Winckelmann was an archæologist; Wackenroder, an enthusiast of the Middle Ages; on the one side knowledge only, on the other all feeling; for the one, paganism, for the other, Christ. For it is from the first a leading principle of the "_Klosterbruder_," that "the finest stream of life only issues from the streams of art and religion when they flow in company." He valued the older painters "because they had made painting the true handmaid of religion"; art was to him an object of devotion. Picture galleries, he says, ought to be temples; he would liken the enjoyment of works of art to prayer; let it be a holy feast day to him if he go with a serious and composed mind to their observance; indeed, reverence for art and reverence for God were so closely interwoven that he was fain to kneel down before art, and offer it the homage of an "eternal and boundless love." This devotion to art, of which he himself was full, he found nowhere in his times. The age of enlightenment was to him an undevout and inartistic age. Only in his wanderings through the uneven streets of Nuremberg did the deepest yearning of his soul seem satisfied. He applied himself to mediæval, and especially to German art. His standpoint is the same which the young Goethe had adopted when he intervened with Herder for "German style and art," and dedicated his pamphlet on German architecture to the shade of Erwin von Steinbach. He is reluctant that one should condemn the Middle Ages because they did not build such temples as the Greeks, any more than that one should condemn the Indians because they spoke their language and not our own. "It is not only beneath Italian skies, under majestic domes and Corinthian columns, that true art thrives, it lives too under pointed arches, intricately decorated buildings, and Gothic spires." [Illustration: OVERBECK. THE ANNUNCIATION.] It was all said so simply and heartily that soon the whole world began to be "Wackenroderite." The ingenious and enthusiastic youth was succeeded by theoretic reasoners. Tieck, who published his _Phantasies upon Art_ in 1799, after Wackenroder's death, and amplified it with his own explanations, was no longer a genuine but a counterfeit "_Klosterbruder_." He first played with Catholicism, and uttered the momentous sentence: "The best of the later masters up to the most recent times have had no other aim than to imitate some one of the primitive or typical artists, or even several together; nor have they easily become great by any other method than by having successfully imitated somebody." His _Sternbald_ is still more haunted by the spirit of monastic devotion. [Illustration: OVERBECK. THE NAMING OF ST. JOHN.] [Illustration: OVERBECK. CHRIST HEALING THE SICK.]