Hans von Aachen is among the artists regarded as representative of the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. During the period from the late 1580s to the beginning of 1600, von Aachen created a number of works referring to the visual arts themselves, especially to the art of painting and its relationship to artes liberales. This paper shows that Hans von Aachen occupied himself intensely with art-theoretical discourses and invented within a decennium a series of paintings and engravings with the same themes. The pictorial concepts of these works, as well as the language of art, reveal the influence of Italian artists and humanists, which are shown distinctly in the newly discovered painting Allegory of the arts.