In looking at this figure, and in studying carefully the cartoons, we tried to come to an impartial conclusion between the opinions of German and French writers in regard to the school of Cornelius, or the revival of German art. This began twenty years later than that of the French, under Louis David, and is said to have been undertaken in an entirely different spirit. A French author says in regard to the Germans that “instead of carrying art forward they turned back, and being not bold enough to go on to the discovery of a new future they took refuge in archaism.” Every one knows that after the death of Albert Dürer, art in Germany fell asleep, that it was aroused by the rumors of a revival in France. Also that the little German colony with Overbeck directing it, did go to Rome to study the antique, but to go further with the Frenchman and say that all subsequent heads of schools—Peter Cornelius included—followed to the letter the paradoxical advice of Lanzi, “that modern artists should study the artists of the times preceding Raphael, for Raphael, springing from these painters, is superior to them, whilst those who followed him have not equalled him”—we can not, inasmuch as the statement includes Cornelius. If it had not been for the interest of Niebuhr, who was German ambassador at Rome when Cornelius was studying there, in exerting himself to get the Prussian government to give Cornelius commissions at home, he might have remained in Italy, and, like Overbeck and others, renounced the religion of his fathers, as well as all style but that anterior to the reformation. But he did go back to Germany. He may have gone to Italy with Van Eyck, Holbein, and Dürer in his mind; he may have returned with Michael Angelo and Raphael as ideals, but he certainly worked as Cornelius. While not disagreeing with the French altogether, we can not unite with the Germans entirely in believing that “he drew the human body as though he saw it for the first time, and had never seen it painted or drawn by others.” He certainly received many impressions, before going to Rome, from the old German and Netherland masters, and adding to all what he learned in Rome, this idea of total individualism seems preposterous. What one must feel in studying his works is, that he did not obliterate from his memory what he had studied from Grecian, Roman, and German Art, but he reconciled them in his own mind, and worked out in his own way results from this reconciliation, giving to Germany productions as faithful to her own instincts as ever Albert Dürer or Lucas Cranach did. The Düsseldorf Academy was the first result. Of this school even Frenchmen have been willing to write: “The school of Düsseldorf, from Kaulbach and Lessing to Knaus, and the school of Munich, with Piloty, Adam, Horschelt, Lier, etc., by returning to picturesque truth have returned to their own times and to their own country.”