“patriotic” and rejected foreign impulses, especially those from Classical Antiquity. It was apparently part of Ludwig's strategy to combine these contrary artistic conceptions in a single patriotic monument, thereby uniting the opposing camps under one national ideal. His attempt at a synthesis of Classical and Romano-Gothic styles is often referred to in the literature as “Romantic Classicism” or the “Ludovician Style”. At first Schwanthaler adhered to the specifications of Klenze's plan. But he soon began to come up with his own variations of the Bavaria statue. He made the fundamental decision not to follow Classical models but rather to clothe her in a “Germanic” style: her floor length shirt dress was draped in a simpler way, and bound up together with a bearskin it gave the figure a typical “German” character according to Schwanthaler. Schwanthaler went a step further in a plaster model dated 1840. He decorated the head with a wreath of entwined oak leaves, and the wreath in the raised left hand, which in the Klenze version was made of laurel leaves, became another oak leaf wreath, the oak being considered an intrinsically German tree. These modifications to the Bavaria statue occurred at the time of the so-called Rhine Crisis of 1840/41, which involved border disputes between France and the German Confederation and led to a surge of patriotic outbursts against the “archenemy” France. For Schwanthaler, who was in any case an enthusiastic patriot, this crisis seems to have been the motivation for portraying his Bavaria statue as emphatically fit to fight and armed with a drawn sword. The Bavaria statue's attributes of bearskin, oak wreath and sword can be relatively easily interpreted as a consequence of the political and art history context of its genesis, but an interpretation of the lion is more problematic. Although it is natural to regard the animal simply as a symbol of Bavaria, this does not really reflect the intention of Klenze and Schwanthaler. The lion always had a firm place in heraldry for the rulers of Bavaria, as Counts of the Rhine Palatinate the House of Wittelsbach had included it in its coat of arms since the High Middle Ages. In addition, two rampant lions served as supporters in the Bavarian coat of arms from the earliest times. The art historian Manfred F. Fischer is, however, of the opinion that the lion next to the Bavaria statue is not only conceived