Portrait of Bianca Quandt
This portrait of Clara Bianca Quandt (1790-1862) was painted in 1820. Right from the start, I trust that my reader has comments. Neither work nor woman looks reminiscent of the 19th century. Her garb and instrument are those of the early Italian Renaissance while the subject’s posture and the architecture are both quite medieval*.
To understand this chaos of anachronism, we must turn on the artist, a passionate young German idealist named Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Along with a band of other passionate young German idealists, Von Carolsfeld moved to Italy to live in an abandoned monastery, grow out his hair and dress like a monk. This band of painters wanted people to call them the Brotherhood of St. Luke, but everybody decided that it would be funnier to call them Nazarenes instead**. The Brotherhood’s primary objective was to break away from the institutionalized academy system of art education*** and try to learn and discover art the way the great masters of the late medieval and early renaissance period had done it, with emphasis on spirituality, romanticism and mystery****.
And so it was that when young Von Carolsfeld had the opportunity to paint the wife of a patron*****, that woman was going to appear in the beloved historical style of the Brotherhood. More specifically, she would appear as a mirrored derivative of a portrait done by Raphael of one Joan of Aragon. If you’re comparing the two paintings now and are thinking “Huh. Raphael’s is better.” then you should know that there are two reasons for this.
Reason the First: The Nazarenes, like the later PRB, were inclined to think of Raphael as being either the last great artist or the first great sell-out. So it was that some insisted that their style should be pre-Raphael, just to be safe. Von Carolsfeld would never get fully on board with this notion, but the influence is there to be seen nonetheless. This painting could be viewed as the pre-Raphael version of a classic Raphael. If that makes sense******.
Reason the Second: Raphael was better than Von Carolsfeld.
*Meanwhile, the completion of the lady’s right hand is apparently a thing of the future.
**People are the absolute worst sometimes.
***A mutual break, it seems, as the academy in Vienna obliged their concerns about institutionalized art by expelling a bunch of them.
****It’s the youthful, monastery-dwelling rebellion that no artist’s parents are prepared for.
*****On whom he had a crush, just for the record. It must have been the remarkably small but sharply dimpled chin that did it for him.
******Nope.