JULIUS SCHNORR VON KAROLSFELD (1794—1872)  , German painter, was born in 1794 at Leipzig, where he received his earliest instruction° from his father Johann Veit Schnorr (1764—1841), a draughtsman, engraver and painter . At seventeen he entered the Academy of Vienna, from which Overbeck and others who rebelled against the old conventional style had been expelled about a year before . In 1818 he followed the founders of the new school of German pre-Raphaelites in the general pilgrimage to Rome . This school of religious and romantic art abjured modern styles and reverted to and revived the principles and practice of earlier periods . At the outset an effort was made to recover fresco painting and " monumental art," and Schnorr found opportunity of proving his powers, when commissioned to decorate with frescoes, illustrative of Ariosto, the entrance hall of the Villa Massimo, near the Lateran . His fellow-labourers were Cornelius, Overbeck and Veit . His second period dates from 1825, when he left Rome, settled in Munich, entered the service of King Ludwig, and transplanted to Germany the art of wall-painting learnt in Italy . He showed himself qualified as a sort of poet-painter to the Bavarian court; he organized a staff of trained executants, and set about clothing five halls in the new palace with frescoes illustrative of the Nibelungenlied . Other apartments his prolific pencil decorated with scenes from the histories of Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa and Rudolph of Habsburg . These interminable compositions are creative, learned in composition, masterly in drawing, but exaggerated in thought and extravagant in style . Schnorr's third period is marked by his " Bible Pictures " or Scripture History in 18o designs . The artist was a Lutheran, and took a broad and unsectarian view which won for his Pictorial Bible ready currency throughout Christendom .

Frequently the compositions are crowded and confused, wanting in

harmony of line and symmetry in the masses; thus they suffer under comparison with Raphael's Bible . The style is severed from the simplicity and severity of early times, and surrendered to the florid redundance of the later Renaissance . Yet through-out are displayed fertility of invention, academic knowledge with facile execution; and modern art has produced nothing better than " Joseph Interpreting Pharaoh's Dream," the " Meeting of Rebecca and Isaac " and the " Return of the Prodigal Son." Biblical drawings and cartoons for frescoes formed a natural prelude to designs for church windows . The painter's renown in Germany secured commissions in Great Britain . Schnorr made designs, carried out in the royal factory, Munich, for windows in Glasgow cathedral and in St Paul's cathedral, London . This Munich glass provoked controversy: medievalists objected to its want of lustre, and stigmatized the windows as coloured blinds and picture transparencies . But the opposing party claimed for these modern revivals " the union of the severe and excellent drawing of early Florentine oil-paintings with the colouring and arrangement of the glass-paintings of the latter half of the 16th century." Schnorr died at Munich in 1872 . His brother Ludwig Ferdinand (1789—1853) was also a painter .