V.A. Zhukovsky and German painters: from C.D. Friedrich to the Nazarenes. Article 2

Zhukovsky owes his intimate knowledge of the philosophy of new religious art and of familiarity with the Nazarenes to famous German scholar and diplomat Carl von Bunsen, who presented him the Eternal City in 1833 in the light of the German world. This strengthened the romanticist's love of the country. J.F. Overbeck, Cornelius, Steinle and other German artists settling in Rome influenced Zhukovsky's becoming a painter and art collector. August Kestner was Zhukovsky's Rome guide when the latter accompanied the Heir to the Throne in December 1838 - January 1839. The guide was introduced to the Heir, and with Zhukovsky's permission, Kestner dedicated poetic lines to the Heir. The message addressed by German Diaspora in Rome to the Heir to the Throne of the Russian Empire consisted of four sextains and showed deep respect and blessing to future Alexander II. In 1840s Zhukovsky with his family was living in an inextricable connection with G. Reutern, his father-in-law, who supported the Nazarenes' ideas. One of Zhukovsky's companions was Principal of the Art Academy in Dusseldorf, successor of P. Cornelius and founder of School of Painting in Dusseldorf, Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow. In Frankfurt on the Main the romanticist developed a good rapport with the youngest and the last of the most outstanding Overbeck's pupils, Professor Edward Jakob von Steinle. The second part of Zhukovsky's creative career of a painter, connoisseur of painting and art collector was under the German religious art sign. The deep feeling of religion, individual self-improvement, conservatism (commitment to the classics of painting), and all-embracing universalism embodied in particular and tangible forms and declared in theoretical works and canvas by the chers maitres of the school, appealed to the Russian romanticist's artistic vision. The profound idea of moral and didactic, educational part of visual art seemed intrinsically close to Zhukovsky in the quality of a teacher. Surrounded by the Nazarenes and pietistic Reutern-Shwaertzel family, Zhukovsky turned to understanding the canonical texts of Christianity, which resulted in the literary translations of the New Testament, the Apocalypse, the poem about Ahasuerus, his own applied Christian philosophy, ''sacred prose'' of the second part of 1840s-1850s.

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