After the death of Dürer and Holbein the German school did not long
hold its supremacy. Its decline was rapid, and not until the present
century was there a re-awakening. Johann Friedrich Overbeck, the chief
of the revivalists of German art, was born at Lübeck, in 1789. When
about eighteen years of age he went to Vienna, to study painting in the
academy of that city. The ideas on art which he had carried with him
were so entirely new and so little agreeable to the professors of the
academy, that they met with but small approval. On the other hand, there
were several among his fellow-pupils who gladly followed his lead; and in
1810, Overbeck, accompanied by a small band of youthful artists, went to
Rome, where he established the school which was afterward to become so
famous.
Overbeck, who was professor of painting in the Academy of St. Luke, a
foreign member of the French Institute, and a member of all the German
academies, died at Rome in 1869, at the advanced age of eighty years. He
painted both in fresco and in oil. Of his productions in fresco, the most
noteworthy are a “Vision of St. Francis” in Santa Maria degli Angeli, at
Assisi, and five scenes from Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” in the villa
of the Marchese Massimo, in Rome. Of his oil paintings, the best are the
“Triumph of Religion in the Arts,” in the Städel Institute at Frankfort;
“Christ on the Mount of Olives,” at Hamburg; the “Entrance of Christ
into Jerusalem,” painted in 1816 for the Marien Kirche, at Lübeck; and
a “Descent from the Cross,” at Lübeck. Overbeck also executed a number
of small drawings. Of these we may mention forty designs of the “Life of
Christ,” and many other Biblical subjects.