Welten der Romantik (German Edition)

Art lovers may not be aware of it, but it is necessary to distinguish between two different notions of Romanticism: for one, the northern German, Protestant variety based on Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge, and for another the Catholic Romanticism that started out from Vienna as it manifests with the Lukas brothers and the Nazarenes, who soon moved on to Rome. The publication contrasts these positions based on works from the Albertina and the Graphic Collection of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and sheds light on the differences on the basis of design principles and themes: the arabesque, the idealization of the German past, the Gothic image, the reception of Old German sagas, the renewal of art after Raffael and Albrecht Dürer, the landscape painting, the symbolic treatment of light, and not lastly the search for the transcendental in the human being and in nature.