This positive Christian standpoint, which allowed art to be esteemed only as a religious service, pictures only as a means of ecclesiastical edification, irritated also the old man of Weimar at the first start. The effort of the Nazarenes to make piety the foundation of true artistic activity was to him a continual subject of contempt. Religion no more bestows talent for the arts than it gives taste. He spoke with irony of the “valiant artists and ingenious friends of art who had resort to the honourable, naïve, yet somewhat coarse taste” of the fourteenth and fifteenth-century masters. He constantly employed of them the expression “star-gazing.” He had already mockingly remarked of Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen what an unwarrantable conclusion it was, that because a few monks were artists, all artists should therefore be monks. He called the life of the Nazarenes “a sort of masquerade which stood in opposition to the actual day,” and wrote in the pages of Art and Antiquity that manifesto, the New German Religious-Patriotic Art, or History of the New Pietistic False Art since the Eighties, which so deeply wounded the young enthusiasts. “The doctrine was that the artist needed piety above everything to equal the work of the best. What an attractive doctrine! How eagerly we should accept it! For in order to become religious one need learn nothing.” The whole movement reached nothing beyond a slavish imitation of Giotto and his immediate followers. Of course, it was inconsistent of Goethe to reproach contemporary art for imitating that of the Middle Ages, and to praise the latter only when it imitated the antique. Speaking as a man of Mengs’ school, and merely proposing Hellenic art as a canon instead of early Italian, he had, after all, no right to be angry if Frederick Schlegel opposed classical models with mediæval. Otherwise, however, even to-day little can be added to Goethe’s animadversions.

FÜHRICH.RUTH AND BOAZ.

As with Carstens, so with the Nazarenes, we are warned by the idealistic tendency which inspired the young enthusiasts. There are but few painters with whom life and art have been in such complete agreement as with the gentle, mild, and modest Overbeck, the “Apostle John,” as he got to be called, that young man, that serene soul who looked upon art simply as a harp of David for the praise of the Lord, to whom the “hope that through his works one soul had been strengthened in faith and piety was of far more value than any fame,” and who ended at last in a sort of religious mania. With the Nazarenes, too, as with the Classicists, it was pure exaltation which drove them to free themselves from the trammels of the school, in order to get back from dead fabrications to creations of art, which, proceeding out of the living spirit, once more had a soul. Even the much-despised conversion of the Protestants among them to the Catholic Church arose out of the deep conviction that they also, as well as their art, must be united in religion.

FÜHRICH.THE DEPARTURE OF THE PRODIGAL SON.

In a certain sense they even show an advance in art. They found between themselves and the great painters of the eighteenth century a gulf that could no longer be spanned. After Carstens had thrown overboard every colouristic acquisition, it was indeed something that the Nazarenes no longer saw the highest aim of painting in black and white design, but turned, though with timidity and hesitation, to the study of the Italian Quattrocento with its joyous delight in colour, and so became the first real painters after the cartoon period. Only that was as yet simply an advance for the nineteenth century, and not especially for the history of art. This was as little enriched with new forms and discoveries by the Nazarenes as by the Classicists. The former, too, were imitators, and only changed masters when they fled from the antique to the Middle Ages, and copied the old Italians in lieu of the Greeks. The Classicists had imitated with a certain cold erudition; the Nazarenes out of the depths of their emotion. As the former used Greeks, so did they use the fourteenth-century painters, as patterns of calligraphy from which they made their copies, cut their stencils after the Italian form, and, like Mengs, were able to reproduce in their works only a very weak reflection of those departed spirits. As eclectics they would stand on the same rung with the academics of Bologna, except that the ideal of the latter school was a combination from Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and Titian, and that it possessed an incomparably greater facility in technique.

FÜHRICH.JACOB AND RACHEL.

The Nazarenes abandoned on principle the employment of the model, from fear lest it might entice them away from the ideal representation of the character to be depicted. They sought in a dilettante manner to supply the control over the material which alone makes the artist, by enthusiasm for the material. Only Cornelius dared to draw from the female form. Overbeck refused to do so, from modesty. The Virgin Mary was to him the highest ideal of womanhood, the paler, the more virtuous, the more akin to the Lamb of God; and he would have deemed it a sacrilege to have depicted her as purely womanly. They therefore only occasionally sat to one another for studies of drapery, and, for the rest, “in order not to be naturalistic,” painted their pictures from imagination in the seclusion of their cells. As the Catholicism of Schlegel was an anæmic system, so the painters, too, deprived their figures of blood and being in order to leave them only the abstract beauty of line. They are beings who are exalted above everything, even above correctness of drawing, and who must expire of a lack of blood in their veins. The command, “Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you,” was carried out by the Nazarenes only too well.

STEINLE.THE RAISING OF JAIRUS’ DAUGHTER.

They have created only two works which will survive, and which possess an historical significance as pre-eminent, works of the whole movement in common—the frescoes of the Casa Bartholdi and of the Villa Massini.