y of
learning remains unbroken--boys flock to the school as in the painter's
youth. The adjoining Town Library also contains the original cartoon,
drawn in Rome, for one of the frescoes illustrative of Tasso in the
Villa Massimo, length about ten feet; likewise the cartoon of the Vision
of St. Francis, painted in fresco in Sta. Maria degli Angeli, near
Assisi; the cartoon is about twenty feet long, the figures are
life-size.]

[Footnote 7: This picture, on canvas, is nearly eight feet long by six
feet high, the figures are about three feet. The 'Lubeckische Blatter'
states that "Overbeck began the work in Vienna in 1809, in the fourth
year of his art study, and there completed the background and the
figures in the middle plane, and that it was taken by him to Rome in
1810." In the course of time the foreground figures were introduced, but
not till 1824 did the picture reach completion. It bears the signature
and date "J. F. Overbeck, 1824." Thus fifteen years elapsed between the
first touch and the last, and some ten further years passed before the
canvas came to the artist's native city. I carefully examined the
painting in the Marien Kirche in October, 1880, and found it in perfect
preservation, the colours unchanged, the surface untouched by time or
restoration. The picture differs from the illustration to these pages.]

CHAPTER II.

ROME--THE GERMAN BROTHERHOOD.

The biographies of artists, proverbially picturesque, present few scenes
more pleasant to look on than the early years in Rome of the Brotherhood
of German Painters, of whom Overbeck and his friend Cornelius were the
leaders. Exiles in some sort from their native land, they entered Italy
as pilgrims, and were not far from suffering as martyrs. They were
devout, hard-working, and withal poor. They had been drawn from distant
cities to Rome as a common focus, and there they severed themselves from
ignoble present times, and abiding quietly amid ancient monuments and
sacred shrines, sought to make the days of old live anew. So congenial
did Rome prove to Overbeck, that he could hardly be induced to sever
himself from the city or its neighbourhood over a space of more than
fifty years. The task he assigned to himself was arduous: how he went to
work and accomplished his mission I shall try to show.

Overbeck, in company with his brother artists, Pforr, Vogel and
Hottinger, having in Vienna cast off al