Abstract
The text follows the original aestheticisation of religious subjects in historical painting of the Czech-German painter Gabriel von Max (1840-1915). Gabriel von Max created historical and figure paintings with Christian, literary and mythological subjects, and was greatly admired as a “painter of souls” addressing the themes of love, religion, death and the afterlife.
He developed his own pictorial idiom for contemporary issues that then had no iconography of their own, including anatomy, vivisection and Darwin’s theory of evolution.