drawn towards Him,"--an observation made at a time when the academic and erudite writer on art was still for years to perceive in the biblical pictures of the great Dutchman only a crude conception of form. In another passage, upon the frescoes of Mantegna, in the Church of the Anchorite, at Padua, there occur the following sentences, showing the deepest historical perception: "How sharp and sure a modernity stands out in these pictures! From this modernity, which is quite real, and not merely seeming, with factitious effects, speaking only to the imaginative faculty, but solid, detailed, and conscientiously circumscribed, and which at the same time has something austere and industrious and painstaking--from this issued subsequent painters such as Titian; and now the liveliness of their genius, the energy of their nature, enlightened by the spirit of their predecessors, built up through their strength, was able to soar ever higher and higher, to rise from earth and create divine but real figures." But, alas! later on he did not draw the conclusion which followed quite logically from these observations for the judgment of contemporary German art. He came back from Italy as a disciple and follower of Winckelmann's writings on art. "Art has once for all, like the works of Homer, been written in Greek, and he deceives himself who believes that it is German." Something pagan entered into his soul, a breath from the calm of Olympus. He derided his earlier Gothic inclinations, contemptuous of all that was opposed to Greek notions of form, mild and indulgent to all that bore at least the outward semblance of the antique. He preferred a cold ideal manner to what was natural, and held Greek art the absolutely valid model. From it should be derived a fixed canon, a table of accepted laws, to be the standard for the artist of our own days, and of every age. The _Prize Essays_, which he published with Heinrich Meyer in the _Propyläen_, and later in the _Jena Literary Journal_, required the treatment of subjects exclusively from the Hellenic legendary cycles, "whereby the artist should become accustomed to come out from his own age and surroundings"; the composition of pictures was to correspond strictly with the style of the antique frieze. Amongst his contemporaries voices were not wanting to point out how fatal this programme was. Notably, Wilhelm Heinse, in 1776, wrote this golden sentence: "Art can only direct itself to the people with whom it lives. Every one works for the people amongst whom fate has thrown him, and seeks to plumb its heart. Every country has its own distinctive art, just as it has its own climate, its scenery, its own taste, and its own drink." Similarly, Klopstock opposed Winckelmann's theories in these lines-- "Nachahmen soll ich nicht und dennoch nennet, Dein ewig Lob nur immer Griechenland. Wem Genius in seinem Busen brennet, Der ahm' den Griechen nach!--der Griech' erfand."