected their rebellious attitude,
they adopted a provocative hairdo modelled after Raphael, Albrecht

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