This positive Christian standpoint, which allowed art to be esteemed only as a religious service, pictures only as a means of ecclesiastical edification, irritated also the old man of Weimar at the first start. The effort of the Nazarenes to make piety the foundation of true artistic activity was to him a continual subject of contempt. Religion no more bestows talent for the arts than it gives taste. He spoke with irony of the "valiant artists and ingenious friends of art who had resort to the honourable, naïve, yet somewhat coarse taste" of the fourteenth and fifteenth-century masters. He constantly employed of them the expression "star-gazing." He had already mockingly remarked of Wackenroder's _Herzensergiessungen_ what an unwarrantable conclusion it was, that because a few monks were artists, all artists should therefore be monks. He called the life of the Nazarenes "a sort of masquerade which stood in opposition to the actual day," and wrote in the pages of _Art and Antiquity_ that manifesto, the _New German Religious-Patriotic Art_, or _History of the New Pietistic False Art since the Eighties_, which so deeply wounded the young enthusiasts. "The doctrine was that the artist needed piety above everything to equal the work of the best. What an attractive doctrine! How eagerly we should accept it! For in order to become religious one need learn nothing." The whole movement reached nothing beyond a slavish imitation of Giotto and his immediate followers. Of course, it was inconsistent of Goethe to reproach contemporary art for imitating that of the Middle Ages, and to praise the latter only when it imitated the antique. Speaking as a man of Mengs' school, and merely proposing Hellenic art as a canon instead of early Italian, he had, after all, no right to be angry if Frederick Schlegel opposed classical models with mediæval. Otherwise, however, even to-day little can be added to Goethe's animadversions. [Illustration: FÜHRICH. RUTH AND BOAZ.]