Before his time what was good in the so-called monumental painting of the nineteenth century was usually not new, but borrowed from more fortunate ages, and what was new in it, the narrative element, was not good, or at least not in good taste. When Paolo Veronese produced his pictures in the Doge's Palace or Giulio Romano his frescoes in the Sala dei Giganti in Mantua, neither of them thought of the great mission of instructing the people or of patriotic sentiments; they wanted to achieve an effect which should be pictorial, festal, and harmonious in feeling. The task of painters who were entrusted with the embellishment of the walls of a building was to waken dreams and strike chords of feeling, to summon a mood of solemnity, to delight the eye, to uplift the spirit. What they created was decorative music, filling the mansion with its august sound as the solemn notes of an organ roll through a church. Their pictures stood in need of no commentary, no exertion of the mind, no historical learning. But the painting which in the nineteenth century did duty upon official occasions and was encouraged by governments for the sake of its pedagogical efficiency was not permitted to content itself with this general range of sentiment; it had to lay on the colours more thickly, and to appeal to the understanding rather than to sentiment. Descriptive prose took the place of lyricism. Puvis de Chavannes went back to the true principle of the old painters by renouncing any kind of didactic intention in his art. In the Panthéon of Paris, when the eye turns to the works of Puvis de Chavannes after beholding all the admirable panels with which the recognised masters of the flowing line have illustrated the temple of St. Geneviève, when it turns from St. Louis, Clovis, Jeanne d'Arc, and Dionysius Sanctus to "The Girlhood of St. Geneviève," it is as if one laid aside a prosy history of the world to read the _Eclogues_ of Virgil. [Illustration: _Graphische Künste._ PIERRE PUVIS DE CHAVANNES.]