He there found a note from the Editor of the Review, which had published his paper on the Fra Angelico in the Louvre, asking him for another article.
This diversion made him glad; he thought that this task might perhaps preserve him from vain thoughts of his discomfiture at Chartres and his fancy for the cloister.
"What can I send to the Review?" said he to himself. "Since what they chiefly ask for is criticism of religious art, I might write some short study of the early German painters. I have ample notes, made on the spot in the galleries there; let us see!"
He turned them over, lingering to read a note-book containing his impressions of travel. A summing up of his remarks on the School of Cologne arrested his attention.
At every page he gave vent to his surprise in more and more vehement exclamations, at the false ideas and absurd theories put forward for so many years with regard to these pictures.
Every writer, without exception, had expatiated, each more enthusiastically than the last, on the pure and religious art of these early painters, speaking of them as seraphic artists who had depicted superhuman beauty, white and sylph-like Virgins all soul, standing out like celestial visions, against backgrounds of gold.
Durtal, prejudiced by the unanimity of this universal praise, expected to find almost impalpably fair angels, Flemish Madonnas, etherealized in some sort, having shed their husk of flesh, rapturous Memlings with eyes full of heaven, and bodies that had almost ceased to be—and he remembered his dismay on entering the galleries of the Cologne Museum.
In point of fact his disenchantment had begun as soon as he stepped out of the train. Carried in the course of a
night from Paris to that city, he had made his way through narrow streets where every basement window exhaled the fragrance of sauerkraut, and he had reached the cathedral square, beautified by Farina's shop-signs, where in front of the famous Dom he had been obliged to confess that this façade, this exterior, was a huge piece of patchwork—a delusion. Every part of it was furbished up, and the church sheltered no sculpture under its portals; it was symmetrical, built by peg and line; its rigid forms, its hard outlines were an offence.
The interior was better, in spite of the vulgar blaze, the cheap fireworks, of ignoble modern glass. And there, in a chapel near the choir, might be seen, for a consideration, the most famous picture of the German school, the Dombild, by Stephan Lochner, a triptych representing the Adoration of the Magi on the centre panel, with St. Ursula on the left hand shutter and St. Gereon on the right.