Title: Zeitschrift fur Christliches Kunst, 1888-1921
Description: The most dramatic revival of interest in the art and architecture of the Middle Ages in nineteenth-century Germany, as in all of Europe, occurred in the wake of the extreme anticlericalism and philosophical radicalism posed by the French Revolution. The end of the Napoleonic Wars was the occasion for both religious revival and efforts at independent national integration and national development. The recovery and propagation of what were thought to be the pure values of medieval Christianity, the celebration of its supposed Germanic roots, and the push for national unification were all elements of nineteenth-century German religious culture. The German Gothic and Byzantine revival began in earnest with the project to complete the Cologne Cathedral under the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV. A principal figure in that project was the politician and writer August Reichensperger, who, though Catholic, believed in German unification under the Prussians. His theory of the importance of the medieval tradition of the Bauhtte, a lodge of building craftsmen attached to a particular cathedral, has been seen as a metaphor for a Germany united under the powerful and Protestant Prussians but based on regional entities living in the freedom associated with the Germanic Gothic past (Brooks, p. 264). The Gothic and Byzantine revival in Europe was influenced by a vibrant British movement to bring liturgical practice back into accord with a more spiritual past--a movement that, combined with growing nationalism everywhere, stimulated an outpouring of work in archaeology and art history. Journals such as the British-based Ecclesiologist and the French-based Annales Archaéologiques circulated among interested parties all over Europe. The Zeitschrift fr Christliche Kunst, founded in 1888 by a canon of Cologne Cathedral named Alexander Schntgen, was the inheritor of many of these concerns. Schntgen began privately collecting medieval art in 1867, buying his first panels from a painter and curator who had associations with the Nazarenes, Johann Anton Ramboux. In 1875 Schntgen joined the board of the diocesan museum, where he continued to advocate the religious value of exhibition of the art of the Middle Ages. While serving as editor and primary author of the articles in the Zeitschrift, he also became the president of the Christian Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts of the diocese and later part of its Advisory Commission for Church Art. His collections are today the heart of the Schntgen Museum in Cologne.
Subjects: Christian art and symbolism, Periodicals, Medieval Art, Christianity and the arts, Liturgical objects
Time periods: Medieval, 500-1500