Vom Klassizismus zum Historismus (1770-1870)

For the history of art in Eastern Central Europe, there are currently no comprehensive accounts that consider the region from the Baltics to the Adriatic as a cohesive historical area. This handbook, projected at the GWZO Leipzig, therefore represents the first art historical work dedicated to the shared cultural heritage of the peoples of this region, discussed from a European perspective. The book series is not solely conceived for a specialist audience but aims primarily to disseminate the current state of research to a broader public.

The entire series is based on common methodological guidelines, particularly the dynamic concept of cultural transfer, which best describes the culture-historical processes between the individual social and ethnic groups of the Eastern Central European space. The focus is therefore on the function of artworks and their historical conditioning, their local rootedness as well as interregional entanglement. This can best be achieved by tracing the pathways and agents of mediation in detail.

The axes of cultural transfer, meaning especially the constantly changing political-cultural relationships of metropolises and centers, formed the basic framework for the outlines of the subject area. It encompasses the historical lands of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Bohemia, and the eastern parts of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, in short: the new EU member states Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Slovenia, and Romania, as well as the eastern parts of Germany and Austria, plus neighboring regions in Belarus, Ukraine, Croatia, Serbia, etc.