Note 364 — Chapter VIII · MUSIC AND PLASTIC

Hence the impossibility of achieving a genuinely religious painting on plein-air principles. The world-feeling that underlies it is so thoroughlythoroughly irreligious, so worthless for any but a “religion of reason” so-called, that every one of its efforts in that direction, even with the noblest intentions (Uhde, Puvis de Chavannes), strikes us as hollow and false. One instant of plein-air treatment suffices to secularize the interior of a church and degrade it into a showroom.