Will a different judgment be pronounced in the lapse of time upon the artistic creations of King Ludwig I? Ludwig also--his biography reads like that of Hadrian--was an enthusiastic admirer of art. After the Peace of Vienna, when the political aspirations of Germany had been frustrated, he alone among the numerous German princes of the old alliance fostered homeless art, and thus fulfilled a noble mission. The king's splendid enthusiasm for the ideal significance of art, which he hoped would lead the German people, then seeking to work out its individuality, from out of its Philistine narrow-mindedness to nobler and greater things--this enthusiasm will redound to his enduring honour. Schiller's idea of educating humanity by æsthetic means had in him grown into a living and powerful sentiment. All that it was possible to accomplish in the cause of art, on the basis of existing development, his endeavours have fully realised. In the course of twenty-three years he spent more than £3,000,000 from his privy purse, and made Munich what it is, the principal art centre of Germany; changed it from a Boeotia into an Athens; founded its art collections, and erected the buildings which give the town its character. Then he offered those new walls to the painter Cornelius, and commanded him to cover them. "You are my field-marshal, do you provide generals of division." In 1814 Cornelius had written to Bartholdy: "The most powerful and unfailing means to restore German art and bring it into harmony with this great period and the spirit of the nation would be a revival of fresco-painting as it existed in Italy from the days of the great Giotto to those of the divine Raphael." And through this royal command the dream was realised beyond all expectation. No such lively artistic animation had been witnessed since the great periods of Italian art; an animation which does not cut the worst figure in German history in those sad times of political stagnation and reaction. But that there was a living soul of art in those days posterity will no more acknowledge than it does in the case of the age of Hadrian. "Wie bei Bartholdy als Kind, so in Massimis Villa als Jüngling Teutshes Fresco wir sehn, aber in München als Mann," sang King Ludwig. Now, after two generations, it can be seen that fresco-painting at Munich from 1820 to 1840 produced less original conceptions of the German art of the nineteenth than weak reflections of the Italian art of the sixteenth century.