Thus he reached, as Fernow says, the method whereby he “did not tread the ordinary way of imitation, gradually progressing to a special invention, but began at once with invention.” There he was the true child of his age. At a period whose creative power found its highest expression in philosophy and poetry, the painter strove for the reputation only of being the poet of his pictures. And Carstens encountered the old tragedians and philosophic writers with a fine, poetic understanding. “The Greek Heroes with Cheiron,” “Helen at the Skæan Gate,” “Ajax,” “Phœnix and Odysseus in the Tent of Achilles,” “Priam and Achilles,” “The Fates,” “Night with her Children,” “Sleep and Death,” “The passage of Megapenthes,” “Homer before the People,” “The Golden Age”—all these prints have really something of the noble simplicity and quiet harmony of Greek art.

CARSTENS.CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT.

It can be understood, then, that such subjects should be in the highest degree interesting to an archæologist. When Carstens, in April 1795, was organising the famous exhibition of his collected works in Rome, Fernow published in Wieland’s Deutscher Merkur a discourse in which he celebrated him as the creator of a new epoch. From the very first, however, an equally resolute opposition was excited in artistic circles. The painter Müller, nicknamed “The Devil’s Miller,” who at that time wandered about Rome as a cicerone, proves that Winckelmann’s principles, even at the threshold of the century, by no means met with universal acceptance. The Writing of Herr Müller, Painter in Rome, upon the Exhibition of Herr Professor Carstens, with the motto Amicus Plato, Amicus Socrates, magis amica veritas, was published in 1797 in Schiller’s Horæ. Carstens imitated; he worked rather by reminiscence and understanding than by fantasy. Isolated figures do not bring their individuality to an expression. Then he pointed out the models, discussed the lack of colour, and proved numerous sins of the draughtsman against nature in detail. The artist must ever seek to find characteristic expression; composition comes in the second degree. Technique, even if the previous age has been an epoch of fabrication, must always stand in the foreground; it is not only from the artist, but from the connoisseur, that knowledge is demanded, and in consequence of this exhibition Carstens is recommended to forbear from his fantastical geniality, observe nature, and achieve a picture exactly, since it is only from nature that the ideal springs, and consequently nothing can be great and beautiful in the representation which is not right and true. In almost similar words, later on, Koch, in his Thoughts on Painting, and with him the majority of artists, has censured Carstens. And posterity cannot but allow them to be in the right as against the archæologists.

CARSTENS.PRIAM AND ACHILLES.

Admirable in Carstens is the zeal with which he defended his ideal, the sacred fire which burned within him and sustained him, even during those years when his sickly frame was weakened by consumption. Art was, as he wrote, his element, his religion, his beatitude, his existence. And it is already something great to wear oneself out alone for the sake of an ideal. Carstens was a sublime dreamer. It will not be forgotten of him that, in an age when abundant mediocrity and manufacture were all-prevailing, he once more pointed, unfaltering in his noble and pure intention, to the sublimity of artistic creation. The history of art, however, has not to deal with hearts, but to judge logically by results; and it would not be doing justice to the old masters, nor to those earnest rococo painters who sat at their easels with less noble intentions, but with so much greater knowledge of their craft, if one were to proclaim Carstens, in consideration of the self-sacrifice and renunciation which he showed in the fight for his ideal, as a martyr and a genius, a pioneer of German art. He was not a genius, as he thought himself, and announced so proudly to Heinitz, the Minister; for that he possessed too little originality. It is not imagination, but reminiscence, which created his works. The outlines of his plates are done with fine sentiment, but sentiment taken from the Greeks, and he required no genius to recognise in his recollection and his hand a transcript of Greek forms. What pleases us in Carstens is in substance not Carstens, but an echo of what we like in the Greek statues and vases, in Michael Angelo and other old masters.

GENELLI.THE EMBASSY TO ACHILLES.

He was not a martyr, because in his struggles he met with assistance and encouragement such as were granted to no old master, and if, in spite of that, he never rose above the cares of life, that is only a proof of the limitations and partiality of his art. He had lost all decorative facility; still more was the inheritance of oil painting first naturally mislaid by him, and by draughtsmanship alone not even Dürer nor Rembrandt could have lived.

This deficiency in technique must even debar him from claiming any higher signification than that of a clever dilettante. He is not an artist who does not in the midst of his exaltation think to put himself in possession of the means which can turn the lispings of genius into a fully intelligible language. Carstens’ plates seduce by a certain wavy treatment of the lines, but no one of them can sustain critical appreciation. It is inconsistent to work in the beautiful and not to become free of ugliness, to move in the great, in the sublime, and at the same time to fall from one defect of form to another, from coarse uncouthness into the most elementary sins against drawing and proportion. Carstens was a draughtsman who could not draw, and, with this limitation of his genius, by no manner of means a founder of German art. One cannot call him a mannerist, because with him art and individuality corresponded; but, nevertheless, like Mengs and Lairesse, he gave art at second-hand, and only differs from them in that with him commences that complete abandonment of the idea of colour which after him disfigured German art. For the future it was quite indifferent that Thorwaldsen took suggestions from Carstens, and Genelli trod in his footprints as a draughtsman.

GENELLI.THETIS LAMENTING THE FATE OF HECTOR.