enhance my admiration. They fulfil the first requirements of wall
decoration: the story is told lucidly and concisely; the style is
simple, noble; accidents are held subordinate to essentials; the
compositions are distributed symmetrically; the colour, though a little
crude, is brought into somewhat agreeable unity; the light and shade are
not focussed at one point, but carried evenly over the whole surface;
and the treatment inclines sufficiently to the flat to keep the
compositions down on the wall. The finished pictures of the four masters
vary in dimensions. The lengths range from eight to seventeen feet, the
height is mostly about eight feet; the figures do not exceed five feet.
The lines bounding the figures and draperies are firm and incisive.
Accordant with the practice of the old fresco-painters, each day's work
is marked and discernible by the joinings in the plaster, and the
junctions between the dry plaster of one day and the wet plaster of the
next are appropriately fixed at the points where the subject breaks off
readily and can be resumed most easily. The technique is thoroughly
mastered, and, barring some surface cracks, the paintings are in as
perfect condition as when they came from the artists' hands. The chief
defect is a somewhat crude opacity of pigments, a characteristic
belonging to the debased period of wall-painting rather than to the
"_fresco buono et puro_" of Giotto, Luini, and Pinturicchio.

Another point to be remarked is that the frescoes in the Casa Bartholdi
show that the four painters--Overbeck, Cornelius, Veit, and
Schadow--worked here at the outset of their career in remarkable unison.
In the course of years they diverged widely, but as yet the school
collectively dominates over the artist individually. The Brethren had
formed themselves equally on the same originals, and had scarcely found
time to take their several departures from nature. Indeed, the actual
presence of nature comes almost as a surprise in these compositions.
Overbeck's figures are manifestly more or less studied from the life,
only, according to his habitual practice, he has taken pains to
eliminate from his models any individual accidents which marred the
generic form, softening down angularity and ruggedness into pervading
grace and beauty. Here and there are traces of affectation, together
with a feebleness incident to the painter's weak physique which stands
in utmost contrast with the force of Cornelius. Overb