core, and perhaps appropriately so, since Hegel was the dominant philoso-
phcr of the Vormärz epoch (1815-1848). 1
The Munich master Wilhelm von Kaulbach made an ambitious attempt
to represent the whole of Hegel's philosophy of history on the walls of the
New Museum in Berlin in six complex, encyclopedie images : The Tower or
Babel, The Rise of Greece,The Destruction of Jerusalem, The Battle of the Huns,
The Crusades, and The Reformation. By the time Kaulbach completed the
twenty-year project in 1865, however, its declamatory character was so out
of touch with the times that he wound up ridiculing it himself (fig · 7. I).
An ebullient personality like Vernet in France, Kaulbach's taste for large-
scale visual spectacles appealed to kings Ludwig I of Bavaria and Friedrich
Wilhelm IV and their tunnel vision of civic improvements. Rather than
p°sit Hegel's direct inßuence on his contemp°raries, I believe we should
examine what his ideas had in common with the work of other represen-
tatives of culture in the pre-March period-in a less grandiose format than
that projected by Kaulbach.
Kaulbach had studied monumental painting under Peter von Corne-
lius, first at Düsseldorf and than at Munich, reminding us of the central
role of the Nazarenes in the development of nineteenth-century German
art. Two diver8ing strains in paintin8 develop during the Restoration, both
receiving impulses from the Nazarenes, who now dominate the teaching
and dissemination of the fine arts : the snug, domestic style of Biedermeier,