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These earlier German Romantics found an obsessive imagery in innocence, whether that of childhood or the supposed moral calm of rural life. Recoiling from industrialization (the first steam pump, the catalog notes, wheezed into action in the Ruhr in 1789, and by 1849 there were almost 2,000 steam engines in Prussia alone), they rediscovered the Volk just as Wordsworth and Constable did with their country idylls. The Germans' pictures were filled with gnarled trees, old walls, villages unchanged since the Middle Ages. A favorite spot for Germans studying in Italy was Olevano, a hill town not far from Rome, where the Nazarenes, a group roughly equivalent to the English Pre- Raphaelites, liked to convene.
There was a moral value in being close to the soil, since nature was the source of all allegory and the direct fingerprint of God. Nature could stir the broadest emotions so long as it was rendered with scrupulous fidelity. Hence the special character of so much German Romantic landscape drawing, as in the work of Joseph Anton Koch or Friedrich: the impaction of vast amounts of detail into panoramic scenes. One sees both close up and for miles, with the focus equal everywhere. The ideal was a Goethean panorama in which sublimity and scientific curiosity were inextricably mingled. Among the Nazarenes, like Schnorr, the desire for precision became almost hallucinatory, with every stroke of the pen given the steeliness of a Durer engraving. But the best moments of broad-view landscape occurred where the elements most nakedly met -- on mountain peaks, or at the edge of the sea, as in Friedrich's wonderfully evocative drawing Rocky Shore with Anchor, 1835-37, with its broad tranquil planes of water, rocks and sky.
Where does classicism end and Romanticism start? The impulses interweave, within the life of one artist and sometimes in the same work. Karl Friedrich Schinkel's buildings, like the Altes Museum in Berlin (1822-30), were the very essence of neoclassicism, strict and canonical, their design underwritten by extreme tenacity in the refinement of detail. Yet as a young man in the mountains, on his way to Rome in 1803, he used generalization to express his yearning for the infinite. The twin blue peaks of the Bohemian Mittelgebirge that he worked up into a watercolor from sketches two years later -- Mountain Range in Bohemia at Sunset, circa 1805 -- are mere silhouettes, as is the dark fringe of pines in the foreground. But that is the source of their visual power. Such drawings warn you that words like classic and Romantic are, indeed, leaky containers.
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