This extensive and in-depth study attempts to elevate Nazarene art from the lesser place it has come to occupy in the art historical canon. It is, however, much more a performance of the pleasures of close reading. A reader could hardly form the impression that Grewe has looked too thoroughly or read too much into a work; one always comes to feel that the art objects in question reward a prolonged gaze. Stated specifically, the author's argument concerns visual literacy in relation to biblical motifs, or how Old Testament typology in Nazarene art is linked to its later antitypes. Starting with works by Franz Pforr and Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Grewe investigates themes including friendship, brotherly love and familial love, and the importance of personal witnessing (which is introduced to account for the profusion of self-portraiture during the period). Grewe examines how the Lukasbund, or the Brotherhood of St. Luke, formed in Vienna in 1809, employed Old Testament imagery, refiguring it in a style distinct from the allegorical one that generally guides the reception of Romantic art. Grewe asserts that Pforr's work is allegorical insofar as it is religious at heart, yet it is also quite open to secular themes. She advances her argument about Nazarene secularization by highlighting the interaction between the artists' intellectual engagements and their religious practices. Starting from this methodological point, her study's six thoughtful and thorough chapters approach Nazarene painting from a wide variety of perspectives.

Grewe's study of Overbeck's drawing Jacob Reproaching Laban for Giving him Rachel in Place of Leah (1807/1808) is a good example of refined close reading. Here the author attributes substantial intentionality to Overbeck, yet it is really Grewe herself who brings to the image an attention to stillness and a fascination with the figures' emotional states. She examines how Rachel gazes at Leah, and how the story is told through gestures and expressions. What emerges is the refined ekphrasis of the art historian, who sees pathos and desire in the figures' body language. There is something in Overbeck's faces and forms—in their curvature and personality—that permits Grewe to supplement the work persuasively with powerful narrative. She is best where she examines female figures such as Sulamith and Maria, who regularly appear as doubles of one another in Nazarene art. In Pforr's 1811 oil painting, for example, Maria appears as a figure for unsatisfied longing and unfulfilled destiny. Studying the “erotic economy” (82) of Sulamith and Maria, the author demonstrates a keen eye for detail.

The quality of the reproductions throughout the book is impressive, and Grewe was fortunate to have published with Ashgate, who has provided her with ample space for images. To choose one example: the colors in Victor Orsel's Le Bien et Le Mal (1832) are arresting. In her discussion of that work Grewe both plots the trajectory from the Lukasbund to the Nazarenes, and explores how St. Michael and Lucifer are rendered as extra-earthly principles alongside the female embodiments of good and evil. In discovering the nature of the lines in Nazarene painting, especially the curvature of the figures' physiognomies and frames, Grewe urges us to see them in terms of their mortality. Her discussion of Orsel's work is articulate, especially in its details, (such as its observations about how the women wear their hair). It is followed by a discussion of Wilhelm Schadow's adoption of the same theme in Pietas and Vanitas (1841) that attends remarkably to the painting's illusionistic background. Each observation, including the analysis of the gestures, the disposition of the hands, and the hems of the various dresses, speaks relevant information. While it seems as though the readings might go on too long, they actually have the opposite effect—one wishes to see them sustained.

In a stimulating analysis Grewe locates the origins of Overbeck's The Seven Sacraments (1865) in Poussin's art. This connection has been little studied. Exploring why did Overbeck chose, chapter 13, verses 1–3 as the basis for his painting, specifically for his depiction of the ordination of Barnibus and Saul, Grewe concludes that the decision originated in his desire to invent rather than repeat iconographic traditions, and the discussion illuminates her main argument: the tension in Nazarene art is between rigidity and hermeneutical self-determination, or between grammar and rhetoric inasmuch as grammar implies an adherence to dogma. An example of her attention to hermeneutic history comes with Grewe's discussion of the depiction of Christ in Overbeck's Eucharist, which is deliberately made to resemble a priest giving mass. She illustrates how the entire cycle is “a particularly complicated rebus” (201).

The work's final chapter is devoted to a reflection on anti-Semitism in Nazarene art. Grewe makes a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism and argues that the Nazarenes were culpable primarily for the latter. Rather than asserting that Jews were a race who could not be converted, that is, the biological framework of Jews excludes all possibility of conversion, the Nazarenes worked from the ostensibly less murderous assertion that Jews could and should be converted. They were, in other words, less guilty of what Daniel Jonah Goldhagen—who is cited by Grewe—would refer to as eliminationist anti-Semitism. Looking specifically at the image of the Jew as Satan's apostle in Ferdinand Olivier's Dedication (1822), Grewe disputes the scholarship that overlooks the anti-Judaic elements or excuses them by asserting that the Jews simply stand in for other opponents of Nazarene art. Here too, her conclusions are solid. Throughout the book one finds a convincing argument in favor of the “controlled openness” of the Nazarenes (311). It is a successful attempt to restore to the works more than just their original complexity.