Pino Blasone

Hail MaryNazarene and Pre-Raphaelite Annunciations

Johann von Schraudolph,

Die Verkündigung Mariae

Annunciation and Visitation of the Other

German Nazarenes in the first, English Pre-Raphaelites in the second half of the 19

century, were respectively a Romantic and a Decadent way to revisit medieval andRenaissance art. Both groups of artists – some of them, men of letters too – were associatedlike confraternities more than as artistic schools or cultural movements. No doubt, the

Nazarenes had an influence on the Pre-Raphaelites. Yet there are also differences betweenthem. Although opposing academic Neoclassicism, the “Brotherhood of St. Luke”appreciated Raphael’s painting better than what the so called Pre-Raphaelites will do. Morereligiously oriented, as their acquired name shows, and politically conservative, they did notlack some nostalgic and utopian spirit at once. In their youth they migrated to Italy, attracted by art history local vestiges and by its natural landscapes, as well as by a Catholic milieu.Among them Franz Pforr, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeldand Johann von Schraudolph, are to be mentioned peculiarly in this context. TheAnnunciation was an inevitable appointment, in their pictorial production of holy subjects.Most Nazarene Annunciations share an architectonic figurative pattern made of arches, in background or in foreground or else in both of them, circumscribing the scene, thecharacters, the landscape, like in a theatre scene painting. Surely this scansion of the spacehas its Renaissance inspiring models. But it looks also reflecting an idealistic influence, sothat the open architectural frame works as a distinction between an intimate “Ego” and anatural “Not-Ego”. The sacred scene is like an interface between these levels of the Self.

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld,

DieVerkündigung

That may be particularly true, as to few

Annunciations

painted or etched by VonSchraudolph and Von Carolsfeld, where the so framed ground is a country landscape.Instead the background of an

Annunciation

(

and Visitation

; Basel, Kunstmuseum; 1814)drawn by Overbeck is the view of a village garden, with a biblical symbolic value. Anyway,usually we do not attend a wild nature, rather a humanized and idyllic one. As in the settingas in the attitude of the characters – mainly the archangel Gabriel and the Virgin annunciate –, or between the former and the latter, we cannot perceive any apparent dramatic tension.What is not so evident in

Sulamith und Maria

, indeed (Schweinfurt, Germany: GeorgSchäfer Museum). This diptych was painted in 1811 by Pforr. On the left wing we cancontemplate the Shulamite, a female Old Testament character. Her vitality contrasts withsome melancholy of Mary, portrayed on the right. Sitting in her chamber before a window,she reads the Bible and plaits her hair with her hands. Most likely, there the announcingangel is still to come. That is part of a series of pictures worked on by Pforr and byOverbeck, where annunciation and visitation are complementary moments, in one explicit or implicit symbolic way. So, a sense of expectance mitigates the loneliness of the maiden.Such a pensive Madonna seems to be a fair image of the modern soul. Besides, it denotes anattention to contemporary German philosophy, by Nazarene leading members at least.