High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Peter von Cornelius (23 September 1784 6 March 1867) was a German painter. Cornelius was born in Düsseldorf. His father, who was inspector of the Düsseldorf gallery, died in 1799, and the young Cornelius was stimulated to extraordinary exertions. His earliest work of importance was the decoration of the choir of the church of St Quirinus at Neuss. At the age of twenty-six he produced his designs from Faust. On 14 October 1811, he arrived in Rome, where he soon became one of the most promising of that brotherhood of young German painters which included Overbeck, Schadow, Veit, Schnorr and Ludwig Vogel (1788-1879), a fraternity (some of whom selected a ruinous convent for their home) who were banded together for resolute study and mutual criticism. Out of this association came the men who, though they were ridiculed at the time, were destined to found a new German school of art, the Nazarene movement.