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Updated: June 29, 2025
At times disputing slightly; at times growing enthusiastic in company, till they agreed in one opinion; namely, that the greatest master of painting, whom it was impossible to compare with anyone among contemporaries, was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an Englishman, but that the school of German Nazarenes, to which Overbeck, Steinle, Fuhrich, and others belonged, was, in spite of certain inequalities and weaknesses, altogether pure Quatrocento.
Frederic Overbeck, the great father of the Christian school of art: Cornelius, to whose magnificent conceptions Munich and Berlin owe their most glorious works, both historical and imaginative as the fresco illustrations of the Nibelungen Lied, in the Royal Palace; the 'Last Judgment, in the Ludwig-Kirche; and the 'History of St Boniface, in the Bonifaz-Kloster Storr, the great Austrian master, whose conception of 'Faust, in the Royal Gallery at Vienna, is in itself a great poem; and the whole Düsseldorf school have conformed to the ancient type.
On a company being formed to work the concessions, Baron VON OVERBECK resigned these titles from the Brunai and Sulu Potentates and they have not since been made use of, and the Baron himself terminated his connection with the country. The grant from the Sultan of Sulu bears date the 22nd January, 1878, and on the 22nd July of the same year he signed a treaty, or act of re-submission to Spain.
It is this book which Heine had in mind when he ridiculed Tieck's "silly plunge into medieval naïveté." Overbeck and Cornelius in Rome, with their pre-Raphaelite, old-German and catholicizing tendencies, became the leaders of a productive school. Goethe scourged it for its "mystic-religious" aspirations, and demanded a more vigorous, cheerful and progressive outlook for German painting.
At the mention of a clergyman's study, perhaps, your too active imagination conjures up a perfect snuggery, where the general air of comfort is rescued from a secular character by strong ecclesiastical suggestions in the shape of the furniture, the pattern of the carpet, and the prints on the wall; where, if a nap is taken, it is an easy-chair with a Gothic back, and the very feet rest on a warm and velvety simulation of church windows; where the pure art of rigorous English Protestantism smiles above the mantelpiece in the portrait of an eminent bishop, or a refined Anglican taste is indicated by a German print from Overbeck; where the walls are lined with choice divinity in sombre binding, and the light is softened by a screen of boughs with a grey church in the background.
As to the eighteenth century, it was not worth a thought; that century was the age of the belly and the bath-room; as soon as art tried to touch the Church it only made a washing-basin into a holy-water stoup. In our own time, again, there is nothing to note. Overbeck, Ingres, Flandrin all sorry jades harnessed willy-nilly to religious tasks by commissions from the pious.
The pictures on the walls were mostly faded Oxford photographs, or outlines by Overbeck and Retsch, which had belonged to Meynell's parents and were tenderly cherished by him. There were none of the pretty, artistic trifles, the signs of travel and easy culture, which many a small country vicarage possesses in abundance.
Children brought out the fatherly part of his character; his wife was ever his loving and devoted companion; some powerful and interesting minds sought his companionship; and a taste for art was improved by intercourse with the rising young artists who were then at Rome Cornelius, Overbeck, Schadow; but, above all, the education of Marcus, his eldest child and only boy, who can wonder if he became more and more of a Roman, and if he closed the seventh year of his residence mournfully when preparing for his return to Germany?
The age of Overbeck and the last religious painters was almost past, but the age of fashionable artistic debauchery had hardly begun. Water-colour was in its infancy; wood-engraving was hardly yet a great profession; but the "Dirty Boy" had not yet taken a prize at Paris, nor had indecency become a fine art.
You say that Popery created these glorious schools of art; how can you wonder if, like Overbeck, "we take the faith for the sake of the art which it inspired?"
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