Entangled Histories

"In 1828, Friedrich Overbeck-an artist born in Lübeck, trained in Vienna, and then working in Rome-unveiled what was to become one of his most celebrated paintings, Italia und Germania (fig. I.1) The work was seventeen years in the making, and resulted from a long meditation on the theme of cultural reciprocity and fraternity. Overbeck portrays Italy and Germany as two women holding hands, "a symbolic image of sisterly complementarity between two different cultures." Today, this iconographic choice may seem puzzling in light of later accounts of nineteenth-century Italian and German cultural rivalry; yet at the time, it resonated with the experience of Overbeck and many intellectuals and artists whose lives and careers developed across the Alps and whose works benefitted from the "sisterly complementarity" of the two cultural traditions. Italia und Germania prompts us to reconsider assumptions about early nineteenth-century Italian and German cultural relationships"--