Cleveland Museum of Art

View across the Moat towards the Thomasschule and the Thomaskirche in Leipzig

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld

Date

1817

Medium

Pen and black ink and graphite on ivory wove paper

Culture

Germany, 19th century

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld belonged to the Nazarenes, a group of artists who looked to early Northern Renaissance art for its simplicity and piety. The artist created this drawing during a visit to his native Leipzig en route to join the Nazarenes in Rome. He depicted the city’s distinctive features, including the oldest German language school in Europe (of which he was an alumnus) and a church where Johann Sebastian Bach served as cantor during the 18th century. The artist himself appears in a self-portrait at right in the pair seen at lower left. He juxtaposed loosely sketched landscape with areas of profuse detail, created with a hard and sharpened pencil reinforced with pen and ink. The landscape in this drawing is seen from the perspective of Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s family home in Leipzig.

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