Kaulbach And The Era Of The Reformation. [Footnote 12]
[Footnote 12: Kaulbach's picture of the _Era of the Reformation_ now being on exhibition in this country, a republication of the above article from the pages of our French contemporary has seemed to us not inopportune.--ED. C.W.]
I call up matters still fresh in recollection, in proceeding to speak here of a work of art which so justly drew to itself the public attention at the Universal Exposition of 1867. I refer to the grand cartoon of Kaulbach, which, under the title of the _Era of the Reformation_, figured in the Bavarian department.
The purely artistic critic has already fulfilled his mission in regard to that remarkable composition, and it is not from the artistic point of view that I permit myself to reopen its study. I had already, years ago, admired that magnificent fresco, one of the most beautiful ornaments of the Berlin Museum; and after having a long while contemplated and meditated upon it, it seemed to me that one could not too highly praise the vigor of composition and the marvellous skill with which the artist had been able to group, within so narrow a space, so many different personages, and to render living to the eyes of the spectator one of the most stormy periods of modern times. But in this beautiful drawing there is something else than a work of art: there is a thesis. And that thesis is this: That the sixteenth century belongs wholly to the Protestant Reformation; that that Reformation is its centre, its heart, its vital principle; that everything of that period--theology, letters, science, art, the discoveries of human genius, political and military power--all came of the Reformation. Hence the name given to the tableau--the _Era of the Reformation_. Hence, also, the selection, the treatment, and the grouping of all the personages in it.
And since I cannot avail myself of the help of an engraving or photograph, I am going to attempt a rapid sketch, as a whole and in its principal details, of this vast composition.
In the centre, and as the culminating point toward which the whole movement of the picture converges, is figured Dr. Martin Luther. The former Augustinian monk holds himself erect, upon the uppermost step of that temple within whose walls a whole century is represented as in motion, and he raises aloft above his head, with both hands, the Bible--the Bible, that world at once both old and new, which, according to the Protestant hypothesis, the genius of Luther discovered, buried under the darkness of ignorance and Roman superstition, as, in like manner, thirty years before him the bold Genoese navigator, Christopher Columbus--whom one sees at the left-hand side of the picture, resting his hand, firm and inspired, upon the map of the world--had found, in the ocean's midst, the vast continents of the American hemisphere.