The first who worked with these principles in Germany was Lessing. He was a great landscape painter, and a clever and amiable man, whose house in Karlsruhe was for many years a meeting-place for the polite world, and every beginner, every young man of talent, visited it to seek protection. During the winter of 1832-33 Menzel’s Geschichte der Deutschen fell into his hands. In it he read the story of Huss and the Hussites, and with “The Hussite Sermon” he soon afterwards began the sequence of pictures which had as their theme the battle between Church and State, the struggle of the Popes with the Emperors, the conflict between binding tradition and free personal conviction—a sequence to be viewed in connection with the opposition between authority and freedom which had actually arisen through Strauss’ Life of Jesus. “Huss before the Council,” “Huss on his Way to the Stake,” “The Burning of the Papal Ban,” were found on their appearance exceedingly seasonable by the orthodox, Protestant side. For people were determined to see in them, at one time, the protests of a Protestant against the Catholic art tendencies of the Nazarenes, at another, biting epigrams on the Catholic and pietistic bias, ruling in Prussia under Friedrich Wilhelm IV. They are of historical interest in so far as Lessing, before the period of French influence, anticipated in them the path on which the German historical painting—whose centre through Piloty came to be Munich—moved in the following years.

PILOTY.GIRONDISTS ON THE ROAD TO THE GUILLOTINE.
(By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., owners of the copyright.)

Seemann, Leipzig.
PILOTY.UNDER THE ARENA.

Piloty’s glory is to have planted the banner of colour on the citadel of the idealistic cartoon drawers. True, it was only the discarded fleshings of Delaroche; but since he possessed, side by side with a solid ability, pedagogic capacities of the first rank, and thus brought to German art, in his own person, all the qualities which it had wanted during half a century, his appearance was none the less most important in its consequences. Even to-day, beside Kaulbach’s “Jerusalem” and Schnorr’s “Deluge” in the new Pinakothek, his “Seni” is indicative of the beginning of a new period. Before him the most celebrated men of the Munich school made a boast of not being able to paint, and looked down upon the “colourers” with a contemptuous shrug; so here everything was attained which the young generation had admired in Gallait and Bièfve. This astounding revelation of colour was in 1855 praised in Germany as something unheard of and absolutely perfect. There was no more of the petty, motley, bodyless painting which had hitherto been dominant. The manner in which the grey of morning falls upon the murdered man in the eerie chamber, the way the clothes and the silken curtains glimmer, were things which enchanted artists, whilst the lay public philosophised with the thoughtful Seni over the greatness of heroes and the destiny of the world. At one bound Piloty took rank as the first German “painter”; he was the future, and he became the leader to whom young Munich looked up with wonder. Before him no one had known how to paint a head, a hand, or a boot in such a way. No one could do so much, and by virtue of this technical strength he founded such a school as Munich had never yet seen. The consequence of his advent was that the town could soon boast of many painters who thoroughly understood their business. What an academical professor can give his pupils (thorough groundwork in drawing and colour), that the young generation received from Piloty, who at his death might have said with more right than Cornelius: “We have left a better art than we found.” He who discovered and guided so many men of talent, left behind him when he died a well-drilled generation of painters; and far beyond the boundaries of Munich they assure him the honourable title of a preceptor of Germany. The Munich movement does not offer the example of passionate and embittered battles, like those which the Parisian Romanticists maintained against the Classicists of the school of David. The guard did not die, but surrendered, and retired into an otium cum dignitate. Without a contest the ground was left to the new generation, which was united by no bond of tradition with that which had just been driven from the field; it was left to an unphilosophic, unpoetic generation, whose only endeavour was to bind together the threads of technical art which had been torn by unalterable circumstances.

This revolution was accomplished with almost unnatural swiftness. In the lifetime of Cornelius himself the Franco-Belgian dogma of colour reached its end and summit in Makart, with whom colour is an elementary power, overflowing and levelling everything with the might of absolutism. In the same year that Cornelius died “The Pest in Florence” made its tour through the world. Already Schwind and Steinle, those two children of Vienna, had separated themselves from the thoughtful stringency of form and plastic clearness of their German comrades, by a certain coloured and lyrically musical element in their work. And now also it was an Austrian who again habituated the colour-blind eyes of the Germans to the splendour of pigment. Michael Angelo’s expression of form, as it had been imitated by Cornelius, was opposed by the colour-symphonies of the Venetians: drapery and jewels, brocade and velvet, and the voluptuous forms of women.

HANS MAKART.