Another curious figure was the water-colour painter, Celestin Nanteuil, who suggested to Gautier the hero of an early piece of his own, written to accompany an engraving in an English keepsake, representing the Square of St. Sebald at Nuremberg.  This hero, Elias Wildman-stadius, or l’Homme Moyen-age, was “in a sort, the Gothic genius of that Gothic town”—­a retardataire or man born out of his own time—­who should have been born in 1460, in the days of Albrecht Duerer.  Celestin Nanteuil “had the air of one of those tall angels carrying a censer or playing on the sambucque, who inhabit the gable ends of cathedrals; and he seemed to have come down into the city among the busy townsfolk, still wearing his nimbus plate behind his head in place of a hat, and without having the least suspicion that it is not perfectly natural to wear one’s aureole in the street.”  He is described as resembling in figure “the spindling columns of the church naves of the fifteenth century. . . .  The azure of the frescoes of Fiesole had furnished the blue of his eyes; his hairs, of the blond of an aureole, seemed painted one by one, with the gold of the illuminators of the Middle Ages. . . .  One would have said, that from the height of his Gothic pinnacle Celestin Nanteuil overlooked the actual town, hovering above the sea of roofs, regarding the eddying blue smoke, perceiving the city squares like a checkerboard, the streets like the notches of a saw in a stone bench, the passers-by like mice; but all that confusedly athwart the haze, while from his airy observatory he saw, close at hand and in all their detail, the rose windows, the bell towers bristling with crosses, the kings, patriarchs, prophets, saints, angels of all the orders, the whole monstrous army of demons or chimeras, nailed, scaled, tushed, hideously winged; guivres, taresques, gargoyles, asses’ heads, apes’ muzzles, all the strange bestiary of the Middle Age.”  Nanteuil furnished illustrations for the books of the French romanticists.  “Hugo’s’ Notre-Dame de Paris’ was the object of his most fervent admiration, and he drew from it subjects for a large number of designs and aquarelles.”  Gautier mentions, as among his rarest vignettes, the frontispiece of “Albertus,” recalling Rembrandt’s manner; and his view of the Palazzo of San Marc in Royer’s “Venezia la bella.”  Gautier says that one might apply to Nanteuil’s aquarelles what Joseph Delorme[39] said of Hugo’s ballads, that they were Gothic window paintings.  “The essential thing in these short fantasies is the carriage, the shape, the clerical, monastic, royal, seignorial awkwardness of the figures and their high colouring. . . .  Celestin had made his own the angular anatomy of coats-of-arms, the extravagant contours of the mantles, the chimerical or monstrous figures of heraldry, the branchings of the emblazoned skirts, the lofty attitude of the feudal baron, the modest air of the chatelaine, the sanctimonious