Johann Friedrich Overbeck German (1789-1869)

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Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

The Prophet Elijah Casting His Mantle Over Elisha, 1835 Black lithographic chalk on off-white paper 25.8 x 33.6 cm Bequeathed by Dr. Grete Ring, 1954 WA 1954.70.129

As one of the six founding members of the Brotherhood of St. Luke, which was formed at the Viennese Royal Academy in 1809, Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869, Lübeck, Germany)  held such an important role in the organization of the group that he was considered its priest.  It was Overbeck who named the group after St. Luke, the patron saint of painting, and it would be Overbeck who remained in Rome much after the other original members had returned to Germany. 

The Brotherhood of St. Luke, better known as the Nazarene movement, began among these six students as a reaction to the academic methods of copying being taught at Vienna.  Holding religion to be the foundation of art, they pursued this ideal among themselves until France occupied Vienna in 1809, closing the academy.  The academy was not able to readmit foreign students when it reopened, and with half of the Lukasbrüder being German, they set off to Rome to pursue their idealized art form in earnest.

The Brotherhood’s values of piety, personal sincerity, austerity, purity, and Catholic spirituality were not limited to their art; the brothers believed in a full integration of one’s aims for art and one’s personal goals; that the heart should match the body should match the work.  They lived in an abandoned monastery while in Rome, dressed in old German dress, and Overbeck refused to draw from cadavers or from the female nude, stating in 1808, “ I prefer to draw less correctly, than certainly damage my feelings, which are the artist’s greatest treasure.”  Purity of intention was placed above all else.  The Lukasbrüder painted one another frequently (in their “Friendship Portraits”), painted themselves among their possessions (a bible was always prominent), worked to create portraits of a ideal wife from composite ideas of good in a woman, and completed many overtly religious frescoes and large commissions.  They idealized Raphael for his purity of form and intent, and believed that above all, man and his work should endeavor in the service of god.  This willed incorporation of being and making which Overbeck practiced feverishly as a convert to Catholicism left him open to attack and confusion in later readings of his work, and the Ashmolean’s drawing is not left out of the fray 

The Prophet Elijah Casting his Mantle over Elisha is drawn in black lithographic chalk on a piece of rough, dark-buff laid paper, and came to the Ashmolean in 1954 from the collection of Dr. Grete Ring.  The page is signed Overbeck in the lower right hand corner, and the figures are labeled in Latin, Elisaeus and Elias, under their respective forms.  The drawing was completed between 1827 and 1835; Colin Bailey dates it to 1827, with its strong compositional similarities to Elisha’s Miracle of the Floating Axe Head of that year, and William Hennessey puts it around 1835, the same year a nearly identical drawing of the same scene was made in graphite on onionskin paper.  1835 seems a more plausible estimation, as the volume of the eyes and the movement of the drapery are not much like the 1827 drawing, and the difference betrays an evolution of ability.

Overbeck’s line is invariably strong and clean, and is always used to indicate form, and not the appearance of light or mass.  He uses hatching cut in a parallel method to find the surface of the objects, and his method of extending a parallel line until it is no longer required by the contour of the object gives the drawing a feeling of freedom and grace, an almost liquid-like skin around a skeleton.  In areas of shadow, he uses a crosshatching which leaves the surfaces with the effect of having retained their texture despite lack of light to depict it.

The chalk’s pressure on the paper is even through out the image, as might be expected of someone who worked so often in silverpoint.  Overbeck changes the sharpness, speed, and frequency of the line to create deeper value. Full accuracy and confident reserve in mark making make the drawing seem almost made by phenomenological means, as though it just happened to the page, and despite a few light erasures, there is virtually no record of struggle on the surface. The darkest lines, although not by much, are those that delineate the forms from their ground.

The figures in the drawing bear many of the hallmarks of good Nazarene draftsmanship: economy of mark and rejection of sensual effect, a fusion of the ideal and realistic forms, the use of line (not shading) to achieve tone, and a purity of presence which Mitchell Benjamin Frank called equal parts “historical authority and originality.” 

The drawing has the appearance of something intended for reproduction, as it may well have been.  One of the collaborative projects undertaken by the Nazarenes was an illustrated bible, in which this drawing was likely intended to be included.  By 1835, Overbeck was the last among the original group to remain in Rome, and he was less and less able to work on the picture bible due to his work on an increasingly large number of commissions.  It being a project of the Brotherhood, work did continue on the picture bible, with much of it being done by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1792-1872).  The project was not completed by the Nazarenes, but was added to by artists including Chagall and Ronault until its eventual publication in 1969 as the Oxford Bible. 

Taken from the Old Testament, The Prophet Elijah Casting his Mantle over Elisha depicts I Kings 19: 16b-19, in which the prophet Elijah throws his cloak over Elisha to indicate Elisha’s status as successor as prophet, or as replacing Elijah.  The passage in the bible is very quiet, and because the same scene appears so infrequently throughout the history of art, William Hennessey feels that the passage must have had special meaning to Overbeck, especially since he drew it twice (the aforementioned nearly-identical version is in the University of Kansas Museum of Art.)  Hennessey proposes that this meaning might be inferred when one pulls the content of Overbeck’s work and life closer together: the action of Elijah’s turning over of duty to Elisha can be read as symbolic of Overbeck’s handing over the responsibility of the picture bible to Schnorr, who continued work on it until 1851.

In the 1840’s, Overbeck was attacked by Friedrich Theodor Vischer for his use of allegory, or outside textual reference, in painting, particularly in Triumph of Religion in the Arts, which Overbeck used, as its title suggests, to place the aspirations of art back in the service of religion.  Vischer felt that this was a treatment inferior to the use of symbolism, where the meaning of the symbol is present in itself, is emblematic, and needs no outside text to create understanding; the art becomes independent.  Further, Overbeck’s pure and delicate draftsmanship was deemed feminine, and was naturally connected back to Overbeck himself in an unfair accusation of effeminacy, since he was always trying to connect art and life. 

While it is certain that Overbeck worked in an illustrative, or allegorical manner, and it can also be established that the married Overbeck was a man, if not a man less lusty that some artists throughout history, it is difficult that Overbeck would have used a scene from the bible intended for open publication to make allegory to his own situation.  The Nazarenes valued an honest but idealized version of the sitter in each of the portraits they executed, and this ability to achieve specificity of appearance was a skill practiced lifelong in the making of Friendship Portraits, and resemblance isn’t present in the drawings.  Moreover, although the Nazarenes did refer to Overbeck the priest of their group (and this seems a strange appropriation of title very meaningful in its sacramental foundation to the group), the drawing of oneself directly into the position of a biblical prophet seems a bit beyond Overbeck’s meek aspirations.

When one compares portraits of Overbeck to the (virtually identical) Elijahs in the Kansas and Ashmolean drawings, one finds little resemblance between the profiles.  Elijah has a strong, straight nose, with only its ordinariness to call attention to it, whereas Overbeck’s nose is consistently overscale throughout the portraits of him, shaped of a very fragile-looking cartilage that forms a prominent bump that stretches most of its length.  Further, Elijah’s up cast hand is of broad palm and medium-thick fingers, and Overbeck’s hands are always delicate, painterly hands with bony, tapering fingers and feminine grace.

Elisha, who should stand in for Schnorr von Carolsfeld, appears differently in the two drawings.  In the Kansas drawing, he appears with a bald pate and a pointy beard hiding a chin that appears to extends beyond his hooked and bony nose.  In the Ashmolean’s drawing, Elisha appears younger, for addition of lovingly-drawn curly hair and an innocuous nose like Elijah’s in both images.  Schnorr von Carolsfeld, as depicted by Friedrich von Oliver in 1820, has a straight and simple nose, a short and nearly receding chin,  and wavy hair that might tend toward curl, but could never enjoy the curly-cue rendering that Overbeck has used in the Ashmolean drawing. 

Matter of lack of physical likeness aside, Overbeck’s Catholic piety and consistent use of direct allegory prevent the The Prophet Elijah Casting his Mantle over Elisha from  having been a depiction of Overbeck Casting the Picture Bible over Schnorr von Carolsfeld.   The similarity of the situations may have sparked an interest in Overbeck’s unconscious mind, but his refusal to account for it in appearance and the likelihood of his including a picture in the Picture Bible for its resonance with his individual life, this man who wouldn’t draw from cadavers to keep pure his feelings, seems too distant, too near blasphemy.  More likely the abstract idea of shared endeavor and the preservation of the Catholic voice in the arts and society was the value he found in the obscure passage, and thus chose to illustrate it.

 
Jessica Slaven