To survey art history as a whole was a pressing task for a generation of German scholars around the mid-nineteenth century. Their projections of a historicist chain of artworks ranged from textual narratives without illustrations, to separate picture compendia as well as images of a more allegorical kind. Other means with which to picture art history as part of a virtually all-encompassing cultural history were the museums of art erected in Germany at the time, in Berlin and Munich especially.
This book deals with practices of representing art history in various media. This includes...