CORNELIUS
377
CORNELIUS
veloping painting in fresco on a heroic scale was
abandoned. At the same time Cornelius did not
find at Munich all the assistants he had wished;
aliove all Overbeck had not followed him. Besides
this the inii)ils did not meet the great problems of
painting in fresco with skill equal to his; he was also
not able to obtain m every case competent teachers
for the theoretical instruction in the subsidiary
sciences which at that time he held to be absolutely
essential. Moreover, the favour of the king was too
extreme to be permanent, nor could it fail to arouse
envy. After 1S20 t'ornelius and his pupils decorated
two halls and an entrance chamber of the Cilyiitothek
at Munich, a building intended for the e.xhibition of
ancient sculpture. The subjects were, for the two
halls, the gods and heroes of classic antiquity and,
for the entrance chamber, the history of primitive
man, the compositions being based on Greek my-
thology. The selertion gave the artist the oppor-
tunity of presenting beautiful forms, strong action.
and lofty ideals; at the same time he could make use
of symbolical allusions as they are conceived by
Dante.
Comelivis has been called a poet and thinker; the loftiness and imity of conception displayed by these frescoes justify the assertion. The mastery of the difficult proportion of space shown is astoni.shing; the surfaces seem to have been planned for the fres- coes and not the frescoes for the spaces. On the Other hand, the inequality of execution especially in regard to colour is very striking. Cornelius allowed great liberty to his unequally gifted pupils; still much of the work, especially what he painted him- self, is excellently carried out, as: "The Fall of Troy", "The Judges of the Lower World", "Eros with an Eagle", and ' ' Eros with Cerberus". It must be acknowl- edged that Cornelius was not strong in colour, although his frescoes from the life of Jose[)h in the Villa Bar- tholdy arc in all particulars satisfactory. King Louis I allowed him to make only the drawings for the loggias of the Pinakothek; the execution of the work was entrusted to Clemens Zimmerraann. In these designs Cornelius gave in an unconstrained manner, yet one full of thought and imagination, the history of German and Italian painting. He hoped to have an opportunity in the new church, the " Ludwigskirche ", to create a Christian epic which shouUl be a Divine Comedy in colour, but to his bitter disappointment he was only commi.ssioned to decorate the choir and transept. The subject chosen for delineation was the Christian conception of the Creation, Redemption, and the Last Judg- ment; the gigantic fresco of the Judgment, contain- ing 2,500 square feet, was painted by Cornelius him- self (18;<6-39). Parts of the fresco show great merit in composition and drawing; a reverent composure
and the avoidance of repellent nudity distinguish the
painting from Michelangelo's "Judgment" on the
altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. The colour scheme,
it must be acknowledged, is somewhat lacking in
harmony, and the light "in the church is unfavourable.
King Louis saw the fresco under peculiarly unfor-
tunate circumstances, and Cornelius fell into dis-
grace.
In 1S41 he went to B(>rlin where the art-loving Frederick William IV became his unwavering patron. While at Berlin he drew for the royal mausoleum planned by the king the celebrated cartoons: "Christ Conquering Sin, mtended for the east wall of a cloister designed in connexion with a new cathedral; "Christ Conquering Death", for the west wall of the cloister; "Christ in His Church", for the .south wall, and "Christ at the End of the World", taken from the imagery of the ApocalJ^3se, for the north wall. In harmony w-ith the scheme of the cartoons is the painting for the apse of the intended cathedral, "Mankmd Awaiting the Day of Judgment", com- pleted by Cornelius in 18,50. During his residence at Berlin Cornelius produced his most mature work as a draughtsman ; his designs were at all times so com- plete that they were not certain to gain by execu- tion in colour. The cartoons for the royal mauso- leum, of which the one for the north wall was on the scale of the intended fresco, met fairly undisputed approval. His work as head of the German School at Rome and as leader in Germany of aspiring artists gives Cornelius the position of a pioneer of the nineteenth century in asserting high ideals and in developing technic on the heroic scale.
H. Grimm, Neue Essais (Berlin, 186.5); Von Wolzogen, Peter von Cornelius (Berlin, 1867); Riegel, Cornelius, der Meister der deutschen Malerei (Hanover, 1870); Forster, Peter von Cornelius, ein Gedenkbuch (Berlin, 1874); Carri^rb in Neuer Plutarch (Leipzig, 1880); Eckbrt, Peter Cornelius (Bielefeld, 1906), gives on p. 131 a complete bibliography. G. GlETMANN.
Cornelius Cornelii a Lapide (Cornelis Cohne- LI8SEN v.\N DEX Steex). Flemish .Jesuit and exegete, b. at Bocholt, in Flemish Limburg, IS December, 1.567; d. at Rome. 12 March, 16.37. He studied hu- manities and philosophy at the Jesuit colleges of Maastricht and Cologne, theology first , for half a year, at the University of Douai, and afterwards for four years at Louvain; he entered the Society of Jesus, 1 1 June, 1592, and, after two years' novil iatc and another year of theology, was ordained priest 24 December, 1.595. After teaching philo.sopliy for half a year, he was made professor of Holy Scripture at Louvain in 1596 and next year of Hebrew also. Twenty years later, in 1616, he w;is called to Rome in the same capacity, where, on the 3rd of November, he assumed the office which he filled with such renown for many years after. The latter years of his life, however, he seems to have devoted exclusively to finishing and correcting his celebrated commentaries. He was a sincerely pious and zealous priest and an exemplar}- religious. Dur- ing his professorship at Louvain he liked to spend his holidays preaching and administering the sacniinents, especially at the pilgrimage of Scherpenheuvel (Mon- taigu). With movdng simplicity and truth he por- trayed hunself in an emotional prayer to the Propliets at the end of his commentarj' on Daniel: "For nearly thirty years I suffer with and for you with gladness the continual martyrdom of religious life, the martyrdom of illness, the martyrdom of study and writing; obtain for me also, I beseech you, to crown all, the fourth martyrdom, of blood. F'or you I have spent my vital and animal .spirits; I will spend my blood too." With liis brethren in religion at Rome he enjoyed so high a reputation for sanctity that, when he died, they gave hun a separate burial [Jace, in order to be the more certain of finding his bones when eventually, as they hoped, he should receive the honour of beatification.
