Now, what strikes one, first of all, in looking at Kaulbach's grand picture, is the exclusive idea which has presided over the whole, as well as over all the details, of its composition. Even the title given by the author to his work is witness to this. It is not so much the sixteenth century that the artist has desired to paint as the _Era of the Reformation_; and the Reformation, moreover, solely as regarded from the Protestant point of view. Accordingly in the picture everything is treated with reference to Luther and Calvin; and the choir of great personages who figure in it serve only, so to speak, as the retinue of the new gospel and its first apostles.
But if the unhappy rupture which separated from the Catholic Church a large part of Northern Europe is one of the most considerable events of the century, it is not, however, so exclusively such that it has the right to absorb into itself all the other events of the period; and it is well known how numerous those events were in an age which should be regarded as one of the most eventful epochs in European history.
And it is not solely from the point of view of religious and artistic history that it is just to make this objection; it should be made, moreover, in behalf of political history. In fact, whatever influence Protestantism may have exercised upon the relations of the civil states among and toward each other, it is but slight up to the seventeenth century, the beginning of the Thirty Years' War and the treaties of Westphalia, which caused new principles to prevail in the public law of Europe. He has been, therefore, entirely blind to the grandest political contest of the sixteenth century--that between France and Austria; a contest that holds too large a place in the history of that century not to be noticed and made mention of, at least by introducing into the sketch the princes in whom it was personified--Charles V. and Francis I.
Francis I., the enlightened patron of letters, the founder of the College of France, the friend of Benvenuto Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci, the secret supporter of the Lutherans of the empire, should have had, by these by-passages of his life, some right not to be forgotten by the pencil of the German painter. But if state policy caused him to lend a helping hand to the Protestants of Germany--the adversaries of Charles V.--that same policy, joined with religious motives, caused him to sign the edicts of proscription against the Protestants of his own kingdom; and the prince who, in despite of his sister's sympathies for Calvin, refused to drag France upon the precipice of the Reformation, could scarcely find favor with the panegyrists of Protestantism.