Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld

In 1818 a young Saxon painter reached Rome and joined the Nazarenes, a brotherhood of German artists who lived almost like monks and wanted to bring back the sincerity of early Renaissance religious art. Schnorr threw himself into their revival of fresco, painting rooms in the Villa Massimo near the Lateran with scenes from Ariosto's Renaissance epic 'Orlando Furioso'.

In 1827 King Ludwig I of Bavaria called him to Munich, and there he spent decades covering halls of the royal Residenz with the legend of the Nibelungs, the medieval German epic, and with scenes from German history. That cycle of murals was not finished until 1867.

What actually carried his name into ordinary homes was smaller and printed. Between 1852 and 1860 he issued the 'Bibel in Bildern', the Bible in Pictures, 240 wood-engraved scenes that were copied, reprinted and pinned up in schoolrooms across Protestant Europe for generations. He spent his last decades in Dresden, professor at its academy and, from 1846, director of the city's picture gallery.