The reviewer claims that Florian Illies’ essays demonstrate a perfect balance between pure scholarship and journalism. Despite representing a miscellany of genres (book and exhibition reviews, articles summarising the author’s view of various painters and art historians), the collection proves harmonious due to a common motif of the essays. The book does not draw a strict line between history of literature and art history. Similarly, Illies does not separate art history from the context of the life around art, i. e. the authors’ correspondence, their relationships with their family and friends, fellow artists and patrons. His unconventional view of art history enables Illies to identify interesting overarching subjects which include the problem of the patron’s influence on a work of art and the category of taste. The essayist is particularly interested in ‘second-rank’ authors, who, he suggests, emerge as first-rank in various historical periods.