A collection of articles and lectures by German art historian Florian Illies, who speaks about art like no other, engagingly and inspiringly. This book includes his key texts on art and literature, written between 1997 and 2017. In them, Illies describes his personal heroes: from Max Friedländer to Gottfried Benn, from Count Harry Kessler to Andy Warhol. He explores why the best 19th-century artists preferred to look at the sky and paint clouds, and what drew them to the small Italian village of Olevano. He questions whether romanticism is curable, and addresses a passionate love letter to Caspar David Friedrich. In these texts, the past feels like the present, paintings appear in movement and color, and historical figures emerge as living and loving people.