846 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



whicb. he was spoken of as the reviver of mysticism in art, taking his 

 inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelite painters and from Rome. The 

 present paper is intended to discharge the same debt to Kaulbach, the 

 originator of a species of monumental art in which the philosophy of 

 History and the subtilties of Allegory played a conspicuous part, and 

 a satirist of remarkable ability. He was the pupil of Peter Cornelius 

 (the third of the artists referred to above), the father of that revival 

 of art in Germany which had King Louis of Bavaria for its patron, 

 and Munich for its chief centre. 



This revival did not bring about the hoped-for results, because its 

 basis was purely artificial. It owed its existence to personal effort, and 

 to the powerful support of a Prince who tried to galvanize spent forces 

 into life, and though the dead eyes opened, and the stiffened limbs 

 moved under the magnetic current so long as it acted upon them, 

 they relapsed into rigid stillness when the motive power ceased. For 

 half a century Cornelius was the guide of those who aimed at giving 

 art in Germany that social influence which it had exercised in ancient 

 Greece and in the Italy of the Renaissance. It was not to be the 

 slave of fashion and the minister to private luxury, but the universal 

 and mighty interpreter of moral and religious ideas as taught in his- 

 tory and sacred writ. These were to be painted on a gigantic scale, 

 where all men could see them, — in churches, halls, palaces, and 

 museums. But though Cornelius and Kaulbach were both men of 

 high purpose, commanding talents, and inflexible will, they failed to give 

 art the position which they wished it to take, for it was not a natural 

 gi'owth of the time, expressive of its ideas and tendencies, like the art 

 of Giotto and Raphael and Michelangelo. Their object was not artis- 

 tic, but didactic. They considered themselves to be teachers in art, 

 and painted not for art's sake, but with a moral purjiose, thus placing 

 that second which should have been first, making that the cause which 

 should have been the effect. From such as these, says Swinburne, shall 

 be taken away even that which they had at starting. 



Brought forward by Prince Louis of Bavaria, on his return from 

 Rome, as the painter who was to be to him and to Munich what 

 Raphael had been to Leo X. and to Rome, Cornelius gradually lost 

 his hold upon public favor (which had been showered upon him, until 

 he chilled it by his mannered and artificial frescoes at the Glyptothek, 

 and his overcrowded and ineffective painting of the Last Judgment for 

 the Church of St. Louis), had the mortification of seeing his best pupils, 

 with, Kaulbach at their head, turn from him to found a new school 

 whose pruiciplcs were in opposition to liis own, and never fully 



