Young Monk

This 1840 Young Monk at the Detroit Institute of Arts is an early work reflecting Chassériau's interest in religious subjects during his Italian period, when he was deeply moved by the medieval and Renaissance sacred art he encountered. Painted when Chassériau was twenty, just after his arrival in Rome, the work shows the influence of the Nazarenes—the German Romantic painters who had settled in Rome and revived early Christian and medieval visual vocabulary for nineteenth-century religious painting. The young monk's contemplative absorption, rendered with the Ingres-derived precision of Chassériau's training, demonstrates his early engagement with spiritual interiority as a subject distinct from the Orientalist and mythological themes of his later career.

The monk's contemplative features are rendered with the precise drawing Chassériau learned from Ingres, while the warm palette and atmospheric handling anticipate the more coloristic direction of his mature work.