This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Princeton University Art Museum, consisting of eighty-eight drawings by artists active in Central Europe during the neglected period following the age of the Old German Masters (Dürer, Holbein, and their contemporaries) and preceding that covered by Central European Drawings 1690–1800.

An introductory essay considers the problem of historiography, and comments on the drawings in relation to the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire, present-day Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia, roughly between the two sieges of Vienna. Problems of style and stylistic definition are treated in relation to idea gained from poetry and rhetoric. The introduction and the fully illustrated catalogue entries, which are organized in chronological order and according to region, also deal with issues of the functions, collecting, technique, and theory of drawings. Discussions of individual drawings raise many of the most important issues of late-16th- and 17th-century art in Central Europe.