Seven meagre years

Seven Meagre Years is a fresco dated 1816, one of the Casa Bartholdy frescoes that marked the Nazarene Brotherhood's first major public commission and their definitive demonstration that German Romantic painting could achieve monumental scale. The Casa Bartholdy in Rome was the Prussian consulate, and the Prussian consul Jakob Salomon Bartholdy commissioned the group — including Overbeck, Cornelius, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and Veit — to decorate its rooms with scenes from the story of Joseph. Fresco technique was itself a statement: the Brotherhood chose the medium of Michelangelo and Raphael to connect their revival project to the pinnacle of Christian art. The story of the seven lean years from Genesis allowed them to combine Old Testament narrative with complex figural composition in a format demanding from all participants. The frescoes were transferred to canvas in 1887 and are now preserved at the Alte Nationalgalerie.

Fresco demanded different technical priorities from panel or canvas: color must be applied to fresh lime plaster while it is drying, requiring decisive, confident execution without revision. The Nazarene formal vocabulary of clear outline and pure color was actually well suited to fresco's technical demands, and the results show confident monumental figure handling compatible with their Raphael and Perugino sources.