Up to this time the most miserable desolation had also reigned over the province of the artistic crafts. But, borne up by the rekindled sentiment of nationality, and favoured by the high tide of the milliards paid by France, since 1870, that eventful movement bearing the words "Old German" and "Fine Style" on its programme had become an accomplished fact. The German Renaissance, which research had been hitherto neglected, was discovered afresh. Lübke explored it thoroughly and systematically; Woltmann wrote on Hans Holbein, Thausing on Dürer; Eitelberger founded the Austrian Industrial Museum; Georg Hirth brought out his _Deutsches Zimmer_, and began the publication of the _Formenschatz_. The national form of art of the German Renaissance was taken up everywhere with a proud consciousness of patriotism: here, it was thought, was a panacea. Those who followed the artistic crafts declared open war against everything pedestrian and tedious. _Lorenz Gedon_ in particular--in union with Franz and Rudolf Seitz--was the soul of the movement. With his black, curly hair, his little, fiery, dark eyes, his short beard, his negligent dress, and his two great hands expert in the exercise of every description of art, he had himself something of the character of an old German stone-cutter. His manner of expressing himself corresponded to this appearance. In every thing it was original, saturated with his own personal conception of the world. As the son of a dealer in old pictures and curiosities, he was familiar with the old masters from his childhood, and followed them in the method of his study. He was far from confining himself to one branch. The façades of houses, the architecture of interiors, tavern rooms and festal decorations, furniture and state carriages, statues and embellishments in stone, bronze, wood, and iron, portrait busts in wax, clay, and marble, models for ornaments, for iron lattices, for the adornment of ships and the fittings of cabins, all objects that were wayward, fantastic, quaint, and curious lay in his province; and for the execution of each in turn this remarkable man felt that he had in him an equal capacity. And, at the same time, the temperament of a collector was united in him with that of an artist in an entirely special way. In the bushy wilderness of a garden before his house in the Nymphenburger Strasse countless stone fragments of mediæval sculpture were strewn about, up to the very hedge dividing it from the street. Rusty old trellises of wrought iron slanted in front of the windows, and in the house itself the most precious objects, which artists ten years before had passed without heed, stood in masses together. As Gedon was taken from his work when he was forty his artistic endeavour never got beyond efforts of improvisation, but the impulse which he gave was very powerful. Through his initiative the whole province of the artistic crafts was brought under observation from a pictorial point of view. The