Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (review)

Although it is prolix, sometimes repetitious, and would have benefited from the attention of a good editor, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism is an immensely learned, carefully argued, and beautifully illustrated book. It should quickly win recognition as a major contribution in English or in any language to modern understanding of the work of the once-celebrated “Nazarene” artists of early-to mid-nineteenth century Germany. Cordula Grewe approaches the work of these deeply committed Christian artists not only as they themselves would have wanted, but in the only way appropriate—that is, not with a sensibility shaped by exposure to modern “autonomous” art, nor from the angle of pure form or painterly quality, but rather with an eye to deciphering meanings and reading complex compositions designed to provoke reflection and meditation in the viewer.

Nazarene art, as Grewe demonstrates, is not primarily representational. The artists’ aim was not to provide a vivid picture of historical events, but to induce the viewer to recognize the actions and figures in their drawings and paintings as signs to be interpreted. Ultimately the image was expected to stimulate a significant spiritual experience in the viewer such as a transformation or a conversion. In some cases—especially in the work of Johann Friedrich Overbeck, one founder of the movement and arguably the artist who remained truest to its original inspiration—the images themselves include features that point to their character as constructions to be “read,” rather than simple representations. This self-consciousness or self-reflectiveness, Grewe argues convincingly, is what defines Nazarene art as “romantic” and “modern,” rather than a simple revival of an earlier style of painting.

For the author of Painting the Sacred, the approach adopted has clearly entailed not only deep familiarization with the texts of the Old and the New Testaments, which provided the thematic material for most Nazarene art, but also an impressive immersion in Christian and, more specifically, Catholic theology and liturgy, as well as close study of the political, theological, and general ideological context in which the art of the Nazarenes arose and evolved. Interpictorial allusion—which emerges from Grewe’s study as infinitely more sophisticated than is commonly believed—also plays an important role in the work of encoding and decoding, as, for instance, in the 1817 fresco Joseph Sold into Slavery that Overbeck made for the Casa Bartholdy in Rome (now in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin). Whereas the artist adapts the basic structure of this scene and many of its details from Raphael’s representation of it in the Vatican Loggia, he turned to a different part of the Vatican cycle, the Baptism of Christ, for the figure of Joseph himself, who stands out as the only nude figure (except for a white loincloth). By modeling his Joseph after Raphael’s Christ, Overbeck introduces a typological motif characteristic of Nazarene art—Joseph as a prefiguration of Christ. Grewe’s sharp and experienced eye for specifically pictorial elements of composition, color, and decoration produces detailed and brilliantly illuminating readings of many individual works.

Painting the Sacred also brings out tensions within the art of the Nazarenes and explores how these work themselves out in four of the movement’s leading artists—Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Wilhelm Schadow, and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld—to each of whom, in succession, a major section of the book is dedicated. Grewe focuses in each case on works that allow her to highlight both the essential character of the Nazarene project and the tensions inherent in it. A Nazarene artwork, for instance, should ideally be open and capable of accommodating multiple references and meanings, both private and public, and thus of drawing the viewer into it and stimulating an intensely personal and individual engagement with it. Such an engagement is the condition of its effectiveness as a work of religious art. At the same time, given the Nazarenes’ conviction that art...