, Detail of the Dante-Cycle in the Casino Massimo In 1809, six students at the
Vienna Academy formed an artistic cooperative in
Vienna called the Brotherhood of St. Luke or
Lukasbund, following a common name for medieval
guilds of painters. In 1810 four of them,
Johann Friedrich Overbeck,
Franz Pforr,
Ludwig Vogel and Johann Konrad Hottinger (1788–1827) moved to
Rome, where they occupied the abandoned monastery of
San Isidoro. They were joined by
Philipp Veit,
Peter von Cornelius,
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld,
Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow and a loose grouping of other German-speaking artists. They met up with Austrian romantic landscape artist
Joseph Anton Koch (1768–1839) who became an unofficial tutor to the group. In 1827, they were joined by
Joseph von Führich (1800–1876). The principal motivation of the Nazarenes was a reaction against
Neoclassicism and the routine art education of the academy system. They hoped to return to art that embodied spiritual values, and sought inspiration in artists of the
Late Middle Ages and
early Renaissance, rejecting what they saw as the superficial virtuosity of later art. In Rome, the group lived a semi-monastic existence as a way of re-creating the nature of the medieval artist's workshop. Religious subjects dominated their output, and two major commissions allowed them to attempt a revival of the medieval art of
fresco painting. The first was a fresco series completed in Rome for the
Casa Bartholdy (1816–17; moved to the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin), a collaborative project by the Nazarenes that "marks the beginning of the revival of fresco decoration for private and public buildings". This, and a second commission to decorate the Casino Massimo (1817–1829), gained international attention for the work of the "Nazarenes". However, by 1830 all except Overbeck had returned to Germany and the group had disbanded. Many Nazarenes became influential teachers in German art academies. ==Legacy==