OVERBECK.THE NAMING OF ST. JOHN.
OVERBECK.CHRIST HEALING THE SICK.

The particular starting-point was in this case too, as it had been before for Winckelmann, the Dresden Gallery, where, at the turn of the century, Augustus William and Frederick Schlegel, the two “Gotter-buben,” held their cultured rendezvous. “The Schlegels had taken possession of the gallery,” wrote Dora Stock, “and with Schelling and Gries spent almost every morning there. It was a joy to see them writing and teaching there. Sometimes they talked to me about art. I felt myself often quite paltry, I was so far from any wisdom. Fichte, too, they initiated into their secrets. You would have laughed if you could have seen them drag him about and assail him with their convictions.” The journal Europa, founded by Frederick Schlegel in 1803, became the rallying-point of the new movement, and his articles published therein contained the germs of all the efforts and errors of the young school. In his discourse on Raphael he compares the pre-Raphaelite period with that succeeding it, and considers the proposition that “indubitably the corruption of art was originally brought about by the newer school which was marked by Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Giulio Romano, and Michael Angelo” so unquestionable that he does not find it in the least necessary to prove it. He casually puts forward as an obiter dictum dropped in amongst a series of quite opposed notions the idea that every art ought to have a national foundation, and that any imitation of a foreign form of art is deleterious. The result follows that it is to be deplored “that an evil genius has alienated artists from the circle of ideas and the subjects of the old painters. Culture can only attach itself to what has been constituted. How natural it would be, then, if painters were to go on in the old way, and cast themselves anew into the ideas and disposition of the old painters.” The artist should follow the painters prior to Raphael, “especially the oldest,” should strive to “copy carefully their truth and simplicity long enough for it to become second nature to his eye”; or he may “select the style of the old German school as a pattern.”

OVERBECK.CHRIST’S ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM.
OVERBECK.THE RESURRECTION.

The latter counsel originated from the discovery in 1804 of the Cologne Cathedral picture, referred to by Schlegel in his Europa. Through the secularisation of the monasteries, attention was again directed to the old ecclesiastical pictures which people had hitherto passed by unnoticed. From the monasteries, churches, guild halls, and castles which the French had plundered, countless masses of paintings of every sort were extricated. A great deal perished; nearly all, however, that had hitherto been kept as heirlooms, and for the most part almost inaccessible, now became movable, attainable property. The brothers Boisserée began their celebrated collection, which is to be seen to-day in the Munich Pinakothek. While hitherto one had, at the most, known of Dürer, now one touched upon an age which lay behind the Reformation, an age in which Catholicism was flourishing, in which “not great artists but nameless monks represented art,” and it was soon all fire and ardour over the sweetness, naïveté, and faith of these pictures. Fernow had still pronounced generally against the capacity of the “Catholic religion, with its Jewish-Christian mythology and martyrology,” to satisfy the demands of a pure taste in art. Carstens had written down for himself the sentence from Webb’s work: “The art of the ancients was rich in august and captivating figures: their gods had grace, majesty, and beauty. How much meaner is the lot of the moderns! Their art is subservient to the priests. Their characters are taken from the lowest spheres of life—men of humble descent and uncouth manners. Even their Divine Master is in painting nowhere to be seen according to a great idea; His long, smooth hair, His Jewish beard and sickly appearance would deprive the most exalted beings of any semblance of dignity. Meekness and humility, His characteristic traits, are virtues edifying in the extreme but in no way picturesque. This lack of dignity in the subject renders it intelligible why we look so coldly at these works in the churches and galleries. The genius of painting expends its strength in vain on Crucifixions, Holy Families, Last Suppers, and the like.” Not five years had elapsed after Carstens’ death when, according to an impression of Dorothea Veit, “Christianity was once more the order of the day.” William Schlegel’s poem, The Church’s Alliance with the Arts, from which, later, Overbeck borrowed the thought for his picture, can be looked upon, as Goethe already wrote, as the true profession of faith of the young school. Where previously Augustus William had described in his sonnets the Io, Leda, and Cleopatra of the Dresden Gallery, it was now the Madonna who received the homage of the gallant poet. By Frederick, Christianity was recommended to the artist as a formal model and a source of æsthetic enjoyment,—as it was, at the same time, by Chateaubriand as prédilection d’artiste.

Seemann, Leipzig.
OVERBECK.THE SEVEN LEAN YEARS.

Even more profound did the tendency become during the War of Independence, which at the same time gave the death blow to Classicism. Distress taught how to pray. In those years of humiliation the young generation abandoned the classic ideal for ever, and Schenkendorf cried imperiously: “We would see no more pagan pictures on any German walls.” French “frivolity” was contrasted with German seriousness, German Christianity with the free-thought of the French; there was a return from the cold philosophy of enlightenment to the vigorous feeling of mediæval faith.

Frederick Schlegel, the author of Lucinde, who had written as lately as 1799:—

“Mein einzig Religion ist die, Dass ich liebe ein schönes Knie, Volle Brust und schlanke Hüften, Dazu Blumen mit süssen Düften,”