This is the commentary written by Kaulbach himself; and Théophile Gautier called the suite _un carnaval au soleil_. "The king in his youth spent millions in order to elevate art," says Schwind; "and now in his old age he pays another thousand pounds in order to be laughed at for it." Heine's loud, scornful laughter resounds over the grave of romantic literature; and so the "monumental period of German art" ends in self-derision. Moreover, as the mural paintings of the new Pinakothek, like the frescoes in the Arcades and most of the other monumental products of the period, are falling into ruin, and only show traces of their past beauty in a few faint spots of colour not yet entirely effaced, it is quite clear that it was an inherent fallacy of Cornelius to expect a _renovation_ of national German art from fresco painting. The Venetians of the sixteenth century well knew why they did not take up fresco painting. Monumental painting, as aimed at by Cornelius, must remain an imported plant that cannot possibly thrive in a northern climate; and oil-painting, since the Van Eycks the medium and basis of art-culture among the Teutonic races, took its revenge upon his one-sidedness and his Michaelangelesque disdain, in the fact that at Munich it had to be learnt again right from the beginning. [Illustration: KAULBACH. MARGUERITE.] CHAPTER VII THE DÜSSELDORFERS On the Rhine there existed a school of painting instead of a school of drawing, a fact which at that time placed Düsseldorf next in importance to Munich. Wilhelm Schadow, its first director, was lacking in any personal distinction as an artist, but he had received from his great father a tendency towards perfection of technique, which brought him and his school into direct opposition with the purely philosophical painters of the severe Cornelian tradition, and which has even in our days been able to exercise an authoritative influence. In Rome he was the only one of the Nazarenes amenable to the French influence, while the others nervously held aloof from the members of the French Academy. And this formal bent of his talent later gave him the qualifications of a sound teacher. Immediately upon his arrival at Düsseldorf, in November 1826, he was escorted by a stately throng of students: Carl Friedrich Lessing, Julius Hübner, Theodor Hildebrandt, Carl Sohn, H. Mücke, and Christian Koehler, who were afterwards joined by Eduard Bendemann, Ernest Deger, and others. These became the mainstay of the celebrated Old Düsseldorf School, which was soon supported by the jubilant enthusiasm of its contemporaries. At the Berlin exhibitions the new school of painting passed from one triumph to the other. Young men fresh from school suddenly made names that were honoured throughout Germany, by reason of the remarkable manner in which their works succeeded in expressing the sentimental romanticism of the time.