The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We shall show a series of lantern slides representing a period of Art to the study of which we may presume the human mind will ever and again return. For in the artistic evolution of this period we witness the unfolding of some of the deepest human relationships which the outward course of history reveals in any epoch—provided we perceive in history the outward picture of inner spiritual impulses.

First you will see some picture by Cimabue. Under this name there go, or, rather, used to go—a number of pictures, church paintings, springing from a conception of life altogether remote from our own. Cimabue (or those who worked in the spirit of the school that is named after him)—Cimabue was working at about the time, let us say, of Dante's birth. For external history, what lies before this period in artistic evolution is veiled pretty much in darkness. So far as anything outwardly preserved is concerned, the work of Cimabue emerges in such a way that to begin with in the West, we can find no immediate historic predecessor. Not only so, but as you will presently bear witness for yourselves, in the history of European Art the school of Cimabue remained without succession.

As we try to feel our way into what comes before us in Cimabue's work, we find ourselves directed to influences coming over from the East. I will try to cut a long story short, albeit this will inevitably involve all the inaccuracies which are unavoidable in such a brief description. We must not forget that the time of the origin of Christianity, and the following centuries until the beginning of the second millennium A.D. when Cimabue lived,—that this epoch, when Christianity was slowly finding its way into all spheres of human life and action, was characterised by a turning of man's spiritual faculties towards the Cosmic, the Spiritual that transcends the Earth. To a great extent, all man's thought and interest was directed to the question: How did the higher spiritual Powers break through into this earthly life? What was it that came into this earthly world from spheres beyond? Men wanted to gain a conception of these things. And if one desired to express in pictorial Art what was thus living in the souls of men, it could be no question of copying Nature directly in any sense, or of painting true to Nature, or following this or that artistic ideal. Rather was it a question of calling forth those forces in the human soul—those powers of imagination, among other things—which can, as it were, make visible to eyes of sense the things from beyond this Earth. Now Western humanity did not possess sufficient powers of imagination to bring forth really plastic works of art. We know from earlier lectures that the Romans were an unimaginative people. It was into the unimaginative Roman culture that Christianity, coming from the East, first had to spread. Nevertheless, Christianity as it came over brought with it, along with all the other fertilising influences from the East, the fruits of Oriental imagination. Thus, inner spiritual visions and imaginations were connected with the early Christian conceptions.

Yonder in Greece vivid ideas arose, as to how one should portray the figures that are connected with the Mystery of Golgotha and with its workings. Witness the evolution of the forms in which they represented the person of the Redeemer Himself, or the Madonna, the angelic worlds beyond the Earth, the figures of saints and apostles transposed into higher realms. We can see quite clearly how, as Christianity found its way into the West, the Roman unimaginativeness, if I may so describe it, took hold of what came over, so rich in fancy and imagination, from the East. In the very earliest times of Christian Art we find the figure of Christ Jesus and the others around Him permeated still by the rich imagination of the Greeks. We find the Redeemer Himself portrayed in some instances with truly Apollonian features. Moreover, we know of a remarkable controversy that arose in the first Christian centuries. Should the Redeemer be represented in an ugly form, yet so, that through the ugly features there shone the inner life of soul, the mighty event that was being enacted in Him for mankind? This type of the Saviour, and similar types for the other characters connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, were evolved more in the East of Europe and in Greece. While in the West, in Italy, men were more of the opinion that the Saviour and all that were connected with Him should be represented beautifully. Strangely enough, this discussion went on into the time when in the West, under the influence of Rome, men had already lost the faculty to represent real beauty—a faculty which they had still possessed in former centuries under the more immediate influence of Greece. For outwardly though Greece was overcome, in a spiritual sense Rome herself had been conquered by the Grecian culture, which, however, subsequently fell into decay amid the unimaginative Romans. Thus in the succeeding centuries they lost the power to create true plastic beauty.

Thus there came over from Eastern tradition the earliest representations, created, of course, by human imagination, in the effort to express the new world-impulses springing from the Mystery of Golgotha. Enriched by Oriental fancy, this early Christian art was transplanted into Italy. And now,—almost all the earlier work having been lost,—in Cimabue's paintings or in those that go by his name, we see what had become of these impulses by the time of Dante's birth. We see them, as it were, at a final culminating point. Cimabue's paintings are frescoes on a large scale and must be understood as such. The figures they portray appear before us in an altogether unnaturalistic form, their outlines conceived more out of the life of feeling—spread over great surfaces, conceived, as it were, in two dimensions—large surfaces covered with the most eloquent painting. Alas, it is no longer really visible today, not even where Cimabue's own works are before us, for his pictures were for the most part subsequently painted over. The full vividness of his colouring, with its wonderful two-dimensional conception, is probably no longer to be seen at any place. Hence Cimabue's pictures lose least of all when shown in lantern slides. We recognise their character as a whole; these remarkable figures—their outlines, as I said, inspired more out of the feeling-life; colossal figures, conceived at any rate on a colossal scale and with impressive grandeur, so that one would say: From other worlds they gaze into this earthly world; they do not seem to have arisen from this earthly world at all. Such are his pictures of the Madonna. Such, gazing down into this earthly world, are his representations of the Saviour and of saints and angels and the like. We must realise that all these paintings are born of an imagination, in the background of which was still a life of spiritual vision. Such vision knew full well that the impulses of Christianity had come to Earth from another world, and that this unearthly world could not be represented in mere naturalistic forms.

We will now show some of Cimabue's pictures. His works are mostly to be seen in the Lower Church at Assisi; also in Paris and in Florence. We can only reproduce a very few:

Look how the human eye, for instance, is drawn so that you can clearly see: It is not copied, but done by following with inner feeling the forces which were believed to be at work, moulding the eye organically in the body. The inner activity of the eye is feelingly traced out,—this is what inspires the forms. Plastically conceived, it is projected in the spirit on to the flat surface. In the background, as you can still see by these pictures, is the conception (far more familiar in the Orient than in the West) of something working in with abundant power from distant worlds. When in that time men let these pictures with their golden background work upon them, they had the feeling of a mighty overwhelming force pouring in from distant worlds into mankind. It was as though all the human confusion upon Earth was only there to be illumined by the Impulses proceeding from a reality beyond, which was pictured in this way.

Once more a picture of the Madonna. This, then, is what we have of Cimabue.

We now pass on to the study of an artist who, for the external history of art, is, in a sense, Cimabue's successor. The legend has it that Cimabue found Giotto as a shepherd-lad who used to draw on rocks and stones, with the most primitive materials, the animals and other creatures which he saw around him in the fields. Cimabue, recognising the great talents of the boy, took him from his father and trained him in painting. Such legends are often truer than the outward ‘historic’ truth. It is true, as the legend suggests, that Giotto—Cimabue's great follower in the further development of art—was inspired in his inner life by the whole world in which he found himself through all that had been created by those whom we include under Cimabue's name. It is true, indeed, that a whole world of things from beyond the Earth looked down upon Giotto from the walls around him. (All this is no longer extant, for reasons we shall afterwards discuss.) On the other hand, we must never forget that with Giotto an entirely new artistic world-conception arose in the West. Indeed, it is Giotto, above all, who in the realms of art represents the rise of the new age, the 5th post-Atlantean age. In painting, the 4th post-Atlantean age goes down with Cimabue; the 5th begins with Giotto. (I leave out of account whether all the works which a well-founded tradition ascribes to Giotto were actually painted by him; for that is not the main point. It is true that under Giotto's name many works are included of which we can but say that they are painted in his spirit. Here, however, I will not go into this question, but simply ascribe to Giotto what tradition has ascribed to him.)

What was mankind entering into during that time, when we find Dante and Giotto side by side on the scene of history? It was entering into what I have always described as the fundamental characteristic of the 5th Post-Atlantean period: into a life in the midst of earthly-material realities. This must not be taken as a hostile criticism of Materialism. The time had to come to mankind to enter fully into the material reality, taking leave for a time of those things to which they had hitherto looked up and whose light we find reflected still in Cimabue's paintings.

We may ask ourselves this question: Who was the first really genuine materialist? Who was it gave the very first impetus to materialism? Considering the matter from a somewhat higher point of view, we shall arrive at an answer which will, of course, sound paradoxical to modern ears. Nevertheless, for a deeper conception of human history it is fully justified. I mean that the first man to introduce the material way of feeling into the soul-life of mankind was St. Francis of Assisi. I admit it is a paradox to describe the holy man of Assisi as the first great materialist, and yet it is so. For one may truly say: the last great conceptions in which the evolution of mankind is still described from a standpoint beyond the Earth come before us in the Divina Commedia of Dante. Dante's great work is to be regarded as a last expression of a consciousness still directed more to the things beyond the Earth. On the other hand the vision of the soul turned to the Earth, the sympathy with earthly things, comes forth with all intensity in Francis of Assisi, who, as you know, was before Dante's time. Such things always appear in the soul-life of mankind a little earlier than their expression in the realm of art. Hence we see the same impulses and tendencies which seized the artistic imagination of Giotto at a later time, living already in the soul of Francis of Assisi. Giotto lived from 1266 to 1337. Francis of Assisi was a man who came forth entirely from that kind of outer world which Roman civilisation, under manifold influences, had gradually brought forth. To begin with, his whole attention was turned to outer things. He delighted in the splendour of external riches; he had enjoyment in all things that make life pleasant, or that enhance man's personal well being. Then suddenly, through his own personal experiences his inner life was revolutionised. It was at first a physical illness which turned him altogether away from his absorption in external things and turned him to the inner life. From a man who in his youth was altogether addicted to external comfort, splendour, reputation, we see him change to a life of feeling directed purely to the inward things of the soul. Yet all this took place in a peculiar and unique way. For Francis of Assisi became the first among those great figures who, from that time onwards, turned the soul's attention quite away from all that sprang from the old visionary life. He, rather, turned his gaze to that which lives and moves immediately upon the Earth, and above all to man himself. He seeks to discover what can be experienced in the human soul, in the human being as a whole, when we see him placed alone, entirely upon his own resources. St. Francis was surrounded by mighty world-events which also took their course on Earth, if I may put it so, in such a way as to sweep past the single life of man, even as the rich imaginations of an earlier Art had represented sublime Beings gazing down from beyond the Earth into this world of human feeling. For in his youth, and later, too, St. Francis was surrounded by the world-historic conflict of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Here one might say there was a battling in greater spheres, for impulses transcending what the single man on Earth feels and experiences—impulses for which the human being on the Earth were but the great and herd-like mass. Right in the midst of all this life, St. Francis with his ever more numerous companions upholds the right of the single human individuality, with all that the inner life of man can experience in connection with the deeper powers that ensoul and radiate and sparkle through each human soul. His vision is directed away from all-embracing cosmic, spiritual spheres, directed to the individual and human life on Earth. Sympathy, compassion, a life in fellowship with every human soul, an interest in the experiences of every single man, a looking away from the golden background whose splendour, inspired by oriental fancy, had radiated in an earlier art from the higher realms on to the Earth. St. Francis and his followers, looking away from all these things, turned their attention to the joys and sufferings of the poor man on Earth. Every single man now becomes the main concern, every single man a world in himself. Yes, one desires to live in such a way that every single man becomes a world. The Eternal, the Infinite, the Immortal shall now arise within the breast of man himself, no longer hovering like the vast and distant sphere above the Earth.

Cimabue's pictures are as though seen out of the clouds. It is as though his figures were coming from the clouds towards the Earth. And so, indeed, man had felt and conceived the Spiritual World hitherto. We today have no idea how intensely men had lived with these transcendent things. Hence, as a rule, we do not realise how immense a change it was in feeling when St. Francis of Assisi turned the life of the West more inward. His soul wanted to live in sympathy with all that the poor man was; wanted to feel the human being especially in poverty, weighed down by no possessions, and, therefore, valued by nothing else than what he simply is as a man. Such was St. Francis of Assisi; and this was how he sought to feel not only man but Christ Himself. He wanted to feel what Christ is for poor simple men. Out of the very heart of a Christianity thus felt, he then evolved his wondrous feeling for Nature. Everything on Earth became his brother and his sister; he entered lovingly not only into the human heart but into all creatures. Truly, in this respect St. Francis is a realist, a naturalist. The birds are his brothers and his sisters; the stars, the sun, the moon, the little worm that crawls over the Earth—all are his brothers and his sisters; on all of them he looks with loving sympathy and understanding. Going along his way he picks up the little worm and puts it on one side so as not to tread it underfoot. He looks up with admiration to the lark, calling her his sister. An infinite inwardness, a life of thought unthinkable in former times, comes forth in Francis of Assisi. All this is far more characteristic of St. Francis than the external things that are so often written about his life.

So we might say, man's gaze is now made inward and centered upon the earthly life; and the influence of this extends, by and by, to the artistic feeling. For the last time, we might say, Dante in his great poem represents the life of man in the midst of mighty Powers from beyond the Earth; but Giotto, his contemporary and probably his friend, Giotto in his paintings already brings to expression the immediate interest in all that lives and moves on Earth. Thus we see, beginning with Giotto's pictures, the faithful portrayal of the individual in Nature and in Man. It is no mere chance that the paintings ascribed to Giotto in the upper church at Assisi deal with the life of St. Francis, for there is a deep inner connection of soul between Giotto and Francis of Assisi—St. Francis, the religious genius, bringing forth out of a fervent life of soul his sympathy with all the growth of Nature upon Earth; and Giotto, imitating, to begin with, St. Francis' way of feeling, St. Francis' way of entering into the spirit and soul of the world.

Thus we see the stream of evolution leading on from Cimabue's rigid lines and two-dimensional conception, to Giotto, in whose work we see increasingly the portrayal of the natural, individual creature, the reality of things seen; we see things standing more and more in space, rather than speaking to us out of the flat surface.

We will now give ourselves up to the immediate impression of Giotto's pictures, one by one. We shall see his growing appreciation of the individual human character and figure. Giotto shows himself with all the greater emphasis inasmuch as his pictures deal with the sacred legend, and so he tries to reproduce in the outward expression the inmost and intensest life of the soul.

Now, therefore, we shall have before us a series of Giotto's pictures, beginning with those that are generally regarded as his earliest. You will still see in them the tradition of the former time, but along with it there is already the human element, in the way in which he knew it—the way that I have just described.

Thus gradually the whole life of St. Francis was painted by Giotto; and everywhere in his artistic work we find a feeling similar to that of St. Francis himself. Even when you take the visionary elements in these pictures, you will see how his effort is in every case to paint them from within, so that the language of human feeling is far more in evidence than in the pictures of Cimabue, who was concerned only with the gazing inward of transcendent impulses from spheres beyond the Earth. Again, in the faces themselves you will no longer find the mere traditional expression, but you will see in every case: The man who painted these pictures had really looked at the faces of men.

Look at these last two pictures. Their inherent tenderness recalls to us the beautiful fact that is related of the life of St. Francis. He had long been working at his Hymn to Nature—the great and beautiful hymn throughout which he speaks of his brothers and his sisters, of sisters Sun and Moon and the other planets, and of all earthly creatures. All that he had felt in loving, realistic devotion of his soul, in sympathy with Nature, is gathered up so wonderfully in this hymn. But the directness of his union with all earthly Nature finds expression most of all in this beautiful fact that the last verse wherein he addresses Brother Death was written in the very last days of his life. St. Francis could not sing the hymn of praise to Brother Death till he himself lay actually on his deathbed, when he called to his brothers that they should sing around him of the joys of death while he felt himself going out and out into that World which was now to receive his spirit. It was only out of the immediate, realistic experience that St. Francis could and would describe his tender union with all the world. Beautifully this is revealed in the fact that while he had sung the Hymn of Praise to all other things before, he only sang to Death when he himself was at Death's door. The last thing he dictated was the final verse of his great Hymn of Life, which is addressed to Brother Death, and shows how man, when he is thrown back upon himself alone, conceives the union of Christ with human life. Surely it cannot be more beautifully expressed than in this picture, revealing the new conception of human life that was already pouring from out St. Francis, and showing how directly Giotto lived in the same aura of thought and feeling.

I have inserted this later picture, so that you may see the progress Giotto made in his subsequent period of life. You see how the figures here are conceived still more as single human individuals. In the period from which the former pictures were taken, we see the artist carried along, as it were, by the living impulses of St. Francis. Here in this picture, belonging as it does to a later period of his life, we see him coming more into his own. We will presently return to the pictures more immediately following his representations of St. Francis.

This, too, is from his later period, showing a consideraby greater realism than before.

Also of his later period.

In such pictures we see how natural it was to the men of that age to express themselves in allegories. The conditions of life undergo immense changes in the course of centuries. It was a tremendous change when the life that had found expression in pictures at that time, passed over into that in which we live today, which takes its course more in thoughts and ideas communicated through the medium of books. This was a far greater revolution than is generally realised. The desire to express oneself in allegories was especially strong in that age. It is most interesting to see how in such a case artistic realism is combined with the striving to make the whole picture like a Book of the World in which the onlooker may read.

This picture is related once more the earlier art of Giotto—springing as it does from his increasing entry into the whole world of feeling of St. Francis of Assisi.

Beautifully we see how the artist seeks to represent the inner life of St. John, bringing forth out of his heart his inner connection with the great World. This, then, is St. John, writing, or at least conceiving, the Apocalypse.

We will insert, directly after this Madonna by Giotto, the Madonna by Cimabue which we have already seen, so that you may recognise the immense difference in the treatment of the sacred figure. Observe—despite the obvious persistence of the old tradition—the realism of this picture, in the eyes, the mouth, and the whole conception of the Jesus child. We have before us human beings, copied from the reality of earthly life, looking out from the Earth into the World. Compare this with Cimabue's picture, where we rather have before us an original spiritual vision traditionally handed down—where Beings gaze from realms beyond the Earth into this world.

However much in the composition is reminiscent of the former picture, you will see, even in the way the lines are drawn, the immense difference between the two.

It is interesting to compare this picture with the “Mourning for St. Francis” which we saw before. The former was an earlier work, while this belongs to a very late period in Giotto's life. We will now insert the previous one once more so that you may see the great progression. This picture is taken from the chapel in Padua, where Giotto returned once more to the former legend.

Here, then, you see how he treats a very similar subject so far as the composition is concerned, at an earlier and at a much later stage in his career. Observe the far greater freedom, the far greater power to enter into individual details which the later picture reveals.

This picture, the Church Militant, is generally associated with the School of Giotto. Here you see the rise of that compositional element which was to play so great a part in the subsequent history of painting. Quite a new inner life appears before us here. We may describe the difference somewhat as follows:

If we consider the evolution of Christianity until the time of Dante and Giotto, we shall find a strong element of Platonism in its whole way of feeling. Far be it from me to mislead you into the belief that it contained the Platonic Philosophy; but Platonism, that is to say, a feeling and conception of the world which also finds expression in the philosophy of Plato, where man looks up into a sphere beyond the Earth, and does not carry into it anything that proceeds from the human intellect. After Giotto's time a theological, Aristotelian element entered more and more into the Christian world of feeling. Once again I do not say the philosophy of Aristotle, but a theological, Aristotelian quality. Men tried, as it were, to see and summarise the world in systematic conceptions such as you see in this picture, rising upward from a world below to a middle and thence to a higher world. Thus was the whole of life systematised through and through in an Aristotelian manner. So did the later Church conceive the life of man placed in the universal order. Past were the times from which Cimabue still rayed forth, when men's conception of a world beyond the Earth proceeded still from the old visionary life. Now came a purely human way of feeling; yet the desire was, once more, to lead this human feeling upward to a higher life—to connect it with a higher life, only now in a more systematic, more intellectual and abstract way. And so, in place of the Earlier Art, creating as from a single centre of spiritual vision, there arose the new element of composition. See the three tiers, rising systematically into higher worlds from that which is experienced and felt below. Observing this in the immediate followers of Giotto, you will already have a premonition, a feeling of what was destined to emerge in the later compositions. For who could fail to recognise that the same spirit which holds sway in the composition of this picture meets us again in a more highly evolved, more perfect form, in Raphael's Disputa.

See how the spiritual events and processes of earthly life are portrayed in the grouping of the human figures. It is the same artistic conception which emerges in Raphael's great picture, generally known as the 'School of Athens.' Human beings are placed together to express the relationships that hold sway in earthly life.

I beg you especially to observe the unique way in which the fundamental idea comes to expression here: in the background the mighty building of the Church, and then, throughout the picture, the power going forth from the Church dignitaries, poured out into the world of the common people. Look at the expression of the faces. See how the artist's work is placed at the service of this grand idea: The rule of the Church raying out over the Earth. You may study every single countenance. Wonderfully it is expressed—raying outward from the centre—how each single human being partakes in the impulse that is thought to proceed from the Church through all the souls on Earth. The physiognomies are such that we see clearly: The whole thing was done by an artist who was permeated by this idea, and was well able to bring to expression in the countenance of men what the Church Militant would, indeed, bring into them. We see it raying forth from every single face. I beg you to observe this carefully, for in the later pictures which we shall see afterwards it does not come to expression with anything like the same power. Though the fundamental idea of the composition—expressed so beautifully here, both in the grouping of the figures and in the harmony between the grouping and the expressions of the faces—though the fundamental impulse was retained by later artists, nevertheless, as you will presently see for yourselves, it was an altogether different element that arose in their work.

Look at the dogs down here: they are the famous Domini Canes, the hounds of the Lord, for the Dominicans were spoken of in connection with the hounds of Lord. Angelico represents these Domini Canes in many of his pictures.

Here we come a stage further in artistic evolution. The following developments may be said to have proceeded from the stream and impulse of which Giotto was the great initiator. But from this source a two-fold stream proceeded. In the one, we see the realistic impulse emancipating itself more and more from the Spiritual. In Giotto and in the last two pictures the Spiritual still enters in, everywhere; for, after all, this impulse proceeding from the Church Militant throughout the World is conceived as a spiritual thing. Every single figure in the composition is such that we might say: Just as St. Francis himself lived after all in a spiritual world (albeit lovingly, realistically inclined through his soul to the earthly world around him), Giotto and his pupils, with 'however loving realism they grasped the things of this world, still lived within the Spiritual and could unite it with their conception of the single individual on Earth. But now, as we come on into the 14th and 15th century, we see the longing, faithfully to portray the individual and Natural, emancipating itself more and more. There is no longer that strong impulse to see the vision as a whole and thence derive the single figures, which impulse was there in all the former pictures, even where Giotto and his pupils went to the Biblical story for their subjects. Now we see the single figures more and more emancipated from the all-pervading impulse which, until then, had been poured out like a magic broach ever the picture as a whole. More and more we see the human figures standing out as single characters, even where they are united in the compositions as a whole. Look, for example, at the magnificent building here. Observe how the artist is at pains, not so much to subordinate his figures to one root-idea, as to represent in every single one a human individual, a single character. More and more we see the single human characters simply placed side by side. Though undoubtedly there is a greatness in the composition, still we see the single individuals emancipated naturalistically from the idea that pervades the picture as a whole.

Even in this Biblical picture you can see how the expressions of the several figures are emancipated from the conception as a whole. Far more than heretofore, the artist's effort is to portray even the Christ in such a way that an individual human quality comes to expression in Him. Likewise the other figures.

In this picture you can already lose the feeling of one idea pervading the whole. See, on the other hand, the wonderful expressions of the faces in Filippino Lippi's work, both in the central figure of the visionary and in the lesser figures. In every case the Human is brought out. Thus we see the one stream, proceeding from the source to which I just referred, working its way into an ever stronger realism, till it attains the wondrous inner perfection which you have before you in this figure of St. Bernard as he receives his vision.

Here you see a wonderful progression in human feeling. Looking at this work of Masaccio's, you can take a keen interest in every single figure, in every single head of these disciples grouped around the Christ. Look, too, how the Christ Himself is individualised. Think of the tremendous progress in characterisation, from the pictures which we saw before, to this one. Observe the transition in feeling. Heretofore it was absorbed in the Christian cosmic conception. Now it has passed over to the renewed conception of the Roman power. Feel in this composition, in the expressions of the several figures, how the Roman concept of power is expressed. A little while ago we say the Rule of the Church Militant pouring out as a spiritual force over the whole. Here, for the most part, are highly individualised figures—men who desire power and who join together for the sake of power, while in the former case it was a spiritual light which shone through all their faces. In the earlier pictures, each was to be understood out of the whole, while here we can but grasp the whole as a summation of the individuals, each of whom is, in a sense, a power in himself. With all the greatness of the composition—the figures grouped around the mighty one, the Christ, mighty through His pure spiritual Being,—still you can read in the expressions of these men: ‘Ours is, indeed, a kingdom not of this world; yet it shall rule this world,’—and, what is more, rule it through human beings, not through an abstract spiritual force. All this is expressed in the figures of these men. So you see how the human and realistic element becomes more and more emancipated, while the artist's power to portray the individual increases. The sacred legends, for example, are no longer represented for their own sake. True, they live on, but the artists use them as a mere foundation. They take their start from the familiar story, using it as an occasion to represent the human being.

See how the artist's attention is directed not to the Biblical story in itself but to the question: How will human beings look when they have been through the experience of Adam and Eve? We must admit that for his time the artist's answer is magnificent.

I need scarce make a comment. With Ghirlandajo we come to a time when the faculty to portray man as man—to represent what is purely human in his life—has reached a high level of perfection.

Henceforth the Last Supper is no longer merely represented (as in the picture that we saw just now) so that the vision of those that behold it may be kindled to an experience of the sacred action. No; the story of the Last Supper is now taken as an opportunity to represent the human beings. Though it is not yet so much so as in some later pictures, nevertheless, we can already study here the physiognomies of the disciples one by one, observing how their human characters are working under the impression that has been kindled in their souls. Such pictures bring home to us the immense change in the whole artistic conception.

So, too, with the problem of the Madonna: the artists now are more concerned to bring out what is human and feminine in the Madonna than to represent the sacred fact. The sacred legend lives on; and, being familiar to all, is made use of to solve problems of artistic realism and to bring out the individual and human.

In these artists, as the last pictures will illustrate, the Human impulse has already grown so strong that they no longer feel the same necessity to choose their subjects from the sacred legend. You can scarcely imagine the entry into Giotto's pictures of any other than a Christian subject. But when the Christian legend came to be no more than the occasion for the artists to portray the human being, they were presently able to emancipate the human subject from the Christian Legend. So we see them going forward to the art of the Renaissance, growing more and more independent of Christian tradition.

Having shown a number of pictures representing the realistic stream, if so we may call it—the seizing of the Human on the Earth, liberated from the Supersensible—we now come to the second stream above-mentioned, of which Fra Angelico is one of the greatest representatives.

It is, if I may so describe it, a more inward stream,a stream more of the soul. The artistic evolution which we followed hitherto was taken hold of more by the Spirit. In Fra Angelico we see the Heart, the soul itself, seeking to penetrate into the human being. It is interesting to see once more, in the wonderfully tender pictures of this artist, the attempt to grasp the individual and human, yet from an altogether different aspect, more out of the soul. Indeed, this lies inherent in the peculiar colourings of Fra Angelico, which, unhappily, we cannot reproduce. Here everything is felt more out of the soul, whereas the emancipation of the Human which appeared in the other realistic stream, came forth more out of the human Spirit striving to imitate the forms of Nature.

It is by the path of the soul, as it were, that the soul-content of Christianity pours in through Fra Angelico. Hence the phenomenon of Fra Angelico is so intensely interesting. Formerly, as we have seen, a supersensible and spiritual content poured through the evolution of Christianity, and took hold also of the world of Art. Then the attention of man was turned to the world of Nature—Nature experienced by the soul of man. We have seen how the same impulses, living as a simple religious enthusiasm in St. Francis of Assisi, found artistic expression in Giotto. Henceforth, man's vision was impelled more and more to an outward naturalism. But in face of all this realism, his inner life seeks refuge, as it were, in the soul's domain, tending, again, rather to melt away the sharper lines of individuality, but striving all the more intensely to express itself, as a life of soul, in outer form. For the soul's life holds sway, pervading all the details in the work of Fra Angelico. It is as though the soul of Christianity took flight into these tender pictures, so widely spread abroad, though the most beautiful are undoubtedly in the Dominican Monastery at Florence.

Thus while the Spirit that had once held sway in vision of the Supersensible was now expended on the vision of the Natural, the soul took refuge in this stream of Art, which strove not so much to seize the physiognomy—the Spirit that is stamped on the expressions of the human countenance and of the things of Nature—but rather to convey the life of soul, pouring outward as a living influence through all expression.

You will remember the picture of the Last Supper which we showed just now. There, everything depended on an answer to the question: How does Nature reveal the Spirit? How does Nature impress on the external features of men the signature of their experience in this event? Here, on the other hand, you see how all the characters are concentrated on a single feeling, and yet this single quality of soul finds living expression in them all. Here is essentially a life of soul, expressed through the soul; while in the former picture it was a life of the Spirit, finding a naturalistic expression. Down to the very drawing of the lines you can see this difference. Look at the wonderful and tender flow of line. Compare it with what you will remember of the former picture of the Last Supper.

See what a quality of soul is poured like a magic breath over this picture.

It is interesting how in Botticelli the same artistic impulse, which we found in Fra Angelico, is transferred—if I may put it so—to altogether different motives. Botticelli, in a certain respect, is most decidedly a painter of the life of soul. Yet he again emancipates, within the life of soul, the Human from the general Religious feeling which pervades the work of Fra Angelico. He emancipates the human working once more towards a certain naturalism in the expressions of the soul.

Compare this portrait with the head we saw before, by Ghirlandajo. In that case something essentially spiritual found naturalistic expression, while here we see an abundant life and content of the soul even in the drawing of the lines.

Following on Fra Angelico, we have shown a series of Botticelli's so as to gain an impression of the progress in the painting of the soul's life, in contrast to the Spirit which we found in Masaccio and Ghirlandajo. These, then, were the two directions that grew directly out of the impulses proceeding from Giotto—impulses handed down through Giotto, and through Donatello in another sphere, down to these painters.

In the further course of evolution on these lines, we now come to the great Renaissance painters, of whom I still wish to show you a few pictures in this lecture. When we have a picture like this of Botticelli's before us, we realise the extraordinary intensity of progress from the 14th to the 15th and on into the 16th century—from the portrayal of the purely Human, In such artists as Ghirlandajo we see the Spiritual, absorbed into the sphere of Nature, brought to a high level of expression. Here in this other stream we see a rich life of soul, come to expression, even in the draughtmanship. In course of time men had attained the knowledge of the human form, with all its powers of expression. It was as though, from the starting-point of Heaven, Earth had been conquered by mankind. That deepening of life which had come about through Christianity passed more and more into the background, and it was as though the object now were to understand man as such in a far deeper way. The heavenly domain became a path of progress, towards the more perfect expression of the inner being of man as it stamps itself upon his outer features, and upon all that comes forth outwardly in the relationships of men to one another, in their life together. It is the conquest of the realm of Man, by the most varied paths, which comes before us here so wonderfully.

And now we see the union of all these impulses in the great artists, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. Let us observe a few of Leonardo's pictures. We shall find in him a synthesis of the varied strivings which came be ore us in the other pictures. For in a high degree, the Leonardo da Vinci, there is a working-together of the Spiritual with the life of the soul—in his drawing, in his composition and in his power of expression.

To begin with I have selected some sketches and drawings by Leonardo, from which you may see how he endeavoured to study man in a fully realistic way. This, of course, was in a time when all that had been gained in the former periods was there to influence the artist. It is characteristic of Leonardo how radically he seeks to bring out the full expressiveness of man; he tries to seize the human being as a whole, and bring him forth to perfection in his drawing. He seeks to enhance his power of expression to the highest point by studying and holding fast all human needs. This was only possible in the flower of an artistic epoch containing all the works which we have seen today—the penetration of the human being in the Spirit and in soul.

More, as I said, you see united all that had formerly been striven for by separate paths.

These are the heads of the Apostles from the famous fresco at Milan,—the Last Supper, which, also, is scarcely visible today, for only isolated patches of colour now remain. We see that in this great artistic epoch the sacred legend merely provided a foundation for the working-out of human characters. Especially in his Last Supper, Leonardo is at pains to study the single human characters. We see him working very, very long at this wonderful picture, for he wanted to study the human characters in all detail. We know how often he disappointed his clients—the dignitaries of the Church. Thus, after long labour, he had not finished Judas Iscariot, and when the Abbot, high dignitary that he was, kept pressing him to finish it at last, his answer was that hitherto, alas, he had not been able to finish it since he lacked a model for Judas Iscariot; but now the Abbot himself, if he would kindly sit for him, would provide an excellent model for the purpose.

We go on in this classical epoch. I beg you to observe this picture by Perugino, Raphael's teacher, to see how Raphael's art grew out of his predecessor's. In Perugino a new element makes its appearance:—a deep religious quality which tries to find expression in the composition, combined with a powerfully architectural imagination. On this, the greatness of Raphael very largely depended.

Look at these two pictures: You will see the one actually growing out of the other; you will recognise how Raphael, starting from his teacher, attained his greatness, receiving the ripest fruits from the different streams which we have learned to know this evening; Raphael brings soul and Spirit into his pictures and combines them with that element of composition which came from his especial schooling.

You will remember the earlier picture of the 'Vision of St. Bernard' which we saw this evening. Consider the great difference. In the former case there was an effort to make the Spirit powerfully active in all that was brought into the picture. Here we see a pure element of composition, contriving to express what is, indeed, the chosen motif of the picture but does not penetrate it fully. Perugino cannot yet deepen his composition so that a living soul speaks out of it. Nevertheless, we see how great a part this element of composition plays in his school of painting.

Here, then, where Raphael receive' such powerful influences, we see the entry of an element of composition. You will, of course, see how great a part it plays in Raphael. In the former pictures we cannot speak of it in the speak of it in the same way as here. The composition was, rather, the result of a totality,—a totality which the artist felt more as a living organism. Man, too, after all, is composed; but though he is composed of head and arms and legs and so forth, we cannot really call this a 'composition'; for in man everything proceeds as from a centre, and we feel his composition—of arms and legs, of head and trunk—as a natural totality, a thing that goes without saying. Here in this picture you not feel it as a natural totality, a thing that goes without saying. You feel it definitely, purposely composed; whereas you will find the earlier compositions flowing more out of a single whole. Here, you see, the whole is placed together; it is literally composed.

Proceeding, therefore, from the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, we recognise the one stream which seeks to conquer Nature through the Spirit, and leads on to a higher stage of realism. Side by side with it we see another stream which seeks to conquer Nature from the aspect of the soul. And now, coming across from Central and Eastern Italy where Raphael and his predecessors had their home, we see this power of composition, this working from the single parts towards the whole, whereas all the former streams still contained an echo of the working from the whole into the single parts, a thing that you could see most strongly, for example, in that composition representing the spiritual rule of the Church pouring out into the world, where everything was conceived out of a given unity, and nothing was built up out of the single details, as it is in this case.

See how the spiritual element finds its way into the soul of Raphael—I mean, all that has been achieved by that spiritual element which grew into Naturalism.

I have inserted this last picture to show how the element of allegory still worked on. I drew attention to it in Giotto. It worked on along with all the other streams; indeed, it was the one thing that more or less remained of the earlier more spiritual conception. This one thing remains:—this element of abstract allegory which is especially to be found in the pictures in the Campo Santo at Pisa, magnificent as they are in many respects. It belongs, indeed, to an earlier time. Nevertheless, I wanted to show you how this allegorical element still worked on even in a later age.

All these things, then, were living in the feeling of the human being,—a spiritual power and a life of soul poured out into Naturalism; and withal, no longer an ability to grasp the whole as such, but purposeful. composition. Lastly, the remnants of allegory.

In this picture you see once more the working-on of allegory. It is intended to represent the influence of the scholastic doctrine, on the one hand downward to the Earth, even to the conquest of heresy, and on the other hand upward into the heavenly regions where the rays of what is living on the Earth are received into the midst of sacred beings. What was conceived working, as it were, in the spiritual substance of the Earth, is here expressed in allegory. It is an allegory, but one derived from the reality. Here, then, the last-named element—that of allegory—is taken as a starting-point, not for the mere sake of allegory in itself, but, rather, to express in allegory what they conceived as really working, even as they represented it.

Thus we have tried to understand the different streams. I will once more repeat them: The Spirit striving into Naturalism; the life of soul, growing ever more realistic in its expressiveness, even as the artists grew more capable of portraying the soul's life in the outward expression; the element of composition, placing together single features in order that the whole might have a spiritual effect; and, lastly, the element of allegory. We have traced these influences, each and severally. Thus was built up what came at last to full expression in the creations of Raphael, Michelangelo and their successors. Throughout, we see a spiritual force, passing through man by varied ways and channels, seeking to conquer Nature. First we see the Spirit endeavouring to master what comes to expression in the human being through the human Spirit. Then the spiritual faculty of vision enters more and more into man's grasp of outer Nature. Then, in such artists as Fra Angelico and Botticelli, we see the entry of a life of soul. And when the composition was no longer given as a matter of course out of a spiritual vision, we witness the attempt to bring the Spirit to expression by composition deliberately placed together, in which direction Raphael achieved the highest eminence. Lastly, we see how the longing to give voice to the great cosmic process led to Allegory, and how Allegory itself grew into Realism, as you can see in this very picture. Indeed, in Raphael it grew once more into a perfectly natural spirituality, a spirituality that works as a matter of course. I beg you to remember such a composition as his 'St. Cecilia' at Bologna. Here we still see, a central figure is set down with obviously allegorical intention, seeking to represent the soul-life of the human being in its connection with the Universe.

In Raphael's St. Cecilia there is the central figures standing in the midst; yet the thing has gone so far that the allegorical quality is completely overcome, obliterated, as it were, so much so that there is much argument today as to what this 'St. Cecilia' is meant to express, though they need only to look up their Calendars to see how closely the picture adheres to the tradition. For in the legends of the Saint you will find all that Raphael included in this wonderful creation. But to such an extent did he attain Nature's power to express the Spirit and the Soul in form, that we no longer notice all the Allegory that underlies the picture. And that, indeed, is the great thing in this epoch, attained by Michelangelo and Raphael. In all the former streams, the impulses from which they come are recognisable. Here, each and all, they are overcome to perfection, with the attainment of a pure and fresh and free (for that time fresh and free) vision and reproduction of the reality around us, in its natural material content and in its soul and Spirit. The works created by this age were based, indeed, on the preceding evolution which we have described. Here, above all, we recognise how such achievements must be preceded by many lines of evolution, which, only inasmuch as they take their start from the Spirit, lead to the recognition of the Spirit in the outer world. Man must first seek the Spirit, then will he find the Spirit in the outer world. Man must first feel and experience the Soul, then will he find them also in the external Nature. Thus we see how the Spiritual that was still at work in Cimabue, worked on after him in Giotto, who in turn carried it outward as a means to understand the forms of Nature. We see the spiritual content radiating still from Giotto's work, applied still further by his successors to apprehend the Spirit in the world of Nature. We see how the deep soul-impulse that came through Francis of Assisi, taking hold of the life of the soul in man himself, was expressed with a certain artistic perfection in the Christian piety of Fra Angelico. This impulse once again rays forth into the world; we have the essence of Botticelli. Then (if I may so express it), out of a kind of memory of the totality of vision which is lost, the artist tries to piece together the single features into a composition, thus creating a totality once more, so that the Spirit—which was lost to immediate vision, to be used in a new way in the taking hold of Nature,—might work again from the totality. And at length we see, in the quest of Allegory, the search for means of expression, leading in the last resort to the overcoming of all Allegory; to the finding the means of expression even in Nature herself. For to him who first sets out to seek it, the free and open-minded vision of the outer World itself will give what he desires. Nature herself is allegorical; yet does she nowhere impose her allegories on us, or let us see them outwardly as such. Man must learn what is there to be read in the book of Nature. But at first he often has to learn his reading in clumsy devious byways. In such a work as the picture of St. Thomas which we saw before, we witness still a clumsy and unskillful reading of the book of Nature. In Raphael's St. Cecilia, on the other hand, we have a reading which contains no longer any Allegory, no longer any of that abstract element which has not yet arisen to the full height of Art.

Thus I think we shall have gained a conception, how the great epoch of the Italian Renaissance gradually came into being. Again and again, I think, the vision of man will be directed to these times, to this artistic evolution; for it lets us gaze so deeply into the life and working of piety, of Wisdom and of Love in the human soul, combined with the artistic fancy, striving to reproduce Nature with a fresh and open mind. It lies not in the mere imitation of Nature, but in the faculty of Man, with all that he has found in his own soul, to discover again in Nature what is already there in her, akin to the inmost experiences of the human soul. This, I venture to hope, our descriptions today—however brokenly, however imperfectly—may still have brought to light.

In our last lecture we showed the period of Art which finally merged into that of the great masters of the Renaissance. We ended by revealing the connecting threads in the artistic world of feeling, which finally led up to what was so wondrously united in Leonardo, in Michangelo and in Raphael. Yet at the same time, in these three masters we must also see the starting point of the new age, in an artistic sense. It is the dawn of the 5th post-Atlantean age, which is heralded in the realm of Art. All three were living, at the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean age. Leonardo was born in 1452, Michelangelo in 1475 and Raphael in 1483; Leonardo dies in 1519, Raphael in 1520, and Michelangelo in 1564. Here we find ourselves at the starting point of the new age. At the same time, something is contained in these artists which we must undoubtedly regard as a culmination of the spiritual stream of preceding ages, inasmuch as they poured their impulses into the realm of Art. It is true, my dear friends, that in our time people have little understanding for what is important in this respect, for in our time—I do not say this as mere criticism—art has been far too much expelled from the spiritual life as a whole. It is even considered a failing of the historian or critic, if he seeks once more to give Art its place in the spiritual life as a whole. People say that our attention is thus diverted unduly from the artistic or aesthetic impulses as such, attaching an excessive value to the content, to the subject-matter, and yet, this need not be the case at all. Indeed, it is only in our own time that this distinction has acquired so much importance. It had no such direct significance in former epochs—epochs when the artistic understanding was more developed in the ordinary common sense of the people. We must not forget how much has been done to extirpate a true artistic understanding by all the atrocities which have been placed before the human mind of men in recent times, by way of pictorial representation and the like. True understanding for the manner of representation has been lost. European humanity, in a certain sense, no longer cares how a given subject-matter is presented to it. In wide circles, artistic understanding has to a large extent been lost.

Speaking of former epochs, and especially of the epoch to which we are now referring, we may truly say artists such as Raphael, Michelango and Leonardo were by no means one-sidedly artistic, but carried in their souls the whole of the spiritual life of their time and created out of this. In saying this, I do not mean that they borrowed their subject-matter from the spiritual life of their time. I mean far more than this. Into the specifically artistic quality of their creation, in form and colouring, there flowed the specific quality of the world-conception of that time. In our time, a world-conception is a collection of ideas which can, of course, be represented in sculpture or in painting and it is frequently embodied, needless to say, in forms and colours and the like which to the true artistic sense will nevertheless be an atrocity. In this respect, unfortunately, we must repeatedly utter warnings, even within our anthroposophical stream of evolution. The feeling for what is truly artistic is not always prevalent among us. I still remember with a shudder how at the beginning of the theosophical movement in Germany a man once came to me in Berlin, bringing with him reproductions of a picture he had painted. The subject was: Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. It is true there sat a huddled figure under a tree, but the man—if you will pardon me the apt expression—understood as little of Art as an ox, having eaten grass throughout the week, understands of Sunday. He simply thought, here is the subject; let us paint it, and it will represent a work of Art. Of course, it represented something. Namely, he who imagined the scene to himself—“Buddha under the Bodhi Tree”—could see it so, no doubt. But there was absolutely no reason why such a thing should ever have been painted.

It is a very different thing when we say of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, that they bore within them the whole way of feeling which permeated the Italian civilisation of their time. For this civilisation entered livingly into the artistic quality of their work, into their whole manner of presentation; nor can we fully understand these artists if we have no feeling for the civilisation in the midst of which they lived. Today, indeed, people believe the most extraordinary things. They will believe, for instance, that a man can build a Gothic church even if he has not the remotest notion of High Mass. Of course, he cannot do so in reality. Or they believe that one can paint the Trinity even if one has no feeling for what is intended to be living in it. In this way, Art is expelled from its living connection with the spiritual life as a whole. At the same time, on the other hand, people fail to understand the artistic element as such, imagining that with aesthetic views and feelings which happen to be prevalent today they can set to work and ciriticise Raphael or Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose whole way of feeling was quite different. It was only natural (though I should need many hours to say in full what should be said on this point), it was only natural for them to be living in the whole way of feeling of their time. We cannot understand their creative work unless we understand the character which Christianity had assumed at the time when these artists blossomed forth. You need only remember that at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century Italian Christianity witnessed the rise even among the Popes, of men who truly cannot be said to have satisfied even the most rudimentary demands of morality, nor need one be in any way a pietist to say so. And, of course, the whole army of priests were of like character. The idea that a specific moral impulse must be living in what goes by the name of “Christian” had been lost sight of, comparatively speaking. And when in later times it emerged again—in pietist and moralising forms, by no means identical with what I described the other day when speaking of St. Francis,—it was imbued with quite a different feeling of Christianity than inspired those who lived, for instance, under an Alexander VI, a Julius II or a Leo X. If, on the other hand, we consider the Christian traditions, the concepts and ideas (and when I say ideas I include “Imaginations”) connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, we find them still living in the souls with an intensity of which the man of today has little notion. Human souls lived in the ideas connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, as in a world that was their very own, and they saw Nature herself in the midst of this same world. We need but call to mind: In that time, even for the most educated, this Earth, of which the Western half was still unknown (or was only just begining to be known and was not fully really reckoned with),—this Earth was the centre of the whole Universe. Going down beneath the surface of the Earth, one found a subterranean kingdom; going but a little way above, a super-earthly. We might almost say, it was as though a man only need lift his arm, to grasp with his hand the feet of the heavenly beings. Heaven still penetrated down into the earthly element. Such was the conception—a harmony, an interplay of the spiritual above and the Earth beneath it, with the world of the senses which contained mankind. Even their view of Nature was in this spirit.

Those, however, among whom we find the three great masters of the Renaissance were striving forth from yonder age. And the one who harbours within him, as in a seed, all that came forth since then—nay, much that is still destined to come forth,—that one is Leonardo. The soul of Leonardo was equally inclined to the feelings of the former time and of the latter. His soul had most decidedly a Janus head. By his education, by the habits of his life, by all that he had seen, he lived with his feelings still in the olden time. Yet he had a mighty impulse to that conception of the world which only came forth in the succeeding centuries. He had an impulse, not so much towards its width as to its depth. From various indications in my other lectures, you know that the Greeks—and even the men of later times during the 4th Post-Atlantean age—knew life quite differently than we do,—that is to say, out of a different source of knowledge. The sculptor, for example, knew the human figure from within—from a perception of the forces that were at work within himself, the forces which we today describe in Anthroposophy as the etheric. Out of this inner feeling of the human figure the Greek artist created. In course of time this faculty was lost. Another faculty now had to appear: the power to take hold of things with outward vision. Man felt impelled to feel and understand external Nature. I showed you last time, how Francis of Assisi was among the first who sought to perceive Nature through a deep life of feeling. Now Leonardo was the first who endeavoured in a wider sense to add to this feeling of Nature, a conscious understanding of Nature. Because it was no longer given to him, as to the men of former ages, to trace from within outward the forces that are at work in man, he tried to know these things by contemplation from without. He tried to know by outward vision what could no longer be made known by inward feeling. An understanding of Nature as against a feeling for Nature: this is what distinguishes Leonardo da Vinci from Francis of Assisi, and this determines the whole constitution of his spirit. He was all out to understand. And though we need not take it word for word—for the sources, as a rule, relate only the current legends—nevertheless, the legends themselves were founded upon fact, and there is truth in it when we are told how Leonardo took especial pains to study characteristic faces, so that by dint of outward contemplation the working of the formative forces of the human organism might become his own inner experience. Often he would follow a character about for days and days, so that the human being might become as if transparent to him, revealing how the inner being works into the outer form. Yes, there is truth in this,—and that he invited peasants to his house and set before them tasty dishes or told them stories, so that their faces assumed every possible expression of laughter and contortion and he could study them. All this is founded upon fact. And when he had to paint a Medusa he brought all manner of toads and reptiles into his studio, to study the characteristic animal faces. These are legendary anecdotes; and yet they truly indicate how Leonardo had to seek, to discover the mysterious creation of Nature's forces. For Leonardo was truly a man who sought to understand Nature. He tried in an even wider sense to understand the forces of Nature as they play their part in human life. He was no mere artist in the narrower sense of the word; the artist in him grew out of the whole man, standing in the very midst of the turning-point of time. The church of San Giovanni in Florence had sunk a little, owing to a subsidence of the soil. He wished to raise it again—a task that could easily be carried out today; but in that time such a thing was considered absolutely hopeless. He wanted to have it raised bodily, as it stood. Nowadays, as has justly been observed, it would only be a question of the cost; in his time it was an idea of genius, for no one beside Leonardo thought such a thing was possible. He also thought of constructing machines whereby men would be able to fly through the air; and of irrigating great areas of swamp. He was an engineer, a mechanic, a musician, a cultured man in social intercourse, a scientist according to his time. He constructed apparatus so unheard-of in that age that no one else could make anything of them. What poured into his artist's hand was working, therefore, from a many-sided understanding of the world. Of Leonardo we can truly say, he bore his whole Age within him, even as it came to expression in the profound external changes which were then enacted in Italy. Leonardo's whole life—his artistic life included—bears the stamp of this his fundamental character. In spite of the fact that he grew out of the Italian environment, he was not altogether at home there. True, he was a Florentine, but he spent only his youth in Florence, and then went on to Milan, having been summoned thither by the Duke Ludovico Sforza—sommoned by no means (as we might naively imagine) as the great artist whom we recognise in him today, but as a kind of court entertainer. From the skull of a horse, Leonardo constructed an instrument of music, from which he enticed various notes, and was thus able with great humour to entertain the ducal house. We need not say that he was intended as a kind of “fool,” but as an entertainer to amuse the Court, most certainly. The works of Art which he produced in Milan, to which we shall presently refer, were certainly created out of the very deepest impulse of his own being. But he had not been summoned to the Court of the Sforza's for this purpose; and though he entered well into all the life at Milan, we find him afterwards, on his return to Florence, working at a battle-picture, intended to glorify a victory over Milan. Then we see him end his life at the French Court.

The one dominating impulse in Leonardo is to see and feel what interests the human being of his time; the political events, complicated as they were, more or less swept past him. He only skimmed off them, as it were, the uppermost and human layer. Indeed, in many respects he rather gives us the impression of an adventurer, albeit one endowed with colossal genius. He bears his whole Age within him; and out of this feeling of his Age as a whole, his creations arise. We shall present them not in chronological but in a freely chosen order, for in Leonardo the main point is to see how he creates out of a single impulse, and for this reason the chronological sequence is less important.

An altogether different nature, though possessing the characteristics of the Renaissance in common with him, was Michelangelo. If we can say of Leonardo that he bore the whole forces of his time within him (and for this very reason often came into disharmony with it and remained misunderstood, just because he understood it in its depths, in the forces that only found their way to the surface during later centuries), of Michelangelo, on the other hand, we may say: he bore within him, above all, the Florence of his time. What was the Florence of his time? It was, in a sense, a true concentration of the existing order of the world. This Florence he bore within him. Unlike Leonardo, he did not stand remote from political affairs. The complicated political events around him—and the whole world-order of that time played into these politics—entered again and again into the soul of Michelangelo. And when again and again he went to Rome, he bore his Florence with him, and painting and sculpting a Florentine element into the Roman setting. Leonardo bore a universal feeling into the works he created; Michelangelo carried a Florentine feeling into Rome. As an artist he achieved a kind of spiritual conquest over Rome, making Florence arise again in Rome.

Thus Michelangelo entered intensely into all that was taking place through the political conditions in Florence during his long life. We see this in the succession of his life-periods. As a young man, when his career was only just beginning, he witnessed the reign of the great Medici, whose favourite he was, and by whose favour he was enabled to partake in all that the Florence of that time could offer to a man's spiritual life. Whatever of ancient Art and artistry was then available, Michelangelo studied it under the protectorate of the Medici; and it was here that he produced his earliest work. Indeed, he loved his protector, and grew together in his own soul with the soul-nature of the Medici. But presently he had to realise that the sons of his patron were of quite a different kind. He who had done so much for Florence—out of an ambitious disposition, it is true, yet cultivating largesse and freedom—died in 1492; and his sons proved themselves more or less common tyrants. Michelangelo had to experience this change in comparatively early youth. Whereas at the beginning of his career the mercantile spirit of the Medici had allowed free play to Art, he must now witness this mercantile spirit itself masquerading as a political spirit, and striving towards tyranny. Yes, he witnessed on a small scale the rise in Florence of what was afterwards to take hold of all the world. It was a terrible experience for him, and yet not unconnected with the whole surrounding world of the new Age. It was now that he first went to Rome, and we may say: In Rome he mourns the loss of what he has experienced as the true greatness of Florence. We can even recognise how the plastic quality of his work is connected with this great change in his feelings: Into the very line we notice what the political changes in Florence had brought about in his soul. Any one who has a deeper feeling for such things will see in the Pieta in the Vatican a work which in the last resort is born out of the mourning soul of Michelangelo—Michelangelo mourning for the city of his fathers.

Then, when better times returned and he went back to Florence, he stood once more under a new impression. He felt uplifted in his soul,—Freedom had entered into Florence once again. He poured out this new feeling into the indescribably great figure of his David. It is not the traditional David of the Bible. It is the protest of free Florence against the encroaching principle of “great powers,” of mighty States. Its colossal character is connected with this very feeling.

Again, when he was summoned by Pope Julius to decorate the Sistine Chapel, now in a far fuller sense than before, he bore his Florence with him into Rome. What was it that he bore with him? It was a whole world-conception, of which we can say that it shows the rise of the new age, just as truly as we can say, on the other hand, that in the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, representing the creation of the World and the great process of Biblical history, we have the twilight of an ancient world-conception. Thus Michelangelo carries with him a whole world to Rome,—carries with him something that could never have arisen at that time in Rome itself, but that could only arise in Florence: the idea of one mighty cosmic process with all the Prophetic gifts and Sibylline faculties of man. You will find further explanations on these things in earlier lectures. These inner connections could only be felt and realised in Florence. What Michelangelo experienced through all the spiritual life that had reached its height in the Florence of that time, cannot, in truth, be felt today, unless we transplant ourselves through Spiritual Science into former epochs. Hence the usual histories of Art contain so many absurdities at this point. A man can only create as Michelangelo created if he believes in these things and lives in their midst. It is easy for a man to say that he will paint the world's creation. Many a modern artist would credit himself, no doubt, with this ability,—but one who has true feeling will not be able to assent. No one can paint the evolution of the world who does not live in it, like Michelangelo, with all his being.

But when he returned once more to Florence, he was already driven, after all, by the new stream, which—to put it bluntly—replaces the sacramental by the commercial character. True, he was destined still to create the most wonderful works, in the Medici Chapel. But in the background of this undertaking was an element which could not but inspire him with melancholy feelings. The purpose was the glorification of the Medici. It was they who mattered,—who in the meantime had become powerful, albeit less in Florence than in the rest of Italy. Then once more the political changes drove him back. The betrayal of the Malatestas, their penetration into Florence, drove him back again to Rome. And now he painted, as it were, into the Last Judgment, the protest of a Florentine, the great protest of humanity, of the human individual against all that would oppose it. Hence the real human greatness of his Last Judgment, the greatness which it undoubtedly breathed forth, as it proceeded from his hand. For now, also, parts of it have been completely spoiled.

But he still had to undergo experiences which entered very, very deep into all the impulses of feeling in his soul. How many events had he not experienced, how much did they not signify for the development of his picture of the world: For the things I have indicated were of great importance to him. They may be taken abstractly today, but in the soul of Michelangelo they worked without a doubt as very deep soul-impulses. But we must add that I have mentioned the fact that he witnessed, too, the great change which came over Florence through the appearance of Savonarola. This was a protest within the life of the Church against what was characteristic of that time in Christianity. So free an Art as was developed in Leonardo and in many others like him could only unfold in this way inasmuch as the ideas of Christianity were lifted out of their context and taken by themselves. I mean the ideas connected with the Mystery of Golgotha—the conception of the Trinity, of the Last Supper, of the connection between the earthly and the spiritual realms, and so forth. All these conceptions, lifted right out of the moral element, assumed a free imaginative character which the artist dealt with at his pleasure, treating it like any worldly subject, with the only difference that it contained, of course, the sacred figures. These things had been objectified, loosed from the moral element; and thus the Christian thought, loosed from the moral element, slid over by and by into a purely artistic sphere. All this took place quite as a matter of course, and the gradual elimination of the moral element was a natural concomitant of the whole process. Savonarola represents the great protest against this elimination of the moral element. Savonarola appears; it is the protest of the moral life against an Art that was free of morals,—I do not say, void of morals, but free. Indeed, we must study Savonarola's will if we would understand in Michelangelo himself what was due to Savonarola's influence.

But this was not all. You must imagine Michelangelo as a man who in his inmost heart and mind could never think in any other than a Christian way. He not only felt as a Christian; he conceived the order of the World in mighty pictures, in the Christian sense. Imagine him placed in the midst of that time, when the Christian conceptions had, as it were, become objectified and could thus slide so easily into the realms of Art. Such was the world in which he lived. But he experienced withal the Northern protest of the Reformation, which spread with comparative speed, even to Italy; and he also witnessed the great and revolutionary change which was accomplished from the Catholic side as a counter-Reformation, against the Reformation. He experienced the Rome of his time,—a time whose moral level may not have been high, but in which there were free and independent spirits, none the less, who were decidedly agreed to give a new form to Catholicism. They did not want to go so far as Savonarola, nor did they want it to assume the form which afterwards came forth in the Reformation. They wanted to change and recreate Catholicism by continuous progress and development. Then the Reformation burst in like another edition, so to speak, of the Savonarola protest. Rome was seized with anxiety and fear, and they parted from what had pulsated through their former life. Michelangelo among others had built his hopes on such ideas as were concentrated, for example, in Vittoria Colonna, hoping to permeate with high ethical principles what had reached so great a height in Art. With a Catholicism morally recreated and renewed, they hoped to permeate the world once more. Now, however, there arose the great Roman powers, the strong Catholic ideas, the Jesuitical principle, and Paul IV became the Pope. What Michelangelo was now to witness must have been terrible for him, for he saw the seeds of an absolute break with what had still been known to him as Christianity. It was the beginning of Jesuitical Christianity. And so he entered on the twilight of his life.

Michelangelo, as I said, had carried Florence into Rome. With Raphael once again it was different. Of Raphael we may say, he carried Urbino—East-Central Italy to Rome. Here we come to that strange magic atmosphere whose presence we feel when we contemplate the minor artists of that region whence Raphael grew forth. Consider the creations of these artists—the sweet and tender faces, the characteristic postures of the feet, the attitude of the figures. We might describe it thus: Here there arose artistically somewhat later what had arisen earlier in a moralising and ascetic sphere in Francis of Assisi. It enters here into artistic feeling and creation, and leaves a strangely magic atmosphere—this tenderness in contemplating man and Nature. In Raphael it is a native quality, and he continues to express it through his life. This is the feeling which he carries into Rome; it flows from his creations into our hearts and minds if we transplant ourselves into the character they once possessed, for as pictures they have to a great extent been spoilt.

What Raphael thus bears within his soul, having evolved in the lonely country of Urbino, stnads, as it were, alone within the time; and yet taking its start from Raphael, it spread far and wide into the civilisation of mankind. It is as though Raphael with this element were carried everywhere upon the waves of time, and wheresoever he goes he makes it felt—this truly artistic expression of the Christian feeling. This element is everywhere poured out over the influence of Raphael.

Summing up, therefore, we may say: Leonardo lives in the midst of a large and universal understanding. He strikes us, stings us, as it were, into awakeness with his keen World-understanding. Michelangelo lives in the policical understanding of his time; this becomes the dominant impulse of his feeling. Raphael, on the other hand, remaining more or less untouched by all these things, is borne, as it were, upon the waves of time, and bears into the evolution of the ages a well-nigh inexpressible quality of Christian Art. This, then, distinguishes and at once unites the three great masters of the Renaissance; they represent three elements of the Renaissance feeling, as it appears to us historically.

Let us now give ourselves up to the impressions of Leonardo's works. We will first show some of his drawings, which reveal how he creates his forms out of that keen understanding of Nature which I sought to characterise just now. Thereafter, not quite in the historic order, we shall show those of his pictures which have the character of portraits. Only then will we go on to his chief creation, the “Last Supper,” Finally, we shall return and show him once more at his real starting-point. The first picture is a well-known Self-portrait.

This, then, is one of Leonardo's portraits. There follows the other one, still better known.

Here we have a picture from an early period of his development, showing how Leonardo grew out of the School of Verrocchio. Tradition has it that the finely elaborated landscape round this figure here was painted by Leonardo in the School of Verrocchio, and that Verrocchio, seeing what Leonardo could achieve, laid down his brush and would paint no more.

Here, again, you see how Leonardo drew—how he tried, even to the point of caricature, to extract the characteristic features by dint of studious contemplation, as I described just now.

We need not imagine that he stood alone in things like this; they had, indeed, been done by others in his time. Leonardo only stands out through his extraordinary genius, but it was altogether a quest of the time—this search for the strong characteristic features, as against what had come forth in earlier times from higher vision and had grown a mere tradition. It was characteristic of that time to seek for what appears directly to external vision, and thus bring out with emphasis whatever in the outward features of a being is most significant of individual character.

Far more important than the subject-matter, the point was to study and portray with precision the positions of the bones and so forth.

This is the portrayal of a thunderstorm.

The two pictures we now show are not attributed to him with certainty, nor are some others which we shall see presently, but they bear the character of Leonardo and are therefore not without connection.

In this famous picture we see the other aspect of Leonardo, where we might say he seeks to attain the very opposite pole from what was illustrated in the former sketches. There he tried to discover and bring out with emphasis the individual and characteristic in all details. People will often not believe that an artist who can create such a work as the Mona Lisa has any need of going in the other direction to the point of caricature. I have, however, often drawn attention to this fact. Think of the inherently natural impulse whereby our friend the Poet, Christian Morgenstern, went from his sublime, serene creations to the humorous poems with which we are familiar, where he seeks the very extremes of caricature. There is this inner connection in the artist's soul. If he desires to create a work so inwardly complete, harmonious, serene as this, he often has to seek the faculties he needs for such creation by emphasising characteristic individual features even to the point of caricature.

These pictures, which, as I said, are not in historic order, represent Leonardo in the quality of an artist seeking for inner clarity, completeness and perfection.

Here is the Dionysos figure, the God Dionysos. You will find indications on these matters in various other lectures. The painting is based on proven designs and sketches of Leonardo da Vinci. However, it is believed that it was carried out by an unknown student from the workshop of Leonardo and between 1683 and 1693 it was modified and painted to represent Bacchus.

We now come to the Last Supper—which he created, it is true, at an earlier time, and worked upon during a long period. We have often spoken of it. We know what an essential progress in the artistic power of expression is visible in this picture as against the earlier pictures of the Last Supper by Ghirlandajo and others. Observe the life in this picture; see how strongly the individual characters come out in spite of the powerful unity of composition. This is the new thing in Leonardo. The adaptation of the strong individual characters to the composition as a whole is truly wonderful. At the same time each of the four groups of disciples becomes a triad complete and self-contained; and, again, each of these triads is marvellously placed into the whole. The colour and lighting are inexpressibly beautiful. I spoke once before of the part of the colouring in this composition. Here we look deep into the mysterious creative powers of Leonardo. If we try to feel the colours of the picture as a whole, we feel they are distributed in such a way as to supplement one another,—not actually as complementary colours, but in a similar way,—so much so that when we look at the whole picture at once, we have pure light—the colours together are pure light. Such is the colouring in this picture.

We now come to the details of the picture. This is generally considered to be an earlier attempt at the Head of Christ. These reproductions are familiar.

This is Morghan's engraving, from which we gain a more accurate conception of the composition than from the present picture at Milan, which is so largely ruined. You are, of course, familiar with the fate of this picture, of which we have so often spoken.

This is a very recent engraving,—a reproduction which reveals the most minute study. It is frequently admired and yet, perhaps, for one who loves the original as a work of art, it leads too far afield into a sphere of minute and detailed drawing. Still we may recognise in this an independent artistic achievement of considerable beauty.

Here we have a fragment of the battle picture projected by Leonardo, which I mentioned a short while ago.

We will now go on to Michelangelo. Considering Leonardo once again, you will see there is something in him which comes out especially when, instead of taking the chronological order, which is in any case a little uncertain, we take his work in groups, as we have done just now. Then we see clearly what different streams are living in him. The one, which comes out especially in his Last Supper, aims at a peculiar quality of composition combined with an intense delineation of character. It stands apart and alongside of that other tendency in which he does not seek this kind of composition. This other _stream we find expressed in the pictures in the Louvre, and at St, Petersburg and London, which we showed before the Last Supper. It might have come forth at any time; one feels it is almost by chance that the pictures of this kind do not exist from every period in his life. That which comes to expression in these pictures is in no way reminiscent of the peculiar composition in the Last Supper, but aims at a serene composition while seeking to express individual character to a moderate extent.

We now come to Michelangelo. To begin with, his portrait of himself.

Here we have Michelangelo before he reached his independence, working in Florence, perhaps under the influence of Signorelli and others, still, in fact, a pupil.

And now we think of Michelangelo moving to Rome for the first time, under all the influences which I described just now.

Look at this picture and then at the following one; compare the feeling in the two.

Look at this work. Undoubtedly it is created under the feeling of his coming to Rome. A more or less tragic element, a certain sublime pessimism pervades it. Let us return once more to the former one, and you will see the two creations are very similar in their artistic character. They express the same shade of feeling in Michelangelo. We now return once more to the Pieta.

People who feel the story more than the artistic quality as such have often said that the Madonna, for the situation in which she is here portrayed, is far too young. This arose out of a belief which was still absolutely natural in that time and lived in the soul of Michelangelo himself:—the belief that owing to her virgin nature the Madonna never assumed the features of old age.

Here you have the work of which we spoke before. The figure strikes us most of all by its colossal quality, not in the external sense, but a quality mysteriously hidden in its whole artistic treatment.

We now come to the Sistine Chapel. To begin with, we have the Creation of the World,—the first stage, which we might describe as the creation of Light out of the darkness of night.

This picture bears witness to a tradition still living at that time as regards the creation of the World. It was that Jehovah created, in a sense, as the successor of an earlier Creator, whom He overcame, or transcended, and who now departed. The harmony of the net World-creation with the old which it transcended is clearly shown in this picture. Truly, we may say, such ideas as are expressed in this picture have vanished absolutely; they are no longer present.

This, then, is the creation of that which went before mankind.

Here we find the creation of man. There follows the creation of Eve.

We now move more and more away from the theme of World-creation into the theme of History—the further evolution of the human race. This is the fall into sin.

We come to the Sibyls, of whom I have spoken in a former lecture. They represent the one supersensible element in the evolution of man, which is contrasted with the other, the prophetic quality. We shall see the latter presently in the series of the Prophets. Here we have the Sibylline element. In my cycle of lectures given at Leipzig, on “Christ and the Spiritual World,” you will find the fuller description of its relation to the prophetic. That Michelangelo included these things at all, in his series of pictures, proves how closely he connected the earthly life with the supersensible—the spiritual. See now the succession of the Sibyls; observe how a real individual life is poured out into each one: in every detail, each one brings to expression a quite specific visionary character of her own.

Observe the position of the hand. It is no mere chance. Observe the look in her eyes, coming forth out of an elemental life; you will divine many things which we cannot express in words, for that would make the thing too abstract,—but they lie hidden in the artistic treatment.

And now we come to the Prophets.

These are examples of his scenes from the Old Testament.

Here we come to his later period in Florence: to the Medicis and the Chapel at which he had to work for the Medicis under conditions that I described before. I have spoken of these tombs of Juliano and Lorenzo in a lecture which I believe has also been printed.

This is the second tomb, with the figures of Morning and Evening.

Once again we accompany Michelangelo to Rome, where he creates, once more by comman of the Pope, the Last Judgment—the altar-piece for the Sistine Chapel. The greatness of this piece lies in the characterisation, the universal significance of the characters. Consider in this picture all that is destined, as it were, for Heaven, all that is destined for Hell, and Christ in the centre, as the cosmic Judge. You will see how Michelangelo sought to harmonise this cosmic scene. Majestically as it was conceived, with an individual and human feeling. Hermann Grimm drew the head of Christ from the immediate vicinity, and it proved to be very similar to the head of the Apollo of Belvedere. We will now show some of the details.

and another detail, the group above the boat:

And now, though in time it belongs to a somewhat earlier period, we give what Michelangelo created for the monument of Pope Julius; for, in fact, this was never finished, and Michelangelo was working at it in the very latest period of his life and finished portions of it.

It is significant that Pope Julius II, whose character undoubtedly contained a certain greatness, called for this monument to be erected to his efforts. It was to have included a whole series of figures, perhaps thirty in number. It was never completed, but there remained this, the greatest figure in connection with it—Michelangelo's famous figure of Moses, of which we have often spoken,—and the two figures now following:

This was completed in the very latest period of his life. It is hard to say exhaustively how it arose. One thing is certain: the group expresses an idea which Michelangelo carried with him throughout his life. Whether there was another group which has somehow been lost, in which he treated this scene at a very early stage in his career, or whether it was the same block at which he worked again, remodelling it at the end of his life, it is hard to say. But we see it here as his last work. Not only is it the one which he completed when he was a very old man; it corresponds to an artistic idea which he carried throughout his long life, and is connected far more deeply than one imagines with the fundamental feeling of his soul. True, he could not have created it thus at every phase of his life. It would always have turned out a little differently; it would always have reproduced the basic mood of his soul in a somewhat different way. But the deep and pure Christian feeling that lives in Michelangelo comes to expression especially in this particular relationship of Christ to the Mother, in this scene of the entombment. Again and again the idea of the Mystery of Golgotha arises in the soul of Michelangelo in this way:—He feels that with the Mystery of Golgotha a deed of Heavenly Love took place, of an intensity that will hover for ever before the eyes of man as a sublime ideal, but that can never be attained by man even in the remotest degree, and must therefore inspire with a tragic mood him who beholds these World-events.

And now imagine, with this idea living in his soul, Michelangelo saw Rome becoming Jesuitical. With this idea in his soul, he underwent all the feelings of which I spoke; and whatever he saw in the world, he measured in relation to this standard. Truly, he underwent much in his long life. While he was creating his earliest artistic works in Florence, the Pope in Rome was Alexander VI, the Borgia. Then he was summoned to Rome, and painted the Creation of the World for Pope Julius. We see the dominion of the Gorgias in Rome replaced by Pope Julius, and then by the Medici, Leo X. In this connection we must realise that Pope Julius II, although he worked with poison, murder, slander, etc., was none the less in earnest about Christian Art. Pope Julius, who replaced the political Borgia princes, strove for the Papal See in order to make it great through spiritual life. Although he was a man of war, nevertheless, in his inmost soul, even as a fighter, he only thought of himself as in the service of spiritual Rome. Of Julius II we must not fail to realise that he was a man of spiritual aims, thoroughly in earnest with all that lay in his impulse to re-erect the Church of St. Peter, and, indeed, with all that he achieved for Art. He was selflessly in earnest about these things. It may sot strange to say this of a man who in carrying out his plans made use of poison, murder and the like. Yet such was the custom of the time in the circles with whose help he realised his plans. His highest ideal, none the less, was that which he desired to bring into the world through the great artists. For a spirit like Michelangelo it is, indeed, profoundly tragical to feel how a perfect good can never find its realisation in the world, but must always be realised one-sidedly. Yet, this was not all, for he lived to witness the transition to the commercial Popes, if we may call them so—those of the house of Medici, who were, in truth, far more concerned with their own ambitions, and were fundamentally different in spirit from Julius II and even from the Borgias. Certainly, these were no better men. We must, however, judge all these things in relation to the time itself. It is easy nowadays to feel Pope Alexander VI, or his son Caesar Borgia, or Julius II, as human atrocities; for today it is permitted to write of them quite independently and freely, whereas many a later phenomenon cannot yet be characterised with equal freedom: But we must also realise:—The sublime works achieved at that time are not without causal relationship with the characters of all these Popes,—indeed, many things would certainly not have come to pass if Savonarola or Luther had occupied the Papal See. And now we come to Raphael.

Here is the picture of which I spoke last time. We will bring it before our souls once more. On the left we have the same subject treated by Perugino, and on the right by Raphael. It is the Sposalizio or Marriage of the Virgin. Here you can see how Raphael grew out of the School of his teacher, Perugino, and you can recognise the great advance. At the same time, we see in the picture on the left all that is characteristic of this School on the level from which Raphael began. See the characteristic faces, their healthily—as we today call it—sentimental expression. See the peculiar postures of the feet. A certain characterisation is attempted; yet it is all enclosed in a certain aura of which I spoke before,—which appears again in Raphael, transfigured, as it were, raised into a new form and power of composition. You recognise here the growth of this power of composition, too. But if you compare the details, you will find that in Raphael it is grasped more clearly and yet at the same time it is more gentle, it is not so hard.

This whole picture is to be conceived of as a world of dream. It is generally known as the “Dream of a Knight.”

We will now let work upon us a number of Raphael's pictures of the Madonna and of the sacred legend. These—especially the Madonnas—are the works of Raphael which first carried him out into the world.

In all these pictures you still have the old, characteristic postures and attitudes which Raphael took with him from his home country.

These are the Madonnas which bear witness to the further development of Raphael. Ile follow him now into the time when he went to Rome. It is not known historically exactly when that was. Probability is that he did not simply go there in a given year,—1500 is generally assumed—but that he had been to Rome more than once and gone back again to Florence, and that from 1500 onward he worked in Rome continuously. Now, therefore, we follow him to Rome and come to those pictures which he painted there for Pope Julius.

This picture is well-known to you all, and we, too, have spoken of it in former lectures. Many preparatory sketches of it exist. In the form in which you see it here, it was done to the order of the Pope,—the Pope who craved, as I said just now, to make Rome spiritually great.

We must, however, hold fast to one point, which is revealed by the fact that some elements of the motif of this picture appear at a very early stage, even in Perugia, representing this idea, this scene, or, rather, the motif of it.

Thus the idea was already living at that early stage, and was able to take shape in this remarkable corner of East-Central Italy.

We must conceive the motif of the picture as living in the very time itself. Below are the human beings—theologians, for the most part. These theologians are well aware that everything which human reason can discover is related to what St. Thomas Aquinas called the “Praeambula Fidei,” and must be permeated by what comes down from Spiritual Worlds as real inspiration, wherein are mingled the attainments of the great Christian and pre-Christian figures of history, and by means of which alone the secret of the Trinity is to be understood. This mystery, we must conceive, bursts down into the midst of the disputations of the theologians below. We may conceive that this picture is painted out of the will to unite the Christian life quite fundamentally with Rome—to make Rome once more the center of Christianity by rebuilding the derelict Church of St. Peter, according to the desires of Pope Julius. Under the influence of the Pope, wishing to achieve a new greatness of Christianity centered in Rome, such ideas are brought together with the fundamental concept; the secret of the Trinity. This fact explains what I may call, perhaps, the outer trimmings of the picture. (Even in the architectural elements which it contains, we see designs which re-occur in St. Peter's.) It is as though this picture were to proclaim: Now once again the secret of the Trinity shall be taught to the whole world by Rome. There are many preliminary sketches showing not only that Raphael only by and by achieved the final composition, but that this whole way of thinking about the inspiration, the Idea of the Trinity had been living in him for a long time. It was certainly not the case that the Pope said: “Paint me such and such a picture.” He rather said, “Tell me of the idea that has been living in you for so long,” and thus together, so to speak, they arrived at the conception which we now see on the wall of the Segnatura.

Now we come to the picture which, as you know, is commonly named the School of Athens, chiefly because the two central figures are supposed to be Plato and Aristotle. The one thing certain is that they are not. I will not dwell on other views that have been put forward. I have spoken of this picture, too, on previous occasions. But they are certainly not Plato and Aristotle. True, we may recognise in these figures many an ancient philosopher, but that is not the point of the picture. The real point is, that in contrast to what is called “Inspiration” Raphael also wished to portray what man receives through his intelligence when he directs it to the supersensible and applies it to investigate the causes of things. The various attitudes which man can then assume are expressed in the several figures. No doubt Raphael introduced the traditional figures of ancient philosophers, as, indeed, he always tried to make use of this or that tradition. But that is not his real point; the point was to contrast the supersensible Inspiration, the descent of the super-sensible as an inspiration to man, on the one hand; and on the other hand the attainment of a knowledge of the world of causes through the intelligence of man directed to the Supersensible. In this sense, the two central figures are to be understood as follows: On the one hand we have a man still in the younger years of life, a man with less experience of life, who speaks more as a man who looks around him on the Earth, there to perceive the causes of things. Beside him is the old, old. man who has assimilated very much in life, and knows how to apply what he has seen on Earth to heavenly things. And then there are the other figures who, partly by meditation, partly by arithmetical, geometrical or other exercises, or by the study and interpretation of the Gospels and the sacred writings, seek to discover the causes of things by applying their human intellect. I have already spoken of these things and I believe that Lecture, too, has been made accessible. I think if we take the contrast of the two pictures in this way, we shall not be misled into nonsensical speculations as to whether this one is Pythagoras or the other Plato or Aristotle—which speculations are at all events beside the mark and inartistic. Much ingenuity has been applied in deciphering the several figures: Nothing could be more superfluous in relation to these pictures. Rather should we study to observe the wonderful varieties expressed in the search for all that is attainable by the intelligence of man.

You may also compare the two pictures. In this present picture the whole thing is placed in an architectural setting, whereas in the other, the “Disputa,” the wide World is the setting. It is the difference between Inspiration whose house is the great universal edifice and the quest of the human intelligence which, as you see it here, goes on in an enclosed and human space.

We come to what is attainable in the human sphere, without the latter being influenced out of the supersensible.

This is like a commentary to the Disputa—the knowledge of the Divine Mysteries represented in a more allegorical figure, and leading on to the Disputa.

Here we have a picture taken from the whole complex which Raphael did for Pope Julius II in order to inspire the idea that Christianity must gain the victory and all that resists it must be overcome.

This is only another aspect of the same idea.

Also belonging to the same group.

Raphael's Sibyls. If you remember those of Michelangelo, you will observe the immense difference. In the Sibyls of Raphael—I beg you to see it for yourselves—human figures are portrayed, to represent beings standing within the cosmos,—Beings into whom the whole cosmos is working. They themselves are dreaming, as it were, within the cosmos as a very part of it and have not fully come to consciousness. The various supersensible Beings, angelic figures between them, bring them the secrets of the worlds. Thus they are dreamy Beings, living within the universal nexus. Michelangelo, on the other hand, portrays the human and individual in all that his Sibyls are dreaming, or evolving out of their dream-consciousness. Michelangelo has to create out of the individual, nay, we may even say, the personal character of each one. These Sibyls of Raphael, on the other hand, live and move and have their being over and above the individual. Even inasmuch as they are individual, they live and move in a cosmic life.

In this room we have the picture of the Transfiguration. (No picture of room available)

Here is the picture itself. It is even possible that Raphael himself did not complete it, but left it unfinished at his death. Christ is soaring heavenward.

To those who say that Raphael in his latest period painted visionary pictures, we need only reply by pointing to this figure (the figure of the boy). It is portrayed in a perfectly real, Occultly realistic sense, how the figure makes it possible for the scene to become visible to the others. Through what I would call the mediumistic nature of the unconsciousness of madness, this figure influences the others, enabling them to behold such a thing as this.

Here we have the figure of the Christ.

And now, my dear friends, think of all that Raphael had painted. All that has passed before you was contained between his twenty-first and his thirty-seventh year, in which he died. In his twenty-first year he painted the first picture which we showed—the Marriage of the Virgin—contrasting it with Perugino's painting. Hermann Grimm worked out in a beautiful way something that bears eloquent witness to Raphael's free and independent evolution, proving even outwardly to some extent what I just said before. Raphael, although he was carried on the waves of time, and learnt, of course, very much from the world, nevertheless took with him into Rome the peculiar nature of that Middle-Eastern part of Italy. In spite of his youth, he created out of his own inmost nature and progressed undisturbed, with perfect regularity in his evolution. Hermann Grimm pointed out that we come to the chief culminating points in Raphael's creative work if, starting from his twenty-first year, we go forward in successive periods of four years. From his twenty-first year we have his Sposalizio; four years later the Entombment, which we have not shown today—an exceedingly characteristic picture, which, especially when we take into account the related sketches and everything connected with it, expresses a certain climax in the work of Raphael. And then, once more, four years later, we have a climax of creative work in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican. Progressing thus by stages of four years, we see how Raphael undergoes his evolution. He stands there in the world with absolute individuality, obeying an impulse connected only with his incarnation, which impulse he steadily unfolds and places into the world something that takes its course with perfect regularity, like the evolution of mankind.

And now consider these three figures all together,—standing out as a summit in the life of Art, in the evolution of mankind. It lies in the deep tragedy of human evolution that this supreme attainment is connected with a succession of Popes—Alexander VI, Borgia, Julius II, Leo X,—men who occupy the first position as regards their artistic aims and who were called upon to play their part in human evolution as rulers in high places. And yet they were of such a character as to take with them into these high places the worst extremes which even that age could nroduce by way of murder, misrepresentation, cruelty and poison. And yet, undoubtedly—down to the Medici, who always retained their mercantile spirit,—they were sincere and in earnest where Art was concerned. Julius II was an extraordinary man, inclined to every kind of cruelty, never scrupling to use misrepresentation and even poison as though it were, in a world-historic sense, the best of homely remedies. Yet it was rightly said of this man that he never made a promise that he did not keep. And to the artists, above all, he kept his promise to a high degree; nor did he ever bind or fetter them, so long as they were able to render him the services which he desired, in the work which he intended.

Consider, alongside of this succession of Popes, the great men who created these works—the three great characters who have passed before our souls today. Think how in the one, in Leonardo, there lived much that has not yet been developed further, even today. Think how there lived in Michelangelo the whole great tragedy of his own time, and of his fatherland, both in the narrower and in the wider sense. Think how there lived in Raphael the power to transcend his Age. For while he was most intensely receptive to all the world around that carried him as on the waves of time, nevertheless, he was a self-contained nature. Consider, moreover, how neither Leonardo nor Michelangelo could carry into their time that which could work upon it fully. Michelangelo wrestled to bring forth, to express out of the human individuality itself all that was contained in his time; and yet, after all, he never created anything which the age was fully able to receive. Still less could Leonardo do so, for Leonardo bore within his soul far greater things than his Age could realise. And as to Raphael—he unfolded a human nature which remained for ever young. He was predestined, as it were, by providential guidance to evolve such youthfulness with an intensity which could never grow old. For, in effect, the time itself, into which all that came forth from his inner impulses was born, first had to grow young. Only now there comes the time when men will begin to understand less and less of Raphael. For the time has grown older than that which Raphael could give to it.

In conclusion, we will show a few of Raphael's portraits.

These, then, are the two Popes who were his patrons.

We have come to the end of our pictures.

In the near future, following on the tree great masters of the Renaissance, we shall speak of Holbein, Durer, and the other masters—the parallel phenomena of these developments in Southern Europe.

Today I wanted especially to bring before our souls these three masters of the Renaissance. I have tried to describe a little of what was living in them, and of their stimulus if, starting from any point of their work, you dwell on the historic factors which influenced and entered into them. You will perceive the necessary tragedy of human history, which has to live itself out in one-sidedness. We can learn much for our judgment of all historic things, if we study how the world-historic process played into that Florentine Age whose greatness is identified with Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo. Today especially I fancy no one will regret the time he spends in dwelling on a historic moment like the year 1505, when Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael were at the same time in Florence—Raphael still as a younger man, learning from the others; and the other two vying with one another, painting battle-pieces, glorifying the deeds that belonged to political history. Especially at the present moment, anyone who has vision for the facts of history in all its domains, and sees the significance of outward political events for the spiritual life, will profit greatly by the study of that time. Consider what was working then:—how the artistic life sought and found its place in the midst of the outer events, and how through these artistic and external events of the time, the greatest impulses of human evolution found their way. See how intimately there were interwoven human brutality and high-mindedness, human tyranny and striving towards freedom. If you let these things work upon you from whatever aspect, you will not regret the loss of time, for you will learn a great deal even for your judgment of this present moment. Above all, you will have cause to rid yourself of the belief that the greatest words necessarily signify that the greatest ideas are behind them, or that those who in our days are speaking most of freedom have any understanding at all of what freedom is. In other directions, too, much can be gained for the sharpening of our judgment in this present time, by studying the events which took place in Florence at the beginning of the 16th century, while under the immediate impression of Savonarola who had just been put to death. We see that Florence in the midst of Italy, at a time when Christianity had assumed a form whereby it slid over on the one hand into the realm of Art, while on the other hand the moral feelings of mankind made vigorous protest against it, was a form fundamentally different from that of Jesuitism which found its way into the political and religious stream immediately afterwards, and played so great a part in the politics of the succeeding centuries down to our day.

Of course, it is not proper at this moment to say any more about these things. Perhaps, however, some of you will guess for yourselves, if you dwell upon the chapter of human evolution whose artistic expression we have today let work upon our

The evolution of Art in Middle Europe up to the time when Dürer and Holbein entered this stream of evolution is one of the most complex problems in the history of Art. Especially in Dürer's case—to speak of all the elements that culminate in him, we have to deal with a whole series of interpenetrating impulses. Another difficult problem is the relation of this artistic evolution to that other one, the culmination of which we considered a short while ago: the Italian Renaissance, the great masters of Italy.

Needless to say, we can do no more than emphasise a few salient points. To understand what is really important in the evolution of this European Art, we must realise, above all, the existence of a peculiar talent, a peculiar activity of fancy, of imagination which had its mainsprings in Middle Europe. I mean that Central Europe which we may conceive extending approximately from Saxony to Thuringia, to the sea, to the Atlantic Ocean. Peculiar impulses of artistic fancy or imagination proceed from this region of Middle Europe. As impulses of fancy they go back into very olden times. In a certain way they were undoubtedly at work even at the time of the first spread of Christianity in the more Southern regions. These Northern impulses of the imagination stand in clear contrast to those of a specifically Southern nature. The difference is not easy to characterise, but we may describe it somehow thus: the Southern impulses of imagination are rooted in a certain power of perception for the quiet form, the form at rest, inasmuch as form, and color too, spring forth from deeper manifestations which lie hidden, in a certain sense, behind what is directly, physically perceptible. Accordingly, whatsoever the Southern imagination seeks to reproduce in Art, it tends rather to raise it above the level of the individual. It tends to raise the Individual into the Typical, the Universal, into a realm where the more special, earthly and human qualities will melt away. It is a striving to reveal how something that lies beneath the outer objects works into their forms and colors. This impulse of imagination also evolves a certain tendency to come to rest in the well balanced composition—placing the figures side by side in certain mutual relationships—a power of composition which, as you know, reaches its highest eminence in Raphael.

The Mid-European impulse of artistic fancy is of a very different kind. Tracing it back into the oldest time, we find that to begin with it makes no immediate effort to take hold of the form as such, or to achieve a restfulness of composition. Its interest is in the quick event which it portrays; it seeks to express what comes from the soul's impulses, to portray how the living Will of man expresses itself in gesture and in movement—not so much in the well-measured Form that is appropriate to human nature, but in the gesture in which the soul itself is living, in which it seeks to find expression itself as in its own sign or token. Such is the Northern impulse of artistic fancy. He who is sensitive to these things will always feel through it the working of ancient runes, where twigs or treetrunks or the like were thrown together, to express something through their positions as they fell. The sign or token, and the inner life which it contains underlies this kind of imagination, which is able, therefore, to unite itself far more with the individual expression of the soul's life; with all that springs directly from the Will-impulse of the soul. Little is left to us of what was there in olden times,—I do not mean so much as finished works of Art but as ideas of human life and cosmic processes. All this was exterminated root and branch with the spread of Christianity. Little is left of what wls contained in the old Paganism. Once more, I do not mean perfect works of plastic Art—nor will I say symbolical—but rather sign-like representations of their ideas about the world and life. If more of these things had been preserved, even the outer world would feel how the essential thing in the Northern Art is this imagination working more from within outward—from the impulses of Will and not contemplative vision. This imagination, working forth from the impulse of the Will, must be regs.rded as the fundamental note in all the cultural life that spread from the North towards the South. And, I may say, more than is generally realised, spread out in this direction. The time will come when men will see and unravel how much of these Northern impulses lies hidden, above all, in the art of the Renaissance. It is hard to recognise in the finished and extant works of Art, whether of the North, or of the South, or Spain, the true nature of the impulses that they contain. For these impulses flowed together from many quarters. Consider, for instance, all that is living in the famous “Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan. Compare it with the earlier pictures of the Last Supper which were derived more purely from the Southern spirit. See what dramatic life and movement he has expressed in the relations of the several figures, see the individual characters of soul which shine out of these faces. Then you will realise, working in all this, a Northern impulse that spread mysteriously towards the South. Something is here poured out, needless to say, poured out into the purely Southern imagination—albeit correspondingly toned down—which we observe again in quite another sphere in Shakespeare. For Shakespeare's figures are certainly born out of the Northern Spirit. They always express the individual human being himself, they no longer contain what comes, as it were, out of the Supersensible, using the human figure and human action like a mere instrument for its expression.

But we may go still further, my dear friends. Strange though it may sould today, if we observe Michelangelo's wonderful foreshortenings in the Sistine Chapel we cannot but realise, even in this element of movement, an impulse coming from the North. These impulses were but submerged and overlaid by Southern ones. We can see a special instance of this process in Raphael, whose imagination, growing up amid the loneliness of the Umbrian Hills, had remained, after all, more or less purely Southern. All that Raphael observed in Leonardo, in Michelangelo—influenced as they were by Northern impulses—all this he took and rounded off and ‘classicised’ if I may put it so, into his marvellous composition.

These are a few bare indications of profound problems, which if we cannot master we do not understand the medieval Art at all. For the same reason, more than elsewhere we find in the oldest extant medieval Art the expression of the word itself in signs quite naturally wedded with the plastic arts. The artistic elaboration of letters into exquisitely printed miniatures, in the biblical works created in Europe at that time, give us a feeling of something absolutely natural. In the oldest period of Christian culture we find the monks—all of whom undoubtedly absorbed Mid-European impulses—decorating their litanies and other books in this way, causing the letters, as it were, to blossom forth into miniature paintings. This was no mere external habit. It sprang straight from the feeling of an inner connection between sign and picture. The sign or token wedged its way into pictorial description, as it were. Now the ‘sign’, once again, is a direct expression of the human Will, the human life of soul. Here, therefore, we have the natural transition from that which seeks expression in sentences and words to that which flows into the painted miniature or into the sculptured ivories with which they decorate the covers of their books. Truly, in all these things there blossomed forth something that was afterwards no longer there for Mid-European Art. In every case these miniatures reveal a creation with inner life and impulse of the soul, combined with a certain naivete, a certain uncouth simplicity in respect to what the South could reproduce with such abundant skill; I mean, what lives in the Form itself, in the Form that belongs to the pure human nature before the movement and mobility expressing the individual life of the soul, works from within and pours itself into the nature of these forms. Take any of these miniatures in the old Bibles. Again and again you will see it is the artist's impulse to express, albeit through the traditional biblical figures, what he himself may have experienced in soul. A guilty conscience, for example—all such experiences of the soul are expressed magnificently in the older Mid-European miniature painting. This, as I said, is combined with great uncouthness in point of Form; I mean that human form to which man himself, through his own individuality, does not contribute, but in which the Divine and spiritual being that underlies all Nature is revealed.

Now the impulse which I have just characterised rayed out again and again from Middle Europe, and as it did so it lost itself in what was raying outward meantime from the South. It lost itself, for instance, in the spread of Christianity and Romanism. Moreover, that which rayed out from Middle Europe was fertilised in turn from the South. All that was gained from the South by way of mastery of Form and of Color, too, inasmuch as it manifests the underlying spirituality of nature, all this entered into the flower of the Northern impulse. Thus did the several impulses grow into one another, layer upon layer, interweaving.

Evolution, therefore, did not take place continuously but more or less by sudden starts. Again and again we feel impelled to ask: What would have evolved if, instead of these sudden impacts, there had been a continuous process of evolution? We have the following feeling, for example (though, needless to say, these are mere hypotheses); What would have been the outcome if that which was contained, during the early Carolingean and Ottonian periods, in the miniatures and sculptured ivories above described, had been enabled to evolve straightforwardly to a great Art? What actually took place was very different; the Romanesque and Classical carried forward on the advancing wave of Christianity, poured itself out into all this, bringing with it in architecture and in sculpture, the impulse of Form which we described just now—the Southern impulse. Then were the Northern impulse of movement and expression, and the Southern of form and color wedded to one another (though when I speak of color in the Southern impulse I must qualify once more:—Color as the manifestation of the underlying Spiritual that is expressed in Nature, not of the individual).

But there was yet another thing. We may say that with the decline of the Ottonian period the first Northern impulse came to an end. The classical and Romanesque grew into it, spreading into the tributary valleys of the Rhone and Rhine. Into these regions especially, but further afield as well, a Classical impulse found its way. The two impulses coalesced and attained their height towards the 12th and 13th centuries. Then from the West emerged another impulse, which had been preparing in the meantime. Once more, then, the impulse of contemplative Vision—the Southern impulse, properly speaking,—was wedded in mid-European Art with that impulse of movement which, as I described just now, sprang essentially from the element of Will. But meanwhile in the West a different impulse was preparing, and grew into the union of the other two, till from the 12th and 13th centuries it was completely interwoven with the united impulse which I characterised just now, raying outward from the basins of the Rhone and the Rhine. This other impulse, prepared in the West, also resulted from the flowing together of two distinct impulses. It appears in the sublime forms of the Gothic. Truly, in Gothic Art once more two impulses have come together. The one is carried thither from the North. It contains, if I may describe it so, a practicality of life, a cleverness in skill and understanding, a certain realism. It comes to Europe on the Norman waves of culture. The other impulse comes from Spain, and more especially from Southern France. Thus we have coming from the North an element of intelligence, utility and realism (but we must not confuse this with the later realism; this early realism sought to understand the Universe, the Cosmos, and wanted to see all earthly things in their connection with the heavenly). From the South, on the other hand, and concentrated most of all in Southern France, there came what we may describe as the mystical element, striving upward from the earthly realm and reaching up to Heaven. Hence the peculiar nature of the Gothic, for these two elements have grown together in it, a mystical element and an intellectual. No one will understand the Gothic who cannot see in it on the one hand this mystical element which, concentrated in the South of France, grew especially in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. It brings into the Gothic Art that mysterious quality of striving upward from below, while united with it, on the other hand, there is an element of cool intelligence and craftsmanship, which is never absent from the Gothic. The sublime upward striving of the Gothic forms is mystical; their interlacings, and ingenious relationships come from another quarter, adding to the mystical element the height of craftsmanship.

Thus in the Gothic the one side and the other are peculiarly united. These impulses which poured themselves into the Gothic flowed over again from the West, notably in the 12th and 13th centuries, to permeate once more the artistic creation of Mid-Europe.

But we must bear in mind another thing in this connection. It is true that in the natural course of civilisation there was always a tendency for things to interweave with one another, layer upon layer; for every impulse always tends to spread. The Classical element of Form is interwoven, for example, in the works proceeding from the Gothic. But this is only the one tendency. In Middle Europe there always remained a certain impulse of revolt which is especially to be observed in Art. Again and again, this impulse tends to bring out a strong element of Will and Movement and expression. Thus, after all, that which flows inward, both from the South and West, is ever and again more or less repelled, pushed back again. In Middle Europe they felt the Classical and in later times even the Gothic as a foreign element.

What is it, essentially, that they feel as a foreign element? It is that which in any way tends to blot out the individuality. They feel in the Roman and Classical something that is hostile to the individual. Nay, in later times they even feel in the Gothic an element beneath which the individual must groan and soffocate. In the artistic life especially, there is in Middle Europe the mood which afterwards finds expression in another sphere, in the Reformation,—a mood already voiced by spirits such as Tauler or Valentin Weigel. Perceiving how the Gothic and the Classical wedged their way into the Mid-European principle and completely overwhelmed it, we must say that in the centuries before Dürer, the Mid-European principle as such, in its own impulses, failed and fell and was unable to come forth, being overwhelmed by the other. Yet it lived on; in thoughts and feelings it was always present. It is the same element which speaks so eloquently out of the subsequent conceptions of Nature, seeking to unite with bold intelligence Heaven and Earth—seeking to comprehend all other things by laws discovered also on the Earth.

But in the heart of it all something quite different is holding sway; it comes to expression very beautifully in the words of Goethe's Faust. Imagine Faust in his study, which we may naturally conceive in Gothic forms. He has studied all that we might describe as Romanism and Classicism, Over against it all he sets the human individuality—the self-supporting individuality of man. Yet how does he contrast it? To understand how Faust opposes the human individuality to all these things in the midst of which he finds himself, we must realise that to this day there thrives almost unnoticed, in Middle Europe, something that unites this country most wonderfully with the East. When today we read or hear of the part that was played in the primeval Persian culture by light and darkness—Ormuzd and Ahriman—we take these things too abstractly. We fail to realise how the men of earlier ages stood in the midst of real and concrete forces. Real light, real darkness, in their mutual interplay, were a direct real experience to the men of former days; and this experience stood nearer to the impulse of Movement and enpression than to the Southern one of Form and composition, where things are placed in quiet balance side by side.

In the creative weaving of the World, light and darkness weave together. Influences of light and dark ray out upon all that lives and moves on Earth, as man and animal. Through light and shade, and through their mutual enhancement to the world of color, we feel the connection between the inner expression of the soul of man that flows into his movements, and something Heavenly and Spiritual which lies far nearer to this human impulse of movement than anything the Southern Art is able to express. Man walks along, man turns his head. With every step, with every turning of the head, new impulses of light and shade appear. When we study this connection between light and movement we enter into something which, as it were, links earthly Nature with the elemental. In this interplay of elemental with earthly Nature the man of Middle Europe lived with a special intensity whenever he could rise to creative fancy. Hence, though the fact has scarcely been observed as yet, color arises very differently in Middle Europe than it does in the South. Color, in the Southern Art, is color driven outward from the inner nature of the being to the surface. That which arises from the artistic imagination of Mid-Europe is cast on to the surface by the interplay of light and darkness; it is color playing over the surface of things. Many things as yet imperfectly realised will only be understood when we perceive this difference in coloring; when we perceive how on the one hand the color is cast on the object and plays over its surface, while on the other hand it surges from within the object to the surface. The latter is the Southern Art of color. Color in Mid-European art is color cast on to the surface, springing from the interplay of light and shade, glistening forth out of the weaving and willing of the light and darkness. As all these things interpenetrate, layer upon layer, the several impulses are not so easily perceived; yet they decidedly exist.

This impulse in Mid-Europe is connected in its turn with what I would call the magical element which we find in the old Persian civilisation. For the interplay of light and shade—light and darkness—is deeply connected with the ancient Persian wisdom of the Magi. Here we have the mysterious manifestations of the life of soul and spirit, as it works at the same time in man himself and in the elemental weaving of the light and shade that play around the human being. It is as though his inner being entered into a hidden relationship with the light and shade that play around him, and with the glistening life of color that springs from light and darkness. This is a thing that lies forever in the element of Will; it brings the quality of magic into connection with the feelings of the soul. And man himself, through this, comes into relation with the elemental beings—those beings who, to begin with, manifest themselves within the elements. Therefore Faust, having turned away from all the philosophic, medical, legal and theosophical studies coming to him from the South, gives himself up to magic. But in doing so he must stand firm and secure within himself. He must not be afraid of all the influences in the midst of which a man is placed when he would stand firm on his own personality alone. He must have no fear of Hell or of the Devil, he must march firmly on through light and darkness. Think how beautiful this feature is: Faust himself working and weaving in the wondrous twilight of the morning! Think how the play of light and darkness enters the famous monologue of Goethe's Faust. It is a wonderful artistic inspiration, intimately connected with the Mid-European impulse. It is equally a poem or a painting, out of the very depths of the Mid-European principle.

Here, again, we have a connection between Man and the naturalistic life and being of the Elements. This is a trait that also played its part in Mid-European conception of the Christian tradition coming upwards from the South. Like a perpetual rebellion, this element wedges itself in; this element by which Mid-Europe is akin to Asia, to an ancient Asiatic civilisation.

All these different influences play into one another; and now into the midst of all this evolution, Albrecht Dürer, an absolutely unique figure in the history of Art, comes upon the scene. Born in 1471, he died in 1526.

I have studied Dürer again and again, as an individual figure, it is true, but placed as he is in the whole context of Mid-European culture, I could never understand him in any other way. Through the infinite and countless channels whereby the unconscious life of the human soul is connected with the life and civilisation around him, Dürer is related to his environment.

We see him at an early age in his portrait of the Jungfer Furlegerie (above) bringing out the light and shade of the figure, modelling this most wonderfully. Here we already recognise the working of the impulse I described just nau. Here and throughout his life, Dürer is particularly great in expressing what arises from the above-described experience and sympathy of man with elemental Nature. He brings this element into all that he absorbs from biblical tradition. At the same time, he has great difficulty in adapting himself to the Southern element. We might say, it is a right sour task for him. How different in Leonardo's case: It seems perfectly natural to Leonardo to take up the study of anatomy and physiology, and so receive into his faculty of outward vision uhat was formerly given to a more occult sensitiveness, as I explained in the last lecture. For Dürer it is a sour task—this study of anatomy, this studious mastery of the forms in which the Divine and spiritual, transcending the individual human being, comes to expression in the human figure. It does not come natural to him to make these studied forms his min, so as to re-create the human figure, as it were, after the pattern first created by God. That is not Dürer's way. His way is rather this: to trace in all existing things the inner movement, the impulse of Will; to follow up uhat brings the human nature into direct connection with all things moving in the outer world,—with light and shade and all that lives therein. This is Dürer's kingdom. Hence he always creates out of the element of movement, whereto his oun original artistic fancy is directed.

Is it not perfectly natural for the everyday, workaday things of human life to have found their vay into the evolution of these impulses? An Art which mainly seeks to express the Divine that works in man, the Universal type that transcends the human individual,—such an Art will of its own inherent impulses be less inclined to portray uhat in the everyday life of man stamps itself upon his form and figure,—from his everyday calling, from the familiar experiences of his life. In the Mid-European Art, on the other hand, this element plays a great part, and in this respect a special impulse proceeded from the districts which we now call the Netherlands. Thence came the practical impulse, if I may call it so, permeating the artistic imagination with all that is stamped upon the human being by the familiar reality of earthly things, so that in his gestures, nay, his form and mien and physiognomy, he grow, together pith this earthly kingdom.

Such impulses flowed together in Mid-Europe, in ways most manifold; and only as we disentangle them (Which would require, of course, far more than these few abstract sketches), do we come to true understanding of what is characteristic in Mid-European Art. We shall still have to bring out many a single point; for these things cannot all be said, we can but hint at them.

We will now begin with the period when the Classical impulse grew together with the Mid-European. We shall see some of the sculptured figures in the Cathedral at Naumburg in Germany, representing individual human beings of that time.

Especially in these sculptured works, you see most beautifully combined on the one hand, the perfect striving for expressiveness of soul, and on the other hand the relatively perfect mastery of form which they had absorbed by this time from the South. You will see this especially in these sculptures of the Cathedral at Naumburg, belonging to the thirteenth century. At that time the Mid-European feeling had grown together in Mid-Europe with the power of form which they received from the Classical. While on the other hand, the same Mid-European feeling blossomed forth in the creations of Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eichenbach. Remembering that this was the time which brought to the surface these great poets, we shall have before us a clearer picture of the stream of civilisation which was then flowing over Central Europe.

Wonderfully, in this work, you see the life of the soul poured out into the facial expression.

Intensely individual expressiveness of soul, not in the least immersed in any Universal type, is here united with a high technique of Form—a faculty which, as I said, they had received from the South.

We will now turn to works derived more out of the Gothic thinking. We will show some sculptures from the Cathedral at Strassburg.

These figures are far more adapted to the surrounding architecture than the ones we saw just now. The expression is still most decidedly determined from within, but the forming of the figures is also called forth by the surrounding architecture. We observe this feature even more if we go further West.

It is characteristic of that time to represent the Church as the power that overcometh. Again and again you will find these motifs of conquered demons or the like.

The Church is represented in the figure of this woman.

Please impress upon your minds not only the head with its peculiar expression, but the whole gesture of the figure. We will show the Church once more so that you may compare and see the wonderful contrast of the soul's life expressed in the two figures, Synagogue and Church.

As a further instance of the working-together of Southern and Mid-European impulses, we will now give some examples of the School of Cologne. The Cologne Master of uncertain identity, often known as the Master Wilhelm, combines great delicacy of form and line with tender intimacy of expression, as you will see in the following:

Observe, too, the lower figures, see how the forms are created out of movement and gesture. The following well-known picture of the Virgin in the Cologne Museum is by the same Master.

I beg you to observe, in all the following pictures, how these Masters love to express the life of the soul, not only in facial expression and in gesture, but especially in the whole forming of the hands. That epoch, more than any other, was working at the perfection of the hands, in relation to the inner life. I mention this especially because it is brought to a great height in Dürer who with the greatest joy portrays all that the soul can bring to expression in the hands.

In this Cologne Master, we truly see a pure permeation of the Southern element of Form with Mid-European expressiveness of the soul. We will now go on to the Master who came from Constance to Cologne, in whom the element of expression rebels once more against the element of Form, albeit this later Master learnt very much from his predecessor—from the creator of the last two pictures.

I refer, of course, to Stephen Lochner, who, deeply rooted as he is in the Art of expression, if I may say so, adapts himself with a certain revolutionary opposition to what he learns in Cologne from the former Master and his pupils.

Here, then, ye have the works of Stephen Lochner following on those we showed just now. However closely he adapts himself to them, we see in him a new beginning—once more, a fresh creation from within. He came to Cologne in 1420. He who became more or less his teacher there—the Master of the “Veronica” and of the “Madonna of the Sweet Pea”—had died about 1410. In 1420 Stephen Lochner came to Cologne.

A wonderful picture by Stephen Lochner: Mary in a bower of roses. Observe the immense mobility of the figures and the attempt to bring movement into the picture as a whole. We can only reproduce it in light and shade; far more is expressed in the coloring. See the mobility that comes into the picture by the spread veil, out of which God the Father looks down on the Madonna and the Child. See how every angel does his task,—what movement this brings into the whole picture. The picture grows into a composition born out of the very movement. In the Southern impulse you have composition born of restfulness; movement comes into it only when the Northern impulse is added. Here, in this work of Stephen Lochner's, everything is inner movement from the outset.

We will now show some examples of the work of another Master—one who received strong impulses from Flanders, from the West. The Western impulses are clearly visible in him. I refer to Martin Schongauer, who lived from 1420 to 1490. Here you will see the same artistic tendency, combined, however, with the Western impulse from Flanders.

You see how this brings in a far more realistic element.

This essentially visionary picture is conceived most realistically and with great individuality. It is, indeed, an extraordinarily true Imagination which enables the artist to embody in such realistic figures the human passions, the content of a temptation. Side by side with the human figure he places that which lives as a reality in the astral body when temptation comes upon us.

Here, again, you have a temptation of Saint Anthony. This one, however, is by Grünewald, who lived from 1470 to 1529. In Grünewald you will admire more or less the culminating point of all that flowed together in the preceding efforts. Real individual expression is combined with great technical power. Grünewald, in many respects, is far more influenced by the Southern imagination than Schongauer. It is most interesting to compare the two “Temptations,” Their subject is the sable. We might even conceiyg,them as the Temptation which came to him on the one day in the former picture, and that which comes on the following day in this one The point is not the detailed subject but the artistic treatment as such which shows, undoubtedly, a higher perfection in this artist than in the forMer.

This is the central picture in the famous Isenhaimer Altar, now at Colmar. Observe, to the very smallest detail, how the characterisation always flows from the expression. Even the little animal down here partakes in the whole action. Study the flowing of the soul into the hands.

One wing of the Isenheimer Altar. Another temptation of St. Anthony, also by Matthias Grünewald.

This is the other wing of the same Altar:

Next is the Predella of the Isenheimer Altar. The representation of character in these works of Art is perfect in its kind.

Also a part of the same Altar-piece.

This, then, is Master Grünewald who represents in a certain respect the very summit of what we have seen coming over, evolving more and more, from the thirteenth century into the fifteenth, and on into the sixteenth.

We will now pass on to a different element, where with comparatively less technical ability (for in these last pictures the technical ability is very great) we find a nee effort to express what I called just now the “rebellion” in individual characterisation. We will pass on to Lucas Cranach, who, though with far less ability, brings out the expressiveness and inner life of the soul with revolutionary impulse. He shows how the soul finds outward expression even in the everyday, workaday life of man. In Lucas Cranach this impulse is especially active.

Here you have the purest Reformation mood, although it is a Madonna,—it is the mood of the Reformation through and through. To a high degree, the human element outweighs all other considerations. Look at the figures, both of Mother and Child, and you will see that this is so.

An individual human being is painted here to show how he reveres the Christ. A personality with both feet on the ground, he expresses as a deliberate Will-impulse of the soul the reverence he feels for the Christ. The whole conception shows how this very soul comes to expression in the human feeling. The man's identity is known, it is Albrecht von Brandenburg.

We now come to the most eminently mediaeval artist, Albrecht Dürer.

More in the period of his youth.

Study once more the hand; observe how the very hair is arranged to bring out the effects of light and darkness.

Here you have Dürer's Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit. The conception is truly born out of the whole spirit of the age—a conception reaching far beyond all thought, and yet in some way it was mastered by that time. The conception is here worked out in Dürer's way, with his wonderful drawing. Study it carefully, and you will see how everywhere, even in his drawing, he is aiming at the light and shade, and arranges the composition accordingly.

For a definite reason we will now once more show Raphael's famous picture known as ‘Disputa,’ which is familiar to you all.

You know what is characterised in this picture: Below, the College of Theologians engaged in the study of the truths of Theology; and there bursts into this gathering the Revelation of the Trinity; Father, Son and Spirit. !le see three stages, as it were: the Spiritual Beings rising ever higher,—those who have passed through the Gate of Death, those who are never incarnated. We see the composition of the figures down below arranged quite in the Southern way; the fundamental conception of the picture is expressed in a restful composition, the various figures balanced side by side; the very movement flows into this state of rest. Now let us return again to Dürer's ‘Holy Trinity,’ painted almost at the same time as this.

Compare this composition with the other. Once more you have three stages, but the composition here arises out of movement. It is wonderfully contrasted with the other, the Southern composition created almost simultaneously with this. The picture is in Vienna, the coloring is very beautiful. It is quite untrue to suggest that in creating this composition Dürer was influenced in any way by anything he had received from the South. On the contrary, the Southern painters can frequently be shown to have been influenced by Northern compositions—if not by Dürer's own. Indeed, in one instance it can be historically proved:—

For his Crucifixion (undoubtedly a later picture), Raphael had Dürer's drawings before him. Needless to say, we make no such assertion in this case; but the idea that Dürer himself was influenced must be rejected. The motif lay in the whole spirit of the time; it existed in the widest circles, and this work of Dürer's is thoroughly a product of the Mid-European impulse.

Here we see Dürer, too, as a master in characterisation. The picture represents Jesus among the Doctors of the Law, but needless to say, the heads of the characters are surch as the artist saw around him in his own environment.

This is the famous picture of the four Apostles. The excellence of the picture lies in the sharp characterisation of the difference of the four Apostles, in temperament and character.

This is the center-piece of the ‘Paumgartner altar.’

I have inserted this picture because it shows Dürer's conception of movement,—movement proceeding directly out of the human being.

This is the famous picture of the Christian knight, or, as it is often called: ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel,’—the Knight, Death and the Devil. Observe how entirely this picture is a product out of the age. Compare it with the passage from ‘Faust’ to which I just now referred.

“Tis true, I am shrewder than all your dull tribe, Magister, doctor, priest, parson and scribe; Scruple or doubt comes not to enthral me, Neither can devil nor hell now appal me.”

There you have the character who will fear neither Death nor the Devil, but go his way straight forward through the world. So, indeed, he must be represented—the Christian knight who has revolted thoroghly against all the doctors, masters, scribes and priests that have encumbered him. He has to go his way through the world alone, fearing neither Death nor the Devil that stand across his path. He leaves them on one side, and perseveres on his way. ‘The Christian Knight’ this picture should be called. Death and the Devil stand in the way; he marches over them, passes them by unfalteringly. The same mood of the time, out of which the monologue in Goethe's "Faust" is consciously created, comes to expression in this picture by Dürer.

Look at this thoroughly medieval room. The composition is born purely out of the light and darkness, and it is consciously intended so. Look at the light that floods the room. Placed into the light, there is the dog asleep, getting least light of all, more or less in the shade. Then the lion, as it were, a creature of more [?ill; he seems to be dreaming, and there is much light on his face. The contrast of the two animals is intentionally thus expressed in their relation to the light that falls upon them. And now contrast with these St. Jerome himself. On him the light is also falling, but at the same time he seems to ray it back again out of himself. Man and animal—saint and animal—are contrasted simply by being placed in the light. So, too, the skull. Dog and lion, saint and skull; the whole composition is ordered with respect to the light and shade.

It is like a very history of evolution, magnificently expressed by placing the different figures thus into the light. It is one of the greatest qualities in Dürer to bring out with such creative power mthe inherent force of composition that lies in the interplay of light with different objects and living creatures. Of course, the main figures do not alone make up the composition. But we must especially adraire in this picture the bringing out of the force of composition which lies inherent in the light and shade.

Of course, you must not take such a statement as beyond cavil, but this picture seems placed into the world for the express purpose of showing what Dürer intended in his treatment of light and shade, his power of composition out of light and darkness. As if to show what he intends, he puts together the angular body of the polyhedron and the round sphere. In the sphere he shows how light and darkness work together; he lets the light fall on the sphere in a quite peculiar way. Having studied the distribution of the light on the sphere, you may proceed to observe how the effects of light expressed in the folds of the garment correspond to those of the spherical surface. Dürer lets them fall in such a way as to express in the arrangement of the folds all that comes to expression by way of light and shade on the simple surface of the sphere. Now let us go on to the polyhedron, and compare this in turn. According to the angle of the surface, it is light, half-dark, quite dark, and brilliantly illumined. Then he sets down a being of more fleeting form, once more in order to portray the falling of the light upon the surfaces, even as he showed it in the polyhedron. So that in every place you have the question: What says the light to this object? What says the light to this being? You may compare the effect of light and shade in every case as in the Polyhedron and in the sphere. In this picture Dürer has created a work of immense educational value. You cannot do better than use this picture if you want to teach the art of shading. Up here, to the right of the bat that carries the word, ‘melancholia,’ he lets a source of light appear—something that is self-luminous, in contrast to the reflected light expressed on all the other surfaces.

(At this point some one interposed the question: Has the picture any deeper meaning?)

Why should this not be deep enough? Why look for any deeper meaning? If you only study the magical and mysterious qualities of light in space, you will find in this a far deeper meaning than if you set to work with symbolic and mysterious interpretations. Such interpretations lead us away from the true domain of Art. Even if deeper meanings can be seen in it—as, for instance, in the table of planetary figures on the right, and other things of that kind,—it is far better simply to associate these things with the character and setting of the time. It was natural in that age to put such things as these together. But we do better to remain within the sphere of Art than to look for symbols. I even think there is considerable humour in this picture, inasmuch as the title (somewhat amateurishly translated, I admit) may be intended to convey, as a more humorous suggestion, the words, ‘black colouring.’ What he really meant with the word ‘Melancholia’ was something like ‘black coloring.’ In a rather hidden way (though, as I said, this is a little amateurish) the word may well be held to designate ‘black coloring’ or ‘blackness.’ That, at any rate, is far more likely than that it was intended to express some profound symbol. Dürer was concerned with the artistic treatment—the plastic quality, the forming of the light. Please do not think there is no depth in this plastic treatment of the light; do not look out for artificial symbolical interpretations. Is not the world deep enough if it contains such light-effects as these? They, indeed, are far deeper than any mystical contents we might hunt for in this picture because it happens to be entitled ‘Melancholia.’

We now pass on to Holbein, an artist essentially different from Dürer. Born in Augsburg, he then lives in Basle, and afterwards loses himself—disappears, as it were,—in England. He is a realist in an especial sense. Even where he creates a composition, he carries his strong realism into the clement of portraiture. At the same time he strives to express what I referred to just now; the things of everyday in the life of the soul. I beg you to observe how the milieu, the calling, the whole environment in the midst of which a man is living, is stamped upon his soul and character. Holbein expresses this in a wellnigh extreme way; he seeks to draw it forth out of the soul, creating the whole human being out of the very time in which he lives.

Here, again, you have the same motive. An actual human being of the time (it is the Burgomaster of Basel, Herr Mayer, with his family) is shown worshipping the Madonna. This picture is in Darmstadt. There is a very good copy in Dresden, so good that for a long time it passed as a second version by Holbein himself. Here you will see the extreme realism of Holbein, whereas in Dürer there are those elements which we tried to characterise before—quite universal elements. I'm sorry we have no slides of Holbein's ‘Dance of Death.’ Perhaps we may show these another time, for Holbein is especially great in his treatment of the motif of Death:

In conclusion, I will show you something which, while not in direct connection with the other, belongs, nevertheless, to the same artistic context.

This sculpture of the Madonna, which is in Nuremburg, reveals to perfection what the Mid-European art could achieve in gesture and tenderness of feeling. It is by an unknown artist. You must imagine this Madonna, opposite her, perhaps, St. John, a great Cross with the Christ in the center; for this Madonna of Nuremberg belongs undoubtedly to a Crucifixion group. Here you have the very flower of German Art in the 16th century or perhaps a little later. Much of the tenderness in the Madonnas which we showed today will be found again in this one, especially in the unique posture.

We have tried to show you, my dear friends, all those things which, seen in the connection I have tried to indicate, bring out in clear relief the individuality of Dürer. One only learns fully to recognise Dürer when one considers him in connection with the time—his own time and the time before him. More than is generally imagined, there lives in Dürer the greatness of that impulse which led, in another sphere, to the assertion and rebellion that we associate with Faust. In Dürer, indeed, there lived, artistically speaking, a goodly piece of Faust.

You will get a real feeling of the time in which Dürer lived and out of which he was born, if you take such pictures as his ‘St. Jerome,’ his ‘Melancholia,’ and his ‘Christian Knight,’ and many another, and compare them with the mood that goes out from the first monologues of Goethe's Faust—which must, of course, be placed in the whole setting of the time, even as Goethe himself intended it. Nay, more, you could compare Dürer's ‘St. Jerome’ with certain actual pictures of Faust and you would find a real connecting link. When I spoke of Dürer's creating out of light and shade, I certainly did not mean it in a banal sense. Needless to say, anyone who wishes to imitate some fragment of reality can work out of the light and shade. This is one of the most characteristic features in Dürer, while on the other hand he also has in him the longing for individual characterisation which is so remarkably expressed in his ‘Heads of Apostles.’

We have thus tried to bring before you a few of the important points in the old Christian Art. On the next occasion we shall refer to some others which entered the main stream here or there. Then we shall see the whole in its totality.

Continuing our studies on the great works of Art, we will show some further slides today, supplementing those that were shown last week. Today I propose in the main to supplement what I endeavoured to explain last week, of the connections and contrasts between the Mid-European, or Northern, and the Southern Art. I tried to show how the specifically artistic quality is always influenced by the character of the South or of the North, while, on the other hand, there were continual interpenetrations of the Southern and Mid-European impulses, layer upon layer, as it were, so that it is by no means easy now to see how these things really worked together. Spiritual scientific investigations will in course of time have to bring more and more light into these matters.

Today I wish to draw attention to the contrasts from certain other points of view. You will remember what I emphasised last time. From underlying impulses of the Mid-European spiritual life, there arose what we may call the art of expression—expression of Will and Intelligence—the power to express the ever-mobile life of the soul. The soul in movement—that is the goal of the Mid-European impulse; while the Southern (which was, however, influenced at a very early stage by the Mid-European) looks more to all that enters our perceptions from the Divine-spiritual in the Cosmos, which finds expression in the power of composition, and in features which transcend the human.

It is a characteristic abuse of our time to consider Art—even the plastic Arts—far too much from the mere point of view of the narrative and subject matter, while appreciating far too little the specifically artistic qualities. At the same time there is another equally pernicious error. Art is very frequently severed nowadays from the general life of culture and civilisation, and treated as though it were something that lives a life apart. This, too, is wrong. For we need only have a feeling for the specifically artistic qualities, for all that works in form and colouring, in composition and the like—we need only wean ourselves of the tendency to explain everything symbolically, or in other artificial ways; we need but feel—before such pictures as Dürer's ‘St. Jerome,’ or ‘Melancholia,’ for example,—how infinitely deeper is the mysterious ebb and flow of the masses of light themselves, than any artificial symbolism we may choose to read into these pictures. Then we shall recognise that the specifically artistic qualities that come to expression in the great works of Art, are also living in the whole general life of civilisation. Out of the common feeling of his time the artist works into the spheres of form and color and expression. The time itself works through the soul of the artist. The whole culture of the age finds expression in the characteristic works of Art.

We saw last time how the Mid-European, or Northern element, works its way upwards more or less independently, while at the same time it grows together with all that is brought to it through the Church—through Christianity from the side of Rome. Until the 12th and 13th centuries we witness the development of a unique artistic life in Middle Europe, uniting the more Roman or Latin elements with a strongly individual characterisation of all that is life and movement in the human soul. We cannot understand what took place until the 12th and 13th centuries if we merely consider what we know of the spread of Christianity in the succeeding time. For the whole spread of Christianity was a very different thing in those earlier centuries from what it afterwards became. It was only in later times that the rigidly dogmatic qualities which so repel us, came into prominence, though, needless to say, there were all manner of excesses even before the twelfth century. And while in Middle Europe the systemmatising, formal tendency of Rome was always felt like a foreign body, still the Christian impulses found their way most wonderfully into the soul-life of the people—especially into the more subconscious, feeling elements of the soul.

This entry of Christianity into the soul found expression especially in the sphere of Art, where there was a wrestling for plastic power of expression.

Here we may point to a truth which can be characterised in two very simple statements which are, none the less, very far-reaching. We may ask this question: To what does Art appeal among the Southern peoples? To what did it appeal already in antiquity? And elsewhere in the South, in the period of its decline and in its resurrection from the early to the late Renaissance? To what does Art appeal in the more southern regions? It appeals to the fancy and imagination. This statement is of infinite importance. The appeal is to the life of the fancy and the imagination, which is present in the souls of the southern people with a slight, suggestion of a sanguine temperament in these respects. Thus in the southern regions we see the Christian ideas entering, above all, into the imaginative life, and borne by fancy into the realm of Art.

Needless to say, such a statement must not be pressed too far. I would say, the statement itself should be artistically understood.

Only so, my dear friends, could it come about that in the time of the Renaissance artistic fancy rose to such great heights of creation, while the moral life, as we showed in a recent lecture, fell to the state revealed in the attacks of Francis of Assisi, and later of Savonarola. The situation stands before us when we contrast the fiery attacks of Savonarola which were all in vain, with the infinitely rich life of Christian vision and imagination in the plastic works of Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and many others.

Art in the North speaks differently and appeals to a different element of soul, namely, to mind and feeling. Once more, these things must not be pressed; nevertheless, in such a statement guiding lines are given for the understanding of whole epochs of History. However we may believe that Christianity contains a peculiar, morally religious impulse of the soul, this impulse did not find its way into the element of fancy and imagination in the Southern culture which reached such giddy heights in the Renaissance. But in the North, the centuries until the 12th—nay, the beginning of the 13th—reveal in Art the progressive appeal of Christianity, and especially the tragic elements of Christianity, to human heart and feeling. The Art of the Italian Renaissance strives to make the countenance of Christianity itself as fair as possible—that, after all, is the essential element in the Renaissance Art: But the centuries to which I now refer, in Middle Europe, are all devoted to the striving to realise the Story of the Passion—with all its tragedy and drama, until the tragic story becomes their very own in heart and soul.

Down to the Carolingian period in Middle Europe, Mid-European paganism continually breaks through into the life of feeling. But in the centuries from that time onward until the 12th and 13th there arises out of the very soul of Middle Europe an inherently Christian Feeling for all human life. And the strange thing is that from the 13th century onward a certain decline can be observed. Yet, as I explained last time, even now when another element once more overwhelms it, there is still the constant striving for the Mid-European soul to assimilate into its deepest inner life all things that come to it, so that, after all, there is a continuity of work and progress in the best souls, from the 11th century on into the 15th and 16th.

The gradual entry of Christianity into the life of the people is also recognisable, or, rather, would be recognisable, if the dramatic representations which did, indeed, grow more and more significant toward the 13th century, had been preserved. All that we now bring to light again—the Christmas and Easter Plays, and Plays of the Three Wise Men—are of a later date, and are but a faint reflection of those earlier ones which tended to a more universal presentation of the Christian world-conception. The Play concerning Anti-Christ, of the 12th century, which has been found at Tegernsee in Bavaria, and a later Play on the Ten Virgins, these, too, are but echoes of Plays that were presented everywhere, dramatising the Biblical stories and the sacred legends. Out of this life with the Christian world-conception as a whole, there arose the works of Art which we shall see again today and which we say last time. There followed what I might call a slow and silent working towards the deepening of the soul's life and its artistic power of expression. It finds expression wonderfully in Dürer's representations of the Passion, and notably in the head of Christ Himself as conceived by Dürer and others. It will be a satisfaction to me if we can show these pictures, too, on some future occasion; we do not possess them at present.

If we study the progress of artistic penetration in pictures of the countenance of Christ till Dürer's time, and in other things as well, we find there was really attained in Mid-Europe at that time an astonishing degree of maturity. It lies inherent in the subtle difference between the Mid-European and Northern, and the Southern life, which developed, as it were, the last phases of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch—(albeit the Fifth epoch already shone into the Renaissance);—the South in its deepest tendencies of feeling was still expressing the last phases of the Fourth; while in Mid-Europe and the North the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch was preparing. What afterwards became the expression of the individual, and of all that is mobile in the human soul—the soul in movement and emotion—all this was working its way up from unconscious depths.

Here we see the whole life of the two regions in their essential difference. We need only bear in mind how much in the Southern Art is due to the fact that there still existed a living atavistic perception of what plays from spiritual regions into the realms of sense. For this was, indeed, preserved in what are known to us of the Byzantine forms of Art—in all the suggestive forms and figures that have come down to us. Take, for instance, what works upon us with such suggestive power in the Art of the Mosaics, and in all that is connected with the name of Cimabue. Here it is more the Christ Figure that works upon us. In Middle Europe it is, rather, the life of Jesus that is presented to us, for the artistic forms are created directly out of the inner life of the soul.

Superhuman as is the Byzantine type of Christ, inwardly human is the Christ type which was afterwards worked out by Dürer.

The Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, including the latest flower (in the Italian Renaissance) has essentially the quality of looking upward to the superhuman and typical; the superhuman and generic nature of the soul, setting aside the individually human. The Southern peoples brought to their Art, in a far higher degree, the ancient, the generic nature of the soul in its superhuman and divine quality.

In the Northern Art, on the other hand, we see the strong decided striving of the individual, as it works its way upwards out of every single human soul. The more these things are understood, the more this will be confirmed.

The southern life still contains mankind as a whole. Think how intensely an Athenian was an Athenian, or a Spartan a Spartan, so that Aristotle rightly called man a “Zoon politicos”—a political animal. The “political animal” was developed to its greatest height in Rome, where, we might say, man lived more in the streets than in his own house; and with his soul-life, also, he lived more in the life that surrounded him than in the house of his own soul. Such, truly, was the Southern imagination as it worked in the world of space. From the very outset men live together, live together as a whole, and the life of Art itself arises out of this principle. This is a feature common to all the Southern Art. They decorate the churches and the public squares; everywhere we see how they reckon with the fact that the people run gladly together, crowd gladly into the churches, or in the public squares, drawn thither by their very temperament and expecting what will there be set before them. To possess themselves fully, they need this life in the outer world, this living with the group-soul nature—with all that is most eminently political—in the right sense of the word.

All this is different in Middle Europe. In Middle Europe man lives within himself; seeks his experiences in his own house and home, even the house of his soul. And if he is to dedicate himself to the group-nature, his heart must first be conquered for it, he must in some way be summoned to it. Many of the underlying impulses of Gothic architecture will be found to lie in this direction. The buildings erected by Gothic architecture stand there not because the people are already running together of their own accord, but, on the contrary, because they must first call the people, bring them together, as it were, through mysterious and suggestive influences. This is expressed in the very forms of the Gothic. The individuals must first be called to the group-life. And the same thing lies inherent in the whole treatment of light and darkness which I described to you the other day. In the elemental surging and interweaving of the light into the darkness, man finds an element into which he can enter to free himself from his own separate existence; albeit he can carry his individual existence, his individuality with him into this very element, because it is so akin to the nature of the soul.

In all these things we find the distinguishing feature of the Northern as against the Southern Art. Hence the striving—the successful striving—of the Northern Art to express inwardness of life and soul. We need only call to mind the portraits, the Madonnas, for instance, of Van Eyck. These Madonnas—their facial expression altogether determined by a turning inward of the life of the human soul—this speaking from an inwardness of soul in the countenance and gesture—all this, Raphael would never have painted. Raphael raises what he paints beyond the human; Van Eyck lifts it into the still more deeply human, so as to seize the human emotions with his paintings, the human hearts of those who see them. Once more it is a question of grasping the human soul.

The priesthood until the 12th and 13th centuries were well aware of these possibilities of the human soul in Europe. They reckoned with these things. They worked with the heart and mind of the people. And without a doubt, much that arose out of this wrestling for artistic powers of expression, came about through the co-operation of the religious orders with that inner life and character of the people which we have here described. We must by all means understand how these more Northerly qualities of artistic creation are connected with the protesting folk-soul of the North, rising up in opposition against the Roman element.

Luther went to Rome. But he saw nothing of the sublime heights of artistic creation; he saw only the moral degradation there. And this implies very much. No doubt he met one or another of the great painters of Rome on the Square of St. Peter's, but what concern had they for him, these men who created out of al altogether different mood of soul, something to which he had no inner relationship. And yet, Luther's very radical one-sidedness was in another way the product of the same Mid-European characteristics which, if I may say so, wrestled most sublimely in the realm of plastic, pictorial expression, and attained an artistic height that stands, in a certain way, so magnificently and independently side by side with the Art of the Italian Renaissance. (We need make no comparisons, for they are always trivial.)

We will therefore now show a few more pictures, supplementing those we showed last week. First we will show some wood-sculptures from the very beginning of the 13th century. They are at Halberstadt.

Look at this Crucifixion Group. I will only say one thing to characterise what is most important. In this group you can see how deeply the story of the Passion had found its way into their lives by that time. There is Mary, there is St. John, and in the center the Christ, looking down towards her. If you could see the face you would see an infinite deepening of soul in the expression, an overwhelming depth. In Mary, if you have a feeling for these things, you will recognise at once the flowing together of the more Roman, priestly conception with the Mid-European depth and tenderness of feeling. Here it is recognisable in a most wonderful way. We shall presently show the face of Mary in detail.

This group reveals how they contrived, out of the specifically Mid-European creative impulse of the soul, to mould the Christianity which had conquered the Mid-European country. We will now show the detail.

Wonderfully characteristic is the expression of the face. The expression in the Southern Art is such that the eyes look far out into the world; in the Northern Art the soul, as it were, presses forward into the look of the eyes from within. Here the two are altogether interwoven—united with one another. A tenderness of soul in the expressions hovers gently, wonderfully, over a more Latin, Roman rounding and perfection of the features.

These things must not be pressed. But I beg of you to observe in all the following pictures how very differently the clothing and drapery is treated in the Mid-European Art and in the Southern. Undoubtedly, such things must not be pressed too far; yet it is true to say that in all the Southern Art the drapery rather surrounds and veils the human form, follows the lines of the form closely, continuing, as it were, the bodily forms. In the Mid-European Art the treatment of the drapery is different. It proceeds from the emotion and movement of the soul. According to the gesture of the hand and the whole attitude of the figure, the quick, mobile life of soul is continued into the raiment. The latter adheres less closely to the body. It does not seek, as in the Southern Art, to veil or to express the forms of the body. It is, rather, like a continuation of the living experience of the soul. You will see this more and more distinctly as we go on into the following centuries.

We have now come to the famous:

This, too, is in the wood, and dates from the first third of the 13th century. None the less, you will see in it a wonderful progression from the former group whose subject is so similar. Observe the communion of soul between the Mary and the Christ-Figure. See how the faith in the Christian world-conception, deeply united with the human soul, appears in the St. John and in the Mary-Figure, as the power that overcomes all things. The Christian world-conception had entered into the souls of these people so as to become an universal historic conception of all earthly evolution. See how Adam, down here, receives the Blood of the Redeemer dropping downward from the Cross. Study the face of Adam, how he is touched by the influence of Grace which he can now receive inasmuch as he may catch the Blood of the Redeemer flowing from the Cross. You will realise with what infinite depths Christianity had found its may into the lives of these people. It had risen to a universal and truly Cosmic conception.

Angels carry the Cross. God the Father descends with the Dove, setting His seal upon the fact that what He had given to the Earth in His Son gives, at this moment, the whole Earth its meaning. In this group with all its artistic perfection we see how deeply Christianity had found its way into Middle Europe,because they tried again and again to permeate it with the human heart and feeling,—to permeate it from within the human soul.

On the other hand, in the South, it was permeated by fancy and imagination, thus producing that peculiar permeation, so free from the moral element—(or shall we say, in order not to give offence, so free from moral cant)—which comes to expression in the Renaissance in the South.

If you were to make a study of the progress in the representation of the Christ-Figure, this Head of Christ would be an important station. Also the Head of Christ in the Cathedral of Amiens, and afterwards, the Head of Christ by Albrecht Dürer.

We now pass to some sculptures which are found at Freiburg in Saxony, also dating from the first third of the 13th century. They show an altogether different aspect, though here, too, it is the sacred history, and a deep striving for inwardness. It is not too much to say that one loves to dwell on every single face. The next picture:

shows us two figures. The one, the figure of a woman, is hard to interpret. Perhaps she is an “Ecclesia.” The other is said to be Aaron. These things are not essential. The figures are undoubtedly connected, allegorically or in some other way, with the Christian world-conception. Once more, observe the deepening of the soul's life. The contrast of expression between the face on the left, and that on the right is particularly fascinating from this point of view.

Supplementing what we showed last time of the Cathedrals at Naumburg and Strasburg, we will now show some sculptures from the Cathedral at Bamberg. Here, to begin with, we have two.

See how directly the dramatic element, the living movement of soul, is expressed in the attitudes, representing the interchange between one soul and another. C. single moment is presented to us, while at the same time the two contrasting characters are well expressed.

The composition is by no means great, but the expressiveness of soul is marvellous. He must remember that this dates from about 1240. Spiritual scientific research will in course of time be confirmed, in that it does not suggest—as many people still do today—that the Mid-European element, in its presentation of the Christian world-conception, was in any high degree influenced by the Southern. That, indeed, is not the case. On the contrary, the very opposite is true.

The different streams are not as yet clearly seen by external history. It is not seen, for instance, what I pointed out the other day—how the Northern impulses worked down even into the creations of Raphael and Michelangelo. Artistically, this conception is altogether a product of the Northern spirit.

This example shows how the worldly and the religious elements played into one another. This was, indeed, the case, especially at the time with which we are now dealing. The worldly and the religious were brought together in the effort which I characterised just now. The souls of men had to be won over; the individual souls must first be called—must by some means be gathered together, if they are to look up in community, in congregation, to the spiritual world. Likewise, they must first be called if they are to express reverence in one way or another, for something in the outer worldly sphere.

Hence the worldly is brought together with the ecclesiastical element. Here, then, we see the Emperor Heinrich, the Empress Kunigunde, and, on the left, St. Stephen.

Needless to say, these things presuppose, as a rule, the naivete of the common people, their blind devotion and dependence. Today, in the fond belief of our contemporaries, these things are overcome. Inwardly, they are present all the more. On the part of the great lords themselves there is very frequently the underlying idea (not unconnected with very human qualities, which shall be nameless), that they themselves stand just a little nearer to the various Saints and supersensible powers than ordinary mortals do.
We will now show a detail, the middle figure of this picture.

The Old and the New Testament were always conceived in unison, as the promise and the fulfilment. Follow the detail of these figures.

And now another figure from the same Cathedral.

A figure of Mary, showing—from whatever point of view you may consider it—how richly the qualities which I described before, come to expression in this stream of Art. You must remember that this was done about the year 1245. What would you look for in the South at that time? The next Picture, from the Cathedral at Bamberg again, represents the figure of:

A favorite representation at that time. Last time we saw the corresponding figure from the Cathedral at Strasburg. The figure of the Church is conceived with a certain inner freedom. Her soul is free, she gazes freely far into the world, with wisdom.

This figure is in contrast, as we saw last time, with the Synagogue, who is represented once more with bound and downcast eyes. The whole posture is intended to represent this contrast in every detail, even to the sweep of the drapery.

Look at the lower portion of the dress, how well it is adapted to the movement of the soul. We will insert the 'Church' once more, in order that you may compare the draperies:

And now a worldly, or secular figure from the same Cathedral.

Study the expression well. The head, which we will now show in detail, is most wonderful:

We now pass on to the 14th century, and see what had occurred by that time. We have a few figures from the Cathedral at Cologne, first half of the 14th century.

It is easy to see that a certain decline had taken place. The next picture is also from Cologne:

Going further in the 14th century we now come to a figure of St. Paul by a master known as the “Master of the Clay Figures.” These figures were executed in burnt earthenware.

Having now shown the rise, and to some extent the decline of a stream of evolution complete in itself, we will give a series of pictures from the Chartreuse de Champmol at Dijon, which are really great of their kind. Most, if not all of them are the independent work of the Dutch sculptor, Sluter, or else done under his direction. He brought to the Chartreuse at Dijon, from the Netherlands, an almost unique power of individual characterisation. From many points of view we see this individualising tendency in his work.

Here especially you see the Art of individual characterisation. Compare this Madonna and Child of Sluter's with the next picture (Moses) and realise the power of one and the same man to characterise these two.

Remember that this Chartreuse at Dijon was built in 1306 to 1334; it was therefore the beginning of the 14th century. Compare this with Michelangelo's Moses—for why should these things not be placed together—they are, indeed, comparable.

And now by the same artist as before—Sluter.

To live with the prophetic figures so as to achieve this degree of individualisation, was, indeed, most wonderful. We will now show one of the figures in detail:

These are by the same artist. The age was especially great in the creation of tomb monuments. We will show the detail of the upper part:

The figures round the base of the tomb which were formerly so small, are wonderfully executed when you come to see them in detail.

Such is the individual characterisation of all the single figures round the base of the tomb. Here is another group.

We now go on to an artist of the 15th century. (We must go according to the pictures we possess at the moment.) The last pictures, you remember, were by an artist of the early 14th century. With the Cologne Master, and the Master of the Clay Figures who made the group we saw before, we came to the 14th century. We now pass on into the 15th. Here, then, we have two figures by Hans Multscher:

This is about the middle of the 15th century. The next is a Madonna, by the same artist (Multscher).

And now we go further and further in what I described just now as the elaboration of the Christian subjects with deep inwardness of soul. The following are figures carved in wood, at Blutenburg (end of the 15th century). The art of characterisation has, indeed, attained its ideal to a marvellous extent.

The figure of Mary, carved in wood—end of the 13th century:

This, then, is the time when Michelangelo and Raphael were born. The next picture, too, is from Blutenburg.

The time when these highly individual figures were created was also especially great in wood-carving, with which they decorated the Choristers' seats in their churches. We will give two examples from the Frauenkirche in Munich, end of the 15th century.

We now come to the sculptor who worked at the end of the 15th century.

And this was the time when the High Renaissance in Italy had not as yet begun. These works were created about 1490–1495.

This St. Elizabeth—created in the early 16th century—is now in the (Germanisches Museum, at Nuremberg.)

This, too, dates from the beginning of the 16th century.

There are wonderful types among these twelve Apostles; one would like to study every single head alone:

Finally, we give two examples of the sculptor—Veit Stoss—early 16th century, who worked in Cracow and also in Southern Germany, creating his plastic works in many different materials.

The next picture is in Nuremberg,. “The Angel's Greeting,” it is called.

I will also show three paintings by Hans Baldung, also known as Hans Grun, who worked in Dürer's workshop at the beginning of the 16th century—about 1507–1509.

His pictures reveal once more, in the sphere of painting, how everything is turned towards the life of the soul.

Hans Baldung was also a portrait painter of no mean order. Here you have an example.

Here you see how the same master cultivated the art of portraiture. He was a pupil of Dürer's, who subsequently lived at Strasburg, and at Freiburg in Breisgau. He did some wonderful paintings of the Life of Christ, and of the Mother of Christ. You will find a picture by him at Basel—“Christ on the Cross.”

This picture, then, is of the early 16th century—the time of Raphael and Michelangelo in Rome.

My dear Friends, the more we multiply these pictures, the more should we see, from this juxtaposition of the Northern and Southern Art, what an immense revolution took place at the turn of the fourth and fifth Post-Atlantean Epochs. And the more should we realise how infinitely rich in content is the simple statement that at that historic moment Civilisation passed from the development of the Intellectual, or Feeling Soul into that of the Spiritual Soul. Infinitely much is contained in such a simple statement. But we only learn to understand these things of Spiritual Science rightly when we follow them into the several and detailed domains of human life.

In conclusion, my dear Friends, I still wish to speak a word of solemn remembrance to you on this day. The day after tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of our dear friend, Fraulein Stinde, and in our hearts we will not forget to think on that day of all that came into our Movement through the work of this dear and valued member.

And we will also turn our thoughts to her soul as she works on in the Spiritual Worlds—deeply and lovingly connected as she is with our Movement. On this day especially we will deepen the thoughts and feelings of our hearts which are directed to her.

I only wished to add this word of remembrance to remind you of the day after tomorrow.

In memory of all that unites us with our dear friend—with the soul of our dear Sophie Stinde—let us now rise from our seats.

Continuing our series of lantern lectures, we will today pick out a single artist—albeit one of the very greatest in the artistic evolution of humanity. I refer to Rembrandt.

In this case the former kind of introduction, indicating the historic background of the artist's life and times, would be a little out of place. With an individual artist such as Rembrandt, it is more important to give ourselves up to the immediate impression of his works—so far as is possible through some few reproductions. For only when we bring before our souls in sequence at least a few of his main works,—only then do we realise how unique a figure is Rembrandt in the history of mankind. We should, indeed, be adopting a false method if we tried—as in the case of Michelangelo, Raphael and others—to reveal the background of his creations more from the point of view of the history of his times. For Rembrandt, as a human phenomenon, stands, to a great extent, isolated. He grows out of the broad foundations of the race. In his case it is far more important to see how he himself stands in the stream of evolution—to see what radiates from him into the stream of evolution—than to attempt to describe him as a product of it.

This is the essential point—to recognise the immense originality which is peculiar to Rembrandt. As an isolated phenomenon of history, he grows out of the broad mass of the European people, once more bearing witness to the truth that when we contemplate the creative work of human individualities, we cannot simply construct a succession of historic causes and effects. Sooner or later we must realise the fact that just as one plant in the garden, standing beside another in a row, has not its cause in the neighbouring plant, so the successive phenomena of history have not always their causes in the preceding ones.

As the plants grow forth from the common soil under the influence of the common sunlight, so do the phenomena of history grow from cut a common soil, conjured forth by the activity of the Spiritual that ensouls humanity.

In Rembrandt we must look for something elemental and original. Many people in Mid-Europe began to feel this very strongly about the end of the eighties and the beginnings of the nineties of last century. It was curious to see what a far-reaching influence a certain book had which was published about that time. The book was not exactly about Rembrandt, but took its start from Rembrandt.

When I left Vienna at the end of the 1880s, I went out of an atmosphere in which everyone was reading and discussing this book Rembrandt as an Educator, by a German. Such was its title. I found the same atmosphere when I came to Weimar, and it went on for two or three years longer. Everyone was reading Rembrandt as an Educator. I myself—if I may interpolate this remark—found the book to some extent antipathetic. To me it was as though the author—undoubtedly a man of keen perceptions—had written down on scraps of paper in the course of time, all manner of ideas that had occurred to him. He might then have thrown them all together into a little box, shaken them up, and taken them out at random and so compiled his book. So confused were all the thoughts—so little logical sequence—so little system was there in the book.

However unpleasing from this point of view, the book nonetheless expressed something of great significance, especially so for the close of the 19th century. People investigated in all directions to discover who the unknown author might be. He had at any rate succeeded in writing out of the hearts of very many people. He felt that the spiritual and intellectual life of men had lost connection, as it were, with the mother-soil of spiritual life. Human souls no longer had the force to penetrate to the heart and center of the Cosmic Order, to draw from thence something which could give them inner fullness and satisfaction. The anonymous writer was everywhere referred to as der Rembrandt Deutsche,—the Rembrandt—German. His desire was to bring the life of the human soul back again to an elemental and original feeling of what pulsates as the underlying heart of things—even in the phenomena of the great world. He wanted to bring them thoughts of an awakening—calling out aloud to mankind: “Remember once more what lives in the elemental depths of the soul! You have lost touch; you are trifling everywhere on the surface of things—in science and scholarship, and even in your cultivation of artistic taste. You have lost the Mother-Earth of spiritual life. Remember it once more!”

To this end he would take his start from the phenomenon of Rembrandt and he therefore called his book Rembrandt as an Educator. He found the conceptions and ideas of men floating about on the surface; but in Rembrandt he saw an individuality who had drawn from the very depths of elemental human forces.

If you look back on our lectures here at Dornach during the last few weeks, you will realise—what we cannot but realise—that the inner intensity of spiritual life had declined considerably in Europe in the last decades of the 19th century. In all directions it had become essentially a culture on the surface. Even the great figures of the immediate past were appreciated only in a superficial way. What, after all, did the late 19th century (I refer to wider circles, a few individuals always excepted) understand of such writers as Goethe or Lessing? They understood practically nothing of their greatest works.

The “Rembrandt-Deutsche” felt, as I have said, that the soul's power of perception must be brought to feel and realise once more all that is elemental, all that is truly great in human evolution. True, if we feel, perhaps, in a still deeper way than he, what was and still is needful for our age, we cannot go all the way with him. Indeed, his limitations—bowed themselves in the subsequent course of his life. There was a deep sincerity of feeling in the “Rembrandt-Deutsche;” yet, after all, he was too much a child of his age to realise that a renewal of all spiritual life was necessary by a discovery of those fundamental sources which we, in our movement of Spiritual Science, are trying now to bring before our souls. All people of that time passed by unheeding—passed by what was “in the air,” if I may use the trivial expression: the need for a spiritual-scientific movement. Most of them, after all, continue to do so to this day.

The “Rembrandt-Deutsche” made a brave beginning. “Look,” he said, “look what it means to wrest one's way through to such resources of humanity as Rembrandt reached!” Yet when all this had been living in his soul, he probably fell more and more into a kind of despair—despair of the presence of any such living sources in the evolution of mankind. Eventually he went over to Catholicism. Thus, after all, he tried to find in something from the past—in old tradition—a consolation for the vain quest on which he had so bravely started in his book. His impulse did not carry him far enough to reach that spiritual life which is needed to sustain the future. None the less, we cannot but feel with him what he felt about Rembrandt.

(I may add that the name of the “Rembrandt-Deutsche” afterwards became known; his name was Langbehn.)

Rembrandt is not at all dependent on that artistic movement which I have characterised in recent lectures as the Southern European stream. He is even less dependent than Dürer was. Truly, one might say that not in a single fiber of his soul was he in any way dependent as an artist on the Latin, Southern element. He stands on his own ground entirely, creating out of the Mid-European life—out of a source of life which he draws from the deep well-springs of the people. What was the time when Rembrandt lived and worked? It was when the Thirty-Years' War was ravaging Mid-Europe.

Rembrandt was born in 1606; in 1613 the Thirty-Years' War began. Thus we may say that while the more southern nations of Middle Europe were being massacred in this War, Rembrandt, in his North-Western corner of the land, was bringing forth the unique creations of his genius out of the very essence of Mid-European humanity. He never even saw Italy. He had no relation to any nature like the Italian. He fertilised his imagination simply and solely out of the Netherlands nature that surrounded him. He made no studies as other painters of his country did—studies of Italian pictures or anything of that kind. Rembrandt stands out as the arch-representative of those who felt themselves in the 17th century so completely—albeit unconsciously—as citizens of the new Fifth post-Atlantean age.

Let us pass in review before our souls what had happened from a certain moment onward until Rembrandt's time. Hermann Grimm, who undoubtedly had a feeling for such things, considered the creations of Art as the purest flowers that mark the historic evolution of mankind. From the aspect of artistic history, artistic evolution, he threw many a beautiful and brilliant search-light on the history of Europe—notably in that time when the Fourth post-Atlantean age was playing over into the Fifth. We ourselves, in recent lantern lectures, have brought before our souls the flowering of artistic life in that age. Hermann Grimm rightly says that to understand what took its start in that period we must go back to the Carolingian era. Nothing can teach us to understand so well what was living in the age of Charlemagne as the Song of Valthari, written by a monk of St. Gall in the 10th century, and relating how Mid-Europe was overwhelmed from Italy, telling of all the destinies that overcame Mid- Europe. (In style and form, however, the Song of Walthari—like many other works of Art which we have shown—betrays strong Latin, Roman influences.)

Then we come to the gradual emerging of a new age. We find, developing in Mid-Europe, the Latin element in architecture and sculpture. We find the gradual penetration of the Gothic. We witness the life of this Gothic and Latin Art in the time of the poets in Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide. And we see how the Mid-European freedom of the cities—the culture of the free cities—comes to expression in the works—especially in the domain of sculpture—which we showed last time. At length we come to the Mid-European Reformation, expressing itself in the great figures of Albrecht Dürer, Holbein and others. Then, as we indicated when speaking of Michelangelo, there came the Counter-Reformation, spreading out over all Europe.

Once more, this is visible in the realm of Art. Hermann Grimm rightly remarks that throughout this period, when the powers of mighty States were overwhelming Europe, sweeping away the political individualities, in this period of the great Principalities, there arose what is made visible in the Art of Rubens, Van Dyck, Velasquez. With all their greatness, when we call to mind these names we cannot but find expressed in them something connected with the Counter-Reformation—with the will to break up the Mid-European people.

Rembrandt, on the other hand, is an artist who makes felt—as an artist—something that contains the highest and strongest assertion of human individuality and human freedom, and his creations spring from the deep originality of this same people.

It is wonderful to see how in Rembrandt has continued what I have already explained in the case of Dürer—the weaving in the elemental play of light and darkness. What Goethe afterwards achieved for Science (although Science to this day does not accept it, not having yet advanced so far—but it will become so in good time)—the discovery in light and darkness of an elemental weaving on the waves of which the true origin of color itself is to be sought—this, I would say, lights up in the realm of Art for the first time in Dürer and finds its highest expression in Rembrandt.

The greatness of the Italian Masters of painting lay in the fact that they raised the individual appearance to the sublime—to the typical. Rembrandt is the faithful observer of the immediate reality. But he observes it not in the spirit of Classical antiquity, for he belongs to the Fifth and not to the Fourth post-Atlantean age.

How does Rembrandt observe the reality? He confronts the object as an outsider—really and truly as an outsider. Fundamentally speaking, even Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, living as they did in the Fifth post-Atlantean age, could do no other than confront the object as men stand outside it. But they still let themselves be fertilised by what came over to them from antiquity. And thus, if I may say so, it was only half-outwardly that they confronted the object. Rembrandt confronted it altogether outwardly, and yet in such a way as to bring it—albeit from without—all his own full inwardness of soul. But to bring inwardness to the outer object in this way is not to carry all manner of things into it out of the egoism of one's human personality. It is, rather, to be able to live with that which works and weaves in space.

Rembrandt was a man who wrestled on and on for decades,—we might almost say, from period to period of five years, and his pictures bear witness to his continual wrestling and his constant progress. This wrestling essentially consists in the ever more perfect working out of light and darkness. Color to him is only that which is born, as it were, out of the light and the darkness.

What I said of Dürer—that he looked not for the color which wells forth from within the object, but for that color which is cast on it from outside—applies in a still higher degree to Rembrandt. Rembrandt lives in the surging and weaving of the light and dark. Hence he delights to observe how the play of light and dark brings forth its remarkable plastic painting effects in a crowd of figures. The Southern painters took their start from composition. Rembrandt does not do this, though in the course of his life, because of the elemental forces working in him so strongly, he rises to the possibility of a certain composition. Rembrandt simply sets down his figures; he lets them stand there and then he lives and weaves in the element of light and shadow, tracing it with inner joy as it pours itself out over the figures. And as he does so, in the very life and movement of the light and darkness, a Cosmic, universal principle of composition comes into his pictures.

So we see Rembrandt (if I may so describe it) painting plastically but painting with light and darkness. And by this means, although he only directs his gaze to the outer reality—not to be the sublimer truth like the South-European painters, but to the actual reality—he still lifts his characters to a spiritual height. For that which floods through the realms of space as light and weaves in them is the element we must always seek in Rembrandt; by virtue of it he is the great and original spirit that he is.

You will recognise this if you let pass before your mind's eye the whole succession of these pictures. Rembrandt is first of all an observer, trying faithfully to reproduce what Nature puts before him.

Then he gets nearer and nearer to the secret of creating out of the light and the darkness, until at length his figures only provide him with the occasion, as it were, to reveal the working of the pure distribution of light and darkness in the realm of space. Then he is able to reveal the mysterious fashioning of sublimer forms out of the light and darkness. The plastic forms of outer reality only provide him with the opportunity. We see emerging more and more in Rembrandt's work as time goes on, the boldest imaginable distributions of light and dark. When we stand face to face with his creations we have the feeling: all these are no mere figures that stood before him in space, as models or the like. The essential thing is altogether different; it is something that hovers over the figures. The figures only provide the occasion for what Rembrandt was essentially creating. He created his great works by using his figures, as it were, to catch the light. The figures give him the opportunity to seize the light. The essential is the play of light and darkness which the figures enable him to grasp. The figures merely stand there as a background; the real work of Art springs from this intangible element which he attains by means of the figures.

To look in Rembrandt's works for the particular subjects which the pictures represent, is to look past the essential work of Art. It is only when we contemplate what is poured out over the figures that we see what is essential in Rembrandt. The figures are no more than the medium for what is poured out over them.

Of such a nature is the delicate, intimate quality of the creations especially of his middle period. Unfortunately we cannot show this, because the reproductions are in black and white; but it is most interesting to see in the middle period of his work how really the colors in his pictures are created out of light and shade. The colors are everywhere born out of the light and the darkness. This artistic conception becomes so strong in Rembrandt that towards the end of his life's work, color recedes, as it were, into the background, and all painting becomes for him a problem of light and darkness.

It is deeply touching from a human point of view, to witness what wrestles its way through to outward existence from decade to decade in Rembrandt's work. For it is undeniable—great as was his talent, his artistic genius from the very first—he was not yet profound; he could not yet reach into the depths of things. What he created to begin with is great in its way, yet it somehow is lacking in depth.

Then about 1642, he suffered a grievous loss—a loss for his whole life. He lost the wife whom he loved so tenderly, and with whom he was so united that she was really like a second life to him. But this loss became for Rembrandt the source of a great, an infinite deepening of soul. Thus we see how his creations gain in depth from this time onward—grow infinitely richer in soul-content than before. Henceforth it is no longer merely Rembrandt, the man of genius—henceforth it is no longer merely Rembrandt, the man of genius—henceforth it is Rembrandt deepened in his own inner life and being.

Considering Rembrandt comprehensively, we must say that here at last we have the painter of the beginning of the Fifth post-Atlantean epoch in the fullest sense of the word. For as you know, we describe the basic character of this epoch when we say that the Spiritual Soul, above all, is now wrestling its way into existence. What does this signify for Art? It signifies that the artist must stand over against his object from without. He lets the world work upon him objectively, yet in such a way that there is still a universal spirit in his contemplation, for otherwise he would be creating merely out of human egoism. The very fact that he confronts the world, and even man himself, as an outer object, gives him the possibility of seeing infinitely much that could not be seen in former ages.

What, after all, would be the meaning of Art if it were only to produce the reality as human beings see it in ordinary life? It is the very purpose of Art to reproduce what is not seen in the everyday life.

Now it is natural in the epoch of development of the conscious Spiritual Soul that man should turn his attention, above all, to man himself and to all that is expressible through man. The artist of the Fourth post-Atlantean age, as I have so often told you, created more out of an inner feeling of himself—out of an inward experience of his own being. The artist of the Fifth post-Atlantean age—and this is true in the highest degree of Rembrandt—creates from outward, contemplative vision. But this signifies for man an artistic process of self-knowledge. And I think we are pointing to no matter of chance when we recall the fact that Rembrandt painted so many portraits of himself. I think there is a deep and significant meaning in the fact that he had to seek again and again for self-knowledge as an artist. His own form was not merely the most convenient model at his disposal—certainly it was not the most beautiful, for Rembrandt was not a handsome man. No, for him the important thing was to become progressively aware of the harmony between what lives within and what can be observed from without—to become aware of this harmony at that very place where it can best be studied—in the self-portrait.

Undoubtedly there is a deeper meaning in the fact that the first great painter of the Fifth post-Atlantean age painted so many portraits of himself.

We might continue for a long time, my dear friends, making one observation or another about Rembrandt. The result would only be to make us realise more and more how he stands out as an isolated phenomenon through his age, though in this isolation he creates out of the very fountain-head, out of the well-spring of Mid-European spiritual life. For Rembrandt creates out of the spirit which is characteristic of Mid-Europe. To create, to look at the outward reality, not merely seeking to observe it realistically, but with a gaze that fertilizes itself with that by which man's gaze can, indeed, be fertilized—with the surging, weaving, elemental world. And for the painter, this signifies the light and dark, surging upon the waves of color, till the outward reality is merely the occasion to unfold this living and weaving in the light and dark and in the world of color.

We will now consider a few of Rembrandt's characteristic pictures, and see how these things can be traced in his works:

Here you see at once how what I indicated just now shows itself in actuality. In Rembrandt's work, even when we stand before the colored paintings, we have the feeling that what lives in color is already there potentially in the light and shade. This must always be borne in mind.

When we let this or any other pictures of Biblical history by Rembrandt work upon our souls, we are struck by a peculiar difference between him and Rubens, for instance, or the Italian Masters. Their presentations of the Biblical figures are always somehow connected with the sacred Legends. Rembrandt's are quite obviously the work of a man who reads the Bible for himself.

We can remember that the time of his creative work was near the climax of that period when Roman Catholicism, and, above all, Jesuitism, was waging an inexorable war on all Bible-reading. Bible-reading was anathema; it was forbidden. Meanwhile, on this Dutch soil which had just freed itself from Southern influence and Southern rulership, there arose the strong impulse to go to the Bible itself. They drew their inner experience from the Bible itself—not merely from Catholic legend and tradition. Such was the inspiration of the scenes which Rembrandt treats so wonderfully with his rays of light and dark.

Even the dress is arranged in such a way as to express his favorite element of light and shadow. He even liked to use a metal collar on which the light could glisten.

This portrait will certainly confirm what I said just now, and it will show you another thing at the same time. Under the influence of his artistic way of feeling—although the reality is by no means lifted into realms of fancy—the life of the soul comes to expression with great depth.

The purest study in light and darkness. Here you will feel what I tried to characterise briefly in the introduction. All that you see here—the architectural and all the other features—merely provided the occasion for the real work of Art, which lies in the distribution of the light itself.

Here we have a picture of Rembrandt and his wife; they are both looking into a mirror:

It is interesting to hear of an experience which Hermann Grimm relates. He introduced the use of Lantern-slides in University lecturing. It is evident on other occasions, also, how much can be gained from the use of lantern slides and projectors in familiarising ourselves with the world of Art. But once when Hermann Grimm was lecturing on Rembrandt, the slides arrived a little late. He had not time to go through them beforehand, and saw them for the first time during the lecture, which thus became a kind of running conversation with his hearers, among whom there were always older people as well as students.

Now I need scarcely remind you that in lecture halls, which are generally well lighted, a more or less wide-awake attention prevails—occasionally more, generally less: But the customary condition was changed in as much as the hall was darkened. And through the darkness and the effect of the Rembrandt pictures thrown upon the screen, people in the audience again and again had a peculiar impression, as Hermann Grimm himself relates. In effect, through the extraordinary vividness which Rembrandt can achieve, one really has the feeling that such a character is present here, among the people in the room. He is there—and if you imagined all the paraphernalia removed—if there were only the light-picture by itself—it would be all the more vivid. The number of people in the room is simply increased by one, so vividly does this figure live among us.

Rembrandt attains this effect because he places his figures into that element in which man always lives—though he is unconscious of it—the element of light and dark. This light and dark which is common to us all, Rembrandt pours out over his figures, and so places them into this living interplay of light and darkness, thus endowing them with a common element—in which the onlooker himself is living. That is the wonderful thing in Rembrandt.

Here you see there is a decided attempt at a composition. Yet the composition, as such, it must be admitted, is not a great success; at any rate it is by no means equal to what is called so in the Southern Art. But look at the characteristic Rembrandt quality once more. Infinite mysteries speak to us out of this picture, simply through the distribution of the masses of light. The composition is truly not very great, and yet I think the picture makes an extraordinary deep impression upon us.

I should really have shown the next two pictures before this one, but I have purposely chosen the reverse order. I beg you to compare this picture with the two next, which most probably preceded this one in time. There is probably an interval of about two between this picture and the next but one. Showing the pictures in the reverse order, I wish to illustrate how Rembrandt perfected himself. He was constantly wrestling and striving. Compare this picture with the next but one—that of the Ascension—and you will see how he advanced. Compare them with respect to depth and inwardness. The next is the Resurrection.

And now we come to:

With the “Entombment,” which undoubtedly represents a considerable advance on this, we come near the year 1640—or, at any rate, the close of the 1630s.

Now for an example of a landscape by Rembrandt:

And now we come to some of the most famous of his pictures:

The Amsterdam Citizen's Guard gathered round the drummers in the night—a whole host of individual figures. Rembrandt was not the only artist of his time to paint such pictures as this. Only he did so with an unique perfection. Such a picture shows us especially how this artist is rooted in the people. Look at this whole collection of men. Some Guild or other—people of one and the same class or calling, men who belonged together—ordered the picture jointly; each one paying his share. This man here, of whom only half the head is visible, made a great fuss. He was very angry and Rembrandt got into trouble because he did not find himself portrayed in his full glory.

“The Night Watch” shows us in the most beautiful way how Rembrandt had progressed. Look at the wonderful distribution in this picture of the light and darkness. This is, indeed, the very time of the great deepening of Rembrandt's life. The picture dates from 1642, the same year that he lost the wife whom we saw in the portrait just now, and in the portrait of the two together.

I think you will feel in these pictures a greater clarity, a more sublime quality than in the former ones.

Now we would like to show a series of “self-portraits”:

Then we have an “Adoration”:

With all its simplicity, this is surely one of his most characteristic pictures. To show the reader in the light, the light itself is made of the subject-matter, as it were—the subject of the story the picture tells.

A picture of great tenderness. We have now come to the year 1648.

I may remark that in the vast majority of Rembrandt's pictures, the Christ is by no means beautiful.

And now we come to that most beautiful picture:

You would realise what Rembrandt is if you could see side by side with this picture the picture of a horse by Rubens, for example. Then you would see the whole difference in the conception of these two pictures.

This horse is really moving; it is really a living horse. No horse by Rubens, ever really moves. Please do not think that this is unconnected with the artist's peculiar conception out of the element of light. He who aims at what is merely seen, he who merely tries to reproduce the “reality,” will, after all, never be able to produce more than the frozen form. However great his work may be, it will always contain just a little of what we might describe as a kind of cramp, or paralysis, poured out over the whole picture.

But the artist who holds fast the single moment in the weaving, ever-moving element that plays round the figures—the artist who does not work merely “realistically,” but places his figures into the true reality which is the elemental world—he will achieve a real impression of movement.

Look at this old woman. Is she not really cutting her nails?

Here, again, we have a picture painted by special command of these great gentlemen. Yet it is one of his greatest masterpieces. See the wonderful simplicity with which they are presented here—the dignitaries of the Guild whose task it was to test the finished cloth and set their seal upon it as a sign that it was good. They are the Presidents of a Clothmakers' Guild—the Stall-Meisters. Of course, they club together to pay for the picture, but as these were especially high lords and masters, Rembrandt must see to it that this time no single face is eclipsed. Every face must come out properly in full relief. And with the high artistic perfection of this picture this is attained. These gentlemen did not go quite so far as the Professors of Anatomy with their half-dissected corpse; one of them holds in his hand a piece of paper on which their names are recorded.

And now the work of a very old Rembrandt:

And now I wish to show you the well-known picture of Faust.

When we see this picture, we are reminded of what I said in one of our last lectures—how Goethe himself in his “Faust” portrays the figure of the 16th century in this weaving of the light.—But Rembrandt had revealed it before Goethe.

I must not leave it unsaid that to know Rembrandt fully it is most necessary to be acquainted with his art as an etcher. The especial love for this Art is, indeed, characteristic of that stream to which Rembrandt wished, above all, to devote himself. He is no less great as an etcher co, than as a painter.

Etchings by Rembrandt:

This is the so-called Hundred Guilder Print: “Come unto me all you who labor and are burdened you ...”

We see in it the real beauty of Rembrandt's art, especially in how these characteristic figures around the Christ figure are expressed.

And now we want to add to the self-portraits we have shown you as a final scene, another etching:

How different is Rembrandt from the other artists whose works we have seen during these lectures: It was only in Dürer that we saw the first lighting-up of what appears so wonderfully in Rembrandt. Rembrandt is a unique figure; he stands alone and isolated. In the continuous study of the history of Art, it is especially fascinating to dwell upon what is really characteristic in the creations of single individualities. Rembrandt, above all, makes us aware of the immediate individual presence of a strong and forceful, mighty personality, lighting forth in the seventeenth century.

At a time like the present it is not without importance that we should turn our gaze to an epoch in which, beside all the devastation that was taking place in Europe, there was this immediate and original creation out of a human soul—a human soul of whom we may, indeed, believe that he was connected directly with the prime sources and elements of world-existence.

I hope it will be given to us while we can still be here together to show some other aspects also of the continued development of Art.

Meister Bertram, Hieronymus Bosch, Dieric Bouts, Pieter Brueghel, Petrus Christus, Gerard David, Jan Van Eyck, Master of Flémalle, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Hugo van der Goes, Quentin Matsys, Hans Memling, and Joachim Patinir.

The pictures we shall show today are to illustrate the development of Dutch and Flemish painting towards the end of the 15th century and on into the 16th.

From the inner historical point of view, this is one of the most important moments in the evolution of Art. It is, as you know, the period immediately after the dawn of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—that epoch which is called upon to bring forth, out of the depths of human evolution, all that is connected with the development of the Spiritual Soul. In the Dutch and Flemish pictures we shall now consider, this comes to expression in a most characteristic way. We see in every detail how the Spiritual Soul begins to work. We can see it, my dear friends, if only we bring to these works of Art an elementary power of understanding—that is to say, if we have to some extent escaped the unhappy fate of being historians of Art after the modern fashion.

The most up-to-date of the modern critics and historians will, no doubt, consider a critic like Hermann Grimm an altogether inferior intellect. But if we have not the misfortune to be quite so up-to-date, then, even if we knew nothing beforehand of the laws and impulses of human evolution as explained by Spiritual Science, we should still find in this artistic evolution a wonderful confirmation of all the differences which Spiritual Science indicates in its descriptions of the Third, Fourth, and fifth post-Atlantean epochs. It is interesting to see how gradually there emerges—century after century during these epochs—what we may regard as the fundamental frame-work of the artistic conceptions of today. It is interesting to see the several elements of it emerging in the most manifold quarters in the evolution of mankind.

If we go back to the history of drawing and painting, we find that the laws of Space, for example, have only been evolved by gigantic efforts of the human soul. The older representations in line and color do not really constitute a pictorial Art in the modern sense. They are more like a kind of narrative or story-telling on the flat surface. This applies to a by no means very distant past. (Without entering at length into these historic aspects, I will only indicate a few general points of view.)

We can see that in those olden times, the artist had in his mind's eye some story which he wished to portray—a story such as one might even narrate in words. He did not try to represent Space as it is; he simply fixed on to the flat surface what he desired to represent. The various things that he relates stand side by side on this flat surface. From our point of view, we could, at most, regard this as a kind of primitive illustration. Today we should not even allow the art of illustration to proceed in this way, merely setting down the events of the narrative on a flat surface.

At the next stage, an attempt is made to represent the ordering of things in Space, at any rate, in a most rudimentary way, by introducing the principle of overlapping. The artist makes use of the visibility, or partial visibility of this or that figure.

A figure that stands in the way of another, is in the foreground; the other stands behind it. By this method of overlapping, the surface is really used to suggest, at any rate, the dimension of depth.

At a following stage, the several figures are already made larger or smaller in proportion, taking into account that that which appears larger is to the front, while all that which appears smaller is further back. If, however, we return to the Third Post-Atlantean period, we find that this spatial treatment to which we are now accustomed, did not exist at all. They either put things down on the flat surface, as described above, or else they used the element of Space to express their thought. This, indeed, continued into the Graeco-Latin period. Contrary to the way in which things are really seen, we often find figures which are obviously to the front (nearer to the spectator) smaller in proportion to other figures which are further away. In olden times they often made use of this kind of treatment.

We see a King, for example, enthroned in the background of the picture. His subjects, in the foreground, are represented as being smaller in proportion. In Space they are not really smaller, but according to the conception prevailing, they are smaller in idea. Hence, while they are placed in the foreground, they are made smaller. This gives you the transition to a thing you will frequently find in older times—I mean what we may call "inverse perspective" compared to the perspective we know today. In this “inverse perspective” we must imagine things envisaged as they are seen by a particular figure in the picture. Figures which are in front from our point of view can, indeed, be smaller than other figures which are farther back, if a figure in the background is conceived as the observer of the scene. But to this end the man who is actually looking at the picture must entirely obliterate himself! He must either imagine himself away, or he must think himself into the picture, as it were,—into the personality of the figure conceived as the observer of the scene.

Here, then, we have an Impersonal perspective. This “impersonal perspective” was still suited to the stage of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, when the Spiritual Soul was not yet so consciously born as afterwards. The man of the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch cannot forget himself; he demands a presentation arising from his own point of view. Hence it is that the art of perspective, strictly related to the visual point of the spectator, only appears with Brunellesco—that is to say, is the main, with the beginning of the Renaissance.

We may truly say that what is now called perspective was first introduced into the technique of Art at that point of time. Moreover, the South, through the impulses I characterised in one of the earlier lectures, is the inventor of perspective. For the South is much concerned with the ordering of things in the inner relationship of Space; concerned, that is to say, with qualities in extension. Thus the South is predisposed for mastery in the whole art of composition, and at a later date we see this art of composition fertilised by the Southern Renaissance—with all that I have described already as the inherent impulses which then came to the surface, and reached so high a degree of perfection.

Thus there comes forth in Art what we may call the gathering together of things in Space, where the man who looks at the picture is included in the whole conception. Truly, this corresponds to the age when the Spiritual Soul is born—when man becomes conscious of himself.

Hence it is in the south—in all that is connected with the Southern culture, which we have described before—it is here that the modern principle of perspective first arises. We see how it evolves quite naturally out of the Southern culture.

Meanwhile, however, another principle is at work, is emerging in the North; this principle we see in its nascent state, as it were, in the very moment of its origin, when we turn our gaze to the Brothers Van Eyck.

In the two Van Eycks—Hubert van Eyck to begin with, and later in his brother Jan—we see emerging, albeit in a different form as yet, what afterwards came forth as described when dealing with Rembrandt, for example. Something which emerges out of the Mid-European, Northern element. These things always find expression in external symptoms—in outwardly real symbols, if I may so call them. Brunellesco must be conceived as the inventor of modern perspective. The ancient perspective—that which underlies the Greek pictures, for example,—does not possess what is called a “vanishing point.” It has a whole “vanishing line.” The scene we see seems to converge, not in a vanishing point, but in a vanishing line. In this is, indeed, expressed the radical difference between the ancient perspective and the modern, which is the perspective of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

Brunellesco, then, is the discoverer of modern perspective. It is discovered in the South. Whereas in the North—this is no mere tradition, but contains a profound truth—in the North oil-painting is discovered. Although Hubert van Eyck was not the sole inventor of oil-painting, nevertheless, it is true that oil-painting was discovered in the age and out of the whole milieu out of which he created.

Now what does this signify? What is the underlying reason? For the art of oil-painting was then carried to the South. Perspective was carried from the South to the North; oil-painting from the North to the South. What does this signify?

It is deeply rooted in their fundamental character and mood of soul. In the South men have a feeling for coming together mutually in the Group. The South has far more attachment to the Group-soul as such. Hence the people of the South are fond of describing themselves as members of such and such a Group. They have little understanding of the individual principle. Such things should be taken into account, for Nations will never understand each other if they take no pains to grasp their several characteristics.

When a man has been brought up in the more Latin spirit—who has received the inner impulse of the Southern nature—speaks of his devotion to nation or people—when he calls himself a Patriot in one sense or another, he means something very different from the Mid-European who speaks of Patriotism. Mid-Europe really has no talent for this belonging together, this gathering of men together into a Group. In Mid-Europe there is a faculty for the Individual principle. The true native character of Middle Europe is expressed in the recognition of the Individual, and in the age of the development of the Spiritual Soul this implies, to begin with, the recognition of the personality, the human individual—the person.

Now, if we feel essentially the Group-element, which is, of course, extensive (spread out in space), we shall naturally live in the element of composition. One who has this tendency will have a natural understanding for the art of composition. If, on the other hand, we have a strong feeling for the individual principle, we shall seek to mould the individual from within—outward. Instead of seeing the Spirit, as it were, put forth its feelers to embrace and hold the Group together, we see the Spirit within each single form; we place the several individual figures side by side, seeing the Spirit in each single one. We seek to bring to the surface of the body what is there in the inner being of the soul.

This is not to be achieved by perspective, but by color that is irradiated, flooded by light. Thus in the profoundly Germanic brothers, Van Eyck, we have the real starting point of the modern art of color, which seeks to hold fast in the color itself, what comes from the individual character of the soul to the outer surface of the body.

The brothers Van Eyck and their successors, derive their essential inner quality from this Northern Mid-European element, while composition, which gradually finds its way into their works, is borrowed more from France and Burgundy.

It is no mere matter of chance that this special development in the 15th century took place at a time when the districts where these artists lived did not possess a hard-and-fast political structure. Such a structure was only afterwards imposed upon them from the South—from France and especially from Spain. In that period we see spread out over the Northern and Southern Netherlands the more individual City-formations—towns and cities whose connection as compact States was at most a very loose one. The people of those regions, and of that time, had no inclination to think that men ought to be held together in groups by well-defined States, where the State itself is the important thing—where the precise extent and frontiers of a particular State are considered a matter of importance. To the people out of whom the brothers Van Eyck arose, the particular nation to which they belonged was not the point. Nor did they think of what is called the “State,” or trouble themselves about its frontiers. What mattered to them was that human beings full, thorough-going human beings—should develop, regardless of the group to which they might belong.

So we see this Art of the Southern Netherlands, the regions of Flanders. The inner being of man is conjured forth to the surface of the body in a tender and thoughtful way. By a mysterious power they flood their pictures with light, introducing just that element which color can introduce, for the individual characterisation of the soul.

Then we see the burgher, the citizen virtues of the Northern Netherlands reaching down into the Southern aristocratic element. The life of the burghers gives birth to that Art which places the individual so thoroughly into the world. It is, in reality, an overcoming of the Group-soul principles in Art.

And yet, as we shall see in the very first of our pictures today, how wonderfully the mass-effects are, nevertheless, attained. But with these mass-effects, it is not that they are conceived as a group from the outset. They arc not deliberately constructed: the figures distributed in Space so as to belong together as a Group. On the contrary, these wonderful groupings arise through the very fact that each individual being has his full importance, and takes his stand beside the others.

Such are the things that we shall recognise out of this portion of artistic evolution. In the brothers Van Eyck we still have comparatively primitive, rudimentary groupings in Space, but withal a high degree of inwardness, and a strong adaptation to what is actually seen, regardless of any hard and fast conventions.

In effect, we have here the second pole of that entry into the physical reality in the artistic life, which belongs to the fifth post-Atlantean period. This pole is in the North, while the other takes its start from the Italian art of the Renaissance. There we have the element of composition, and all else is to some extent subservient to this. In the North we have a creating from within, outwards. Only gradually and by dint of constant striving do they arrive at a certain power of composition by the placing together of individuals portrayed with inwardness of soul. Thus the one aspect of the naturalistic principle in Art, which belongs to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, found its essential fountain-head in these regions. These painters place their subject in the immediate reality which surrounds them. The Biblical story, for example, when reproduced in Art by men of earlier times, was taken right away from their immediate surroundings. But this period in Art places the Biblical narratives into the midst of the immediate naturalistic reality. Men of the Netherlands stand before us as the characters of Biblical history.

What formerly shut one off, as it were, from the outer naturalistic world—the golden background and all that was expressed in it—ceases to exist. On the very soil where we ourselves are standing, the Biblical scenes move before us.

It goes with this, quite naturally and inevitably, that they everywhere surround their human figures with that peculiar treatment of space which we find in their interiors, not in their outer landscapes. I would express it thus. Having ceased to be living in the composition, the space itself must be transposed, transplanted into the picture. Space, as such, must now appear in the picture. How, then, can this be done? By shaping a portion of the picture itself as a “space,” that is to say, by placing the figures in an “interior”—in a room, or the like. Or, again, by painting a naturalistic space such as forms itself around the human being in the landscape. Thus with all the impulses of the new age which, as above described, permeate especially this Dutch and Flemish Art, we see arising quite naturally, the art of landscape painting. The landscape appears, often with a mighty and overpowering grandeur, in the background of the figures, or in some other way.

This Art evolves and flourishes most beautifully in the age of the free cities, when every town or city in these regions has a pride in its independence, and feels no inner need for territorial union with other cities. A certain international consciousness arises. This freedom from separations, this freedom from the Group-spirit, is a product of the sound and strong Germanic burgher-spirit of those times and places.

All this grows out of the life of the Northern and Southern Netherlands. Influenced very slightly by the South—influenced only by the Southern art of composition through the adjoining southern countries—their artistic creation springs from this democratic strength and soundness of the burghers, and blossoms forth until the time when the whole thing is eclipsed, if I may put it so, by the Group-mind once more.

Thus the period in artistic evolution which we shall illustrate today is at the same time a period of free development of human beings. I might continue to say many other things; but I wanted, above all, to fix your minds on the world-historic moment when this development in Art took place.

We will now proceed at once to show a number of pictures on the screen.

We begin with the famous Altar-piece of Ghent, by the Brothers Van Eyck.

1. The Brothers Van Eyck. Altar-piece. (St. Bavo. Ghent.)

2. God, the Father

3. Mary

4. John

This Altar-piece consists of many parts. This is the portion seen when the front is opened—the middle portion above the Altar. The figure in the center, in Papal costume, is representing God the Father. Conceived in the spirit of the Church, God the Father is actually represented as a Pope. Nevertheless, the features I have indicated are recognisable in the whole artistic composition. If we went back still further, we should find the preceding evolution altogether steeped in Christian ideas—the Christian traditions—that is to say, which the ecclesiastics forcibly impressed upon the people. These traditions most certainly corresponded to a manner of thought inspired by the Group-consciousness. But out of the midst of this very element we now witness the individual spirit making itself felt.

The figure to your left is Mary; that on the right is St. John. Here, then, we find ourselves in the first third of the 15th century. Hubert Van Eyck died in 1426; the Altar-piece was finished by his brother Jan. It is the first third of the 15th century.

From the same Altar-piece we will show the angel-pictures, to the right and left of these central figures.

5. Angels making Music

Here you see a group of angels playing on instruments of music. Compare them with the angels by the German Christian Masters of the period immediately preceding this. Lochner, for instance, or the Master of Cologne—the pictures we saw in a former lecture. You will see how great a difference there is. The angels here are full-grown human beings, in spite of their clerical and ceremonial garments—fully developed human beings—no longer as before, half child-like forms. In such a group as this, you will see that the artist has not yet reached a thorough-going perspective. The perspective is only carried through to a slight extent. You see the whole picture on the surface—spread out like a tapestry. We will now show the angel-picture from the other side of the altar-piece.

6. Angels singing

This whole Altar-piece was done by order of a wealthy Burgher for the Church of St. Bavo. The several parts are now scattered abroad—at Ghent, in Brussels, in Berlin ...

7. The Brothers van Eyck. Adoration of the Lamb.

Here we come to the main portion of the picture, beneath the other three. The “Adoration of the Lamb” is one of the fundamental motifs of this and the preceding period. Here we see it beautifully presented as the fundamental religious conception which had evolved during the course of many centuries. It could not have been embodied in this beautiful artistic form till they had so grown together with this conception as to represent it thus. Throughout the centuries of Christianity this idea had gradually taken shape—this idea of the Salvation, the Redemption of mankind through a great Sacrifice.

We must go far, far back in time to realise its full significance. Compare the subject—the story which this picture tells—with a picture, for example, of the Mithras Offering. There you have Mithras seated on the Bull; the Bull is wounded, the blood is flowing. It is the uplifting of Mithras, His salvation by the overcoming of the Beast. You are familiar with the deeper spiritual meaning of this picture; it is, if I may so describe it, the very antithesis of the one we now see before us. The rearing and rebellious Bull has to be fought down—gives up his blood by force; the Lamb gives His Blood of His own free will.

8. Adoration of the Lamb as compared to a Mithras-Relief

What does this signify? Salvation is lifted out of the element in which it was previously conceived—the element of violence, and strife and conflict. It comes into the element of free devotion and out-pouring Grace. Such is the idea which is here expressed. Not by man seeking in pride to rise beyond himself, seeking to kill his lower nature, but by experiencing in his soul that which streams through the world and patiently suffers with the world, will he attain his liberation at every point of this world's existence, his redemption.

Such is the Universal—and therefore, the individually universal—principle of redemption which we here find expressed. The Lamb is One, yet no one being is striking it. Therefore we see it offered up for every one of those who worship it, who draw near to it from all their different spheres of life—near to the Lamb of Salvation, near to the Fountain of Life.

The greatest conception of the Middle Ages, grown and matured in the course of the centuries, is thus recorded at the end of the Mediaeval Ages by the brothers Van Eyck, and there arises in this period one of the greatest of all works of Art.

Of course, we must bear in mind the points of view I emphasised just now. The individual principle, creating from out of the inner life, wrestles still with an inadequate mastery of the treatment of space. You will, for instance, scarcely be able to imagine a spectator situated with his eye in such a place as to perceive the spatial distribution of this figure here (at the bottom of the picture).

Very beautifully Van Eyck portrayed how the Impulse of the Lamb works in the various callings, in the several branches of human life. Here are some examples.

9. Brothers van Eyck. The Knights and Judges. (From the Altar-piece at Ghent. Berlin Museum.)

These are the Judges and the Knights as they draw near to the Lamb. All these are portions of the same great Altar-piece. The next is a very tender picture:

10. Brothers van Eyck. The Pilgrims and Hermits. (From the Altar-piece at Ghent.)

Here we can already admire the treatment of landscape in relation to the human beings to whom it belongs.

Hubert van Eyck died in 1426, when the Altar-piece was not nearly finished. His brother Jan continued working at it for many years, and scholars have long been engaged in the dispute, which they seem to regard as so important, as to which portions are due to Hubert and which to Jan. This dispute is, after all, more or less superfluous, if we are interested in the artistic aspect. We now come to another picture by Van Eyck.

11. Jan van Eyck. Madonna. (At Bruges.)

This picture was painted in 1436. You will admire the tenderness of expression in the Madonna, no less than the characterisation of this figure (the Canon, Georg van der Pole). It reveals a wonderful observation of Nature and a strong sense of character, with all the primitiveness of the period—needless to say. The next picture was painted by Jan van Eyck in Spain, whither he had been summoned.

12. Jan van Eyck. The Waters of Life. (Prado. Madrid.)

Observe the Gothic architecture in the background. To represent the Waters of Life, the Well of Life, in connection with the Sacrifice of the Lamb, was natural to the ideas of that time. Once more, as in the former picture, you have the motif of God the Father with Mary and St. John.

Here, however, it is transferred more into the spirit of the Southern Art—not unnaturally, as the picture was painted in Spain.

In the former picture we had the same theme treated with more of the Northern character.

13. Jan van Eyck. The Crucifixion. (Berlin.)

Notice how the characteristic qualities come to expression in this picture. The human element far outweighs the Biblical tradition. Only the subject, the occasion, we might say, is taken from that quarter. See with what deep human sympathy the Biblical story is re-awakened, as it were. Here it is not merely the prevalent idea that it is meet to represent in pictures what the Bible tells. The whole event is felt again and re-experienced in the highest degree. It is scarcely conceivable—(pointing to the figures of Mary and St. John)—that a Southern artist would have placed this line, and this, side by side. Here, however, the painter's chief concern is not with the composition, but to give an impression of real inwardness—to realise the inner experience. And then we must say that the effect of this line, and this line, together, is most wonderful, characterising as it does the different moods of the soul.

We now give two examples of secular subjects by the same artist.

14. Jan van Eyck. The Betrothal. (National Gallery. London.)

This picture shows very clearly how great was the artist's power of characterisation and expression. Our last picture by Van Eyck shows the attempt to get still further in the way of portraiture;

15. Jan van Eyck. The Man with the Carnation. (Berlin.)

Here you will see with great distinctness, the artist does not care at all to conceive what a man should be like; he does not work out of any such impulse, but as he sees the human being—whatever presents itself to his vision—this he reproduces.

We now come to a contemporary artist who outlived Van Eyck by a few years—the Master of Flémalle, as he is called.

16. Master of Flémalle. St. Veronica. (Frankfort.)

In him we recognise a seeker inspired by somewhat the same impulse as the Van Eycks, yet influenced far more from France. He recognise these influences in the “line.” There is a kind of echo of artistic tradition. In Van Eyck's work we feel that everything is born out of an elemental inner need. Here, on the other hand, there is already an underlying opinion—this thing or that ought to be represented in such or such a way. Though they are not by any means predominant in his work, still we can see the Master of Flémalle accepts the principles of certain aesthetic traditions. In the former artist you will not easily find, for example, this peculiar position of the hand, nor this peculiar treatment of facial expression. These elements in the picture are undoubtedly to some extent determined by certain influences from France. An atmosphere of elegant grace is poured out over these figures, which you will not find to this extent in the figures of Van Eyck.

17. Master of Flémalle. Death of the Virgin. (London.)

Characteristically—this picture shows the Christian legend transplanted into the artist's present time. These pictures were painted about the thirties of the 15th century.

We now come to Van der Weyden, who—like the former artist, received certain influences from France. Still, he contains all those elements which mark him out clearly as a follower of the Van Eycks.

18. Rogier van der Weyden. Descent from the Cross. (Berlin.)

Already in this picture you will see a characteristic difference. There is an essentially dramatic life in this, whereas we might say Van Eyck is purely ethical. Van Eyck places his figures quietly side by side; they influence one another, but there is no one all-pervading movement. Here, however, in Van der Hayden's work, there is a certain drama in the working together of the figures. It is not merely ethical.

19. Rogier van der Weyden. Descent from the Cross. (Prado. Madrid.)

The same subject, treated once more by the same artist. And now a picture taken from the Christian legends.

20. Rogier van der Weyden. St. Luke painting the Madonna. (Munich.)

Here you see the Evangelist St. Luke, who, as the legend has it, was a painter, painting Mary and the Child.

21. Rogier van der Weyden. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Alte Pinakothek. Munich.)

One of these is King Philip of Burgundy; this one, who is just taking off his hat, is Charles the Bold. If only by this external feature, the whole scene is very much transferred into the artist's immediate present. For the Kings who come to worship the Child, he takes the figures of princes more or less of his own time.

22. Rogier van der Weyden. Charles the Bold. (Berlin.)

Here, then, we have a portrait by Van der Weyden. All these artists attained—a certain perfection in the art of portraiture.

We now come to Petrus Christus:

23. Petrus Christus. The Annunciation (wings of an Altar-piece) (Berlin.)

24. Petrus Christi. The Birth of Christ

The Angel and Mary (The Annunciation) and the presentation of the Christ Child. Petrus Christus works more or less equally along the lines of Van der Weyden on the one hand, and the Van Eycks on the other. These pictures were painted about 1452—the middle of the 15th century.

In the following pictures we come increasingly to the more Northerly Dutch element, where the landscape is developed to greater and greater perfection. The next picture is by Dieric Bouts the Younger. And now, a picture extraordinarily characteristic of this stream in Art:

25. Dieric Bouts. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Alte Pinakothek. Munich.)

26. John the Baptist and Christopher

On one side is the Baptist; on the other side the Christophorus—the Christ-Bearer. Truly, there comes to expression here the full and immediate human inwardness, and with it the landscape that belongs to it. In Dieric Bouts you will especially notice this art—to place the human being fittingly within the landscape of open Nature.

The realistic representation of things is working its way through more and more. Man as an artist becomes more and more able to find, in the direct reproduction of Nature, what he has been striving for along this path.

27. Hugo van der Goes. Portinari Altarpiece, c. 1475. (Uffizi. Florence.)

Truly, Realism has here reached a high degree of perfection. The same subject again:

28. Hugo van der Goes. Adoration by the Shepards, 1480 (Berlin.)

29. Hugo van der Goes. St. Anthony and St. Matthew.

Below are the Donors of the picture. By the same artist:

30. St. Margaret and St. Mary Magdalene. (Ste. Maria Novalis. Florence.)

31. Hugo van der Goes. The Death of Mary. (Academy. Bruges.)

32. Hugo van der Goes. Adam and Eve. The Fall. (Vienna.)

The Art of that time—as I have said on previous occasions relating to Meister Bertram—did not picture a mere snake, but tried to portray the Luciferic element.

33. Meister Bertram. The Fall (Hamburg.)

That the snake itself—the existing physical snake—should have been the Tempter, is an invention of the most modern naturalistic materialism.

We now come to the artist who, educated in the School of Van der Weyden, represents, in a certain sense, its continuation. He was known in the School as Der deutsche Hans. I refer to Hans Memling.

34. Hans Memling, Madonna Enthroned. (Uffizi. Florence.)

This artist was born at Mainz. We shall, if possible, in the near future, show some examples of Upper German paintings, which have their own characteristic peculiarities. Its tendencies are quite evidently present in this picture; but for the rest, Memling had absorbed all that was then living in the Art of the Netherlands, including the influence that came over from France. The next picture is also by Hans Memling.

35. Hans Memling. The Seven Joys of Mary. (Munich.)

—a motif which was also familiar to those times. The various events connected with the life of Mary are here portrayed. Unfortunately it is too small in this reproduction to recognise the details very clearly.

36. Memling. The Last Judgment. (Marienkirche. Danzig.)

A characteristic picture by Memling. With real genius, in his own way, he brings to expression his conception of the Last Judgment. There is a certain angular quality about it, and yet the whole event is permeated with humanity, with inward feeling. The picture is note at Danzig. A powerful trader stole the picture—but, being a pious man also, he afterwards bequeathed it to a church in Danzig.

He will also acquaint ourselves with Memling's portraits. You will see that all this School achieves a greatness of its own in representing the human individuality.

37. Memling. Portrait of a Man. (Berlin.)

The expression of the qualities of the soul in this face is, indeed, remarkable. This is a well-known picture at the Hague.

38. Memling. Portrait. (The Hague.)

We come now to the later artists who no longer show quite the same freedom and simplicity, but a certain contortion and inner complexity. David, for instance, was born in 1400; he came from Holland. Hitherto, we may say, we have had before us the pre-Reformation period in Art; the artist we shall now show brings us already very near the Reformation.

39. Gerard David. Adoration of the Magi. (Munich.)

Here you will recognise how strongly the Southern influence is already working in the element of composition.

40. Gerard David. Baptism of Christ. (Bruges.)

41. Gerard David. Madonna and Christ, with Angels. (Rouen.)

42. Gerard David. Mary and Child

The next is by an artist who was in a sense only a kind of imitation of David. We now come to Geertgen, who, though he dies at the early age of twenty-eight, does, indeed, bear within him all the peculiar characteristics of this epoch.

43. Geertgen. Holy Family. (Amsterdam.)

44. Geertgen. The Holy Night. (Berlin.)

As we go forward into the 16th century, other elements mingle more and more with what was characteristic of the Van Eyck period. We come now to Hieronymus Bosch.

45. Hieronymus Bosch. Descent from the Cross.

In his work we find a strong element of composition. Also we have no longer the mere naturalistic observation. His work is permeated with a fanciful, fantastic feeling—so much so, that he becomes the painter of all manner of grotesque and “spooky” subjects.

46. Hieronymus Bosch. Christ carrying the Cross.

47. Hieronymus Bosch. Hell. (Prado. Madrid.)

The fantastic element is mingled with all that he had learned in this direction.

Now we come to Quentin Matsys, in whom the element of composition is already strongly paramount. Indeed, this is already in the 16th century.

48. Quentin Matsys. Holy Family, 1509. (Brussels.)

49. Quentin Matsys. Mourning for Christ. (Antwerp.)

Here you see quite deliberate composition. In the next picture we shall see how this feeling for composition combines with that for individual characterisation even where there is less intensity of form, or movement, in the group.

50. Quentin Matsys. The Money-Changer and His Wife. (Louvre. Paris.)

We now come to an artist who reveals the characteristics of the period especially in his landscape-painting—Joachim Patinir. It was at this time and from these regions that landscape-painting first developed and found its way into the full artistic life. Only from this time onward was it really discovered for the life of Art.

51. Patinir. The Flight into Egypt. (Madrid.)

52. Patinir. The Flight into Egypt. (Berlin.)

53. Patinir. The Baptism of Christ. (Vienna.)

I beg you to look at this especially, from the point of view of landscape-painting. Such landscape treatment could naturally only originate in the age of attempted naturalism; only then does landscape begin to have a real meaning for Art.

54. Patinir. Temptation of St. Anthony. (Prado. Madrid.)

The next is a painter quite definitely of the 16th century. I spoke just now of the “Burgher” element. He carries it still further, even into the sphere of the peasantry. His works are born of the elemental simplicity of the people. Nevertheless, all manner of other influences enter into them—Italian influences, for example. Thus he strangely unites his elemental Dutch simplicity with a very marked Renaissance feeling. I refer to Pieter Brueghel—born in 1525.

55. Brueghel. The Pious Man and the Devil. (Naples.)

56. Brueghel. The Blind Leading the Blind. (Paris. Louvre.)

57. Brueghel. The Fall of the Angels. (Brussels.)

58. Brueghel. The Way to Calvary. (Vienna.)

And another Biblical subject by the same painter.

59. Pieter Brueghel. The Adoration of the Magi. (London.)

With that, we will finish for today.

Today—since Dr. Trapesnikoff has ordered them—we will show you some pictures arranged from a different point of view than in our former lectures; more from the point of view of subject-matter. The pictures today will relate especially to the birth of Christ Jesus, the Adoration by the Shepherds and by the Three Wise Men, and finally the Flight into Egypt. Comprising an evolution through several centuries, they will bring before our souls, from another aspect, that which is living in the Old Christmas Plays of which we have been speaking in the last lectures. We shall thus be concerned today, not in the first place with the artistic elements, as such, but with the treatment of a certain theme in the history of Art, and I will therefore speak not so much of the evolution of artistic principles, but draw your attention to some other points of view which may be of interest in relation to these pictures. You will, however, bear in mind the general lines of development of Christian Art, which we have described in the past lectures of this series. You will observe the same great trend of evolution, as we pass from the artistic representations of the early Christian centuries into the times of the Renaissance. First you will see the more typical representations of an early time. These, as we have seen, were still under the influence of Revelations from the Spiritual World. Less concerned with naturalistic expressions of form and color, they try to reproduce the spiritual Imaginations, revealed out of the Spiritual World. Thenceforward you will see this Christian Art evolve towards Naturalism, that is, towards a certain reproduction of that which may be called reality from the point of view of the physical plane. As we follow the evolution of this Art, the sacred personalities stand before us in a more and more human form.

We shall first show some pictures relating more especially to the Birth of Christ. Then we shall show the Adoration of the Child by the Shepherds; indeed, these two, to some extent, will go together. The next series of pictures will deal mainly with the story of the Three Wise Men of the East—the Magi. Here I beg you to observe how the two streams evolve: the stream of St. Luke's Gospel, as we may call it, and that of the Gospel of St. Matthew. They are the streams which take their start from the two Jesus Children. Artistically, too, we can recognise the difference. The Adoration by the Shepherds—all that is more or less related to this theme—could best be understood (understood, that is to say, by the inner feelings) under the influence of what remained from those Northern Mysteries whose center, as I told you, was in Denmark. This stream is connected with all that related to the Birth of Jesus—springing forth, as it were, with Jesus, out of the earthly evolution, out of the spiritual beings that are bound up with the life of Nature.

In the Adoration by the Magi, on the other hand—the mission of the Three Wise Men from the East—we always find a direct expression of the “Gnostic” stream. Under the influence of the “Star”—which means, something that is made known out of the Cosmos—the Wise Men draw near to the Christ Who heralds His approach and develops in the Zarathustra Jesus. In all that is connected with the Adoration by the Three Wise Men, we have, therefore the Gnostic stream: the consciousness that the Christ-Event was a cosmic one; that a fertilisation of the Earth had taken place out of the Cosmos.

Our friends have been kind enough to put up here a drawing of the Three Wise Men. The picture is taken from an old Gospel Book. We see them looking up in adoration, that is, in quest of spiritual knowledge, by striving upward with all their inner being, and looking up to the Star wherein the Spirit Who shall liberate the Earth draws near.

1. Three Wise Men.

It may truly be said that this stream, which finds expression in St. Matthew's Gospel, was less and less understood in the further course of centuries. True, it also came to life, as you know, in the Old Christmas Plays. But the appearance of the Three Wise Men of the East cannot really be understood with the same understanding, as the appearance of Jesus to the Shepherds according to St. Luke's Gospel. For the latter is a simple understanding of the heart, of inner feeling; while the understanding which we must bring to bear on all that is connected with the Wise Men from the East must needs be of a “Gnostic” character. All that is signified by the Wise Men “following the Star” will only come into the consciousness of humanity again when—not the Gnosis this time, it is true—but anthroposophical Spiritual Science gains acceptance.

Finally, we shall show some pictures of the Flight into Egypt. This, too, is connected with the “Gnostic” Revelation concerning Jesus Christ. We cannot speak of it at great length today; we may return to it another time.

To begin with, it is important here, again, to realise that there is a certain underlying composition in all that the Gospels contain. The composition is always important. We need only faithfully follow the Gospel narrative. The Flight into Egypt appears in direct connection with the Mission of the Three Wise Men. It happens, as it were, on the basis of what was first undertaken by the Three Wise Men. This bears witness to the fact that the Gospel is taking into account the connection with all that was related about Egypt in the Old Testament. Moses was learned in the Wisdom of the Egyptians. Now we are told in the Gospel that the Three Wise Men of the East came to the birthplace of Christ Jesus, led by the Star which is really the Star of Christ. But it goes on to relate that something now had to take place which did not entirely accord, as it were, with the course of the Star; something which was not in the consciousness of the Wise Men themselves—for so the Gospel explicitly tells us. Here we are shown one of those cases where the astrological determination, as it were, of certain great events has to be broken through. How precisely the astrological determination corresponds to what is known of the historic facts—you could see this from the instance which we spoke of recently. Our friends drew up the Horoscope for that point in the course of Time which was indicated as the day of Christ Jesus's Death.

But we see that the Jesus Child, in whom the Zarathustra Soul was living, had to be taken out of the domain of this Star. He was taken into Egypt, and from Egypt He was then led back again into the realm of the Star. In this is contained the whole Mystery of the ebbing away of that ancient stream of evolution which had grown atavistic in the Egyptian Gnosis. The new Revelation had to enter once more into a certain union with the Old in order that it might free itself consciously.

These are the underlying Mysteries, and though they are little recognised, none the less they lie inherent in the composition. I may take this opportunity to point out once more, how important it is to pay attention to the composition when we read the Gospels. For the text is frequently corrupt and can only be read in its true form by those who are able to read with the help, if I may say so, of the Occult Text. Notably in the translations, naturally enough, the text is often quite unintelligible. But in the composition (compare my Lecture Cycle held in Cassel on the Gospel of St. John)—in the composition there is something which will strike any reader immediately, if he reads the Gospel carefully.

One more remark I would like to make, before we go on to show the pictures. The materialistic consciousness of our age has altogether lost the point of view which would indicate such inner connections as underlie the revelation to the Three Wise Men. Whatever goes by the name of Astrology today has fallen into the hands of utter dilettanti, who carry on all kinds of nonsense and abuses with it. Few people nowadays are in true earnest when they speak of that relation of the Earth to the Cosmos which finds expression in actual physical relationships—in the constellations of the Stars. On the other hand, for the official Science of today Astrology of whatever kind is a mere antiquated superstition.

Nevertheless, the knowledge of these things did not decay or die out absolutely until the 18th century. Even as late as the 18th century people still spoke of something which is of extreme importance if we wish to understand the deep, deep truths that underlie the appearance of the Three Wise Men. In the 18th century, those who had still preserved some knowledge of the old Initiations spoke of the significance of the physical constellations. But not only so: they also spoke of the significance of invisible constellations. Even in the 18th century it was expressly stated in certain circles who possessed Initiation Knowledge. “There are also Stars which only the Initiate can see.” This is a true statement, and this, above all, must be taken into account if we wish to understand why it was that “Imaginations” appeared to the Shepherds, while “Stars” appeared to the Three Wise Men. Such is the indication: The Revelation came to the Shepherds inasmuch as they still had dreamlike clairvoyance in the old atavistic sense. But the Wise Men of the East had their knowledge through the ancient Science that had been handed down. Through this they knew of the relation between the Cosmos, the Heavens and the Earth. Through this they knew—could calculate, as it were—what was drawing near.

Hence we can see in the evolution of these pictures—and you will now have opportunity to observe it for yourselves—we see, with all the transition to Naturalism, the pictorial representations growing less and less adequate to the theme of the Wise Men. For the Wise Men or Magi, the most ancient and typical representations are the most fitting. For the real truth that is intended in this story is lifted right out of the earthly domain. On the other hand, the representations of Jesus grow the more intimate and tender, the more naturalistic they become. For in this case the naturalistic quality is fitting. All that goes out to meet the approaching Christ from the physical plane—all that is connected, therefore, with the life of Nature—is naturally best portrayed by such means.

We will now go on to the pictures, first of the Nativity itself and of the Adoration by the Shepherds, and then of the Three Wise Men or Kings.

2. The Nativity. (mosaic) (Palermo, Chiesa della Martorana.)

In these old compositions, as you see, everything is conceived in typical form—based on the typical representations of the ancient Myths which came over largely from the East. In a most natural way the typical representations of the Myth grew into the representations of the Christian theme. The Orpheus type, for instance, the type of the Good Shepherd, was handed down from earlier representations of Myth or Cult or Ritual, and taken to represent the new impulse, the Christ event; and so it was with many another theme and composition.

3. A Page of the Biblia Pauperum. 1st Edition. (15th century) The Nativity, etc. (German Woodcuts.)

These early Bibles generally showed parallel representations from the Old and New Testaments. They bore in mind that the New Testament is the fulfilment of the Old; this idea is brought out again and again in these “Bibles of the Poor.” The Nativity, which interests us mainly now, is shown in the middle of the page.

4. The Nativity, 11th Century. (Limburg Monestary.)

This is at Cologne. Beneath is the Flight into Egypt; the two are together in this slide. Apart from this one, we shall show the Flight into Egypt at the end of the lecture. Here you have a beautifully naive conception of the Nativity. You will feel the connection of it with what is given in the old Christmas Plays with which we are familiar. Though the latter belong, of course, to a later time, nevertheless they are from earlier Christmas Plays which are no longer extant.

5. The Flight into Egypt. (Evangeliar of the 12th century. Cathedral of Cologne.)

It is interesting to see, all around the picture, representations of what was cosmically connected with the Event, showing how they were still aware of the spiritual relationships. And now we will take the same motif as it appears in the work of Niccola Pisano.

6. Niccola Pisano. The Nativity. (Baptistery at Pisa.)

7. Giotto. The Nativity. (San Francesco. Assisi.)

You see how the representations of the theme are gradually passing into Naturalism.

8. della Robbia. The Nativity. (Hamburg. Altarpiece.) (National Museum. Florence.)

9. Meister Francke. The Nativity. (Hamburg.)

This picture is at Hamburg; I remember having seen it there myself not long ago.

10. Philippo Lippi. The Nativity. (Cathedral at Spoleto.)

You really see how in the course of time Naturalism takes hold of it more and more.

11. Piero della Francesca. The Nativity. (National Gallery. London.)

Here we are in the fifteenth century once more; and we now go on to Correggio.

12. Correggio. Holy Night. (Dresden.)

We pass again to the more Northern Masters, whose names you know. First we have a work of Schongauer' s.

13. Martin Schongauer. The Nativity. (Alto Pinakothek. Munich.)

Most interesting to see the Italian and the Northern Masters one after the other. In the former you still find a stronger adherence to ideal types, while here there is more individualisation—creation out of inwardness of soul, as we have seen before. Down to the tiny feet, all is pervaded with feeling, albeit the artistic perfection is not so great as in the Southern Masters.

14. Herlin. Nativity from the Altar of St. George. (Museum at Nordlingen.)

We come now to the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, to Albrecht Dürer.

15. Dürer. The Nativity. (Alto Pinakothek. Munich.)

See how the Art is taken hold of here by all that I described to you—the working out of the element of light. It is most interesting to study this in Dürer.

16. Altdorfer. The Holy Night. (Berlin.)

Altdorfer was Dürer's successor in Nuremberg.

We shall now give a series of pictures relating mainly to the Adoration by the Shepherds. First, some older Miniatures from Bible and Gospel Manuscripts.

17. Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds. (Codex Egberti. Trier. 10th century.)

18. Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds, from Menologion of Basil II (Vatican. Rome. 11th Century.)

We go on to the Italian representations of the Adoration of the Child by the Shepherds.

19. Cimabue. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Assisi.)

With Cimabue, as you know, we find ourselves in the 13th century. We go on into the 15th and come to Ghirlandajo, the Master of whom we lately spoke.

20. Ghirlandajo. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Akademia. Florence.)

Another Master of the 15th century is Piero di Cosimo.

21. Piero di Cosimo. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Berlin.)

And now we come to the Art of the Netherlands, with which we are familiar.

22. Hugo van der Goes. Adoration of the Child. (Uffizi. Florence.)

23. Hugo van der Goes. Adoration of the Child. (detail.)

Finally we give two works by Rembrandt.

24. Rembrandt. Adoration by the Shepherds. (In the Lantern Light. Etching, about 1652.)

25. Rembrandt. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Alte Pinakothek. Munich.)

We now go on to the pictures representing the Adoration by the Three Wise Men. To begin with, an old Mosaic, of the 6th century.

26. Mosaic. Chiesa della Martotana. Palermo. Three Wise Men.

27. Mosaic. Sant Apollinare Nuovo. Ravenna.

In these older pictures the events are shown thoroughly in connection with the Spiritual World—remote from all Naturalism, lifted into a higher sphere.

28. Nativity and Adoration by the Wise Men. (Menologium Basilius. Vatican. 11th century)

29. Niccola Pisano. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Baptistery at Pisa.)

This is the famous Golden Gate at Freiberg, second half of the 12th century:

30. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Cathedral of Freiberg. The Golden Gate.)

31. Domenico Veneziano. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Berlin.) Formerly attributed to Pisanello (Vittore Pisano).

We go on to the 15th, to Stephen Lochner:

32. Stephen Lochner. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Cathedral of Cologne.)

The next is by Gentile da Fabriano, also of the 15th century.

33. Gentile da Fabriano. Adoration of the Child. (Florence.)

34. Fra Angelico. Adoration of the Kings. (St. Marco. Florence.)

Fra Angelico is as tender and lovely in this as in all other subjects.

35. Filippo Lippi. Adoration by the Wise Men.

Whichever subject it is, you see how Naturalism progresses. This is especially interesting when one follows the treatment of one and the same subject through the centuries.

36. Sandro Botticelli. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Uffizi. Florence.)

Now we come to the second half of the 15th century.

37. Ghirlandajo. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Spedale degli Innodenti. Florence.)

End of the 15th century:

38. Mantegna. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Uffizi. Florence.)

39. Giorgione. The Wise Men of the East. (Vienna.)

40. Giorgione. Adoration by the Wise Men. (National Gallery. London.)

41. Giovanni Bellini. Adoration by the Kings. (Layard Gallery. London.)

And now I ask you to call to mind once more the various Dutch and Flemish Masters of whom we have spoken in a former lecture. For we now have the same subject by

42. Rogier van der Weyden. Adoration by the Kings. (Alte Pinakothek.Munich)

43. Dieric Bouts. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Alte Piankothek. Munich.)

44. Adoration by the Wise Men, 15th centry, from the Brevarium Grimani.

We have spoken of the characte of these painters. The next is by the artist who worked in Bruges and died about 1523.

45. Gerard David. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Alte Pinakothek. Munich.)

And now the same theme treated by Leonardo.

46. Leonardo da Vinci. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Uffizi.Florence) And by his pupil,

47. Luini Bernadino. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Saronno.)

Going North again:

48. Dürer. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Uffizi. Florence.)

49. Brueghel. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Vienna.)

And finally, Rembrandt.

50. Rembrandt. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Buckingham Palace.)

And now we come to our last theme: the Flight into Egypt. First we have a painter of the late 15th and early 16th century.

51. Herrad von Lanndsberg. The Flight into Egypt.

52. Joachim de Patinir. Rest in the Flight. (Prado. Madrid.)

53. Correggio. Madonna della Scodella. (Parma)

The next, a little later.

54. Bernhard Strigel. The Flight into Egypt. (Stuttgart.)

Strigel painted also in Vienna, and died in 1528.

55. Albrecht Dürer. Resting on the Flight into Egypt.

56. Workshop of Albrecht Dürer. Resting on the Flight into Egypt.

Next is Hans Baldung or Hans Grun, going on into the 16th century.

57. Hans Balding (Baldung). Rest in the Flight. (Germanisches Museum. Nuremberg.)

58. Lucas Cranach. Rest in the Flight. (Berlin.)

Finally, Rembrandt:

59. Rembrandt. Rest in the Flight. (Etching.)

So much for today. Perhaps you will now take the opportunity to see at close quarters this impressive picture of the Wise Men which indicates so clearly the worship of the Star with the incoming of the Christ Jesus Soul.

The pictures we shall show today will enable us to give a kind of recapitulation of various things that came before our souls in former lectures. I shall draw attention today to further aspects, arising out of what we have said before. In the course of these studies, we have distinguished between the more Southern European and the Northern or Mid-European artistic streams and we have indicated characteristic aspects of these two. I do not wish to repeat what has already been set forth. Today we are able to show some further reproductions of pictures by Raphael, and I wish to say a few words about him, unfolding—if I may so describe it—a more special outcome of our ideas concerning the artistic genius of the South.

Anyone who lets Raphael's creations work upon his soul, will admit that in Raphael—with respect to certain artistic intentions—the highest ideal has been attained. When we let them work upon us and try to understand them, we ask ourselves again and again: What is it that comes to expression in his works, and how does it stand in relation to the World? Think for a moment from this aspect of the Madonna della Sedia,—how this picture is placed in a great world-perspective: It is so, indeed, in all directions. To begin with, you may consider the picture as an outcome of the Christian world-conception. So perfectly does it express this theme: The Birth of Christ Jesus in connection with the Madonna, that we must say, 'The ides, the meaning, the impulse, the world-historic significance which it is desired to express, has here been expressed by means that cannot ever be transcended.

From a certain point of view you cannot imagine a further enhancement of this theme—the Madonna with the Jesus Child—in its impression on the human soul. One of the ideas of the Christian conception of the world has come to expression here in the highest imaginable way, seen from a certain aspect.

1. Raphael. Madonna With Child.

And now let us look at the picture for a moment as though we knew nothing of the Christian world-conception. Let us consider it in the way Herman Grimm once spoke of it, simply as an expression of the deep mystery of the relation of the mother to the child. A mother with her child: Once more, the highest means of expression have been found by Raphael for one of the most mysterious themes in the whole Cosmos, as it lies before us human beings living in the Physical. Thus even if we take the pure picture of Nature—the mother and child—apart from the world-historic happenings, once more the thing is perfect in itself, the highest of its kind.

It is always so with Raphael. His themes are of universal significance, and perfectly expressed,—the means of expression proceeding from those streams and influences which we recognise as characteristic of the South. Always, however, his themes must be seen in the context of great universal meanings. We can regard them from a Christian aspect (and the above two points of view are by no means the only ones),—looking at it in a Christian way, the theme places itself at once in a great context of Nature. Again it rises free from the individually human; we seem to forget the human being that worked to create it—the human being, Raphael himself. Behind the artist stand great cosmic perspectives—world-conceptions coming to expression in him. This, indeed, is to characterise such an artist as Raphael, as the artist of an epoch that was drawing to it close: the Fourth Post Atlantean epoch. Such epochs, when they draw near their end—or when their inner essence reaches beyond the boundary of times, often bring forth their very highest.

We shall presently see how very different it is when we consider in this light, say, the personality of Albrecht Dürer. There it is altogether different. But you might also think of the Sistine Madonna, even as we have now spoken of the Madonna della Sedia. Again we should have to say: What is here placed before us interests us, above all, inasmuch as it stands out against the background of a great world-conception. Without this background of a great world-conception, the Sistine Madonna is, indeed, unthinkable.

2. Raphael. Sistine Madonna With Child

3. Raphael. Sistine Madonna With Child (detail)

Looking at some of Raphael's pictures today, let us bear in mind the aspect which has thus been characterised. For Raphael to create in this way—for his pictures to arise out of a mighty world-perspective—something of cosmic law and principle had to be working in his very soul. This is, indeed, the case. It comes to expression in the remarkable course of his life, which was already emphasized by Hermann Grimm. Raphael's work takes its course in regular cyclic periods. At the age of twenty-one he creates the Sposalize; four years later the Entombment; four years after this he completes the Frescoes of the Camera della Segnatura; four years later, once again, the Cartoons for the tapestries in the Vatican and the two Madonnas. And finally, four years after this, at the age of thirty-seven, he is working at the Transfiguration, which stands unfinished when he leaves this physical plane. In cyclic periods of four years, something of the nature of a cosmic principle works in Raphael. Truly, we here have something that proceeds from a great cosmic background. Hence Raphael's work is so strongly separated from his personality. Again and again the question comes to us: How is it that the themes—and they are world-historic themes—come to expression in his work so perfectly; so self-contained, so inwardly complete?

Down to this day, the study of Art derives—more than from any other source—from that great Art in the center of which is Raphael.

The study of Art in the exoteric life today is more or less of this kind. All its available ideas have been learned from the Art which finds its highest expression in Raphael—the Art of the Italian Renaissance. Thus in the outer life the concepts to express this Art are the most perfect, and all other Art is measured by this standard. The works of this Art are the ideal, and we have few words at our disposal, few concepts and ideas, even to speak of any other streams in Art, specifically different from this one. That is the unique thing.

And now we will let pass before our souls a number of pictures by Raphael, most of which we have not yet seen in these lectures.

4. Raphael. The Vision of Ezekiel. (Florence, Palazzo Pitti.)

4. Raphael. The Vision of Ezekiel. (detail) (Pitti. Florence.)

The ideas, the living conceptions, out of which such a picture proceeded even in Raphael's time, are naturally no longer near us today. To represent so truly this wandering of the soul in human form through the spiritual world, would no longer be attainable today for those who have not Spiritual Science. The animal nature below expressed what man has cast aside from himself, but it is still there, needless to say, even in his etheric body, and we find it there when the etheric is freed from the physical. The union of the soul with something childlike, as it is is represented by the angel figures here, is an absolutely true conception. The conception corresponds to a reality. We must consider man in his full being, such as he really is. In recent communications on the Guardian of the Threshold we had to speak of the Threefold being of Man. This threefold nature of man emerges everywhere, where reference is made to the Spiritual part of man emancipated from the Physical. We find this threefoldness in manifold forms—not symbolic, but corresponding to spiritual Realities. And so we find it here, in the full-grown Man related to the Child and the Beast.

5. Perugino. The Marriage of Maria. (Vienna, Albertina.)

Today we are able to show a study from the Sposalizo, the picture with which Raphael's great career as an artist properly begins. He did this at the age of twenty-one—at the beginning of the four-year period which dominated all his work.

6. Perugino. “Sposalizo”. (Caen.)

7. Raphael. “Sposalizo”. (Milan, Brera.)

8. Raphael. The Call of St. Peter. (London, Kensington Museum.)

9. Raphael. The Road to Calvary. (Madrid, Prado.)

10. Raphael. Sketch of the Mourning for Christ. (Louvre. Paris.)

11. Raphael. Sermon of St. Paul at Athens. (London, Kensington Museum.)

We will now show once more a reproduction of the so-called “Disputa,” with certain details.

12. Raphael. Disputa. (Vatican. Rome.)

13. Raphael. The Holy Trinity. (Perugia, San Severo.)

The Holy Trinity, as it is called.

14. Raphael. Sketch for the Disputa. (Windsor.)

15. Raphael. St. Cecilia. (Bologna.)

And now, as an example of Raphael's portraiture:—

16. Raphael. Cardinal Bihbiens. (Pitti. Florence.)

The next two are examples of his tapestries in the Vatican.

17. Raphael. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. (Tapestry in the Vatican.)

18. Raphael. The Healing of the Lame. (Tapestry in the Vatican.)

These are the things of which Goethe said that nothing he had known till then could compare with them in greatness.

Looking back once more over the pictures by Raphael which we have seen today, I beg you observe how we may recognise in them the echoing of a mighty tradition of great Art. Even the sketches which we have shown today reveal this most especially. Raphael's work is the last, the highest, the closing act in a great tradition. There is also another point I would ask you to consider. Think of the picture of the Sermon of St. Paul and others—the “Disputa,” for example. You may take any one of those that we have seen today. In every case, having distinguished the subject of the picture, you may naturally ask yourself about the event or personality represented. But it will never be sufficient to answer: The subject is such and such; it represents this or that. In Raphael's case you will have to ask: How is the artist contriving to express—whatever the subject is—in accordance with the ideas and canons of great Art? We cannot merely ask: How would St. Paul actually have lifted up his hand to speak? With Raphael we must ask: What angle will the arm have to make with the body according to aesthetic laws of balance and proportion? And so forth ... A magic breath is poured out over it all,—a magic breath of aesthetic traditions, of harmony and balance. Look at the boy who stands here, in this picture. It is not enough to ask: What is going on in the soul of the boy? Your question must, rather, be directed to these laws of artistic harmony. See how the line of the arm, reaching out on either side, is placed into the composition. In short, you can distinguish what is purely artistic from the underlying subject-matter. Here, however, the artist's power is so magnificent that it draws the subject-matter into its own sphere. With such an artist as Raphael, we may, indeed, pronounce the word, for it is literally true:—“Artistic truth makes all the rest true,—compels all the rest into its circle.”

You cannot apply this saying, in its present meaning, to the works we shall now let pass before our souls. We will begin with one by Martin Schongauer, who died in 1488.

19. Martin Schongauer. The Road to Calvary.

Here you see the very opposite. To begin with, the artist is simply concerned to express his subject. No longer is there poured out over it the magic breath of a peculiarly aesthetic truth, the climax of a great tradition. Here the effort is, to the best of the artist's technique and ability, with the artistic means at his disposal, to bring to expression what is there in the souls of men. Here the world speaks to us directly—not through the medium of a tradition of great Art.

We will now let work upon our souls the personality of Albrecht Dürer; showing a number of pictures which we did not see in the former lectures. In Albrecht Dürer, whom we may speak of as a contemporary of Raphael, we have before us an altogether different personality. It is impossible to think of Dürer's works in the same way as of Raphael's. In Dürer's case we shall not easily forget the personality, the human being. Not that we must always necessarily imagine him; but the pictures themselves are eloquent of all that is direct and intimate and near to the human soul, springing from the soul with elemental force. Raphael paints with the ever-present background of great world-perspectives. He is only conceivable if we imagine, as it were, the Genius of Christianity itself painting in the soul of Raphael. And, again, he is only conceivable as one who stands at the close of a great epoch, during which pupils were learning from their Masters many a tradition of aesthetic law, artistic harmony,—learning that certain things should be done in certain ways, to correspond with the canons of great Art.

In Raphael's works these things are always there before us. In Dürer's work, on the other hand, we feel in the background, as it were, the aura of the life of the time in Middle Europe,—the German towns and cities. Invisibly his pictures are pervaded by all that blossomed forth in the free life of the cities, working its way towards the Reformation. Nor does he stand before us with any cosmic perspectives in the background. It is, rather, the ordinary individual man's approach to the Bible and to his fellow-men, bringing his own soul to expression. The Human element can never be separated from his works. We cannot seek in Dürer for a cosmic principle working through his soul, as we can in Raphael. But we may look for something intimate and deep; deeply connected—we cannot say so too often—with the human soul, its feelings and its seeking, its longing and striving.

20. Dürer. The Four Witches. (Etching)

21. Dürer. Hercules.

22. Dürer. Melanchthon Etching.

Here we have a portrait of Melanchthon, the theological bearer of the Reformation, as against Luther, who was the “priestly” bearer.

23. Dürer. “Rosenkranzfest.” (Prague.)

This picture is now in the “Rudolfinum” at Prague. The Pope, the Emperor and representatives of Christianity are being crowned with roses by Mary, the Jesus Child and St. Dominic. The two figures against the tree trunk will be shown in detail in the next slide.

24. Dürer. Portrait of Himself and Pirkheimer. (Detail of the above.)

Further examples of Dürer's portraiture:—

25. Dürer. Portrait of his Father. (Uffizi. Florence.)

26. Dürer. Portrait. (Prado. Madrid.)

Looking at such a portrait, the whole life of the time comes vividly before you. Truly, in this sense Dürer is an historic figure of the very first rank. No historic document tells us so well, what the people of that time were like.

We shall now show some characteristic examples of Dürer's drawings—etchings and woodcuts. To begin with, from his cycle on the Apocalypse—fifteen leaves, done in 1498.

27. Dürer. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (1498.)

28. Dürer. The Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Seven-headed Dragon (1498.)

29. Dürer. The Adoration of the Lamb and The Hymn of the Chosen. (1497).

30. Dürer. The Battle of the Angels. (1498.)

31. Dürer. Michael and the Dragon. (1493.)

And now we will show a number of pictures from the series of etchings of the Passion—known as the “Kupferstich-Passion.”

32. Dürer. The Kerchief of St. Veronica. (Etching)

Then the motif that occurs again and again in that time:—

33. Dürer. The Man of Sorrows. (Etching)

34. Dürer. The Scourging. (Etching)

35. Dürer. The Crowning with Thorns. (Etching)

36. Dürer. Ecce Homo. (Etching)

We will next show a number of pictures from the Holzschnitt-Passion—of thirty-six small woodcuts. They are extraordinarily tender and intimate. The first is the title-page:—

37. Dürer. Christ with the Crown of Thorns. (Woodcut)

38. Dürer. Saint Veronica. (Woodcut)

39. Dürer. The Last Supper. (Woodcut)

40. Dürer. The Scourging. (Woodcut)

41. Dürer. Ecce Homo. (Woodcut)

42. Dürer. The Way to Calvary. (Woodcut)

43. Dürer. Christ on the Cross. (Woodcut)

44. Dürer. Mourning for Christ. (Woodcut)

45. Dürer. The Resurrection. (Woodcut)

46. Dürer. The Ascension. (Woodcut)

We can also show two pictures by Hans Baldung, who worked for a certain time, at any rate—in Dürer's workshop. These pictures date from the end of the 15th or beginning of the 16th century.

47. Hans Baldung. The Three Fates.

48. Hans Baldung. Ecce Homo.

49. Hans Sebald Beham. The Man of Sorrows.

I would like to make the following remarks:—The transition from the Fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and all that is connected with it, finds expression—far more than we can realise from the ordinary textbooks of History—in the whole life of the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. We must remember that at such times, at the turning-point of one epoch and another, many things are perceptible in the life of the time, expressing the mighty transformation that is taking place. History, truly, does not take its course—though the text-books might lead one to suppose so—like a perpetual succession of causes and effects. At characteristic moments, at the turning-points of epochs, characteristic phenomena emerge, in the most varied spheres of life. Thus, at the transition from the age of the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings to that of the Spiritual Soul, phenomena appear in all domains of life, revealing how men felt when the impulses of the Spiritual Soul were drawing near. The evolution of the Spiritual Soul involved the development of those relationships with the purely physical plane into which men had to enter during the fifth post-Atlantean age. To a high degree, man was about to be fettered to that physical plane. Naturally, this brought in its train all the phenomena of reaction—of opposition and revulsion at this process. Moreover, at the same time many things emerged out of the former epoch, reaching over with multitudinous ramifications into the new.

Among the many symptoms of that time we see, for instance, the intense preoccupation of man with the phenomenon of Death. In many different spheres—as we can easily convince ourselves—the thought of Death came very near to men. Death as a great mystery—the Mystery of Death—drew near to men at the very time when their Souls had to prepare to come out most of all on to the physical plane of existence.

Moreover. the things of the fourth epoch were reaching over into the Fifth. There were the excesses of the Papacy which had degenerated more and more into a pure impulse of might. There were the excesses connected with the old divisions—the riches of the higher orders, their overweening arrogance, their growing superficiality of life,—while the religious themes themselves were being made external, flat and superficial. Those human beings, on the other hand, who attained some inwardness of soul were pondering deeply on the penetration of the Spiritual world into the physical. Added to this, there was the absolute need to turn one's attention to the spiritual world; inasmuch as the seeds of decay and destruction were entering most terribly into the physical world just at that time. For in those centuries the plague was raging far and wide in Europe—truly, an awful death, Death, in the Plague, came face to face with men as a visible phenomenon in its most awful form.

In Art, too, we see this intensive study of the significance of Death. It comes before us especially in the famous Procession of Death on the cemetery wall at Pisa—one of the earliest appearances of this kind. Then we find many pictures of Death as it draws near to men under the inexorable laws of Fate—draws near to man of whatsoever rank or class. The “Dance of Death,” the “Wandering of Death through the World,” Death's entry into all human relationships—this becomes a very favorite theme. It was out of this mood and feeling that Holbein himself created his cycle on the Dance of Death, three examples of which we shall now show. In Holbein's Dance of Death the object was especially to show how Death approaches the rich man, for instance; approaches man of every social rank—from the highest in the land to the lowest. Moreover, the object was to show Death as a righteous judge. Holbein in his Dance of Death desired to show every conceivable circumstance under which Death draws near to human life.

44a. Holbein. Death and the King.

Here we see Death coming to the King, to tear him away from his royal life.

44b. Holbein. Death and the Monk.

The people of that time had great delight in pictures such as these. This was the time when the Reformation strove to put an end to all the growing worldliness and emptiness of the religious life—to the corruption of the Church and the religious orders.

45. Holbein. Death and the Rich Man.

Death draws near to the rich man, and finds him with his pile of money.

My dear friends, we have seen how the German Art came to expression in these great examples—and especially in the greatest, in Dürer,—at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century. One question cannot but interest us again and again: How is it with the origin and evolution of this special stream of Art? In order to say a little more upon this subject, we shall presently show a few pictures revealing how the several factors stood at a characteristic moment. We can make very interesting studies on the evolution of the Mid-European or German Art—and notably the Southern German Art—at the beginning of the 15th century. True, the pictures of the period, which we shall show, give only the outcome of a long line of evolution. But this outcome appears in them strongly and characteristically. When we wish to characterise a great range of phenomena, we have to sum up many things in a few words; and if we desire to be true, it is by no means easy ... It may be that the characteristic pictures we choose does not fully represent all that is here intended. But if we take things on the whole, we shall find it is confirmed, undoubtedly.

The origin of the Mediaeval Art of the German people shows itself most characteristically on the slopes of the Alps reaching out into Southern Germany, into the regions of Southern Bavaria and Swabia. And we must realise that here was a flowing together of two factors. The one represented by all that was imported from the South along the paths of evolution of the Church—and notably the Roman Church system. We must decidedly imagine (though the historic documents contain little about it) that in artistic matters, too, many an impulse came through the Church and the clerical orders. This applies especially to the districts to which I have just referred. Undoubtedly, many priests and clerics also became painters—good and bad—and they, of course, were always in close connection with the whole system of the Church, working its way upwards with its Roman, Latin impulses from the South. They carried with them all that was living there as artistic tradition. Needless to say, this great tradition reached its eminence only in men of genius, but it existed and was taught as a tradition even among lesser men. Tradition was especially at home in Italy, and thence the priests and monks absorbed and carried it with them to the North.

With all the other things which they derived from the Roman Church, they also took with them these conceptions of how the artist should work, ideas of artistic harmony and balance: Of how one ought to group the persons in a picture, and how the lines should go, and so forth. All this that we see at its loftiest eminence, say in the works of Michelangelo and, above all, Raphael, too, did not create naively, but, as I said before, out of a far-reaching artistic tradition. These artists knew how the figures should be grouped, in the composition, how the single figures should be placed, and so forth. And as I mentioned recently, they had brought the laws of perspective to a high degree of perfection.

All this was taken Northward. Monks and Priests who had enjoyed artistic training would frequently discuss such things with those who showed signs of artistic talent. But it must be said that the people whose home was in the German-speaking districts of what is now called Austria or Southern Bavaria or Swabia absorbed these rules of Art only with great reluctance. There can be no doubt about it; they confronted many of these things without real understanding. They heard that a thing must be done so, and so; but it did not truly appeal to them, it did not strike home. They had not yet developed in themselves a vision for these things. For a period, from which little has been preserved, we must assume, proceeding from these districts, works of Art carrying forward in a very clumsy fashion whatever had to do with the great artistic tradition of the Latin, Roman South. They could not enter into it; they had very little talent for it. The talents of the people of these districts lay in another direction.

I have spoken of all that was carried Northward by the Roman priesthood. This, as I said, was the one factor. The other was what I would call the elemental originality of heart and mind of the human beings themselves who in these regions showed any kind of talent for the Art of painting. They had no talent to follow the rules which were considered the highest requirements of Art in the South. To begin with, they had no eye for perspective. That a picture must somewhat express the fact that one figure is standing more in the foreground and another towards the back,—this they could only understand with great difficulty. To the people of these districts in the first half of the 15th century the spatial conception was still well nigh a closed book. Yet these very districts are in many respects the source and fountainhead of German Art. They could not work their way through to feel the laws of perspective independently and of their own accord. At most, they felt that the things must somehow be expressed by overlapping. The figure that overlaps the other is in front, the other is behind. In this way they tried to bring some measure of spatial order into their pictures, and so they began to find their way into the laws of space.

Primitive as they still are, we see in these pictures—appearing so characteristically in the first half of the 15th century—how hard it is for that stream of evolution which tries to take shape out of the elemental forces of the human heart, to discover for itself the laws of artistic creation. We will now show some examples from the above-mentioned districts. We shall see that they had no real inner relation to the tradition that has been brought to them. They absorbed it, as it were, unwillingly, with reluctance. Nor had they yet the power to obey the laws of space out of their own understanding. To begin with, I will show you an artist of the first half of the 15th century: Lucas Moser.

46. Lucas Moser. The Voyage of Mary and Lazarus. (Altar-piece at Tiefenbronn.)

46. Lucas Moser. The Voyage of Mary and Lazarus. (detail)

Here you see how difficult, how well-nigh impossible the artist finds it to escape from the flat surface. He seems quite unable to obey any kind of perspective law. He creates out of the elemental forces of heart and mind, but his figures are in the flat—he can scarcely get out of the plane. It is, however, interesting for once to see something so primitive.

Lucas Moser was one of those artists, creating within a social order wherein undoubtedly some of the laws and canons of Art, that had been introduced from the South, were living. Some element of the Southern style undoubtedly plays into his works. At the same time he tries to contribute something of what he sees for himself. And the one thing does not quite agree with the other. For one does not actually see things in accordance with the laws of Art.

Look at this Voyage of the Saints across the Sea, as it is called. Look in the foreground (although one can scarcely speak of a “foreground” here),—see the water in which the ship is floating. The waves are merely indicated by the crests, painted in lighter color. If you try to imagine a visual point from which the whole picture might be seen, you will get into difficulties at once. We must imagine it high up so as to look down on the water. But that, again, will not agree with the aspect of the figures of the saints, below.

On the other hand, you see this artist is already striving towards what afterwards emerged—as their essential greatness—in the German artists of a later time, whom we have now considered. Look at the element of naturalism—the faithful portrayal of expression in the faces of these saints. And yet they are sitting on the very edge of the boat, so that they would certainly fall overboard at the least breath of wind. In spite of this, how intimate is the artist's observation; how delicately the souls are expressed. He makes an unskillful attempt to observe the laws of Art, and tries to be realistic at the same time, and the two things do not agree ... Needless to say, the face could not be in this position, in relation to the body (see the figure of the saint, with the mitre). There are countless faults of the same kind. It is all clue to the fact that the artist is striving on the one hand towards what afterwards became the real greatness of the German Art, while on the other hand he is impressed with certain rules. For instance: That there should be a full-face figure in the middle of the picture, and others in profile to contrast with it. He has been taught certain rules in arrangements of composition. All this he tries his best to observe. But he can only do so according to the measure of his own elementary conceptions. He has not yet worked his way through to any kind of perspective or observation of the laws of space.

Observe these little hills,—and yet the picture does not really recede towards the background. You will realise the immense progress that has been made by the time of Dürer and Holbein. And yet how short was the intervening time! This alter-piece was done in the first half of the 15th century. How strongly the forces must have worked, overcoming the artistic traditions imported from the South (for these they did not want) and bringing forth a new stream out of an independent elemental impulse. They rebelled against the Southern tradition and tended to overcome it, and to find for themselves what they required. And you have seen how far they got in a comparatively short time.

We will now show another picture by the same artist.

47. Lucas Moser. Saints Asleep. (Marseilles. From the Altar of Tiefenbronn.)

Look at this creation! It shows how the artist combines a clear vision of Nature with an absolute disregard of some of the simplest natural facts. The tiled roof and the church tower—the whole ensemble is such that the artist cannot possibly have seen it anywhere. He just puts it together, having learned certain rules about the distribution of figures in space. Yet look how he brings out the single items according to his own vision. There is a decided beginning of Naturalism. He tries to be naturalistic and yet to express what he feels should be. His subject is "Sleeping Saints," but he conceives that they must appear worthy and dignified. Look at the figure of St. Cedonius (?) here, with his mitre.

48. Lucas Moser. Saints Asleep. (Detail)

49. Lucas Moser. Self Portrait. (Detail)

Once more the whole thing seems on the flat. But you will already observe the first attempt to bring out of the spatial effects by the strong shadows thrown. His relations to the laws of perspective are very strained, to say the least. But he contrives to get the effect of space by the strong shadows, and altogether by the distribution of light and dark.

This, as we saw in former lectures, is a peculiar characteristic of the German stream,—to feel the quality of space by catching the light, using the spatial virtue of the light itself. Here we do not take our start from the laws of lineal perspective—laws of perspective drawing. We extend the surface forward and backward by discovering the hidden effects of light itself.

We can see this most significantly in another artist, who already seeks for truth of Nature, but can still be characterised fundamentally in the same way as the former one. I refer to Multscher.

50. Multscher. The Nativity. (Berlin.)

Here is a representation of the Birth of Christ. Once again there is really nothing of those Laws of Space that came from the South. But you see the beginnings of the spatial working of the light itself. Space is born, as it were, out of the activity of light, and in this element the artist works with keen attention. This picture dates from 1437.

In Moser's and Multscher's works we have a true artistic impulse, born out of the very nature of the German South. Here is the element that afterwards rose to its height in Dürer, Holbein and the rest, though the latter were also influenced from Flanders and the Netherlands. The Cologne Masters, too, are rooted in these same impulses. Again and again we see how wonderfully the characteristics emerge even at the very beginning of the evolution of such an impulse. Observe in this picture the striving to express the inner quality of soul of every single person. And yet the artist's relation to certain other truths of Nature is very strained; Imagine you were in this crowd of people standing in the background. Look at the faces. Considering how near some of them are, they could not be standing side by side in that way unless their arms were chopped off, right and left; the artist pays no heed to these elementary matters of spatial distribution. One person is dovetailed into the other. The next is another picture by Multscher.

51. Multscher. Christ in Gethsemane. (Town Hall. Sterzing.)

The artist tries to find his way into the representation of landscape. Note how deeply he has felt the three figures of the apostles, left behind. Yet how little he succeeds in making any real distinction between foreground and background. He seems almost unable to follow any of the laws of space. But he tries once more to express the spatial by the effects of light. Here once again we see the element which afterwards became so great in German Art.

52. Multscher. The Entombment. (Stuttgart. Museum.)

In Lucas Moser and in Multscher we see the actual beginnings of German Art. There are others, too, but very little has been preserved; most of it is to be found in the churches. With all their primitive unskilfulness, we have here the beginning of what emerged with real greatness in the pictures of a later date, that we have seen. They paint out of a primitive feeling, while they simply cannot find their way into the traditions that come to them from the South. Their inwardness is in opposition to these laws in which they are instructed. One more picture by Multscher.

53. Multscher. The Resurrection. (Berlin.)

All that we have said of the two artists comes out very prominently in this picture. If you look for a point from which these figures with the sarcophagus (for so we might call it) are seen, you have to look high up above. We are looking down on the whole scene. And yet if you look at the trees you will see, they are seen from a frontal aspect. There is no single visual point for the picture as a whole. The trees are seen from in front; the picture as a whole, from above. There is no single point of vision according to the laws of space. Indeed, whatever of perspective you do see in the pictures would largely be eliminated were it not for the strong differentiation of the space through the effects of the light itself. In this respect, our eyes will easily deceive us. You would look in vain for line perspective in this picture. You would find mistakes everywhere. I do not mean naturally admissible mistakes, but errors which by themselves would make the picture quite impossible. We see once more the striving to get beyond the mere linear perspective by means of a spatial depth and quality which the light itself begets.

We see how these artists of Middle Europe have to feel their own way towards a totality of composition. There is another interesting point,—less evident in these pictures, but you will find it in other works by Multscher belonging to the same altar-piece. His fine feeling for light enables him to bring out the facial expression beautifully. But he is scarcely able to do the eyes with artistic truth. You can see it here to some extent, though it is less evident than on other pictures. And as for the ears—he does them just as he has been taught. Here he does not yet possess a free and independent feeling. Thus on the one hand he observes what he has been told, but without much artistic understanding. The things he does according to tradition he does badly. On the other hand, we see in him, in a primitive form, what was only afterwards able to appear more perfectly in German Art.

It is, indeed, remarkable how all these things, which we find in the German Art, emerge already in a highly perfect form in the Hamburg Master, Meister Francke, who was practically a contemporary of Moser and Multscher.

54. Meister Francke. The Man of Sorrow. (Hamburg.)

In this Ecce Homo, this Man of Sorrows, you see how high a degree of perfection the expression of the Head of Christ, which was elaborated by and by in the course of time, had already reached. Compare this Head of Christ with the one by Multscher which we saw just now. You will recognise a great advance. Likewise, in the whole forming of the figures. Of course, the peculiar quality which afterwards came out through greater skill and variety of technique in Dürer's work,—in his paintings, etchings and woodcuts,—is lacking still.

55. Meister Francke. The Resurrection. (Schwerin.)

All in all, considering the artistic developments that are potentially there in these first beginnings, and that produced Dürer and Holbein and the others, we must admit that the thread is broken. For afterwards there came a break; they turned back again to the Roman, Latin principle. And in the 19th century, artistic evolution was decidedly on a retrogressive path. There can, however, be no doubt that this fact is connected with deep and significant laws of human evolution. This stream of evolution in Art works out of the element of light and dark, and discovers—as I tried to explain in the lecture on Rembrandt—the inner connection of the world of color with the light and dark. Through the historic necessity of the time, it could not but tend towards a certain Naturalism; but it can never find its culmination in Naturalism. For in this peculiar talent to perceive the inwardness of things, the possibility to paint, to represent the spiritual Mysteries, still lies inherent. When I say “inwardness of things,” I mean not merely inwardness of soul, but the inwardness of things themselves, expressed in the spatial laws of light and darkness which also contain the mysteries of color. Goethe, as you know, tried to express this systematically in his Theory of Color. This possibility, therefore, still lies open and unrealised in evolution. The possibility to paint the spiritual Mysteries out of the inner virtues of the world of color, out of the inner essence of the light and dark. And the possibilities in this direction can be extended also to the other Arts.

But such a thing can only be brought about through the inspiration of Spiritual Science, of the anthroposophical conception of the world. In the none too distant future, the possibilities that lie inherent in the beginnings of this stream of Art must all be brought together. To create out of the inner light—out of the forming and shaping power of the light—will at the same time be to create out of the inner source of being, and that, I need not say, can only be the Spiritual. In the portrayal of the sacred History, this stream in Art could not, in the nature of the case, attain the high perfection which Raphael attained, for instance. (Nevertheless, in some respects it attained a perfection of its own—notably in the great artists whose works we have seen again today.) But the Spiritual that pervades the works of this Art is still alive. We must only find the connection of what surges through these works of Art, with the underlying laws of the spiritual life. Then will spiritual Imagination and artistic fancy join together and create a true Imaginative Art.

To some extent, as a first beginning, this has been attempted in our (Goetheanum) Building. For this is, after all, a beginning of new artistic impulses. Naturally, there is something primitive about every new beginning; but we have ventured, none the less, to strive for something new and in a grander style. The time may come when people will understand what we have been striving for in this Building. Then it will be realised why certain occult impulses that came already to expression in this art which we have seen today and in the preceding and contemporary sculpture (examples of which we have also seen) remained to this day unrealised. It will be understood why a certain break was inevitable in the evolution of this art. How remote, after all, is that which emerges in the 19th century in the art of a Kaulbach or a Cornelius from what is living in this art which we have seen today! In Kaulbach, Cornelius, Overbeck and the rest, we see a mere repeat of the Southern element. In this art, on the other hand, we see on all hands a radical rebellion and revolution against the Latin and Roman.

He who is prepared to look more closely, will find still deeper connections. Think of the four pictures by Multscher which we have shown today. They represent, if I may say so, the native Swabian tendencies in the realm of Art. Here we find a certain native talent for a flat surface with the help of light. Anyone who has a feeling for finer, more intimate relationships will perceive a similar quality in the Philosophy of Hegel—likewise a product of the Swabian talent, and in that of Schelling, of whom the same thing may be said, and in the poetry of Holderlin.

This grasp of the flat surface, but working forth from the flat surface with the help of light,—we find it not only in the primitive beginnings of this art; we find it again even in Hegel's Philosophy. Hence Hegel's Philosophy, if I may say so, makes such a ‘flat’ impression on us. It is like a great canvas, like an ideal painting of the world. It works from the surface; and in its turn, after all, it can but be the philosophic beginnings of what will now work its way—not merely into this projection of Reality on the flat—but into the full Reality itself. And this “Reality,” I need not say, can be none other than the Spiritual.

These things are interrelated in all truth. What I have lately been trying to describe to you for other realms of life, with regard to the history and civilisation of Europe, is wonderfully confirmed, in all detail, in the sphere of Art. All that we recognised in the lecture the day before yesterday—the impulses working in the different regions of Europe—you can trace it again in the life of Art. Bring before your minds again the art of the Netherlands which we have seen,—coming from thence into Western Germany. Then consider what we have studied today—as something growing absolutely and originally out of the German spirit itself. For the country of which we have spoken today, the soil on which Lucas Moser and Multscher worked, is, after all, the central region of the German Spirit. It is here that the German Spirit has evolved most originally and most truly. Here, too, Christianity was inwardly absorbed, as though by an inner kinship with the spiritual nature of the German heart and mind. The absorption of Christianity was a far more inward process in these districts; and here the original and elemental gifts of the German nature came forth in the realms of Art. They did not accept what brought Christianity to them from the South in a form already marred by Rome; they tried to recreate Christianity themselves artistically out of their inner heart and feeling.

Such a thing could not emerge in the same measure in the more Northern regions of Germany without the coming of an impulse from the South. We see the same thing once more in the fact that Hegel's philosophy received its quickening from the Southern region, and Schelling's too; while, on the other hand, the philosophy of Kant reveals itself quite evidently as a North German product. The peculiar quality of the Kantian philosophy is not unconnected with the fact that the originally Prussian districts remained Heathen for comparatively long. They were brought over to Christianity at a later period and by a rather external process—a conversion far more external than in the Southern German districts. Prussia, properly speaking, remained Heathen till a very late period.

The things we otherwise recognise in historic evolution—we can find them confirmed in the evolution of Art and in the evolution of the life of Thought. For this very reason I wanted to place Moser and Multscher before you at the close of our considerations for today.

I have often quoted Goethe's saying, when he felt in Italy the echo of the nature of Greek Art. I may remind you of it once again today, now that we shall show a few representations of Greek sculputre. Goethe was writing from Italy to his friends in Weimer. He had seen something in Italy of the Grecian Art, and he had divined still more. He had made acquaintance with it. And he wrote: After this experience he had become convinced that in the creation of their works of art the Greeks proceeded according to the same laws by which Nature herself proceeds—and he himself was on the track of their discovery.

This saying of Goethe's always seemed to me of deep and lasting significance. Goethe at that moment divined that something was living in the Greeks, in intimate unison with the laws of the great Universe. Alread before his journey to Italy, he had been trying to discover the principle of universal evolution and becoming. He had done so, above all, in his Theory of Metamorphosis. He found that the manifold forms of Nature can be referred to certain typical or fundamental forms, in which is expressed the spiritual Law and Essence that underlies the outer things. He started, as you know, from Botany—the study of the Plant world. He tried to perceive the growth of the plant in this way: A single fundamental organ, whose basic form he recognised in the leaf, undergoes constant metamorphoses. All organs are transformations of this one. Not only so, but having thus begun, he sought to understand the several plant species as diverse manifestations of one archetypal form, the primary plant.

Likewise he looked for a connecting thread throughout the world of animals. We have often spoken of this work of Goethe's. But, as a rule, we have not a ufficiently vivid conception of what he intended. We are wont to conceive things too abytractly, and we do so in this case. Goethe, if I may put it thus, wanted to take hold in a really living way of the life of living things, in their organic metamorphosis. He wanted to discover the principle on which Nature works. In so doing, he was, indeed, steering straight towards what must be the characteristic of the Science of the fifth post-Atlantean age, even as that which the Greeks conceived and expressed in their works of art was characteristic of the fourth.

In this connection I have often called upon you to observe what is recognisable in the Golden Age of Greek Art, and notably of Grecian sculpture, in so far as it been preserved for us. The Greek artist created from an altogether different starting point. He had a certain feeling. To exprec it in our fully concrete way, we must describe it thus: He felt how the Etheric Body in its living forces and mobility underlies the forms and movements of the Physical. He felt how the Etheric is manifested or portrayed in the forms of the Physical Body, while in the movements of the latter the living forces that abound in the Etheric Body come to expression.

The Greek art of Gymnastics, the Greek Athletics, were built on this foundation. Those who partook in them were to gain thereby a real feeling of what lives invisibly within the visible being of man. And in his plastic art the Greek wanted to portray what he himself experienced in his own nature. All this, as I have often said, grew different in later times, for afterwards men copied what they saw before them with their eyes, what they had outwardly before them. The Greek copies what he felt within himself. He did not work after the model as was done in later times—(whether they do so more or less obviously or indistinctly is not the point). To work from the model is only a peculiarity of the Fifth post-Atlantean age. Nevertheless, in this very age there murst arise a new view of Nature, for which the living starting-point is given in Goethe's “Metamorphosis.” True, there are weighty obstacles, as yet, to such a view of Nature. In this sphere, as in all others, materialistic prejudices stand in the way of a healthy conception of existence. The latter will have to work its way forth in the overcoming of these hindrances. We have to witness in our time things that are little noticed yet—movements that tend in the long run to brutalise even the artistic life. Goethe recognised in a beautiful way the connection between Truth in knowledge or science and Truth in Art, in practice. Science to him was still a living life within the Spirit.

Among the hindrances in this regard is one thing to which—if able to look more deeply into all the impulses of hindrance and of progress in our timei—we cannot give a pleasant name. I refer to what are now called sports and games, athletics and the like, which—if we look more deeply—are also largely among the forces of hindrance in modern civilisation. I can describe them in no other way, than as a tendency to degrade civilisation to the level of the ape. Modern sports and athletics—themselves an outcome of the materialistic conception of life—represent, as it were, the other pole. At the one pole, materialism tends to conceive man as a merely more perfect ape, while at the other pole—through many of the activities that fall under the heading of sport—they are working hard to turn him into a kind of carnivorous monkey. The two things run parallel with one another. Needless to say, modern sports and games and athletics are regarded as a great sign of progress. Indeed, they are often thought of as a kind of resurrection of the spirit of ancient Greece. But in their real essence they can only be described as working towards the ideal, to “monkeyfy” the human race. What can become of man if he proceeds along this path of modern sports, etc? Precisely a “monkeyfied” man, whose chief distinction from the real monkey will lie in the fact that the latter is a vegetarian, while monkeyfied man—presumably—will be a carnivorous species of monkey. The hindrances that face us in the civilisation of today must sometimes be described grotesquely; otherwise we do not describe them strongly enough to bring them home—however little—to the people of today. It is quite in keeping with the propensities of our time: On the one hand theoretically, they are at pains to understand Man as a more perfect ape, while on the other hand in practice they work to bring out the apishness of Man. For if that human being were developed, who is the underlying ideal of the extremer movements in sports and games today, a scientist could truly describe him in no other way, than in all essentials as an offshoot of the ape-nature.

We must think truly on these matters, to gain some understanding of those noble forms of Humanity which underlay the Golden Age of Grecian Art. It was inevitable in the Fifth Post-Atlantean age, for man to leave behind him his life within the spiritual ... The ancient Greek was living in it still. When he moved his hand, he knew that the Spiritual—the etheric body—was in movement. Hence, too, as a creative artist, in all that he imparted to the physical material, he strove to create, as it were, the expression of what he felt within him—the movement of the etheric body. The man of today must go a different path. By way of outward vision, contemplation,—combined with the living Imagination of the weaving of the Ethereal in the organic reelm,—he must bring ancient Greece to life again on a higher level, permeated this time by conscious knowledge, according to the true impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean age. In an elementary way, Goethe was striving towards this end in his Theory of Metamorphosis.

Goethe lived with his whole being in this striving towards a living conception of the Spiritual in the world. For this reason he was glad to refresh and strengthen himself by all that came to him from the study of Greek Art.

To understand the art of ancient Greece in its proper nature—its characteristics entirely a product of the mood of soul of the fourth post Atlantean age—we must start from such ideas as we have just set forth. In this respect it is interesting to see how the Greek Art found its way. Few of the original works have been preserved. Most of them are only handed down to us through later copies. It was with the help of later copies that a man like Winckelmann, in the 18th century, strove so wonderfully to recognise the essence of the art of ancient Greece. Winckelmann, Lessing and Goethe, in the latter half of the 18th century, tried to express in words the essence of Greek Art—tried to find their way back, to re-discover it. And we may truly say: Greek Art in its essence, once it is really grasped, can bring salvation from the perils of materialism.

It would take us too far afield if I were to give you even an outline sketch of the real history, the occult history of Greek Art. Only this much may be said, in connection with the illustrations we shall see today. Even in the early works of the Fifth or of the end of the Sixth century B.C., the relics of which have come down to us; the underlying foundation which I described just now is clearly recognisable. Albeit, in that early period the Greeks had not yet the ability to express through the material what they experienced within, nevertheless even in the archaic forms, imperfect as they are, we can see that the artist's creation is based on a feeling of the inner life and movement of the etheric body. By this means the Greek could find the way to raise the human form so marvellously to the Divine. The Greek was well aware that the figures of his Gods were based on real Being in the ethereal universe. Out of this there arose quite instinctively (for everything in that time was more or less instinctive) the need to represent the world of the Gods and all that was connected with them, in such a way that the outer form was the human form idealised. The point was by no means merely to idealise the Human—that is only the idea of an age that fails to understand the real depths. Through the idealised human form they were able to express what lives and weaves in the ethereal life.

In the earliest figures we still see a certain stiffness. But out of this, in their Golden Age, the Greeks evolved the power to express in the outer physical form the etheric human being. In the earliest pictures we shall still see a certain stiffness; but even here it can be seen that the shaping of the limbs proceeds from a true feeling for the ethereal in movement.

Then as we go on to Myron and bring some of his works before our souls, we shall see how what first came to expression only in the forming of the limbs, begins to take hold of the whole body. In Myron we already see how when an arm is moved—or represented in movement—it means something for the whole breathing organism, the forming of the chest. The human being as a whole is felt through and through. And this must have been the case to the highest degree in Phidias and his School and in Polycletus—in the Golden Age of ancient Greece.

Thereafter we find a gradual descent of Art from this sublime feeling of the ethereal. Not that the ethereal is left out; but they now try to master the actual forms of Nature, they follow the forms of Nature more faithfully, more humanly and less divinely. Nevertheless, the forms are still an expression of the living etheric movement within.

In looking at the several pictures, we shall be less concerned to discuss the individual artists; we chiefly want to see the gradual evolution of the Grecian Art as a whole. Nor does it matter so much, whether we speak—as the historians of Art are wont to do—of a decline in the latest works. In the earlier period the body was conceived, as it were, more in position, thus a certain restfulness or repose pervades the older works. Movement itself is conceived as though it had come to rest. We have the feeling that the artist endeavors to represent the body in such a way that the position in which the figure is might be a lasting one. The later artists strive for a more dramatic quality, holding fast the moment of time in the progressive movement. Thus there is more of movement in the later works. It is, after all, a mere matter of choice—arbitrary human choice—whether we call this a decline or not.

After these few remarks we will see some illustrations, and whatever more there is to say can be said in connection with the single works that will be shown.

1. Apollo of Tenea. (Glyptothek. Munich.)

This is of an early period—about 600 B.C. Observe how the limbs, especially, are permeated with the ethereal ... One feature of the earliest Greek sculpture is often emphasized: the smile, as it is called, about the lips. In time to come this will be recognized as arising from the effort to represent not the dead human being—the mere physical body—but really to seize the inner life. In the earliest period they could do this in no other way than by this feature.

2. Dying Warrior. Eastern Pediment. Temple of Aegina. (Glyptothek. Munich.)

These works of art in the Doric Temple at Aegina were done as a thank-offering for the Battle of Salamis. They chiefly represent battle-scenes. Dominating the whole is the figure of Pallas Athene, which we shall see presently. This dying recumbent figure is a beautiful example of the figures that are found in this temple. The figures are grouped in the pediment. It is most interesting to see the composition, the perfect symmetry. The figures are distributed to the left and right with the most beautiful symmetrical effect.

3. Pallas Athene from the Pediment of the Temple at Aegina. (Glyptothek. Munich.)

4. Reconstruction of the Western Piedemont of the Aphaia Temple.

These works take us to the beginning of the 5th century B.C.

5. Head of a youth.

6. Charioteer from Delphi

7. Runner (middle of the 5th century B.C.)

And then I ask you to note, as with Myron—as we come in to that age that one can denote as the pinnacle—as with Myron, that a very different treatment of the body arises, in that he no longer separates, what even here is still the case, but he knows how to treat the whole body in connection with the limbs.

8. Discus Thrower

Thus we stand in the middle of the 5th century and find in such a shapes a tryly high degree of perfection in the direction, we have tried to characterize.

And now we come, or are already in, to the Age of Periclean. From the time of Phidias, of whomwe unfortunately know very little, you have the so-called Athena Lemnia:

9. Athena Lemnia

10. Head of Athena

We will now give a few examples of the famous Parthenon. You may read the interesting story of these figures in any History of Art. The greatest of them have in all probability been lost. We can only gain some idea of them from the drawings made by the Frenchman, Carrey, in the 17th century. Subsequently they were largely destroyed by the Venetians, and only the relics were discovered by Lord Elgin in the 19th century.

11a. Drawings of the eastern pediment.

11b. Remains of the left side of the eastern pediment. (Bristish Museum. London.)

11c. Reconstruction of the figures in the last photo.

11d. Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite from the right side of the eastern pediment. (British Museum, London.)

11e. Far right of the eastern pediment.

Now for the Parthenon western pediment:

11f. Drawings of the western pediment.

11g. Reconstruction of the western pediment.

The Parthnon Friezes:

12a. Drawings of the Friezes.

12b. Calvary. (Western Frieze.)

We may assume that these works were mostly executed in the presence of Phidias himself by his pupils. The next group is from the Eastern Frieze:

12. Poseidon Group. (Eastern Frieze.)

With Phidias, indeed, all that was typical of Greek Art was already given. The stamp, the signature, as it were, was now given to the bodily figure, as it should be represented in Art. The way in which Phidias and his pupils saw it lived on for a long time. It was felt that the line of the face, the features, the movement of the limbs, the flow of the drapery and so forth, should accord with what was evolved in this ideal age.

Through all the traditions this was handed down, even into the times when they were able to imitate quite superficially what had lived so strongly in this Golden Age of the Art of ancient Greece. Unhappily, the greatest works have been destroyed. It is no longer possible to gain by outer vision a conception of Phidias' greatest masterpieces, which were transcendent and sublime. We must realise that in the 18th century, when Goethe and others, stimulated by Winckelmann, entered so deeply into the essence of Greek Art, they could only do so with the help of poor, late imitations. Truly, great intuition was necessary to penetrate into the nature of Greek Art through the poor imitations that were then available. And if we really try to feel the truth about these things we cannot but admit: In the time when Goethe was a young man, or when he travelled in Italy, there was still quite a different instinctive feeling for Art than later in the 19th century,—let alone the 20th. For otherwise it would have been impossible for these late imitations to inspire the lofty conceptions of Greek Art which lighted forth in Winckelmann or in Goethe.

Look, for instance, at the next, the head of Zeus, which is to be seen in Rome:

13. Zeus of Otricoli. (Vatican. Rome.)

14. Athena

Here you can see something like a later continuation of the type that was evolved in the time of Phidias. This is, of course, a later imitation, though undoubtedly it still appears with a certain grandeur,—With a far less grandeur they imitated the Hera type which had been evolved by Polycleitus. And as to the famous Pallas Athene, which is also to be seen among these statues in Rome, here I must say the imitation has become insipid, fatuous. Indeed, this figure shows already the type of the later imitations of Pallas Athene. These things even become a little reminiscent of fashion-plates! We can but divine how magnificent were the works from which these later imitations were derived.

In this head of Zeus you see the tradition that was handed down from Phidias.

14a. Zeus

14b. Profile of Zeus.

And now we will go back to the figures from the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Here, too, the composition is magnificent:

15. Western Pediment. Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

16. Figure of Apollo.

The next, too, is from the School of Phidias:—

17. Orpheus Relief. (Museum. Naples.)

We remember how Phidias was accused by his fellow-citizens of stealing gold for his gold-and-ivory statue of Athene. His “grateful” fellow-citizens threw him into prison.

18. Bust of Pericles. (Berlin.)

Truly an ideal conception—lifted far beyond the sphere of portraiture.

The next is perhaps a work of Phidias' youth.—

19. Amazon.

Here we will insert a work of Polycleitus:—

20. Amazon.

Myron and Phidias are the artists of the Golden Age of Grecian Art; they, indeed, created the traditions.

21. Amazon.

Another Amazon. The next is more difficult to date; it represents about the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries B.C. We insert it here to show that ancient Greece was quite capable of producing something of the character of Genre:—

22. Boy, extracting the Thorn from his Foot. (Rome.)

And now we gradually come into the age of which I tried to indicate just now that the whole conception is lifted down into a more human realm, even though the figures be still the figures of the Gods. Take the following, for instance:—

23. Aphrodite of Cnidos. (Vatican, Rome.)

Although it is the figure of a Goddess, it is brought down into a more human sphere. The sublimity of the earlier artists is made more human. We see this already in Praxiteles. This picture represents the so-called Aphrodite of Cnidos. Praxiteles brings us to the 4th century B.C. In connection with this we will also show the

24. Demeter of Cnidos. (British Museum.)

It breathes the same spirit. The next is the Hermes of Olympia:

25. Hermes of Olympia, (By Praxiteles.)—holding the Dionysos child in his left hand.

26. Satyr, by Praxiteles. (Capitol. Rome.)

To the same epoch belongs the famous Niobe Group,—Niobe losing all her children through the wrath of Apollo.

27. Figure in Flight, from the Niobe Group. (Vatican. Rome.)

Going on into the 4th century, we come into the Alexandrian age. Lysippus actually worked in the service of Alexander the Great.

28. Bust of Alexander. (Louvre. Paris.)

29. Hermes. (Museum. Naples.)

30. Youth, in Adoration. (By Lysippus.) (Berlin.) His arms are lifted up to Heaven in reverence, in prayer.

31. Alexander the Great. (Munich.)

Here we already see the descent of Art from the Typical to the Individual—though in the Grecian Art the process nowhere went as far as in the later epochs.

32. Medusa Head. (Glyptothek. Munich.)

33. Sophocles. (Vatican. Rome.)

This status reaches back again to the best, ideal tradition of the older times; it reminds us of the Golden Age. We might equally well entitle it: The Poet, as such. This is symbolised by the rolls of script which are put there of set purpose. Compare this with the figures that now follow, tending more or less towards a portrait likeness in each case. You will see how they strive away from the ideal type, towards the quality of portraiture.

34. Socrates.

35. Plato. (Vatican. Rome.)

Of course, these portraits are not done from the model, but still there is an attempt at a human likeness—by which I do not mean to say that they are really like the original.

These remarks will refer especially to the Homer which will now follow:—

36. Homer. (Museum. Naples.)

Now we gradually approach the 2nd century.

37. The Victory of Samothrace. (Louvre. Paris.)

38. The Venus of Milo. (Louvre. Paris.)

This famous work does, indeed, preserve the tradition of the Golden Age, although it belongs to a later period.

In the next picture, on the other hand, we see a fresh attempt to bring in movement:—

39. Sleeping Ariadne.

This is probably a work of the same period, but you will see a distinct contrast between the two.

And now we come towards the last century before the birth of Christ. We come to the School of Rhodes.

40. Laocoön. (Vatican. Rome.)

This is the famous Laocoön group—the starting-point, as you know, of many an artistic discussion, ever since Lessing's Laocoön of the 18th century. It is the work of three sculptors of the School of Rhodes. Lessing's writings on this subject are, indeed, most interesting. He tried to show, you will remember, how the poet describes is not placed before the eyes. We must call it to life in our imaginations. Whereas what the plastic artist has created is there before our eyes. Therefore, says Lessing, what the plastic artist portrays must contain far more repose; it must represent moments which can at least be imagined—for a single moment—in repose.

Much has been said and written about this Laocoon group, especially in relation to Lessing's explanations. It is interesting how the aestheticist, Robert Zimmermann,—without, of course, having any knowledge of Spiritual Science—arrived at an explanation which needs, no doubt, to be supplemented, but which was none the less correct for an age that had not Spiritual Science. His explanation contains—albeit only as an instinctive suggestion—some element of what I have been setting forth today. We see the priest, Laocoon, with his two sons, wound around by the serpents and going towards their death. Now we cannot but be struck by the peculiar way in which the body has been moulded. Much has been written on this subject. Robert Zimmermann rightly pointed out: The whole representation is such that we have before us the very moment where the life (or, as we should say, the etheric body) is already fleeing away. It is already a moment of unconsciousness. Hence the artist represents it as though the body of Laocoon were already falling asunder. That is the marvellous quality about this figure. The body is already being differentiated into its parts. Thus even in this late product we see how the Greek was aware of the etheric body. He brings to expression the actual moment where life is passing into death. It is the quick withdrawal of the etheric body through the shock—the shock that is expressed by the awful snakes coiling around. This effect of the etheric body withdrawing from the physical, and the physical falling asunder, is the characteristic thing in the Laocoon; not the other things that are so often said, but the peculiar way the body becomes differentiated. We could not imagine the body thus, unless we conceived it as the moment when the etheric body is drawing away.

And now two more examples—imitations of earlier works, perhaps, which have, none the less, made a great impression on later students of Art.

41. Apollo Belvedere. (Vatican. Rome.)

This is the famous Apollo Belvedere—Apollo represented as a kind of battle-hero.

42. Artemis. (Louvre. Paris.)

This, too, will be a later imitation of an earlier work.

Now, as we know, the Art of the ancient Greece gradually drew near its decline, when Greece was subjugated by Rome. In Rome, to begin with, there was a kind of imitation of the Greek Art. It was carried across to Rome, but it was soon submerged in the widespread unimaginativeness of the Roman people, to which we have frequently referred.

The next centuries, as you know ... were to a large extent a dark and troubled age for our evolution. Then a new age began. I will only repeat quite briefly:—In the 12th and 13th centuries in Italy, when through manifold circumstances they rediscovered some of the ancient works of Art that had been buried in the early Middle Ages, the contemplation of the ancient works kindled the rise of a new Art, which grew in time into the Art of the Renaissance. From the 13th century onwards, artists would educate themselves by means of the Antique—the works of Art that had been found or excavated, though the number at that time was relatively small.

We will now consider this re-discovery of the ancient Art in the period immediately preceding the Renaissance. In Niccola Pisano in the 13th century we find a wonderfully refined spirit who waxed enthusiastic over the relics of Greek Art, and tried to create once more in the spirit of the Greeks—out of his own imagination fructified, as it were, by the Greek Art itself.

Our first picture is the famous pulpit in the Baptistery at Pisa; note the reliefs in the upper portion:—

43. Niccola Pisano. Pulpit in the Baptistery at Pisa.

The pulpit is supported by antique columns between which are Gothic arches. Underneath are also lion figures; above are the relief in which he expressed so wonderfully what he owed to the inspiration of the antique. Niccola Pisano worked until the end of the 13th century.

44. Niccola Pisano. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Relief. Details of the above.)

Another representation of the same subject:—

45. Niccola Pisano: The Crucifixtion. (Relief. Pulpit in the Cathedral at Siena.)

We now go on to Giovanni Pisano. In his works you will observe already a far greater element of movement. A certain quietude pervades all the figures of Niccola Pisano.

46. Giovanni Pisano. Pulpit. (San Andrea. Pistoja.)

47. Giovanni Pisano. Capital from the above Pulpit.

Truly, it was due to the stimulus and inspiration of the Antique, arising, to begin with, in the Pisanos, that the Christian Art afterwards became able to express its motifs so perfectly as it did in
the Renaiscance.

48. Giovanni Pisano. Bas-Relief from the same Pulpit.

The next two are by Giovanni Pisano:—

49. Giovanni Pisano. Pulpit in the Cathedral at Pisa.

We see at the same time how naturally the Antique grew together with the Gothic.

And two Madonnas from him:

51. Giovanni Pisano. Madonnas. (Berlin and Padua.)

And now we have a sample of the work of Andrea Pisano, who was summoned to do one of the Bronze gates of the Baptistery at Florence.

52. Andrea Pisano. Tubal Cain. (Campanile. Florence.)

A Bas-Relief representing Tubal Cain, inventor of the craft of metallurgy according to the Bible, the Old Testament.

We have thus approached the 15th century, and we come to Ghiberti, the great artist who at the age of twenty years was already able to compete with the others in designing the doors of the Baptistery in Florence.

53a. Ghiberti. The Offering of Isaac. (Baptistry. Florence.)

53b. Ghiberti. Northern Door of the Baptistery in Florence.

At the early age of twenty he was already allowed to do the Northern Portals. From a simple goldsmith's apprentice he grew to be one of the very greatest artists. These bas-reliefs of the doors of the Baptistery in Florence are, of their kind, among the greatest things in the whole evolution of Art. Afterwards the Eastern door was also given to him to do. It represents scenes from the Old Testament. Michelangelo said that these were worthy to be the gates of Paradise. [Note:the doors at the Florence Baptistery were moved causing some confusion as to where the works of Ghiberti and Andrea Pisano are located. – e.Ed.]

54. Ghiberti. The Gates of Paradise. (Baptistery. Florence.)

This work had, indeed, a great influence on the whole Art of Michelangelo himself. Even in the details we can recognise certain motifs in Michelangelo's paintings, which he took from these bronze reliefs.

55a. Ghiberti. Sacrifice of Isaac. (Detail from the 'Gates of Paradise.')

55b. Ghiberti. Creation of Man. (Detail from the 'Gates of Paradise.')

56. Ghiberti. St. Stephen

These works of Ghiberti's were undoubtedly due to a faithful contemplation of the Antique.

We will now insert the Art of the della Robbias. To begin with:—

57. Luca della Robbia. Dancing Boys. (Cathedral. Florence.)

The della Robbias are famous as the inventors of a special art—the use of burnt clay as a material. To a large extent their works were done in this material.

58. Luca della Robbia. Singing Boys. (Cathedral. Florence.)

Luca della Robbia covers practically the whole period of the 15th century.

59. Luca della Robbia. Madonna in the Bower of Roses. (Museo Nazionale. Florence. )

Observe once more the age that we have now come into. The Art of antiquity that had been derived from immediate inner experience—experience of the Etheric—works as a great stimulus and inspiration. Yet at the same time the Art of this age is founded on what is seen—the faithful representation of what is actually seen. It is no longer based on something felt and sensed inwardly. It is very interesting to receive the impression of the two epochs, one after the other, in this way.

60. Andrea della Robbia. Bambino. (Spedale degli Innocenti. Florence.)

61. Madonna (della Cintola Fojano). Andrea della Robbia.

The Madonna is shown in the spiritual world.

62. Giovanni della Robbia. Reception of the Pilgrims and Washing of the Feet. (Hospital. Pistoja.)

We now go on to Donatello, who was born in 1386. In him we observe the influence of the Antique combined already with a decided tendency to Naturalism. His vision has a naturalistic stamp. Donatello enters lovingly and sympathetically into Nature. But while he becomes a real naturalist, he derived his technique from what his predecessors had evolved out of the old tradition.

His naturalism went so far that his friend and companion in his strivings, Brunelleschi, seeing a Christ that Donatello attempted, exclaimed; “That is not a Christ that you are doing, that is a peasant:” Donatello at first did not understand what he meant. The anecdote is interesting, if not historically true; it gives us a right impression of the relation between the two artists—the contrast between the two artists—the contrast between Donatello and Brunelleschi with his high idealism—immersed as he was in the contemplation of the Antique, in its rebirth. Brunelleschi thereupon himself undertook to model the Christ. Donatello—for they lived together—had gone out to buy things for their breakfast. He returned with all the dainties for their common meal wrapped up in a kind of pinafore. Just as he entered, Brunelleschi unveiled his Christ. Donatello gaped with wide open mouth, and his astonishment was such that he dropped all the breakfast on the ground. What Brunelleschi had achieved was a revelation to him. We cannot say that the impression he experienced went very deep. None the less, Brunelleschi undoubtedly had an ennobling influence on him. The above story goes on to relate, Donatello was so overwhelmed that he even imagined the breakfast had disappeared. “What have we now to eat?” he said. “We'll just pick the things up again,” said Brunelleschi. “I see I shall never be able to do any more than peasants,” said Donatello.

Donatello. Crucifix. (Florence.)

Filippo Brunellesco. Crucifix. (Florence.)

63. Donatello. David. (Museo Nazionale, Florence.)

And now we come to the beautifully self-contained marble statues by Donatello in Florence, showing his ability—out of his naturalistic vision—to create human figures strong and firm, even as he wanted them, their feet firmly planted on the ground.

64. Donatello. David. (Florence.)

65. Donatello. St. Peter. (Or San Michele. Florence.)

66. Donatello. Jeremiah. (Campanile. Florence.)

Habbakuk

67. Donatello. St. John Baptist. (Campanile. Florence.)

In Donatello Naturalism certainly finds its way in. It is not the inner soul that we found in the Northern sculpture, but a decidedly naturalistic vision of what the outer senses see.

69. Donatello. Habakkuk. (Campanile. Florence.)

Niccola Pisano and Donatello were two artists who powerfully influenced Michelangelo. Those who afterwards saw what Michelangelo created—especially in his early period—remembered Donatello and coined the phrase which then became current: Donatello Michelangelosed or Michelangelo Donatelloised.

70. Donatello. Lodovico III Gonzaga

71. Donatello. St. George. (Florence.)

Most characteristic is this St. George by Donatello. All the power of his naturalism is in it. Such works of Art arose out of the freedom of the free city of Florence, which also gave birth to Michelangelo.

By a wider historic necessity—a cosmopolitan historic necessity, we might say,—it was in Italy that the Antique came to life again. On the other hand, the naturalistic tendency everywhere was bound up with the mood and feeling that arose in the culture of the Free Towns or Cities. Here, as in the North—though in different ways, of course, according to the different characters of the people,—we find this element arising out of the life of the free cities, where man became conscious of his dignity, his freedom, his individual being. In the characteristic works of Art which we found in the Netherlands and other Northern parts, we were reminded again and again of the life of the free cities and the feeling that pervaded them. And so it is here, when we look at this figure of a man, so firmly established in the world of space, this Florentine St. George. We cannot but think of the civilisation of the Free Cities, whose atmosphere made such a thing possible.

72. Donatello. Bas-Relief. St. George and the Dragon. (From the Base of the St. George Statue.)

73. Donatello. Madonna Pazzi. (Berlin.)

74. Donatello. Bas-Relief. Angels Singing. (Uffizi. Florence.)

75. Donatello. Annunciation. (Santa Croce. Florence.)

76. Donatello, Portrait of Niccolo da Uzzano.

Donatello. Gattamelata.

Donatello. Gattamelata.

Finally, we will show some examples of Verrocchio—teacher of Leonardo and Perugino—in his capacity as a sculptor. First the famous equestrian statue:—

77. Verrocchio. Bertolomeo Colleoni. (Venice.)

79. Verrocchio. Head and Shoulders. (Detail of the above.)

80. Verrocchio. Guiliano de Medici. (Paris.)

And in conclusion:—

81. Verrocchio. David. (Museo Nazionale. Florence.)

And so, my dear friends, we have had before us the artists of the pre-Renaissance. They entered deeply into the Antique and brought it forth again, in a time when men no longer lived within the soul in the same inward way as did the ancients. They brought to life again in outer vision, contemplation, what the ancients had felt and known inwardly—what they had feelingly known, knowingly felt, I should say. Moreover, they united this with the element which had to come in the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch—the element of naturalism, with clear outward vision. They thus became the fore-runners of the great artists of the Renaissance—of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, and, through Perugino, of Raphael himself. For all these were influenced directly by the Art of the precursors, whose works we have seen today. They stood, undoubtedly, on the shoulders of these artists of the pre- Renaissance period, the early Renaissance.

It is interesting to see, in relation to this figure, for example, how quickly they progressed in that time. Compare this David with the David by Michelangelo. Here you still see a comparative inability to dramatise the theme—to take hold of it in movement. Michelangelo, on the other hand, in his David, has seized the very essence of dramatic movement; he has caught the actual moment of resolve to go out against Goliath.

82. Michelangelo. David, Marble Statue (Florence, Academy)

Thus we have tried to bring these things to some extent before our souls:—On the one hand what radiates from the Greek Art itself, and on the other, its lighting-up-again in the age when Humanity was trying to find the life of Art once more with the help of the Greek Art which came to life again.

I didn't want to use several images as an introduction to my art history lecture today, but limit our observational introduction to only two images, both which will be placed into the newer historical development of mankind. We will then link these to the introduction of cultural epochs as we have done in earlier years.

Look at this first painting to which our primary observation will refer; a painting you know well, the so-called “Disputa” of Raphael.

Let us visualize the painting's content briefly: below, in the centre, we see a kind of altar with a chalice on it and the host, a sacramental symbol. To the left and right are religious individuals and we recognise them as teachers, popes and bishops according to their drapery. Opposite the middle, the group is seen as moving from left and right according to the hand gesture of a person directly right of the altar. According to this we observe that these individuals are taking part in something descending from above. As a result we see, by looking at the space close behind the altar where the group is positioned, into the landscape and directly above it—in the upper half of the picture—cloud masses accumulating. To some extent we see the infinite horizon within this space. From out of the middle of these cloud masses we see angelic genii rise, floating on both sides of the dove, bringing the Gospels, transported out of the undeterminable spiritual world. In the centre we can see the Holy Ghost depicted in the symbol of a dove. Above the somewhat receding Holy Ghost we have—clearly, the angelic figures carrying the Gospels are actually coming forward in perspective—the figure of Christ Jesus and above Him the figure of the Father God. Thus we have the Trinity above the chalice where the sanctuary is found. On both sides of the Christ figure we have corresponding groups; a heavenly group above, reflected below by the worldly group. On both sides of the central Christ figure appear Saints, the Madonna on his right and John the Baptist, followed by others: David, Abraham, Adam, Paul, Peter and so on. Still further up rising into the clouds are actual genii figures, spiritual individualities.

This image we have in front of us now—of course there are much better copies available—I would like to link this to the evolution of mankind.

Primarily we need to clearly distinguish between what is given here and what we can experience when we transport ourselves into the feelings of the time when this image was actually being painted. If we shift ourselves into the 16th Century and compare it with the complexity of sensations a painter would paint in, today, we need to say: at that time, in Rome, when Pope Julius II reigned and what worked in him as Julius II in the middle of his twentieth year to call Raphael to Rome, was at that time, and in every town, the human experience of something which lived as a deep truth depicted in this painting. Today of course something similar could be painted; but if it was to be similar to this painting in the scene design, it would not depict any true reality.

Such things need to be made completely clear otherwise one will never arrive at a concrete observation of human history but forever remain in abstract observations of a legend—a bad saga—which is called the history today in schools and universities. Every detail which we can lay our eyes on in order to understand this painting, to really understand it artistically, means every small detail has a certain meaning. Just think how Raphael, this extraordinary individuality Raphael, about whom we have often spoken, how he arrived in Rome. He too was in a body of a twenty year old and one can easily conclude that while he was mainly painting this picture, he was approaching the end of his twenties. At the time he was completely under the influence of two old people who had already experienced two great battles in life and who had plans and ideas, ideas who everyone, one could say, considered as most far-reaching.

Let us be completely clear: under the papal predecessors before Julius II, Rome was at the time basically completely different than during Julius II's reign. The most remarkable here, as predecessors, were the Borgias. One could say that during the time of Alexander VI Rome was gradually being developed as overlapping the old ruins and rubble work of the ancient world where the Church of St Peter almost expired and became impractical. Admittedly these people were filled with a certain nostalgia for the artistic immensity of antiquity and wanting to enliven it again. However, a strange incident happened between the Borgias and Julius II, just at the turn of the 15th into the 16th century. Beneath the room and hall which belonged to the Camera della Segnatura, Alexander VI had two frescoes painted which we want to talk about today. It is surely extraordinary that Julius II, the patron of Raphael, had shunned this lower room which had been the ordinary residence of his predecessor, as if ghosts of cholera and the plague circulated there. He shunned this completely, could not be bothered with artistic or any other events which had taken place there before. On the contrary he decided, according to his ideas for the rooms and halls in the upper storeys, to spruce them up as we can still see them today. We must just think of the mind-set of Pope Julius II in connection with the beginning of the 16th Century and how his mind worked quite differently to those of his predecessors.

The other patron of Raphael was Bramante. He had a plan in his head for the new St Peter's Church. Both Julius II and Bramante were already old people, as I said, who had the storms of life behind them. They called youthful individuals like Raphael to Rome to serve them, bring to expression picturesquely the new ideas powerfully rumbling in their heads, new impulses which they thought should penetrate humanity. One should look more closely at these impulses that originated in Rome and were to penetrate humanity from the beginning of the 16th Century onwards. These impulses depended from the one side on the close connection of the development of the outer Christian ecclesiastical world and then again, what the establishment of the Christian ecclesiastical world would relate to. On the other side it relates to the entire historic development of the western world. Just think for once, that today's human being has great difficulty in transporting his feelings and thoughts into a time, as it were, that have developed out of this image, so often named the “Disputa”. Even more difficult it is for contemporary mankind to transport themselves into centuries further back when Christianity already had power. I have often mentioned that people today have the impression that mankind were always as they are today. That is not quite the case, particularly in relation to their soul life, they were not like now. Just as with almost two thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha something had been inserted into human evolution beside this Mystery which has spread into the breadth of social evolution, so something quite different to the Mystery of Golgotha came forth which we understand in a different way today. People imagine far too vaguely that at the time when this image was created, mankind was subjected to the discovery of America towards the end of the 15th century; secondly the entirely different social understanding came about through the invention of printing which finally, through Copernican and Kepler viewpoints established a new science.

Just look at this painting. I want to say: if a painter would paint it today it would not in the same sense of truth be what it was then, it can't be; because today one couldn't find the soul who would paint this image in the same sense as at that time when it was actually painted, who would objectively with such an imagination for the earth have been thus, as if America hadn't yet been discovered. These would be souls who look at up at the clouds with true faith, who imagine the spiritual world in the clouds as we imagine it today, who to a certain extent imagine the clouds as real spatial bodies. Such souls are no longer to be found today, not even amongst the most naive. However, we imagine the souls of those times incorrectly if we don't believe that the content of this painting was something directly reflected by them. Let us consider—what exactly is the content of this painting? Out of today's scientific viewpoint we could identify the content of this image: we are accustomed to say that Imagination is the first step to looking into the higher worlds. If we say: up to the 16th century mankind had a view regarding the world and cosmic space in relation to the earthly world, which depended on imagination, then this is the actual truth. Imaginations were at that time something lively; and Raphael painted lively representations of soul experiences. The view of the world, the world image, was still at that time something imaginative.

These imaginations were dispelled by the caustic power of Copernicanism, the discovery of America and the art of printing. From this time mankind took the place of imagination, what we call imaginative knowledge and imaginative perception, and replaced it with outer representational images of the world's construction in totality. Thus, while presently we imagine the sun, the circling planets around it and so on, the people then couldn't do so at all; when they wanted to speak about something similar, they spoke about imaginative images. A representation of such an imagination is this painting. In the centuries in which imaginative cognition developed gradually to allow such paintings like those Raphael made, came to a certain cessation in the 16th Century, these centuries are thus the 16th, 15th, 14th, 13th, 12th, 11th, 10th right back to the 9th Century, but no further back. If we want to go yet further back we won't find any real imaginative representations any longer if we ourselves want to experience imaginative art, as people did in these mentioned centuries, which we find difficult enough to raise in the soul today, imaginatively.

If we wish to experience what Christianity was before the 6th Century we need to imagine the Christian experience as far more spiritual than we tend to do usually. Augustine extracted only what he could use from the Christian imaginations. Yet by reading Augustine today one gets quite a different feeling for what else lived as a world view and as an image of the interconnections of the world with humanity at that time, so different from now. Of particular importance are the ideas which you find on reading Scotus Erigena, who taught at the time of Charles the Bald. One might say that these ancient centuries before the 9th were permeated with Christian thoughts experienced by those who at least elevated their thoughts to permeate their Christian thinking with highly spiritual imagination. One might say when humanity created a world view during these ancient times they included really very little of their direct sense experiences. From their world view they included much more of that which did not result from sense experiences but had been brought about by old clairvoyant sight of the world. When we go back to the first centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha and follow the Christian ideas then we find that these ideas are such than one would rather say—these people were interested in the heavenly Christ, the Christ as He was in the spiritual worlds, while what He became on the earth below they considered more as supplementary. To search for The Christ amidst spiritual beings, to think of Him in relation to super-sensory spirituality was their essential striving, and that came out of the old spiritual—then the atavistic—world view. This world view filled the ancient culture right down to the third post-Atlantean age. At that time it was thought that the earth really was some kind of supplement to the spiritual.

One should familiarise oneself with an imagination which is entirely essential if one would understand, would want to comprehend, how humanity actually developed from that time to now. With this imagination we must acquaint ourselves with the idea that the Europeans had by necessity to drive back spiritual imagination for the unfolding of their culture. This should be dealt with in sympathy and not antipathy—this should in no way be judged with a critical mind but the facts should simply be taken as they are presented: it was simply the fate, Europe's karma to acquire their culture in a way they had to. It was Europe's fate: pushing back spiritual ideas, curbing it so to speak.

Thus it became ever clearer and more meaningful that from the 9th Century Europe needed Christianity while spiritual ideas were being suppressed. A result of this necessity was the splitting of the Greek- oriental and the Roman Catholic Church. At that time it split the East from the West. This is very important. The West had the destiny to push spiritual impulses into the East. There they remained. One can really not understand what happens in the becoming of being human beings when one doesn't have a clear understanding of the need to repel spiritual impulses towards the East—to what is connected to Asia and to Russia as a European peninsula—from the 8th and 9th Centuries. These impulses were pushed together and developed independently from western European and central European life, and propagated into the present Russia.

This is very important. Only once this was properly established. Today there is a tendency not to consider things through relationships. As a result an event such as the Russian revolution apparently developed in a few months—someone or other came to this idea—while the truth pre-empting it lay in the background as a result of the specific course of events through the centuries, while spiritual life became invisible, impractical and pushed back towards the East and being stuck, yet still working in a chaotic, indefinable way made people stand right within events in the East. Yet this standing within it was really hardly living within it just like people who swim in a lake—if they have not exactly drowned—have seawater surrounding them. Likewise, what worked as spiritual impulses superficially in the East, still existed spiritually. People swam inside it and had no clue what pressed in on the surface from the 9th Century and which was then pushed back to the East, so that it could be safe guarded to survive and enter evolution later. People who originated in the East and who gradually developed from migration and similar relationships, into their souls the spiritual impulses were introduced which couldn't be used in the West, South and Central Europe.

The West retained something extraordinary. The East, without knowing—most important things run their course in the subconscious—the East, without knowing, remained steady on the basic saying of the Gospels: “My Kingdom is not of this world”. Hence in the East the leaning within the physical plane is always upwards, towards the spiritual world. The West depended on reversing the sentence: “My Kingdom is not of this World” by correcting it to make the Kingdom of Christ in this world. As a result we see Europe had the fate of constituting the realm of Christ outwardly as an empire on the physical plane. One could say from Rome the law was proclaimed since the 9th Century: break away from the sentence “My Kingdom is not of this World” by actually constituting a worldly kingdom, a kingdom for Christ Jesus on earth, which would be on the physical plane.

The Roman pope gradually became the one to say: My Kingdom is the Kingdom of Christ; but this Kingdom of Christ is from this world; we have constituted it in such a way that this Kingdom of Christ is of this world. However a consciousness prevailed that Christ's kingdom was not one which could be based on the 13 ground rules of external natural existence. People were aware that when they looked out into nature, lit by the sun's morning redness and the sunset's glow, by the stars, then it is not only a matter of what the eyes saw, what the ears heard or the hands could grip, but in the widths of infinite space at the same time existed something of the spiritual kingdom. Everything visible in the world is to some extent the last outflow, the last wave of the spiritual world. This visible world is only complete when one is totally aware that it is the outflow of a spiritual world. The spiritual world is real; humanity has but lost their sight of this spiritual world. It is hidden yet it is a reality, an actuality. When a person enters the gate of death and is particularly blessed, he or she steps into the spiritual world. In times past people were far more lively in their thoughts than we can imagine. When the blessed ones who had died went through the gate of death, they entered a world which we can imagine in the very present time—permeated with clouds, permeated with stars, piercing the orbit of the planets. It was something so concrete that the souls of the dead could create the upper group depicted in the painting. The souls of the dead combined what existed for them out of the past to depict this concrete mystery, this concrete secret of the nature of the Trinity in their midst: as the Father God—out of the character of the present: the Christ Jesus—and out of the reality of the future: the Holy Ghost.

In the reality of that present day world, if the physically sensed world did not appear as a mere illusion to people and let them live like animals, what differentiated itself in the reality of time had to appear on the physical plane in sighs, as a reference to the invisible spiritual world weaving and living above the clouds. Future generations have to have living signs for those not yet born and for those who are now passed over souls and are in possession of direct sight.

On the altar stands the Chalice with the Sanktissimum, the host. This host or wafer is no mere bit of external matter for people who stand on the right, left and around it, but this host is surrounded by its aura. Within this aura of the host forces work which pour down from the Trinity. Such imaginations experienced by the heads of church fathers, bishops and popes regarding the sanctity of an altar are incomprehensible by present day humanity. This imagination has elapsed in the course of time. A moment is eternalized in this painting by the people below the altar rising: here is the mystery which is positioned on the altar: something surrounds the host. This something can be seen by those who have died, namely the blessed ones: David, Abraham, Adam, Moses, Peter and Paul—these departed ones look upon this in the same way we on the physical plane would observe things in the sense world.

When we look at what is below, under the central sacred sacrament, we have to some measure an image in the lower layers of the painting of which a person like Pope Julius II said: This, in its great glory, I want to establish on earth in Rome if at all possible; such a kingdom, such an empire—not a state but an empire—in order for things to take place in this empire and be so enveloped by these auras that the past and its impulses live on in these auras. An empire that exists in this world but which, because it is of this world, contains signs and symbols for what lives in the spiritual world.

Ideas of this kind Julius II incited first in Bramante and then in youthful Raphael. Thus it came about that the young Raphael could compose this painting. In a way Julius II wanted this painting in his study, have it constantly before him like a holy saying on which Rome had to be based because it contained the most important things in the mysteries. However this empire had to be on this earth, of this earth with a spiritual inclusion.

If one allows all these experiences we have spoken about to work on one's soul, from its impression one might say: the spiritual world has been pushed back into the East since the 9th Century as is shown by the clouds driven backward and up, waiting for their time to come.

In contrast there were preparations being made in the West for the 5th post-Atlantean epoch in which we are all still living and in which we will live for a long time, which exists under the signature: My kingdom is of this world and this kingdom will increasingly become more of this world. However this kingdom which is of this world was founded nearly from the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch under the influence of old people like Bramante and Julius II, but also the youth Raphael. The most important historical things happen subconsciously and from this subconscious yet wise basis Julius II called Raphael. We know that humanity was becoming ever younger through the centuries; we know that since the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch the age of the twenty eight had been reached and it was now “27 years old”. Certainly Bramante and Julius II were old people but they were not as directly placed in the world as could the youthful Raphael in his young body with youthful forces of twenty-eight when he painted this way. This is an important spiritual background in the development of humanity.

We can recall how Raphael painted in the characterized thought (explained above) of Rome at the time; he painted to a certain extent in protest against the 5th post-Atlantean epoch for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. This was not the case but let us hypothetically argue that it was thus in Raphael's soul: we can imagine that in his soul, in his subconscious soul lived knowledge which would be coming out of the 5th post Atlantean time. Out of this godless, spirit-robbed world of the 5th post-Atlantean time humanity's thoughts would be permeated with bare, barren and icy space where sun and spiritless planets depict the dreary space, spiritlessly imagining the world and try, according to spiritless laws of nature, construct the unfolding of the world. Let us imagine what had been presented to Raphael's soul: the reality of the spiritual emptiness of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch. Raphael's soul had counter acted: It should not be like this, I will throw myself against this mindless epoch with its imposed notions in frozen space with mindless mist in the form of the Kant-Laplace theories, with my lively spiritual existence. I want to permeate the imagination as much as possible in this dreary existence with true imagination which offers itself to clairvoyant understanding of the world.—Suppose this is what Raphael's soul depicted. Thus it appeared in his subconscious soul; it had even appeared in the same way in the soul of Julius II.

Our age really doesn't need to despise great minds like Julius II or even the Borgias as is done with historical winners, because history still has to reduce some judgements regarding our contemporaries—the greatest ones of our times—just as it did with the Borgias or Julius II and will be the case of individuals in the future. People present at that time just did not have a distance to it.

Raphael was born at the start of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch, one could say, as a child of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch. He was really born out of this 5th post-Atlantic epoch but as a lively protest against his age—he wanted to stand within its beauty which this epoch no longer experienced as real; this epoch strived to insert sensible spirituality into de-spiritualized certainty and impose that on the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, as has been discovered from spiritual research. Raphael's aim was more or less to depict clear images visible in the spiritual realm, imported from that realm into this world, in a painting filled with signs of the supersensible, thereby creating another world. As a result this image is through and through a true picture because it has originated in a lively experience arising from that time.

Just consider this particular time when the child of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch drew the entire imaginative, spiritual imagery of the 4th post-Atlantean time into the 5th. Roughly at this time, during nearly the same year, a Nordic personality slipped up the penitent's stair in Rome, the stairs acclaimed for their ability to be equated to godly work according to the number of stairs climbed, because the number of steps taken on the stairs meant the same number of days relieved of hell fire. While Raphael was painting in the Vatican the Camera della Segnatura and similar images, this Nordic person, so devoted, in full of belief, so concerned for his soul's salvation, ascended the stair—so many stairs for so many days free from purgatory, doing work to please God. While he was thus climbing the stair, he had a vision—the vision showed him the futility of such holy work rushing up the stairs—a vision which ripped open the veil between him and that world which Raphael as a child of the 5th post-Atlantean time was painting as a testament of the 4th post-Atlantean time.

You can recognise this person as Luther, the antitheses of Raphael. Raphael, even when he was looking around in the outer world, would see colour and form, all kinds of spiritual images, everything as expressions of the supersensible world yet reflected, expressed as sensual colour, forms and gestures. Luther was at the same time in Rome, filled with song and poetry, yet amorphous, formless in his soul, rejecting everything in this world which surrounded him in Rome. Like the spiritual world was pushed back in the 9th century into the East, it was now a testament of the 4th post-Atlantean epoch in Europe. Luther pushed it all back. Thus in the future the threefold world presented itself: in the East spirituality was pushed back, in the South it was somewhat divided as the testament of the 4th post-Atlantean epoch and again became pushed back and rejected. The musical element of the North took the place of the colour and form-rich testament of the South. Luther is really the antithesis of Raphael. Raphael is a child of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, his soul however contained everything which lived in the 4th post-Atlantean time. Luther is a late-comer of the 4th post-Atlantean time, he doesn't belong in the 5th post-Atlantean epoch; one might say he was transferred from the 4th into the 5th. In his frame of mind Luther was completely within the 4th post-Atlantean time. His thoughts and feelings were like a person living in the 4th epoch but he was transferred into the 5th and lived now out of an echo sounding into the 5th epoch with its blatancy, its obvious natural history and ice fields of barren spirituality. Raphael had the soul content of the 4th post-Atlantean time; Luther, even though he was transferred out of the 4th into the 5th, had a soul standing right in the 4th post-Atlantean time but rejected everything external, he wanted by contrast to create everything which had nothing to do with external work and external human activities—a soul based solely between the formless inner connection of the human soul and the spiritual world, dependant on faith only.

Just think for a moment how a painter like Raphael would have painted out of southern Catholicism, and compare how it could be painted from a Lutheran standpoint. What would he paint? He would paint a Christ figure somewhat like Albrecht Dürer's; or he would paint a religious person in whose physiognomic expression one would recognise a soul with nothing in common regarding the material surroundings and the objects within this environment into which it has been imposed.

Thus one age connects to another. In the present time mankind has quite different ideas. This you see in paintings where Christ is depicted as a person amongst the people: “Come, Master Jesus, be our guest”—as human and equal as possible:

In our painting we have a group of Bishops, learned church fathers, and in the middle the obvious sign, the symbol. This points to the supersensible world; the Trinity is concretely included.

Let us lift out this “Trinity” in particular. We have another painting which represents this Trinity on its own.

At the top we see the Father God, below that, Holy Ghost and the Son. You behold these members as concrete content of the future, the present, taken out of the past. It would not have been appropriate in the world view of that present time to mix the blessed souls of the dead directly with the observation of the outer visible world. However Raphael used, in the sense of the imagination of that time, what he observed as the truth, the free view in the widths of natural realms. To a certain extend he had to express the blatant obviousness that filled the space was not the truth; but the truth places them within the space. Thus we have at the bottom—you still notice the line of the horizon—the width, infinity within the expanding perspective. To a certain extent protest is expressed against representing nature at present as a purely sense perceptible image.

Raphael didn't simply arrive at this image and hit upon the composition. In order for it to become clear, let us consider two of Raphael's preliminary sketches towards the painting's gradual development:

Imagine the entire story, from the time Raphael came to Rome roundabout the time Julius II called him to execute the commission in 1507, 1508, and try include this into the painting which he had in his imagination. Gradually he was first instructed by Julius II; gradually a relationship developed in him between space, nature and the supersensible and sensible aspects in the human group, how it had to be.

Also the other sketch refers more to the lower part than the first sketch, with still incomplete indications. You see it hasn't come into its own. What Raphael came to was this: he had to really imagine himself into that time and the relationship between the spiritual world and nature. In olden times, still up to the 9th Century, there was still a clear imagination of the relationship between the human past and the natural present. The people before the 9th Century—as grotesque as it may sound to mankind today—didn't think that when something was happening to them, it was by chance; no, they knew that when something happened to them it was because of the events into which they were being spun was where the dead were living, connected to them through karma. Before the 9th century the events which surrounded us place the dead before us. Such images diminished gradually and remained in the past as I have characterised for you in the 16th Century.

Returning once more to the 9th Century we arrive at an imagination which needs consideration: a timely separation between the natural- and the spiritual world was not apparent for these ancient folk. Nature was at the same time a continuation—before the 9th Century, mind you—a continuation of the spiritual world. Already during the Greek times the human being had introduced their own I into their world view, by using thinking. Raphael was painting—he expressed this in the upper part of the canvas in the image later called “Disputa” even though certainly nothing was being disputed—and introduced a female figure out of the symbolism of that time with the motto: DIVINARUM RERUM NOTITIA = divinely written comment. Basically before the 9th Century the world view included the “divinely written comment” and nature was like a wave of the godlike world extending below to where mankind found itself.

This entire notion, as I've mentioned, was pushed back to the East and the echo remained within the imagination, like a testament painted by Raphael from the 4th post-Atlantic epoch. In those days it was deliberated from the south to establish the kingdom of Christ on the physical plane itself as a real empire of power. Pope Julius II had even, like other similar personalities, written on his flag what he really wanted. He wanted to really establish this which could not happen because Luther came along, as did Calvin and Zwingli. He wanted to create the foundation for Christ's Empire in this world. He dared not say so. One can usually see this in such personalities as something esoteric. Julius II did not dare go through Italy as a commander in order to harness the Italians to his empire. He said it differently. He said he was going through Italy as a commander in order to free the Italian folk. This is what was said. In later times it was said something or other should be done to free the folk while this only hid the real goal. At the time however, many believed Julius II went through Italy to free the separate Italian nations. It didn't occur to him, just as little as it occurred or could in anyway occur to Woodrow Wilson, to set some or other folk free.

Now, you see, here we have this immense border, one might say, between the two time periods: the backward push to everything southerly. Retained from this is the division in the world view in the Greek time. It was clearly as follows: What had streamed through nature as deeds of the dead was no longer present when people developed spiritual powers in themselves, unfolding it in their souls; it then doesn't become DIVINARUM RERUM NOTITIA, not something “written up as godly things” but becomes CAUSARUM COGNITIO—and attains “direct knowledge of causes in the world”. Here care should be taken not to want an interpretation of nature in its totality as an outcome. To come to an idea of nature—this Julius II felt compelled to shout in thunderous words—an imagination was to be made to show that the sun rises, the morning- and evening glow exists as do the stars, and just as people did in the 5th post-Atlantean epoch, it meant lying. In fact one denied that the souls of the dead were within the Trinity which was really something capable of imaginative expression by looking back to the dead souls, David, Abraham, Paul, Peter and express the Holy Trinity. Julius said: Leave away nature and the old Eons, only depict the youngest Eons! Do you want to rely on yourselves? If you want to develop through only human forces, depend only on what is inherent in the physical body, then you arrive at an external science regarding the outer nature of people, a science only in so far as the human being has no connection with the endless expanse of the world, but is hemmed in, interwoven within the boundaries it sets itself.

This is roughly what Julius II told Raphael: If you want to paint what the human being through his own soul faculties know about humanity then you must not paint the people out of an endless perspective in nature, but include the people, whether genial or wise, in their self-made borders. You must include them in halls to show: from these rooms where the world is governed—because Julius wanted to have the world depicted as it would have become had no Luther arrived, nor a Zwingli, or any Calvinist.—If you want to paint the world as it is governed from these rooms, then paint on the one side the reality existing in the breadth of nature and on the other side, what people can find if they only sought forces from within their own souls. Then you may not paint nature but paint the people in their self-imposed borders.

This is what we have when we allow the contrasting aspects in the image to work on us ... the so-called “School of Athens”.

This painting, later becoming known as the “School of Athens”, was often painted over in the course of time and so the man standing in the middle had his book painted over with “Ethics” then later with “Time”—that was painted even later. The painting is in many ways ruined and one can't find the true image of the original painting today in Rome. In Raphael's time it was never called “The School of Athens”, this only happened later and then theories developed about it. We can imagine it essentially thus: truly the world is measured through the changed painting (197) when we peer into the endless realms of space and imagine nature not with obvious senses but permeated with everything existing in eternity and temporality, permeated with that which has gone through the gate of death. Taking knowledge from within one's own soul and representing it in everything coming together, like these wise men, here (202); the heavenly knowledge which can only be found built up within oneself, is represented in a personality which points upwards (203). No inartistic stupidity is needed to see Plato in this figure. (See below)

You can imagine the following: the gesture of the rising hand represents the word being spoken by the figure on the right. The personality on the right begins to speak as if his expression is translated into words. Everything originating by itself in the human soul can only be truly imagined if it is contained within an enclosed space, where one remains within oneself. If one searches within for an image of nature then nothing other than an abstract image of nature will be found, much like the Copernican world view represents which is not a picture of concrete nature.

Thus Raphael took the task from Julius II and placed it before the godly experience which could live by itself in the human soul in the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantic epoch. Here everything of worldly science is grouped, but worldly science raised up to divine concepts, to intellectual understanding of the godly. On analysis the seven free arts appear: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music.

Up to the culminating expression you can find the whole of worldly science applied to the divine and how this is expressed by the human word—here the opposites of looking and speaking are alive—expressed in the image itself. Un-artistic, amateurishly learned chitchat saw the entire Greek philosophy in the same image. That is unnecessary and has no relevance to the artwork we have been speaking about and of which we finally want to point out: it shows us how this painting, in the sense of that time, represents a true human experience—an experience which the soul discovers when it is allowed to find wisdom within itself regarding mankind.

We have more details of this painting which I want to show you:

If you allow yourself to be drawn in more you will recognise the right sided figures are linked to the central main figure who is entering into speech; here on the right (205) we have everything which depends more on Inspiration, and to the left, (204) it touches more on Imagination and its equivalent.

We have one more image of the central figures:

The opposite of looking and speaking is presented. Let us be clear about it—the present time can only be understood if we try to throw more and more of such glances into the past which we can do by experiencing such paintings in an artistic sense. Our time is the time in which something returns to itself. In our time there is a return in Europe—Central Europe, Northern Europe and in certain moods in Western Europe—of karmic connections with the European development of the 9th Century. This hasn't become particularly observable to most people, actually in fact, not at all. What happens today takes place out of necessity, the opposite manner used to spiritually grasp what Europe's destiny had to be in the 9th century. What had been pushed back to the East at that time was the spiritual world, so now it has once again to be manifested on the physical plane. The moods of the 9th Century after Christ are now reappearing in western European, in Central and Northern Europe. Out of Europe's east will develop something like moods out of the terrible chaos, spreading out in something like moods which will mysteriously remind us of the 16th Century. Only out of the combined harmonising of the 9th and 16th Centuries will mysteries originate which to some extent can give a degree of clarity for present day humanity who wants to rise to its own understanding of evolution.

It is remarkable to see how in the 16th Century everything most secret and mysterious in nature, man and God, was visibly represented outwardly in art. The holy secret of the Trinity we have found in the most meaningful images of the world set before our souls. The opposite appears at the same time—the Protestant-Evangelistic mood which totally denies these holy secrets being able to share this historic period. At intervals Herman Grimm, a truly northern Lutheran spirit, speaks about the thoughts his contemporaries have regarding Christ, thoughts they treasure as wholly good within their souls—the exact opposite in Raphael's mood when he painted the world.

You see, at the beginning of the 16th Century the Reformation brought evolution further which became the world's lot, even in Rome, in the sphere of Julius II, of the popes. But how? It became the lot of the world that people wanted to reflect about the supersensible worlds as if they were visible but visible through human development. As a result—this Herman Grimm discovered rightly—the Pauline Christianity became a particular problem for Raphael and his contemporaries—yes, even the figure of Paul himself. It can be said that up to the 16th Century Christianity was far more permeated by what one could call the Peter Christianity—Peter who saw the supersensible and sensible worlds as undivided, experiencing in the sensible world the supersensible within it, finding the supersensible in the sense perceptions. The extrasensory world disappeared from it. People were aware of this right up to the 16th Century. The experience of the Damascus secret living in Paul as a seer, and the figure of Paul himself, became a problem. As a result Raphael tried in his later development to depict, and include, Paul's figure in various paintings. It can be said: from the south a Reformation wanted to be established with the aim to depict the Pauline vision in the world in such a way as I set before you now, as it lived in Raphael's paintings which originated through the inspiration of Julius II.

Paul was a problem for him. You appreciate this when you research Paul's form in Raphael's other paintings. You see a visual expression of the music of the spheres in the “Saint Cecile”.

Naturally it is inaccurately expressed. Left, in the corner, is the practical shape of Paul. Raphael made a study of Paul in a painterly way. Repeatedly Paul posed a problem. Why?—Because Paul's quest originates from within him as a human individuality through which he strives to have sight, penetrate into the sight. Here we see it in his whole attitude, in his gesture: Paul as he participates in something self-evident to others as a seeker. He develops both sides, therefore if it comes down to him, he shows Christian revelation differently. As Paul understands—you see it here, how Paul teaches—it became a problem for Raphael.

Now we have another painting: Paul speaking in Athens.

You can see Raphael studied Paul. What did Paul become for him?—The hero, the spiritual hero of the Reformation who should have succeeded from the south, but did not succeed. This impulse was pushed back and later Jesuitism from the South was put in the place of the Reformation—more about that at another time. Paul should have established the Kingdom of Christ on earth as foreseen by Julius II.

Now characterise for yourself the two Paul heads, which we have before us now and allow it to really work on us.

These are heads studied by Raphael in which he wanted to depict through the physiognomy a gaze penetrating the secrets of the spiritual Christian world, into the spiritual secrets enabling words to outwardly pronounce these secrets; we have in Paul the binding link between the world of causes and the world into which only those with blessed vision have access, the supersensible world. Paul is looking and teaching, the connecting link between the world of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch and the ancient spiritual time. Remind yourselves of your consideration of the Paul physiognomy, the Pauline gestures right up to the movement of the fingers—here only the arm is lifted—and be reminded of that ...

... consider these and then look once more at the figure in the so-called “School of Athens”:

... and compare that to the two heads of Paul which we have looked at (235, 236) with the heads here (203) on your right and you have such a personality in whom seeing has become words, one might say: because Paul, who grew out of seeing the results of the Mystery of Damascus and became the orator of Christianity, made his pact of compromise with what can be found in the Causarum Cognitio when the experience of the physical causal world is elevated into a relation of possible experiences of divine things. As a result you will experience something like the constant “Signatur” which wafts through the “Camera della Segnatura” when you look over the image which later was called the “Disputa”, to what is called the “School of Athens”. In the “Disputa” is the truth, the spiritual truth in a nature filled space; glancing over to the other, opposite wall, so companions and visionaries encounter Paul the teacher who points to the worldly learning from which everything can arise which the human soul can find within itself. Looking at the fresco, which is the so-called “School of Athens”:

...so one finds a soul living in the central figure with a content which is painted in the opposite fresco:

... then one roughly has the connection. Take the one wall—everything that is within the soul, all one does not see except as the outer bodily aspect, that very aspect is revealed on the opposite wall, on the fresco of the so-called “Disputa”.

I would like to say: if you could see into the souls of these two people painted on the one wall, then you will see what lives in the souls of these two people on the opposite wall, on the fresco. More about this later.