King Ludwig I entrusted Peter Cornelius with the interior mural decoration of the neo-Romanesque Ludwigskirche in Munich. The painter worked on apse and choir frescoes between 1836 and 1840. His 60' 5" high and 37' 3" wide fresco behind the main altar of the church depicts The Last Judgment and represents the definitive statement of the Nazarene artist. (Figure 2, Peter Cornelius, The Last Judgment, Ludwigskirche, Munich, 1836-40.). The American art historian Robert Rosenblum describes the painting in great detail. He links the rigid, symmetrical arrangement of the figures, their doll-like stiffness, and the dry, linear style to the earlier art by the Italian master Fra Angelico and the German painter Albrecht Duerer.[11] It must be added that there is no three-dimensional illusionistic space in Cornelius' frescoes, that he rarely portrayed lifelike individuals, but instead preferred abstract figures closely resembling medieval Christian prototypes. Such stylistic oddities appeared again in much German-American religious art.

   King Ludwig I broke off relations with Peter Cornelius over the design of the Ludwigskirche murals, which he deemed too austere and archaic. Peter Cornelius accepted an offer by the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV to come to Berlin where the painter died in 1867.[12] The main principle of the Nazarenes was their belief that spiritual purity was necessary for artistic achievement and that Catholicism was the only path to reach great artistry.[13] It was a limited viewpoint that found support from only a few patrons of nineteenth century art.

    As to the connection of the Bavarian king with the Nazarenes, it must be regarded as a youthful love for an earlier lifestyle and culture. The king's promotion of the group should also be understood as an expression of fierce nationalism. He was convinced that the Nazarenes had reestablished German art after many years of French dominance. Ludwig belonged to the early representatives of nationalistic romantic ideas. Although he professed to cherish medieval German art, he was at heart a classicist, as his dislike of The Last Judgment fresco by Peter Cornelius demonstrates. The buildings the king commissioned from his court architect Leo von Klenze, beginning with the Glyptothek and ending with the Propylaeen, were modeled on Greco-Roman art and greatly pleased Ludwig.[14]

    Of the public Romantic Nazarene art works in Munich only the Ludwigskirche frescoes have survived. There is, however, no shortage of examples of this Christian revival style in German-American mission churches of the second half of the nineteenth century.

    The next step in the introduction of religious art from Germany to its North American missions involved the Benedictine monastic order and a dynamic German missionary. Catholic religious orders in Bavaria began to flourish again after King Ludwig I had begun to reinstate them in 1827. The king maintained very close relations with the Benedictines, and his friendship with the priest Boniface Wimmer had important consequences for Catholic German immigrant communities in North America. Wimmer has been called "the greatest Catholic missionary of nineteenth century America." [15] (Figure 3. Portrait of Boniface Wimmer,)

   Boniface Wimmer was born in 1809 in a small village near Regensburg in Franconia, Germany. He attended the local Latin school and seminary and went on to study philosophy and theology at the University of Munich. After graduation in 1827, he entered the Benedictine Monastery of St. Michael at Metten in Bavaria and was ordained a priest in 1834.[16]  Boniface Wimmer had a keen interest in missionary work and felt great concern for the German Catholics, who had settled in North America, where they found themselves bereft of spiritual counsel by German priests.  While he was teaching Greek and Latin at the Ludwig Gymnasium in Munich in 1841, Wimmer petitioned his superiors to be able to go to America as a missionary, but his request was denied. In 1845 he met Father Peter Lempke, a German missionary from western Pennsylvania, who had come to Munich to solicit funds and to recruit additional missionaries for his diocese. He offered to sell Wimmer a parcel of land in Pennsylvania where the Benedictine priest could build a monastery and a college for training German-speaking boys of recent immigrant families.[17]