Franz Pforr's Brotherhood, Bilder and Bildung: Drawing on Friendship, Chivalry, and Schiller

This dissertation presents a biographical and iconographical study of the early nineteenth-century German artist Franz Pforr (1788-1812) in order to demonstrate that his reputation as Nazarene cofounder has led to a misunderstanding of his art historical significance. It seeks to set the record straight, so to speak, by showing that Pforr was not a religious painter-he did not make bible-based pictures. Nevertheless, the dissertation focuses on Pforr's obsessive concern with virtue as expressed through his idealization of brotherhood and the Middle Ages, two themes central to understanding his work. The dissertation provides a personal account of Pforr's life with emphasis on his friendship to Johann David Passavant and Johann Friedrich Overbeck. Pforr is also placed within the larger artistic and cultural context of the Bildungsburgertum and the emergence of the public literary sphere. The dissertation argues that Pforr was among the first painters of his time to look to contemporary literature for subject matter and inspiration, particularly the historical dramas of the Sturm und Drang. Another theme examined in the dissertation concerns Pforr's effusive emotional life, as registered in his writing, and its direct contrast to his controlled and rigid painting style. Finally, the dissertation also shows how Pforr's classification as a romantic artist has also sold him short. While he did embody many of the qualities typical of what we understand to be romantic, the dissertation seeks to establish the degree to which he was equally an inheritor of the German Aufklarung in order to argue that finally, he is an artist best situated at the threshold between the two.