For example, he almost always paints
the interiors of his Gothic cathedrals on broad canvases of
insignificant height, which causes the pointed arches and vaulted
structures of the foreground to be cut off at the top. In spite of the
mathematically correct drawing the general plan of the picture
therefore reveals that the age of Peter Neefs no longer had a correct
eye for the principle, for the spirit, of the Gothic, otherwise the
master would not have cut off precisely the characteristic terminations
of the columns and vaultings by the arbitrary horizontal line of the
frame. Thus, in very truth, Neefs paints rigid Gothic, but in his
pictures we can recognize the seventeenth century which, at the most,
could see the medieval forms correctly with the outer but not with the
inner eye.
All the outlines of the ancient statues swell up under the pencil of the
draughtsman of that day, every muscle becomes coarser, fuller, more
fleshy, although the draughtsman undoubtedly believed he had reproduced
it with mathematical exactitude. The Grecian goddess no longer looks so
demure. She has grown to be a coquette; the Virgin has become a wife,
because the age lacked the virgin eye, because Rubens' full-bosomed
women's figures and Buonarotti's swelling play of the muscles obtruded
themselves everywhere, not only before the creative vision but also
before the inner receptive vision.
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