And he has found, in fact, the mighty and formidable lever with which without difficulty he will lift the world of modern thought.
Such, so far as I have been able to describe it, passing by some personages or some details of secondary interest, is this famous picture, which, as a work of art, I admire with the fullest measure of sympathy, and have found it truly worthy of the high award made to it. But, I repeat, the artist has not been in it the artist only. He has also, at the same time, been the controversialist and the historian. He has not only made a chef-d'oeuvre of painting: he has wished also to write a page of the history of Europe. That was his right unquestionably, and I am far from disputing it with him. I will even add that, if I was a Protestant, I should be justly proud of the manner, so intelligent and bold, with which the illustrious author of the Berlin frescoes has been able to glorify the Reformation.
It is for this very reason, also, that I have profoundly studied this grand picture. In fact, if a work of art is at the same time a thesis of history or of theology, it is no longer amenable to artistic criticism only. Kaulbach has, so to speak, crowned the work of the Magdeburg centuriators, in making, as he has done, all the events of the sixteenth century the triumphal cortége of the Reformation. Historic science has the right, then, to intervene; and, without being a Baronius, one can try to answer this thesis, and to point out what there is in it of the purely systematic and exclusive.
II.
I commence by according thus much to it: To compress a whole century within the frame—narrow and always a little factitious—of a picture or of a historical representation, is no easy task. So many diverse facts to bring together, to condense, or at least to point out; so many movements and collisions of ideas to depict; so many personages to group together and arrange; then to gather this multitude into unity, to bring order out of this seeming confusion; to know precisely how to seize and place in proper relief that which can be called the culminating point of the epoch, and to make that point the centre around and from which shall radiate all the other events of the period—this is a work which demands at once great power of synthesis, a wide yet sure range of vision, an accurate sentiment of just proportions, and, in the case of a historical painting, a complete divesting of one's self of the spirit of mere system, and a most scrupulous impartiality.
Now, what strikes one, first of all, in looking at Kaulbach's grand picture, is the exclusive idea which has presided over the whole, as well as over all the details, of its composition. Even the title given by the author to his work is witness to this. It is not so much the sixteenth century that the artist has desired to paint as the Era of the Reformation; and the Reformation, moreover, solely as regarded from the Protestant point of view. Accordingly in the picture everything is treated with reference to Luther and Calvin; and the choir of great personages who figure in it serve only, so to speak, as the retinue of the new gospel and its first apostles.
But if the unhappy rupture which separated from the Catholic Church a large part of Northern Europe is one of the most considerable events of the century, it is not, however, so exclusively such that it has the right to absorb into itself all the other events of the period; and it is well known how numerous those events were in an age which should be regarded as one of the most eventful epochs in European history.
And it is not solely from the point of view of religious and artistic history that it is just to make this objection; it should be made, moreover, in behalf of political history. In fact, whatever influence Protestantism may have exercised upon the relations of the civil states among and toward each other, it is but slight up to the seventeenth century, the beginning of the Thirty Years' War and the treaties of Westphalia, which caused new principles to prevail in the public law of Europe. He has been, therefore, entirely blind to the grandest political contest of the sixteenth century—that between France and Austria; a contest that holds too large a place in the history of that century not to be noticed and made mention of, at least by introducing into the sketch the princes in whom it was personified—Charles V. and Francis I.
Francis I., the enlightened patron of letters, the founder of the College of France, the friend of Benvenuto Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci, the secret supporter of the Lutherans of the empire, should have had, by these by-passages of his life, some right not to be forgotten by the pencil of the German painter. But if state policy caused him to lend a helping hand to the Protestants of Germany—the adversaries of Charles V.—that same policy, joined with religious motives, caused him to sign the edicts of proscription against the Protestants of his own kingdom; and the prince who, in despite of his sister's sympathies for Calvin, refused to drag France upon the precipice of the Reformation, could scarcely find favor with the panegyrists of Protestantism.