The eighteenth-century Austrian fresco painter, Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724–96), is not well-known outside Central Europe, even among art historians. With perhaps the exception of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Central European art has on the whole fared poorly among Anglo-American scholars in the past. If Central European art is now increasingly making inroads into the canon, it is thanks to the labors of art historians like Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. From his published dissertation, Variations on the Imperial Theme in the Age of Maximilian II and Rudolf II (New York, 1978), through his award-winning The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II (Chicago, 1988), to his important survey, Court, Cloister, and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (Chicago, 1995), Kaufmann has done much to bring the glories of Central European art to the attention of an English-speaking audience. In the current, richly illustrated volume, he is the first to introduce that audience to an “original strangeling” (3) whose striking work is to be found in churches and monasteries throughout the former lands of the Habsburg monarchy.

After a brief introductory chapter that sketches the career and historiography of Maulbertsch, Kaufmann's volume addresses itself to three distinct themes. The first is the painter's relationship to the Enlightenment. Here Kaufmann reveals an artist caught up in the complex and multivalent strands of an ecclesiastical and secular reform movement, subsequently known as Josephinism. A significant component of this movement was Reform Catholicism, whose ideals increasingly found expression in Maulbertsch's work—frequently in response to the explicit instructions of his ecclesiastical patrons. Kaufmann shows that Maulbertsch was well aware of the many different sources of such reform. By analyzing in detail “the impact that social, pedagogical, and ethical ideals associated with the Enlightenment” (83) had on him, Maulbertsch gives us a much more nuanced understanding of the Habsburg Enlightenment than is often the case.

The second major theme of the book concerns Maulbertsch's relation to the transition in aesthetic style from late baroque or rococo to neoclassicism. As a painter who made his career with religious art for ecclesiastical and imperial patrons, Maulbertsch could clearly never identify completely with the secular premises of the neoclassical movement. Kaufmann nevertheless shows that Maulbertsch's work gradually evolved from a clear ornamental rococo style to one increasingly influenced by “incipient neoclassical” (77) forms. It is, however, interesting to note that as the neoclassical movement gained strength in the imperial capital of Vienna in the 1760s and 1770s, Maulbertsch's commissions there declined while he continued to remain in demand in Hungary. This illustrates well what church historians have long noticed: the delay in the ecclesiastical reform momentum in the Kingdom of St. Stephen in relation to the western parts of the monarchy. Hungary only reached the full bloom of the Counter Reformation and its concomitant aesthetic in the eighteenth century when it was already under attack and in decline elsewhere.

The third theme of Kaufmann's volume looks at Maulbertsch as a colorist and as a fresco painter in a time when that form was giving way to easel painting and when emphasis was placed more on content than on color. Kaufmann shows Maulbertsch to be an extraordinarily subtle colorist worthy of comparison with his Italian contemporary, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. While his contemporaries may not have appreciated this aspect of Maulbertsch, it was a characteristic that anticipated aspects of modernism. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that among the painter's earliest modern admirers was that twentieth-century rebel of colorist expressionism, Oskar Kokoschka. As a youngster, Kokoschka was overwhelmed by “the inner fire of colors of the painter of luminosity” (ix) that he experienced in Maulbertsch's ceiling frescoes of Vienna's Piarist Church, Maria Treu.

A final important contribution of this volume is not explicitly addressed in the text. Rather, it is laid bare in one striking map at the beginning of the book that identifies all the locations in Central Europe where Maulbertsch carried out commissions. Covering current Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, the map immediately echoes an important argument in another recent work of Kaufmann's: Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago, 2004). In this work Kaufmann demonstrates how cultural boundaries and political borders do not always coincide, but that the former are often fluid and complex. In a Europe witnessing the rebirth of regionalism, the Habsburg successor states are also increasingly recognizing their common heritage. Precisely through understanding “original strangelings” like Maulbertsch can scholars in the successor states take possession of their common history.