CORNELIUS.THE APOCALYPTIC HOST.

At the same time that Heinrich Hess was carrying on his calligraphic exercises after Raphael and Andrea del Sarto in the Basilika at Munich, Cornelius was making his schoolboy sketches after Michael Angelo. What is great in his master is empty pose in him; what is furia in the former is a laboured imitation in the latter. While the terrific Florentine Master found within himself the expression of his superhuman figures, his learned follower copies attitudes, gestures, groups—familiar to anyone who has been to Italy and passed a few hours in the Sistine Chapel. One seems to hear the old Florentine’s great voice toned down through the telephone, and irritating us with false pathos at moments when pathos is quite superfluous. All the faces are distorted with grimaces, heads of hair are puffed up as though with serpents, garments fly about; people shout instead of speaking, open their mouths wide as though they were giving the word of command to an army, stretch out their arms as though they would embrace the world. A mother bearing a child in her arms squeezes it to death. A cook roasting a leg of mutton bastes it with a Herculean gesture, and a butler emptying a leather bottle has the air of a river-god meditating a flood. In order that his human beings may look vigorous and heroic, he makes them walk in seven-league boots, dislocate their limbs, expand the gigantic measurement of the body far beyond the human. Every head shows a different colouring: one red as sealing-wax, another rose-pink, a third caput mortuum. Added to this, the academic drapery arrangements, those florid garments with their rolling, writhing folds, for which there is no real justification, and which have no use but that of ornament. “Ah,” says Goethe, in one of his letters, “how true it is that nothing is remarkable but what is natural: nothing grand but what is natural: nothing beautiful, nothing, etc., etc., but what is natural.” Michael Angelo is not at all easy to understand; and Cornelius’ study of him resulted in the very same mannerism into which the Dutchmen had fallen three hundred years earlier,—the only difference being that he surpassed them in erudition. But although this quality would no doubt have greatly helped him had he written books, we cannot take it into account in discussing his artistic merits, any more than we can judge Gérard de Lairesse by his literary achievements. Nay, more, as he had elected to confine himself to painting, his erudition became a curse to him, bringing him to disregard beauty of form in a manner as yet unknown in the history of art. Not only was he filled with ardour for the loftier thoughts, without allowing any other forms for their presentation but those which were mere reminiscences of former art periods—he did not even give himself leisure thoroughly to assimilate the forms borrowed from Michael Angelo, and to animate them with fresh life. Hence the fact that, as an artist, he remains greatly below the level of the Dutch copyists, in whose work there is at least no faulty drawing and tasteless colouring to be found. He asked for walls, not as panels to paint on, but as tablets on which to inscribe his thoughts; felt exclusively as a poet, a man of learning, brooding ideas. Engrossed in developing these ideas, he valued form and colour no more than an author would the embellishing of his manuscript with flowing letters and an artistic arrangement of inks. It is only by this means that we can explain the unjustifiable carelessness with which he surrendered his cartoons to his pupils, and allowed them a free hand in the carrying them out, or account for the evanescent colouring in the Glyptothek and in the Ludwigskirche,—a colouring which was even at that time far below the general level, and which could only be excused in the case of a self-trained and quite untutored school.

Seemann, Leipzig.
CORNELIUS.THE FALL OF TROY.

WILHELM KAULBACH.

A man of this kind, who had nothing to teach that was worth the learning, and who excelled only in intellectual qualities which could not be imparted to others, must needs prove the most dangerous academy-principal Germany has had since she first boasted an academy. So much the more as his pupils readily submitted to the personal fascination of this earnest little man with his black clothes, his pompous appearance, his flashing eagle eye, which made one believe that, Dante-like, he had looked upon heaven and hell. “As there are men born to command an army, so Cornelius was born to be the head of a school of painting,” said King Ludwig. We can scarcely help smiling at Schwind’s account of the trembling awe with which, upon his arrival from Vienna, he presented himself to the master. The red-haired stripling, in his outgrown clothes, timidly strolling round the rooms of the Glyptothek suddenly sees Cornelius himself, high on a scaffolding, in all his glory, in an effulgence such as surrounds the head of Phœbus Apollo. Accustomed to seeing young artists stoop before him, now stammering, now paling, now blushing, the demi-god descends to the level of the unknown mortal. “He is quite a little man, in a blue shirt, with a red belt. He looks very stern and distinguished, and his black, gleaming eyes impress you. He descended from his throne, changed his blue smock for an elegant frockcoat, drank a glass of water with an easy manner, and made my flesh thrill with a short explanation of what had been painted and what was still to be done, tucked a few writing books under his arm, and went upon his business to the academy.”

The reformation of the academy, instigated by him at Munich, demonstrated the one-sidedness of his point of view. He turned it into a school for fresco-painting. “A professorship in genre and landscape painting appears to me superfluous,” he wrote to the king in 1825; “true art knows no subdivision.” But as he himself had only partially mastered fresco painting, he did not even succeed in establishing a school of fresco painters. It was only one of designers of cartoons.

“Read the great poets: Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe; do not forget to include the Bible. The brush has become the ruin of our art. It has led from Nature to Mannerism.” By means of this teaching Cornelius infused all his own defects into his academy, which for that reason was doomed from the outset to an early decease. A war of extermination, often leading to the most burlesque scenes, was declared by the Cornelians against the Langerians, who were despised because they had retained a few of the technical acquirements of the peruke period. When Cornelius’s attention was drawn to the fact that in one of his cartoons he had given a Greek hero six fingers he answered with indifference: “Ay, and if he had had seven, how would it affect the general idea?”