He was joined by a company of like-minded artists, including Peter von Cornelius, Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow and Philipp Veit, who jointly housed in the old Franciscan convent of Sant'Isidoro, and became known among friends and enemies by the descriptive epithet of Nazarenes.

Their precept was hard and honest work and holy living; they eschewed the antique as pagan, the Renaissance as false, and built up a severe revival on simple nature and on the serious art of Perugino, Pinturicchio, Francesco Francia and the young Raphael.

The characteristics of the style thus educed were nobility of idea, precision and even hardness of outline, scholastic composition, with the addition of light, shade and colour, not for allurement, but chiefly for perspicuity and completion of motive.

In the same year, Prince Massimo commissioned Overbeck, Cornelius, Veit and Schnorr to cover the walls and ceilings of his garden pavilion, near St. John Lateran, with frescoes illustrative of Tasso, Dante and Ariosto.

To Overbeck was assigned, in a room 5 metres square, the illustration of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered; and of eleven compositions occupying one entire wall, is the Meeting of Godfrey de Bouillon and Peter the Hermit.

The leisure thus gained was devoted to a thoroughly congenial theme, the Vision of St Francis, a wall painting 6.5 metres long, finished in 1830, for the Porziuncola in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli near Assisi.