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 In his manuscript on the genres of Italian Renaissance painting – still unpublished in the original German and published here in English for the...

Karel Teige (1900-1951) was a graphic designer, critic, and Czech partisan who in 1920 founded a group to promote modernism in the international sphere through polemics and manifestos. This is a translation of Karel Teige's 1930 publication that brou...

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 ap...

Published in 1765, Giovanni Battista Piranesi's "Osservazioni" is an impassioned defence of the superiority of Roman architectural "invention" over the "beautiful and noble simplicity" of Ancient Greece. In this three-part polemical work, the engrave...

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 Battist...

When "Friedrich Gilly" died in 1800 at the age of 28, his architectural career had spanned less than a decade and construction of his major designs was incomplete. Nevertheless, his ideas so strongly influenced Berlin architecture of the next century...