This volume presents a selection of studies written during the past decades by Professor DaCosta Kaufmann on a variety of topics concerning the history of painting, sculpture, art theory, collecting, and architecture. It includes several of his ground-breaking essays interpreting art at the Prague court of Rudolf II (1576-1512). However, the collection represents other aspects of the broad range of his interests as well: the papers gathered here range through Central Europe from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century.

In addition to essays on Rudolfine Prague, another "complex of papers deals with art at other courts in Salzburg, Germany, the Low Countries, and Denmark in the early "seventeenth century, and with art during the time of the Thirty Years' War. Two papers consider important developments in the history of collecting. Five essays offer interpretations of architecture (and sculpture) in Bohemia, Germany, Austria and Poland during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

While concentrating on the visual arts and architecture of Central Europe, many of these essays engage with broader issues of cultural history. Many of them also offer approaches "which will be of more general methodological interest.