Writing from Hanover on 3 June [1859] during his trip to acquaint himself more fully with German art and galleries, Ruskin told Lady Trevelyan: 'The German paintings are indescribably Funny in their intense resolve to be fine. Overbecks Assumption in the cathedral of Cologne is out and out the most excrable picture I ever saw in my life... I believe you might have tied that fellow Overbeck to a mill wheel on the Rhine - & let him go round upon it for a thousand years, without washing the least particle of conceit out of him' (see Surtees, Reflections of a Friendship, p. 137-8). His diary entry of 28 May [1859] written in Cologne confirms the above viewpoint:
'Overbeck's Virgin in the chapel of cathedral, with Abraham and David below, excrable beyond all contempt. The lower part feebly and basely borrowed from Titian's Apotheosis of Philip lV' ( Evans and Whitehouse, Diaries II, p.540).