Heine’s work on the visual arts, not as well-known as his critical pieces on music, foreshadows contemporary cultural history. Heine analyses national variants in painting, from Germany (Nazarenes, « northern » landscape artists) with its historical misery, to France (David, Delacroix), the land of politics and freedom, through Italy and the Low Countries, lands of beauty and the joy of living. But he also provides an overview of painting’s general history with its links to the history of Europe, from the Enlightenment to the 1830s and 1840s, the history of the triumph of a financial bourgeoisie, taking in the « heroic » phases of Revolution and Empire. But Heine does more than highlight these various contrasts in a panoramic account of painting’s history, he also opens onto both the question of a « new art » linked to the political changes of 1830, and to that of « supernaturalism » as a way to transcend the old understanding of art as « an imitation of nature ».