Die Renaissance der deutschen Renaissance

摘要

The user of this book oscillates between a fascination with the subject as presented through the author's breadth of knowledge and fruitful insights, and the pain of wading through roughly a quarter of a million words of text and perhaps another hundred thousand words of information in the notes, along with hundreds of small black-and-white illustrations. On the whole, it is curious to note that decades of German scholarship has not until now dealt systematically with the country's most important design movement of the later nineteenth century. Earlier investigations judged the neo-Renaissance, of which the German neo-Renaissance forms a subsection, as ephemeral and incoherent. To this day German historiography generally characterizes architecture of this period in terms of "historicism," reflecting a modernist point of view that nineteenth-century designers passively adopted past styles.