Carstens’ influence on German art has been then entirely a negative one. It was not on such a foundation that a German art could arise. He prepared no ground for his successors on which they could build further; but through his abandonment of the whole capital which, since Stephen Lochner, had been handed down at compound interest from one generation of painters to another,he rather cut away the ground from under their feet. “For very easily can art go astray, but it is a difficult and lengthy process for her to recover herself.”
The art which was born in that humble studio in Rome to the sickly, neurotic man, the “famous draughtsman,” needed later, in order to become technically healthy again, an impulse replete with life from abroad.
CHAPTER IV
THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN FRANCE
InFrance also modern art began with a stream of antiquarianism which flowed from the same archæological source. De Brosses published a history of the Roman Republic, and wrote on Herculaneum. Leroy produced hisRuines des plus anciens monuments de la Grècein 1758. Shortly afterwards theRecueils d’Antiquitéof Caylus and Hamilton were published. The former undertook his great journeys, and presented the Academy of Inscriptions with a succession of archæological treatises. He is perhaps the first since Batteux and Coypel who again makes of the modern painter a positive demand for a quiet beauty of lines after the “manière simple et noble du bel antique.” The architects begin to take counsel of Vitruvius, and to work after some model borrowed from the antique. Soufflot rebuilt the Pantheon, and produced the Temple of Pæstum.
Even in 1763 Grimm could write: “For some years past we have been making keen inquiry for antique ornaments and forms. The predilection for them has become so universal that now everything is to be doneà la Grecque. The interior and exterior decorations of houses, furniture, dress material, and goldsmiths’ work all bear alike the stamp of the Greeks. The fashion passes from architecture to millinery: our ladies have their hair dressedà la Grecque, our fine gentlemen would think themselves dishonoured if they did not hold in their handsune boîte à la Grecque.” Even Diderot’s preference for the ethical and emotional, as Greuze had painted it—and as Diderot himself had dramatised it—veered round at the commencement of the sixties into an enthusiasm for the antique. After 1761 he carried on in the salons a war of extermination against poor old Boucher, and lectured him in a menacing voice upon the “great and severe taste of antiquity.” He twitted him with possessing neither reality nor taste, and produced in proof the fact that, in the whole catalogue of Boucher’s figures, not four could be found which could be employed in relief, or even as statues. The new taste demanded pure and simple lines, the beauty of sculpture; it went back to the antique. When a French translation of Winckelmann appeared in 1765 he spoke out, on the occasion of a review of the book, clearly and plainly: “Il me semble qu’il faudrait étudier l’antique pour apprendre à voir la nature.” In the same vein Watelet pronounced on Boucher: “Jamais artiste n’a plus ouvertement témoigné son mépris pour la vraie beauté telle qu’elle a été sentie et exprimée par les statuairesde l’ancienne Grèce.” Thus the change in the artistic outlook was heralded long before the curtain went up upon the events of 1789.
Madame Vigée-Lebrun, the French Angelica Kauffmann, possessed of a tender, soft, sympathetic talent, is perhaps the truest representative of this gracious, entirely French transition style, over which like a breath, but only like a breath, hovers the antique. She has in her portraits, in an especially refined manner, fixed that age when noble ladies desired to forget the Marquise and Duchess, to exhibit only the wife and mother, and believed that by unconstraint of attitude in their simple white robe, the scarf thrown modestly over the shoulders, they had effected a return to antique simplicity. Boucher, moved to the depths of his consciousness by Diderot, resolved to paint a picture taken from ancient history. Greuze painted “Severus and Caracalla,” Fragonard “Chœreas and Callirhöe.” Hubert Robert grew more and more archæological, and played in his landscapes with ancient remains and classical ruins. Vien became enthusiastic over antique gems, and thought he must draw the conclusion, from the noble calm of these figures, that the amiable coquetry and capricious garments ofrococowere without nobility. His plan was “to study the antique—Raphael, the Caracci, Domenichino, Michael Angelo, and, in one word, all those masters whose works convey the character of truth and grandeur.”
But what gave far other significance to the French classicism of the ensuing period was that great event in the world’s history, of which France became the theatre at the close of the eighteenth century. In the secluded gardens of Versailles, where the goat-footed Pan embraced the tall, white nymphs by an artificial water-fall, the noble lords and ladies, clad as Pierrots and Columbines, overheard in the midst of their whispered flirtations the menacing earthquake which was announced in thunder from Paris. Soon they beheld the earth crack and burst asunder, as that time came when the air was filled with the smoke of powder, when the first notes of the Marseillaise rang out, and in the Place de la Concorde, where to-day the loveliest fountains in the world are playing, blood ran from a dozen guillotines. That “après nous le deluge” of the Marquise de Pompadour had become a dire, prophetic truth, and in that flood of blood and horrors the artistic ideal of the eighteenth century was also washed away. The Revolution gave the death-blow torococo. At one stroke it overthrew the most pleasant of all French periods, the truest presentiment of French grace andesprit, the noble and amiable art of LouisXV, which the melancholy, life-emitting Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard cause to hover before us as in the clouds of a dream. Classicism, however, attained through it a new and stronger basis, a certain connection with modern life, since it was transposed by it from the Museum of Antiquity into the middle of the Place de la Concorde beneath the guillotine.
What the age of the Revolution demanded of art was at all events not a “noble style,” as Vien had required of it, but rather in the first place a Spartan virtue. Various philosophical writers had drawn a parallel between the organisation of the old and the modern state; they had exerted themselvesto show that the old Republics were models of an almost absolute perfection, which the modern should, in so far as it was possible, imitate. They had contrasted the moral conditions of Sparta and the Roman Republic with the moral constitution of contemporary, monarchical France. They had quoted on every opportunity the acts of virtue, renunciation, courage, and patriotic sacrifice of the great men of antiquity; they had used these deeds as a means of proving their thesis, and their ideas aroused deep echoes in men’s hearts.
The sentiment of Rome had entered into the people as a thing of flesh and blood even before the catastrophe had ensued. “We were more prepared,” wrote Nodier, “for the particular tone of the language of the Revolution than people would have believed, and it cost us little pains to pass from the studies of ourgymnasesto the strife of the forum. In the schools we had prize compositions set of this kind: Who stands higher, the elder Brutus who judged his children, or the younger Brutus who judged his father? And so Livy and Tacitus have done more to overthrow the monarchical system than Voltaire and Rousseau.” It was evident then that France, so soon as she had freed herself from her kings, so soon as she had spoken the word “Republic,” must take theRomanRepublic as her pattern. People lived in an atmosphere of antiquity; the great citizens of Rome and Athens were ranged with the French National Convention; Scævola, Scipio, Cato, Cincinnatus, were the idols of the populace. The speakers in the council cited the ancients in preference; Madame Vigée-Lebrun gavesoupers à la Grecque. “Everything was ordered according to theVoyage d’Anacharsis—garments, viands, amusements, and the table, all were Athenian. Madame Lebrun herself was Aspasia; M. l’Abbé Barthélémy, in a Greek dress with a laurel wreath on his head, recited a poem; M. de Cabierès played the golden lyre as Memnon, and young boys waited at table as slaves. The table itself was set entirely with Greek utensils, and all the viands were actually those of ancient Greece.” Children were given Greek and Roman names. People called themselves “Romans.” “Mais, je l’aimais, Romains!” cried Coulon at the death of Mirabeau. Paris is Rome. In the theatre the bust of Brutus is set opposite that of Voltaire, and the actor says: “O buste réveré de Brutus, d’un grand homme, transporté dans Paris tu n’as point quitté Rome.” And as with the bust of Brutus in the theatre, that of Mucius Scævola appears in the cafés, which Parisian journalists, still full of remembrances of ancient history studied in the gymnasium, liken to the Lyceum and the Porch. In every case ancient Rome is set up as the exemplar. The Parisian collection of engravings on copper possesses a reproduction of the guillotine, with the inscription:A similar machine was used for the execution of the Roman, Titus Manlius. A valet committed suicide, and quoted the illustrious example of Seneca. Had it been possible, people would have gladly thrown themselves back eighteen hundred years into the past, with all its grandeur, its simplicity, and its ruthlessness. Political and social forms did not suffice; even the implements and costume of the ancients were again brought into honour. Furniture put on antiquarian shapes; thewalls were decoratedà la Grecque. The lively frivolity ofrococo, with its freaks and fancies, was no longer adapted to the boudoir of the age of revolution, now transformed into the political council-room. Twists and curves were no longer permitted: everything had to be straightforward, logical, ungenerous, inexorable. Men went clad wretchedly, with red Phrygian caps and no breeches. Women and girls cast aside their ordinary attire and put on straight, falling drapery, discarded their heeled shoes and bound sandals round their feet, shook the powder from their locks and tied their hair in a Greek knot. “Dressed in white raiment without adornment, but decked in the virtue of simplicity,” they appeared in the cabinet of the president, in order to surrender their jewels for the salvation of their country, like those Roman matrons in the time of Camillus.
And, in co-operation with the building up of this new world, painting also advanced. It was only when it assisted to arouse civic virtue, it was said at a sitting of the jury at the Salon of 1793, that painting could possess a right to exist in the new state, and as the handmaid of this patriotism might fulfil an even higher mission than it had done in ancient Greece and Rome. “The Greeks and Romans were indeed only slaves, but we French are by nature free, philosophers in character, virtuous in our every perception, and artists through our taste.” In proportion as the French Republic transcended the old free states, so too must French art take the lead of the antique. “All that stimulated art in Greece, the gymnastic exercises, the public games, the national festivals, is also accessible to the French, who possess above all that which the Greeks lacked, the feeling for true liberty. To depict the history of a free people is indeed quite another mission for the true genius than to embody scenes out of mythology.”
Through this freshnuance, which classicism thus acquired, the ground was cut from under the feet of those who devoted themselves to the study of the antique as conceived by Diderot. The new moral age would have no traffic with those artists in whom the last smile of the eighteenth century was personified. Their pictures, full of grace and caprice, fell into the same disrepute into which everything of yesterday had come, and it was only with a bitter smile that they followed the course of events. The younger Moreau, that animated master ofrococo, became academically cold and tedious when he designed his book on the French costume of the Revolution. The good Fragonard, who was only fifty-nine in 1789, and lived till 1806, saw himself hooted in spite of his “Chœreas.” He, the true representative of frivolous tenderness, of fair and roseate hues, had lost every right to exist in the new world, and ended his life by a sad death when, after the Reign of Terror, there was no longer a place forfêtes galantes. A delightful portrait of himself, which he painted in the first period of the Revolution, shows us an old man, clothed entirely in black, softly melancholy, standing in a formal, dusky-brown salon. On the table on which his arm rests lies a guitar, at his feet a portfolio of engravings; but he neither plays the guitar nor looks at the prints. In theshadows of the falling evening he reminds himself forlornly of past days, and his bald forehead, where so many rose-coloured dreams have passed, is overcast with gloomy shadows.
Greuze, too, outlived himself. It was no use for him to pretend more and more to the utmost virtue, and to paint an “Ariadne at Naxos.” He died in misery and oblivion in 1805. The demands which this new classicism made were able to be satisfied by no one any longer, not even by Vien. However loudly he might proclaim himself a student of the Greeks, he, nevertheless, remained a very timid and lukewarm revolutionary. An old man, cold and peaceful and stolid, moderate in everything, he had neither the energy nor the audacity of the reformer. He had been the Court painter of LouisXVI, a most monarchically disposed and loyal man, and was a suspect on this ground alone to those who were in power in 1789. His pictures, too, describe no more than the end of a world. Greuze, Fragonard, and Vien, in spite of their assumed seriousness, survived only as gallant phantoms in the new age, by the side of those men of more rugged countenance who inaugurated the nineteenth century.
Jacques Louis Davidfirst satisfied the new requirements, and in so doing lent to French classicism, if only for a few years, a certain touch of far greater vivacity. He it was who carried through, in all its consequence, that reformation in taste which Vien had sought in externals, in costume, furniture and decoration; who inspired the gems painted by Vien with republican pathos, and became in this way the great herald of that age which read Plutarch and made Paris into a modern Sparta. David,Prix de Romeafter three successive failures, still came from that “corrupt epoch” against which Republican prudery was so excited. At the age of twenty-six he had already painted Soffits, in the manner of his kinsman “Boucher, to say it with respect.” But the journey to Rome converted Saul into Paul. In 1775 Vien, on his appointment as director of the Roman Academy, had taken him to Italy as his best pupil, and hardly dreamt at that time that this young man would strike out on such an entirely new path from his Roman studies. He did not wait for the Revolution to be converted; when the hour struck he was ready. Thus his first pictures were in a manner the prelude to the Revolution. In them he had already quite consciously entered upon the road along whichhe was to go later. His “Oath of the Horatii” and his “Brutus,” both painted in Rome in 1784, proclaimed his programme. The little, rosy loves, the doves of Venus, and all the charming frivolity and gallantry ofrococo, received their final dismissal, and rough men walked in their stead. He broke his staff over all that he had previously venerated, and declared loudly that he had sinned when in his youth he had believed in the flowery palette ofrococo, and completed in tender tones those ceiling frescoes which Fragonard had commenced in the house of Mdlle. Guimard. Capricious frivolities had to make way for a manlier art, matter “that was worthy to rivet the gaze of a free nation upon itself.” Already, long before the taking of the Bastille, the painting of young David was valued by the rising generation as the artistic embodiment of their political ideas, imbibed while they were still at school. When the “Horatii” was completed it was not only old Pompeo Battoni who exclaimed, when he saw the picture in David’s Roman studio, “Tu ed io soli siamo pittori, pel rimanente si puo gettarlo nel fiume.” In Paris his success was universal; all the critics were unanimous in praise; David was the man after the heart of the age, for his picture was the first which spoke clearly and perceptibly of the pathos of the revolution which stood at the threshold. People saw in it an “example of patriotism which knew no obstacles,” since not even love for their sister, who was betrothed to the enemy, prevailed upon the Horatii to refrain from combat with the Curiati. His next picture, “Brutus” as he receivedthe lictors, when they bring him the bodies of his sons who have been implicated in a monarchical conspiracy, was greeted as allegorical of the incorruptible justice of republicanism. The populace saw in it the “glorification of the chastisement of all traitors to liberty,” and acclaimed David because he “had founded the sinewy style which should characterise the heroic deeds of the revolutionaries, children of liberty, equality, and fraternity.” And one understands—when one also adds the influence of Napoleon—this reaction of military simplicity against the effeminacy ofrococo.
David, at the outbreak of the Revolution, no longer a young man, but forty years old, was the terrible painter of the age, its despotic dictator. As a deputy in the Convention he not only ruled over painting, but also imposed his taste upon sculpture, ivory work, goldsmiths’ work, and decoration. He designed the new costumes for the deputies and ministers. As organiser of public fêtes, he brought to life again the whole of republican Rome. He was one of those rare artists who are the men of their hour. To a new plebeian race, to whose feverishly excited patriotism the soft, luxurious, aristocratically reprehensible art ofrococomust seem as a mockery of all the rights of men, he showed, for the first time, the man, the hero who died for an idea or for his country; and he gave this man huge and elastic muscles, like those of a gladiator who struggles in the arena. He was a second Hercules, cleansing the Augæan stables; with his own strong shoulders he thrust back the petulant band of painters who had tarried too long in the island of Cythera. He applied art to the heroism of the day, gave it the martial attitude of patriotism, inspired it with the spirit of Robespierre, St. Just, and Danton. The more obtrusively his heroes paraded their patriotism, the more people saw in them a picture of the French nation, as true as a transposition could hope to be. This strained rhetorical pathos dwelt in the mind of the age. Talma moved the people to enthusiasm when he played the “Horatii” of Corneille in the classic cothurnus. When David painted, the state declamations of the orators still rang in his ears. Robespierre is said to have spoken from the tribune slowly, rhythmically, artistically: a Bossuet in his rostrum, a Boileau in his chair, while the volcano quivered beneath his very feet: his philippics were carefully divided into three sections, like academic discourses: his patriotism resolved itself into tirades with correctly composed periods. In David’s pictures we have an exact correspondence with all this: the rigid classicality of his composition, figures grouped as though on parade; his cold pathos, the counterpart to that of the orators’ fine sentiments set forth in fine phrases.
The great distinction between the beginning of modern art in Germany and in France is that in France the new style was not only called forth by the influence of a scientific programme from outside, but stood in conjunction with a great transformation in culture, and that it was compelled at first to concern itself not only with imitation and philological retrospect,but with the free expression of the characteristically modern spirit. German art had no new pronouncement to make through the medium of the antique; it followed, on the other hand, the programme of an artistically barren scholar who forgot that archæology is not art, recommended imitation as the path to perfection, and perpetually reminded the artists who followed him how widely they deviated from the correct lines of the model. “Afterwards they rebuke it, and say it is not antique and consequently not good art,” as Albrecht Dürer had complained of such people. In the earnest sentiment, the exalted Roman spirit, the declaiming over rugged, masculine virtues, freedom and patriotism, that found expression in David’s first pictures, there lived something of the Catonian spirit of the Terror; and that still gives them historical value. His enthusiasm was not, first and foremost, for antique art, but for the ideas of country, duty, freedom, progress. The words antiquity and democracy were of like meaning to him.
And how thoroughly this man was permeated with the spirit of his age is shown still more when he discarded the cothurnus, boldly attacked the present, and gave himself up entirely to the delineation of what came under his direct observation in his own life and experience. There he became not only a rhetorician, a revolutionary agitator, but a really great painter. Lepelletier on hisdeath-bed, the assassinated Marat, and the dead Barre, are works of a mightynaturalist. Lepelletier, one of the many deputies who had voted for the death of LouisXVI, was treacherously assassinated in Paris, on 20th January 1793, by a valet of the king’s. The body was publicly exhibited; David painted it, and on 29th March presented the picture to the Convention. As the portrait of the “first Martyr of Liberty,” it was hung in the Convention chamber. On 13th July 1793 Marat, the man-of-terror, fell a victim to the knife of Charlotte Corday. David was presiding at the Jacobin Club when the news was brought him, and he embraced the citizen who had arrested the girl. Deputations of the people appeared in the Convention to express their grief for the heavy loss. Suddenly a voice was heard to cry: “Où es tu, David? Tu as transmis à la posterité l’image de Lepelletier mourant pour la patrie, il te reste encore un tableau à faire.” Silence succeeded in the Assembly. Then David started up: “Je le ferai.” On 11th October he informed the Convention that his “Marat” was finished. “The people asked for their murdered man back again, longed to look once more on the features of their truest friend. They cried to me: ‘David, take up your brush, avenge Marat, so that the enemy may blanch when they perceive the distorted countenance of the man who became the victim of his love for freedom.’ I heard the voice of the people, and obeyed.” Thus David spoke in the Assembly when he presented the Republic with the picture of the murdered man—one of the most thrilling representations of that awful age. The body is lying in the bath. Only the naked upper part of the body, and the head, with a dirty cloth tied round it, and fallen back upon the right shoulder, are visible; one hand, resting back on the side of the bath, still holds a paper in a convulsive grip; the other hangs down limp and dead to the ground. Over this head, with the half-closed eyelids, and the mouth distorted from the death-throes, Caravaggio would have rejoiced, there is such keen naturalism in every stroke of the brush. Like Géricault, in later times, David was then a regular visitor at the Morgue, attended at executions, and took an interest in the convulsive muscular movements of the guillotined. And the colour, too, like the drawing, is of a naturalistic strength to which he never again attained. The light falls slantingly on the corpse from above and throws the head, shoulder, and one arm into strong relief, while all the rest is left in obscurity. In this awfulstill-lifeof uncompromising reality and tragical grandeur he has created a work in the midst of an age of storm which will survive all storms and all changes of taste.
His portraits have no less strikingly survived the fiery ordeal of time. In them, too, he is neither rhetorical nor cold, but full of fire and the freshness of youth. Face to face with his model, he forgot the Greeks and Romans, saw life alone, was rejuvenated in the youth-giving fount of nature, and painted—almost alone of the painters of his generation—the truth. Here his effect, when otherwise he was lacking in all naïveté, is actually naïve and intimate. The best painters have never treated flesh better. He had an aversion to palette tones, and sought after nature with unexampled attention. The fine pearl-grey of his colouring is as delicate as it is distinguished; in his portraits, especially, the relief-tones of blue and light rose seem almost to anticipate the delicate, toned-down tints of modern Impressionism. Himself an ardent Revolutionist, he was, as it were, created to be the portrayer of those men of an austerity like Cato’s, and those women with their free, masculine, proud gaze; that valiant generation that felt within itself a desire to begin civilisation again and found religion anew. The portrait of Lavoisier and his wife reminds one in its refinement of Madame Vigée-Lebrun. The chemist is sitting by a table covered with instruments; his wife, in an elegant light gown, bends attentively over him. The picture dates from 1788, and it still looks like some good work of the age of LouisXVI. Again, how intimate is the effect of the marvellous portrait of Michael Gérard and his family. The good man, in his shirt-sleeves, seems to feel really at home; a small boy is leaning against his knee, a girl is playing on the clavicorde. There is not the slightest suggestion of pose or a conventional type of beauty in this stout old gentleman sitting so comfortably in hisbourgeois négligé, and with honest eyes gazing out so inquisitively round him. In a few other pictures the spiritual life of women is portrayed with remarkable tenderness. One of the earliestis the exceptionally fine portrait of his mother-in-law, Madame Pécoult, in 1783; then, in 1790, the portrait of the Marquise d’Orvilliers, with that expression of dreamy languor which plays round the eyes of the beautiful woman. The Louvre possesses, in the portrait of Madame Récamier, perhaps the most charming and attractive woman’s portrait that David ever painted. The beautiful Juliette lies stretched on a divan of antique pattern. She wears a white dress, her soft rosy feet are bare. The arrangement of the room coquettes primly with that simplicity which was paraded at the time. Apart from the divan, there is only a huge bronze candelabra to be seen. Then there is Barere’s portrait. He stands on the tribune, and delivers the speech which is to cost LouisXVIhis life. The face is small and insignificant, the gaze cold and harsh, and on the mouth there is a shadow of bitter hate and narrow fanaticism. But the triumph of these portraits of men is that of Bonaparte. David was one of the first of the men of the Revolution to come beneath the spell of the Little Corporal. One day, while he was working in his studio at the Louvre, a pupil rushed in breathlessly: “General Bonaparte is outside the door!” Napoleon entered in a dark-blue coat “that made his lean yellow face look leaner and yellower than ever.” David dismissed his pupils, and drew, in a sitting of barely two hours, the stern head of the Corsican. Thus he passed into the service of Napoleon.
This man, who viewed himself only as the coping-stone of the Republic—after the example of Augustus when he transformed the Roman Republic into the Empire—was unwilling to show any opposition to the republican tastes. The first painter of the Republic was appointed to be the Imperial Court painter. What he had been under Robespierre he was under Napoleon: the dictator of his age, who maintained a supremacy over the whole of art similar to that which Lebrun held beneath LouisXIV. The “Marat” was the great work of his revolutionary, the “Coronation” of his monarchical period,—that colossal picture which, completed between 1806 and 1807, has handed down to posterity a true representation of the ceremonial pageants that took place in Notre Dame on 2nd December 1804. The moment selected is when Napoleon places the crown, which is carried on a velvet cushion by the Duc de Berg, upon the head of the Empress, who kneels before him in a white robe and a crimson mantle. The picture contains portraits of all the personages present at the ceremony, amongst them being David himself, as he stands on a platform and sketches at a small table. The whole composition of this picture and the grouping of the figures is full of stately gravity. Real energy and patience must have been required to paint this immense picture, though it shows not the least sign of fatigue. With the exception of Menzel’s “Coronation of WilliamI,” I know of no historical picture of the century of as high an artistic value, with the like noble sublimity of colour, with so tender, quivering a light. There are certain portions of the “Coronation” in which the white robes, the deep-red velvet of the mantles, and gold embroideries affect us like a symphony in colours. When the picture was completed Napoleonvisited David’s studio, accompanied by the Empress, his ministers, and his staff. The Court drew up, and the Emperor moved up and down in front of the picture, hat in hand, for more than half an hour, examining it in all its details. Finally, with one of those dramatic effects of which he was so fond, he lightly raised his hat: “C’est bien, très bien; David, je vous salue.”
David had now still better opportunities than at an earlier period of proving his great capacity as a portrait painter. His portraits of the Emperor, of the Pope, of Cardinal Caprara, and of Murat symbolise the brutal greatness of an age which worshipped strength. Even at the close of his life, when the Restoration had exiled him from France, there resulted in Brussels graceful and tenderly observed portraits, such as that of the daughter of Joseph Bonaparte, which will perpetuate his name. One, in the Praet Collection at Brussels—three women of indescribable ugliness—marks the pinnacle of his pictorial strength and keen naturalism. They are the “Three Fates” of 1810, and he has painted them with the true artist’s delight, and with a massiveness like that of Frans Hals.
When these works were brought together at the Paris Exhibition of 1889,universal astonishment prevailed when it was discovered what a great painter this Louis David was. He appeared in these pictures as an artist who stood completely within his age, who shared its passions and was permeated by its greatness; he even appeared as acharmeurwho handled the phenomena of colour and light as few others have done. It is true, David showed himself in this favourable light at the exhibition only because the entirely archæological side of his talent was not represented. For at the bottom of his heart he too was an archæologist. Many of his works, such as “The Death of Socrates,” “Brutus,” “The Oath in the Tennis Court,” and “The Rape of the Sabines,” are specimens of a barren theory.
Against all the caprice of the eighteenth century, with its charming, alluring grace, he opposed a strict, inexorable system, as he believed he saw it in the antique. Simplicity, however, beneath his hands became dryness, nobility formal. He saw in painting a sort of abstract geometry for which there existed hard-and-fast forms. There was something mathematical in his effort after dry correctness and erudite accuracy. The infinite variety of life with its eternal changes was hidden from his sight. The beautiful, he taught with Winckelmann, does not exist in a single individual; it is only possible to create a type of it by comparison and through composition. The human being of art ought always to be a copy of that perfect being, primitive man, whom the Roman sculptors had still before their eyes, but who had deteriorated in the course of ages. Thus in France, too, the sensuous art of painting was converted into an abstract science of æsthetics. The classic ideal weighed upon French art and prescribed for all alike the same “heroic style,” the same elevation, the same marble coldness and monotony of colour.Jean-Baptiste Regnault, andFrançois André Vincent, whose studios were most frequented after David’s, worshipped the same gods. After David’s departure,Guérin, in particular, endeavoured to bequeath to the students those genuinely academic rules which his pupil, Delacroix, has summed up in these words: “In order to make an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinous, and then say, ‘We have done our utmost; if he is, nevertheless, not beautiful, we must altogether abstain from this freak of nature, with his squat nose and thick lips, so unendurable to the eyes.’” When he had to paint his “Insurrection in Cairo,” therefore, Egyptians as well as Arabs must first be supplied with heads of Antinous and transformed from modern soldiers into ancient warriors, Romans of the time of Romulus, before they could enter into the kingdom of art. Everything was sacrificed to line,—an inflexible, inexorable, correct, and icy line, the conventional, ideal line,—not the true line which follows from observation of the infinite variety of nature.
Nevertheless, even in works constructed as these were by rule and line, we cannot fail to be impressed by the technical ability displayed by the artist.
France, who in her outward relations has generally had a feverish longing for change, has been in literary and artistic respects, as a rule, exceedinglyconservative, has upheld authority, supported an academy, and prized limitations and proportion above everything. They had upset the monarchy, murdered the hated aristocrats, built up the republic, done away with Christianity before they ever thought of touching the three unities of the drama. Voltaire, who had a reverence for nothing in heaven or earth, respected the received treatment of the Alexandrine verse. And David, the great painter of the Revolution, who cast the pictures of Boucher out of the Louvre, and whose pupils used to shoot bread-crumbs at Watteau’s masterpiece, the “Voyage à Cythère,” yet conveyed with him into the new age, as an inheritance fromrococo, its prodigious knowledge. The good old traditions of the technique of French painting were little shaken by him and his school. The Academy described by Quatremère as the “eternal nursery garden of incurable prejudices,” was indeed overthrown, but David became immediately the head of a new one. This age of absorption in politics developed an art to correspond, more disciplined than ever, girt round by an iron cuirass; and this art, notwithstanding multifarious phases, at no time lost its touch, technically, with the acquisitions of former epochs, but evolved itself in its various directions from one centre, distracted from its path by nothing brought into it from outside. Géricault, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet, widely as they differ from one another, are links in one chain of evolution. Art comes from knowledge. This maxim, which David held in honour, has remained to the present day a dominant force in French art, and by virtue of this knowledge, which David received from the old masters and guarded as a sacred trust, France became in the nineteenth century the chief school of technique for all other nations. From the French the other nations learned their grammar and syntax; through them they acquired a wider horizon and a deeper insight into the great mystery of nature.
BOOK II
THE ESCAPE INTO THE PAST
CHAPTER V
THE NAZARENES
Hereinlies 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 ofrococo, 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 thebeaux 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 titleHerzensergiessungen 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.
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. TheHerzensergiessungen 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 olderpainters “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.”
It was all said so simply and heartily that soon the whole world beganto be “Wackenroderite.” The ingenious and enthusiastic youth was succeeded by theoretic reasoners. Tieck, who published hisPhantasies upon Artin 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.” HisSternbaldis still more haunted by the spirit of monastic devotion.
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 wouldhave laughed if you could have seen them drag him about and assail him with their convictions.” The journalEuropa, 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 anobiter dictumdropped 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.”
The latter counsel originated from the discovery in 1804 of the Cologne Cathedral picture, referred to by Schlegel in hisEuropa. 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 MunichPinakothek. 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 generallyagainst 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 borrowedthe 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 asprédilection d’artiste.
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 ofLucinde, 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,”
“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 hisPhilosophy of Revelation; Görres, the editor of theRothen Blut, ended as the author of theChristian 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.
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.Overbeckof Lübeck came in 1810 with Pforr of Frankfort and Vogel of Zürich; the Düsseldorfer, Cornelius, followed in 1811,SchadowandVeitof Berlin in 1815,Schnorr von Carolsfeldof Leipzig in 1818, the VienneseFührichandSteinlein 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.
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.
“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 turnsto 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 theStanze. 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.”
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’sHerzensergiessungenwhat 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 ofArt and Antiquitythat manifesto, theNew German Religious-Patriotic Art, orHistory 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.
As with Carstens, so with the Nazarenes, we are warned by the idealistictendency 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.
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 becamethe 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.
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, byenthusiasm 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.
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.
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 isconfronted 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.