The early 19th century was a period in German art in which painting played a significant part in the cultural resurgence commonly known as the Romantic Movement. This Movement and some of its chief exponents are examined against a background of German literature, philosophy and music.

The modernist aesthetic and, later, Nazi ideology split German Romantic painting into two opposed phases, an early progressive movement, represented by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), and a later reactionary one - epitomized by Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869) and Peter von Cornelius (1783-1867). In this rich and engaging book, Mitchell Frank explores the continuities between these two phases to reconstruct the historical position that existed in the nineteenth century and to look once again at the Nazarenes - and Overbeck in particular - as a fully integrated part of the Romantic movement. His innovative book is crucial to an understanding of German Romanticism and the legacy of this period in European art.

Explains the development of Romantic arts and culture in Germany, with both individual artists and key themes covered in detail.

After a century of Rationalist scepticism and political upheaval, the nineteenth century awakened to a fierce battle between the forces of secularization and the crusaders of a Christian revival. From this battlefield arose an art movement that would become the torchbearer of a new religious art: Nazarenism. From its inception in the Lukasbund of 1809, this art was controversial. It nonetheless succeeded in becoming a lingua franca in religious circles throughout Europe, America, and the world at large. This is the first major study of the evolution, structure, and conceptual complexity of this archetypically nineteenth-century language of belief. The Nazarene quest for a modern religious idiom evolved around a return to pre-modern forms of biblical exegesis and the adaptation of traditional systems of iconography. Reflecting the era's historicist sensibility as much as the general revival of orthodoxy in the various Christian denominations, the Nazarenes responded with great acumen to pressing contemporary concerns. Consequently, the artists did not simply revive Christian iconography, but rather reconceptualized what it could do and say. This creativity and flexibility enabled them to intervene forcefully in key debates of post-revolutionary European society: the function of eroticism in a Christian life, the role of women and the social question, devotional practice and the nature of the Church, childhood education and bible study, and the burning issue of anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism. What makes Nazarene art essentially Romantic is the meditation on the conditions of art-making inscribed into their appropriation and reinvention of artistic tradition. Far from being a reactionary move, this self-reflexivity expresses the modernity of Nazarene art. This study explores Nazarenism in a series of detailed excavations of central works in the Nazarene corpus produced between 1808 and the 1860s. The result is a book about the possibility of religious meanin

Crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience and the interplay of text and image in Romantic epistemology. The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between "internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy, literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Missouri, Columbia.