It thus came about that a definite style no longer generally existed, and, since many considered their directions to be the only correct ones, their styles to be the styles of the future, there were necessarily many reciprocal influences. Thus the employment by Schinkel himself in his Academy of Architecture, built in 1835, of a characteristic brick architecture exe cuted with delicate detail and most refined ornament—which, indeed, echoes many structures of the Renaissance period, but which shows more tendency toward a new independent style—may be attributed quite as much to the influence of the various contemporaneous currents as to the knowledge of the value of forms which are characteristic because they are evolved from the materials themselves.
Schinkel tendencies developed more and more in Berlin after a new era had been opened for ideal efforts through the desire of Frederick William IV. to introduce a romantic trait into classical art. It was chiefly to Schinkers pupils and followers that the king assigned most of the tasks which required more than new combinations of older motifs. Also, the attempt at more picturesque grouping, and finally the demands of life, brought new elements partly derived from other periods, but partly quite new. Thus, Schinkel himself in his designs for churches, even where he did not wish the Gothic style to predom inate, as in the Werder Church, adopted many romantic elements.
Berlin above all; Schinkel and his followers endeavored, whenever they erected their structures in other styles, to give to the details that Hellenic refinement which Schinkel in his Academy of Architecture knew how to impress upon brick-construction. These cur rents so intermingled that it is often difficult to tell whether the Greek or some other style formed the groundwork of the set of forms used in any definite building; so that we may properly speak of a Berlin style, since until after 186o all these structures had something in common which was not exhibited by any other school. We may here mention Schinkel's magnificent domed church at Potsdam, and also his villas in its suburbs; the buildings of Persius, composed in the spirit of the clas sic idyls; the entire series of palaces and dwelling-houses of Strack, Hitzig, and Knoblauch; Stiller's new museum, Hitzig's exchange, etc. To the latest, hut the best, works of this kind belongs the theatre at Leipsic by C. F. Langhans (p/. 51, figs. 6, 7).
Neither can those buildings for which medieval examples furnished the groundwork deny their relationship to the preceding, particularly the various churches of Berlin and other parts of Prussia which, in con sequence of the preference of Frederick William IV. for Roman basil
icas, were constructed in imitation of them, as well as those which resulted from an approach to the Gothic or the Romanesque style. We mention Soller's St. Michael's, Stfiler's St. Mark's (o/. 52, fig. io), and various other churches by the same masters; Adler's churches—among them that of St. Thomas (fig. II), etc.; and even Strack's St. Peter's, in which the Gothic comes into play with comparative definiteness, is more " Berlinish " than Gothic.
The Prussian provinces show a great number of similar works. Yet this tendency may now be considered as entirely obsolete. On the one hand, the Rhenish mediaeval school, essentially through the merits of Adler, has brought about, even in Berlin, a more severe rendering of the mediaeval style; while, on the other hand, after many works of Strack and Stiller, particularly the university buildings of the latter at Kiel and Rostock, as well as his academy at Pesth, had already shown a definite inclination toward the Renaissance, this latter style made such strides from the fifteenth-century Italian phase to the baroque of the Dres den Zwinger that it cannot in Berlin be said to belong to the nearest future, but to the present. Even the finer rendering of the details, which not long since adhered to the Renaissance structures of Berlin as a remnant of the Schinkel school, is rapidly disappearing to make way for a more archceologically correct and more vigorous manner.
The Romanesque tendency of Munich and Carlsrnhe also extended its offshoots. Semper, who later on was the leader in another direction, fol lowed it in the Dresden Synagogue; some works at Frankfort, Darmstadt, and Mayence were executed in it; while Baden—where Eisenlohr's rail way-stations are really artistically-important and praiseworthy achieve ments—and Bavaria were filled with more or less good works.
Hanoverian School.—But a special school which was to a certain extent a branch of that of South Germany was formed in Hanover, where the new Rathhaus is one of the older, if not exactly one of the better, works, since the school, especially Haase, soon evolved a fresh and pleasing origi nality, and in the museum, the military hospital, and finally in the Wel feuschloss, attained magnificent results, though, indeed, in the last-named building the attempt at originality goes too far.