Shulamit and Mary

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.