Mysterious Wisdom Read Online Free PDF Page B

betrayed by Napoleon and his imperial ambitions, had turned horribly sour and so, in the hope of discovering an alternative idyll, people were beginning to look back towards the Middle Ages instead. Medieval society could be more safely admired. Here was a spiritual antidote to contemporary materialism; here was an era in which, it was wistfully imagined, the values which modernity was destroying could be rediscovered again. The towers of England’s Gothic churches stood like stone guardians amid its patchwork landscapes, stalwart survivors of a lost age of belief. They rose like reminders of the glories of faith, of the grandeur of God and of man’s highest aspirations and the fact that the Gothic style was widely believed to have been British in origin made such ideals feel appropriately patriotic to boot.
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    Artists were in a quandary. It was all very well to admire the simple grace of the Gothic, but what about the hard-fought advances of their professional practice? For generations painters had striven for the skills of life-like representation, studying anatomy, poring over perspective, learning to render the light and shadow which could lend three-dimensionality to form, testing out a variety of atmospheric effects, striving to present the figure in motion, to capture the variety of facial expression, to manifest the drama and vibrancy of life. By the nineteenth century, an ability to imitate naturalistically had become a benchmark of talent. Such mimesis could not simply be abandoned without finding some other great achievement to elevate in its place. A group of German artists presented one solution. Coming together in Vienna in 1809 with Johann Friedrich Overbeck, the son of a Protestant pastor, at their centre, they formed a cooperative similar to that of a medieval guild. Members of the Brotherhood of St Luke – named after the patron saint of artists – believed in hard work and holy living. Forswearing the painting techniques of the present, eschewing the antique as pagan, the Renaissance as false, they looked instead to the art of the Middle Ages, aiming for a style which would combine nobility of intention with precision of outline and scholastic composition and to which light, shade and colour could be added, not for sensual allurement, but for further clarification of their sacred message.
    In 1810 the group travelled to Italy and, moving into the abandoned monastery of St Isidoro in Rome, formed the core of a loose commune of fellow believers who, wearing biblical robes, rough beards and long uncut locks, would garden or do household chores in the morning before coming together to collaborate on artistic projects, including, most prominently, religious fresco painting, until the end of the day. This group became known as the Nazarenes, a name that had originally been coined as a term of mockery but which, with time, would become adopted as a badge of pride. The Nazarenes, even as they pursued the Christ-like affectations which their critics derided, rejected at the same time all that was easy or familiar. Refusing to fall in line with the academy system of teaching, spurning the naturalistic conventions of their day and hence also, symbolically, the materialism of modernity, their practice slowly accrued what was seen as an innate moral power.
    The Nazarenes’ paintings look rather less impressive from a historical perspective than they did to their contemporaries. Their compositions are stilted, their subject matter is derivative and their colours lack energy. But, in their day, these images proved eye-catching if only because they were also so odd. Their style had ‘little or nothing to do with reality’, declared Charles Eastlake, a painter of historic and biblical subjects who was to go on, in 1843, to become the first Keeper of the National Gallery and the President of the Royal Academy. ‘To censure it for being destitute of colour, light and shade, would be