human
Ezzelino :
gpt
I will explain the picture to you. Ezzelino is seated in his dungeon, and two monks are attempting to convert him. One of them recognises that all pains are thrown away upon the old sinner, and takes himself off, regretfully desisting from all further endeavour; the other still has hopes, and continues his exhortations. But Ezzelino only keeps his angry gaze fixed before him, muttering, 'Leave me alone! Don't you see that I am--posing as a model!' He had had occasion to write to his friend Bauernfeld:
human
I have seen so many schools of so-called painting in my time that it is an absolute horror to me ; he had asked Piloty:
gpt
What calamity are you preparing for us now? and had thought it his duty to address to one of the younger painters the question:
human
Are we then an academy of the Fine or of the Ugly Arts?
gpt
A man like me, with his ideas, walks like a ghost amid the battle of the virtuosi, in which the whole life of art has gone astray, he used sadly to say. His last wonderful works stand alone in a time which was dazzled by the flash of arms characterising the Franco-Belgian school of art. It was not till much later that Hans Thoma took up the threads which connect the work of Schwind with the present epoch. When he died he was a solitary, isolated man taking leave of a generation in which he had no part. The period of historical painting which followed him produced no single work distinguished by Schwind's sense of fragrant legendary poetry. The charming forest fairy who had appeared to him showed herself to no other; like the betrayed Melusina, she had returned to rest again, solitary, in her fountain home. Fantasy, tender soul that she is, had taken wings, whither none can tell.
human
That is why nobody has a single idea,