als. It is recounted now on Sunday evenings, after the reception
in the studio of fifty or a hundred guests, the meditative artist would
recall and describe the visitors one by one, and after many years, and
perhaps in a distant place, meeting some person, otherwise unknown, he
would say, "I remember to have seen that face once in my painting-room."
In like manner his memory was peopled with figures, whose acquaintance
he had made only in pictures: thus, when he came to paint _The
Assumption_ for Cologne Cathedral, he had recourse to the mental vision
of the Madonna, derived from an old Sienese panel, and, when charged
with the plagiarism, he replied: "The figure realises my idea, and I do
not see why I should search further." Thus, however, it came to pass
that he borrowed more and more from others, just in proportion as he
took less from nature. But in coming to a fair judgment, we have to
remember that the accidents in nature, and the grosser materialism in
man, were foreign to this super-sensuous art, the aim being to reach the
hidden meaning and the inner life. Hence the favourite practice of
placing and posing in the painting-room some well-chosen figure which
was quietly looked at, carefully considered, and taken in; thus the
irrelevant elements were eliminated, and only the essential truths
assimilated. This was for Overbeck the saving study of nature: he made
extracts and essences, elaborated generic types, and thus his art became
supreme in beauty. However, the beautiful is not always new, neither is
the new always beautiful.

The painter's relation to the historic schools of Christian Art has been
so fully stated, that little more remains to be said. The old masters
were studied much in the same way as nature: their spirit was inhaled,
and just as John Gibson was accustomed to ask, What would the Greeks
have done? so Overbeck put himself in the place of the early Italian
painters, and desired that his pencil might be guided by their spirit.
Like Raphael, what he borrowed he made his own, and often added an
aspect and a grace peculiar to himself. A gallery of pictures was for
him what a well-stored library is to a literary student, who takes from
the shelves the author best supplying the intellectual food needed. The
method is not new or strange: Bacon teaches how the moderns inherit the
wisdom of the ancients, and surely if for art, as for learning, there be
advancement in store, old pictures, like old books,