Johannes Veit

Origins and early life

Johannes Veit was born in Berlin on 2 March 1790, the elder son of the Jewish banker Simon Veit and of Brendel Mendelssohn, the eldest daughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who took the name Dorothea and became the writer Dorothea Schlegel. He was born a Jew and circumcised as one, and this fiche states plainly that in 1810, in St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, he was baptized a Catholic together with his mother and his younger brother Philipp, a conversion that neither he nor this site conceals and that does not change the fact of his birth.

After his parents' divorce in 1799 he was raised by his father in Berlin and then joined his mother and her second husband, Friedrich Schlegel, in Paris and Vienna, where he studied painting.

Work and career

In 1811 he went to Rome and joined the brotherhood of St Luke, the circle of young German painters known as the Nazarenes, who lived in the abandoned monastery of Sant'Isidoro and sought to revive the devout art of the early Renaissance. He painted altarpieces and devotional pictures in the Nazarene manner, among them a Madonna for the church of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte and works for German patrons, and shared in the decoration of the Casa Bartholdy in Rome that his cousin Jakob Salomon Bartholdy commissioned in 1816–1817.

Later years

Less prolific than his brother Philipp, who became director of the Städel in Frankfurt, he spent almost his whole life in Rome, where the Nazarenes remained his family, and died there on 18 January 1854. His grandfather Moses Mendelssohn and his mother Dorothea have their own fiches on this site.