Peter von Cornelius

Peter von Cornelius (23 September 1784 – 6 March 1867) was a German painter.

Cornelius was born in Düsseldorf. From the age of twelve he attended drawing classes at the Düsseldorf Academy. His father, who was superintendent of the Düsseldorf gallery and professor at the academy, died in 1799, after which Cornelius supported his family by his work as a portraitist and illustrator. In a letter to the Count Raczynski he wrote:

It fell to the lot of an elder brother and myself to watch over the interests of a numerous family. It was at this time that it was attempted to persuade my mother that it would be better for me to devote myself to the trade of a goldsmith than to continue to pursue painting – in the first place, in consequence of the time necessary to qualify me for the art, and in the next, because there were already so many painters. My dear mother, however, rejected all this advice, and I felt myself impelled onward by an uncontrollable enthusiasm, to which the confidence of my mother gave new strength, which was supported by the continual fear that I should be removed from the study of that art I loved so much.

His earliest major work was the decoration of the choir of the church of St Quirinus at Neuss, commissioned by Canon Wallraff of Cologne in 1803. In 1809 he began a series of drawings illustrating Goethe's Faust, the first part of which had been published the previous year. For these Cornelius employed a linear style much influenced by a facsimile edition of Dürer's prayer book for Maximilian I. Six of the images were shown to the poet, who approved of them. Cornelius continued the series following his move to Rome, and it was published in twelve engravings between 1816 and 1826, under the title Bilder zu Goethe's Faust. He moved to Frankfurt in 1809, and worked there until going to Rome two years later.

Cornelius arrived in Rome on 14 October 1811, and soon became one of the most promising of the Lukasbund or "Nazarene Brotherhood", a group of young German artists resident in the city, which included Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, Philipp Veit, Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld and Ludwig Vogel, a fraternity (some of whom selected a ruinous convent for their home) who had banded together for resolute study and mutual criticism. At Rome Cornelius participated, with other members of the brotherhood, in the decoration of the Casa Zuccari (the residence of Jakob Salomon Bartholdy, the Prussian consul general), and the Villa Massimi, while at the same time also working on designs for the illustration of the Nibelungenlied.

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