She and Mengs were the last who still possessed considerable technical knowledge. Almost everything which has survived of the tradition of craftsmanship in Germany in the nineteenth century is traceable to Mengs' influence, and that fact so offended his successors that they no longer counted him as one of them, but put him contemptuously aside as a "mannerist painter by recipe." "Such technical knowledge," wrote Goethe, "hinders that complete abstraction and elevation over the real, which is asked of identical representations in sculpture, which merely furnish forms in their highest purity and beauty." "Colouring, light and shadows, do not give such value to a painting as noble contour alone," wrote Winckelmann, and these sentences became the starting-point of the next generation. Winckelmann's error when he recommended the imitation of Greek sculpture to the modern painter consisted still further in this, that he confused "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" with lack of colour and coldness. Herder had written well: "In distinction to the compact harmony of form in sculpture, painting has her harmonious unity in colour and light. I do not know why many theorists should have spoken so contemptuously of what is called _chiaroscuro_, the grouping of light and shade; it is the instrument of genius with every scholar and master, the eye with which he sees, the flashing, spiritual sea with which he sprinkles everything, and on which, indeed, every outline also depends. This divine, spiritual sea of light, this fairyland of adjusted light and shade, is the business of painting: why should we fight against nature, and not allow every art to do what it alone can do and do best?" [Illustration: _Photographic Union, Munich._ CARSTENS. PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.] His words died away. The philosophic tendency of the century, which sought to penetrate into the "soul" of things, and to recreate things from the throne of the universe of the abstract, tried its hand also upon painting. By abstracting from the manifestation of colour, and touching upon form and line, it came to believe that in these plastic elements it had discovered the Essential of which it was in search.