German painter. He was one of the founders of the Nazarenes and went to Rome with other members of the group in 1810. His work evokes a fairy-tale type of medievalism, with bright colours and picturesque details. It is best represented in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut of his native Frankfort.
Fra Angelico’s work was especially esteemed in nineteenth-century Germany, where intellectuals sought to recover the Gothic past and an imagined age of faith.
Pforr’s small panel in the shape of a medieval two-winged altarpiece stands in the tradition of the Romantic friendship picture. The female figure of Shulamit, on the left, symbolically represents the artist’s friend and fellow painter, Friedrich Overbeck, while Pforr associates himself with Mary, on the right.
On the right panel, the figure of Mary serves as an image of contrast. She is depicted in an interior whose bull’s-eye panes and exposed-beam ceiling characterize it as an Old German parlor of the type seen, for instance, in Albrecht D�rer’s engravings. Pforr’s ideal of feminine beauty is the blonde, upstanding German maiden.
In his painting Pforr separates the Italian and the German worlds, the Old and the New Testament. Pforr also wrote a novel of this theme.
Pforr’s short life was overshadowed by illness and depression and this is evident in this painting. The combatants are self-sufficient, in a way that is quite out of keeping with a struggle; only the large and penetrating eye of the horse takes up contact with the viewer. This is a fight without effort, as if the knight were dreaming his own experience in a lethargy remote from time.
In 1809 Franz Pforr from Frankfurt and Friedrich Overbeck from L�beck founded the first association of artists in the modern sense in Vienna, the St Luke’s Brotherhood. It was established in opposition to the schematic historicism of the Vienna Academy, which was then the foremost institution of its kind under its director, the Neoclassical Heinrich F�ger. The members of the association were all patriotic, swore by the art of the old German masters, and wore their hair long under a beret. They wanted to live Spartan lives like monks, and undertook to sustain religious morals. While he was still in Vienna, Pforr examples of the new school, created one of the most remarkable The Entry of Emperor Rudolf of Habsburg into Basel.
This painting is the first large medieval subject painted in a deliberately historicist manner. Its flattened perspectives, awkward figures and bright colours are all calculated to achieve an effect of child-like innocence and naivet�. The work reflects the artist’s nostalgia for a proud period of Germanic unity under the Holy Roman Empire and his admiration for the first monarch of the Habsburg dynasty to be elected Emperor.
