The painting of the Dutch seventeenth century, now considered its golden age, was not well liked in Hegel's day. Though elements of the Romantic avant-garde did favor northern European painters, they were principally attracted, in anticipation of later primitivisms, by the crude piety of the early medieval period. For mainstream audiences, meanwhile, Winckelmann's neoclassicism and the (French) Academic hierarchy to which it was allied continued to hold sway. Schelling, who found the painters of the Netherlands “uncouth,” typifies this stance. One might have expected Hegel, an admirer of Winckelmann and a former colleague of Schelling's, to follow the contemporary high road past the lowlands, and it is telling that he did not.