CHAPTER V

THE NAZARENES

Herein lies the great difference between France and Germany. Although following along new lines, the art of France did not thereby suffer as regards the quality of its execution; in spite of all Classicism it remained the disciplined art of the schools. These favourable preliminaries were lacking in Germany. It was not allotted to German painting to grow up in naïve contentment with the technical inheritance of its forefathers, but, on the contrary, at the entrance of its new career it broke so completely with its predecessor--the art of the eighteenth century--that it could no longer adopt even its technical traditions. It arose out of the negation of earlier art, an absolute negation such as the world had never seen before. It began with a self-made man who had never acquired the charter of craftsmanship, who never learnt to paint. In France, revolutionary pictures inspired with intense pathos, and frankly naturalistic portraits of masterly technique; with Carstens, outlines showing refined feeling, but faulty very generally in execution, sketches drawn roughly with the pencil, crayon, or red chalk.

It had taken many generations of painters, whose lives had been spent in careful devotion to the work, to collect the technical capital which Carstens so carelessly flung to the winds.

The next step along this way was taken by the Nazarenes.

Just as it was inevitable that cold and lifeless Classicism should follow the brightness and animation of _rococo_, so it was necessary, according to the law of extremes which alternate in every evolution of culture, that, next to the antique, should come its exact opposite, the Gothic or Middle Ages. The antique was so monotonous that people longed for variety of colour again; it was so cold and statuesque that they longed for something soulful, so Greek and pagan and severe that they hankered again after something Christian, would believe again like children.

Even in the young days of the old pagan, Goethe, religion formed the favourite topic of the _beaux esprits_, and in the same year, 1797, that Carstens died, this cult of the emotional life found, for the first time, expression in literature. In every library one finds a dainty, finely printed book in small octavo, without the author's name, with the title _Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders_, and with a sort of head of Raphael as a frontispiece, in which, with his prominent eyes, full lips, and long neck, he looks like some intellectual, Christ-inspired, consumptive enthusiast. It is the pale, gentle face of Wackenroder.

[Illustration: FREDERICK OVERBECK.]

First Winckelmann, then Wackenroder. In the very personalities of these two the whole opposition between Classicism and the Nazarenes is reflected. A student barely twenty years old, a mild, modest, contemplative soul, who had attached himself from early youth with womanly devotion to his more energetic friend Tieck, and written letters to him that read like a young girl's effusions to her sweetheart, he entered the Erlanger University with his friend at the Easter of 1793. They saw Nuremberg. More than once they made pilgrimages to the old fashioned town, the treasury of German art; and the spirit of the past powerfully inspired them. Whilst for Lessing and Winckelmann "Gothic" art only meant barbarian art, the wonders of Nuremberg were now observed with fresh eyes. In a sort of intoxication of art the friends wandered through churches, stood by the graves of Albrecht Dürer and Peter Vischer, and a vanished world rose before them. The spires and turrets behind falling walls and ramparts, the old, stately, patrician houses, which jutted out their oriel windows, as it were with curiosity, into the crooked streets, were peopled to their imagination with picturesque figures in bonnet and hose from that great time when Nuremberg was "the living, swarming school of native art," when "an exuberant, artistic spirit" governed within its walls, when Master Hans Sachs and Adam Kraft and Peter Vischer and Albrecht Dürer and Willibald Pirkheymer were alive. Shortly after that they came to Dresden, and devoted themselves in the gallery there to an enthusiastic cult of the Madonna. The _Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders_, which appeared a year before Wackenroder's death in his twenty-sixth year, was the result of these wanderings and studies. In this tender production of a visionary youth the spirit of Romantic art found expression.

Winckelmann was an archæologist; Wackenroder, an enthusiast of the Middle Ages; on the one side knowledge only, on the other all feeling; for the one, paganism, for the other, Christ. For it is from the first a leading principle of the "_Klosterbruder_," that "the finest stream of life only issues from the streams of art and religion when they flow in company." He valued the older painters "because they had made painting the true handmaid of religion"; art was to him an object of devotion. Picture galleries, he says, ought to be temples; he would liken the enjoyment of works of art to prayer; let it be a holy feast day to him if he go with a serious and composed mind to their observance; indeed, reverence for art and reverence for God were so closely interwoven that he was fain to kneel down before art, and offer it the homage of an "eternal and boundless love." This devotion to art, of which he himself was full, he found nowhere in his times. The age of enlightenment was to him an undevout and inartistic age. Only in his wanderings through the uneven streets of Nuremberg did the deepest yearning of his soul seem satisfied. He applied himself to mediæval, and especially to German art. His standpoint is the same which the young Goethe had adopted when he intervened with Herder for "German style and art," and dedicated his pamphlet on German architecture to the shade of Erwin von Steinbach. He is reluctant that one should condemn the Middle Ages because they did not build such temples as the Greeks, any more than that one should condemn the Indians because they spoke their language and not our own. "It is not only beneath Italian skies, under majestic domes and Corinthian columns, that true art thrives, it lives too under pointed arches, intricately decorated buildings, and Gothic spires."

[Illustration: OVERBECK. THE ANNUNCIATION.]

It was all said so simply and heartily that soon the whole world began to be "Wackenroderite." The ingenious and enthusiastic youth was succeeded by theoretic reasoners. Tieck, who published his _Phantasies upon Art_ in 1799, after Wackenroder's death, and amplified it with his own explanations, was no longer a genuine but a counterfeit "_Klosterbruder_." He first played with Catholicism, and uttered the momentous sentence: "The best of the later masters up to the most recent times have had no other aim than to imitate some one of the primitive or typical artists, or even several together; nor have they easily become great by any other method than by having successfully imitated somebody." His _Sternbald_ is still more haunted by the spirit of monastic devotion.

[Illustration: OVERBECK. THE NAMING OF ST. JOHN.]

[Illustration: OVERBECK. CHRIST HEALING THE SICK.]

The particular starting-point was in this case too, as it had been before for Winckelmann, the Dresden Gallery, where, at the turn of the century, Augustus William and Frederick Schlegel, the two "_Gotter-buben_," held their cultured rendezvous. "The Schlegels had taken possession of the gallery," wrote Dora Stock, "and with Schelling and Gries spent almost every morning there. It was a joy to see them writing and teaching there. Sometimes they talked to me about art. I felt myself often quite paltry, I was so far from any wisdom. Fichte, too, they initiated into their secrets. You would have laughed if you could have seen them drag him about and assail him with their convictions." The journal _Europa_, founded by Frederick Schlegel in 1803, became the rallying-point of the new movement, and his articles published therein contained the germs of all the efforts and errors of the young school. In his discourse on Raphael he compares the pre-Raphaelite period with that succeeding it, and considers the proposition that "indubitably the corruption of art was originally brought about by the newer school which was marked by Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Giulio Romano, and Michael Angelo" so unquestionable that he does not find it in the least necessary to prove it. He casually puts forward as an _obiter dictum_ dropped in amongst a series of quite opposed notions the idea that every art ought to have a national foundation, and that any imitation of a foreign form of art is deleterious. The result follows that it is to be deplored "that an evil genius has alienated artists from the circle of ideas and the subjects of the old painters. Culture can only attach itself to what has been constituted. How natural it would be, then, if painters were to go on in the old way, and cast themselves anew into the ideas and disposition of the old painters." The artist should follow the painters prior to Raphael, "especially the oldest," should strive to "copy carefully their truth and simplicity long enough for it to become second nature to his eye"; or he may "select the style of the old German school as a pattern."

[Illustration: OVERBECK. CHRIST'S ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM.]

[Illustration: OVERBECK. THE RESURRECTION.]

The latter counsel originated from the discovery in 1804 of the Cologne Cathedral picture, referred to by Schlegel in his _Europa_. Through the secularisation of the monasteries, attention was again directed to the old ecclesiastical pictures which people had hitherto passed by unnoticed. From the monasteries, churches, guild halls, and castles which the French had plundered, countless masses of paintings of every sort were extricated. A great deal perished; nearly all, however, that had hitherto been kept as heirlooms, and for the most part almost inaccessible, now became movable, attainable property. The brothers Boisserée began their celebrated collection, which is to be seen to-day in the Munich _Pinakothek_. While hitherto one had, at the most, known of Dürer, now one touched upon an age which lay behind the Reformation, an age in which Catholicism was flourishing, in which "not great artists but nameless monks represented art," and it was soon all fire and ardour over the sweetness, naïveté, and faith of these pictures. Fernow had still pronounced generally against the capacity of the "Catholic religion, with its Jewish-Christian mythology and martyrology," to satisfy the demands of a pure taste in art. Carstens had written down for himself the sentence from Webb's work: "The art of the ancients was rich in august and captivating figures: their gods had grace, majesty, and beauty. How much meaner is the lot of the moderns! Their art is subservient to the priests. Their characters are taken from the lowest spheres of life--men of humble descent and uncouth manners. Even their Divine Master is in painting nowhere to be seen according to a great idea; His long, smooth hair, His Jewish beard and sickly appearance would deprive the most exalted beings of any semblance of dignity. Meekness and humility, His characteristic traits, are virtues edifying in the extreme but in no way picturesque. This lack of dignity in the subject renders it intelligible why we look so coldly at these works in the churches and galleries. The genius of painting expends its strength in vain on Crucifixions, Holy Families, Last Suppers, and the like." Not five years had elapsed after Carstens' death when, according to an impression of Dorothea Veit, "Christianity was once more the order of the day." William Schlegel's poem, _The Church's Alliance with the Arts_, from which, later, Overbeck borrowed the thought for his picture, can be looked upon, as Goethe already wrote, as the true profession of faith of the young school. Where previously Augustus William had described in his sonnets the Io, Leda, and Cleopatra of the Dresden Gallery, it was now the Madonna who received the homage of the gallant poet. By Frederick, Christianity was recommended to the artist as a formal model and a source of æsthetic enjoyment,--as it was, at the same time, by Chateaubriand as _prédilection d'artiste_.

[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._

OVERBECK. THE SEVEN LEAN YEARS.]

Even more profound did the tendency become during the War of Independence, which at the same time gave the death blow to Classicism. Distress taught how to pray. In those years of humiliation the young generation abandoned the classic ideal for ever, and Schenkendorf cried imperiously: "We would see no more pagan pictures on any German walls." French "frivolity" was contrasted with German seriousness, German Christianity with the free-thought of the French; there was a return from the cold philosophy of enlightenment to the vigorous feeling of mediæval faith.

Frederick Schlegel, the author of _Lucinde_, who had written as lately as 1799:--

"Mein einzig Religion ist die, Dass ich liebe ein schönes Knie, Volle Brust und schlanke Hüften, Dazu Blumen mit süssen Düften,"

was converted to Catholicism. Schelling wrote his _Philosophy of Revelation_; Görres, the editor of the _Rothen Blut_, ended as the author of the _Christian Mystic_.

Here set in the period of the Nazarenes. What Schlegel had said was to become true, that the German artist has either no character at all or he must have the character of the mediæval masters, true-hearted and thoughtful, innocent withal, and somewhat maladroit. In architecture the Hellenic school is succeeded by the Gothic, painting passes from the reverence of the Greek statues to that of old Italian pictures.

[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._

JULIUS SCHNORR VON CAROLSFELD.]

Rome remained for the Nazarenes, too, the centre of influence, only they no longer made pilgrimages, like the Classicists, to ancient but to Christian Rome. _Overbeck_ of Lübeck came in 1810 with Pforr of Frankfort and Vogel of Zürich; the Düsseldorfer, Cornelius, followed in 1811, _Schadow_ and _Veit_ of Berlin in 1815, _Schnorr von Carolsfeld_ of Leipzig in 1818, the Viennese _Führich_ and _Steinle_ in 1827 and 1828. In all of them there lived the perception that in such a serious age men should be of high moral endeavour, and art the expression of the religious capacity of their lives.

[Illustration: _Wigand, Leipzig._

SCHNORR. ADAM AND EVE AFTER THE FALL.]

There still stands to-day, on a secluded hillock of the Monte Pincio a small church, whose façade is adorned with the statues of St. Isidore, the patron of husbandmen, and of St. Patrick, apostle of Ireland. A court with weather-beaten cloisters and an old well separates the church from the monastery which lies behind it, where the cells of the monks, Irish and Italian Franciscans, are placed. Above, on the terrace of the house, one has a charming view of Rome and the Campagna, of Monte Cavo and the heights of Tusculum. Below stretch the gardens of the Capucin Convent, and farther back the grounds and avenues of the Villa Ludovisi. On the first floor is a large hall, the walls of which have been decorated by the hand of some old monk with frescoes, and which, formerly a refectory, is used to-day as a theological lecture-room. This was the room where Overbeck and his friends in the first period after their arrival stood for one another as models. Lethière, the director of the French Academy, had obtained permission for them to install themselves in the deserted rooms of the monastery of San Isidoro, which had been spared by Napoleon, for which they paid the small sum of three scudi monthly.

[Illustration: JOSEPH FÜHRICH. _Graphische Kunst._]

"We led a truly monastic life," relates Overbeck; "held ourselves aloof from all, and lived only for art. In the morning we marketed together; at midday we took it in turns to cook our dinner, which was composed of nothing but a soup and a pudding, or some tasty vegetable, and was seasoned only by earnest conversation on art." Overbeck, as a good housekeeper, kept accounts; the principal items of the daily outlay occurred for polenta and risotto, oranges and lemons; every now and then oil, too, was noted down. The afternoons were dedicated to the study of the creations of art in Rome. With "beating hearts and holy awe" they passed over the threshold of the _Stanze_. In the chapel of San Lorenzo they became "familiar with the seraphic Fiesole, whose frescoes transcend everything in purity of conception." They shunned the paganism of St. Peter's, and marvelled with all the more intimate devotion at the old Christian monuments. The churches of San Lorenzo and San Clemente, the cloisters of St. John Lateran and St. Paul's-without-the-Walls, made an ineffaceable impression upon the young men. At the twilight hour they wandered up on to Monte Cavo. "And of evenings we drew studies of drapery--glorious folds!--from Pforr's big Venetian mantle, in which we took turns to pose for one another." Their whole hearts, however, first swelled when they undertook a journey to Tuscany. In Orvieto, Luca Signorelli awaited them, whose frescoes especially impressed Cornelius mightily. At Sienna they found teachers who were still more sympathetic to them, Duccio and Simone Martino, those masters of a tender, intimate spirit and a charming sweetness of expression. In the Campo Santo at Pisa they turned their attention to Fiesole's pupil, Gozzoli. Those became their great teachers in art. "Just as ardent Christians wander to the grave of the princes of the apostles in order to confirm their faith and quicken their zeal, so should zealous young artists derive strength and illumination from the silent and yet so eloquent speech of the sublime geniuses of art. An artist of real worth will find in the masterpieces of painting at Rome everything necessary for him in order to reach the right path. But, to be sure, a well-made plait of hair does not certainly constitute one a Raphael, because Raphael, too, arranged his hair with feeling. Study alone leads to nothing. If since Raphael's age, as one can almost declare, there has been no painter, that is the fault of nothing else than of the fact that art has been vanquished by workmanship. One learnt at the academies to paint excellent drapery, to draw a correct figure, learnt perspective, architecture--in short, everything, and yet no painter was produced. There is one want in all recent painting--heart, soul, sentiment. Let the young painter then watch, before everything, over his sentiments: let him allow neither an impure word on his lips nor an impure thought in his mind. But how can he guard himself from that? By religion, by study of the Bible, the one and only study which made Raphael. This view now certainly contradicts the accustomed principles that everything must be systematically learnt; mere learning produces certainly an instructed but also a cold artist. On that ground it is not good either to study anatomy from dead bodies, because one dwarfs thereby certain fine sensibilities, or to work from female models, for the same reason. Let the painter be inspired by his subject as those of old were, and the result will be the same. Like those old painters, let every artist remind himself that the truest use of art is that which leads it heavenwards, its one function that of having a moral effect upon men." "How pure and holy," cries Cornelius to Xeller, as late as 1858, "was the end at which we aimed! Unknown, without encouragement, without aid, except that of our loving Father in heaven."

[Illustration: FÜHRICH. FROM THE "LEGEND OF ST. GWENDOLIN."]

It is obvious that between the ascetics of the monastery and the Classicists direct friction must ensue. To them the "ever repeated and pale reflexions of Greek sculpture" said nothing, while the Classicists scoffed at the religionists, for whom the sarcastic brawler, Reinhart, invented the nickname of "Nazarenes," which has since become a watchword. The opposition was historically immortalised when Bunsen, the Prussian envoy, invited the whole colony to the christening of his little daughter, and Niebuhr touched glasses with Thorwaldsen "to the health of old Jupiter." Only Cornelius joined in; the others started and looked upon the young Düsseldorfer as a heretic.

This positive Christian standpoint, which allowed art to be esteemed only as a religious service, pictures only as a means of ecclesiastical edification, irritated also the old man of Weimar at the first start. The effort of the Nazarenes to make piety the foundation of true artistic activity was to him a continual subject of contempt. Religion no more bestows talent for the arts than it gives taste. He spoke with irony of the "valiant artists and ingenious friends of art who had resort to the honourable, naïve, yet somewhat coarse taste" of the fourteenth and fifteenth-century masters. He constantly employed of them the expression "star-gazing." He had already mockingly remarked of Wackenroder's _Herzensergiessungen_ what an unwarrantable conclusion it was, that because a few monks were artists, all artists should therefore be monks. He called the life of the Nazarenes "a sort of masquerade which stood in opposition to the actual day," and wrote in the pages of _Art and Antiquity_ that manifesto, the _New German Religious-Patriotic Art_, or _History of the New Pietistic False Art since the Eighties_, which so deeply wounded the young enthusiasts. "The doctrine was that the artist needed piety above everything to equal the work of the best. What an attractive doctrine! How eagerly we should accept it! For in order to become religious one need learn nothing." The whole movement reached nothing beyond a slavish imitation of Giotto and his immediate followers. Of course, it was inconsistent of Goethe to reproach contemporary art for imitating that of the Middle Ages, and to praise the latter only when it imitated the antique. Speaking as a man of Mengs' school, and merely proposing Hellenic art as a canon instead of early Italian, he had, after all, no right to be angry if Frederick Schlegel opposed classical models with mediæval. Otherwise, however, even to-day little can be added to Goethe's animadversions.

[Illustration: FÜHRICH. RUTH AND BOAZ.]

As with Carstens, so with the Nazarenes, we are warned by the idealistic tendency which inspired the young enthusiasts. There are but few painters with whom life and art have been in such complete agreement as with the gentle, mild, and modest Overbeck, the "Apostle John," as he got to be called, that young man, that serene soul who looked upon art simply as a harp of David for the praise of the Lord, to whom the "hope that through his works one soul had been strengthened in faith and piety was of far more value than any fame," and who ended at last in a sort of religious mania. With the Nazarenes, too, as with the Classicists, it was pure exaltation which drove them to free themselves from the trammels of the school, in order to get back from dead fabrications to creations of art, which, proceeding out of the living spirit, once more had a soul. Even the much-despised conversion of the Protestants among them to the Catholic Church arose out of the deep conviction that they also, as well as their art, must be united in religion.

[Illustration: FÜHRICH. THE DEPARTURE OF THE PRODIGAL SON.]

In a certain sense they even show an advance in art. They found between themselves and the great painters of the eighteenth century a gulf that could no longer be spanned. After Carstens had thrown overboard every colouristic acquisition, it was indeed something that the Nazarenes no longer saw the highest aim of painting in black and white design, but turned, though with timidity and hesitation, to the study of the Italian Quattrocento with its joyous delight in colour, and so became the first real painters after the cartoon period. Only that was as yet simply an advance for the nineteenth century, and not especially for the history of art. This was as little enriched with new forms and discoveries by the Nazarenes as by the Classicists. The former, too, were imitators, and only changed masters when they fled from the antique to the Middle Ages, and copied the old Italians in lieu of the Greeks. The Classicists had imitated with a certain cold erudition; the Nazarenes out of the depths of their emotion. As the former used Greeks, so did they use the fourteenth-century painters, as patterns of calligraphy from which they made their copies, cut their stencils after the Italian form, and, like Mengs, were able to reproduce in their works only a very weak reflection of those departed spirits. As eclectics they would stand on the same rung with the academics of Bologna, except that the ideal of the latter school was a combination from Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and Titian, and that it possessed an incomparably greater facility in technique.

[Illustration: FÜHRICH. JACOB AND RACHEL.]

The Nazarenes abandoned on principle the employment of the model, from fear lest it might entice them away from the ideal representation of the character to be depicted. They sought in a dilettante manner to supply the control over the material which alone makes the artist, by enthusiasm for the material. Only Cornelius dared to draw from the female form. Overbeck refused to do so, from modesty. The Virgin Mary was to him the highest ideal of womanhood, the paler, the more virtuous, the more akin to the Lamb of God; and he would have deemed it a sacrilege to have depicted her as purely womanly. They therefore only occasionally sat to one another for studies of drapery, and, for the rest, "in order not to be naturalistic," painted their pictures from imagination in the seclusion of their cells. As the Catholicism of Schlegel was an anæmic system, so the painters, too, deprived their figures of blood and being in order to leave them only the abstract beauty of line. They are beings who are exalted above everything, even above correctness of drawing, and who must expire of a lack of blood in their veins. The command, "Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you," was carried out by the Nazarenes only too well.

[Illustration: STEINLE. THE RAISING OF JAIRUS' DAUGHTER.]

They have created only two works which will survive, and which possess an historical significance as pre-eminent, works of the whole movement in common--the frescoes of the Casa Bartholdi and of the Villa Massini.

When the intelligence of the Battle of Waterloo had penetrated even into the silent cells of the monks, they believed that art too should

## participate in this universal elevation, and become a factor again in

the development of the German nation. It must not be used, wrote Cornelius in his famous letter to Görres, as a mere plaything, or to tickle the senses, not merely for the delectation and pomp of high and rich Maecenases, but for the ennoblement and glorification of public life. The means of this artistic elevation, and at the same time a new means of popular culture, was to be the introduction of fresco painting.

[Illustration: STEINLE. "I HAVE TRODDEN THE WINEPRESS ALONE: AND OF THE PEOPLE THERE WAS NONE WITH ME."]

And thus the Brothers of San Isidoro re-discovered what had, as a matter of fact, always been quietly practiced by the "rustics painters," but since Mengs' time had no longer been employed by the "art painters," and had been forgotten for half a century. The Prussian consul at Rome, Bartholdy, gave them the commission. An old mason, who had last arranged wall-plastering under Mengs, was recruited as technical adviser; Carl Eggers, of Neustrelitz, zealously made chemical researches; and it is said to have been Veit who, at Cornelius' request ("Now, Philip, you make the first attempt!"), was the first to paint the portrait of a head in fresco, whilst his companions looked on with amazement and delight. Then the others set to work, "and painted away at it in the name of God." "Yes, believe me, my friend, it is a desperate matter to paint over a whole room in a manner which one has never before practised oneself nor seen practised by others. Every day we tell each other that we are fine bunglers, and give each other a regular dressing down. You can have no conception how strange it feels at first when one is confronted by damp plaster and lime. And nevertheless we construct daily fresh castles in the air for painting churches, monasteries, and palaces in Germany."

The frescoes represent, in six mural paintings and two lunettes, the history of Joseph in Egypt, from his sale to his recognition by his brethren. The two latter are the work of Cornelius and Overbeck, the others of Veit and Schadow. The work was prolonged through many years, interrupted by manifold difficulties, and when one stands to-day before the transferred pictures in the Berlin National Gallery one cannot refrain from admiring them.

[Illustration: EDWARD STEINLE.]

There lives within them an unpretentiousness and sincerity of sentiment, and, in spite of all deficiencies and lack of independence, somewhat of that lofty inspiration which raises the pictures of really earnest artists, even if they are faulty, far above any fabricated productions. An association of young men, which, unconcerned about success and material profit, contended only for ideal products, found here for the first time an opportunity to display what it wanted. In the interpretation of Pharaoh's dream and in the recognition by the brethren, Cornelius, in formal language, full of character, and without any phrases and posture, displayed all that he had derived from the great Italians in nobility of grouping and fine arrangement of lines. Overbeck reaches the same height in his allegory of the seven lean kine. But it is not only as youthful works of artists, who, if they belonged to a period of decadence, yet were, withal, the greatest representatives of a period of German art, that these pictures are worthy of high esteem; they are essentially the best that these masters have created. Cornelius, notably, shows a study, a care for execution, indeed even a harmony of colouring, that stands in surprising opposition to his later negligence. From the conception that the artistic performance is determined in the invention, and the design, but that the pictorial execution is an indifferent, mechanical accessory which could be supplied even by other people, he was at that time still free.

[Illustration: STEINLE. BOOK ILLUSTRATION.]

When the pictures had been unveiled in 1819 a festival of German artists was held in Rome. Rückert, Bunsen, the Humboldts, the Herzes were there; Cornelius, Veit, and Overbeck had arranged the transparencies. "The centre of all," writes the Danish romantic Atterbom, was the Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, "the idol of every German artist, whose ruling passion is for the fine arts and fair ladies. Everything was in old German masques, the ladies in wide ruffs. The Crown Prince was in the utmost good humour, and treated the artists as his equals. A toast was drunk to German unity. The scene struck me like a beautiful dream out of the Middle Ages." German unity at a Roman fancy ball! The German nation a beautiful dream out of the Middle Ages! The Crown Prince Ludwig, when he took Cornelius and Schnorr out of the Roman circle, at least created a fatherland for German art, and later on the others also found at home a suitable sphere of activity.

Philip Veit, who went to Frankfort in 1830 as Director of the Staedel Institute, was the first to settle down, and for all his energy could only for a very short time make that city into a seat of the Christian tendency in art. Of his pictures there, the fresco painted for the Staedel Institute, "The Introduction of Christianity into Germany by St. Boniface," is by far the most important. The apostle has hewn down the oak of Thor, and from where it once stood there flows forth the new spring of Christianity. The old Germans shrink back timorously, but the youths listen to the preacher, and follow his direction to the figure of religion which approaches with the palm of peace. In the background a church rises, and in the distance, by a limpid river, a flourishing town, in contrast to the sombre, primeval forest to which the Germans who reject religion are flying.

"The two Marys at the Sepulchre," in the Berlin National Gallery, and the "Assumption," in the Frankfort Cathedral, date from a later period. It was of no avail to him that he mingled with his Nazarenism a certain air of the world, which found expression in a less ascetic language of form and a somewhat stronger sense of colour. In 1841 he had already a feeling that the restless, struggling age had passed him by. He abandoned his post and went to meet oblivion as Director of the Gallery at Mayence.

[Illustration: _Munich, Albert._

STEINLE. THE VIOLIN PLAYER.]

Overbeck, the only one who could not tear himself from Rome, remained, till his death in 1869, the "Young German Raphael," as his father had called him in a letter from Lübeck in 1811: a devout, religious poet, pure of soul and of fine culture, as one-coloured and one-sided as he was mild and tender. At the outset he knew, at least, how to extract from the old masters a certain naïve piety without positive character, whereas later he lost himself more and more in the arid formalism of dead dogmas. What was in his power to give he has given in pictures such as the "Entry of Christ into Jerusalem" and the "Weeping over the Body of Christ"--both in the Marienkirche at Lübeck, in the "Miracle of Roses," in Santa Maria Degli Angeli at Assisi, in the "Christ on the Mount of Olives" in the Hospital at Hamburg, and the "Betrothal of Mary" in the Berlin National Gallery--pictures which expressed nothing that would not have been expressed better at the end of the fifteenth century. His "Holy Family with St. John and the Lamb," of 1825, in the Munich Pinakothek, is in composition and type a complete imitation of the Florentine Raphael; his "Lamentation of Christ" in the Lübeck Marienkirche is reminiscent of Perugino; his "Burial" would never have existed but for Raphael's picture in the Borghese Gallery. His sentiment coincided exactly in devotion and godliness with that of Fra Angelico or of the old masters of Cologne, and when he devoted himself to programme-painting he lost all intelligibility. In the "Triumph of Religion in the Arts," which he completed in 1846 for the Staedel Institute, and in which he wished to embody the favourite ideas of Romanticism, that art and religion must flow together in one stream, he has copied the upper part from the "Disputa," the lower part from the "School of Athens," and worked up both into a tedious and scholastically elaborated whole. It is only through a series of unpretentious sketches which he prepared for engravings, lithographs, and woodcuts that his name has still a certain lustre. Plates such as the "Rest in the Flight," the "Preaching of St. John," or the series "Forty Illustrations to the Gospel," the "Passion," the "Seven Sacraments," may be contemplated even to-day, since in them at least no tastelessness of colour stands in the way. These plates, too, like his pictures, are less observed than felt--felt, however, with an innocence and cheerfulness of heart often quite childlike.

[Illustration: PHILIP VEIT.]

It shows above all much self-understanding that all these masters in their later years restricted themselves exclusively to design, which better expressed their character. In compositions and sketches of this kind, which were only _drawn_, and were thus untrammelled by the fruitless struggle with the difficulties of the technique of painting and a complete lack of the notion of colour, they moved more freely and lightly. In their frescoes and oil-paintings, partly through insufficient technique, partly through their all too servile imitation of foreign ideals, they went astray. As draughtsmen, they had more courage to be themselves, and while in the completer paintings many a fine trait, many an intimate reflection of the soul was lost, or through the obduracy of the material did not attain a right expression, here their spiritual and emotional qualities can be better valued.

Joseph Führich, one of the most staunchly convinced champions of these reactionary tendencies, has become, entirely owing to his extensive

## activity as a draughtsman, somewhat more familiar to our modern

knowledge than most of his contemporaries. He had begun as a draughtsman. As a student of the Prague Academy he was an enthusiast for Schlegel, Novalis, and Tieck; and even before his journey to Rome he had etched fifteen plates for Tieck's _Genoveva_. It was Dürer who exercised the deciding influence upon his further development. He had been led to him through Wackenroder, and had copied his "Marienleben" in 1821. "Here I saw," he says in his Autobiography, "a form before me which stood in trenchant opposition to that of the Classicists, who are anxious to palm off as beauty their smoothness and pomposity borrowed from the misunderstood antique, and their affected delicacy as grace. In contrast with that absence of character which prevailing academic art mistakes for beauty I saw here a keen and mighty characterisation which dominated the figures through and through, making them, as it were, into old acquaintances." The strong and godly German middle age took then in Führich's heart the same place which the Italian Quattrocento had filled in Overbeck's range of thought. And this old-German tendency was only temporarily interrupted by his sojourn in Rome. After he came to Rome in 1826 he became a Nazarene, and was accustomed there to look back at the tendencies of his youth as an error; and both at Prague, where he returned in 1829, after collaborating at the frescoes in the Villa Massini, and at Vienna, where from 1841 he held the post of professor in the Academy, he found rich opportunity for putting into practice his ecclesiastical and orthodox views of art.

[Illustration: VEIT. THE ARTS INTRODUCED INTO GERMANY BY CHRISTIANITY.]

His frescoes in the Johannis-und-Altleschenfelder Church in Vienna are, perhaps, more harmonious in colour, but no more independent in form, than the works of the others. In his old age he returned once more to the impressions of his youth, and so found himself again.

As a boy, in his little native village of Kratzau, in Bohemia, he had tended the cows in summer time and had acquired a certain sincere knowledge of nature and shepherd-life. He had to thank Dürer for his preference for the idyllic and patriarchal family scenes in Sacred History, and these tendencies found pleasing expression in pictures like "Jacob and Rachel," or "The Passage of Mary across the Mountains." No matter that the figures in "Jacob and Rachel" are taken out of the early pictures of Pinturicchio and Raphael, they are still interwoven, with their background of landscape, into an idyll of great naïveté and charm. More especially, however, did the qualities which he owed to Dürer acquire value--a sturdy characterisation, a naïve art in telling the story, and a great wealth of fresh traits, straight from nature--in the serial compositions of his old age. There is no sentimental vagueness, nothing academical. Führich had a keen eye for what was intimate, familiar; a tender sense of the individualities of landscape in woodland and meadow, of the charm of everyday life as well as of the animal world; and though an idealist, he knew how to assimilate ingeniously what he had observed with a certain realistic fulness. The old story of Boaz and Ruth grew beneath his hands into a delicious idyll of country life. From the story of the Prodigal Son he has extracted with sensitiveness the purely human kernel, and as late as the winter of 1870-71, at the age of seventy-one, he illustrated the legend of St. Gwendolen, in which he depicted with tender reverence the escape of a human soul, withdrawn from the world and resigned to God's will, into Nature and her peace.

Edward Steinle, who went from Rome to Vienna in 1833, and settled in Frankfort in 1838, is called, not very appropriately, by his biographer, Constantine Wuzbach, "a Madonna painter of our time." His name deserves to come down to posterity rather for what he created outside the essential characteristics of his art. In his frescoes in the minster at Aachen, in the choir of the cathedrals of Strasburg and Cologne, he stood firm on the standpoint of the Nazarenes; which is as much as to say they contained nothing novel in the history of art. In his fairy pictures, however, imagination broke through the narrow confines of dogma, and entwined itself in creative enjoyment round the vague figures of fable. His "Loreley," in the Schack Gallery, as she looks down, a Medusa-like destroyer, from the tall cliff; his watchman who looks dreamily into space over the houses of the old town; his violin player on his tower who plays, forgetful of the world,--these have something musical, poetical, that freshness of sentiment and unsought naïveté which as an inheritance of his Viennese home was also peculiar in such a high degree to Schwind.

The Romantic aspiration is revealed in Steinle, even, in a certain "yearning after colour." There lives in his works a refined feeling for colour that, especially in his water-colours, rarely forsakes him. Take, for instance, the fresh, tinted pen-drawings, engraved by Schaffer, in which he displayed with the naïveté of Memlinc the life of St. Euphrosyne; the five aquarelles of Grimm's "Snow-White and Rose-Red"; or his illustrations to Brentano's poems, such as the _Chronicle of the Wandering Student_, and the _Fairy Tale of the Rhine and Radlauf the Miller_, in which he developed a delight in the world and an idea of landscape that in the ascetic Nazarene excite astonishment.

[Illustration: VEIT. THE TWO MARYS AT THE SEPULCHRE.]

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld went, after the completion of the Ariosto Room of the Villa Massini, first to Vienna, then in 1827 to Munich, in order to paint the _Nibelungen_ in the halls of the royal residence of that time, and in the imperial halls of the state palace the history of Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, and Rudolf of Hapsburg. He also, however, created his best work at the close of his life in Dresden,--the forcible woodcuts of his _Picture Bible_, which narrated the world's sacred history in strong and vigorous strokes.

Strangest to the present-day taste have become the drawings of Cornelius. His plates to Goethe's _Faust_ have, indeed, a certain austere strength of conception, which he learnt from Dürer; but also faults of drawing, exaggerations, crudities, and errors in perspective, which he did not find in Dürer.

In his second work, the Nibelungen cycle, an intentional old-German angularity, with an unintentional modern clumsiness, has effected a _mésalliance_ even less attractive.

[Illustration: OVERBECK. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF AND CORNELIUS.]

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