"Via Dolorosa or The Way of the Cross" edited by Rev. E.D. Graham with complete set of 14 plates by Johann Friedrich Overbeck, published by D.H. McBride, Akron, Ohio, 1898.

Hard boards, original publisher's cloth with gold title and cross on the front board, 4.3/4" x 6.1/2"; 48 pages, all pages with red frame, very good condition.

Contents:

On Christian Art
Johann Friedrich Overbeck
The Way of the Cross
Indulgences of the Way of the Cross
Conditions for Gaining the Indulgences

Station Crucifixes
Advantage of the Way of the Cross
Devotions of the Way of the Cross (14 Devotions with 14 plates by Overbeck on the opposite pages)
Stabat Mater

Johann Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869) was a German painter, a member of the Nazarene movement.

Johann Friedrich Overbeck studied at the academy of Vienna under the direction of Heinrich Friedrich Fuger. While Overbeck clearly accrued some of the polished technical aspects of the neoclassic painters, he was alienated by lack of religious spirituality in the themes chosen by his masters. Together with other disaffected young artists at the academy he started a group named the Guild of St Luke, dedicated to exploring his alternative vision for art. After four years, the differences between his group and others in the academy had grown so irreconcilable, that Overbeck and his followers were expelled.

He left for Rome, where he arrived in 1810. He was joined by a company of like-minded artists, including Peter von Cornelius, Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow and Philipp Veit, who jointly housed in the old Franciscan convent of Sant Isidoro, and became known among friends and enemies by the descriptive epithet of Nazarenes. Their precept was hard and honest work and holy living; they eschewed the antique as pagan, the Renaissance as false, and built up a severe revival on simple nature and on the serious art of Perugino, Pinturicchio, Francesco Francia and the young Raphael. The characteristics of the style thus educed were nobility of idea, precision and even hardness of outline, scholastic composition, with the addition of light, shade and color, not for allurement, but chiefly for perspicuity and completion of motive. Overbeck in 1813 joined the Roman Catholic Church, and thereby he believed that his art received Christian baptism.

Ten years of Overbeck later period, reaching from 1843 to 1852, were dedicated to the Life of Christ as recorded by the four Evangelists. Overbeck evolved three such consecutive series of drawings The Gospels" in forty cartoons, "The Sacraments" in seven, and "The Stations of the Cross" [Via Delarosa] in fourteen.

According to Nazarene view on European culture, the nature of earlier European art had been corrupted throughout contemporary Europe, starting centuries before the French Revolution, and the process of discarding its Christian orientation was proceeding further now. The Nazarene artists, including Overbeck, sought to express Christian art before the corrupting influence of the late Renaissance, casting aside his contemporary influences, and taking as a guide early Italian Renaissance painters, up to and including Raphael. [Reference: The Great Artists Series. "Johann Friedrich Overbeck," by J. Beavington Atkinson, 1882]

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