There lives within them an unpretentiousness and sincerity of sentiment, and, in spite of all deficiencies and lack of independence, somewhat of that lofty inspiration which raises the pictures of really earnest artists, even if they are faulty, far above any fabricated productions. An association of young men, which, unconcerned about success and material profit, contended only for ideal products, found here for the first time an opportunity to display what it wanted. In the interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream and in the recognition by the brethren, Cornelius, in formal language, full of character, and without any phrases and posture, displayed all that he had derived from the great Italians in nobility of grouping and fine arrangement of lines. Overbeck reaches the same height in his allegory of the seven lean kine. But it is not only as youthful works of artists, who, if they belonged to a period of decadence, yet were, withal, the greatest representatives of a period of German art, that these pictures are worthy of high esteem; they are essentially the best that these masters have created. Cornelius, notably, shows a study, a care for execution, indeed even a harmony of colouring, that stands in surprising opposition to his later negligence. From the conception that the artistic performance is determined in the invention, and the design, but that the pictorial execution is an indifferent, mechanical accessory which could be supplied even by other people, he was at that time still free.
When the pictures had been unveiled in 1819 a festival of German artists was held in Rome. Rückert, Bunsen, the Humboldts, the Herzes were there; Cornelius, Veit, and Overbeck had arranged the transparencies. “The centre of all,” writes the Danish romantic Atterbom, was the Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, “the idol of every German artist, whose ruling passion is for the fine arts and fair ladies. Everything was in old German masques, the ladies in wide ruffs. The Crown Prince was in the utmost good humour, and treated the artists as his equals. A toast was drunk to German unity. The scene struck me like a beautiful dream out of the Middle Ages.” German unity at a Roman fancy ball! The German nation a beautiful dream out of the Middle Ages! The Crown Prince Ludwig, when he took Cornelius and Schnorr out of the Roman circle, at least created a fatherland for German art, and later on the others also found at home a suitable sphere of activity.
Philip Veit, who went to Frankfort in 1830 as Director of the Staedel Institute, was the first to settle down, and for all his energy could only for a very short time make that city into a seat of the Christian tendency in art. Of his pictures there, the fresco painted for the Staedel Institute, “The Introduction of Christianity into Germany by St. Boniface,” is by far the most important. The apostle has hewn down the oak of Thor, and from where it once stood there flows forth the new spring of Christianity. The old Germans shrink back timorously, but the youths listen to the preacher, and follow his direction to the figure of religion which approaches with the palm of peace. In the background a church rises, and in the distance, by a limpid river, a flourishing town, in contrast to the sombre, primeval forest to which the Germans who reject religion are flying.
“The two Marys at the Sepulchre,” in the Berlin National Gallery, and the “Assumption,” in the Frankfort Cathedral, date from a later period. It was of no avail to him that he mingled with his Nazarenism a certain air of the world, which found expression in a less ascetic language of form and a somewhat stronger sense of colour. In 1841 he had already a feeling that the restless, struggling age had passed him by. He abandoned his post and went to meet oblivion as Director of the Gallery at Mayence.
Overbeck, the only one who could not tear himself from Rome, remained, till his death in 1869, the “Young German Raphael,” as his father had called him in a letter from Lübeck in 1811: a devout, religious poet, pure of soul and of fine culture, as one-coloured and one-sided as he was mild and tender. At the outset he knew, at least, how to extract from the old masters a certain naïve piety without positive character, whereas later he lost himself more and more in the arid formalism of dead dogmas. What was in his power to give he has given in pictures such as the “Entry of Christ into Jerusalem” and the “Weeping over the Body of Christ”—both in the Marienkirche at Lübeck, in the “Miracle of Roses,” in Santa Maria Degli Angeli at Assisi, in the “Christ on the Mount of Olives” in the Hospital at Hamburg, and the “Betrothal of Mary” in the Berlin National Gallery—pictures which expressed nothing that would not have been expressed better at the end of the fifteenth century. His “Holy Family with St. John and the Lamb,” of 1825, in the Munich Pinakothek, is in composition and type a complete imitation of the Florentine Raphael; his “Lamentation of Christ” in the Lübeck Marienkirche isreminiscent of Perugino; his “Burial” would never have existed but for Raphael’s picture in the Borghese Gallery. His sentiment coincided exactly in devotion and godliness with that of Fra Angelico or of the old masters of Cologne, and when he devoted himself to programme-painting he lost all intelligibility. In the “Triumph of Religion in the Arts,” which he completed in 1846 for the Staedel Institute, and in which he wished to embody the favourite ideas of Romanticism, that art and religion must flow together in one stream, he has copied the upper part from the “Disputa,” the lower part from the “School of Athens,” and worked up both into a tedious and scholastically elaborated whole. It is only through a series of unpretentious sketches which he prepared for engravings, lithographs, and woodcuts that his name has still a certain lustre. Plates such as the “Rest in the Flight,” the “Preaching of St. John,” or the series “Forty Illustrations to the Gospel,” the “Passion,” the “Seven Sacraments,” may be contemplated even to-day, since in them at least no tastelessness of colour stands in the way. These plates, too, like his pictures, are less observed than felt—felt, however, with an innocence and cheerfulness of heart often quite childlike.
It shows above all much self-understanding that all these masters in their later years restricted themselves exclusively to design, which better expressed their character. In compositions and sketches of this kind, which were onlydrawn, and were thus untrammelled by the fruitless struggle with the difficulties of the technique of painting and a complete lack of the notion of colour, they moved more freely and lightly. In their frescoes and oil-paintings, partly through insufficient technique, partly through their all too servile imitation of foreign ideals, they went astray. As draughtsmen, they had more courage to be themselves, and while in the completer paintings many a fine trait, many an intimate reflection of the soul was lost, or through the obduracy of the material did not attain a right expression, here their spiritual and emotional qualities can be better valued.
Joseph Führich, one of the most staunchly convinced champions of these reactionary tendencies, has become, entirely owing to his extensiveactivity as a draughtsman, somewhat more familiar to our modern knowledge than most of his contemporaries. He had begun as a draughtsman. As a student of the Prague Academy he was an enthusiast for Schlegel, Novalis, and Tieck; and even before his journey to Rome he had etched fifteen plates for Tieck’sGenoveva. It was Dürer who exercised the deciding influence upon his further development. He had been led to him through Wackenroder, and had copied his “Marienleben” in 1821. “Here I saw,” he says in his Autobiography, “a form before me which stood in trenchant opposition to that of the Classicists, who are anxious to palm off as beauty their smoothness and pomposity borrowed from the misunderstood antique, and their affected delicacy as grace. In contrast with that absence of character which prevailing academic art mistakes for beauty I saw here a keen and mighty characterisation which dominated the figures through and through, making them, as it were, into old acquaintances.” The strong and godly German middle age took then in Führich’s heart the same place which the Italian Quattrocento had filled in Overbeck’s range of thought. And this old-German tendency was only temporarily interrupted by his sojourn in Rome. After he came to Rome in 1826 he became a Nazarene, and was accustomed there to look back at the tendencies of his youth as an error; and both at Prague, where he returned in 1829, after collaborating at the frescoes in the Villa Massini, and at Vienna, where from 1841 he held the post of professor in the Academy, he found rich opportunity for putting into practice his ecclesiastical and orthodox views of art.
His frescoes in the Johannis-und-Altleschenfelder Church in Vienna are, perhaps, more harmonious in colour, but no more independent in form, than the works of the others. In his old age he returned once more to the impressions of his youth, and so found himself again.
As a boy, in his little native village of Kratzau, in Bohemia, he had tended the cows in summer time and had acquired a certain sincere knowledge of nature and shepherd-life. He had to thank Dürer for his preference for the idyllic and patriarchal family scenes in Sacred History, and these tendencies found pleasing expression in pictures like “Jacob and Rachel,” or “The Passage of Mary across the Mountains.” No matter that the figures in “Jacob and Rachel” are taken out of the early pictures of Pinturicchio and Raphael, they are still interwoven, with their background of landscape, into an idyll of great naïveté and charm. More especially, however, did the qualities which he owed to Dürer acquire value—a sturdy characterisation, a naïve art in telling the story, and a great wealth of fresh traits, straight from nature—in the serial compositions of his old age. There is no sentimental vagueness, nothing academical. Führich had a keen eye for what was intimate, familiar; a tender sense of the individualities of landscape in woodland and meadow, of the charm of everyday life as well as of the animal world; and though an idealist, he knew how to assimilate ingeniously what he had observed with a certain realistic fulness. The old story of Boaz and Ruth grew beneath his hands into a delicious idyll of country life. From the story of the Prodigal Son he has extracted with sensitiveness the purely human kernel, and as late as the winter of 1870-71, at the age of seventy-one, he illustrated the legend of St. Gwendolen, in which he depicted with tender reverence the escape of a human soul, withdrawn from the world and resigned to God’s will, into Nature and her peace.
Edward Steinle, who went from Rome to Vienna in 1833, and settled in Frankfort in 1838, is called, not very appropriately, by his biographer, Constantine Wuzbach, “a Madonna painter of our time.” His name deserves to come down to posterity rather for what he created outside the essential characteristics of his art. In his frescoes in the minster at Aachen, in the choir of the cathedrals of Strasburg and Cologne, he stood firm on the standpoint of the Nazarenes; which is as much as to say they contained nothing novel in the history of art. In his fairy pictures, however, imagination broke through the narrow confines of dogma, and entwined itself in creative enjoyment round the vague figures of fable. His “Loreley,” in the Schack Gallery, as she looks down, a Medusa-like destroyer, from the tall cliff; his watchman who looks dreamily into space over the houses of the old town; his violin player on his tower who plays, forgetful of the world,—these have something musical, poetical, that freshness of sentiment and unsought naïveté which as an inheritance of his Viennese home was also peculiar in such a high degree to Schwind.
The Romantic aspiration is revealed in Steinle, even, in a certain “yearning after colour.” There lives in his works a refined feeling for colour that, especiallyin his water-colours, rarely forsakes him. Take, for instance, the fresh, tinted pen-drawings, engraved by Schaffer, in which he displayed with the naïveté of Memlinc the life of St. Euphrosyne; the five aquarelles of Grimm’s “Snow-White and Rose-Red”; or his illustrations to Brentano’s poems, such as theChronicle of the Wandering Student, and theFairy Tale of the Rhine and Radlauf the Miller, in which he developed a delight in the world and an idea of landscape that in the ascetic Nazarene excite astonishment.
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld went, after the completion of the Ariosto Room of the Villa Massini, first to Vienna, then in 1827 to Munich, in order to paint theNibelungenin the halls of the royal residence of that time, and in the imperial halls of the state palace the history of Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, and Rudolf of Hapsburg. He also, however, created his best work at the close of his life in Dresden,—the forcible woodcuts of hisPicture Bible, which narrated the world’s sacred history in strong and vigorous strokes.
Strangest to the present-day taste have become the drawings of Cornelius. His plates to Goethe’sFausthave, indeed, a certain austere strength ofconception, which he learnt from Dürer; but also faults of drawing, exaggerations, crudities, and errors in perspective, which he did not find in Dürer.
In his second work, the Nibelungen cycle, an intentional old-German angularity, with an unintentional modern clumsiness, has effected amésallianceeven less attractive.
CHAPTER VI
THE ART OF MUNICH UNDER KING LUDWIG I
Morethan seventeen hundred years ago there reigned a Roman emperor who loved art passionately. He looked upon it from an intellectual altitude which few have reached, and he valued it as the monumental consummation of Græco-Roman culture. Standing upon a plane of intellectual elevation, himself gifted with artistic intuition, he knew of no higher enjoyment for a ruler than the cultivation of the architectural and other forms of art. It was he who opened up to the energy of artists a field such as has never been offered to them before or since. He spent upon his works sums incalculable, so that his people grew restless under their emperor’s mania for building. His villa at Tivoli, which attained to the extent of a town, was in itself a copy of everything that he most loved and admired in the world. It united nearly all the renowned buildings of Athens in one masterly reproduction. And then with architecture came the other arts. The most magnificent collections of sculpture were formed, for none had better opportunities of acquiring the antique masterpieces of the Greek towns. Numberless frescoes, scenes from those cities and regions which had most impressed him on his travels, adorned the walls.
And yet subsequent generations have viewed with unconcern this halcyon period in the history of art. Though his contemporaries fancied that the splendour of the Greek sun was still radiating over them, it was but a borrowed lustre, which never went beyond the reproduction or copying of classic examples. Whatever Greek temples the emperor might build and decorate, he failed to summon into being a Phidias or a Polygnotes to revive for him the forms of the antique. The names of the artists who worked for him are forgotten. They had no originality; they copied the types of the Grecian and Egyptian periods, and their art was but a repetition of old ideals, without character of age or place. The fifteen colossal columns of his Olympieion that are still standing impress one as foreign to Athens, and would seem more in place at Baalbeck or Palmyra than in this city of the Muses. Epictetus would have smiled at the emperor diverting himself with an album of the wonders of the world, as a piece of sentimentality. The age of Hadrian produced thousands of buildings, statues, and pictures, but no original works.
Will a different judgment be pronounced in the lapse of time upon the artistic creations of King LudwigI? Ludwig also—his biography readslike that of Hadrian—was an enthusiastic admirer of art. After the Peace of Vienna, when the political aspirations of Germany had been frustrated, he alone among the numerous German princes of the old alliance fostered homeless art, and thus fulfilled a noble mission. The king’s splendid enthusiasm for the ideal significance of art, which he hoped would lead the German people, then seeking to work out its individuality, from out of its Philistine narrow-mindedness to nobler and greater things—this enthusiasm will redound to his enduring honour. Schiller’s idea of educating humanity by æsthetic means had in him grown into a living and powerful sentiment.
All that it was possible to accomplish in the cause of art, on the basis of existing development, his endeavours have fully realised. In the course of twenty-three years he spent more than £3,000,000 from his privy purse, and made Munich what it is, the principal art centre of Germany; changed it from a Bœotia into an Athens; founded its art collections, and erected the buildings which give the town its character. Then he offered those new walls to the painter Cornelius, and commanded him to cover them. “You are my field-marshal, do you provide generals of division.” In 1814 Cornelius had written to Bartholdy: “The most powerful and unfailing means to restore German art and bring it into harmony with this great period and the spirit of the nation would be a revival of fresco-painting as it existed in Italy from the days of the great Giotto to those of the divine Raphael.” And through this royal command the dream was realised beyond all expectation. No such lively artistic animation had been witnessed since the great periods of Italian art; an animation which does not cut the worst figure in German history in those sad times of political stagnation and reaction. But that there was a living soul of art in those days posterity will no more acknowledge than it does in the case of the age of Hadrian.
“Wie bei Bartholdy als Kind, so in Massimis Villa als JünglingTeutshes Fresco wir sehn, aber in München als Mann,”
“Wie bei Bartholdy als Kind, so in Massimis Villa als Jüngling
Teutshes Fresco wir sehn, aber in München als Mann,”
sang King Ludwig. Now, after two generations, it can be seen that fresco-painting at Munich from 1820 to 1840 produced less original conceptions of the German art of the nineteenth than weak reflections of the Italian art of the sixteenth century.
Various favourable circumstances combined at that time to cause Cornelius to be specially looked upon by his contemporaries as an incomparable master. Since Tiepoli, German monumental art had remained dormant. The frescoes at Munich were the first attempts made to revive it. And it seemed as though with Cornelius, German art had at once risen to the dizzy heights to which Italian art had been led by Michael Angelo. The lookers-on believed in Buonarotti’s resurrection. As in the Sistine “Last Judgment,” the movement of his heroic figures appeared plastic and pathetic, and his types, not excepting the women, gave that impression of the terrible, which none but Signorelli and Michael Angelo had attained before him. His advent, it was said, might almost make one believe in a kind of metempsychosis; as though the spirit ofthe great Florentine master, that giant of the Renaissance, had been restored to humanity. At that very period the Italian art of the Cinquecento enjoyed the exclusive favour of the German scholars. It alone was worthy of imitation; in it the æsthetic philosophers sought for rules and laws to govern the development of art. And as they thought that all the qualities of this artistic method were to be found in the works of Cornelius, it was only logical to arrive at the conclusion which the Crown Prince Ludwig summed up in the following words: “There has been no painter like Cornelius since the Cinquecento.”
At the same time the intellectual character of his work harmonised with the wishes of a period in which the leaders of German thought tried to forget the dreary dulness of life by plunging into the most profound speculations. “What does it matter,” writes Hallman, “if we lack all joyous, independent national feeling? What though we do not even try to resuscitate this feeling with wars and battles? We strive after something higher! The world is beginning to respect German intellect and learning. We believe that in this we are in advance of other nations, and we seek a mode of expression, we want to give a form to that lofty thought through our art, in order that we may bequeath to posterity an image of our fortunate condition.... Therefore it is a remarkable sign of the times that painting strives to make the weighty output of intellectual thought a common treasure of all who are neither able nor disposed to follow speculation to its dizzy heights, nor erudition to its lowest depths; that painters try to transform the results of those investigations into fresh and ever lively conceptions—the element of art.”
To accomplish this none was better fitted than Cornelius. What a weight of thought and learning his works display!
In the Pinakothek, Cornelius’ main idea was to paint the life and work of Nature as illuminated by the figures of the Greek gods. For the series of paintings in the Hall of the Gods, Hesiod’sTheogonyoffered a basis upon which to demonstrate the idea of the triumph of the creative mind in heaven and upon earth. In the second room, human passion, power, and tyranny were illustrated in scenes of Greek heroic life from theIliad. The frescoes in theLudwigskirche were to follow the Christian apocalypse as a concatenation, and to depict it in symbolic treatment from the Creation to the Last Judgment. The frescoes for the Campo Santo at Berlin were meant to represent “the universal and most exalted fortunes of humanity, the manifestation of divine grace towards the sins of mankind, the redemption from sin, perdition, and death, the triumph of life and eternity.” Each of these paintings is a treatise. Each fresco bears a definite relation to the other; deep philosophic speculations weave their threads from one to the other. Or else the painter revels in a suite of compositions which trace a network of intellectual combinations from one picture to the other. As he himself expressed it, he delivered his diploma lecture through his paintings.
And this painted erudition harmonised with the requirements of those times of dominating intellectual tendencies. The scholars saw in Cornelius the poet, the doctor-in-philosophy; held that the principal value of the work of art lay in its intellectual contents, and felt that their loftiest mission was to express these contents still more correctly than the painter himself. The idea, they said, was the alpha and omega of the painter’s art, and must be accepted at its full value, even when represented in the most shadowy external form.
These opinions have now vanished entirely. A more extended intercourse with the old masters and with the art of other countries has gradually cured the Germans too of that mental hypertrophy from which they suffered in their view of art—a complaint whose characteristic symptom was the entire lack of sensuousness, of that sensibility to beauty of form and external charm which always has been and always must be the predominating mood of a society in which art is to flourish. They have gradually reached the point at which one interests one’s self in a picture for the sake of the painting of it, looks first at the picture, and only then asks what the painter’s idea may have been, or what the spectator is to gather from it. No poem will find favour which offers acceptable thoughts in badly worded, halting, unmelodious verse; nor do the loftiest thoughts in themselves suffice to make a work of art. Profundity of thought is a thing that has little to do with pure art; and the subject alone, however world-stirring the ideas in it may be, never makes a thing artistic. We have learnt to find the most intense enjoyment in the mere contemplation of Titian’s “Earthly and Heavenly Love,” although we may not yet know what this picture is really meant to convey. And we know none the less that what renders Raphael’s “School of Athens” immortal is not its catalogue of ideas, which has been drawn up by an anonymous pedant, but the master’s artistic power, the intensity with which he expresses what was barely showing bud in the material, the self-reliant strength and sureness with which the form and colour have succeeded in outlining and creating every figure and every movement in the picture.
No less has the comparative study of art gradually refined people’s sensibility to originality. We are no longer compelled to place an artist on thesame level with a master of ancient art because of the outer resemblance of their work. We have progressed so far as to respect in art none but original genius, and to look upon imitation as atestimonium paupertatisthough Praxiteles or Michael Angelo be the model. In this we find the explanation of the low esteem in which some of the old masters are now held. The contemporaries of Mabuse and Marten Heemskerk thought that in these painters they had found again the great primeval, Titanic nature of Michael Angelo, his vast motives and majestic forms. To-day we say of them, and with justice, that they produced nothing better than caricatures of Michael Angelo, that they expressed themselves in shallow phrases, that their religious pictures are cold and inflated, and that their mythological presentations with naked figures impress us as bombastic and repellent. Houbraken, in his biography of Gérard de Lairesse, wrote: “A whole book could be filled with the description of his innumerable pictures and panels, ceilings and frescoes.” To-day we dismiss this unattractive mannerist in a few lines. What his contemporariesdescribed as his Michaelangelesque and majestic fierceness appears to us, looking back, as a mere pale imitation.
Measure Cornelius by the same rule, and the result is no less melancholy. Merciless history paused for a moment to consider whether it ever saw his equal, and then passed on to the order of the day, as it did with his predecessors. To us he is no longer the original genius that he was to his contemporaries, but an imitator. The retrospective history of art marks a new epoch with him, Heinrich Hess, and Schnorr: the advance from the paths of the early Italians, trodden by the Nazarenes, to this link with the golden age of the Cinquecento. The works of Cornelius are mighty shadows cast into our days by the gigantic figures of Michael Angelo. But only shadows! There is no blood in them. A direct line leads from Michael Angelo to Millet; but I doubt whether the master would delight in Cornelius, who has only used him as agradus ad Parnassum. The works of Cornelius are the products of a civilised yet artistically poor period. The idealism of Michael Angelo had raised itself upon the naturalistic shoulders of Donatello and Ghirlandaio; this new Cornelian idealism sprang into being full-grown from reminiscences, and was therefore from the outset without backbone. It is the fruit of a decadence, not the mature product of a full-blown art, which has taken centuries to grow and ripen. In Michael Angelo the aspirations of Italian art, from Giotto onward, attained their zenith. Cornelius, standing solitary in an inartistic period that had lost every tradition and all technicalmethod, believed in the possibility of rising to the same level by making the forms borrowed from Michael Angelo convey scraps of modern knowledge. In doing this he could not but confirm the experience, thus described by Goethe in hisTheory of Colour: “Even the most perfect models are delusive, by causing us to pass over necessary decrees of culture, and thus generally carrying us beyond the goal into a domain of boundless error.”
At the same time that Heinrich Hess was carrying on his calligraphic exercises after Raphael and Andrea del Sarto in the Basilika at Munich, Cornelius was making his schoolboy sketches after Michael Angelo. What is great in his master is emptyposein him; what isfuriain the former is a laboured imitation in the latter. While the terrific Florentine Master found within himself the expression of his superhuman figures, his learned follower copies attitudes, gestures, groups—familiar to anyone who has been to Italy and passed a few hours in the Sistine Chapel. One seems to hear the old Florentine’s great voice toned down through the telephone, and irritating us with false pathos at moments when pathos is quite superfluous. All the faces are distorted with grimaces, heads of hair are puffed up as though with serpents, garments fly about; people shout instead of speaking, open their mouths wide as though they were giving the word of command to an army, stretch out their arms as though they would embrace the world. A mother bearing a child in herarms squeezes it to death. A cook roasting a leg of mutton bastes it with a Herculean gesture, and a butler emptying a leather bottle has the air of a river-god meditating a flood. In order that his human beings may look vigorous and heroic, he makes them walk in seven-league boots, dislocate their limbs, expand the gigantic measurement of the body far beyond the human. Every head shows a different colouring: one red as sealing-wax, another rose-pink, a thirdcaput mortuum. Added to this, the academic drapery arrangements, those florid garments with their rolling, writhing folds, for which there is no real justification, and which have no use but that of ornament. “Ah,” says Goethe, in one of his letters, “how true it is that nothing is remarkable but what is natural: nothing grand but what is natural: nothing beautiful, nothing, etc., etc., but what is natural.” Michael Angelo is not at all easy to understand; and Cornelius’ study of him resulted in the very same mannerism into which the Dutchmen had fallen three hundred years earlier,—the only difference being that he surpassed them in erudition. But although this quality would no doubt have greatly helped him had he written books, we cannot take it into account in discussing his artistic merits, any more than we can judge Gérard de Lairesse by his literary achievements. Nay, more, as he had elected to confine himself to painting, his erudition became a curse to him, bringing him to disregard beauty of form in a manner as yet unknown in the history of art. Not only was he filled with ardour for the loftier thoughts, without allowing any other forms for their presentation but those which were mere reminiscences of former art periods—he did not even give himself leisure thoroughly to assimilate the forms borrowed from Michael Angelo, and to animate them with fresh life. Hence the fact that, as an artist, he remains greatly below the level of the Dutch copyists, in whose work there is at least no faulty drawing and tasteless colouring to be found. He asked for walls, not as panels to paint on, but as tablets on which to inscribe his thoughts; felt exclusively as a poet, a man of learning, brooding ideas. Engrossed in developing these ideas, he valued form and colour no more than an author would the embellishing of his manuscript with flowing letters and an artistic arrangement of inks. It is only by this means that we can explain the unjustifiable carelessness with which he surrendered his cartoons to his pupils, and allowed them a free hand in the carrying them out, or account for the evanescent colouring in the Glyptothek and in the Ludwigskirche,—a colouring which was even at that time far below the general level, and which could only be excused in the case of a self-trained and quite untutored school.
A man of this kind, who had nothing to teach that was worth the learning, and who excelled only in intellectual qualities which could not be imparted to others, must needs prove the most dangerous academy-principal Germany has had since she first boasted an academy. So much the more as his pupils readily submitted to the personal fascination of this earnest little man with his black clothes, his pompous appearance, his flashing eagle eye, which made one believe that, Dante-like, he had looked upon heaven and hell. “As there are men born to command an army, so Cornelius was born to be the head of a school of painting,” said King Ludwig. We can scarcely help smiling at Schwind’s account of the trembling awe with which, upon his arrival from Vienna, he presented himself to the master. The red-haired stripling, in his outgrown clothes, timidly strolling round the rooms of the Glyptothek suddenly sees Cornelius himself, high on a scaffolding, in all his glory, in an effulgence such as surrounds the head of Phœbus Apollo. Accustomed to seeing young artists stoop before him, now stammering, now paling, now blushing, the demi-god descends to the level of the unknown mortal. “He is quite a little man, in a blue shirt, with a red belt. He looks very stern and distinguished, and his black, gleaming eyes impress you. He descended from his throne, changed his blue smock for an elegant frockcoat, drank a glass of water with an easy manner, and made my flesh thrill with a short explanation of what had been painted and what was still to be done, tucked a few writing books under his arm, and went upon his business to the academy.”
The reformation of the academy, instigated by him at Munich, demonstrated the one-sidedness of his point of view. He turned it into a school for fresco-painting. “A professorship ingenreand landscape painting appears to me superfluous,” he wrote to the king in 1825; “true art knows no subdivision.” But as he himself had only partially mastered fresco painting, he did not even succeed in establishing a school of fresco painters. It was only one of designers of cartoons.
“Read the great poets: Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe; do not forget to include the Bible. The brush has become the ruin of our art. It has led from Nature to Mannerism.” By means of this teaching Cornelius infused all his own defects into his academy, which for that reason was doomed fromthe outset to an early decease. A war of extermination, often leading to the most burlesque scenes, was declared by the Cornelians against the Langerians, who were despised because they had retained a few of the technical acquirements of the peruke period. When Cornelius’s attention was drawn to the fact that in one of his cartoons he had given a Greek hero six fingers he answered with indifference: “Ay, and if he had had seven, how would it affect the general idea?”
It was only natural, therefore, that his pupils should feel above using a model. It is said that at the time when they were turning Munich into an Athens, and the painters were covering the city walls with frescoes, Munich possessed but one model, and the poor fellow died of starvation. And then, how they hated colours! They were so difficult to manage! Who, pray, wanted to learn fresco painting by hard labour, and swallow the chalk-dust? It was much easier to copy their lord and master, whose name was on their lips, but not a spark of whose genius was in their heads, with every sort of mannerism. “When nature once produces a new birth she does so with a lavish hand. Talents, talents enough for centuries!” In these words Cornelius himself did honour to his pupils—to Carl Herrmann, Strähuber, Hermann Anschütz, Hiltensperger, and Lindenschmit the elder, the mention of whose names evokes a painful memory of the arcades in the palace garden at Munich.
What survives of Cornelius is only the man, the individual. Posterity will doubtless always honour him for the unflinching energy with which he upheld his ideal from youth to failing age; for his courage in propounding and defending what seemed right tohim; for refraining from putting on velvet gloves with the multitude, but frankly showing them his nails. This high-mindedness of Cornelius, and his lofty conception of the aims of art, must always command our respect. All his works are the product of a serene, great, and noble soul. His is a physiognomy with a proud, vigorous profile, which expresses an intellectual tendency, and can never be forgotten. He was a man—as a painter, a curse to German art, but a self-conscious, aristocratic mind. As he himself said: “Art has its high-priests and also its hedge-priests”; and when at the end of his life he made his profession: “Never, under any circumstance of my life, have I lost my pious reverence for the divinity of art; never have I sinned against it,” we none of us refuse to accept his word.
This unfailing earnestness which suffuses Cornelius’s work raises him high aboveWilhelm Kaulbach, and secures for him lasting fame, when that of Kaulbach shall have been buried with the last of the “cultured” patrons for whom he worked, and by whom he was placed on a pedestal. Look at both of them from a purely artistic point of view, comparing them with the old masters, and both of them sink equally into insignificance. But if we come to accept the problem of art criticism as a matter of psychology rather than of æsthetics, if we search for the relations between the work of art and the soul of its author, we cannot but look upon Kaulbach as by far the inferior. Cornelius endeavoured to raise the masses to his level, paid for his idealism with unpopularity, and was never understood. Kaulbach, the humble servant of the public, changed the Spartan iron of the art of Cornelius for the base coin of the art unions; to tickle the multitude, he clothed voluptuoussensuality in the stately garment of the earnest Muse, and was hailed with jubilation throughout his life. But the valise with which alone, according to the fairy-tale, one can enter upon the journey to immortality, was still lighter in his case. Idealistic painting, as professed by Cornelius, had skimmed all the cream from religious and mythological subjects; so Kaulbach tried to give something more actual in its stead. He found this in the philosophy of history, in the images of epochs in the history of the world which were then so much in vogue, and handed his public, eager for knowledge, a printed programme upon which he had catalogued the gigantic thoughts and even weightier references which the picture was said to contain. As the masses were awed by the severity of the Cornelian conception of forms, he softened it down with superficial calligraphic elegance: what was sturdy and angular in the former was by him changed into a coquettish effeminacy. This he effected by daubing his pictures, which were in no way colour conceptions, with insipid combinations of colour, and replaced with oleographs Cornelius’s illuminated monumental woodcuts. By these concessions to the picturesque he drove the axe into the tree which the designers of cartoons had planted. The part he plays is that of a man of compromise between Cornelius and Piloty; his frescoes are too sugary; his oil-paintings too faulty. It was he who buried the era of cartoons, although the obsequies were conducted with all pomp.
A spiritual battle, an aerial battle, the “Battle of the Huns,” is the first of his works. Beneath, a real historical event; above, the same reproduced in the spiritual world. The battle is over; the field is hidden beneath the corpses of the slain; but the spirits continue the combat in mid-air, and strive to turn the occasion to account for a display of nudity. Next came the “Destruction of Jerusalem,” crammed with ingenious references, and elucidated with long, printed commentaries. This programme-painting played its trump card on the staircase of the Berlin Museum, where a space of 240 feet by 28 feet is occupied by “the intellectual manifestations of the historicalWeltgeist”; “the total evolution of culture with every people of every period in its principal historical phases”; those incidents “which, in the evolution of universal history, mark the important knots with which the closely entwined threads of the national dramas of the universe are bound together.” The “Battle of the Huns,” the “Destruction of Jerusalem,” were included in the series; and to them were added the “Tower of Babel,” the “Rise of Greece,” the “Crusades,” and the “Reformation.” The whole of Hegel’s philosophy was reproduced on the walls. But as the pictures are not new through any novelty or greatness of their conception, we need certainly not enter into the “astounding profundity” of their philosophy. The eye is struck with mere compositions, built up according to certain formulas, andtableaux vivants, put together with more or less cleverness, theatrical in effect and crude in colour.
Of his other large pictures, the “Naval Battle at Salamis” caused a special stir through its sinking harem. In his “Nero” he contrasted the orgies ofthe Romans of the decadence with the enthusiasm for death of the early Christians. Again, in his great cartoon in charcoal of “Peter Arbue,” he inflated to monumental dimensions a drawing suitable for a comic paper.
Kaulbach is not an artist to be taken seriously. Woltmann, who made the same observation twenty years ago, tried at least to vindicate the illustrator, and expressed his regret that a man who had the stuff in him of a German Hogarth should unfortunately have been caught in the toils of the Cornelian school. But this comparison does little justice to Hogarth. There is nothing in the illustrations of Kaulbach which many other artists could not have improved upon. In his “Reynard the Fox” he adapted, for the benefit of the German public, Grandville’sScènes de la Vie privée et publique des Animaux, published in 1842. His illustrations foréditions de luxe(“The Women of Goethe,” etc.) marked the first steps of the road which ended in Thuman. And Thuman stands higher than Kaulbach. The faint, unaccented drawing, the oval “beauty” of heads, declamatory and expressionless, the academic touch are common to both of them. But only with Kaulbach do we find the penetrating perfume of the demi-monde, the voluptuous, satirical laughter which is not even stilled before Goethe, the pandering sensuality which cannot touch the purest and tenderest figures in German poetry without using them as a pretext to fling nudities to the public like bones to a dog. In his “Dance of Death” suite, Kaulbach turned into frivolity what Rethel had before expressed solemnly and earnestly. Like the two augurs, who could not meet without laughing, so at last the satirical designer began to laugh at his own monumental pictures. After completing in his series of mural paintings at the Berlin Museum his “Apotheosis of the Evolution of Human Culture,” he explained in his friezes that the whole was, after all, nothing but a dustbin and a lumber-room. When he was commissioned to depict a suite of paintings for the upper walls of the new Pinakothek at Munich, the artistic life of that town, as glorified by King Ludwig—a suite which the weather has since been kind enough to render almost invisible—he fulfilled his task by mocking at what he should have glorified.
“All die Meister Kunstbahnbrecher, wie die Herren selbst sich nennen,Wahrlich Widderköpfe sind sie, Mauern damit einzurennen.Mit dem Loche in der Mauer ist’s noch lange nicht geschehen,Da muss erst der Held erscheinen, siegreich dadurch einzugehen.Gegen jenes Ungeheuer ziehen sie zu Feld mit Phrasen,Wie die sieben Schwaben einstmals ritterlich bekämpft den Hasen.Voran zieht der edle Ritter Schnorr, der Künste Don Quixote,Seine Rosinante setzt er, statt des Pegasus in Trotte;Heiliger Hess, sein Sancho Pansa, Du nicht liebst das offene Streiten,Und du lässt dich sachte, sachte, ’rab von Deinem Esel gleiten.Was ist denn so grosses Neues in der Neuen Kunst geschehen?Nichts, als was sie nicht der aften, längst vergangnen abgesehen.Wände ich auch Lorbeerkränze all um diese Alltagsfratzen,Würden sie sie doch nur zieren zu bedecken hohle Glatzen.”
“All die Meister Kunstbahnbrecher, wie die Herren selbst sich nennen,
Wahrlich Widderköpfe sind sie, Mauern damit einzurennen.
Mit dem Loche in der Mauer ist’s noch lange nicht geschehen,
Da muss erst der Held erscheinen, siegreich dadurch einzugehen.
Gegen jenes Ungeheuer ziehen sie zu Feld mit Phrasen,
Wie die sieben Schwaben einstmals ritterlich bekämpft den Hasen.
Voran zieht der edle Ritter Schnorr, der Künste Don Quixote,
Seine Rosinante setzt er, statt des Pegasus in Trotte;
Heiliger Hess, sein Sancho Pansa, Du nicht liebst das offene Streiten,
Und du lässt dich sachte, sachte, ’rab von Deinem Esel gleiten.
Was ist denn so grosses Neues in der Neuen Kunst geschehen?
Nichts, als was sie nicht der aften, längst vergangnen abgesehen.
Wände ich auch Lorbeerkränze all um diese Alltagsfratzen,
Würden sie sie doch nur zieren zu bedecken hohle Glatzen.”
This is the commentary written by Kaulbach himself; and Théophile Gautier called the suiteun carnaval au soleil. “The king in his youth spent millions in order to elevate art,” says Schwind; “and now in his old age he pays another thousand pounds in order to be laughed at for it.” Heine’s loud, scornful laughter resounds over the grave of romantic literature; and so the “monumental period of German art” ends in self-derision.
Moreover, as the mural paintings of the new Pinakothek, like the frescoes in the Arcades and most of the other monumental products of the period, are falling into ruin, and only show traces of their past beauty in a few faint spots of colour not yet entirely effaced, it is quite clear that it was an inherent fallacy of Cornelius to expect arenovationof national German art from fresco painting. The Venetians of the sixteenth century well knew why they did not take up fresco painting. Monumental painting, as aimed at by Cornelius, must remain an imported plant that cannot possibly thrive in a northern climate; and oil-painting, since the Van Eycks the medium and basis of art-culture among the Teutonic races, took its revenge upon his one-sidedness and his Michaelangelesque disdain, in the fact that at Munich it had to be learnt again right from the beginning.