Once on the road to execute statues in paint, the question ensued, Ought we to paint our statues? And as that age, following in Winckelmann's track, understood no word of the significance which the specific, picturesque principles had for the Greeks, it was only logical that they should endeavour to reconcile the idea of immaculate whiteness with that of classical beauty, to see pure beauty in absence of colour, and in consequence to accentuate the question, Ought we to paint our _pictures_? To painters the most suspicious element in a painting became the paint! There is nothing more urgent for them to do than to deprive themselves ascetically of all coloristic means of expression. Painting is shown to be an essential form of corruption--"The brush is become the ruin of our art," wrote Cornelius--and there commences the era of a cartoon style hitherto unprecedented, which is to be carried on by the most highly endowed in the most earnest fashion. While during the _rococo_ the sense of colour had reached, through a piquant arrangement of the most tender and variegated tones, its highest point of refinement, there followed now as a reaction an absolute lack of colour. The ideal is seen in an abstract beauty of line, colour as a secondary matter and a vain show. It was of as much value as a vari-coloured dress, which nature could put on or off, without being less nature thereby. Amongst painters there was talk of nothing but outlines. This line style, whose world is not the wall or the canvas, but white paper, can do with a proportionately meagre study of nature. Why, therefore, when the ideal was so easy of attainment, drudge in the academy, where, moreover, since the introduction of Mengs' Classicism, universal desolation of the spirit and doctrinaire pedantry reigned? As Mengs had broken with the taste of the _rococo_, so the younger generation broke with its technique, whilst they left the academy in open dissatisfaction, and threw off in contempt the whole paraphernalia of technical traditions. _Carstens_ plays the momentous rôle in German art as the first who trod this path. He has more individuality than Mengs; _antiquarianising_ with him is not exclusively an external derivation and a cold imitation: he lives in the antique; the world of the Greek poets is his spiritual home, and their profound thoughts find in him a subtle interpreter. But he has, at the same time, the melancholy fame of being the first of the frivolous to renounce the national inheritance, the knowledge bequeathed by the _rococo_ age, and so definitely to cut the chain which should otherwise have connected German art of the nineteenth century with that of the eighteenth.