Such, so far as I have been able to describe it, passing by some personages or some details of secondary interest, is this famous picture, which, as a work of art, I admire with the fullest measure of sympathy, and have found it truly worthy of the high award made to it. But, I repeat, the artist has not been in it the artist only. He has also, at the same time, been the controversialist and the historian. He has not only made a _chef-d'oeuvre_ of painting: he has wished also to write a page of the history of Europe. That was his right unquestionably, and I am far from disputing it with him. I will even add that, if I was a Protestant, I should be justly proud of the manner, so intelligent and bold, with which the illustrious author of the Berlin frescoes has been able to glorify the Reformation.
It is for this very reason, also, that I have profoundly studied this grand picture. In fact, if a work of art is at the same time a thesis of history or of theology, it is no longer amenable to artistic criticism only. Kaulbach has, so to speak, crowned the work of the Magdeburg centuriators, in making, as he has done, all the events of the sixteenth century the triumphal _cortége_ of the Reformation. Historic science has the right, then, to intervene; and, without being a Baronius, one can try to answer this thesis, and to point out what there is in it of the purely systematic and exclusive.
I commence by according thus much to it: To compress a whole century within the frame--narrow and always a little factitious--of a picture or of a historical representation, is no easy task. So many diverse facts to bring together, to condense, or at least to point out; so many movements and collisions of ideas to depict; so many personages to group together and arrange; then to gather this multitude into unity, to bring order out of this seeming confusion; to know precisely how to seize and place in proper relief that which can be called the culminating point of the epoch, and to make that point the centre around and from which shall radiate all the other events of the period--this is a work which demands at once great power of synthesis, a wide yet sure range of vision, an accurate sentiment of just proportions, and, in the case of a historical painting, a complete divesting of one's self of the spirit of mere system, and a most scrupulous impartiality.