NAZARENES. - This designation was used, initially not without a touch of irony, for those German painters who between 1810 and 1815 gathered in Rome around Friedrich Overbeck in the cloister of St. Isidore at Trinità dei Monti, forming a sort of artistic confraternity. They lived in common and, in opposition to neoclassical theories, proclaimed the need to restore to Christian art those sentimental values that had already been proper to Italian painting toward the end of the 15th century, particularly in the orbit of Raphael's predecessors. By following such a path they also hoped to attain the excellence of his art.
For the N., art was understood as a means of religious propaganda; they therefore despised the cult of formal and bodily beauty exalted by the neoclassicists. Their theories, in any case, must also be linked with those of the Italian "Purists" and of other countries which, with varying tone, represent an intermediate moment between neoclassical manifestations and the more decidedly Romantic ones that precede the establishment of verism. The major painters who were part of the group of the N. are, besides the already mentioned Overbeck, P. Cornelius, Ph. Veit, W. von Schadow, Schnorr von Carolsfeld and J. Führich.
Their principal works, programmatic in character and executed in collaboration, were painted in Rome. They are the frescoes of the Bartholdy house (1816), detached since the last century and transferred to Berlin in the Friedrich Museum, and those of Villa Massimo Lancellotti (1821) near St. John's. Later, in 1843, when the group of the N. had practically already dissolved, Overbeck signed with T. Minardi and P. Tenerani the manifesto of "Purism" drafted by the painter and man of letters Antonio Bianchini. - See plate CXII.
