In a time that sees a renaissance of religiosity and a new impact of an undercurrent religion without faith, this exhibition uses the example of the artists’ movement of the Nazarenes to explore the concepts, phenomena, and strategies of modernity. The German-Austrian-Swiss brotherhood around Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, and Philipp Veit came together at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the goal of using artistic means to revive a Christian-influenced society. Its modernity lies in its attitude to religious matters and in its protest against society as well as in its conceptual idea of art.

The exhibition attempts to shed new light on an artists’ group that has been considered anti-Enlightenment because of its advocacy of a monastic lifestyle and a formal language based on Raphael and Dürer. The postmodern focus of the exhibition seeks to contribute to a new evaluation of the Nazarenes as the first movement of aesthetic modernism.