The _Rundbogenstil_ was particularly dominant in the southern German states, overflowing also into Switzerland, where the Federal Palace in Berne, built in 1851-7 by Friedrich Studer (1817-70), is a particularly extensive and nobly sited example. It was, however, in Prussia in the north of Germany that the greatest architect who worked in this mode was active, and he owes his reputation largely to his Grecian work. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel, the only architect of the first half of the nineteenth century who can be compared in stature with the English Soane, was the great international master of two successive phases of Romantic Classicism, first of the programmatic Greek Revival, with which the post-Napoleonic period began almost everywhere in the second decade of the century, and then of the more eclectic phase that followed. Born in 1781, a generation later than Soane, Schinkel’s serious architectural production began only in 1816. His relatively early death in 1841 truncated his career; but his pupils and his spirit dominated Prussian, and indeed most of German, architecture for another score of years and more. Somewhat as the long-lived Titian stood to the short-lived Giorgione stood Schinkel in relation to his near-contemporary and associate Friedrich Gilly, whose projects have already been mentioned (Plate 9A). Indeed, Schinkel showed almost as great a capacity to absorb and continue the revolutionary architectural ideals of the 1780s in France as Gilly—more, certainly, than most of the foreigners who visited Paris during the unproductive years following the Revolution, or even those who stayed on to study there. Schinkel, however, soon to be one of the most architectonic of architects, made his earliest mark not with architectural projects but, like Inigo Jones in England before him, as a designer of theatre sets. Down to 1815 he executed no buildings of any consequence; but in his paintings of these years, even more perhaps than in his stage sets, he established himself as a High Romantic artist of real distinction. At their best these follow in quality very closely after the master works of German Romantic landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. Characteristically, buildings play an important part in Schinkel’s pictures, and vast Gothic constructions in the ‘Sublime’ spirit of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey are actually more frequent than Grecian or Italianate fabricks. [Illustration: Figure 5. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: project for Neue Wache, Berlin, 1816 ]