To this earliest type of conception it is that for the most part the miracle-working pictures belong. To such as to something stupendous man is merely placed in a relation of stupidity, from which the aspect of their artistic merit vanishes, so that they are not brought nearer to his conscious life in friendly guise in accordance with their vital humanity and beauty, and the very pictures which are most revered in a religious sense are from an artistic standpoint the most execrable.
If, however, isolated figures of this type do not supply an object for devotion or interest as being already complete and independent personality, their execution, carried out as it is in consonance with the principle of statuesque conception, has no meaning at all. Portraits, for example, are of interest to relatives who know the man thus portrayed and his individuality. But where the personages thus depicted are forgotten or unknown the sympathy which is excited by their portraiture in a given action or situation, which gives definite content to a particular character, is of a wholly different kind to that which we find in the entirely simple type of conception above referred to. Really great portraits, when they face us in the fullest wealth of life all the means of art can display, possess in this wealth itself the power to stand forth from and step out of their frames. In looking at the portraits of Van Dyck, for example, more particularly when the pose of the figure is not wholly full face, but slightly turned away, the frame has struck me like the door of the world, which the man before me enters. When consequently individuals do not possess, as saints, angels and the like do, a characterization which is in itself sufficiently complete and acknowledged, and are only interesting by virtue of the definite character of a given situation, some single circumstance or particular action, it is not suitable to present them as independent figures. As an example of this the last work of Kügelchen in Dresden was a composition of four heads, half figures, namely, Christ, John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, and the Prodigal Son. So far as Christ and John the Evangelist are concerned I found the conception quite appropriate. But in the case of the Baptist, and in every respect in that of the Prodigal Son, I failed to connect with them the authentic character which could justify a treatment of them as half-length portraits. In such cases it is essential to place the figures in a condition of action or incident, or at least to show them in situations, by means of which, in vital association with external environment, they can assert the individuality which marks an essentially exclusive whole. The head of the Prodigal Son in the above picture expresses no doubt, very finely too, pain, profound repentance and remorse, but the only indication we have given us that this is the repentance of the Prodigal Son is a very diminutive herd of swine in the foreground. Instead of a symbolical reference of this kind we ought to see him among his swine, or at least in some other scene of his life. The Prodigal Son, in short, does not possess for us any further general characterization complete as such in our minds and only exists, in so far as he is not purely allegorical, in the well-known scenes of Biblical narrative. He should be depicted to us as leaving his father's house, or in his misery, his repentance and return, that is, in the concrete facts of the tale. Those swine put in the foreground do not carry us much further than a label with "The Prodigal Son" written on it.