whole realm of thought and emotion, and the lofty ideas of race and nationality, which had already provoked fiery outbursts in Czech literature, were gradually finding expression in the arts as well.
But the Romantic Art of Bohemia went to German sources for its inspiration, and the artists were Czech in little more than in name. This timorous Romanticism was obviously unaffected by the seething maelstrom from which French Romantic art had sprung, overturning the old idols and renovating technical processes from top to bottom. Unadventurous to the core, our Romantics continued to model themselves upon the outworn Classicism of the schools, and their patriotic zeal is betrayed not so much in the form as in the choice of subjects drawn from the national history. Moreover, the religious motif takes pride of place, in Bohemia as in Germany. It is to Rome, therefore, that men go to seek salvation for humanity and, for art, consecration by the Church. The monastic school of San Isidoro, the influence of Overbeck and Cornelius lie behind the efforts of these Romantics, and the quattrocento sheds its rays before them as an ideal to be pursued. The new director of the Prague Academy, the devout František Kadlík, invested these tendencies with the Official seal of his authority. Nevertheless, by virtue of his feeling for Nature and of a certain freshness in his brushwork he stands apart from these theologians, remote as they are from the living world and absorbed in their dreams, to which they are ever striving to give form in line-drawings timidly eked out with a little arid colouring.
Yet Prague, despite its isolation, gradually saw the belt of its fortifications lapped by faint ripples from the great revolutionary wave that had started from Paris. Thus even in Prague men learnt that Romanticism stood for a rehabilitation of colour, deprived of its rights since the Baroque period, and at the same
