The “good Angelica” is the second representative of this phase of transition. She, too, at the persuasion of her friend Winckelmann, clothed herself as an ancient Vestal, but her true woman’s nature left in her classical raiment still a neat fashion of rococo. Through her intercourse with Winckelmann she became somewhat of a “blue-stocking,” and studied the historians of antiquity in order to find there subjects like Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, Agrippina with the urn of Germanicus, Phryne, and the like. Still more there were the tender legends of the ancients, out of whose store she satisfied her patrons: Adonis at the chase, Psyche, Ariadne abandoned by Theseus or found by Bacchus, the death of Alcestis, Hero and Leander. In these she is soft to the point of sentimentality, and pleasant to the point of nausea. Goethe says of her with justice: “The forms and traits of the figures have little variety, the expression of the passions no force, the heroes look like gentle boys, or girls in disguise.” But he also says of her: “The lightness, grace in form, colour, conception, and treatment is the one ruling quality of the numerous works of our fair artist. No living painter has surpassed her either in grace of representation or in the taste and capacity with which she handles her brush.” And this decision, too, can still be endorsed. Angelica knew how to impart to those clear lines and forms demanded by Winckelmann a grace now coquettish, now sentimental, but always extremely lovable. She has struck soft and—notably in her portraits of women—very tender colour chords.

She and Mengs were the last who still possessed considerable technical knowledge. Almost everything which has survived of the tradition of craftsmanship in Germany in the nineteenth century is traceable to Mengs’ influence, and that fact so offended his successors that they no longer counted him as one of them, but put him contemptuously aside as a “mannerist painter by recipe.” “Such technical knowledge,” wrote Goethe, “hinders that complete abstraction and elevation over the real, which is asked of identical representations in sculpture, which merely furnish forms in their highest purity and beauty.” “Colouring, light and shadows, do not give such value to a painting as noble contour alone,” wrote Winckelmann, and these sentences became the starting-point of the next generation. Winckelmann’s error when he recommended the imitation of Greek sculpture to the modern painter consisted still further in this, that he confused “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” with lack of colour and coldness. Herder had written well: “In distinction to the compact harmony of form in sculpture, painting has her harmonious unity in colour and light. I do not know why many theorists should have spoken so contemptuously of what is called chiaroscuro, the grouping of light and shade; it is the instrument of genius with every scholar and master, the eye with which he sees, the flashing, spiritual sea with which he sprinkles everything, and on which, indeed, every outline also depends. This divine, spiritual sea of light, this fairyland of adjusted light and shade, is the business of painting: why should we fight against nature, and not allow every art to do what it alone can do and do best?”

Photographic Union, Munich.
CARSTENS.   PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.

His words died away. The philosophic tendency of the century, which sought to penetrate into the “soul” of things, and to recreate things from the throne of the universe of the abstract, tried its hand also upon painting. By abstracting from the manifestation of colour, and touching upon form and line, it came to believe that in these plastic elements it had discovered the Essential of which it was in search.

Once on the road to execute statues in paint, the question ensued, Ought we to paint our statues? And as that age, following in Winckelmann’s track, understood no word of the significance which the specific, picturesque principles had for the Greeks, it was only logical that they should endeavour to reconcile the idea of immaculate whiteness with that of classical beauty, to see pure beauty in absence of colour, and in consequence to accentuate the question, Ought we to paint our pictures? To painters the most suspicious element in a painting became the paint! There is nothing more urgent for them to do than to deprive themselves ascetically of all coloristic means of expression. Painting is shown to be an essential form of corruption—“The brush is become the ruin of our art,” wrote Cornelius—and there commences the era of a cartoon style hitherto unprecedented, which is to be carried on by the most highly endowed in the most earnest fashion. While during the rococo the sense of colour had reached, through a piquant arrangement of the most tender and variegated tones, its highest point of refinement, there followed now as a reaction an absolute lack of colour. The ideal is seen in an abstract beauty of line, colour as a secondary matter and a vain show. It was of as much value as a vari-coloured dress, which nature could put on or off, without being less nature thereby. Amongst painters there was talk of nothing but outlines. This line style, whose world is not the wall or the canvas, but white paper, can do with a proportionately meagre study of nature. Why, therefore, when the ideal was so easy of attainment, drudge in the academy, where, moreover, since the introduction of Mengs’ Classicism, universal desolation of the spirit and doctrinaire pedantry reigned? As Mengs had broken with the taste of the rococo, so the younger generation broke with its technique, whilst they left the academy in open dissatisfaction, and threw off in contempt the whole paraphernalia of technical traditions.

Carstens plays the momentous rôle in German art as the first who trod this path. He has more individuality than Mengs; antiquarianising with him is not exclusively an external derivation and a cold imitation: he lives in the antique; the world of the Greek poets is his spiritual home, and their profound thoughts find in him a subtle interpreter. But he has, at the same time, the melancholy fame of being the first of the frivolous to renounce the national inheritance, the knowledge bequeathed by the rococo age, and so definitely to cut the chain which should otherwise have connected German art of the nineteenth century with that of the eighteenth.

Through the Investigations of Beauty in Painting, by Daniel Webb, which was founded on Winckelmann’s Thoughts on Imitation, the seed of Hellenism was already sown in the youth’s soul. He heard talk of the dwarf intelligences of the age; how the studios of inferior artists were full of gaping visitors, whilst the halls of the Vatican stood deserted. “Learn the taste for beauty in the antique,” the cooper’s apprentice learns from Webb’s works. “Let us meditate upon the style of the painter’s art in the ‘Laocoön,’ with regard to the fighter. Notice the sublimity in the divine character of Apollo. Let us stand hushed before the exquisite beauty of the Venus di Medici. These are the extreme incentives of the art of drawing.... The Belvedere Apollo and the daughter of Niobe offer us an ideal of nobility and beauty. Raphael’s drawing never reached to such a height of perfection as we find in the statues of the Greeks.... Whither do you carry me, gods and demigods and heroes who live in marble? I follow your call, and, Imagination! thy eternal laws. I go into the Villa Medici and breathe there the purest air. I stretch myself on a flowery plot, the shadow of the orange trees covers me;—there, unmolested, I gaze at a group full of the highest feminine beauty. Niobe, my beloved, beautiful mother of beautiful children, thou fairest among women, how I love thee!” So dreamed Asmus Jacob in the wine-cellar at Eckernförde, or in his solitary chamber by the dim light of his lamp, as he had been seized with giddiness before all the great and marvellous revelations of art which this book had afforded him. In his enraptured fantasy he painted the hour nearer and nearer when he should attain to a sight of the works which were described. Could he have looked into the future, what a picture would have come before his eyes! Would he have recognised himself in the broken-down man, with the pale countenance, the grief-marked expression, and the decrepit figure, who in Rome gazed spellbound at the Colossus of Monte Cavallo?

CARSTENS.SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS.

Our Holsteiner was two-and-twenty years old when he discarded the cooper’s apron and entered the Copenhagen Academy, being then too old for any regular training. His head was so full of “inventions” that “it could not enter his mind to begin from the beginning.” “Drawing from the life did not satisfy me; the fellow, too, who sat as my model, although he was for the rest well built, seemed to me, in contrast with the antique from which I had attained a higher ideal of beauty, so petty and imperfect that I thought I could easily learn to draw a better figure if I only confined myself to that. I resolved not to visit the academy, in spite of the other artists impressing upon me the importance and utility of academic study.” He stayed daily, instead, for hours together before the casts in the antique room, and “a holy feeling of adoration, almost compelling me to tears, pervaded me. There I never drew at all after an antique. When I attempted it, it was as though all my emotion was chilled by it. I thought that I should learn more if I gazed at them with great studiousness.”

CARSTENS.ARGO LEAVING THE TRITON’S MERE.