Philipp Veit

Origins and early life

Philipp Veit was born in Berlin on 13 February 1793, the younger son of the Jewish banker Simon Veit and of Brendel Mendelssohn, eldest daughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who took the name Dorothea and became the writer Dorothea Schlegel; both his grandfather and his mother have their own fiches on this site, as does his elder brother Johannes Veit. He was born a Jew, 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 brother, a conversion that neither he nor this site conceals and that does not alter the fact of his birth.

He was raised after his parents' divorce partly by his father and partly in the household of Friedrich Schlegel, studied in Dresden and Vienna, fought as a volunteer in the war against Napoleon in 1813, and in 1815 went to Rome, where he joined the brotherhood of St Luke, the German painters known as the Nazarenes.

Work and career

There he made his mark: with Overbeck, Cornelius and Schadow he painted the fresco cycles of the Casa Bartholdy in 1816-1817 and of the Casino Massimo, and in doing so revived buon fresco, true fresco painting on wet plaster, which had been effectively lost in Europe for two centuries — the technique passed from these painters to the muralists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Called back to Germany in 1830, he directed the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt for thirteen years, reformed its teaching and enlarged its collection, painted the great allegory The Introduction of the Arts into Germany through Christianity, and resigned in 1843 over the museum's acquisition of works he judged irreligious. He spent his last years as director of the gallery at Mainz, where he died on 18 December 1877.