Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld: Nazarene Art Prints

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld spent almost forty years on the Nibelungen Halls and reached his widest audience with 240 woodcuts. more about the artist

Germany · 1794–1872 · Romanticism · 155 artworks found

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld

Two images of the same man could hardly be further apart in format and purpose. One is a mural in the Munich Residence, “Hagen Killing Siegfried at Fountain”: beneath ancient oaks, Siegfried kneels at the spring, the golden drinking horn still at his lips, while Hagen raises his spear behind his back and the horrified hunters in the background throw up their arms. The other is a woodcut the size of a book page, “Expulsion of Heliodorus”: between temple columns, a shaft of light falls upon an armoured rider whose horse forces the temple robber Heliodorus to the ground; chests topple, coins lie scattered across the floor. Mural and book plate are by the same hand - that of the German painter, draughtsman and illustrator Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. His working life unfolded between these two formats.

He was born in Leipzig on 26 March 1794; his first lessons came from his father, a painter and engraver. From 1811, he studied at the Vienna Academy. In March 1817, he joined the Brotherhood of St Luke, the nucleus of the group of artists soon known as the Nazarenes; in January 1818, he arrived in Rome and became part of their circle around Overbeck and Cornelius. At the Casino Massimo, the home of a Roman marquis, the young Leipzig artist was given a room of his own, where he frescoed the Ariosto Room with scenes from Ariosto's chivalric epic Orlando Furioso. Completed in 1827, the room helped establish the Nazarenes' reputation as fresco painters. In Rome, he also created a work of a very different kind, “Portrait of Clara Bianca von Quandt, 1820”: the wife of the Leipzig collector Johann Gottlob von Quandt, travelling through Italy with her husband on a nine-month honeymoon, sits playing the lute in Renaissance costume in an arcaded hall, with a small orange tree and blue mountains behind her. The patron expressly requested a reference to the portrait of Joanna of Aragon in the Louvre, then believed to be a work by Raphael; the painting remained unfinished and now hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

In 1825, King Ludwig I appointed him professor of history painting in Munich, where he arrived in 1827; that same year, he married Maria Heller, a stepdaughter of Ferdinand Olivier, in Vienna. In Munich, his life's great task awaited him: five halls in the royal wing of the Residence based on the medieval Nibelungenlied and named after stages of the epic - from the Hall of Heroes to the Hall of Lamentation. Work on the cartoons, the large-scale preparatory drawings, began in 1828; in the meantime, the king reassigned him to a second wing of the Residence, where he decorated the Imperial Halls in the Festival Hall Building with images of Charlemagne, Barbarossa and Rudolf of Habsburg. These rooms burned down in 1944. Only in 1843 did he return to the Nibelungen cycle, whose execution, with the help of assistants, continued for decades.

Anyone bringing one of these wall scenes into a domestic setting also takes on a quality of lime plaster: it is matt and warm and absorbs every trace of sheen. Our workshop therefore reproduces the Nibelungen images on a matt, coarsely textured canvas whose natural white most closely resembles the plaster of a great hall; in this way, the scene at the spring retains the character of a mural even above a desk.

In 1846, he accepted an appointment in Dresden - as professor at the Academy and, from 1846/47, director of the Picture Gallery, which he transferred to architect Gottfried Semper's new building in 1855. A Nazarene thus stood at the head of one of Europe's most celebrated collections. In Dresden, he also completed the Bible in Pictures, 240 compositions of his own invention drawn on wood and issued in thirty instalments between 1852 and 1860 by the Leipzig publisher Georg Wigand; the idea dated back to his years in Rome. In the preface, Schnorr explained that the work was intended to be affordable for ordinary people and to serve the young. An English edition appeared as early as 1861, and the series became the most successful Bible illustration cycle of its century. Plates such as “God is Resting After the Creation of the World” and “Adam and Eve with the Apple” belong to this series, as does The Expulsion of Heliodorus, plate 154 of the cycle - an original composition based on a subject Raphael had painted before him in the Vatican. The man who painted walls for a king found his largest audience in the smallest format.

The Dresden years also brought an early death in the family. His son Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a celebrated heroic tenor, sang the title role in the premiere of Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde in Munich on 10 June 1865, alongside his wife Malvina as Isolde; six weeks after the premiere, he died at the age of twenty-nine. The Nibelungen Halls were completed in 1867, almost forty years after the first cartoons; in 1868, the elderly father drew his son once more in pen, dressed as Tristan. Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld died in Dresden on 24 May 1872 - by then, the plates from his Bible had long lain on tables in parlours and classrooms from Leipzig to London.

Artworks by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld

155 artworks found

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