y be encouraged thereby
in your noble task. Strive to approach the great masters with all the
powers of your mind, but know that you can only reach their eminence by
steadily keeping in view the goal which I have endeavoured in this
painting to place before you. Several of the artists here assembled may
serve as warnings to you: the Venetians went astray as soon as they made
colouring the principal object of attraction, and so by degrees they
sank in sensuality. The effeminate Correggio proceeded in this career at
a more rapid rate, until he had cast aside every restraint of modesty
and morality, and gave himself up to unbridled voluptuousness.[12]
Michael Angelo set up the antique as an object of idolatry, and Raphael
was tempted to taste the forbidden fruit, and so the sin of apostasy in
the fine arts became manifest. In after times, indeed, various attempts
have been made to elevate the arts; but as no remedy was applied to the
source of the evil, the result proved on the whole unsuccessful. This is
also the reason why none of the celebrated masters of late times have
been introduced into our painting.[13] In conclusion, you may
unhesitatingly adopt as a principle that the fine arts can alone be
beneficial to man when, like the wise virgins, they go out to meet the
bridegroom in humility and modesty, with their lamps burning and fed
with the faith and the fear of God: only as such daughters of heaven are
they worthy of your love."

Ten years of the painter's later period, reaching from 1843 to 1852,
were dedicated to the Life of Christ as recorded by the four
Evangelists. German artists of the modern time have revived the practice
of the old religious painters of composing Biblical series, and such a
narrative is technically termed a "cyclus." Overbeck evolved three such
consecutive compositions--"The Gospels" in forty cartoons, "The
Sacraments" in seven, and "The Stations" in fourteen. The large drawings
for "The Gospels" or "Evangelists"[14] I was accustomed to see from time
to time while in progress within the studio; none were ever carried out,
as the artist might have hoped, in oils, or as wall pictures or
tapestries, but all, in common with most of his drawings, have been
widely diffused by means of engraving.[15] Overbeck was specially
qualified by his habits of mind and literary tastes and antecedents thus
to write off his thoughts in outline; his drawings may be compared to
"thinking aloud," and one scene af