Beside this group who adapted French localities for classical landscapes there arose in the meantime another group, and they proceeded in the opposite direction. Their highest aim was to go on pilgrimage to sacred Italy, the classic land, which, with their literary training and their one-sided æsthetics, they invariably thought more beautiful and more worthy of veneration than any other. But they tried to break with Valenciennes' arbitrary rules of composition, and to seize the great lines of Italian landscape with fidelity to fact. In going back from Valenciennes to Claude they endeavoured to pour new life into a style of landscape painting which was its own justification, compromised as it had been by the Classic school. They made a very heretical appearance in the eyes of the strictly orthodox pupils of Valenciennes. They were called the Gothic school, which was as much as to say Romanticists, and the names of _Théodore Aligny_ and _Edouard Bertin_ were for years mentioned with that of Corot in critiques. They brought home very pretty drawings from Greece, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and Bertin did this especially. Aligny is even not without importance as a painter. He aimed at width of horizon and simplicity of line more zealously than the traditional school had done. He is, indeed, a man of sombre, austere, and earnest talent, and the solemn rhythm of his pictures would have more effect if the colour were not so dry, and if a fixed and monotonous light were not uniformly shed over everything in place of a vibrating atmosphere. _Alexandre Desgoffe_, _Paul Flandrin_, _Benouville_, _Bellel_, and others drew from the same sources with similar conviction and varying talent. Paul Flandrin, in particular, was in his youth a good painter in the manner of 1690. His composition is noble and his execution certain, recalling Poussin. Ingres, his master, said of him, "If I were not Ingres I would be Flandrin." It was only later that the singular charm of Claude Lorrain and the Roman majesty of Poussin were transformed under the brush of Flandrin into arid still-life, into landscapes of pasteboard and wadding.