Desiderius Lenz

Peter Lenz (1832–1928), afterwards Desiderius Lenz, was a German artist who became a Benedictine monk and together with Gabriel Wüger was a founder of the Beuron Art School. Peter was his birth name, but Desiderius became his name when he entered religious orders in 1872. The name was presumably given in reference to the eleventh-century Abbot Desiderius of the Abbey of Monte Cassino, the source of the Benedictine Order.

Peter Lenz was born in 1832 in Haigerloch, Baden-Württemberg. From 1849 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich as a pupil of the painter and sculptor Max von Widnmann and the muralist Wilhelm von Kaulbach, where he learnt about ancient Greek art, medieval German painting and artists of the Italian Renaissance. In 1851 he joined the Union of Artist Pupils at the Academy, and met Jakob Wüger. Although of differing characters, the two became friends and worked together.

Peter von Cornelius was a significant figure in Lenz's artistic development, and promoted his career. Cornelius had engaged in the Nazarene Brotherhood or Lukasbund at Rome between 1811 and 1819, where he worked with Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, a Lutheran convert to Roman Catholicism and founder of the Düsseldorf school of painting. Schadow taught that the spiritual life of the artist must be invested in the truths of Christian art. Cornelius was Director of the Munich Academy c.1825-40, and exercised a powerful influence there from which Lenz and Wüger benefited.

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