The Nazarenes abandoned on principle the employment of the model, from fear lest it might entice them away from the ideal representation of the character to be depicted. They sought in a dilettante manner to supply the control over the material which alone makes the artist, by enthusiasm for the material. Only Cornelius dared to draw from the female form. Overbeck refused to do so, from modesty. The Virgin Mary was to him the highest ideal of womanhood, the paler, the more virtuous, the more akin to the Lamb of God; and he would have deemed it a sacrilege to have depicted her as purely womanly. They therefore only occasionally sat to one another for studies of drapery, and, for the rest, "in order not to be naturalistic," painted their pictures from imagination in the seclusion of their cells. As the Catholicism of Schlegel was an anæmic system, so the painters, too, deprived their figures of blood and being in order to leave them only the abstract beauty of line. They are beings who are exalted above everything, even above correctness of drawing, and who must expire of a lack of blood in their veins. The command, "Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you," was carried out by the Nazarenes only too well. [Illustration: STEINLE. THE RAISING OF JAIRUS' DAUGHTER.] They have created only two works which will survive, and which possess an historical significance as pre-eminent, works of the whole movement in common--the frescoes of the Casa Bartholdi and of the Villa Massini. When the intelligence of the Battle of Waterloo had penetrated even into the silent cells of the monks, they believed that art too should participate in this universal elevation, and become a factor again in the development of the German nation. It must not be used, wrote Cornelius in his famous letter to Görres, as a mere plaything, or to tickle the senses, not merely for the delectation and pomp of high and rich Maecenases, but for the ennoblement and glorification of public life. The means of this artistic elevation, and at the same time a new means of popular culture, was to be the introduction of fresco painting. [Illustration: STEINLE. "I HAVE TRODDEN THE WINEPRESS ALONE: AND OF THE PEOPLE THERE WAS NONE WITH ME."]