Bonaventura Genelli, if one takes for once the standpoint of the painters of his time, who desired to be the “poets” of their works, is certainly a not unremarkable poet. In him, who was born in the year of Carstens’ death, the spirit of the little Holsteiner was raised to life, and the figure which he assumed in this new incarnation actually made an impression like a picture out of beauty-illuminated days of Hellas. The muscular, thick-set figure of a youthful Hercules, with a broad chest and sturdy neck, a head of short brown curly hair, full lips fringed by the compact beard of a Sophocles, the short Greek nose, grave eyes glancing out from beneath the strong brows—such was Genelli, a Hellene left stranded in Germany, the last Centaur, as Heyse has depicted him in his novel—“an antediluvian, mythological enigma on four sound legs sprung upon our godless world.” Thus he sat, as he himself writes, in Rome, “in his dirty chamber, bare except for a chair or two, rickety or quite broken down, and on the wall a pair of hawks nailed up, whose pinions served as models for his winged figures.” Thus he sat later in his little house in the Sendlingergasse at Munich, and lived in his world of imagination. Perhaps, had he been the child of a more fortunate period in art, he might have become a strong and memorable painter; as a successor of Carstens he has left behind him a legacy of two suites of copper prints—the two tragedies of the “Profligate” and the “Witch.” He existed, moreover, only in contour; he never rose above harmoniously outlined silhouette. It was only to this point that his talent would sustain him. The more he wished to produce shadow, water-colour, or even oil, the more tedious and pale and vague did he become. And even in his drawing he shares with Carstens the desolate generalisation of form, the eternal euphony which so soon becomes wearisome and monotonous. To beauty of line everything is offered up. The blank characterlessness of the faces is even more noticeable with him than with Carstens, who had, after all, in his youth drawn excellent portraits in crayons, and on this account was able to give even to his Greeks more individual traits and a certain variety of expression. With Genelli the heads are treated as no more than parts of the body, and as they gave no opportunity for flowing lines, they have not even the same graciousness as the limbs. His women fared worst, for whilst he could be his own model for his men, he created the ewig Weibliche out of his inner consciousness. In men and women the eyes, in particular, are merely animal.
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| GENELLI. | ODYSSEUS AND THE SIRENS. |
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.
| Seemann, Leipzig. |
| BONAVENTURA GENELLI. |
CHAPTER IV
THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN FRANCE
In France 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 his Ruines des plus anciens monuments de la Grèce in 1758. Shortly afterwards the Recueils d’Antiquité of 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.