If the nineteenth century is correctly seen as an age when a new and acute historical awareness reshaped the cultural sensibility, then it is no small irony that in the age of history, history painting was in crisis. One reaction to this crisis is the subject of this paper. Focusing on one of the Nazarenes’ most enchanting fresco projects, the decoration of the Casino Massimo in Rome after major epics by Dante, Tasso, and Ariosto, it traces the reworking and redefinition of history in painting by the German Nazarenes. In so doing, it examines the transformation of history painting into symbolic representation, and maps out the narrative structures, aesthetic strategies, and amalgamation of temporalities that carried this process and were produced in the process.