The music and art historian and publicist Oscar Bie (1864 - 1938) illuminates the art of sculpture in the Italian Renaissance in this work, based on a 'romantic' conception of art that originates from antiquity: "Of all these romantic issues that the layperson wishes to take to Italy, the development of the new plastic human still seems to me the most central today. At a crucial point, the ancient and the modern collide. The ideal, the anthropomorphic religion of every art, is expressed here. Man shapes his own image. Michelangelo succeeded in awakening the new human being, who not only artistically continued his career into the works of Rodin but also spiritually lived on into the ecstasies of modern literature." Reprint of the original edition, no date.