Klassischer Bilderschatz
A late nineteenth-century German art-history picture book, compiled by Franz von Reber and Adolph Bayersdorfer and published in Munich in 1889, offering reproductions of European paintings for students and art lovers. The plates show a religious altarpiece with saints around a central Madonna, a crowded Renaissance-style scene under Gothic arches, a group of figures in dark robes, and a mythological gathering of nymphs and figures in a landscape. A designer might take from them the layout of symmetrical altarpiece panels and the dense, crowded compositions of historical painting.
