CHAPTER VI
THE ART OF MUNICH UNDER KING LUDWIG I
More than seventeen hundred years ago there reigned a Roman emperor who loved art passionately. He looked upon it from an intellectual altitude which few have reached, and he valued it as the monumental consummation of Græco-Roman culture. Standing upon a plane of intellectual elevation, himself gifted with artistic intuition, he knew of no higher enjoyment for a ruler than the cultivation of the architectural and other forms of art. It was he who opened up to the energy of artists a field such as has never been offered to them before or since. He spent upon his works sums incalculable, so that his people grew restless under their emperor’s mania for building. His villa at Tivoli, which attained to the extent of a town, was in itself a copy of everything that he most loved and admired in the world. It united nearly all the renowned buildings of Athens in one masterly reproduction. And then with architecture came the other arts. The most magnificent collections of sculpture were formed, for none had better opportunities of acquiring the antique masterpieces of the Greek towns. Numberless frescoes, scenes from those cities and regions which had most impressed him on his travels, adorned the walls.
And yet subsequent generations have viewed with unconcern this halcyon period in the history of art. Though his contemporaries fancied that the splendour of the Greek sun was still radiating over them, it was but a borrowed lustre, which never went beyond the reproduction or copying of classic examples. Whatever Greek temples the emperor might build and decorate, he failed to summon into being a Phidias or a Polygnotes to revive for him the forms of the antique. The names of the artists who worked for him are forgotten. They had no originality; they copied the types of the Grecian and Egyptian periods, and their art was but a repetition of old ideals, without character of age or place. The fifteen colossal columns of his Olympieion that are still standing impress one as foreign to Athens, and would seem more in place at Baalbeck or Palmyra than in this city of the Muses. Epictetus would have smiled at the emperor diverting himself with an album of the wonders of the world, as a piece of sentimentality. The age of Hadrian produced thousands of buildings, statues, and pictures, but no original works.
Will a different judgment be pronounced in the lapse of time upon the artistic creations of King Ludwig I? Ludwig also—his biography reads like that of Hadrian—was an enthusiastic admirer of art. After the Peace of Vienna, when the political aspirations of Germany had been frustrated, he alone among the numerous German princes of the old alliance fostered homeless art, and thus fulfilled a noble mission. The king’s splendid enthusiasm for the ideal significance of art, which he hoped would lead the German people, then seeking to work out its individuality, from out of its Philistine narrow-mindedness to nobler and greater things—this enthusiasm will redound to his enduring honour. Schiller’s idea of educating humanity by æsthetic means had in him grown into a living and powerful sentiment.
All that it was possible to accomplish in the cause of art, on the basis of existing development, his endeavours have fully realised. In the course of twenty-three years he spent more than £3,000,000 from his privy purse, and made Munich what it is, the principal art centre of Germany; changed it from a Bœotia into an Athens; founded its art collections, and erected the buildings which give the town its character. Then he offered those new walls to the painter Cornelius, and commanded him to cover them. “You are my field-marshal, do you provide generals of division.” In 1814 Cornelius had written to Bartholdy: “The most powerful and unfailing means to restore German art and bring it into harmony with this great period and the spirit of the nation would be a revival of fresco-painting as it existed in Italy from the days of the great Giotto to those of the divine Raphael.” And through this royal command the dream was realised beyond all expectation. No such lively artistic animation had been witnessed since the great periods of Italian art; an animation which does not cut the worst figure in German history in those sad times of political stagnation and reaction. But that there was a living soul of art in those days posterity will no more acknowledge than it does in the case of the age of Hadrian.
| “Wie bei Bartholdy als Kind, so in Massimis Villa als Jüngling Teutshes Fresco wir sehn, aber in München als Mann,” |
sang King Ludwig. Now, after two generations, it can be seen that fresco-painting at Munich from 1820 to 1840 produced less original conceptions of the German art of the nineteenth than weak reflections of the Italian art of the sixteenth century.
Various favourable circumstances combined at that time to cause Cornelius to be specially looked upon by his contemporaries as an incomparable master. Since Tiepoli, German monumental art had remained dormant. The frescoes at Munich were the first attempts made to revive it. And it seemed as though with Cornelius, German art had at once risen to the dizzy heights to which Italian art had been led by Michael Angelo. The lookers-on believed in Buonarotti’s resurrection. As in the Sistine “Last Judgment,” the movement of his heroic figures appeared plastic and pathetic, and his types, not excepting the women, gave that impression of the terrible, which none but Signorelli and Michael Angelo had attained before him. His advent, it was said, might almost make one believe in a kind of metempsychosis; as though the spirit of the great Florentine master, that giant of the Renaissance, had been restored to humanity. At that very period the Italian art of the Cinquecento enjoyed the exclusive favour of the German scholars. It alone was worthy of imitation; in it the æsthetic philosophers sought for rules and laws to govern the development of art. And as they thought that all the qualities of this artistic method were to be found in the works of Cornelius, it was only logical to arrive at the conclusion which the Crown Prince Ludwig summed up in the following words: “There has been no painter like Cornelius since the Cinquecento.”
| PETER CORNELIUS. |