mind which the painter
persistently cultivated as a virtue.

Four years' work within an organised academy could not be otherwise than
a gain to a tyro who had everything to learn. Director Fuger was at
least thoroughly trained; talent and industry had early won him the
distinction of pensioner to Rome, and he subsequently executed important
frescoes in Naples, which obtain honourable mention in the history of
the times. His school might be bad, but still it was a school; and the
fact cannot be controverted that Overbeck issued from it an artist. He
learnt what his father had laid down as essential to success, drawing,
composition, technique, and his advance was such, that while in Vienna
he commenced, and in part painted, _Christ's Entry into Jerusalem_, a
prized possession to this day in the Marien Kirche, Lubeck. Moreover, I
am inclined to think that under Fuger he was grounded in the art of
wall-painting, not only as a manipulative method, but as a system of
composition and decoration; otherwise it is hard to understand how,
shortly after arriving in Rome, he knew more about fresco than the
Italians themselves. Overbeck and his master, however, became all the
more irreconcilable because the discords lay less in the letter than in
the spirit.

In order to realise Overbeck's artistic and mental difficulties here in
Vienna, and afterwards in Rome, it may be well in fewest words to
indicate the perplexed state of things in Germany generally--a wide
theme on which volumes have been written. We have to consider that
Europe had suffered under the throes of the great French Revolution, and
that then followed the galling despotism of Napoleon. Art and literature
lay frozen and paralysed, and Overbeck in Lubeck and Vienna, like
Cornelius in Dusseldorf, found in tyrannous sway the pseudo-classic
school of the French David, cold as marble, rigid as petrifaction,
spasmodic as a galvanised muscle. But the Germans, especially the more
intellectual sort, smarting under the yoke, were all the while gathering
strength to reclaim nationality as their birthright. The reaction came
through the romantic movement, otherwise the revival of the poetry and
the art of the Middle Ages. Overbeck fell under the influence: in his
Lubeck home he read Tieck's 'Phantasies on Art,' and thirsted for the
regeneration drawing near. In Rome the spell heightened; thinkers such
as Frederick Schlegel brought over proselytes, and the painter's early
frescoe