The introduction offers two interventions into the history of the Romantic arts. First, it argues that there was a “sister-arts moment” between 1760 and around 1820. This moment was brought on by pressure from classical antiquarians, who started to publish luxury “art books” in the 1760s. The moment ends after 1816 when artists asserted their cultural authority over antiquarians by persuading the British government to purchase the Parthenon marbles. In theorizing a sisterly relationship between painting and poetry, visual artists developed a series of practices based on literary authorship, including mediation through print. Second, the introduction makes a case for “media ecology” as a model for describing the world Romantic artists and authors inhabited. The Introduction offers a model for holistic consideration of cultural producers and consumers as agents in a much larger ecology characterized by dynamic material circulation. Cultural products spread across media and are consumed, put to use, recycled, stored or discarded. Media ecology reconsiders cultural works in the context of the labor that affords all aspects of their production, consumption and circulation. Media ecology serves as an alternative to the concept of “print culture” and to “remediation,” neither of which adequately account for labor or institutional practice.