A lecture by Joseph Imorde, Professor of History of Art at the University of Siegen. The lecture concentrates on the tremendous success that was enjoyed by Michelangelo in Germany between 1860 and 1945. What it tries to show is the speed with which interest in Michelangelo developed and the surprising fever pitch that “Michelangelomania” reached finally in Germany until the point in 1941 when one spoke of Michelangelo being viewed as "spirit of German spirit, and flesh of German flesh." Viewed in a larger context, this story is about Germany's intellectual encroachment on Italy, or, as Wilhelm Bode – the first director of the Kaiser- Friedrich-Museum in Berlin – once put it, "the framing of the German cultural self in the mirror of foreign art," a framing that, in other words, might have been described as nothing other than German cultural imperialism.