The latter counsel originated from the discovery in 1804 of the Cologne Cathedral picture, referred to by Schlegel in his _Europa_. Through the secularisation of the monasteries, attention was again directed to the old ecclesiastical pictures which people had hitherto passed by unnoticed. From the monasteries, churches, guild halls, and castles which the French had plundered, countless masses of paintings of every sort were extricated. A great deal perished; nearly all, however, that had hitherto been kept as heirlooms, and for the most part almost inaccessible, now became movable, attainable property. The brothers Boisserée began their celebrated collection, which is to be seen to-day in the Munich _Pinakothek_. While hitherto one had, at the most, known of Dürer, now one touched upon an age which lay behind the Reformation, an age in which Catholicism was flourishing, in which "not great artists but nameless monks represented art," and it was soon all fire and ardour over the sweetness, naïveté, and faith of these pictures. Fernow had still pronounced generally against the capacity of the "Catholic religion, with its Jewish-Christian mythology and martyrology," to satisfy the demands of a pure taste in art. Carstens had written down for himself the sentence from Webb's work: "The art of the ancients was rich in august and captivating figures: their gods had grace, majesty, and beauty. How much meaner is the lot of the moderns! Their art is subservient to the priests. Their characters are taken from the lowest spheres of life--men of humble descent and uncouth manners. Even their Divine Master is in painting nowhere to be seen according to a great idea; His long, smooth hair, His Jewish beard and sickly appearance would deprive the most exalted beings of any semblance of dignity. Meekness and humility, His characteristic traits, are virtues edifying in the extreme but in no way picturesque. This lack of dignity in the subject renders it intelligible why we look so coldly at these works in the churches and galleries. The genius of painting expends its strength in vain on Crucifixions, Holy Families, Last Suppers, and the like." Not five years had elapsed after Carstens' death when, according to an impression of Dorothea Veit, "Christianity was once more the order of the day." William Schlegel's poem, _The Church's Alliance with the Arts_, from which, later, Overbeck borrowed the thought for his picture, can be looked upon, as Goethe already wrote, as the true profession of faith of the young school. Where previously Augustus William had described in his sonnets the Io, Leda, and Cleopatra of the Dresden Gallery, it was now the Madonna who received the homage of the gallant poet. By Frederick, Christianity was recommended to the artist as a formal model and a source of æsthetic enjoyment,--as it was, at the same time, by Chateaubriand as _prédilection d'artiste_. [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ OVERBECK. THE SEVEN LEAN YEARS.]