In the preface to his classic study of Albrecht Dürer, Erwin Panofsky referred to high- and postmedieval European art as a grand fugue that, as it was most often played, lacked a distinctively Germanic voice. In contrast to that of their more celebrated peers in France, the reputation of German artists in subsequent eras does not appear to have risen much higher. This is complicated by the irony that Germany’s notoriously chauvinistic art-historical establishment deprecated her uniquely important contributions to the evolution of post-Enlightenment architecture, its pedagogy, and its theory. Whether seen from a classic or romantic point of view, many of the enduring features of twentieth-century architecture and theory reflect specifically Teutonic concerns that were either later attributed to the French (by Siegfried Giedion), to the English (first by Hermann Muthesius then a generation later by Nikolaus Pevsner), or seen as an aesthetic dead end. Harry Francis Mallgrave, who is editor of architecture and aesthetics for the Texts & Documents Series at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, has toiled for over a decade to correct these errors. His stunning new biography of the architect Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) is bound to exert a healthy influence on the way we approach the aesthetic achievements of the nineteenth century—and the twentieth.

If remembered at all by the public today, Semper’s name is associated with a handful of historicist gems that stud Vienna’s Ringstrasse as well as with the recently restored Dresden Opera House that