No Dutchman, however, had penetrated into the nursery. Chardin, in surprising the child-world at their games, in their joys and sorrows, has opened out to art a new province. And with what affectionate devotion has he not absorbed himself in the spirit of the little people! I know of no one before him who has painted the unconscious spiritual life of the child with such discreet tenderness: the little hands that grasp at something, the lips that a mother would like to kiss, the dreamy wide-open young eyes. In this Chardin is a master. It is not only obvious expressions of joy and sorrow, but those refined shades, so difficult to seize, of observation, thoughtfulness, consideration, calm reflection, quaintness, obstinacy or sulking, which he analyses in the eyes of the child. There is the little girl playing with her doll, and lavishing on her all the love and care of a tender mother. There is an elderly, half-grown-up little lady teaching her younger brother the mysteries of the alphabet. Then come the games and the tasks. They build card-houses, blow bubbles, or are wholly engrossed in their drawing-books and home-lessons. How attentive the little girl is whose mother has just given her her first embroidery materials. How charmingly embarrassed is the small boy whom she hears his lesson. And what trouble she takes in the morning, that her darling shall be clean and tidy when he goes to school. In one picture the cap on the little girl’s head is crooked, and her mother is putting it straight, whilst the child with a pretty pride is peeping curiously in the glass. Again, there is the boy just saying good-bye. He is neat andwell combed; his playthings, too, have been nicely tidied up, and his books are under his arm. His mother takes his three-cornered hat off again in order to brush it properly. When school is over, you see them sitting at dinner. The table is laid with a snow-white cloth, and the cook is just bringing in a steaming dish. It is touching to see how prettily the small boy clasps his hands and says his grace. And when they are again off to afternoon school the mother sits alone. She looks charming in her simple house-dress, with the loose sleeves, her clean white apron and kerchief, her striped petticoat and coquettish cap. Soon she takes her embroidery on her lap and stoops forward to take a ball of wool out of her basket. Next she sits before the fire in a cosy corner against a folding screen. A half-opened book rests in her hand, a tea-cup stands close by, a homely atmosphere of the living room hovers round her. Then, like a true housewife, she takes up her house-keeping book, or goes into the kitchen to help the cook, while she scrapes carrots or scrubs the cooking utensils or brings in the meat from the larder. It is all rendered with such truth and simplicity that one acquires an affection for Chardin, who with his art got to the root of family life and bestowed upon it the subtlest gifts of observation and generous comprehension, while none the less his domesticity never became commonplace.
His contemporary,Étienne Jeurat, painted scenes at country fairs, andJean Baptiste le Princepictures of guardrooms and similar subjects. In HollandCornelis Troostwent on parallel lines with him. He depicted the life of his age and of his nation—comic scenes, banquets, weddings, and the like—in pastels or water colours, and that without seeking inspiration from any of the Dutch classics, but with a vivid, intelligent comprehension. Even Italian art ended in two “genrepainters,” the Venetians Rotari and Pietro Longhi, who have bequeathed to us such charming little pictures of the life of that age—fortune-tellers, dancing-masters, tailors, apothecaries, little boys and girls at play or at their tasks.
Germany presented no such great manifestation as Chardin, although there too the tendency was the same. There too, after the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, a moral, activebourgeoisiehad at last sprung up that was prepared to take up the line which had been already laid down by the English. Lessing was the first in this magnificent struggle for evolution. He wrote, in hisMiss Sarah Sampson, the first German tragedy without the support of great mythical or historical heroes, and without the stiff ponderousness of the Alexandrine. He declared, like Moore, that helmets and diadems do not make tragic heroes; he even in hisMinnaset vividly before the eyes of his contemporaries something in the immediate present, the Seven Years’ War. And just as Lessing liberated the German drama from the jurisdiction of Boileau, so art began to mutiny against the classicism which had come in through the medium of France, and which had been inherited from the age when it was the pride of German courts to be small copies of Versailles.
“How exceedingly abhorrent to me are our berouged puppet painters,” cries the young Goethe, in his essay on German style and art, “I could not sufficiently protest; they have caught the eyes of the women with theatrical poses, false complexions, and gaudy costumes; the wood engravings of manly old Albrecht Dürer, at whom tyros scoff, are more welcome to me.... Only where intimacy and simplicity exist is all artistic vigour to be found, and woe to the artist who leaves his hut to squander himself in academic halls of state.”
Daniel Chodowiecki, with all his commonplaceness, is a genuine expression of this phase of German art. He in Germany, Hogarth in England, and Chardin in France, are products of the same tendency of the age. After Lessing had produced inMinnathe first domestic German tragedy, Chodowiecki, following the road of Hogarth and Chardin, was able to become the painter of the German middle class. He is not a master of such penetrating strength as they were, but he is no less an artist of notable merit. He is certainly no genius—in fact almost a handicraftsman, sober and philistine, but, like Hogarth, a self-made man who in his whole artistic and personal outlook was rooted in the soil of his city and of his age. Berlin society of that day was the basis of his art, the daily life of house and street his domain. He began by illustrating poems and depicting scenes out of theSeven Years’ Warand theHistory of Charles the Great, and went on from that to the pleasant, homely life of the smallbourgeoisie. Himself of the middle classes, he chiefly worked for them, and with his sensitive and dexterous graving tool he kept the liveliest and most exhaustive chronicle of the Germanbourgeoisieof that age. At times almost too reasonable and prosaic, a genuine Nicolai, he has in other plates an enchanting freshness, and—which should not be forgotten—is more of an artist than Hogarth, since he is neither moralist nor satirist. His object, without any moral after-thought, was the true and kindly observation of life as displayed in the world around him. He took the wholly naïve delight of the genuine artist in turning everything he saw into a picture. These chronicles of his have some, it may be but a particle, of the spirit of Dürer. Simultaneously, the youngTischbeindelved into the past of the nation, the age of Conradin and the Hohenstaufen, with the intention of finding there the simplicity which the academic pictures had come to lack; and, later on, he painted in Hamburg extremely realistic historical pictures of his own period, such as that which is to be found in the Oldenburg Gallery: “Entry of General Benigsen into Hamburg, 1814.” He did good work too as a portrait painter. In his best picture, “Goethe amongst the Ruins of Rome,” the head of the poet is energetic and full of strength, the colouring of an excellent clear grey.
In portrait painting in general, the revolution is reflected with especial clearness. The artificial manner that had been copied from the seventeenth century, the age of long perukes, gives way, slowly but surely, to an ever-growing naturalness, simplicity, and originality. At that time, while the spirit of LouisXIVstill hovered over everything, the passion of the individual to be king in his own sphere had penetrated into the family. The honest citizen, therefore, would not let himself be painted as such, but only as a prince,—he, himself, in gala dress, with a pompous air, as stately as though he were giving an audience to the spectator, his wife in silk and gold and lace; she has a great mantle of state worn loose over her shoulders and hips, and looks down with an assumption of grandeur on her grandchild, who is half respectful and half inclined to make fun. The frame is as rich as the costume, and probably bears a crown. We are with difficulty persuaded that these are pictures of simple citizens, that the man, apart from the hours during which he sat to the painter, is an industrious tradesman, and the wife, glancing out so haughtily, most probably darned his stockings. Their portraits seem to form part of an ancestral gallery.
This age of princely state was followed by that of fraternity. In place of berouged and postured portraits with allegorical accessories, there appeared simple, unpretentious likenesses of human beings in their work-a-day clothes; in place of stiff attitudes,genremotives with the easy naturalness of everyday life.
In Berlin, ever since 1709,Antoine Pesnehad been for half a century the centre of artistic life, and in his works the revolution may be traced. Something familiar and intimate takes the place of that stately pomp. The princes, hitherto, had liked to be represented in mediæval armour or antique equipment; Pesne painted them in the costume of the time. And in his portraits of his friends and his family circle he has been still more unconstrained. There is the charming picture of 1718, in the New Palace at Potsdam, which shows the painter himself with his wife and his two children; the portrait of Schmidt the engraver, in the Berlin Museum; and the beautiful picture of 1754 in the collection of Colonel Von Berke, at Schemnitz, which depicts him again at the age of seventy-one with his two daughters. Pesne is revealed in these characteristic portraits, as well as in his character pictures in the Dresden Gallery (“The Girl with the Pigeons,” 1728, “The Cook with the Turkey-hen,” 1712), as a thoroughly sane and strong realist, of a kind which became almost extinct in Berlin a hundred years later.
In the next generation, in theSturm-und-Drangperiod,Anton Graff, the Swiss, took the lead with his simple, domestic, honest, real portraits.It was a happy disposition of fate that Graff’s activity just corresponded with the great period of the awakening of intellectual life in Germany, that Lessing and Schiller, Bodmer and Gessner, Wieland and Herder, Bürger and Gellert, Christian Gottfried Körner and Lippert, Moses Mendelssohn and Sulzer, and a long succession of other poets and scholars of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, found in him a portrait painter whose quick and agile hand left us their features in the truest and most authentic manner. What and how robust his art is, how clear and plastic the execution of the heads, how adroit and infallible the technique!
Besides Graff, there worked in DresdenChristian Leberecht Vogel, likewise a most independent, picturesque, and sensitive artist, who, if only for his pictures of children, deserves a place of honour in the history of art in the eighteenth century. In the portrait of his two boys, in the Dresden Gallery, the naïveté of child-life is observed with such tenderness and rendered with such vigour as only Reynolds understood. The boys are sitting close together on the ground. One, in a brown frock, is holding a book on his knees, which the other, in a red frock, with a whip in his hand, is looking at. The thoughtful expression of the little ones is quite charming; the execution broad and strong, the colour treatment delightful and tender.
In Munich lived the excellentJohann Edlinger, the most industrious of these sturdy masters, who were so modest and yet so capable.
In the domain of landscape the Continent produced no one who could be compared with Gainsborough; but here, too, the English influence made itself felt. It can be traced how the same feeling for nature which had given birth to Thomson’sSeasonsand Gainsborough’s landscapes, afterwards found expression in France and Germany, and dissipated the prevailing taste in gardens. The seventeenth century—with the exception of the Dutch—had set nature in order with the garden shears. As Lebrun in his historical compositions endeavoured to outdo the Italians, so Lenôtre’s garden style exemplified the perfection and exaggeration of the gardens of the Italian Renaissance, which themselves again were laid out on the plan of the old Roman gardens from existing descriptions. A garden reminded one more of state apartments, which one could only walk through with measured steps, quietly and respectfully, than of nature, where one is, and dares to be, human. Corresponding to this formally planned, correctly measured style of garden there was a school of landscape which improved nature on “artistic” principles, and, by the arrangement of bits of nature, produced a world peculiarly full of style. Landscapes were nicely laid-out parks, which, like the figure pictures, made for an abstract beauty of mass and lines, and which, by means of accessories, such as classical ruins, would turn one’s thought to the ancient world. Nature must not, as Batteux taught, be the instructor of the artist, but the artist must select the parts and build up his picture. Out of many leaves he takes only the most perfectly developed, puts only such perfect leaves on one tree, and so obtains a perfect tree. Let the essential of his production benature choisie, a selection of objects that “are capable of producing agreeable impressions”; his aim “le beau vrai qui est représenté comme s’il existait réellement et avec toutes les perfections qu’il peut recevoir.” Theeighteenth century went back from this “noble,” improved nature, step by step to the divine beauty of unimproved nature; just as those masters untouched by the Romans, Dürer and Altdorfer, Titian and Rubens, Brouwer and Velasquez, had painted her. The great Watteau, too, was here for the most part in advance of his age, in that, instead of the stiffly designed stage scenery of Poussin, he gave Elysian landscapes,—abodes of love, that now glisten in the sunshine of the young morning, now are suffused with golden light and the misty shadows of the evening twilight. The rose in her young bud is odorous, the nightingale sings, the doves coo, the light boughs whisper to the soft west wind, bright silver rivulets ripple, the wind sighs through the tall branches. Watteau knew nature and loved her, and rendered her in her transparent beauty with the intoxicated eyes of a lover. The spirit of nature, not of humanity, dominates in his pictures. It is only because nature is so lovely that man is so happy.
But still more modern is the effect, when instead of painting Elysian landscapes with happy inhabitants, he drew mere bits of rural nature, poor solitary regions in the neighbourhood of big towns, where bricklayers are working on the scaffolding of some house, or peasants are riding with their horses over some stony byway. Out of a number of spirited drawings, thisside of his perception in landscape is especially notable in the picture in the New Palace at Potsdam, in the left background of which a small stream flows past a farmhouse, whilst in front a peasant is laboriously dragging a two-wheeled cart over the rough ground.
It is interesting to observe, at that time, after Watteau and his English predecessors, the widespread growth of this new feeling for nature. Thomson was followed by Rousseau, who, on his lonely wanderings, looked with moved eyes at “the gold of the corn crop, the purple of the heather, the majesty of the trees, and the wonderful variety of flowers and grasses.” He delighted in the blossoming of spring, the copses and rivulets, the song of birds, shady woods, and the landscapes of autumn, where the reapers and vine-dressers were working. He is the author of that lively feeling for nature that henceforth was aroused through the whole of Europe. A breath of pure mountain air, a wholesome draught of fresh water from Lake Leman, were brought suddenly into the sultry atmosphere of salons, and filled people’s hearts with a new and charming sensation when Rousseau’s works appeared. It was over with all efforts of “stylists” as soon as Rousseau declared that everything was good just as it came out of the lap of the universal mother, nature.
Goethe, the pupil of Rousseau, presages, in his whole conception of nature, something of the manifestation of the school of Fontainebleau. He had something of Daubigny when, as Werther, he lies on the bank of the streamand looks down thoughtfully at the worms and small insects. He makes one think of Dupré or Corot when he says: “As nature declines upon autumn, within me and around me it grows autumn”; or, “I could not now draw so much as a stroke, and I have never been a greater painter than at the present moment”; or, “Never have I been happier, nor has my perception of nature, down to the pebble or the grass beneath me, been fuller and more intimate. Yet,—I know not how I can express myself, everything swims and oscillates before my soul, so that I can seize no outline. A great, shadowy whole waves before my soul, my perception grows indistinct before it, even as my eyes do.”
Thus were the French gardens delivered by the English. Just as figure painting renounced lofty, architectural, formal composition, so those bisected and upholstered gardens were supplanted by irregular and, as it were, accidental bits of nature. People took no more trouble, in Rousseau’s phrase, “to dishonour nature by seeking to beautify her,” but laid out gardens in harmony with Goethe’s remark inWerther: “A feeling heart, not a scientific art of gardening, suggested the plan.” Close to Versailles, near the box-tree patterns of Lenôtre, lay the Petit Trianon, with its pond, its brook, and its dairy, where the unfortunate Marie Antoinette used to dream. And if painting still loitered on its preliminary return to nature, that only implied that the great artists—they only came in 1830!—were not yet born. Great artists can only raise themselves on the shoulders of their predecessors, whose value lies in their utility. The French landscapes of the eighteenth century, seen in the light of historical development, are of no importance; but, nevertheless,they gave a considerable stimulus in that they sought to animate the style of Poussin with a closer perception of nature. Hubert Robert is certainly strongly decorative, but he has a light touch; one cannot take him at his word, but he is intelligent, and has sometimes grey and green tones that are soft and beautiful. Joseph Vernet painted coast scenery, views of harbours, storms at sea, likewise with decorative, superficial effects of light; he let flashes of lightning streak black clouds, sun-rays dance over lightly ruffled waves, silver moonshine play mysteriously upon the water, and caused conflagrations to break out and red flames to shoot up to heaven. He is somewhat inane and motley in his colouring. But he had ceased to see in the parts of nature nothing but materials for the construction of nicely fitting scenery. He no longer attempted to speak to the reason by means of lines, but to touch the soul through humour, and he employed in his scenery not only buildings and ruins, gods and ancient shepherds, but also modern groups of every kind.
In Switzerland, the charming etchings and water-colours ofSolomon Gessnermust be especially mentioned. Ludwig Richter, indeed, pointed them out as the eighteenth century works which, after the engravings of Chodowiecki, he loved the best. Gessner venerated Claude, and had an enthusiasm for Poussin, but his pictures have no traces of the lofty style of the heroic school of landscape. He sketched his native meadows, trees, and brooks; he loved all that was small and secluded and cosy, arbours and hedges, quiet little gardens and idyllic nooks. He approached everything with a very childlike and faithful observation of nature. A second Swiss, Ludwig Hess, dedicated a similar subtile sense of nature and loving zeal as much to his native Switzerland as to the Roman Campagna.
The GermanPhilip Hackerthas been prejudiced rather than profited by the monument which Goethe erected to him. As Goethe’s enthusiasm was not in due proportion with Hackert’s importance, he ceased later to attract attention, though this he did not merit, as he was always a vigorous and healthy landscape painter. He did not see nature with the tender sensibility of the Swiss. He looked at a landscape somewhat insipidly, as Chodowiecki at his models. But his drawing is sober, the atmosphere of his pictures clear and fresh; he cannot be tedious in his composition. In Dresden there lived Johann Alexander Thiele, who roamed through Thüringen and Mecklenburg as a landscape painter. Even in Italy landscapeswere the most independent performances which the eighteenth century had brought forth there. There worked in Rome the Netherlander, Vanvitelli, who depicted in graceful water-colours Roman and Neapolitan street life; and Giovanni Paolo Pannini, thepeintre des fêtes publiques, in whose pictures groups of richly coloured figures moved through splendid palaces. Venice was the home of the Canaletti. InAntonio Canale’stown pictures of Venice, Rome, and London there is at once so subtle an atmospheric movement, the water is so clear, the air so transparent, that even if they represent mere streets and buildings, they yet leave an impression of landscape achieved in a broad, pictorial method.Bernardo Canalettoproduces an effect by the fine, cool, damp light of his northern studies even simpler and more intimate, while by his discovery that sunshine does not—as it was hitherto believed—gild but silver the object it falls on, he became one of the fathers of realistic landscape. The most ingenious, however, of the school of Canale, not to say one of the cleverest landscape painters of the century, wasFrancesco Guardi. Antonio Canale was a great artist, and shows it never better than in his distinguished etchings, but as a painter he interests the collector more than the connoisseur. There his qualities are too often petrified into an excessive formality; he shows something too much of thecamera obscura. Guardi is ingenious and startling. Where you have accuracy in Canale, in him you find spirit. Canale shows us the real Venice, Guardi shows it as we have dreamed it to be. Hehas not Canale’s knowledge of perspective and architecture, but he fascinates us. He is a musician and a poet whose palette resounds with the purest harmonies. In his pictures the whole seductive legend of the fallen Queen of the Adriatic abides. Garlanded gondolas glide peaceful and fairy-like, majestic as vessels in some distant wonderland, over the clear, green water of the canals, beneath the high, marble palaces, which mirror their columns and balconies, their arches and their loggias in the stream. Foreign ambassadors pass in great state through the Piazza di San Marco; all that proud, Venetian nobility greets them; and thick throngs of people in their Sunday attire move to and fro beneath the Hall of the Procuration. Gay bands of musicians row along the Piazzetta and the Riva. A moist breeze sweeps over the water; the sunshine, now subdued and mellow, now dancing coquettishly, plays upon the water or on the houses. Francesco Guardi, the magician of Venice, is an animated, exquisite, always ingeniousimprovisatore, strong as few others are in the direct transference of his personal impression to canvas. Every stroke of his brush takes effect,—in each one of his pictures one sees the nervous exaltation of the hand; and that gives him a power of attraction which, compared with Canale, is like that of the clay model, in which the hand of the sculptor is still perceptible, compared with the cold, marble statue.
Even Spain, which, except for the colossal figure of Velasquez, had so far produced no painters of landscape—even Spain, after the middle of the century, turned into this road.Don Pedro Rodriguez de Mirandapainted his broad, clear, and vigorously observed highland studies;Don Mariano Ramon Sanchezhis small views of towns and harbours.
And, as in England, hand in hand with that came paintings of animals.
In France,François Canovawas working, the painter of huge battle scenes and small pictures of animals;Jean Louis de Marne, who was famous for his cattle, market scenes, village pictures, and the like; and the greatJean Baptiste Oudry, who painted with breadth and freedom animals alive and dead, wild and tame, still-life of every kind. In Augsburg livedJohann Elias Riedinger, whose field of activity embraced the entire animal world, dogs and horses, stags and roes, wild boars, chamois, bears, lions, tigers, elephants, and the hippopotamus—which he depicted with fine observation, both in their proud solitude and at strife with men.
If we cast one more glance back to the road which art had travelled since the commencement of the century, we can have no doubt as to the end which was proportionately aimed at in all countries. Until quite recently a courtly, aristocratic art had shed its light upon the whole of Europe. In the seventeenth century the Dutch alone had maintained their isolation. They who entered fresh into art, and had to break with no tradition, gave at that time the first expression to the new spirit, in that they resolutely recalled art from its courtly surroundings to the humbler dwellings of the middle classes. Theypaintedwhat Dürer and the “little masters” had only graved upon woodblocks and copper plates. Still, they wished to paint these things less for their own sakes than because so intimate a light was shed upon them. Through elements of light they contrived to cast over everyday moments a sort of fairy inspiration. Watteau and his successors made a further advance in the conquest of the visible world, in that they desired to paint their age, for its own sake, in all its grace; and by the middle of the century we find this new, intimate, familiar art, independent of ancient tradition, triumphing all along the line. “Sublime” painting is more and more forsaken. Art becomes more and more indigenous to her world and age. Aristocratic Watteau is succeeded by Hogarth, Greuze, Chardin, and Chodowiecki, who treat the Third Estate no longer in the Dutchchiaroscuro, but in all its heavy reality as a valid object of art. Instead of that lofty, majestic, vainglorious painting of mere representations, which was the outcome of Cinquecento, and which at the expiration of the seventeenth century had sunk, through abstraction, into something uniform, trivial, and tedious, there appeared on all sides an art which was simple and sincere, which plunged into the life of every day, observed man in his relations with nature, with his fellows, with his faithful animals, and with his household goods—an art which created the variety of its representations out of its own experience. So with landscape, the most modern branch of art; it reached in the schools of all nations a greater significance—at least, in extent—than it had ever possessed in the history of art. And this development proceeded without its being established that any one country had direct influence on any other. The ideas hung in the atmosphere; they were the ideas of the century. It is as though the departing age would hold a mirror before us—a magic mirror—which foretells the future; as though it would point out that nineteenth century art, advancing further along this road, should be domestic-human, and that it should find in landscape its most appropriate expression.
It was not given to painting to proceed straight forward in this course, for through favour, partly of the changed current of literature, partly of the revolution, the flame of reactionary classicism shot up brightly once more before it expired.
CHAPTER III
THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN GERMANY
A hundredyears 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 theAntiquities of Athens. To a German, however, was to fall the honour of becoming the hero of the archæological period. TheHistory 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 hisHistory ofArt, 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 hisTreatise on Painting, that “Terburg and Metsu never showed us fair Andromache amongst her industrious women, instead of Dutch sempstresses.” In 1766 Lessing wrote hisLaocoön, and, like Winckelmann, saw in the sculpture of the Greeks the ideal to be imitated. From this point forward he despised landscape andgenrepainting, 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 inWerther, “makes the great artist”; and in his essay uponGerman Method and Arthe 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 fromthese 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. ThePrize Essays, which he published with Heinrich Meyer in thePropyläen, and later in theJena 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.”
“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 theGerman 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 onGermany, 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’sHoræhis well-known treatise onBeauty 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 hisPlastik, and in theViertenKritischen 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 beantiquarianisedaway. 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”
“Des Deutschen Künstler’s Vaterland,
Ist Griechenland, ist Griechenland”
was sung in the academies. And this violent grasping after the ideal of aforeign 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.
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 wasAnton 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 forrococo, and are its last expiring manifestation. They are a testimony that it was not without some justice that the Apelles of Dresdenwas 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.
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 hisDirections 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.
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 hisLaocoön, 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.
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 amélangeof plagiarism andbanalreminiscences, 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 greatdécorateurTiepolo; 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 therococo.
The “goodAngelica” 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 ofrococo. 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 calledchiaroscuro, 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?”
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 ourpictures? 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 becomethe 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 therococothe 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 therococo, 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.
Carstensplays the momentous rôle in German art as the first who trod this path. He has more individuality than Mengs;antiquarianisingwith 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 therococoage, and so definitely to cut the chain which should otherwise have connected German art of the nineteenth century with that of the eighteenth.
Through theInvestigations of Beauty in Painting, by Daniel Webb, which was founded on Winckelmann’sThoughts 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?
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 uponme 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.”
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 thepoetof 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,” “Phœnix 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.
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’sDeutscher Merkura 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. TheWriting of Herr Müller, Painter in Rome, upon the Exhibition of Herr Professor Carstens, with the mottoAmicus Plato, Amicus Socrates, magis amica veritas, was published in 1797 in Schiller’sHoræ. 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 consequentlynothing can be great and beautiful in the representation which is not right and true. In almost similar words, later on, Koch, in hisThoughts 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.
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 earnestrococopainters 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 sentimenttaken 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.
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 individualitycorresponded; 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.
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 theSendlingergasseat 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 asuccessor 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 theewig Weiblicheout of his inner consciousness. In men and women the eyes, in particular, are merely animal.