THOMAS DACOSTA KAUFMANN. Painterly Enlightenment: The Art of Franz Anton Maulbertsch, 1724-1796. (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 162. $34.95

Abstract

This book validates the adage that “Good things come in small packages.” Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's work is good because it enhances scholars' appreciation of an artist who worked in a pivotal time in Central European history but who is much neglected in Western histories of art. It is good because it is 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. The title of the book implies that Maulbertsch was an artist inspired by the Enlightenment or was, through his art, himself an engine of the Enlightenment in Habsburg Central Europe. It poses a familiar conundrum: Does the artist shape the Zeitgeist, or does the Zeitgeist shape the artist? The only satisfying answer is that there is a symbiosis at work that seldom provides a clear assignment of influences either way. Maulbertsch certainly was exposed to the ideas and practices of the Enlightenment in its Austrian expression. He had some traffic with exponents of Enlightenment, Joseph von Sonnenfels and Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz among them, and some of his works are expressions of the Enlightenment (Allegory on Education, Allegory on the Edict of Toleration, Glorification of Joseph II, for examples). But most of his work was in frescoes on ceilings and walls in buildings of religious purpose, allowing only narrow opportunity for themes of Enlightenment, even during the time of Reform Catholicism. There is insufficient evidence to judge Maulbertsch to be either a champion of Enlightenment or a product of it. He executed commissions as they were defined in consultation with his patrons, and when, in his later career, Enlightenment notions were anathema in the Habsburg lands, his work went with the change.