The thesis investigates some elements of the eighteenth century German public sphere concerned with the visual arts. It considers the periodical press (with the art journal Miscellaneen artistischen Inhalts [1779-1808] providing a particular focus), the new bourgeois public for this press (the subject of Part I), and what is argued was the most crucial mediator of the visual to the new public, the engraved print, particularly the English print. The thesis locates these issues into the larger project of eighteenth century German bourgeois society, that is, the creation of a cultured class, with the 'man of taste' at its core. Part II considers the periodical press in general, and the art journal in particular, in relation to the new reading public and to the role they played in mediating/constructing information about the print as an art object. The role of print collecting handbooks in creating a discourse about the print as art and as equal to painting is similarly considered. The idea of Nachr.ichtenverkehr (information exchange) as part of Warenverkehr (commodity exchange) is discussed in terms of the art journal's use of artist's biography and its role in the print market. Part III focusses on the fashion (Mode) for the English print in Germany and explores, through the use of the case study, the issues of review writing and the male reader/viewer in regard to the subject matter, form, and medium of the English print (and some of its German imitators) . It is argued that the English print, because of its strong market presence and its representation of what was believed to be a positive English middle class model, had a relevance to Germany's new art collecting public. The specific examples of the stippled 'fancy' picture, the 'Grecian' pictures of Arigelica Kauffmann and the engraved modern history piece of West's Death of General Wolfe, are discussed respectively in terms of gendered viewing, bourgeois notions of virtue and the 'feeling' viewer. The final section points out that the development of a public taste, as formed by the press and the print market, was not without its opponents. The use of the public's press by scholars and academicians is discussed in terms of their project as self-appointed leaders in the creation of a tasteful society, and their own agenda of instituting measurable standards based on their interpretation of the antique, art theory and a metahistorical notion of 'art'.

Art historians tend to focus on the literary aspects of Hunt's paintings and little is said about their disconcerting appearance. This thesis explores Hunt's attitude to art-making and his artistic practice in order to investigate the relationship between the form of his work and its content. To this end, Hunt's written output is reevaluated. A distinction is made between public texts and private journals and letters. The latter display accelerating concerns about the artistic persona. A sense of religious doubt, weakness and mortality is answered by an alternative self-image which aspires to prophetic authority. During later years, this fantasy centres on hopes of resurrection. These anxieties pivot around the perfection and authenticity of the artist's production. The realism of Hunt's painting style authenticates his religious subject matter and the beliefs and self-image behind it. Public texts emphasise an objective, mimetic technique and attempt to elide the processes by which subjective meanings are inscribed into the image. However, in practice, Hunt completes his paintings in two distinct stages. The combination, on the same canvas, of an elaborate, linear design and precise, mimetic colour effects represents the artist's attempt to synthesise the imagined and the real. This process results in a paradoxical subversion of both imaginative and optical authority which retraces the doubts manifested in Hunt's writings. The dislocation between real and imagined appearance is confronted at the point of laying the colour on the canvas. Hunt conducts extensive research into technique in order to gain control over this act, but this also heightens an awareness of the contradictory identity of the image as paint. He addresses this by aligning the materials themselves with the moral order which is being depicted. Their inevitable imperfections therefore connote disorder and the art object, as well as the image, becomes an expression of the artist's unstable identity and beliefs.

This thesis reconsiders the late pictorial production of Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899) in the wider philosophical and cultural context of fin-de-siecle Italy. Its primary aims are: first, to re-evaluate the artist's involvement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900); second, to offer an interpretation of the intellectual concerns which informed Segantini's adoption of a divisionist technique for the articulation of Symbolist aesthetics in his later work; third, to demonstrate the central role played by the myth of rebirth (palingenetic myth) in informing the cultural climate of the fin-de-siecle. Evidence suggests that rather than being predominantly characterized by a set of pessimistic and decadent trends, the Italian fin-desiecle was permeated by a widespread concern with regeneration. During the 1870s the absorption of Richard Wagner's ideas into the Italian cultural arena can be seen as one of the earliest and most significant manifestations of such concern; Wagner's theories of cultural regeneration threw into relief the country's necessity for a national identity. Thus Chapter One offers a brief consideration of the ways in which Wagner's project for fostering the cultural unification of Germany through the power of myth and art came to have profound resonances both in the political and intellectual spheres of post-Risorgimento Italy. Chapter Two then considers the pivotal role played by the poet and political activist Gabriele D' Annunzio (1863-1938) in tailoring Nietzschean and Wagnerian notions of cultural regeneration to the peculiar context of the Italian tln-de-siecle with a view to embodying and engendering the archetypal homines noviwho would provide the catalyst for Italy's rebirth. Chapter Three moves on to tracing the dissemination of palingenetic discourse within the Positivist climate of turn-of-the-century Italy, and considers in comparative terms the regenerating ambitions which underpinned both the Positivist and Modernist paradigms. Chapter Four considers the emergence of Italian Divisionism in the context of the contemporary philosophical and cultural trends discussed in the preceding chapters. It also investigates Vittore Grubicy's theorization of 'musical Ideism' as a pictorial correlative to the Schopenhauerian assertion of the primacy of music over all the other arts. The chapter ends with a consideration of Divisionism in relation to the notions of artistic and scientific 'truth', and the role played by Nietzschean philosophy in determining a crisis of the principle of truth. Chapter Five explores in detail the divergence of opinion between Segantini and his mentor Vittore Grubicy over the capacity for tangible elements of the material world to function as symbols of 'the Idea', and suggests that Segantini's use of technique to render the visibility of the idea was informed by his reading of Nietzsche. The chapter concludes with an interpretation of Segantini's last works as embodiments of his Nietzschean ethic and aesthetic of this-worldly transcendence.

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