SCHNORR VON CAROLSFELD, Julius

This painting, signed and dated 1818, is one of a series of Marian subjects ordered from the Nazarenes by the canon of Dresden’s cathedral. Its Roman execution is attested to by St. Peter’s dome, rising in the background. Stiff, precise, with a loving re-creation of Albertian perspective, this archaising Annunciation merges Northern European and Italian fifteenth-century motifs in an ingratiating pastiche.

This panel by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, the Nazarene painter, is based on Raphael’s Portrait of Jeanne d’Aragon. It includes a pinch of earlier Netherlandish precisionism for good Gothic measure. No mere prop, the sitters lute was well played by Bianca.

The objective of Schnorr was to stand with Raphael or the early Renaissance painters in melodious line, intensity of expression and delicacy of stroke or outline. He had an instinctive feeling for composition on a grand scale and it is evident from the encaustic wall paintings he created for the Reisidenz in Munich. A whole cycle was destroyed in the war, but the Niebelung halls have survived, and they show with what consummate ease Schnorr could handle the huge surfaces.

The encaustic is an antique method in which hot melted wax is poured over the plaster, and it gives the painting a smooth quality that also repels damp.

The experience of Italy was not only decisive for the majority of German landscape artists of the nineteenth century but also for figurative painting, secular as well as sacred. In 1818 Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld moved to Rome from his home town of Leipzig. There he joined the Lukas-Bund (Guild of St Luke), an artists’ group originally set up by Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr in Vienna in opposition to the academy there. After Overbeck and Pforr had moved to Rome the Lukas-Bund exercised great influence (though Pforr died in 1812), and not only on the German artists in Rome. The members of the group, called the ‘Nazarenes’ after their long hair like Christ’s, wanted to return to what they saw as the simple truth and piety of D�rer and the early Italian Renaissance. They tried in their work to employ the forms, style and colour of the Old Masters. The composition and clear luminous colour of the Madonna and Child illustrates Schnorr’s intensive, creative relationship with the Italian Renaissance.

The artist executed this painting in the house of Ferdinand Oliviers in Vienna, before moving to Italy.

Schnorr was considered the best draughtsman of the Brotherhood of St. Luke. Like no other artist, he knew how to exploit the potential of the sepia technique. He drew in pen over pencil before applying wash with a brush. His works are characterized by dark and illuminated sections, dynamic sketching within the contours of objects and gently curving contours of line, as in this picture.

This painting contains such a variety of themes and motifs that the later “Neo-Nazarenes” were still drawing on it for their church paintings into the first decades of the 20th century.