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 meaning in modern
art. It will reinvigorate scholarship in the fields of
nineteenth-century art, romanticism, and religion and the arts, and
restore the Nazarene artists to their rightful place at the forefront of
romantic art history.
