OF ARTS AND SCIENCES : MAT 24, 1870. 241 



long merits and defects. We need go no farther to understand him ; 

 for, unlike men of original genius, Overheck had but one style, or, to 

 speak more correctly, but one manner, which too often degenerated 

 into mannerism. He was in no sense progressive ; his art wanted 

 individual life ; it was a plant carefully trained after the outward 

 pattern of a phase of art which still keeps its high place because it 

 was the spontaneous growth and vital expression of the age which 

 produced it, — a ghost clad in Pre-Raphaelite garments, cold, cor- 

 rect, full of evidences of careful study, but never inspired, never 

 living. Now and then, as in this very fresco, or in his great pic- 

 ture of The Influence of Religion upon the Arts in the Staedel In- 

 stitute at Frankfort, we are charmed by a naive grace and simplicity ; 

 but this is because we are thinking of Perugino, rather than of 

 Overbeck. 



After completing their work at the Palazzo Zuccheri, Overbeck, 

 Schadow, and Cornelius painted frescos, representing scenes selected 

 from the poems of the four great Italian poets, in the casino of the 

 villa of Prince Massimo, near St. John Lateran. Overbeck took his 

 subject from Tasso ; but he was not the man required for such a work, 

 and could not rise to the same level as when his pencil was employed 

 upon Biblical scenes. In dealing with these he was in his element, 

 and the long series of charcoal drawings which he commenced, while 

 living at the Palazzo Cenci, for an illustrated German Bible, are, as 

 it seems to us, by far his best works. For color he had no feeling. 

 His oil pictures are positively disagreeable from their leaden tones, 

 false scale of crude tints, and inharmonious juxtaposition of colors ; 

 but his simple outline drawings, only slightly shaded, are masterly. 

 His most important paintings, besides those already mentioned, are 

 the Miracle of St. Francis and the Roses, in the Church of Sta. Maria 

 degli Angeli at Assisi ; Christ in the Garden, at Hamburg ; and the 

 Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem, in the Church of the Virgin at 

 Lubeck. After residing fifty-nine years at Rome, Overbeck died there 

 of rapid consumption on the 12th of November, 1869. 



No one who has ever seen him can forget his striking appearance. 

 Like his art, he was an .anachronism. Clad in a long purple robe 

 bordered with gray fur, and wearing a cap of the same material and 

 trimmings upon his head, grave and sober in his walk and conversa- 

 tion, he looked as if he had stepped out of one of Holbein's pictures. 

 Could he have been set down in the Rotterdam of the sixteenth cen- 



VQL. VIII. 31 



