Philipp Veit

He was a grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher at the heart of the German-Jewish Enlightenment, and the son of Simon Veit, a Berlin banker. His mother later left that marriage for the writer Friedrich Schlegel, and the family converted to Catholicism. Philipp grew up inside that turn, and faith became the subject of nearly everything he painted.

In Rome after 1815 he joined a circle of young German artists who called themselves the Brotherhood of Saint Luke, and whom others nicknamed the Nazarenes for their long hair and monkish devotion to sacred art. They wanted to recover the plain faith of painters before Raphael. Working with them on the walls of a Prussian diplomat's house near the Spanish Steps, Veit helped bring back fresco, a wall-painting technique that had nearly been forgotten in Germany.

In 1830 he moved to Frankfurt to direct the Städel, the city's art institute, and there painted his best-known wall picture, a large fresco of Christianity being carried to the German lands. After the museum's board rejected another canvas it had commissioned from him, he resigned and spent his last decades running a smaller gallery in Mainz, still painting altarpieces in the devout style he had learned as a young man in Rome.