Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar was a seminal work for Carl Gustav Carus even decades after its publication. His painting shows Raphael and Michelangelo on a hilltop in Rome, gazing at St Peter’s in the evening light. He interweaves ideal and reality: using the devices of Romantic painting, he draws on the Renaissance while depicting two artists with an edifice they helped to create but never saw in its completed state. In his painting, nature and art – referred to in Outpourings as the “two wonderful languages” – enter into an ideal alliance.