an ironic name given to the German and Austrian artists who were members of the Lukasbrüder (Brotherhood of St. Luke), a group organized in 1809 in Vienna. Beginning in 1810 the Nazarenes, who included F. Overbeck, F. Pforr, P. von Cornelius, W. von Schadow, J. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, P. Veit, and J. A. Koch, worked in Rome, where they occupied the abandoned San Isidoro Monastery and lived in the manner of a medieval religious commune.
Opposed to late international classicism, the Nazarenes sought to revive religious mural art in the spirit of the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. They strove to reflect the religious and traditional illusions typical of the conservative followers of German romanticism. Choosing the works of A. Dürer and Perugino, as well as the early works of Raphael, as their principal models, they strayed increasingly from nature, lost their ties with contemporary life, and rather quickly adopted a dry and cold type of abstract stylization, which was essentially in harmony with academic traditions.
Besides painting individual pictures, the Nazarenes collaborated with one another on fresco cycles dealing with biblical subjects (frescoes in the Bartholdi House, 1816–17; now in the National Gallery, Berlin) and with scenes from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (Casino Massimo, Rome, 1819–30).
The Nazarenes made their most significant artistic contribution to portraiture and landscape painting. Their portraits and landscapes were based more on direct observations of nature. In the 1820’s and the 1830’s most of the Nazarenes returned home to positions at the academy and at court.
(1) A religious sect in Russia that formed in the 1840’s and 1850’s among the Transcaucasian Molokans, of which it was an offshoot. The Nazarenes also interpreted the Bible allegorically but more consistently than the Molokans; they repudiated church rites. In the early 20th century they merged with the Molokans.
(2) Jewish Christians were also called Nazarenes. The word in this sense was even used in the Koran.