This essay provides an associatively structured overview of the wide field of painting and ekphrasis in Sebald’s work. Starting with Sebald’s collaborations with his friend and artist Jan Peter Tripp, the essay moves to his use of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) in The Rings of Saturn. Then the essay then explores the role of battle paintings in Sebald’s writings, especially their use to discuss issues of representation of historical events. In the next step, figurations of melancholy in Sebald are discussed on the basis of Dürer’s engraving Melencolia along with the theme of pulverization relating to the painter Ferber in The Emigrants. The conclusion compares Sebald’s poetics to the epistemology of knowledge inaugurated by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.

Far from a mere technique of three-dimensional spatial representation, perspective has become a dominant metaphor for objectivity, rationalism, mastery, and domination. Conversely, to lack perspective, as in Islamic art, suggests an absence or ineptitude in these qualities often Chapter 10 examines the roots of European perspectivalism from the Italian Renaissance in its relationship with knowledge from Islamic discourses; interaction with European religious doctrines; and the rise and normalization of colonialism. It argues that, far from presaging a modern, secular, and supposedly objective way of looking, discussions of perspective in the seventeenth century were deeply engaged with proofs of the existence of God. This limited the potential of multi-perspectivalism to enable