“The two Marys at the Sepulchre,” in the Berlin National Gallery, and the “Assumption,” in the Frankfort Cathedral, date from a later period. It was of no avail to him that he mingled with his Nazarenism a certain air of the world, which found expression in a less ascetic language of form and a somewhat stronger sense of colour. In 1841 he had already a feeling that the restless, struggling age had passed him by. He abandoned his post and went to meet oblivion as Director of the Gallery at Mayence.
| Munich, Albert. |
| STEINLE. THE VIOLIN PLAYER. |
Overbeck, the only one who could not tear himself from Rome, remained, till his death in 1869, the “Young German Raphael,” as his father had called him in a letter from Lübeck in 1811: a devout, religious poet, pure of soul and of fine culture, as one-coloured and one-sided as he was mild and tender. At the outset he knew, at least, how to extract from the old masters a certain naïve piety without positive character, whereas later he lost himself more and more in the arid formalism of dead dogmas. What was in his power to give he has given in pictures such as the “Entry of Christ into Jerusalem” and the “Weeping over the Body of Christ”—both in the Marienkirche at Lübeck, in the “Miracle of Roses,” in Santa Maria Degli Angeli at Assisi, in the “Christ on the Mount of Olives” in the Hospital at Hamburg, and the “Betrothal of Mary” in the Berlin National Gallery—pictures which expressed nothing that would not have been expressed better at the end of the fifteenth century. His “Holy Family with St. John and the Lamb,” of 1825, in the Munich Pinakothek, is in composition and type a complete imitation of the Florentine Raphael; his “Lamentation of Christ” in the Lübeck Marienkirche is reminiscent of Perugino; his “Burial” would never have existed but for Raphael’s picture in the Borghese Gallery. His sentiment coincided exactly in devotion and godliness with that of Fra Angelico or of the old masters of Cologne, and when he devoted himself to programme-painting he lost all intelligibility. In the “Triumph of Religion in the Arts,” which he completed in 1846 for the Staedel Institute, and in which he wished to embody the favourite ideas of Romanticism, that art and religion must flow together in one stream, he has copied the upper part from the “Disputa,” the lower part from the “School of Athens,” and worked up both into a tedious and scholastically elaborated whole. It is only through a series of unpretentious sketches which he prepared for engravings, lithographs, and woodcuts that his name has still a certain lustre. Plates such as the “Rest in the Flight,” the “Preaching of St. John,” or the series “Forty Illustrations to the Gospel,” the “Passion,” the “Seven Sacraments,” may be contemplated even to-day, since in them at least no tastelessness of colour stands in the way. These plates, too, like his pictures, are less observed than felt—felt, however, with an innocence and cheerfulness of heart often quite childlike.
| PHILIP VEIT. |
It shows above all much self-understanding that all these masters in their later years restricted themselves exclusively to design, which better expressed their character. In compositions and sketches of this kind, which were only drawn, and were thus untrammelled by the fruitless struggle with the difficulties of the technique of painting and a complete lack of the notion of colour, they moved more freely and lightly. In their frescoes and oil-paintings, partly through insufficient technique, partly through their all too servile imitation of foreign ideals, they went astray. As draughtsmen, they had more courage to be themselves, and while in the completer paintings many a fine trait, many an intimate reflection of the soul was lost, or through the obduracy of the material did not attain a right expression, here their spiritual and emotional qualities can be better valued.
Joseph Führich, one of the most staunchly convinced champions of these reactionary tendencies, has become, entirely owing to his extensive activity as a draughtsman, somewhat more familiar to our modern knowledge than most of his contemporaries. He had begun as a draughtsman. As a student of the Prague Academy he was an enthusiast for Schlegel, Novalis, and Tieck; and even before his journey to Rome he had etched fifteen plates for Tieck’s Genoveva. It was Dürer who exercised the deciding influence upon his further development. He had been led to him through Wackenroder, and had copied his “Marienleben” in 1821. “Here I saw,” he says in his Autobiography, “a form before me which stood in trenchant opposition to that of the Classicists, who are anxious to palm off as beauty their smoothness and pomposity borrowed from the misunderstood antique, and their affected delicacy as grace. In contrast with that absence of character which prevailing academic art mistakes for beauty I saw here a keen and mighty characterisation which dominated the figures through and through, making them, as it were, into old acquaintances.” The strong and godly German middle age took then in Führich’s heart the same place which the Italian Quattrocento had filled in Overbeck’s range of thought. And this old-German tendency was only temporarily interrupted by his sojourn in Rome. After he came to Rome in 1826 he became a Nazarene, and was accustomed there to look back at the tendencies of his youth as an error; and both at Prague, where he returned in 1829, after collaborating at the frescoes in the Villa Massini, and at Vienna, where from 1841 he held the post of professor in the Academy, he found rich opportunity for putting into practice his ecclesiastical and orthodox views of art.
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| VEIT. | THE ARTS INTRODUCED INTO GERMANY BY CHRISTIANITY. |
His frescoes in the Johannis-und-Altleschenfelder Church in Vienna are, perhaps, more harmonious in colour, but no more independent in form, than the works of the others. In his old age he returned once more to the impressions of his youth, and so found himself again.