Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (review)

During the past decade—in essays like her interpretation of Wilhelm Schadow’s oil painting Mignon as an allegory of romantic art in Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik (ed. Walter Hinderer [Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002] 307–43)—Cordula Grewe has been working to counteract the all-too-common assessment of the late romantic “Nazarene” painters as derivative, second-rate emulators of renaissance religious art. In that regard, her present monograph will be instructive not only for those colleagues in art history for whom the only viable directions in European modern art are developments in France or Great Britain; this incisive, elegantly written, well organized, and handsomely illustrated study also can serve as a model of how to integrate scholarship from fields as diverse as literature, history, theology, and gender and Jewish studies in mutually illuminating ways.

Grewe understands the artists associated with the “Lukasbrüder” (Brotherhood of St. Luke) founded in 1809 by Franz Pforr and Johann Friedrich Overbeck as typically romantic in that they not only regarded nature and (salvation) history as hieroglyphs in need of deciphering, but also brought into their work the same self-reflective element more commonly associated with literary romanticism. In Overbeck’s The Raising of Lazarus (1808; pp. 30–33), for example, the artist includes portraits of himself and Pforr as rapt witnesses to the miracle transpiring before their eyes. Both in her introduction and this first chapter, entitled “The Great Code of Art: Religious Revival and the Rebirth of Pictorial Meaning,” Grewe underscores the missionary impulse behind these artistic strategies; ultimately, artists like Pforr, Overbeck, Schadow, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and Ferdinand Olivier wanted to inspire in the viewer not only an informed understanding, but also an emulation of the “religious revival” that features in so many of their works.

This proselytizing impulse led to resistance by contemporaries such as Goethe and Johann Heinrich Meyer in their polemic “Neu-deutsche religiös-patriotische Kunst” (1817); it also has caused modern scholars uncomfortable with a discussion of religion in modern art to interpret works such as Pforr’s Sulamith and Maria (1811), the last painting he completed before his death in 1812 at the age of twenty-four, as an allegory of Pforr’s friendship with (and repressed desire for) Overbeck. Another attempt to make Sulamith und Maria more palatable for twentieth-century viewers and critics was to focus on formalistic analyses of the diptych’s contrast of an Italianate landscape behind Sulamith to the old German interior in the room where Maria sits and muses; this harmonious contrast then was understood as being indicative of Overbeck’s and Pforr’s respective idealization of the Italian and Northern Renaissance that later finds expression in the canvas by Overbeck that we have come to know as Italia and Germania (1828). While not denying the validity of such readings, Grewe also contends—convincingly, in this reviewer’s judgment—that a typological reading of Sulamith and Maria in the context of both medieval mystical and eighteenth-century literal readings of the Song of Songs adds immensely to the richness of Pforr’s canvas.

Both in “Sulamith and Maria: Erotic Mariology and the Cult of Friendship” (61–98) and the chapters that follow, Grewe links in-depth interpretation of one particular artistic project with a framing of the work(s) in question within a contemporary context—in this case the burgeoning fascination with the figure of Maria in the works of romantic writers such as Novalis, Tieck, and Brentano. At the same time, these chapters are not hermetically sealed off from one another. The question in chapter two as to whether erotic fulfillment has a proper place in Christian women’s upbringing is amplified by the succeeding chapter’s analysis of an 1841 oil on canvas work by Wilhelm Schadow in the context of “Pietas and Vanitas: Gender, Moralization, and Allegory” (99–148). Here, the explicit allegorizing of female figures sets limits to the fluidity of interpretative levels...