CHAPTER III

THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN GERMANY

A hundred years ago there lived a man of the name of Asmus Carstens; and he was the pioneer and founder of the new German art. That has become since Fernow a standing maxim in manuals of the history of art. Dilettantism, however, is not an element, but an end. It is on this account, therefore, that later times will see in Carstens, not a pioneer, but only one of the close followers of that tendency of which the founders were the brothers Caracci, and the offshoots Lebrun, Lairesse, and Van der Werff. It is, at all events, historically clear that Hogarth and Gainsborough, Watteau, Greuze, Chardin, and Goya were the men to whom the future belonged. Their art survived the overthrow of the Classicalism represented by Mengs and Carstens, which, through external circumstances, once more got the upper hand for a short time, and it became the foundation on which, after the disappearance of this tendency inherited from the past, the moderns built further. The former represented progress, because they moved forwards; Carstens and David, reaction, because they looked backwards--backwards to an age which had long ago been buried.

There is always danger to a living art in the contact with any great art of the past. Only those who are themselves highly gifted may hope to emulate the great ones of the earlier centuries; lesser geniuses perish in the attempt. Painters like Leonardo and Raphael, like Titian and Poussin, taking the Greeks as their masters, produced immortal works, and Goethe and Schiller proved to us that the Hellenic spirit is still alive and active in our midst. But would anyone dare to mention Mengs and Carstens in the same breath with these giants?

The close of the eighteenth century was a period of antiquarian revival. The ruins of Pæstum had been brought to light, Greek vases and Roman monuments had become known to the public by the works of Hamilton and Piranesi. In 1762 Stuart and Revett published their splendid work on the _Antiquities of Athens_. To a German, however, was to fall the honour of becoming the hero of the archæological period. The _History of Ancient Art_, by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, appeared in 1764, and this writer devoted his literary energies to the hymning of the glories of the re-discovered treasures of antiquity. In the realm of pictorial art he may also be looked upon as the chosen of fate. Already, nine years before the appearance of his _History of_ _Art_, he had given, at the age of thirty-eight, his first writing to the world, _Thoughts upon the Imitation of Greek Works_, in which the reformation motive is epitomised in this sentence: "The sole means for us to become--ay, if possible, inimitably great--is the imitation of the ancients."

From Winckelmann the stone kept on rolling. "In Greek sculpture the painter can attain to the most sublime conception of beauty, and learn what he must lend to nature in order to give dignity and propriety to his imitation," writes Solomon Gessner in 1759. In 1762 Hagedorn of Dresden deplored, in his _Treatise on Painting_, that "Terburg and Metsu never showed us fair Andromache amongst her industrious women, instead of Dutch sempstresses." In 1766 Lessing wrote his _Laocoön_, and, like Winckelmann, saw in the sculpture of the Greeks the ideal to be imitated. From this point forward he despised landscape and _genre_ painting, and especially everything which illustrates intimate emotions and actions, and would confine the composition of pictures to an arrangement of two or three "ideal figures which please by physical beauty." Soon afterwards, with almost astonishing partiality, Goethe intervened in a notable manner on behalf of Classicism with the most flagrant contradiction of the ideas of his youth. "Nature alone," he had said in _Werther_, "makes the great artist"; and in his essay upon _German Method and Art_ he aimed this sentence at Winckelmann and his followers: "You yourselves, admirable beings, to whom it was given to enjoy the highest beauty, you are hurtful to genius; it will be raised up and borne along on no strange wings, were they even the wings of the dawn." In the same essay occurs the beautiful passage: "If art is produced out of an inward, single, independent conception, untroubled by, unconscious indeed, of, all that is extraneous, then whether she be born of rough wildness or of cultivated sensibility, she is complete and living." Soon afterwards he wrote again these great words: "Rembrandt appears to me in his biblical subjects as a true saint who saw God present everywhere, at every step, in the chamber and in the fields, and did not need the surrounding pomp of temples and sacrifices to feel drawn towards Him,"--an observation made at a time when the academic and erudite writer on art was still for years to perceive in the biblical pictures of the great Dutchman only a crude conception of form. In another passage, upon the frescoes of Mantegna, in the Church of the Anchorite, at Padua, there occur the following sentences, showing the deepest historical perception: "How sharp and sure a modernity stands out in these pictures! From this modernity, which is quite real, and not merely seeming, with factitious effects, speaking only to the imaginative faculty, but solid, detailed, and conscientiously circumscribed, and which at the same time has something austere and industrious and painstaking--from this issued subsequent painters such as Titian; and now the liveliness of their genius, the energy of their nature, enlightened by the spirit of their predecessors, built up through their strength, was able to soar ever higher and higher, to rise from earth and create divine but real figures." But, alas! later on he did not draw the conclusion which followed quite logically from these observations for the judgment of contemporary German art. He came back from Italy as a disciple and follower of Winckelmann's writings on art. "Art has once for all, like the works of Homer, been written in Greek, and he deceives himself who believes that it is German."

Something pagan entered into his soul, a breath from the calm of Olympus. He derided his earlier Gothic inclinations, contemptuous of all that was opposed to Greek notions of form, mild and indulgent to all that bore at least the outward semblance of the antique. He preferred a cold ideal manner to what was natural, and held Greek art the absolutely valid model. From it should be derived a fixed canon, a table of accepted laws, to be the standard for the artist of our own days, and of every age. The _Prize Essays_, which he published with Heinrich Meyer in the _Propyläen_, and later in the _Jena Literary Journal_, required the treatment of subjects exclusively from the Hellenic legendary cycles, "whereby the artist should become accustomed to come out from his own age and surroundings"; the composition of pictures was to correspond strictly with the style of the antique frieze.

Amongst his contemporaries voices were not wanting to point out how fatal this programme was. Notably, Wilhelm Heinse, in 1776, wrote this golden sentence: "Art can only direct itself to the people with whom it lives. Every one works for the people amongst whom fate has thrown him, and seeks to plumb its heart. Every country has its own distinctive art, just as it has its own climate, its scenery, its own taste, and its own drink."

Similarly, Klopstock opposed Winckelmann's theories in these lines--

"Nachahmen soll ich nicht und dennoch nennet, Dein ewig Lob nur immer Griechenland. Wem Genius in seinem Busen brennet, Der ahm' den Griechen nach!--der Griech' erfand."

Again, in the _German Republic of Letters_, in the chapter "On High Treason": "It is high treason for any one to maintain that the Greeks cannot be surpassed." In a letter to Goethe, in the year 1800, Schiller wrote: "The antique was a manifestation of its age which can never return, and to force the individual production of an individual age after the pattern of one quite heterogeneous, is to kill that art which can only have a dynamic origin and effect." Madame de Staël, in her book on _Germany_, says: "If nowadays the fine arts should be confined to the simplicity of the ancients, we should not then be able to attain to the original strength which distinguished them, while we should lose that intimate, composite feeling for life which is especially found in us. Simplicity in art would easily turn with the moderns into coldness and affectation, whereas with the ancients it was full of life." In 1797 Counsellor Hirth published in Schiller's _Horæ_ his well-known treatise on _Beauty in Art_, which, in opposition to the inanimate type of beauty of Winckelmann, upheld the characteristic as the first principle in art. Most remarkable, however, is the breadth of historical outlook which was peculiar to Herder, and the stern actuality with which in his _Plastik_, and in the _Vierten_ _Kritischen Wäldchen_, he turned against "those pitiful critics, those wretched and narrow rules of art, that bitter-sweet prattle of universal beauty, through which the younger generation is being ruined, which is nauseating to the master, and which, nevertheless, the rabble of connoisseurs takes in its mouth as words of wisdom.... Shadows and sunrise, lightning and thunder, the brook and the flame the sculptor cannot model; but is that therefore to be a reason why it should not be done by the painter? What other law has painting, what other power and function, than to depict the great scheme of nature with all her manifestations, in their great and beautiful aspect? And with what magic it does this! They are not clever who despise landscape painting, the fragments of nature of the great harmony of creation, who depreciate it or entirely forbid it to the sincere artist. Is a painter not to be a painter? Is he to turn statues with his brush, and fiddle with his colours, just as it may please their antique taste? To represent the scheme of creation seems vulgar to them; just as though heaven and earth were not better than an old statue.... Doubtless Greek sculpture stands in the sea of time like a lighthouse, but it should be only a friend and not a commander. Painting is a scheme of magic, as vast as the world and as history, and certainly not every figure in it can or ought to be a statue. In a picture no single figure is everything; and if they are all equally beautiful, no one then is beautiful any longer. They become a dull monotony of long-limbed Greek figures with straight noses, who all stand there and parade and take as little part in the action as possible. Now, when this misrepresentation of beauty cries scorn at the same time upon the whole conception, upon history, upon character, upon action, and this openly attacks that as a lie, there comes a discord, something insupportable, into painting, which certainly the antique pedant is unaware of, but which is felt all the more by the true friend of the antique. And finally, our own actual age, the most fruitful subjects of history, the liveliest characters, all feeling of a simple truth and precision, will be _antiquarianised_ away. Posterity will stand and gape at such fantasies in practice and theory, and will not know what we were, in what age we lived, nor what brought us to this wretched folly, to the wish to live in another age, in another nation and climate, and thereby to abandon, or vitiate deplorably, the whole order of nature and history."

These sentences, however, stood in isolation, or else they came too late. Immediately after it had been heralded by the literary movement, after the archæologists had verbally announced its aim, formulated its principles and laws, German art turned into the new paths. "It happened for the first time in the history of art," wrote Goethe, "that important talents took pleasure in disciplining themselves by the past, and so founding a new epoch in art."

"Des Deutschen Künstler's Vaterland, Ist Griechenland, ist Griechenland"

was sung in the academies. And this violent grasping after the ideal of a foreign race brought a bitter revenge, since not one of the artists who now appeared had the genius to create anything new out of the old.

[Illustration: _Photo Union, Munich._

MENGS. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]

The disciples of Winckelmann had not been, like Goethe and Schiller, vigorous naturalists until the spirit of ancient times had looked upon them, and they were consequently still less able to resist her glance. They entered upon the new road not with that generative impulse of the creative mind, whose superabundance did not know what course it should take, what stream it should find. They adopted the forms, as they had been provided by the greater ages, without any doubt as to their absolute excellence, or the least attempt at any happy innovation. And if they "have better understood" the Greeks than their predecessors in Italy and France were able to do, then one is never less like an original nature than when one imitates them faithfully. Winckelmann's road to inimitability led not only to a more hollow and lifeless Classicism than there ever had been, to a more cheerless and unpleasant art than any which the school of Bologna had produced. It tended, above all, since the thinking people had thought out the classic idea--which the other nations had not--to the sacrifice of all pictorial technique, of the whole knowledge which the age had up till then possessed. There is a legend in the history of the Church, that at the time of the donation of Constantine a voice was heard from Heaven: "This day has poison entered into the body of the Church." To the German art of our century this poison was the writings of Winckelmann.

First of all it was _Anton Rafael Mengs_, whose originally strong and great talent was distorted by the counsels of the learned. As in the works of the Caracci, those only are to-day of any interest which reveal themselves least as eclectics and most as children of the seventeenth century, so with Mengs--he is only enjoyable now where he did not try to be antique, but sympathised without too much reflection on the traditions of his age. He is particularly so in his fine pastel portraits in the Dresden Gallery, which are wholly influenced by the taste for _rococo_, and are its last expiring manifestation. They are a testimony that it was not without some justice that the Apelles of Dresden was called by his contemporaries the most remarkable German painter of the eighteenth century. Rosalba Carriera and Liotard seem weak and insipid beside him; Reynolds only at his best had that characteristic clearness, that plastic energy of modelling, and that life-like colouring. There is nothing insipid or affected, nothing of that simpering affability that his successors brought into vogue. And when we remember that they proceeded from a youth of sixteen, the strength and simplicity of intuition seem incredible. In his later portraits, too, painted in oil, the better ones are directly classic; very noble in their clear, subtile, grey tone, strikingly alive, and, withal, of an extraordinary independence which shows no leaning upon any other master whatever. Mengs belongs to those portrait painters who look into the souls of their sitters, and he ranks, in works like his portrait of himself, in the Munich Gallery, amongst the best portrait painters of the eighteenth century.

[Illustration: MENGS. MOUNT PARNASSUS.]

In his huge ecclesiastical paintings he is the son of that period which had just commenced to be touched by the pallor of thought, and groped eclectically now in this direction and now in that. "First of all must the weeds be rooted up," wrote Zanotti in his _Directions to a Young Man upon Painting_. "And then we must go back again to Cimabue and Giotto, and again, a few years later, to Buonarotti and Sanzio, and their noble successors whose footsteps are no longer sought or followed by any one. But when such a happy resurrection will take place, God knows!" The old Ismael Mengs believed that that was his concern; he chose Antonio da Allegri and Rafael Sanzio as sponsors for his son. Anton Rafael should become the eclectic reformer of art, and as he was probably the first painter who, by the express permission of the Elector of Saxony, was allowed to visit the hitherto inaccessible Dresden Gallery, this wish was easy of accomplishment.

[Illustration: ANGELICA KAUFFMANN. _Cassell & Co._]

He was quick in freeing himself from the immediate tradition of the age, and in harmony with the teaching of the Caracci, in returning to the so-called "higher" models of painting. When one runs across such of his pictures in some gallery--notably his altar pieces--they strike one as the works of some good master of the seventeenth century whose name one cannot, for the moment, recollect. His famous "Holy Night," in which he wished to enter into rivalry with Correggio, has something of a Maratti about it, only the heads are more vacant and insipid.

It is that unfortunate "Parnassus" in the Villa Albani which first marks the collapse of this great talent. When, upon the advice of his friend Winckelmann, he turned from the study of Raphael and Correggio to that of the antique, Mengs forfeited not only the remnant of all that was essentially natural, but even all the picturesque qualities which had hitherto distinguished him. After painting had so long taken sculpture in tow, now sculpture seemed anxious to be revenged on it, and there was a manifestation of those prettily painted figures in plaster which for some score years afterwards paraded in every German picture.

For Winckelmann's mistake, as Herder had already pointed out with great justice, consisted not only in this, that he set up for imitation a departed ideal for the consciousness of his contemporaries, but notably in that he obtruded principles upon modern painting which might be valid in ancient sculpture. Since the antique ideal was solely a plastic one, and neither the Greek Prussian nor, later, Meister Ephraim was clear as to the difference between sculpture and painting, they practically recommended the painter to work after plastic models.

The fact that Lessing, in discussing the limits of painting in his _Laocoön_, took a work of sculpture as his starting-point, proves that to him the laws and conditions of both arts were valued as the same. They denounced the confusion of the art of painting with poetry, and instead advocated the confounding of painting with sculpture, which was no less hazardous.

[Illustration: ANGELICA KAUFFMANN. PORTRAIT OF A LADY AS A VESTAL.]

In this manner there came an alien element into Mengs' hitherto quite pictorial apprehension; a vain and exclusively reproductive ideality deprived his figures of the last remnant of truth to nature which he had formerly understood how to give them. It is difficult to believe that Winckelmann's paroxysm of friendship should have burst out, upon the completion of the "Parnassus," into this pæan: "During the whole of the new age a more beautiful work has not appeared in painting; even Raphael would have bowed his head." The whole is nothing more than a _mélange_ of plagiarism and _banal_ reminiscences, without soul or perception, without freshness or individuality; a mere plastic warehouse, and not even a painted antique group, but a daubed compilation of solitary statues, colder and more lifeless than any Baltoni ever painted. There was an audacious, strong aim, genial strength and an overwhelming flow of fantasy in the contemporary works of the great _décorateur_ Tiepolo; here there is a mere work of intellect which with philological aid builds up the composition entirely of borrowed materials. The only thing which even still points in this work to the good old times is a more solid study of form and colour than all that which originated in Germany during the next fifty years. The figures are painted with a strength and bloom which are still quite worthy of the _rococo_.

The "good _Angelica_" is the second representative of this phase of transition. She, too, at the persuasion of her friend Winckelmann, clothed herself as an ancient Vestal, but her true woman's nature left in her classical raiment still a neat fashion of _rococo_. Through her intercourse with Winckelmann she became somewhat of a "blue-stocking," and studied the historians of antiquity in order to find there subjects like Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, Agrippina with the urn of Germanicus, Phryne, and the like. Still more there were the tender legends of the ancients, out of whose store she satisfied her patrons: Adonis at the chase, Psyche, Ariadne abandoned by Theseus or found by Bacchus, the death of Alcestis, Hero and Leander. In these she is soft to the point of sentimentality, and pleasant to the point of nausea. Goethe says of her with justice: "The forms and traits of the figures have little variety, the expression of the passions no force, the heroes look like gentle boys, or girls in disguise." But he also says of her: "The lightness, grace in form, colour, conception, and treatment is the one ruling quality of the numerous works of our fair artist. No living painter has surpassed her either in grace of representation or in the taste and capacity with which she handles her brush." And this decision, too, can still be endorsed. Angelica knew how to impart to those clear lines and forms demanded by Winckelmann a grace now coquettish, now sentimental, but always extremely lovable. She has struck soft and--notably in her portraits of women--very tender colour chords.

She and Mengs were the last who still possessed considerable technical knowledge. Almost everything which has survived of the tradition of craftsmanship in Germany in the nineteenth century is traceable to Mengs' influence, and that fact so offended his successors that they no longer counted him as one of them, but put him contemptuously aside as a "mannerist painter by recipe." "Such technical knowledge," wrote Goethe, "hinders that complete abstraction and elevation over the real, which is asked of identical representations in sculpture, which merely furnish forms in their highest purity and beauty." "Colouring, light and shadows, do not give such value to a painting as noble contour alone," wrote Winckelmann, and these sentences became the starting-point of the next generation. Winckelmann's error when he recommended the imitation of Greek sculpture to the modern painter consisted still further in this, that he confused "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" with lack of colour and coldness. Herder had written well: "In distinction to the compact harmony of form in sculpture, painting has her harmonious unity in colour and light. I do not know why many theorists should have spoken so contemptuously of what is called _chiaroscuro_, the grouping of light and shade; it is the instrument of genius with every scholar and master, the eye with which he sees, the flashing, spiritual sea with which he sprinkles everything, and on which, indeed, every outline also depends. This divine, spiritual sea of light, this fairyland of adjusted light and shade, is the business of painting: why should we fight against nature, and not allow every art to do what it alone can do and do best?"

[Illustration: _Photographic Union, Munich._

CARSTENS. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.]

His words died away. The philosophic tendency of the century, which sought to penetrate into the "soul" of things, and to recreate things from the throne of the universe of the abstract, tried its hand also upon painting. By abstracting from the manifestation of colour, and touching upon form and line, it came to believe that in these plastic elements it had discovered the Essential of which it was in search.

Once on the road to execute statues in paint, the question ensued, Ought we to paint our statues? And as that age, following in Winckelmann's track, understood no word of the significance which the specific, picturesque principles had for the Greeks, it was only logical that they should endeavour to reconcile the idea of immaculate whiteness with that of classical beauty, to see pure beauty in absence of colour, and in consequence to accentuate the question, Ought we to paint our _pictures_? To painters the most suspicious element in a painting became the paint! There is nothing more urgent for them to do than to deprive themselves ascetically of all coloristic means of expression. Painting is shown to be an essential form of corruption--"The brush is become the ruin of our art," wrote Cornelius--and there commences the era of a cartoon style hitherto unprecedented, which is to be carried on by the most highly endowed in the most earnest fashion. While during the _rococo_ the sense of colour had reached, through a piquant arrangement of the most tender and variegated tones, its highest point of refinement, there followed now as a reaction an absolute lack of colour. The ideal is seen in an abstract beauty of line, colour as a secondary matter and a vain show. It was of as much value as a vari-coloured dress, which nature could put on or off, without being less nature thereby. Amongst painters there was talk of nothing but outlines. This line style, whose world is not the wall or the canvas, but white paper, can do with a proportionately meagre study of nature. Why, therefore, when the ideal was so easy of attainment, drudge in the academy, where, moreover, since the introduction of Mengs' Classicism, universal desolation of the spirit and doctrinaire pedantry reigned? As Mengs had broken with the taste of the _rococo_, so the younger generation broke with its technique, whilst they left the academy in open dissatisfaction, and threw off in contempt the whole paraphernalia of technical traditions.

_Carstens_ plays the momentous rôle in German art as the first who trod this path. He has more individuality than Mengs; _antiquarianising_ with him is not exclusively an external derivation and a cold imitation: he lives in the antique; the world of the Greek poets is his spiritual home, and their profound thoughts find in him a subtle interpreter. But he has, at the same time, the melancholy fame of being the first of the frivolous to renounce the national inheritance, the knowledge bequeathed by the _rococo_ age, and so definitely to cut the chain which should otherwise have connected German art of the nineteenth century with that of the eighteenth.

Through the _Investigations of Beauty in Painting_, by Daniel Webb, which was founded on Winckelmann's _Thoughts on Imitation_, the seed of Hellenism was already sown in the youth's soul. He heard talk of the dwarf intelligences of the age; how the studios of inferior artists were full of gaping visitors, whilst the halls of the Vatican stood deserted. "Learn the taste for beauty in the antique," the cooper's apprentice learns from Webb's works. "Let us meditate upon the style of the painter's art in the 'Laocoön,' with regard to the fighter. Notice the sublimity in the divine character of Apollo. Let us stand hushed before the exquisite beauty of the Venus di Medici. These are the extreme incentives of the art of drawing.... The Belvedere Apollo and the daughter of Niobe offer us an ideal of nobility and beauty. Raphael's drawing never reached to such a height of perfection as we find in the statues of the Greeks.... Whither do you carry me, gods and demigods and heroes who live in marble? I follow your call, and, Imagination! thy eternal laws. I go into the Villa Medici and breathe there the purest air. I stretch myself on a flowery plot, the shadow of the orange trees covers me;--there, unmolested, I gaze at a group full of the highest feminine beauty. Niobe, my beloved, beautiful mother of beautiful children, thou fairest among women, how I love thee!" So dreamed Asmus Jacob in the wine-cellar at Eckernförde, or in his solitary chamber by the dim light of his lamp, as he had been seized with giddiness before all the great and marvellous revelations of art which this book had afforded him. In his enraptured fantasy he painted the hour nearer and nearer when he should attain to a sight of the works which were described. Could he have looked into the future, what a picture would have come before his eyes! Would he have recognised himself in the broken-down man, with the pale countenance, the grief-marked expression, and the decrepit figure, who in Rome gazed spellbound at the Colossus of Monte Cavallo?

[Illustration: CARSTENS. SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS.]

Our Holsteiner was two-and-twenty years old when he discarded the cooper's apron and entered the Copenhagen Academy, being then too old for any regular training. His head was so full of "inventions" that "it could not enter his mind to begin from the beginning." "Drawing from the life did not satisfy me; the fellow, too, who sat as my model, although he was for the rest well built, seemed to me, in contrast with the antique from which I had attained a higher ideal of beauty, so petty and imperfect that I thought I could easily learn to draw a better figure if I only confined myself to that. I resolved not to visit the academy, in spite of the other artists impressing upon me the importance and utility of academic study." He stayed daily, instead, for hours together before the casts in the antique room, and "a holy feeling of adoration, almost compelling me to tears, pervaded me. There I never drew at all after an antique. When I attempted it, it was as though all my emotion was chilled by it. I thought that I should learn more if I gazed at them with great studiousness."

[Illustration: CARSTENS. ARGO LEAVING THE TRITON'S MERE.]

Thus he reached, as Fernow says, the method whereby he "did not tread the ordinary way of imitation, gradually progressing to a special invention, but began at once with invention." There he was the true child of his age. At a period whose creative power found its highest expression in philosophy and poetry, the painter strove for the reputation only of being the _poet_ of his pictures. And Carstens encountered the old tragedians and philosophic writers with a fine, poetic understanding. "The Greek Heroes with Cheiron," "Helen at the Skæan Gate," "Ajax," "Phoenix and Odysseus in the Tent of Achilles," "Priam and Achilles," "The Fates," "Night with her Children," "Sleep and Death," "The passage of Megapenthes," "Homer before the People," "The Golden Age"--all these prints have really something of the noble simplicity and quiet harmony of Greek art.

[Illustration: CARSTENS. CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT.]

It can be understood, then, that such subjects should be in the highest degree interesting to an archæologist. When Carstens, in April 1795, was organising the famous exhibition of his collected works in Rome, Fernow published in Wieland's _Deutscher Merkur_ a discourse in which he celebrated him as the creator of a new epoch. From the very first, however, an equally resolute opposition was excited in artistic circles. The painter Müller, nicknamed "The Devil's Miller," who at that time wandered about Rome as a cicerone, proves that Winckelmann's principles, even at the threshold of the century, by no means met with universal acceptance. The _Writing of Herr Müller, Painter in Rome, upon the Exhibition of Herr Professor Carstens_, with the motto _Amicus Plato, Amicus Socrates, magis amica veritas_, was published in 1797 in Schiller's _Horæ_. Carstens imitated; he worked rather by reminiscence and understanding than by fantasy. Isolated figures do not bring their individuality to an expression. Then he pointed out the models, discussed the lack of colour, and proved numerous sins of the draughtsman against nature in detail. The artist must ever seek to find characteristic expression; composition comes in the second degree. Technique, even if the previous age has been an epoch of fabrication, must always stand in the foreground; it is not only from the artist, but from the connoisseur, that knowledge is demanded, and in consequence of this exhibition Carstens is recommended to forbear from his fantastical geniality, observe nature, and achieve a picture exactly, since it is only from nature that the ideal springs, and consequently nothing can be great and beautiful in the representation which is not right and true. In almost similar words, later on, Koch, in his _Thoughts on Painting_, and with him the majority of artists, has censured Carstens. And posterity cannot but allow them to be in the right as against the archæologists.

[Illustration: CARSTENS. PRIAM AND ACHILLES.]

Admirable in Carstens is the zeal with which he defended his ideal, the sacred fire which burned within him and sustained him, even during those years when his sickly frame was weakened by consumption. Art was, as he wrote, his element, his religion, his beatitude, his existence. And it is already something great to wear oneself out alone for the sake of an ideal. Carstens was a sublime dreamer. It will not be forgotten of him that, in an age when abundant mediocrity and manufacture were all-prevailing, he once more pointed, unfaltering in his noble and pure intention, to the sublimity of artistic creation. The history of art, however, has not to deal with hearts, but to judge logically by results; and it would not be doing justice to the old masters, nor to those earnest _rococo_ painters who sat at their easels with less noble intentions, but with so much greater knowledge of their craft, if one were to proclaim Carstens, in consideration of the self-sacrifice and renunciation which he showed in the fight for his ideal, as a martyr and a genius, a pioneer of German art. He was not a genius, as he thought himself, and announced so proudly to Heinitz, the Minister; for that he possessed too little originality. It is not imagination, but reminiscence, which created his works. The outlines of his plates are done with fine sentiment, but sentiment taken from the Greeks, and he required no genius to recognise in his recollection and his hand a transcript of Greek forms. What pleases us in Carstens is in substance not Carstens, but an echo of what we like in the Greek statues and vases, in Michael Angelo and other old masters.

[Illustration: GENELLI. THE EMBASSY TO ACHILLES.]

He was not a martyr, because in his struggles he met with assistance and encouragement such as were granted to no old master, and if, in spite of that, he never rose above the cares of life, that is only a proof of the limitations and partiality of his art. He had lost all decorative facility; still more was the inheritance of oil painting first naturally mislaid by him, and by draughtsmanship alone not even Dürer nor Rembrandt could have lived.

This deficiency in technique must even debar him from claiming any higher signification than that of a clever dilettante. He is not an artist who does not in the midst of his exaltation think to put himself in possession of the means which can turn the lispings of genius into a fully intelligible language. Carstens' plates seduce by a certain wavy treatment of the lines, but no one of them can sustain critical appreciation. It is inconsistent to work in the beautiful and not to become free of ugliness, to move in the great, in the sublime, and at the same time to fall from one defect of form to another, from coarse uncouthness into the most elementary sins against drawing and proportion. Carstens was a draughtsman who could not draw, and, with this limitation of his genius, by no manner of means a founder of German art. One cannot call him a mannerist, because with him art and individuality corresponded; but, nevertheless, like Mengs and Lairesse, he gave art at second-hand, and only differs from them in that with him commences that complete abandonment of the idea of colour which after him disfigured German art. For the future it was quite indifferent that Thorwaldsen took suggestions from Carstens, and Genelli trod in his footprints as a draughtsman.

[Illustration: GENELLI. THETIS LAMENTING THE FATE OF HECTOR.]

_Bonaventura Genelli_, if one takes for once the standpoint of the painters of his time, who desired to be the "poets" of their works, is certainly a not unremarkable poet. In him, who was born in the year of Carstens' death, the spirit of the little Holsteiner was raised to life, and the figure which he assumed in this new incarnation actually made an impression like a picture out of beauty-illuminated days of Hellas. The muscular, thick-set figure of a youthful Hercules, with a broad chest and sturdy neck, a head of short brown curly hair, full lips fringed by the compact beard of a Sophocles, the short Greek nose, grave eyes glancing out from beneath the strong brows--such was Genelli, a Hellene left stranded in Germany, the last Centaur, as Heyse has depicted him in his novel--"an antediluvian, mythological enigma on four sound legs sprung upon our godless world." Thus he sat, as he himself writes, in Rome, "in his dirty chamber, bare except for a chair or two, rickety or quite broken down, and on the wall a pair of hawks nailed up, whose pinions served as models for his winged figures." Thus he sat later in his little house in the _Sendlingergasse_ at Munich, and lived in his world of imagination. Perhaps, had he been the child of a more fortunate period in art, he might have become a strong and memorable painter; as a successor of Carstens he has left behind him a legacy of two suites of copper prints--the two tragedies of the "Profligate" and the "Witch." He existed, moreover, only in contour; he never rose above harmoniously outlined silhouette. It was only to this point that his talent would sustain him. The more he wished to produce shadow, water-colour, or even oil, the more tedious and pale and vague did he become. And even in his drawing he shares with Carstens the desolate generalisation of form, the eternal euphony which so soon becomes wearisome and monotonous. To beauty of line everything is offered up. The blank characterlessness of the faces is even more noticeable with him than with Carstens, who had, after all, in his youth drawn excellent portraits in crayons, and on this account was able to give even to his Greeks more individual traits and a certain variety of expression. With Genelli the heads are treated as no more than parts of the body, and as they gave no opportunity for flowing lines, they have not even the same graciousness as the limbs. His women fared worst, for whilst he could be his own model for his men, he created the _ewig Weibliche_ out of his inner consciousness. In men and women the eyes, in particular, are merely animal.

[Illustration: GENELLI. ODYSSEUS AND THE SIRENS.]

Carstens' influence on German art has been then entirely a negative one. It was not on such a foundation that a German art could arise. He prepared no ground for his successors on which they could build further; but through his abandonment of the whole capital which, since Stephen Lochner, had been handed down at compound interest from one generation of painters to another, he rather cut away the ground from under their feet. "For very easily can art go astray, but it is a difficult and lengthy process for her to recover herself."

The art which was born in that humble studio in Rome to the sickly, neurotic man, the "famous draughtsman," needed later, in order to become technically healthy again, an impulse replete with life from abroad.

[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._

BONAVENTURA GENELLI.]

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