Joseph Führich, one of the most staunchly convinced champions of these reactionary tendencies, has become, entirely owing to his extensive activity as a draughtsman, somewhat more familiar to our modern knowledge than most of his contemporaries. He had begun as a draughtsman. As a student of the Prague Academy he was an enthusiast for Schlegel, Novalis, and Tieck; and even before his journey to Rome he had etched fifteen plates for Tieck's _Genoveva_. It was Dürer who exercised the deciding influence upon his further development. He had been led to him through Wackenroder, and had copied his "Marienleben" in 1821. "Here I saw," he says in his Autobiography, "a form before me which stood in trenchant opposition to that of the Classicists, who are anxious to palm off as beauty their smoothness and pomposity borrowed from the misunderstood antique, and their affected delicacy as grace. In contrast with that absence of character which prevailing academic art mistakes for beauty I saw here a keen and mighty characterisation which dominated the figures through and through, making them, as it were, into old acquaintances." The strong and godly German middle age took then in Führich's heart the same place which the Italian Quattrocento had filled in Overbeck's range of thought. And this old-German tendency was only temporarily interrupted by his sojourn in Rome. After he came to Rome in 1826 he became a Nazarene, and was accustomed there to look back at the tendencies of his youth as an error; and both at Prague, where he returned in 1829, after collaborating at the frescoes in the Villa Massini, and at Vienna, where from 1841 he held the post of professor in the Academy, he found rich opportunity for putting into practice his ecclesiastical and orthodox views of art. [Illustration: VEIT. THE ARTS INTRODUCED INTO GERMANY BY CHRISTIANITY.] His frescoes in the Johannis-und-Altleschenfelder Church in Vienna are, perhaps, more harmonious in colour, but no more independent in form, than the works of the others. In his old age he returned once more to the impressions of his youth, and so found himself again.