Painterly Enlightenment

“Despite its modest format, this is a monumental book. The author has fitted into comparatively few pages one of the most carefully considered methodological assessments, historical analysis, and art historical interpretations of eighteenth-century Central European culture to have appeared in the last half-century.”—caa.reviews

“A gracefully written, clearly expressed description of the artist, his work, how his work was related to his times, and how it may have foreshadowed modern expressionism. To do all that in a slender book of 173 pages (and thirty-two colored plates) is a very ambitious undertaking. Lecture series often do not translate into well-wrought books, but, in this case, Kaufmann has carried it off so adroitly that he satisfies the demands of cognoscenti and pleasurably enlightens readers less familiar with the period, place, issues, and art of Franz Anton Maulbertsch.”—American Historical Review

“Painterly Enlightenment is an elegant and illuminating volume in which the author presents several possible ways of interpreting Maulbertsch as an Enlightenment painter.”—H-German

“Maulbertsch gives us a much more nuanced understanding of the Habsburg Enlightenment than is often the case.”—Austrian History Yearbook

“A splendidly lucid study that finally gives the great fresco painter his due. Scholars have never quite known how to fit the idiosyncrasies of Maulbertsch’s corpus into the broader canon of art history. Kaufmann does just that and more, establishing Maulbertsch’s artistic distinctiveness but also his complex relationship to the emergent Enlightenment culture of Habsburg Austria.”—James Van Horn Melton, Emory University