Double Portrait of the Painter Konrad Eberhard and his Brother Franz

Ramboux spent the years from 1815-22 in Rome, where he came under the influence of the group of German expatriate artists known as the Nazarenes, who sought to revivify German art through models and styles provided by Medieval and early Renaissance painting. Ramboux absorbed much from the Nazarenes, with their precise, clear, and hard-edged vision. Here, in one of the key images of German Romanticism, Ramboux commemorates his friends, the Nazarene artists (and brothers) Konrad and Franz Eberhard. The overlapping portraits seem to breathe much the same air as the intensely observed close-up portraits of 15th-century Flanders---a parallel that is no accident. Yet there is innovation here as well. The double-portrait format---often called a friendship portrait, with the heads so close as to merge into one being---is an innovation of the Romantic era, which put great stock in the intensity of the bonds of friendship and love. Indeed, Ramboux seems to have intended the print, based on a painting now in Cologne’s Wallraf-Richartz Museum, as a marker of friendship itself; he printed only a small number of impressions, in varying techniques, for distribution to friends and family.