Christian Leopold Bode (1831-1906)

The history painter, gymnastics and drawing teacher Christian Leopold Bode was born on March 11, 1831 as the eldest son of Georg Wilhelm Bode in Ludwig André's house in Kleiner Biergrund. He naturally received his first drawing and painting lessons from his father, who is said to have preferred his son to pursue a career in commerce. However, according to Leopold Bode's grandniece, his mother Anna Maria also exerted a great influence on her son. She introduced him early on to the romantic poetry of Tieck and Brentano and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, some of which he was later to illustrate. Among his comrades from his secondary school days (then in Herrnstrasse) were the later Offenbach historian Emil Pirazzi and Leopold Sonnemann, the founder of the "Frankfurter Zeitung". From 1848 he attended the Städelsche Kunstinstitut, where Professor Jakob Becker, Johann David Passavant and Eugen Schäffer were his first teachers. From 1851-1857 he studied under Eduard von Steinle, under whose influence he created the religious history paintings belonging to the so-called "Nazarene direction". The structure of the first of these paintings, "Visit of Mary to Elisabeth", is clearly reminiscent of Perugino and Raphael. He traveled to Belgium and the Alpine countries. On August 3, 1851, he married Catharina Elisabeth, née Geiger (May 23, 1826 - July 11 or 18, 1856 in Offenbach), from whom they had 4 children. In his second marriage, on July 19, 1859, he married Maria Margaretha, née Geiger, the sister of his late wife (April 12, 1828 - June 26, 1916), who bore him three children. In 1873, he received the "Great Golden Medal for Art" from the Austrian Emperor and, on his 70th birthday in 1901, the "Golden Medal of Merit for Art and Science", which came with the title of professor, from the Grand Duke of Hesse. For decades, the painter had a studio in the Städel Art Institute, as well as a workroom in the palace. In his final years, he suffered from hearing loss inherited from his mother, which is said to have forced him to live a life of seclusion. After 46 years in Isenburg Castle, he gave up his apartment there in 1883 and moved to Sachsenhausen. His departure is said to have been very difficult for him, so that he - who "had tears in his eyes" - was serenaded by the singers of the Offenbach gymnastics club. He died there of pneumonia on July 26, 1906 and was buried in the old cemetery in Offenbach. Leopold-Bode-Straße was named in his honor.
Even during his lifetime, a fierce newspaper feud - also known as the "Bode War" - arose over whether he belonged to Offenbach or Frankfurt, as both cities claimed the master for themselves. While Offenbach was his place of birth and residence, Frankfurt was the focus of his artistic activity. However, this debate illustrates the recognition of Leopold Bode and his supra-regional importance.

Leopold Bode, initially a representative of the Nazarenes who was committed to religious themes, became more and more of a Romantic and history painter over time, a portraitist, illustrator and genre painter who paid tribute to central motifs of European culture and history.
His first oil painting, with which he made his debut as a 24-year-old in 1855, was the "Visit of Mary to Elizabeth". Other works with a biblical theme include "Scene from the Story of Ruth" (1857), "Visitation of Mary", "Altarpiece in Mariabuchen near Lahr" (1857), and later works such as "Flight into Egypt" (1897), "Let the little children come to me", altarpiece for the new Protestant garrison church in Strasbourg (1897).
From 1861 to 1864 he was employed in Cologne as an assistant to Steinle in the execution of his frescoes in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. The 1863 painting "The Alpine Bride" - based on a ballad by the Austrian poet J.G. Seidl - already shows a romantic theme. Finally, the work "Cinderella's Happiness" from 1866 marks him out as a complete Romantic. In 1870, he painted the chapel at Klein-Heubach for Prince von Löwenstein. This was followed by the painting of a hall with the legends of Charlemagne for Baron W. von Erlanger in Nieder-Ingelheim. In 1873 he published the cartoons for Schiller's "Glocke", watercolors for Charlemagne (1873/74), followed by the watercolor cycle "Undine" (1878) after de la Motte Fouqué and the "Winter's Tale" after Shakespeare (around 1878). In 1880 he was involved in the painting of the new Frankfurt Opera House. During this time, he also created the oil painting "The mountain giant Rübezahl, how he makes a carter feel his power". This was followed by the large watercolor cycle "Lohengrin" (1882) and numerous portraits of Offenbach personalities, such as the Andrés, the d'Orvilles and the Pirazzis.
Otto Kellner described the oil painting "Rudolf von Habsburg", painted in 1868, as Leopold Bode's main work: It depicts the aforementioned count returning home from a hunt and meeting a priest who is hurrying to administer the sacrament to a dying man.

Leopold Bode has been called the "last Nazarene" and is considered one of the most outstanding representatives of the Romantic school.

The Nazarenes were a German-Austrian community of artists active in Rome from 1810 to around 1830, whose members included the painters Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Peter von Cornelius, Philipp Veit and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. The painters were interested in reviving German religious art in the style of the Italian masters of the 15th century - especially Perugino and Raphael - but also with elements of old German painting from the Dürer period. The association emerged from the Lukasbund, an ascetic and austere brotherhood of artists founded in Vienna in 1809. In 1810, some of the Lukas brothers, including Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr, moved to the remote Franciscan monastery of Sant'Isidoro near Rome, where they were later joined by numerous artists. The artists' commitment to a strict moral and religious lifestyle earned them the mocking name of Nazarenes, which they later adopted themselves. In the spirit of medieval workshop communities, the painters mainly created large fresco cycles with biblical subjects. Their aim was a New German, religious-patriotic art in which the line was to take precedence over color.

As a counter-reaction to the rational Enlightenment, Romanticism (1800-1830) turned in particular to religion, the emotional and the past (especially the Middle Ages). Its character was expressed in the individual and the spiritual. The landscape depiction favored by the Romantics, however, broke away from the previously dominant antique ideal landscapes and rediscovered the value of one's own homeland (Philipp Otto Runge, Caspar David Friedrich). Romanticism - the term was first coined by Friedrich Schlegel in 1798 in the journal "Athenäum", who derived it from the medieval verse epic and novel - also strove for a unity of art and religion. The unfinished, the implied, the religious, the magical and legendary, the popular and the chivalric became the preferred subject. In her book "De l'Allemagne", Madame de Staël made these ideas accessible to French and English readers from 1810 onwards, who enthusiastically embraced them.
Romanticism developed its own theory, which set out three basic tendencies of this epoch:

1. romanticism meant placing the emotions and intuition above (or at least on an equal footing with) reason
2. the firm belief that there are decisive moments of experience that are not grasped by reason and are thus neglected
3. the conviction of the comprehensive importance of the individual, the personal and the subjective