Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld

For the last 12 years of his life, Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld looked after the emperor's pictures. In 1841 he became second curator of the imperial picture gallery, which then hung in the Upper Belvedere in Vienna, and two years later its first curator. Some of his own paintings are in the same building today, among them Rudolf of Habsburg and the Priest, from 1828. It shows the legend of the dynasty's founder giving up his horse to a priest carrying the sacrament.

He came from Königsberg in East Prussia and from a family of painters. His father taught him, and his younger brother Julius became one of the leading Nazarenes, German painters who looked back to medieval and early Renaissance religious art. Ludwig Ferdinand entered the Vienna Academy in 1804, as a teenager, and stayed in the city for good. He shared the Nazarenes' ideals in a moderate form and avoided an open break with the Academy.

From 1818 the imperial family gave him commissions, including work for the Franzensburg, a mock-medieval castle in the park at Laxenburg. For ten years he also directed the artistic refurbishment of the Brandhof, the Styrian estate of Archduke Johann, the emperor's brother. Between 1821 and 1823 he gave private lessons to the young Moritz von Schwind, later known for his fairy-tale paintings, and through him came to know the circle around Franz Schubert. Goethe's Faust also occupied him, and his large Faust and Mephistopheles in the Study hangs in the Belvedere as well.