The Evolution of Friedrich Overbeck's Monumental Painting

Abstract

The subject of the study is monumental murals, as well as cardboard and sketches by the German artist, one of the founders of the "Union of St. Luke", Friedrich Overbeck (Johann Friedrich Overbeck; 1789-1869), in comparison with his easel works and frescoes by masters of his circle. The object of research is the specifics and evolution of the artist's approach to monumental painting. The purpose of this work is to identify the features of Friedrich Overbeck's fresco painting, and also to analyze the evolution of the manner of his work on monumental cycles. Stylistic, iconographic, historical and cultural analysis is used as the methodological basis of the study. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that despite the fact that Overbeck's activity became one of the important phenomena of European artistic life in the first half of the XIX century, the problem of the formation and development of his approach to fresco painting was practically not touched upon in Russian and Western historiography. This study traced the gradual transition in Overbeck's work from simple illustrative compositions to complex multi-level programs in their meaning. The main specificity of Overbeck's monumental cycles relative to other Nazarenes is the complication of the symbolic content of the works, primarily based on the use of "typological symbolism".