Ludwig's interest in religious art dates to his 1818 visit to Rome where he was introduced to a group of German artists known as the Nazarenes. The original founders of the group - Franz Pforr from Hessen and Friedrich Overbeck from Luebeck - had arrived at the Vienna Academy of Art in 1805 to study painting. They were caught up in the Romantic reverence for the Middle Ages, which the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel pursued in his writings and in his lectures at the University of Vienna.[5]

    The Romantic movement of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries looked back to historic times with nostalgia. Many German Romantic thinkers, like Friedrich Schlegel, thought of creating a society patterned on a previous age. They felt that the visual arts should imitate pre-Renaissance Christian painting and sculpture instead of forging ahead with new styles. The artist Albrecht Duerer came to be regarded as an ideal model of the God-fearing craftsman of medieval Germany.[6]

    Before moving to Rome in 1810, Franz Pforr and Friedrich Overbeck had founded the Brotherhood of St. Luke with six members, all of them fellow art students in Vienna. The Evangelist Luke had been the patron of the medieval guild of painters in Germany. When they lived in Rome, the young artists' Catholic visions also encompassed a revival of Italian pre-Renaissance religious fresco painting. This revival was stimulated by Peter Cornelius, a young Catholic painter from Duesseldorf, who joined the Nazarene group in 1811.[7]

    When Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria first met the Nazarene painters in Rome in 1818, they lived in an abandoned monastery of the Order of St. Isidore. It was their biblical attire, long hair and sandals that had earned them the Nazarene label. Ludwig recognized the painters as congenial spirits. He likened Friedrich Overbeck to the Apostle John and called Peter Cornelius the "new Duerer".[8]  He offered the Nazarenes patronage and commissions. In 1819 he called Cornelius to Munich, and in 1824 he appointed him Director of the Royal Academy of Art. He knighted the painter one year later. King Ludwig was an avid collector of easel paintings by the Nazarenes. He displayed them in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. This museum housed the King's private collection of modern art acquired with his personal funds. The Alte Pinakothek belonged to the Bavarian state.[9]

    It was Peter Cornelius who introduced Nazarene ideals and the Nazarene style to the Munich art establishment. Of the original group, he remained the only German painter who devoted himself to spreading the ideas of this Romantic interlude in art. Franz Pforr died prematurely in Rome in 1812, and Friedrich Overbeck never returned to Germany but preferred to live and work in Rome, where he died in 1869.[10]  On the other hand, Peter Cornelius carried the group's neo-Catholic practices to Munich, where he pursued a renascence of pre-Renaissance mural painting.  He left a legacy of frescoes in a number of official buildings, among them three rooms in the Glyptothek, which housed King Ludwig's collection of antique sculpture, and a hallway in the Alte Pinakothek, where paintings dating before 1800, were exhibited. These Cornelius frescoes were destroyed during World War II. The Nazarene painter was aided by a group of devoted students, who perfected the art of mural painting and shared his Christian revival convictions. A large number of German-American artists, who decorated mission churches in North America between 1850 and 1900, disseminated the ideas and techniques of the Munich school of religious art in their adopted country.