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...

In this highly original and innovative study of Nicolas Poussin, one of seventeenth-century Europe's greatest artists, Oskar Batschmann presents a series of connected studies that offer new ways of interpreting the work and ideas of this brilliant and complex figure. This superbly illustrated book is a polemical challenge in a field of art-historical research that has often lost its way in insoluble disputes and erudite details.
"Like Poussin's paintings, this is a highly polished work. In prose of great elegance, Batschmann achieves an almost perfect balance between exposition and...

Hans Holbein d.J. (1497/98-1543) war einer der bedeutendsten Renaissancekünstler im deutschsprachigen Raum. Lange Jahre in Basel tätig, führte ihn seine künstlerische Laufbahn nach Italien, nach Frankreich und schließlich nach England, wo er zum Hofmaler Heinrichs VIII. aufstieg. Berühmt wurde er durch seine Altarbilder, Buchillustrationen und Wandmalereien, vor allem aber durch seine psychologisch fein beobachteten Portraits. Oskar Bätschmann, einer der besten Kenner seines Werkes, stellt in diesem Band das Leben und das vielseitige Wirken Holbeins anschaulich dar.