Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck's "Italia und Germania" (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society)

Winner of the American Philosophical Society’s 2007 John Frederick Lewis Award for best book or monograph.

In this original and thought-provoking book, Lionel Gossman, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, focuses on Franz Overbeck's "Italia and Germania" to discuss the importance of religious conversion in Romantic thought. Gossman has an impressive knowledge of the historical situation and philosophical background of the time. Gossman gives excellent translations from original German sources that are not only accurate but may enable the Anglophone reader to truly grasp the spirit of the sources.

This book serves as a thoughtful and elegantly written introduction to the way of thinking of one of the most important of the Nazerene painters.It treats the evolution of the Nazarene artists' preoccupation with religious issues in an engaging manner and offers a social-historical and theological context to Overbeck's painting by looking interestingly at a wide range of issues and contacts in his early Nazarene period. Illustrations.