As with Carstens, so with the Nazarenes, we are warned by the idealistic tendency which inspired the young enthusiasts. There are but few painters with whom life and art have been in such complete agreement as with the gentle, mild, and modest Overbeck, the "Apostle John," as he got to be called, that young man, that serene soul who looked upon art simply as a harp of David for the praise of the Lord, to whom the "hope that through his works one soul had been strengthened in faith and piety was of far more value than any fame," and who ended at last in a sort of religious mania. With the Nazarenes, too, as with the Classicists, it was pure exaltation which drove them to free themselves from the trammels of the school, in order to get back from dead fabrications to creations of art, which, proceeding out of the living spirit, once more had a soul. Even the much-despised conversion of the Protestants among them to the Catholic Church arose out of the deep conviction that they also, as well as their art, must be united in religion. [Illustration: FÜHRICH. THE DEPARTURE OF THE PRODIGAL SON.] In a certain sense they even show an advance in art. They found between themselves and the great painters of the eighteenth century a gulf that could no longer be spanned. After Carstens had thrown overboard every colouristic acquisition, it was indeed something that the Nazarenes no longer saw the highest aim of painting in black and white design, but turned, though with timidity and hesitation, to the study of the Italian Quattrocento with its joyous delight in colour, and so became the first real painters after the cartoon period. Only that was as yet simply an advance for the nineteenth century, and not especially for the history of art. This was as little enriched with new forms and discoveries by the Nazarenes as by the Classicists. The former, too, were imitators, and only changed masters when they fled from the antique to the Middle Ages, and copied the old Italians in lieu of the Greeks. The Classicists had imitated with a certain cold erudition; the Nazarenes out of the depths of their emotion. As the former used Greeks, so did they use the fourteenth-century painters, as patterns of calligraphy from which they made their copies, cut their stencils after the Italian form, and, like Mengs, were able to reproduce in their works only a very weak reflection of those departed spirits. As eclectics they would stand on the same rung with the academics of Bologna, except that the ideal of the latter school was a combination from Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, and Titian, and that it possessed an incomparably greater facility in technique. [Illustration: FÜHRICH. JACOB AND RACHEL.]