Patrick Bade
The Glories of German Romanticism

Patrick Bade - The Glories of German Romanticism

- Right, Romanticism with a capital R. A lot of people are rather vague about what it is. It’s the term is used in very different ways. Well, I’m certainly not using it tonight in the way of, say, a Hollywood Romantic movie or comedy. I’m talking about a movement that develops in the second half of the 18th century, and it continues through the first half of the 19th century. So it lasts really for the best part of a century. And it’s a revolution. It’s contemporary with other revolutions, the American and French Revolutions, right up to the Revolution of 1848, the Industrial Revolution. And it’s a revolution in sensibility. It’s a change in the way that we see the world, the way we feel about the world. And many people see it as the beginning of modernity. That’s an international movement. But to start with the two most important countries in getting it going are Britain and Germany. Tonight, of course, I’m concentrating on Germany. It’s of course a very complex movement that encompasses philosophy, literature, music, and the visual arts. In Germany, of course, the giant figure of German Romanticism is Goethe. And these two very famous portraits of him as a young man in Italy in the 1780s made by his friends Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, So Goethe is a name of course everybody’s familiar with. And I have to say that British people and Americans, to some extent, are extremely parochial when it comes to literature. So even well educated British people, perhaps I shouldn’t speak for America, are probably not very familiar with Goethe’s work, except perhaps in the form of operas inspired by his work or lieder songs by Schubert, Schumann and so on.

Of course, I know there have been many in this audience who come from a middle European background, and I think of our dear friend Anita Delaskavalfish who at age 97 is still capable of reeling off great screeds of Goethe by heart over the lunch table. It’s very different, actually, the other way around that Germans, well-educated Germans are extremely familiar with the work of Shakespeare who was discovered in both Germany and France around this time, and made into a kind of honorary Romantic hero. A very famous translations by Schlegel and Tieck which you can see here. And I mean for Germans, Shakespeare is in effect a German Romantic. And I remember when I first went to live in Germany in the 1970s, and I was adopted by an elderly German couple, a . He was a member of the Stauffenberg family. His first cousin was the man who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944. A very cultured man, very francophone. And I remember he once said to me, of course, you know, the English, the Englander, as they always call the British, they have never really produced great writers like the French. I was raised in Edinburgh, and I said, well, Shakespeare maybe? And he said, Shakespeare Englander. They’re so familiar with Shakespeare that they hardly even remember, of course, that he’s not German anymore. Well, as part of Romanticism is a new role for the artist in society. He’s no longer the lackey of aristocrats and princes and church prelates working at their behest.

He is now a kind of priest, prophet, somebody who is in a way separate from the rest of society. And we see this in two images of Caspar David Friedrich. Oh, another thing I wanted to say before we get to this is that, of course, outside of Germany, people know about Goethe, even if they don’t really know his work, And of course they, anybody who is even remotely civilised knows about German music of the Romantic period. We all know the work of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and onto Felix Mendelssohn, the great giants of German Romanticism in music. Painting is a another matter. I think that, I hope to be able to show you over this lecture and one I’m doing in a couple of weeks time, that there are really marvellous German painters in the late 18th and well through the 19th century. But this has been a traditionally very neglected, certainly in Britain, the first time that there was an exhibition of Caspar David Friedrich the most important of the painters I’m talking about today, was not in, that didn’t happen till the 1970s. There was a show at the Tate Galleria. I remember it was, well for me personally, it was a tremendous revelation. I’d never seen his work before that. And in fact, no museum in Britain managed to acquire a painting by Friedrich until the following decade, in the 1980s, the National Gallery bought a painting, which I’ll show you later. Here we see Friedrich in a self-portrait with very staring, intense eyes. He seems to be looking straight through you actually, even rather than at you. And you can see the way he’s dressed is well, he’s got this, a very different appearance from any 18th century artist with his tousled hair and his shaggy beard. He looks like somebody from the ancient world and even the way he’s draped the material around his shoulders looks more like a toga than it does early 19th century costume.

And on the right hand side, we have a portrait of him by one of his pupils, an artist called Kersting, which is also very revealing. Shows him in his studio. And you can see the studio is completely bare. There is nothing in it except the chair and the easel and the canvas. And also I think significantly you can see the view the window is there, it has to be there to let in the light. But there’s a shutter in the lower part of the window that blocks the outside world. And I think this is making a point that the inspiration of the artist has to come actually as much from inside his head as it does from the world around him. Here are a couple of other Romantic portraits of artists, a self-portrait by Heinrich Fussli or Henry Fuseli he’s known in England on the left-hand side. And a portrait of Delacroix by Gericault. Again, the same in intensity, the same gaze that seems to stare right through you and a strong sense of the artist in a life. The word , it’s not completely translatable in English. Inner is about as near as you can get. Again, Fuseli on the right hand side and a little known German Romantic artist called Victor Emil Janssen, a very startling, unimaginable really, well, actually not quite unimaginable. ‘Cause as I’ve shown you before, there are nude self-portraits by Durer. But they remain very, very exceptional until this period. So this is an artist who’s intensely staring into the mirror as he draws himself, but he’s stripping himself naked before your eyes. And this is of course, something we find in later much, we’re 100 years later here on the middle and left, right hand side.

We’re into the period of expressionism where artists, again, are, you can say it’s a continuation of Romanticism. Where very much, Gerstl in the middle, and Egon Schiele on the right are stripping themselves naked in front of you. Another major innovation with Romanticism is a new attitude to nature. A much, much more intense engagement with nature. And I, for comparison here, I’ve got a mid 18th century picture by Boucher, very pretty, very chocolate box, could be a set for an operetta. Very unreal. You don’t really feel that he’s engaged with nature at all. And he made the notorious statement that he thought that nature was too green and badly lit. So he’s lit that as though it’s a stage set. On the right hand side, a minor British Romantic that’s John Martin, but a scene inspired by Byron of Manfred on the Jungfrau. So nature is no longer pretty. It has a terrible frightening beauty as the artist teeters on the brink of the precipice. So nature is taken very, very much more seriously. Important document for this is the early autobiographical novel of Werther, “Die Lieden Des Jungen Werthers” published, as you can see, in 1774. And there’s a famous scene in that where he addresses nature and thrills to a sense of oneness with nature and actually throws himself on the ground to embrace nature. Not something I think anybody would’ve ever done before the Romantic period. And you can see here are two paintings with only really a decade apart, just over a decade apart.

It’s Stubbs, the end of the 1760s. You’ve got a very polite, nicely dressed Rococo lady reading a book on a bench in a park. And then a few years later you have Wright of Derby painting Sir Brooke Boothby and he’s getting down and dirty with nature, a bit like Werther. He’s thrown himself on the ground to really become one with nature. So Romanticism opens up a very great period in landscape painting, particularly I would say in Germany and Britain. Three greatest landscape painters of Romantic period are Caspar David Friedrich, he’s born 1774. Turner is born the next year, 1775, he’s in the middle, and John Constable born 1776. You have these three great painters born in consecutive years. And you know, it’s very much, I mean, whether they were aware of one another, well, of course Turner and Constable were very aware of one another, but I’m not sure if they were aware of Caspar David Friedrich or he was aware of them, But there are many parallels. It’s really a question of zeitgeist, the spirit of the time. This is an extraordinary painting by Caspar David Friedrich, So original, so radical, what a radical picture. It’s called The Monk by the Sea. It’s painted in 1808 to '09. One critic when it was first exhibited, said it gave you the sensation of having your eyelids ripped off. You know, this sense of the vastness of the ocean. This is a very Romantic thing, of course, the incredible power of nature, the insignificance of man in compared to nature. But what is so radical and revolutionary about this picture is its emptiness. The fact that you do not, there was apparently originally going to be a boat in it, but that was painted out.

Compare it with these two earlier seascapes, but a Dutch one, Willem van de Velde on the left, where the ocean is absolutely full of boats, the boats are really the interest. And the Claude, Claude Lorrain, top right hand side, where very typically you have framing motifs, you know, to round off the composition. Of course Friedrich does completely does away with these. There are some comparable images by Turner. This is a sketch by Turner, of course, this is not a painting. He didn’t exhibit this. Friedrich exhibited The Monk by the Sea. But there’s a similar sense of vastness and emptiness of the ocean landscape. When I was a student at The Courtauld in the early 1970s, this book came out, Robert Rosenblum, “Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: from Friedrich to Rothko.” I read it when it came out, and for me, and I think for an enormous number of people, it was a revelation as a student at The Courtauld studying 19th century, that was what I was studying, if it wasn’t French, it didn’t count. People were really not aware of German painting or Northern European and the importance it had in the early development of modern art. So you can see the point he’s making, of course, that there is a direct line from Friedrich to Rothko. For Friedrich, and I think for Turner, and certainly for Constable, nature represents God, God in nature. A landscape can be a religious painting. And in 1808, Friedrich painted this picture, which which is called the Tetschen Altar piece, which was intended to go in a church on an altar.

There were some people at the time who were scandalised by this. One critic, said it’s an impertinence for a landscape painting to seek its way into a church and to crawl upon the altar. Here’s a closer, closer view of the Tetschen Altar of Caspar David Friedrich. Now he’s an artist who has been, I think, very interpreted by a lot of particularly German art historians, sometimes very over interpreted. And I think this is dangerous, because I think you, by over interpreting pictures, wanting to explain every detail, in a very, this means this, this means this, this means this, maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But I think you risk killing the poetry of the picture by trying to explain it in this way. Friedrich himself usually avoided any kind of specific interpretation. And about this particular picture, which is called the Cross in the Baltic, he said, for some this will be an image, for some this will be consolation, and for others it will just be a cross on a rock. And he left it at that, it’s up to you. In a way, you have to feel it. You shouldn’t really have to have it explained to you. But nevertheless, there are obvious painting, like this painting, this is actually the only painting by Friedrich in a British collection. It was sold at Christie’s in Monaco in the late 1980s. And I remember it very well because one of my students, ex-students was working in the auction house, and she actually rang me in my office at Christie’s and she said, guess what I’m holding in my other hand. And it was this little painting by Friedrich. And it’s called the Cross in the Mountains.

And you can see that it clearly has a didactic and specific religious meaning. You have a man who is disabled, he’s walking with a crutch and he’s sitting against a rock and he’s thrown away the crutch and he’s praying to God, so to Jesus. So there’s a pretty obvious meaning to that. The other interesting thing, I think, is the analogy that Friedrich is clearly making between the misty Gothic church in the distance and the shape of the fir tree. Course there was a legend that was widely believed at the time. This is the time when you’ve got the Gothic revival, Gothic, which had been utterly despised since the, neglected since the Middle Ages, since the end of the Middle Ages, since there’s the Renaissance. But there’s a revival of interest in the Gothic and mediaeval, everything mediaeval in the Romantic period. And one of the theories of the time was that the Gothic arch was discovered by somebody noticing that two trees falling against one another, supported each other, creating a natural Gothic arch. And I think this painting by Constable of great Gothic church of Salisbury Cathedral is making a clear reference to that idea. This is a little painting by Samuel Palmer, a wonderful if perhaps minor, I don’t know, minor, what that means really in this context. He’s a really, a wonderful painter for a short time. Samuel Palmer painting this idyllic view of piety and worship again with the Gothic church framed by trees creating an arch.

And again, Friedrich on the left and Samuel Palmer on the right. So Medievalism, it’s a very big thing. And again, it really, it starts in England and Germany, well in England, of course, going right back to the 1760s with the creation of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill is really the first building of the Gothic revival. And then this very influential book that came out in 1796 by Wackenroder Tieck, with the wonderful title, “Herzensergiessungen Eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders” which means the heart outpourings of an art loving monk. And of course, Friedrich medievalism is evident in the many pictures he did of ruined Gothic churches. Trees, I want to stay with trees for a moment. And so this tree, it takes on a kind of monumentality, a significance, even a sense of defiance, I don’t know, or even of tragedy, whatever you want to read into it really, by the placing of the tree centrally in the composition. And the other thing is, I mean, certainly in that sense, this is quite an abstract picture. But in another sense, this is a very real tree. I’m sure this image is based on a tree that existed and there are wonderful drawings by Friedrich that show he went out in, as well as, sitting in his studio and putting up the shutters and painting for imagination, he also went out into nature and he made studies from nature. And I’d like to, this is very different from the way that trees were painted in earlier periods in the Baroque or the Rococo. And for comparison, just for fun really, I thought I’d give you this is a tree painted by Claude in the 17th century from a mythological painting.

It’s called Landscape with Narcissus. And Ruskin, who of course, great supporter of Romanticism and the greatest supporter of Turner, he was absolutely disgusted by Claude’s tree. He said, “this is not a tree, this is a boa constrictor with a feather duster attached.” He felt that Claude had not sufficiently studied nature. That was not something he could have said about Friedrich. And again, this is for comparison, Wonderful Tree by Samuel Palmer. And, as well as, I mean these are trees that if you met them on a country walk, you would recognise them, you’d know them immediately. But they’re also trees that seem to be invested with emotion, human emotion really, I think, well both of these trees. And again, for comparisons this is Constable on the right hand side and very definitely a specific tree that he encountered and he made a portrait of a tree. These trees are also, these are trees that I think are imbued with, with a nationalist sentiment. I noticed from the title of William’s lecture that’s coming up on Wednesday that he’s going to be talking about the birth of nationalism in the 19th century, particularly associated with the 1848. In Germany, I mean there wasn’t, Germany of course, wasn’t a nation and didn’t become one until 1870. It was divided into lots of little electorates, dukedoms, principalities. But the invasion of the French, Napoleon’s invasion, the French occupation of Germany, was a tremendous boost to nationalist sentiment.

And that is clearly the meaning of this picture, which shows a French soldier, a chasseur, lost in the vast German forest. And I think this is really a reflection on the end of the Napoleonic Empire in 1813, Battle of the Nations outside Leipzig, the final defeat of, well not the final, but the penultimate defeat of Napoleon. More trees here. This is a painting, this is actually rather exceptional in Friedrich’s work, and it has an interesting title. It’s called Picture in Remembrance of Johann Emanuel Bremer, dates from 1817. But we don’t really know much about Bramer, who he was, whether he was a friend of Friedrich or whether this was a commissioned picture. But he was somebody who died, obviously, and we have this sense of division between life and the afterlife. So you have this fence and the gate and the afterlife is what’s on the other side of the gate after we die. And in the distance we see this city with a skyline dominated by Gothic spires. And again, you’ve got the comparison between the trees and the tall Gothic buildings. So Friedrich is certainly, he’s a very religious artist. I think his religious feelings permeate everything he did. And he is somebody who is very preoccupied, I think, with the afterlife. And I think that’s what this picture is really all about. Where again, you see the distant city like Xanadu or Oz or something, gleaming towers in the distance on the other side of the hill, and the crows, which may well be symbolic of death.

So this is a fairly constant image in his work is the distant city is of course the heavenly Jerusalem. The heavenly Jerusalem, which is referred to so often in Christian iconography and philosophy, the place we hope or they hope they will be after they die. And this, I find this a very, very incredibly poignant image of the young boy rushing over the hill in a way towards the afterlife. And this too, there are many picture, of course sea pictures I did talk about them specifically in a recent talk about the Baltic. But what you very often find in these pictures is that you’ll see people seen from behind, and I’ll talk a bit about that in a minute, looking out to sea, and there’ll always, there’ll be a boat for each, corresponding with each person coming towards us. These are the boats coming into harbour as we will be when we reach the end of our lives. And again, there’s a lot to be interpreted in or read into this picture. And I think it’s a painting about the ideal relationship as a man of a man and a woman as would’ve been, it would’ve been understood at the time, with the woman in both a dependent and a supportive role to her husband, seen from behind, again, looking towards the moon. And so this painted in Dresden, and this painted in Shoreham in Kent by Samuel Palmer. Very interesting parallels, I think, between these two artists who are highly unlikely to have ever come across each other’s work. Another very famous image, of course, of Caspar David Friedrich, called Sea of Clouds, a man who’s climbed a mountain. It’s often said that nobody really climbed mountains for the view until the Romantic period.

There is, let me see, there’s a Renaissance poet, I’m trying to think who it is, I think it might be Petrarch, who described climbing a mountain. But it’s once you get to the, before the Romantic period, mountains were usually places for most people to avoid. And if you wanted to go to Italy from Northern Europe, obviously the preference would be to go by sea. But if you couldn’t do that, then the mountains were something you had to get through probably in a coach with the shutters down shuttering. And then you’d sigh with relief when you got out the other side in Italy. So it was a remarkable thing in 1803, when Turner, when there was a gap in Napoleonic wars, and the English artist Turner took the opportunity to visit continental Europe for the first time. Went to Paris of course, and then rushed off to Switzerland. So for the Romantics, Switzerland is a go-to place, as is of course Scotland, rather than just a place to get through, to find somewhere nicer on the other side. So here is a man who’s climbed a mountain to the peak to enjoy the splendour of the awesome view. A more modest view perhaps, this painting. Friedrich married quite late to a much younger woman. And this painting, although we don’t know for sure, is assumed to be a portrait of his wife, again, seen from behind. What’s kind of intriguing here is of course we don’t really know what she, we can’t see what she is seeing. And this painting from very right towards the end of his life.

And again, you’ll find that there is actually a boat of the right size corresponding with every figure in this. And again, the boat’s coming towards us as we look out. And that this is Friedrich, it’s often again assumed to be a self-portrait, the older man with the grey hair seen from behind to the left of the group. An exceptional painting and a very famous painting is this one, The Wreck of the Hope, that was a ship called The Hope that was destroyed by Arctic ice, and this was a disaster that actually happened. 'Cause the Romantics, all the Romantics are absolutely fascinated by disasters, particularly natural disasters. And it’s kind of ironic that here we are, by this time, 'cause it we’re in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, which was the beginning of all the problems from which we’re suffering now, you know, climate wise, this was the time where man for the first time was seriously raping nature through factories, through pollution, through all kind of commercial exploitation. And it’s interesting that I think the Romantic artists, particularly Friedrich and Turner were probably very aware that this was eventually going to end very badly. But all altogether, of course, Romantics love a good disaster. I sometimes think these Romantic paintings are like, you know, the fashion for all those disaster movies there were in the 1970s, you know, with the end of the world or towering inferno or dreadful floods or whatever. So here is Friedrich top left, Turner, a very young Turner on the left, inspired by his first trip across the channel to France. This is Calais Pier, the sense of the tremendous power of nature, the insignificance, the helplessness of man in their little boats being tossed around on the sea.

And this absolutely amazing picture by Turner, bottom right hand kind, which has a wonderful, actually almost funny title, really. Well not funny in that it’s a painting that it’s dealing with the horrors of the slave trade, where as you know, millions of people were transported across the Atlantic in the most hideous and appalling conditions. And many fell ill and many died. And the full title of this painting is Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming On" to add another layer of drama to the image. The other very famous shipwreck, of course, of the Romantic period is the Gericault, The Raft of Medusa. These paintings are more or less contemporary. Again I think pretty well impossible, that the artist knew about each other’s works. But they are very, very interesting parallels, even actually in the composition. It’s almost the same composition in reverse, isn’t it, With this dynamic diagonal leading up to a climax. And I think both paintings are meant to make you think about the human condition and the fragility of the human condition. But one contemporary said about the Gericault, it’s all of France, giving it a more nationalist interpretation. It’s on the raft. But I think that’s, even that’s too narrow an interpretation. It’s all of humanity, which is on that raft by Gericault. And the Friedrich is a similar kind of meditation on the fragility of humanity. Now moving on from Friedrich, he had some pupils and some very minor followers, but he is pretty well a one-off. The artist who probably comes close to him is the Norwegian… I’m going to switch some light on.

And oh, of course you can’t see me, I’m in the dark, and I can’t see my notes. So excuse me while I switch a light on. So this is the Norwegian artist, Johan Christian Dahl. And he’s a generation younger than Friedrich, but he came to… I’m including him in this lecture on German Romanticism, 'cause he actually spent most of his life in Germany. Something’s buzzing and I’m not quite sure what that is. And he arrived in Dresden in 1818, and he befriended Friedrich. And quite a lot we know about Friedrich actually comes from him. And he actually describes going with him for a walk in the moonlight. And he’s another artist of course, a lot of his best paintings are moonlight scenes. This is Dresden by Moonlight. And like all the Romantics, of course, he’s very engaged with nature and he’s a wonderful painter of skies. And you know, again, before Romanticism you could say that most artists painted generic clouds. They didn’t really look carefully at clouds. They had a formula for painting clouds. But these, to me, this looks like these are clouds that he’s actually observed. These are portraits of clouds.

And in that respect, of course, he’s very similar to Constable, who is a great painter of clouds. That’s Constable on the right hand side. Now we move on to the artist who is, I suppose, the second most famous after Friedrich among the German Romantics. This is Philip Otto Runge, very short lived. I think the think there’s a very interesting correlation between different art movements and longevity. I mean, mostly impressionist, as you know, lived to a ripe old age. Renoir and Monet into their eighties. I think it has to, well, you could put it down to being in the fresh air and living healthy lives. But I think it probably has to do also with their attitude and their view of the world and their relationship with it. And Romantics are notorious for dying young. Just think of it, you know, Chopin, Schubert, Keats, Shelly, Byron. In fact, there’s something slightly indignified about becoming a middle-aged or an elderly Romantic. Well, Philipp Otto Runge, he lived the age of 33. And there’s also this sense with many Romantics, you get it with Gericault and Delacroix, to a certain extent, of having impossible ambitions that being so ambitious, wanting to do something so great that it could never possibly be realised. And I think there’s, it makes me think of Keates saying, “yes, sung melodies are sweet, but unsung melodies,” those things that you actually aspire to but really can’t do, “are even sweeter.”

So a highly intelligent man, very literate man, had correspondence with Goethe and many other important Romantics. And he wanted, this as you can see, is somewhat strange, but nevertheless to a certain extent, conventional religious painting of a familiar New Testament subject, which is the rest on the flight to Egypt. But actually he wants to replace traditional Christian iconography with some kind of almost pantheistic symbolism in nature. So he made a very fascinating version of this picture in which the figures are replaced by natural forms and trees, as you can see here. Even the upraised armour of little Jesus becomes a root or a part of a plant. His great ambition, his unfulfilled ambition throughout his life, his great project was going to be a series of mural sized paintings of the times of the day. And it was going to be a Gesamtkunstwerk. It was going to involve architecture, it was going to involve poetry, it was going to involve music. We have a number of sketches and smaller works which were preparatory for this. The four times a day, this is morning. And very interesting abstraction of patterns, surface patterns. And he’s often being compared with the English mystical artist William Blake, who’s a slightly older, contemporary. So here’s Blake on the left hand side, and Runge. Again, I think virtually no possibility that they knew of each other’s work. It’s just an interesting example of artists working along parallel lines. The final paintings were never completed and now only exist in a series of fragments.

This is a fragment of morning. What do exist and I think are very interesting are his portraits. I don’t think any of them are commissioned portraits. They’re all portraits of people who he was related to or he was very friendly with. And this is a portrait of his parents and his children. The Hulsenbeck Children, this, I think, I find this a very compelling, a very strange picture really. And the children, because you’re dropped down to their level and 'cause the fence is kind of shrunk as well. And the children, they look enormous. They look like giants. And I think with Romanticism you get a change in attitudes towards children and childhood. If you think the 18th century pictures of children tend to be very chocolate boxy and sweet and sentimental. This is not really, this is not a sentimental picture. These are alarmingly powerful creatures, these three children, the Hulsenbeck. And this is his son. Again, you’re dropped down to the level of the child and the child, it looks like a child giant.

You know, it’s filling up so much of the canvas space. And this is something that’s picked up later, I think by Van Gogh. his portrait, famous portrait of the child, of the Postman Roulin that you see on the left hand side. That you see this innate life force of this child, which is absolutely enormous. Moving on to the Nazarenes and in their day, these were the most famous and influential of the German Romantic artists. They started off as a group of art students who were studying at the academy in Vienna. But they were very dissatisfied with what they were being taught. They’re often seen as predecessors of the English Romantics, the English Pre-Raphaelites rather, and like the Pre-Raphaelites, they wanted to turn back the clock. They were looking back in particular to the 16th century and the Middle Ages. The two main figures to start with are Overbeck and Pforr. In fact both these paintings are by Overbeck. The one on the left is a self-portrait with his wife and his child. Again, that’s a pretty powerful looking child, isn’t it? Wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of that child. And this is Overbeck’s portrait of Pforr on the right hand side. And this, right at the start, of course, I showed Goethe in Italy. And throughout the Romantic period, there is a very strong relationship between Germany and Italy, and this just kind of longing for the south, which is most famously expressed in the Goethe poem, “Do you know the country where the lemon trees blossom?”

And so the Nazarenes on block group, they all went down to, in the following year, 1810, they joined a brotherhood that they called the Lukasbund, the brotherhood of St. Luke. And the following year they went down to Rome and they moved into an abandoned monastery on the outskirts of the city and they lived there separate from the community. And they dressed very eccentrically and they wore beards. That’s a new thing really in the 18th century, people weren’t wearing beards. And the local Italians thought that they looked like something out of the New Testament, and that’s why they called them the Nazarenes. This is a painting by Pforr, Sulameta and Maria. And you can see he’s looking back to the early 16th century with Maria on the left-hand side, it’s Italy. And with Sulameta on the right-hand side, he’s looking back to Durer and the German Renaissance. This is a Overbeck, perhaps his most famous painting. And the title is Germania and Italia. So it’s again, a painting about this symbiotic relationship between Germany, north of the Alps and Italy, south of the Alps. They were absolutely unhealthily besotted with Raphael. They hero worshipped Raphael. This is actually for me, one of the least attractive aspects of their work that paintings. Do I need to tell you here, which is the real Rafael and which is the imitation Rafael by Overbeck?

Well, of course it’s the real Raphael on the right hand side and the imitation Rafael by Overbeck. I think that they at this point, this excessive homage for Rafael, imitation of Rafael actually even eventually damaged Raphael’s reputation. Of course, Ruskin very, very sniffy about Raphael, and said the “tasteless poison of Rafael infected the art” of his time. This is Pforr and it’s a historical scene. It shows the Hapsburg Emperor entering the city of Basle in Switzerland. So it’s a scene showing date depicting the early 16th century. And it’s looking, this is more looking back to Durer of course, and the German Renaissance. So they are archaizing artists, the Nazarenes. And they revived the art of Fresco, which had really largely fallen into, out of fashion in the late 18th century. And as a group, they painted their first important set of frescoes in a house in Rome called the Casa Bartholdy. And that was, it was commissioned from the Prussian Consul in Rome. He was a man called Jacob Salomon van Bartholdy. Bartholdy, I’m sure a name very familiar with you. It was an important Jewish dynasty. He was descended from Moses Mendelssohn and I think he was the uncle of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.

This is by an art another important member of the Nazarenes, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld The subject commissioned by the Prussian Consul, Herr von Bartholdy, was the story of Joseph. And this is a fresco by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers. I think today it’s quite hard to like the oil paintings and the frescoes of the Nazarenes. There’s something very cold, very academic about them. They’re drawings, most wonderful drawings, particularly their portrait drawings, incredibly delicate drawings. But again, look back to the Renaissance. They’re looking back to Durer and Holbein and so on. And this is a self-portrait of Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, with his fellow Nazarene artist Peter Cornelius. And this is again, Schnorr von Carolsfeld. A lot of these best drawings, again, the portrait drawings are not really commissions. They’re portraits of artists’ friends or family members. Again, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. They’re really extraordinary drawings, wonderful quality of line. Now I’m certainly embarrassed here because there are two brothers called the Olivier Brothers. There’s Friedrich and there’s Ferdinand. You probably can’t see it, but at the bottom it says Ferdinand Olivier. But I’m not sure whether this is a portrait of Ferdinand by Friedrich or a portrait of Friedrich by Ferdinand.

All my notes and my books are in London, so I wasn’t able to check that today. But anyway, I wanted to show it to you anyway ‘cause I just think it’s such a lovely drawing by one brother or by one of them of his brother sitting sketching in nature. And neither of them particularly distinguished as painters but wonderful drawings. This one is by Friedrich Olivier of shrivelled leaves. What a fantastic drawing. Really almost the quality of Durer or Leonardo da Vinci. And this is an another minor artist, German Romantic artists associated with the Nazarenes. This is Franz Horny, that’s spelled H-O-R-N-Y. Had trouble getting this image off the internet 'cause I was warned by my computer that if I Googled Horny, I might come up with pornographic images. So I had to get round that in order to get this very lovely drawing of the town of Olevano in central Italy, which was a place beloved of the German Romantics. They all went there and made drawings and paintings of it. Now I’m finishing off with artists that I would describe as Biedermeier. Biedermeier is a term that’s used for German culture between the end of the Napoleonic Empire, between the Congress of Vienna, really in 1814 and the 1848 revolution. And it’s, Biedermeier is really a kind of cosy domesticated form of Romanticism with a very strong emphasis on family values.

So instead of Manfred teetering on the brink of a precipice, as we got on the right hand side, we have a group of family and friends going for a healthy walk in the countryside to admire nature. This is by an artist called Georg von Dillis who is based in Munich. And this is Carl Spitzweg, born in Munich. So this is even more be Biedermeier really, isn’t it? The very well fed with his wife and his children going for a healthy Sunday afternoon walk in the fields. Spitzweg again, possibly a self-portrait, very charming, cosy, likeable kind of art. So this is very far from the darker side of Romanticism and often charming, anecdotal, sentimental anecdotes that can remind you of songs of the period, songs of Schubert Schumann love songs. And he paints hobbies. Hobbies, I suppose is a very bourgeois thing is that you’ve got to have a middle class, before you can have a thriving of hobbies at the Cactus lover and the butterfly catcher. And this is perhaps Spitzweg’s most famous image, the the poor poet starving in a garret with only an umbrella to protect him from the rain. And the last artist I’m going to mention very briefly, Moritz von Schwind, born in Vienna, but moved to Munich and had his career based in Munich. And this is, I suppose, kind of in a way the proto Walt Disney side of Romanticism. His art is folkloric, fantastic legendary subjects, fairy tales, very Grimms’ fairytales, very charming. This drawing, which I know very well because when I lived in Munich, for a year I was staying in a house of a art collector and this drawing was actually in my bedroom. It’s now in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington. And it looks like an illustration to a Schubert song or a Schumann song, or Carl Loewe, of the Knight who’s lost in the forest and lured on by a ghostly femme fatale into the forest. Now I’m going to finish and see what you have to say and ask.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: The insignificance of man and nature is often portrayed in Chinese scroll painting art. Did knowledge of this enter Europe and influence?

A: Hmm, I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I wouldn’t have thought so. Of course there was a fashion for all things Chinese a generation or so before, in the middle of the 18th century. But I don’t think they had a really, that , is a very, very superficial interest in Chinese art. I don’t think they had a very profound knowledge of Chinese art or its principles.

Q: How do I know it’s a French soldier who’s lost?

A: By his uniform.

Q: Do I know that the…

A: No I don’t know the variety I wish I did and could identify all the trees for you.

Yes, I should have talked about that Barbara. I think it’s very interesting that Friedrich does so often paint people from the back. I think it’s in a way to, for you to enter into that person. It’s like it becomes you looking at the view through the person that you see from the back. That’s the only explanation I can really offer for that.

Q: Could the boats be read as preparing to carry?

A: I think that it’s a similar meaning, isn’t it Sandy, the boat coming into the harbour, Lethe being the river of death, of course.

Q: Have you ever heard of the names Otto Kish, no, and Luo Volmun from Munich?

A: No, I haven’t. I will look them up after this lecture.

Was it, no, Ron. It’s a totally different Bartholdy and spelled differently. ‘Cause the Bartholdy, you know, the Mendelssohn family have a y at the end and Fredric Bartholdi, is the one you are thinking about, has an i at the end. And I’m not, I don’t think that Fredric Bartholdi was Jewish.

Q: Why was it called Romantic period?

A: I think it was originally because of mediaeval, the medievalism, mediaeval romances.

Andrea Wulf’s “Magnificent Rebels” is an interesting description of German Romanticism. No, it’s Biedermeier, spelled differently anyway, B-I-E-D-E-R meier is a period. And of course it is very, it’s not a company, Biedermeier was a character actually in a satirical magazine called “Fliegende Blatter” who he represented the petty bourgeois values that were dominant in the Biedermeier period. There is of course, wonderful furniture in the Biedermeier period, is what it’s particularly famous for.

Pforr, yes my list of artists with the spellings should have been sent. I think you must have missed my explanation that Nazarenes got their name from their long hair and their beards that maybe made people think of the Bible. The artist who paint the larger than life babies. That’s Philip Otto Runge.

Thank you very much, that’s all. And 'cause I’m moving on to music next week. I’m slightly bewildered by the title that you’ve been given. I’m talking specifically on Wednesday about the Singspiel, and I’ll explain what that is. It’s a form of German opera. I’m talking about four of most famous examples of the Singspiel. Well, I’ll tell you now, a Singspiel is an opera in German, in which all the musical numbers are connected by German spoken dialogue. And I will be talking about “The Abduction from the Seraglio”, “Magic Flute”, “Fidelio” and “Der Freischutz” which are four of the most famous examples of this type of German opera.

So thank you all very, very much and hope to see you again on Wednesday.