At the same time the intellectual character of his work harmonised with the wishes of a period in which the leaders of German thought tried to forget the dreary dulness of life by plunging into the most profound speculations. “What does it matter,” writes Hallman, “if we lack all joyous, independent national feeling? What though we do not even try to resuscitate this feeling with wars and battles? We strive after something higher! The world is beginning to respect German intellect and learning. We believe that in this we are in advance of other nations, and we seek a mode of expression, we want to give a form to that lofty thought through our art, in order that we may bequeath to posterity an image of our fortunate condition.... Therefore it is a remarkable sign of the times that painting strives to make the weighty output of intellectual thought a common treasure of all who are neither able nor disposed to follow speculation to its dizzy heights, nor erudition to its lowest depths; that painters try to transform the results of those investigations into fresh and ever lively conceptions—the element of art.”

To accomplish this none was better fitted than Cornelius. What a weight of thought and learning his works display!

In the Pinakothek, Cornelius’ main idea was to paint the life and work of Nature as illuminated by the figures of the Greek gods. For the series of paintings in the Hall of the Gods, Hesiod’s Theogony offered a basis upon which to demonstrate the idea of the triumph of the creative mind in heaven and upon earth. In the second room, human passion, power, and tyranny were illustrated in scenes of Greek heroic life from the Iliad. The frescoes in the Ludwigskirche were to follow the Christian apocalypse as a concatenation, and to depict it in symbolic treatment from the Creation to the Last Judgment. The frescoes for the Campo Santo at Berlin were meant to represent “the universal and most exalted fortunes of humanity, the manifestation of divine grace towards the sins of mankind, the redemption from sin, perdition, and death, the triumph of life and eternity.” Each of these paintings is a treatise. Each fresco bears a definite relation to the other; deep philosophic speculations weave their threads from one to the other. Or else the painter revels in a suite of compositions which trace a network of intellectual combinations from one picture to the other. As he himself expressed it, he delivered his diploma lecture through his paintings.

And this painted erudition harmonised with the requirements of those times of dominating intellectual tendencies. The scholars saw in Cornelius the poet, the doctor-in-philosophy; held that the principal value of the work of art lay in its intellectual contents, and felt that their loftiest mission was to express these contents still more correctly than the painter himself. The idea, they said, was the alpha and omega of the painter’s art, and must be accepted at its full value, even when represented in the most shadowy external form.

These opinions have now vanished entirely. A more extended intercourse with the old masters and with the art of other countries has gradually cured the Germans too of that mental hypertrophy from which they suffered in their view of art—a complaint whose characteristic symptom was the entire lack of sensuousness, of that sensibility to beauty of form and external charm which always has been and always must be the predominating mood of a society in which art is to flourish. They have gradually reached the point at which one interests one’s self in a picture for the sake of the painting of it, looks first at the picture, and only then asks what the painter’s idea may have been, or what the spectator is to gather from it. No poem will find favour which offers acceptable thoughts in badly worded, halting, unmelodious verse; nor do the loftiest thoughts in themselves suffice to make a work of art. Profundity of thought is a thing that has little to do with pure art; and the subject alone, however world-stirring the ideas in it may be, never makes a thing artistic. We have learnt to find the most intense enjoyment in the mere contemplation of Titian’s “Earthly and Heavenly Love,” although we may not yet know what this picture is really meant to convey. And we know none the less that what renders Raphael’s “School of Athens” immortal is not its catalogue of ideas, which has been drawn up by an anonymous pedant, but the master’s artistic power, the intensity with which he expresses what was barely showing bud in the material, the self-reliant strength and sureness with which the form and colour have succeeded in outlining and creating every figure and every movement in the picture.

PETER CORNELIUS‘LET THERE BE LIGHT’
CORNELIUS.FROM THE FRESCOES IN THE FRIEDHOFSHALLE, BERLIN.

No less has the comparative study of art gradually refined people’s sensibility to originality. We are no longer compelled to place an artist on the same level with a master of ancient art because of the outer resemblance of their work. We have progressed so far as to respect in art none but original genius, and to look upon imitation as a testimonium paupertatis though Praxiteles or Michael Angelo be the model. In this we find the explanation of the low esteem in which some of the old masters are now held. The contemporaries of Mabuse and Marten Heemskerk thought that in these painters they had found again the great primeval, Titanic nature of Michael Angelo, his vast motives and majestic forms. To-day we say of them, and with justice, that they produced nothing better than caricatures of Michael Angelo, that they expressed themselves in shallow phrases, that their religious pictures are cold and inflated, and that their mythological presentations with naked figures impress us as bombastic and repellent. Houbraken, in his biography of Gérard de Lairesse, wrote: “A whole book could be filled with the description of his innumerable pictures and panels, ceilings and frescoes.” To-day we dismiss this unattractive mannerist in a few lines. What his contemporaries described as his Michaelangelesque and majestic fierceness appears to us, looking back, as a mere pale imitation.

CORNELIUS.MARGUERITE IN PRISON.

Measure Cornelius by the same rule, and the result is no less melancholy. Merciless history paused for a moment to consider whether it ever saw his equal, and then passed on to the order of the day, as it did with his predecessors. To us he is no longer the original genius that he was to his contemporaries, but an imitator. The retrospective history of art marks a new epoch with him, Heinrich Hess, and Schnorr: the advance from the paths of the early Italians, trodden by the Nazarenes, to this link with the golden age of the Cinquecento. The works of Cornelius are mighty shadows cast into our days by the gigantic figures of Michael Angelo. But only shadows! There is no blood in them. A direct line leads from Michael Angelo to Millet; but I doubt whether the master would delight in Cornelius, who has only used him as a gradus ad Parnassum. The works of Cornelius are the products of a civilised yet artistically poor period. The idealism of Michael Angelo had raised itself upon the naturalistic shoulders of Donatello and Ghirlandaio; this new Cornelian idealism sprang into being full-grown from reminiscences, and was therefore from the outset without backbone. It is the fruit of a decadence, not the mature product of a full-blown art, which has taken centuries to grow and ripen. In Michael Angelo the aspirations of Italian art, from Giotto onward, attained their zenith. Cornelius, standing solitary in an inartistic period that had lost every tradition and all technical method, believed in the possibility of rising to the same level by making the forms borrowed from Michael Angelo convey scraps of modern knowledge. In doing this he could not but confirm the experience, thus described by Goethe in his Theory of Colour: “Even the most perfect models are delusive, by causing us to pass over necessary decrees of culture, and thus generally carrying us beyond the goal into a domain of boundless error.”