_Anselm Feuerbach_ was the first distinguished German artist who made the journey to Paris with a proper knowledge of the necessity of this step. In Germany he was the greatest representative of that Classicism of which the principal master in France was Ingres, and the continuator Thomas Couture. And he succeeded in accomplishing that which the German Classicists of the beginning of the century strove after in vain. Whilst they contented themselves with suggestions and an indeterminate symbolisation of poetical ideas after the Greek writers, German Classicism achieved in Feuerbach's "Symposium of Plato" a great, noble, and faultless work, which will live. He moved upon classic ground more naturally and freely and with more of the Hellenic spirit than even the French. For the classic genius was begotten in him, and not inoculated from without. In the _Vermächtniss_ the son calls his father's book the prophetic seal of his own original being. He inherited the classic spirit from the enthusiastic scholar, the subtile author of the Vatican Apollo, to whom the genius of Greece had so fully and completely revealed itself. [Illustration: _Hanfstängl._ ANSELM FEUERBACH. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.] A remarkable nature: philologer and dreamer, German and Greek, one who rejoiced in beauty and in the life of the senses, and whose proud muse strayed through life solitary and with leaden weights upon her feet,--such was Anselm Feuerbach, and by that division of his being he was ruined. Equipped with a superior education, an appearance of singular nobility, and with proud family traditions, he emerged like a shining meteor in Düsseldorf, when he began his career at the age of sixteen, brilliant, precocious, and already a favourite amongst women. This was in 1845. He ran through all the schools in Germany, Belgium, and France. In regard to the living, he believed himself to be indebted to the French alone, and eagerly claimed the merit of having been the first to seek them out. But it was in Italy that he had passed through his novitiate as an artist. A glorious hour it must have been when Feuerbach, full-blooded and dedicated to the worship of beauty, entered Venice in 1855, in company with that cheerful and convivial poet Victor Scheffel. In the town of the lagoons, whither he had come on a commission from the Court of Karlsruhe to copy the Assumption of Titian, Feuerbach made the second determining step of his life. The third he made when his stipendium was withdrawn, and, full of youthful confidence in his luck and his good star, he undertook his journey to Rome. [Illustration: _Albert, Munich._ FEUERBACH. HAFIZ AT THE WELL.] [Illustration: _Albert, Munich._ FEUERBACH. PIETA.]