Anselm Feuerbach

Anselm Feuerbach (1829–1880) was among the most ambitious and melancholy figures of nineteenth-century German painting, a central representative of the Deutschrömer — the German artists who settled in Rome in search of a monumental classical ideal that seemed impossible to realise in their homeland. Born in Speyer into an exceptionally cultivated family — his father was a classical archaeologist, his uncle Ludwig Feuerbach the philosopher — Anselm grew up immersed in classical antiquity and carried an almost crushing cultural inheritance throughout his life.

He studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, then in Munich, Antwerp, and Paris under Thomas Couture, before settling permanently in Rome in 1856. There he found in the Roman model Nanna Risi (later Anna Risi) the ideal embodiment of his classical aesthetic: a Trasteverine woman of statuesque bearing whose features he used for a series of large paintings — Nanna (1861), Iphigenie (1862), Medea (1870) — that fused ancient subject matter with a directly observed, living presence. The relationship with Nanna was not merely professional; when she left him for another man around 1865, Feuerbach was devastated and his subsequent work acquired an even deeper vein of melancholy.

Feuerbach's paintings are characterised by a severe formal beauty, muted chromatic range, and a pervasive atmosphere of tragic contemplation. His large mythological canvases — the two versions of Iphigenie, the Symposium (1869, 1873), the Battle of the Amazons — aspire to the monumental gravity of ancient sculpture, rejecting both the anecdotal domesticity of genre painting and the flashy colour of contemporary Salon art. He was appointed professor at the Vienna Academy in 1873 but the experience was unhappy; his work was poorly received and he resigned after four years. He died in Venice in 1880, convinced that his achievement had gone unrecognised.

Feuerbach painted in a severe, classicising manner that drew on Venetian Renaissance colour — he greatly admired Titian and Veronese — combined with the formal restraint of ancient Greek relief sculpture. His palette is characterised by deep, warm tonalities: terracottas, olive greens, warm browns, and the lustrous flesh tones of Italian academic tradition. He avoided the bright, saturated colour of his French contemporaries and the anecdotal detail of genre painting, preferring instead large, simply organised compositions in which monumental figures are arranged in shallow, frieze-like space.

His handling is smooth and controlled, with modelling achieved through fine gradations of tone rather than visible brushwork. Figures are painted with sculptural solidity, their poses derived from antique sources — Elgin Marbles, Hellenistic reliefs — but inhabited by the warm physical presence of his Italian models. The overall effect is one of noble, timeless gravity, occasionally tipping into cold formalism when the balance between the classical ideal and living observation is lost. At its best, in the first Iphigenie or the melancholy Nanna portraits, the fusion is deeply moving.

Feuerbach represents the most intellectually serious attempt within nineteenth-century German painting to revive the monumental classical tradition of the Renaissance on the basis of direct engagement with ancient art and living Italian models. His ambition was nothing less than a German equivalent of Raphael's Stanze — a programme of large-scale mythological painting that would give German culture visual equivalents to its literary and philosophical achievements. That the attempt was ultimately felt by contemporaries to be anachronistic and cold is itself historically significant: Feuerbach's failure illuminates the impossibility, in the age of Courbet and Impressionism, of the idealist programme he had inherited. His rehabilitation came after his death, when Hans von Marées and Böcklin were also reassessed, and he came to be seen as a tragic figure of exceptional ambition.