The Nazarenes engaged the most vital philosophical, theological, and poetic issues of their time with an intensity scarcely rivaled in the history of nineteenth-century art. Thus, given the interest of contemporary art historians in theory and interdisciplinary studies, one could confidently assume that research on Nazarenism would represent a burgeoning field. And yet, the contrary is the case. The puzzling lack of scholarly engagement with Nazarenism has partially resulted from the modernist disdain for the movement’s historicist idiom and its orientation toward religion. Whereas these issues clearly bear ideological connotations—reinforced by questions of taste—the neglect of Nazarene art reflects more than the politics of modernism. This neglect has also resulted from an absence of basic research on the movement’s leading figures, research which would have allowed scholars outside the specialized field of Nazarene studies to integrate Nazarene art and art theory into the broader scheme of nineteenth-century European culture.

The two-volume monograph on Peter Cornelius (1783-1867) by Munich art historian Frank Büttner, published in 1980 and 1999 respectively, is a major contribution to the closing of this yawning gap. One of the most eminent Nazarene artists, Cornelius exerted a seminal influence on the movement’s progress and—as the director of the Munich Academy of Art—on the course of German academic art in general. Büttner carefully traces the steps of Cornelius’s development: the first volume follows Cornelius from his initial education in Düsseldorf and neoclassical beginnings through to his Romantic turn in 1810—marked by Düreresque illustrations for Goethe’s Faust—and then to his Roman years (1811-19) and, finally, the first decade of his stay in Munich. The volume ends with the year 1830, when Cornelius completed the fresco program of the Glyptothek, Munich’s museum of classical sculpture. The Glyptothek frescoes—regarded as the first cycle of monumental painting in nineteenth-century Germany—formed the pinnacle of Cornelius’s high phase.

The second volume deals with the artist’s later work, focusing on two assignments for monumental fresco decorations—a cycle of Christ’s life for the newly erected Ludwigskirche in Munich (executed 1836-40) and a vast mural program for the grand plan of a burial site for the Prussian royal family, modeled on the Campo Santo in Pisa. When Cornelius died in Berlin on March 6, 1867, he was still working on the design of this cycle. The completion of the Ludwigskirche frescoes coincided with the end of Cornelius’s engagement in Munich. After a falling out with Ludwig I, who had been his major patron for two decades, he now turned to Berlin, where the new king, Frederick William IV, sought to convert the Prussian Empire into a Romantic Gesamtkunstwerk. Like the king’s pursuit, Cornelius’s project for the burial site remained an unfulfilled dream. Yet the vision he drafted in pen on monumental cartoons was so forceful that it was chosen as the initial centerpiece of what later was to become Germany’s first national gallery, the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Working for almost sixty years, Cornelius exhibited in all major European countries, including the 1855 Universal Exposition in Paris. The appreciation of his work also was expressed by his nomination as an honorary member of major art academies of his time, from Berlin, Munich, St. Petersburg, and Rome to Rio de Janeiro, Urbino, and Philadelphia. Nothing could better summarize Cornelius’s outstanding position in the European art scene than a remark by Théophile Gautier, who wrote in 1856: “La renommée de Cornélius est européenne. Son nom est intervient das toutes des discussions d’art, et il occupe une place élévée que personne ne lui contest parmi les maètres les plus sérieux” (vol. 1, ix). (“Cornelius is renowned throughout Europe. His name is mentioned in all discussions of art, and no one disputes his exalted position among the most respected masters.”)

In view of the meticulous archival research, the careful reconstruction of destroyed—or never executed—fresco programs and the intellectual breadth of Büttner’s undertaking, it is not surprising that it took the author more than twenty years to compose his monumental account. In fact, his subtitle, “Frescoes and Fresco Projects,” is actually too humble, because Büttner pursues a much broader agenda and sets out to do two things: first, to deliver a painstakingly researched account of Cornelius’s complete oeuvre and the history of each artwork’s development; and second, to locate Cornelius firmly in the context of German Romanticism and, in so doing, provide a detailed discussion of the theological, philosophical, poetic, historical, and political background of Cornelius’s artistic production. In the process, Büttner discusses almost every major intellectual movement between 1810 and 1860 that was either connected or opposed to Romanticism, especially Romantic Catholic theology. One of the pioneering aspects of Büttner’s enterprise is his close reading of the religious dimension of Cornelius’s work, thereby finally addressing one of the central aspects of Nazarene art: the connection between modes of seeing and ways of believing. Although no one could overlook the emphatically religious nature of the movement, most scholars have avoided confronting this aspect, even though it lies at the center of its creative practice. Tracing the history of every iconographical detail of Cornelius’s works—above all of his extensive fresco programs—Büttner succeeds in developing a theory of Nazarene aesthetics that intimately links artistic practice to religious belief.

It is this profound theoretical grounding that distinguishes Büttner’s analysis from earlier work on the Nazarenes. This conceptual dimension compensates for the sometimes exhausting monographic passages, with their detailed descriptions of the artworks’ evolution and iconography. Büttner’s combination of elements characteristic of a catalogue raisonné with those of an interpretative study oriented toward intellectual history is not always felicitous. Gaining access to specific information or tracking particular concepts through these dense pages is difficult, which makes the absence of an index regrettable. As it is, the general reader will often have to skip through the book and concentrate on those chapters—fortunately marked clearly—that explore the philosophical and theological implications of Cornelius’s oeuvre. It is, however, worth the effort.

From the extraordinarily rich analysis, the shift from what Büttner calls the concept of “characteristic art” to the notion of a “historical-symbolic sacred art” surfaces as the unifying theme that binds Cornelius’s work together. The concept of a “characteristic art” emerged from the search to incarnate in art the essence of a national character—in Cornelius’s case, the essence of Germanness. This concept remained a key to Cornelius’s production until 1830, when it began to yield to an idea of “historical symbolism” that sought to surpass all national boundaries. In its universal outlook, the “Christian epic of painting”—to use another of Cornelius’s programmatic definitions of his agenda—aimed to transcend confessional as well as nationalistic borders. As an ecumenical and supranational project, Cornelius’s turn toward historical symbolism suggests a much more complicated relationship between Nazarenism, Restoration politics, and confessionalism than that described in most of the historiography.

Guided by the two overarching themes of “characteristic art” and “historical-symbolic sacred art,” Büttner discusses a variety of central theoretical issues. Cornelius’s historicist mindset emerges as one of the essential forces in his art. Büttner convincingly argues against the narrow understanding of historicism as stylistic eclecticism so common in art-historical literature. Instead, he demonstrates the far-reaching implications of this attitude toward history as “the consciousness of an organic and therefore most real tie of the present with the own past” (vol. 1, 25). Büttner thereby identifies Cornelius’s “idealist historicism” as an expression of Romantic historical-mindedness and distinguishes it from the kind of “objective historicism” associated with Leopold von Ranke, with its emphasis on archaeological authenticity, historical probability, and an exclusion of symbolic elements such as personifications. The question of “idealist historicism” links up with Cornelius’s rethinking of narrativity. Büttner provides a fascinating discussion of Cornelius’s use of epic structures and drama theory to generate a narrative mode able to carry out the Nazarene search for a union between a timeless world of religious and moral truth and a historical grounding of an artworks’ message. The epic structure of Cornelius’s later frescoes thus aimed to cope with a paradox that constituted one of the fundamental tensions in Nazarene art. This goes also for his use of the Romantic arabesque as a means to establish a multitude of cross-references that allow the observer to read the fresco programs, such as the decorations of the Glyptothek, on a variety of levels. Last but not least, Büttner firmly grounds Cornelius’s oeuvre in the thought of the Brotherhood of St. Luke, the nucleus of the Nazarene movement, which he joined in 1812. The Brotherhood’s ethical understanding of art—with “Truth” as its motto—decisively informed Cornelius’s own thinking about art. Like all Nazarenes, Cornelius began to favor content over technique and moved from the classicist notion of Wirkungsästhetik (an aesthetic oriented toward didactic effect that values beauty mainly for its educational capacities) to Gehaltsästhetik (an “aesthetic of content”). With his emphasis on fresco as the supreme art form, Cornelius represented a distinguished branch of Nazarenism. Displaying only marginal interest in oil painting, he fostered a notion of art as public and educational and played a notable part in the German revival of fresco painting in the nineteenth century, a revival that proved crucial to the later unfolding of public art in other European countries, such as France and England.

Büttner provides a thought-provoking discussion that in the main is extraordinarily persuasive and comprehensive. The monograph reminds us forcefully that Cornelius was a central player on the European stage. Even as Büttner’s two volumes narrow the gap in Nazarene studies, they simultaneously open up new fields of inquiry. It is now possible to reassess traditional accounts of the relationship between French and German art, as well as the visibility or invisibility of national borders in a history of nineteenth-century art conceived truly on a European scale. Büttner’s study also provides a basis for developing a theory of Romantic religious painting and the systems of aesthetics on which it was based. Finally, contemporary scholars often will experience a shock of recognition by the range of theoretical issues that engaged this highly conceptual artist. From a decidedly antimodernist context, Cornelius emerges as a surprisingly modern artist. One hopes that awareness of this paradox will open Cornelius and the Nazarenes to the plurality of approaches that has selectively enriched the historiography of nineteenth-century art.