son of a lawyer-politician, mayor of Lübeck
with Joseph Nikolaus Peroux (1804); with Alfred H. Maurer at Vienna Academy (Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, 1806-09)
1806 – meets Franz Pforr at Vienna Academy
1809 – co-founds Nazarenes (Lukasbund), with Franz Pforr, Ludwig Vogel, Joseph Wintergerst, Joseph Sutter and Johann Konrad Hottinger
1810 – moves to Rome with Nazarenes, establishes artist cooperative at monastery of San Isidoro
1812 – Franz Pforr drowns, Nazarenes disband, Overbeck converts to Catholicism
1816-18 - Casa Bartholdy frescoes: Story of Joseph (now Nationalgalerie, Berlin)
1857 –commission from Pope Piux IX: Christ Evading his Pursuers on the Mountain near Nazareth, 1857 (Quirinale Palace, Rome)
Rome (1810-69)
Salomon Bartholdy (Prussian Consul in Rome); Marchese Carlo Massimo; Pope Pius IX
Italia and Germania, 1811 and 1815-20 (Neue Pinokothek, Munich)
Adoration of the Magi, 1811-13 (Kunsthalle, Hamburg)
Andrews, Keith. The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964
Frank, Mitchell Benjamin. German Romantic Painting Redefined. Nazarene Tradition and the Narratives of Romanticism. Aldershot, UK-Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001.
Grewe, Cordula. Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009
Heise, Brigitte. Friedrich Overbeck: Das kunstlerische Werk und seine Literarischen und autobiographischen Quellen (Pictura et poesis). Vienna: Bohlau, 1999 (in German)
Morowitz, Laura. Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000
Vaughan, William. German Romanticism and English Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979