Twelve Illustrations to Goethe's Faust by Peter Cornelius (Bilder zu Goethe's Faust von P. Cornelius)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: The Tragedy (Part I) was first published in 1808 and was an immediate success. This complex play—the best known version of the Faust story in which the medieval scholar sells his soul to the devil Mephistopheles for infinite knowledge—was conceived as a closet drama, meaning that it was intended to be read rather than performed. Staging difficulties with Goethe’s complex, often reality-defying scenes kept the play off German stages for twenty years.

In the winter of 1810/11 Peter von Cornelius composed a number of pen-and-ink drawings illustrating the play with the plan of having these studies engraved. Five compositions were completed by April 1811, and Goethe responded with an encouraging letter to the artist. A first edition, consisting of eleven plates, appeared at the end of 1817 or the next year. The second edition—as seen here—appeared in 1845 and included a twelfth plate, engraved only in 1824 and also after a design by Cornelius.

Using a style that emulated the fine-line manner of 15th- and 16th-century prototypes, especially in drawings and prints by Albrecht Dürer, Cornelius developed in the Faust cycle an approach to engraving characterized by the silvery-gray tonality of the finest layers of line and shading. He clothed his figures in medieval costume and the drama’s setting in the Gothic past, features that Goethe liked because they reflected the era of the historical Faust. For his first major print cycle, Cornelius even stated: "I want to be absolutely German, and therefore selected this form."

This cycle of engravings and those by Cornelius illustrating the medieval German epic poem Song of the Nibelungs (Nibelungenlied) that appeared in 1817–21 are by far the most important print series to emerge from the circle of the Nazarenes, and they reveal Cornelius’s great gift for epic narrative.