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. This is no unremarkable accomplishment, as it can only have been written in the maturity of a scholarly career engaged with the history, culture, and art of Europe in its full geographical and intellectual breadth, from the Renaissance through the Baroque into Neo-Classicism. But as striking as is the erudition informing the book’s multiple theses, equally impressive is the author’s literary eloquence and intellectual accessibility. Indeed, this is an excellent volume not just because of its innovatory content for the practice of art history but also for its exemplary reasoning and persuasive argumentation. In short, Painterly Enlightenment, which comprises the expanded Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History delivered at the University of North Carolina, may be read as the summa of Kaufmann’s writing on art, history, and culture.

The frescoes of the talented eighteenth-century painter Franz Anton Maulbertsch constitute the putative subject of the present study; yet Maulbertsch’s extensive painting for court, cloister, and church throughout the heartlands of the Habsburg imperium (principally Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, Slovakia, and Hungary) does not lie at the precise center of this book. Rather, Kaufmann, though sensitive and sympathetic to the artist’s pictorial majesty, is keen to comprehend the intellectual and cultural contexts in which Maulbertsch’s art emerged, triumphed, changed, and later was mostly neglected. Thus, Maulbertsch becomes for Kaufmann a singularly appropriate figure through whom to engage his principal subject, as rightly announced in the book’s title.

Kaufmann begins his investigation of the pictorial culture of eighteenth-century Central Europe by asking why those of us living outside the region know little if anything about Maulbertsch, whose productivity, inventiveness, and embattled critical reception made him one of the most accomplished masters of fresco from his age, and, in general, one of the most recognized and controversial artistic figures among the secular and religious Habsburg elites of his time. The question is in no way rhetorical; it is strategic, for it allows Kaufmann to begin to reconsider—and ultimately to define—the visual art of the eighteenth century in intellectual historical terms, a tactic that will become elevated into a methodological theory in the second and third chapters of the volume. The emergent art historical paradigm may also be understood as the most consequential of the book’s several signal achievements.

Kaufmann embarks on his march through the kunstgeographie of eighteenth-century Central Europe with a consideration of the historiography on Maulbertsch, with special attention paid to the way in which his frescoes were described, praised, and criticized in the artist’s time. Already by the late 1780s, Maulbertsch’s contemporaries attested to his artistic originality, both as an aesthetic characteristic worthy of praise as well as a categorical confirmation of the painter’s immanent strangeness. By 1801, Hans Rudolf Füßli, of the Swiss family who had an intimate acquaintance with “strangeness,” was able to characterize Maulbertsch as “ein origineller Sonderling.” And Kaufmann does an excellent job in explicating what an “original Strangeling” meant and why it is of consummate significance to the understanding of eighteenth-century art in general and to the paintings of the Vienna-born and educated Maulbertsch in particular.

The painter’s strangeness should have ensured his stature well into the mid-nineteenth century, when Romanticism lionized those figures whose native boldness and unrestrained talent, what Oskar Kokoschka would later identify as Maulbertsch’s powerful “inner fire,” broke through the bounds of conventional expectation and academic traditions. Yet, Maulbertsch was mostly forgotten until the end of the century, when Austrian scholars, perhaps motivated by a desire to shore up the threatened transnational character of the Habsburg imperium, began to study seriously Maulbertsch’s extraordinary and many-sided production throughout the empire. This impulse was given further impetus in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when Expressionists, including Kokoschka, began seeing in the Central European Baroque and especially in Maulbertsch’s frescoes the brilliant fire of “magic color” and “unbound imagination.” By the 1920s there was, in effect, a renaissance of interest in the artists of Baroque Central Europe, not infrequently motivated by nationalist sympathies. Yet, it was not until 1960 that the first monograph on Maulbertsch was published; written by Klára Garas, this monograph (along with its 1974 expansion and accompanying oeuvre catalogue) remains a foundation stone for all later studies, which now number over one hundred, though almost exclusively in German. What Kaufmann endeavors to undertake in the volume under review—and what he achieves through his own “unbound imagination” and rigorous scholarship—is to acquaint an English-reading audience with the “inner fire” of Maulbertsch’s frescoes, while reconsidering the visual aspects of Central European culture in the Age of Enlightenment.

For Kaufmann, Maulbertsch is less the embodiment of “enlightened” sentiments than he is exemplary of the Enlightenment’s historical circumstances and philosophical paradoxes, at least as they were manifest in the Habsburg empire. And it is in this nexus between the intellectual-cum-historical situation and the artistic practices in Central Europe that the author best displays his creative thinking, and Maulbertsch most brilliantly reveals himself as a mesmerizing strangling.

Maulbertsch painted religious works during a period when secular subjects were increasingly appealing. He received numerous commissions from aristocrats and religious orders at a time when his patrons’ authority was threatened by revolution. He was an original colorist at a historical juncture when the emotionality of color was increasingly suspect. And his greatest work was realized as a muralist for ambitious, large-scale projects just as easel painting was becoming a favored format for an emerging middle class. Yet far from being a man out of season, Maulbertsch, as Kaufmann convincingly shows, was an ideal artist for the Habsburg world, where “humanism was suppressed, Enlightenment delayed, revolution opposed, and Jacobinism (sympathy with the French revolution) crushed” (9). Although Maulbertsch would by the late 1760s moderate his earlier style with its broad brushwork, bright contrasts of color, imaginative composition, and brilliant light effects, shifts that Kaufmann carefully analyzes and creatively interprets, it still remains an open question whether these adjustments were prompted by the dynamics of the painter’s own aesthetic development or whether they were occasioned by the intellectual currents from enlightened circles with which Maulbertsch was consistently in contact. In either event, the change in his style provides Kaufmann with the opportunity to offer an expansive and consequential assessment of the intersection of Enlightenment thinking and artistic production in Central Europe.

Kaufmann’s command of the philosophical source material for the pan-European Enlightenment is as profound as it is well-tempered by his intimate knowledge of the intellectual history of eighteenth-century Central Europe. Thus, he can embed his discussion of Maulbertsch’s career and his aesthetic intentions—informed by a careful reading of the painter’s surviving letters, contracts for commissions, and accounts of his peers—within a well-mastered historical matrix. Thus, for example, when Kaufmann discusses Josephism (the reformist policies, programs, and appointments undertaken by and under the aegis of Joseph II), he does so with full appreciation of the consequences for the system of patronage, for the commissioned art’s iconographical program, and for the stylistic shift from a pictorial aesthetics based on the color of emotion to one (purportedly) rooted in a linearity of reason. But never does the author jump to conclusions unwarranted by available evidence. Yes, Physiocracy may have held attraction for the Habsburg emperor, but Kaufmann acknowledges that there is no evidence that Maulbertsch would have embraced such radical doctrines, even though attributing to the artist a physiocratic sympathy might be an appealing way to explain the pronounced change in his fresco style. Kaufmann cautions against the temptation of relying exclusively on a visual explanation without accommodating documentary and historical evidence. And the historical evidence Kaufmann appropriately marshals does as much to complicate as to clarify Maulbertsch’s relationship to Josephism (here employed to stand for the complex of often inconsistent or paradoxical “enlightened” perspectives). One of the author’s prime examples is helpful to cite here in order better to understand the care he invests in analyzing Maulbertsch’s art. In 1785, without having received a commission, the painter completed an etching extolling Joseph’s promulgation of the “Edict of Toleration” through which the emperor granted religious freedom to Protestants and Jews. Although the theme may suggest the artist’s sympathy for social reform and progressive aesthetics, Kaufmann demonstrates that Maulbertsch presented his subject “through the use of historical figures, and traditional, as well as new personifications” (67). Moreover, during this period of transformation in the 1780s and 1790s, the artist was profiting from an impressive number of commissions received from Hungarian prelates, most all of whom actively resisted Joseph’s reforms. What to make then of Maulbertsch’s art and intellectual orientation? It is in coming to terms with artistic (and historical) contradiction and paradox that Kaufmann proves himself to be most academically responsible and methodologically inventive. And chapters 2 and 3 make compelling reading on how to treat an artist—and an epoch—on whom different and often contradictory demands were placed by patrons and public, and by competing secular and religious interests.

It is in the book’s fourth and final chapter that the author brings to bear his intellectual resources and acute powers of analysis to confront one of the most challenging issues of eighteenth-century aesthetics, namely, the role and significance of color and coloring. Although Roger de Piles’s 1673 thesis, Dialogue sur le coloris, may have initiated this concern, the issue of coloring was central to the meaning of the visual arts throughout Europe; and it was of consummate importance in Central Europe during the last third of the eighteenth century when a host of intellectuals addressed “das Problem des Kolorits.” And, of course, Kolorit was for Maulbertsch and his later advocates the very source of his frescoes’ “inner fire.” Thus, Kaufmann quite properly focuses on the specific nature and consequential effects colorism carried for Baroque artists in Central Europe, and for Maulbertsch in particular. Here, again, the author relies on a careful reading of texts and documents, coupled with a thorough pictorial analysis of the frescoes, to arrive at a new understanding of “colorit” apropos of Maulbertsch, one unique to the specific circumstances of artist, geography, and historical circumstance.

In Painterly Enlightenment, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has realized a monumental set of achievements. He has not only introduced to an English-reading audience one of the most remarkable, talented, and “strange” artists of the eighteenth century. He has also provided art historians with a model through which the visual arts in general might be responsibly analyzed, historicized, and ultimately comprehended. In short, Kaufmann has enabled us to stand alongside Kokoschka and appreciate that “inner fire of the colors of the painter of luminosity,” and of the painterly enlightenment he revealed.