Itália e Germânia

Overbeck was one of the Nazarenes, a group of young German painters who moved to Rome in the 1810s, several converting to Catholicism, living almost like monks and trying to paint with the plain sincerity they admired in artists before Raphael. This picture grew straight out of that world. Two women lean together, Italia dark-haired and crowned with laurel, Germania fair and reaching for her hand, set in a landscape that holds both a Gothic spire and a Roman monastery. It stands for the pull the German north felt toward Italy, its art and its light. Overbeck began it thinking of his close friend Franz Pforr, a fellow Nazarene who had died young. He kept returning to the canvas, and only signed it finished in 1828.