he
contrary, Overbeck and his adherents declared that they sought for
nothing else than truth, only they held that nature should not be
studied superficially, but with the end of deciphering her hidden
meanings. The human body they looked on as a temple, the face they read
as the mirror of the mind. All this, and much more besides, though then
a novelty, is now an old story; the doctrine that the bodily form is
moulded on the spiritual being, the speculations concerning the
relations between the "objective" and the "subjective," the outward and
the inward, the correspondence between the world of sense and the world
of thought, have one and all taken definite place in the history of
mental philosophy. We have here fully to realise that Overbeck had
breathed the atmosphere of mystic spiritualism in Lubeck; hence his
entrance into "spiritual art," hence his "soul pictures." His mind being
thus sublimated, he looked down upon the Viennese Academicians as common
and unclean; a rupture naturally ensued, and he and his companions being
in the minority, were with a strong hand, and with little ceremony,
expelled from the classes. The blow for the moment seemed overwhelming,
yet it brought salvation. Had Overbeck remained chained to the Academy,
art through him would not have seen a new birth. His course became
clear: he quitted Vienna for Rome, the city of his desire.

In the fourth and last year of the painter's apprenticeship in the
Austrian capital, was begun a really arduous composition, _Christ's
Entry into Jerusalem_.[7] The picture is of the utmost import as
affording the only evidence of the artist's attainments in Vienna. In
the first place to be remarked is the striking fact that not a vestige
remains of the French school of David, or of the showy masters of the
Italian decadence; the work, indeed, might have been designed as a
protest against the Viennese Academy, and as a justification of the
painter's revolt. The style adopted is conjointly that of the Italian
pre-Raphaelite and of the early German and Flemish masters. The
background is built up into a high horizon giving support to the
foreground figures; the colours are deep and lustrous, and so far
contrast favourably with the weaker and cruder tones unfortunately
adopted at a later period. The costume is a deliberate compromise
between the classic and the naturalistic. Nowhere does the artist
venture, as Horace Vernet, on the Bedouin dress. Christ is clothed in