The first English translation of Gilly's essays demonstrates his influence on Berlin architects, justifying his standing as the founder of the Berlin architectural tradition.

Julien-David Le Roy's Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grece, initially issued in 1758, first revealed to European eyes the wonders of Greek classical architecture. Overnight, Greece became the rage, much to the chagrin of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and other defenders of the genius of Rome. contemporary aesthetics was heightened, particularly in the much-expanded edition of 1770, by its two highly provocative theoretical essays. In one, Le Roy set forth a compelling linear history of the conceptual forms of architecture that began in Egypt, moved to Greece, then Rome, and finally...

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869)--court physician to the king of Saxony--was a naturalist, amateur painter, and theoretician of landscape painting whose Nine Letters on Landscape Painting is an important document of early German romanticism and an elegant appeal for the integration of art and science.
Carus was inspired by and had contacts with the greatest German intellectuals of his day. Carus prefaced his work with a letter from his correspondence with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was his primary mentor in both science and art. His writings also reflect, however, the influence of the...

The Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) was one of the first great historians of culture and art. In his manuscript on the genres of Italian Renaissance painting - still unpublished in the original German and published here in English for the first time - Burckhardt assayed a transformative approach to the study of art history. Rather than undertaking a biographical or a chronological reading of artistic development, Burckhardt chose to read the source materials and extant works of the Italian Renaissance synchronically, by genre. Probably written between 1885 and 1893, this manuscript...