Nerlys Rom und die Erfindung der deutschen Kunst

Friedrich Nerly is a special case in the German-Italian art scene. He is younger than most of the important representatives of Romanticism, he comes to Rome later, he is better educated, he has better nerves, better health - and he is successful, for a long life. After all, a long life was the exception rather than the rule for German landscape painters of the time.

Nevertheless, Nerly was not an outsider, but part of a romantic drop-out movement: Young painters who left their homeland at perhaps the bleakest moments in German history after 1815 to reinvent German art in Italy. It was a backward-looking avant-garde. They did not look forwards, into the future of a modern, bourgeois, rapidly industrializing world, but backwards into a largely imaginary past of the Middle Ages, the Bible and fairy tales.

Nerly was still carried by this romantic movement, but he was no longer part of it. He was to celebrate his great - and commercial - successes in Venice, but it was in Rome that the course was set.

With Dr. Golo Maurer, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome
In cooperation with the Italian Cultural Institute Hamburg