Rome

??????I see the walls and arches, O my Italy,

??????The columns and the images, the solitary

??????Towers of our ancestors,

??????But this I do not see:

??????The glorious laurels and the swords they bore

??????In ancient times.…

??????Who brought her down to this?—and what is worse,

??????Both her arms are bound about with chains…

??????Weep, for you have good cause, my Italy.

By the early nineteenth century, Rome was swarming with foreign artists; despite Napoleon’s invasion, the city had come to be regarded, once again, as the world’s school. Several of these expatriates rivaled the native Italians not only in reputation, but in the demand for their work: if you could not secure a piece by Canova, for instance, a very good neoclassical sculpture by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) was an acceptable replacement and could well be available.

Thorvaldsen, who spent most of his working life in Rome, first went there on a scholarship in 1797 after entering the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at the precocious age of eleven.

It was not always easy, at first sight, to distinguish Thorvaldsen’s mature work from Canova’s. The subjects were much the same, drawn from Homeric poetry and Grecian antiquity in general: Thorvaldsen’s over-life-sized Jason with the Golden Fleece (1803–28) produced many similar commissions— Ganymede, Hebe, Apollo, and so on. He was also a prolific and fluent portrait sculptor— Byron’s letters reveal how eagerly he was waiting for Thorvaldsen to complete his bust and that of his adored Venetian mistress. Canova’s sculptures had more surface polish, and Thorvaldsen’s tended to be matte, but this difference was sometimes reduced or even abolished by overenergetic cleaning. Most of his major sculptures found their way to his native Copenhagen, where, emulating the example of Canova’s museum at Possagno, he endowed his city with a large and comprehensive collection of his own work. Nobody could have accused this Dane of a hampering modesty: one of his larger self-portrait sculptures represented him as Thor, the thunder god.

Not the least aspect of Thorvaldsen’s sojourn in Rome was his support of other expatriate artists, mainly from the North, whose work he thought significant. He was particularly attracted to the work of the so-called Nazarenes, a group of young Germans who had set themselves up in Rome—a nickname they were given by more skeptical Germans in Rome for their demonstrative piety. He bought their work in some quantity, forming the city’s most important collection of modern works of art in Rome. The Nazarenes’ chief figures were Joseph Anton Koch, Peter Cornelius, Wilhelm Schadow, and their leader, Friedrich Overbeck (1789–1869). The chief literary influence on his and his friends’ work was an essay by the German cultural ecstatic Wilhelm Wackenroder, Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk. In it, as the title suggests, art was discussed as a holy activity akin to prayer, leading to an unshaken belief in divine nature. Other artists and writers might feel they were part of the great movement toward the secularization of culture which was under way throughout Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, but Overbeck and his friends in Rome did not, and wished only to oppose and reverse it. They felt their duty was to create a revival of religious art in Germany and, spreading outward from there, throughout Europe. Religion, Overbeck came to believe, was the true foundation of art. Merely secular painting was culturally impotent. This was the basis of the revulsion he felt at the wholly secular, classicizing teaching methods of the Vienna Academy, which he attended from 1806 to 1809. But the starting place for this belief’s assimilation into visual culture, he concluded, would have to be Rome, that mighty capital of past religious imagery. Other young artists he came to know at the academy felt the same, and just as warmly; among them were Ludwig Vogel, Franz Hottinger, and Franz Pforr.

Together they formed a small confraternity they called the Lukasbruder, or Brothers in Saint Luke—the Apostle Luke, said to have painted the Virgin Mary from life, being the patron saint of artists.

The past artists they most admired and sought to imitate were Italians of the early Renaissance, particularly Masaccio and Fra Angelico. These, the “Lukes” believed, were more sincere and naively truthful in their responses to Nature and to religious faith than any painters of the Baroque or neoclassical persuasion. Baroque artists were coarsened by the rhetoric of their style; neoclassical ones, by an excessive refinement and the traces of paganism. It was hardly surprising that the ideas of the “Lukes” would presently cross to England and find strong echoes in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

“Art is to me,” declared Overbeck, “what the harp was to David. I use it on every occasion to utter psalms in praise of the Lord.” But what had become of this sacred impulse, once so general among painters? It had irreversibly declined, wrote Franz Pforr in Vienna. Not all the art that was being made in Rome was “sacred” or even Christian-religious in its general themes. Neoclassicism itself worked against so narrow a definition of the artist’s role in Rome, and it tended to contradict exclusively religious, or even primarily moral, readings of art and its functions—simply by holding up pre-Christian themes as desirable ones. In times gone by, “few men can have had so strong an influence upon morality and virtue” as artists. But now, in these fallen times, it had declined and could only be brought back with difficulty.

When we consider the ends for which [art] is now used, one can only deplore that its decay is so very general. Formerly the artist tried to charm the spectator into devotion by representing pious objects, and to induce him to emulate the noble actions he depicted; and now? A nude Venus with her Adonis, a Diana in her bath—toward what good end can such representations point?

Both Pforr and Overbeck found the classical past, as promoted at the academies, not only irrelevant to the present but even slightly disgusting to a good Christian soul. “Why do we seek subjects so distant from our interests,” Pforr demanded, “why not instead those that concern us? In the old Israelite stories we find more material than anywhere else.” Overbeck was saying the same, in more high-flown accents of faith.

It seemed to them that there was only one place where such desires could be satisfied, where a young German could complete his religious and artistic education; Rome, just by virtue of being a religious capital, would provide the balance the young Germans sought between stylistic tradition and living faith. Overbeck and Pforr longed to immerse themselves in it, not for the ancient marbles (they had seen quite enough of the academy’s plaster casts of those) but for the accumulated deposit of Christian belief the city represented. The very name of Rome spoke to pious young Germans like these with an intensity and promise that no other place could offer. They were determined to move there. And so, in May 1810, Overbeck and Pforr, along with Hottinger and Vogel, left Vienna for the Holy City. They entered Rome a month later, scarcely stopping to look at anything on the way.

The city at the time was still occupied by the French, who had closed and secularized a number of its religious institutions. One of these was the Irish-Franciscan monastery of Sant’Isidoro, up on the Pincio, above Piazza del Popolo. The Napoleonic occupation had driven its monks out, and the four youngsters, with minimal bargaining, got