von Karsten Harries
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
I n m e m o r y o
f m y f a t h e
r W o l f g a n g H a r r i e s
Die Herrlichkeit der Erden
muss Rauch und Aschen werden,
kein Fels, kein Erz kann stehn.
Dies, was uns kann ergötzen,
was wir für ewig schätzen,
wird als ein leichter Traum vergehn.
Andreas Gryphius
1. THE PICTORIALIZATION OF ORNAMENT 10*
French Origins 10
Régence and Rococo 16
Ornamental Metamorphoses 18
The Turn to Rocaille 21
Provincial Rococo? 28
Abstract Rocaille 30
Frames and Frescoes 33
Ornament and Architecture 40
2. SPACE AND ILLUSION 48
A Modest Beginning 48
Heaven Made Visible 50
Impossible Illusions 54
Beyond Illusionism 60
Mediating Frames 66
An Exemplary Rococo Church 68
3. ARCHITECTURE AGAINST ARCHITECTURE 73
Indirect Light 73
Renaissance Interlude and Gothic Prelude 75
St. Michael and the Wall-Pillar Church 78
An Influential Adaptation 85
Transformations of the Hall Choir 89
Versions of the Centralized Nave 101
Diaphanous Walls and Weightless Vaults 112
Pictorialization and Sacralization 116
4. THEATRUM SACRUM 120
A Lesson of Two Tournaments 120
Frescoes as Theatre 122
Altar and Stage 126
Stages Within Stages 138
Aesthetic and Religious Play 144
The Insufficiency of Perspective 146
Theatre and Reality 150
5. TIME, HISTORY, AND ETERNITY: THE TEMPORAL
DIMENSIONS OF THE ROCOCO CHURCH 156
The Church and Religious Action 156
The Triumph of St. Michael 157
Journey to a Bavarian Heaven 160
Even Kings Must Die 170
6. ECCLESIA AND MARIA 176
The Church as Symbol of the Church 176
Hieroglyphic Signs 177
Emblematic Play 180
Marian Piety 182
The Church as Symbol of the Virgin 184
Marian Naturalism 188
The Wedding of Sky and Water 192
7. ROCOCO CHURCH AND ENLIGHTENMENT 196
An Ominous Mandate 196
Bavarian Enlightenment 198
A Waste of Time? 199
The Critique of Opera 203
Architecture and the Demands of Reason 205
The Impropriety of Rocaille 210
8. THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE ROCOCO CHURCH 220
Transition and End 220
Autumnal Rococo 222
The Secularization of Light and Landscape 231
Autonomous Omament 236
9. CONCLUSION: THE DEATH OF ORNAMENT 243
The Ethical Function of Ornament 243
The Case Against Ornament 246
Aesthetic Purity 250
Art and the Sacred 255
NOTES 259
INDEX 275
*Pagecounting as in the original
ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece. Andechs, Benedictine abbey and pilgrimage church,
interior (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
Plates
Unless otherwise noted, all color photographs were taken by the author.
1. Diessen, Augustinian priory church, detail of main fresco (Standish
D. Lawder)
2. Steingaden, Premonstratensian abbey church, fresco above organ
3. Rottenbuch, Augustinian priory church, fresco of nave vault
4. Ettal, Benedictine abbey and pilgrimage church, choir arch
5. Schäftlarn, Premonstratensian abbey church, interior
6. Die Wies, pilgrimage church, interior (Bildarchiv Huber)
7. Die Wies, pilgrimage church, decoration of choir (E. J. Johnson)
8. Rottenbuch, Augustinian priory church, interior
9. Weitenburg, Benedictine abbey church, high altar
10. Landsberg am Lech, Johanneskirche, high altar
11. Oppolding, St. Johann Baptist, high altar
12. Niederding, parish church St. Martin, detail of right side altar
(Franz Eberl)
13. Altenerding, parish church Mariae Verkündigung, interior
14. Andechs, Benedictine abbey and pilgrimage church
15. Maria Gern, pilgrimage church near Berchtesgaden
16. Dickelschwaig near Ettal
Figures
1. Johann Michael Fischer, Zwiefalten, Benedictine abbey church,
interior (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
2. Zwiefalten, abbey church, north side of nave (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
3. Juste Aurèle Meissonier, engraving from the Livre
d'ornemens, 1734 (Source: Oeuvre [Paris: Huquier, n. d.], reissued with
an introduction by Dorothea Nyberg [Bronx: Benjamin Blom, 1969])
4. Nymphenburg, Pagodenburg, upper cabinet with boiseries by Johann
Adam Pichler (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
5. Schliersee, parish church St. Sixtus, decoration of choir vault
(Karsten Harries)
6. Paul Decker, design from Fürstlicher Baumeister, 1711
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
7. Maria Medingen, Dominican convent church, doorframe (detail)
(Karsten Harries)
8. Ottobeuren, Benedictine abbey, library (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
9. Benediktbeuern, Benedictine abbey, ceiling decoration of library
(Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
10. Jean Bérain, arabesque, ca. 1690 (Source: Rudolf
Berliner, Ornamentale Vorlage-Blätter [Leipzig: Klinkhardt und
Biermann, 1926])
11. Nymphenburg, Amalienburg, bedroom, looking into the Spiegelsaal
(Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
12. Amalienburg, Spiegelsaal (Bayerische Verwaltung der staatlichen
Schlösser, Gärten und Seen)
13. Paris, Hótel de Soubise, Salon de la Princesse (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
14. Jean Mondon fils, Chinese ornament, 1736 (Source: Berliner,
Ornamentale Vorlage-Blätter)
15. Juste Aurèle Meissonier, engraving from the Livre
d'ornemens, 1734 (Source: Meissonier, Oeuvre)
16. Franqois de Cuvilliés, war cartouche, 1738 (Source:
Hermann Bauer, Rocaille: Zur Herkunft und zum Wesen eines
Ornament-Motifs [Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962])
17. Jacques de Lajoue, war cartouche, ca. 1735 (Source: Bauer, Rocaille)
18. Munich, Residenz, decoration of the bedroom (Diana Appears to
Endymion) (Karsten Harries)
19. Amalienburg, Spiegelsaal, Amphitrite (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
20. Kempten, Residenz, throne room, cartouche an the west side (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
21. Kempten, Residenz, bedroom, cartouche an the west side (Bildarchiv
Foto Marburg)
22. Diessen, Augustinian priory church, main fresco (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
23. Zwiefalten, abbey church, northern transept (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
24. Zwiefalten, abbey church, stucco of southern transept (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
25. Metten, Benedictine abbey church, interior (Bayerisches Landesamt
für Denkmalpflege)
26. Aldersbach, Cistercian abbey church, nave vault (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
27. Aldersbach, abbey church, interior (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
28. Freising, cathedral, interior (Bayerisches Landesamt für
Denkmalpflege)
29. Freising, cathedral, northern nave wall (Bayerisches Landesamt
für Denkmalpflege)
30. Freising, cathedral, looking into the north gallery (Bayerisches
Landesamt für Denkmalpflege)
31. Freising, cathedral, south gallery, stucco (detail) (Karsten
Harries)
32. Ingolstadt, Marienkirche, vault of a side chapel (John Cook,
Guilford)
33. Wehheim, Friedhofskirche, decoration (detail) (Karsten Harries)
34. Benediktbeuern, Benedictine abbey church, nave vault (Bildarchiv
Foto Marburg)
35. Michelfeld, Benedictine abbey church, interior (Dr. Johannes
Steiner, München)
36. Weingarten, Benedictine abbey church, dome and choir vault (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
37. Andreas Pozzo, perspective construction from the Perspectiva
pictorum et architectorum (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University)
38. Weingarten, abbey church, nave vault (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
39. Aldersbach, abbey church, fresco (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
40. Paul Decker, ceiling decoration from Fürstlicher
Baumeister (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
41. Schleissheim, Neues Schloss, great hall (Bayerische Verwaltung der
staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Seen)
42. Steinhausen, pilgrimage church, nave vault (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
43. Schäftlarn, Premonstratensian abbey church, interior
(Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
44. Prague, Vladislav Hall (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
45. Munich, St. Michael, façade (Bayerisches Landesamt
für Denkmalpflege)
46. Rome, Il Gesù, façade (Bildarchiv Foto
Marburg)
47. Amberg, St. Martin (1421-34), transverse section (Source: Kurt
Gerstenberg, Deutsche Sondergotik [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1969])
48. Elsenbach, St. Maria, plan (Source: Georg Dehio and Ernst Gall,
Handbuch der Deutschen Kunstdenkmäler, Oberbayern, 4th ed.
[München, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1964])
49. Munich-Perlach, parish church St. Michael, plan (Source: Bernhard
Schütz, St. Michael
in Perlach, Kleine Führer, no. 933 [München,
Zürich: Schnell und Steiner, 1970])
50. Munich, St. Michael, original plan (Max Hauttmann, Geschichte der
kirchlichen Baukunst in Bayern, Schwaben und Franken, 1550-1780, 2d ed.
[München: Weizinger, 1923])
51. Munich, St. Michael, plan (Source: Hauttmann, Geschichte)
52. Rome, Il Gesù, plan (Source: Nikolaus Pevsner, An
Outline of European Architecture [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958] )
53. Munich, St. Michael, interior before World War II (Bildarchiv Foto
Marburg)
54. Rome, Il Gesù, interior (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
55. Dillingen, Studienkirche, plan (Source: Hauttmann, Geschichte)
56. Dillingen, Studienkirche, interior (Dr. Johannes Steiner,
München)
57. Fürstenfeld, Cistercian abbey church, interior (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
58. Salzburg, Franziskanerkirche, section (Source: Franz Fuhrmann,
Franziskanerkirche Salzburg, Christliche Kunststätten
Osterreichs, no. 35 [Salzburg: Verlag St. Peter, 1962])
59. Salzburg, Franziskanerkirche, plan (Source: Fuhrmann,
Franziskanerkirche Salzburg)
60. Salzburg, Franziskanerkirche, interior (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
61. Dillingen, Studienkirche, hall choir (Karsten Harries)
62. Polling, Augustinian priory church, interior (Bayerisches Landesamt
für Denkmalpflege)
63. Polling, priory church, plan (Source: Georg Rückert,
Stiftskirche Polling, Kleine Führer, 3d ed. [München,
Zürich: Schnell und Steiner, no. 10, 1956])
64. Vilgertshofen, pilgrimage church, interior (Bildarchiv Foto
Marburg)
65. Die Wies, pilgrimage church, choir (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
66. Munich, Theatinerkirche St. Cajetan, plan (Hauttmann, Geschichte)
67. Munich, Theatinerkirche, dome (Bayerisches Landesamt für
Denkmalpflege)
68. Weilheim, parish church St. Mariae Himmelfahrt, section (Source:
Willi Mauthe, Die Kirchen und Kapellen in Weilheim [Weilheim:
Kirchenverwaltung Mariä Himmelfahrt, 1953])
69. Weilheim, parish church, interior (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
70. Weilheim, parish church, choir dome (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
71. Steinhausen, pilgrimage church, interior (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
72. Steinhausen, pilgrimage church, plan (Source: Hauttmann,
Geschichte)
73. Osterhofen, Premonstratensian abbey church, interior (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
74. Beuerberg, Augustinian priory church, interior (Dr. Johannes
Steiner, München)
75. Wolfegg, St. Katharina, section (Source: Heinz Jürgen
Sauermost, Der Allgäuer Barockbaumeister Johann Georg Fischer
[Augsburg: Verlag der Schwäbischen Forschungsgemeinschaft,
1969] )
76. Wolfegg, St. Katharina, plan (Source: Sauermost, Johann Georg
Fischer)
77. Wolfegg, St. Katharina, interior (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
78. Munich, St. Anna im Lehel, plan (Source: Hauttmann, Geschichte)
79. Munich, St. Anna im Lehel, interior as it appeared from 1951 to
1967 (Bayerisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege)
8o. Munich, St. Anna im Lehel, interior before 1944 (Bildarchiv Foto
Marburg)
81. Kreuzpullach, Hl. Kreuz, interior (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
82. Murnau, parish church St. Nikolaus, plan (Source: Hauttmann,
Geschichte)
83. Aufhausen, pilgrimage church, plan (Source: Hauttmann, Geschichte)
84. Rott am Inn, Benedictine abbey church, section and plan (Source:
Norbert Lieb, Barockkirchen zwischen Donau und Alpen [München:
Hirmer, 1953] )
85. Unering, parish church St. Martin, plan (Source: Felicitas
Hagen-Dempf, Der Zentralbaugedanke bei Johann Michael Fischer
[München: Schnell und Steiner, 1954])
86. Unering, parish church, choir arch (Karsten Harries)
87. Schäftlarn, abbey church, section and plan (Source: Lieb,
Barockkirchen)
88. Munich-Berg am Laim, St. Michael, interior (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
89. Osterhofen, Premonstratensian abbey church, interior (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
90. Die Wies, pilgrimage church, southern gallery of the choir (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
91. Munich-Berg am Laim, St. Michael, Gabriel and putto from the high
altar (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
92. Schäftlarn, abbey church, fresco (The Founding of the
Abbey) (Karsten Harries)
93. Steingaden, Premonstratensian abbey church, fresco (A Vision of St.
Norbert. An Angel Shows the Plan of the Monastery) (Karsten Harries)
94. Rohr, Augustinian priory church, choir and high altar (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
95. Rohr, priory church, high altar (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
96. Rohr, priory church, The Virgin Ascending (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
97. Andrea Pozzo, altar design from the Perspectiva pictorum et
architectorum (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University)
98. Weitenburg, Benedictine abbey church, section and plan (Source:
Lieb, Barockkirchen)
99. Weitenburg, abbey church, interior (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
100. Weitenburg, abbey church, high altar (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
101. Diessen, priory church, choir and high altar (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
102. Rottenbuch, Augustinian priory church, high altar (Dr. Johannes
Steiner, München)
103. Die Wies, pilgrimage church, section and plan (Source: Hauttmann,
Geschichte)
104. Die Wies, pilgrimage church, southern ambulatory (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
105. Die Wies, pilgrimage church, main fresco (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
106. Die Wies, pilgrimage church, interior to the west (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
107. Weitenburg, abbey church, the shell of the nave vault (detail with
bust of Cosmas Damian Asam) (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
108. Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, perspectival stage design (Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
109. Giuseppe Galli-Bibiena, design from Architetture e prospettive,
1740 (Source: Theaterdecorationen, Innenarchitektur und Perspectiven
[Berlin: Claesen, n. d.])
110. Munich, St. Michael, interior before World War II (Bayerisches
Landesamt für Denkmalpflege)
111. Diessen, priory church, façade. Tower built 1846-48
(Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
112. Diessen, priory church, interior (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
113. Diessen, priory church, section and plan (Source: Lieb,
Barockkirchen)
114. Diessen, priory church, St. Jerome from the high altar (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
115. Diessen, priory church, decoration of the vault (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
116. Munich, Nymphenburg, Magdalenenkapelle (Bayerische Verwaltung der
staatlichen SchIösser, Gärten und Seen)
117. Die Wies, pilgrimage church, exterior, looking south (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
118. Munich, Residenz, Hofkapelle, decoration of nave vault (Bayerische
Verwaltung der staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Seen)
119. Munich, Residenz, Hofkapelle, decoration of choir vault
(Bayerische Verwaltung der staatlichen Schlösser,
Gärten und Seen)
120. Devotional picture of the seventeenth century (Source: Stephan
Beissel, Geschichte der Verehrung Marias im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert
[Freiburg: Herder, 1909])
121. Steinhausen, pilgrimage church, main fresco (Bildarchiv Foto
Marburg)
122. Marienberg, pilgrimage church, main fresco (Karsten Harries)
123. Munich, Nymphenburg Castle, fresco of the great hall (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
124. Oppolding, St. Johann Baptist, pulpit (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
125. Weyarn, Augustinian priory church, Annunciation, by Ignaz
Günther, 1764 (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
126. Munich, Bürgersaal, Guardian Angel, by Ignaz
Günther, 1763 (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
127. St. Blasien, Benedictine Abbey Church (1768-83), exterior
(Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
128. St. Blasien, abbey church, interior (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
129. Die Wies, pilgrimage church, ambulatory (detail) (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
130. Jacques de Lajoue, Naufrage (Source: Berliner, Ornamentale
Vorlage-Blätter)
131. Frangois de Cuvilliés, design from Livre nouveau de
morceaux de fantaisie, ca. 1750 (Source: Berliner, Ornamentale
Vorlage-Blätter)
132. Johann Esaias Nilson, New Cóffee House, before 1756
(Source: Bauer, Rocaille)
133. Johann Esaias Nilson, The Dear Morning (Source: Bauer, Rocaille)
134. Johanna Dorothee Philipp, rocaille parody (after Krubsacius)
(Source: Bauer, Rocaille)
135. Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner, Earth, 1752 (Source: Berliner,
Ornamentale Vorlage-Blätter)
136. Johann Esaias Nilson, The Play of Nature, 1752 (Source: Berliner,
Ornamentale VorlageBlätter)
137. Gottlieb Leberecht Crusius, Capriccio, ca. 1760 (Source: Berliner,
Ornamentale Vorlage-Blätter)
138. Johann Esaias Nilson, engraving, ca. 1770 (Source: Bauer, Rocaille)
139. Ebersberg, St. Sebastian, two styles of decoration, ca. 1750 and
1783 (Karsten Harries)
140. Birnau, pilgrimage church, interior (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
141. Birnau, pilgrimage church, interior, looking back toward the organ
(Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
142. Scheidegg, parish church St. Gallus, interior (Dr. Hugo Schnell,
Scheidegg)
143. Rott am Inn, abbey church, interior (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
144. Egling, parish church St. Vitus, fapde (Karsten Harries)
145. Inning, parish church St. Johann Baptist, interior (Bayerisches
Landesamt für Denkmalpflege)
146. Baitenhausen, pilgrimage church, fresco (Fair as the Moon)
(Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
147. Baitenhausen, pilgrimage church, fresco (Bright as the Sun)
(Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)
148. Munich, Residenz, conference room, stucco (detail) (Bayerische
Verwaltung der staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Seen)
149. Lippertskirchen, pilgrimage church, decoration of vault (Karsten
Harries)
150. Niederding, parish church St. Martin, Fassmalerei, by Georg
Andrä and Franz Xaver Zellner (Franz Eberl, Erding)
151. Windberg, Premonstratensian abbey church, St. Catherine altar,
1756 (Hirmer Fotoarchiv)
152. Eschlbach, parish church Mariae Geburt, right side altar (Karsten
Harries)
153. Kitzingen-Etwashausen, Hl. Kreuz, interior (Photo-Verlag
Gundermann, Würzburg)
154. Osterhofen, abbey church, north side of the nave (Hirmer
Fotoarchiv)
Maps on p. 274 show the political and religious organization of Bavaria
in 1770.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ever since a teacher in Munich's Maxgymnasium led my twelve-year-old
classmates and me through the Benedictine abbey church of Andechs, I
have been fascinated by the architecture and culture of the Bavarian
rococo. The present study gave me an excuse to give in to this
fascination. I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation for its support, which ten years ago allowed me to get
started seriously on a project I had long played with, and to Yale
University for its generous leave policy.
I owe thanks to those many persons with whom I visited and discussed
these churches. Special thanks are due to Standish and Ursula Lawder
and to Dr. and Mrs. Hubert Endres, who not only extended the
hospitality of their home in Erding, but introduced me to many of the
delightful churches in Munich's northeast.
A study such as this depends on illustrations. Yale University's
Whitney Center for the Humanities provided financial support that
helped me to assemble the needed visual material. Frau Irmgard
Ernstmaier of the Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Dr. Annemarie Kuhn-Wengenmayr of
the Bayerisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, Dr. Burkard von
Roda of the Bayerische Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlösser,
Gärten und Seen, Frau Ursula Meier of the Bildarchiv Foto
Marburg, Rektor Franz Eberl of Erding, Professor S. Lane Faison of
Williams College, and Professor John Cook of the Yale Divinity School
helped and granted permission to draw on their collections. The Graham
Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts made it possible to
include the colorplates. I am especially indebted to Susan Murray:
without the Leica she gave me I could hardly have kept track of the
many churches I visited and revisited.
I wish to thank Judy Metro, Anne Lunt, Lawrence Kenney, and Nancy
Ovedovitz of Yale University Press for the caring attention they have
given to this book. I owe special thanks to S. Lane Faison, who more
than twenty years ago visited many of these churches with me, and gave
an earlier version of this book an unusually thorough, sympathetic, yet
critical reading. I have accepted many of his suggestions. My wife, who
shared in this book from beginning to end, deserves more than thanks.
INTRODUCTION
In our approach to art we are the heirs of the Enlightenment. The
"aesthetic" treatises of the eighteenth century helped to establish a
distinctly modern understanding of works of art as occasions for an
enjoyment that is its own justification. Beauty is divorced from truth,
art from the sacred. Only as long as the work of art is governed by the
Jemands of its own aesthetic perfection does it remain pure: art,
earlier in the Service of religion, morality, or society, becomes "art
for art's sake."[1] The term aesthetics itself belongs to this period,
for we owe it to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Reflections an Poetry
of 1735. Speculations, however, did not cause the shift to the aesthetic
approach. The aesthetic literature of the eighteenth century is part of
a transformation that is more immediately grasped in the changes of the
art of the period. In this study I examine only one example of these
changes: the evolution and eventual disintegration of the Bavarian
rococo church, more especially of its style.[2] Yet this transformation
sheds light an both the essence and the origin of the aesthetic
approach and on the confused situation of the arts today.
Given my interest in the emergence of the aesthetic attitude, why the
Bavarian rococo church? Why indeed the rococo at all? Why not turn to
the work of late eighteenth century architects like Ledoux or
Boullée? As Emil Kaufmann has shown, a distinctly modern
approach does indeed govern the architecture of the French
Revolution.[3] But just because it does, we have to look back further
to understand the transformation that this approach presupposes. What
attracted me to the rococo was the fact that, as the last of the
great period styles, it occupies the threshold to our own aesthetic
culture. Yet many of the points that matter most to me could have been
made equally well discussing some other aspect of eighteenth century
art-ornamental engravings, for example, or garden architecture. I chose
the Bavarian rococo church because of its precarious position between
the Italian baroque and the French rococo, between the enduring culture
of the Counter Reformation and an already quite modern aestheticism.
Tinged with skepticism, the Bavarian rococo is no longer able to take
quite seriously the pathos and rhetoric of the baroque, yet refuses to
give them up; so it plays with them. The playful character of the
rococo church manifests itself above all
in its borrowed ornament. Nowhere did rocaille, defined by the
asymmetry of its shell forms, develop more exuberantly than in Bavaria,
until finally it emancipated itself from its merely ornamental
character, shed its subservient rote, and approached the Status of an
autonomous abstract art. But autonomous ornament would seem to be a
contradiction in terms. Where ornament strives for autonomy, it dies as
ornament. It is precisely its tendency toward aesthetic autonomy that
makes rocaille an ornament to end ornament. Just as there is a sense in
which style can be said to have died with the rococo, so is there a
sense in which ornament can be said to have died with rocaille. With it
died also the traditional approach to architecture and to art.[4] It is
all too easy to make such assertions. They must be supported by
an examination of the buildings themselves. Careful description should
yield those features of the Bavarian rococo church that determine its
particular style and help us to relate it to and at the same time to
distinguish it from both the French rococo and the Italian baroque. But
how do we determine a style? The concept of style is problematic.
We speak of the style of an artist, a group, a school, a country, a
period. In each case to speak of a style is to suggest that different
works of art are related, not as parts of a larger whole, but as
variations an an unknown theme,[5] originating in the Same force or
feeling, which in turn manifests itself in a common formal "language."
To call the Bavarian rococo a distinct style is to suggest that its
creations refer us to something like a distinct artistic intention.
Following Alois Riegl, we may want to speak of a distinct Kunstwollen.
But the concept of a Kunstwollen is even more problematic than that of
style. Riegl's term is of course a metaphor. Human beings intend or
will; but how can we understand the artistic intention manifesting
itself in a period style? Who or what intends? To speak of a
Kunstwollen suggests an ideal artist who haunts and allows us to
understand the work of particular artists. Our construction of such
ideal types is always governed by our presuppositions. Depending an
their interests and prejudices, different interpreters will arrive at
different determinations of the artistic intention and thus at
different classifications of artistic phenomena. Consider the term
baroque.[6] Burckhardt still saw in the baroque
little more than a late and degenerate phase of Renaissance: baroque
architecture speaks the Same language as the Renaissance, but in a
crude dialect that overturns the established grammar. And Burckhardt
was not alone with his estimate. Only in the last decades of the
nineteenth century, beginning with such works as Cornelius Gurlitt's
Geschichte des Barockstils in Italien (1887) and Heinrich
Wölfflin's Renaissance und Barock (1888) was the baroque
recognized as a style of its own. Even Wölfflin set out to
show that baroque was a late and corrupt form of Renaissance art, and
to use this story of decline to demonstrate the laws governing art
historical development. Instead he discovered that the baroque was an
independent style, a style that no longer obeyed Renaissance norms. The
baroque was governed by a Kunstwollen of its own. But to what extent do
the examined works of art yield such a
Kunstwollen and to what extent is it read into them? We should not
forget that the discovery of the baroque by art historians followed its
discovery by the public at large. The neobaroque castles of Ludwig II
at Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee, the architecture of the French Second
Empire, and similar developments in Vienna and elsewhere show that the
writing of the history of art followed a general change of taste. It
was this change that enabled art historians to look at long-familiar
phenomena with fresh vision. The discovery of the specific unity, first
of the rococo, then of the
Bavarian rococo, rests an similar shifts in point of view. Like baroque
and Gothic, the term rococo long suggested disapproval, implying
artificiality and decadence. It shed such negative connotations only
slowly and established itself, first in Germany, "as a formal
designation of the general period and style of Louis XV, both in France
and elsewhere under French influence."[7] Yet this formal designation
often continued to carry disparaging overtones. The definition of
rococo offered by the Oxford English Dictionary is quite in accord with
common usage: "Having the characteristics of Louis Quatorze or Louis
Quinze workmanship, such as conventional shell- and scroll-work and
meaningless decoration, excessively florid or ornate." But what
criteria allow us to judge an ornament meaningful or meaningless? How
is excess measured, and by what standard of taste is the rococo found
tasteless? More often than not such objections are not simply to an
aesthetic phenomenon, but to this phenomenon understood as an
expression of a decadent age. Arnold Hauser is not alone when he
interprets the art of the rococo as the art of "a frivolous, tired, and
passive society,"[8] a last expression of the disintegrating old order.
As we shall see, there is much that supports such an interpretation,
although it is difficult to reconcile with that side of the rococo that
suggests the innocence of spring. The rehabilitation of the rococo is
inseparable from the rehabilitation
of the baroque. Wäfter Hausenstein's influential Vom Geist des
Barocks (1921), which, very much in the spirit of expressionism,
celebrated the baroque as a metaphor of the organic, is also a
celebration of the rococo, especially of the South German rococo. In
this it reflects a tendency, still widespread, to interpret the rococo
simply as the last phase of the baroque. This measures the rococo by
criteria derived from an examination of developments in Italian art. As
Fiske Kimball rightly emphasizes, such criteria are unlikely to do
justice to the specifically French character of the rococo. But if,
with Kimball, we emphasize the originators of the style rocaille and
identify the rococo as a French style of decoration, the Bavarian
contribution must be taken as secondary. The gloriously spontaneous
decorations of such native Bavarians as Johann Michael Feichtmayr or
Johann Georg Ublhör would have to be judged coarse imitations
lacking in elegance and refinement.[9] Challenging Kimball's definition
of the rococo as a French style of
decoration, Hermann Bauer points out that, while its origins lie in
France, it reached its greatest height in Germany, in good part because
there it was able to make its way into the religious sphere.[10] Bauer
does not claim that the South German rococo church originated only in
the French tradition; he insists an the importance of Italian
illusionism. But his suggestion that the Bavarian rococo church be
understood as an original synthesis of Italian baroque and French
rococo makes it difficult to accept his other claim that, despite
obvious differences, the Kunstwollen of the style rocaille and of the
rococo church are one and the same, that both are variations of the
same style. Bauer examines rocaille as the "critical form" that reveals
the essence of this style, a style that he also finds in such
superficially different forms as the English park-with its picturesque
ruins, temples, and pagodas-and the romanticizing classicism of the
eighteenth century. But is he justified in calling these different
expressions of the same style? Bauer also suggests that the French
rococo was, if not a sufficient, at
least a necessary condition of the Bavarian rococo church. Can we say
that there would have been no Bavarian rococo church without the style
rocaille?[11] Not surprisingly, many German historians of
eighteenth-century
architecture have objected to interpretations of the Bavarian rococo
church that emphasized the French origin of rocaille and have insisted
that the Bavarian rococo be understood in terms of its own artistic
intention. But what is this intention? What we take to be the
Kunstwollen of the Bavarian rococo church depends very much on what
examples we see as decisive. This again presupposes that we already
know what is to count as a Bavarian rococo church. How are we to enter
this circle? Fortunately there is considerable agreement: no
determination of the essence of the Bavarian rococo church is likely to
be taken seriously that would not allow us to consider Dominikus
Zimmermann's pilgrimage church at Steinhausen (1729-33) and Die Wies
1745-54) as major rococo churches. Yet if these churches can serve as
paradigms, we have to question the
dependence of the Bavarian rococo church on rocaille. Steinhausen was
built a number of years before rocaille was introduced into Bavaria in
the mid-1730s. It thus has become common practice to give a somewhat
earlier date as the beginning of the Bavarian rococo. Norbert Lieb's
date of 1730 is supported by the often-repeated suggestion that
Steinhausen be considered the first real rococo church. This early
rococo is preceded by a proto-rococo that can be pushed back to the
beginning of the century, although new impulses make themselves felt
toward the middle of the second decade, so that in Bavaria, too, we can
speak of a French inspired régence style beginning at that
time.[12] To assert that rocaille is not essential to the Bavarian
rococo church
is not to claim that the enthusiastic reception that this ornament
received in Bavaria was an accident: there must have been something
about the intentions of those who commissioned and built the churches
of the Bavarian rococo that made them particularly receptive to the new
style of ornamentation. Still, given the nonessential, if very
important, role of rocaille, it seems questionable whether an analysis
of its essence can do full justice to the Bavarian rococo church.
Bauer's proposal that the French style rocaille, the English park, and
the Bavarian rococo church are governed by the same Kunstwollen invites
challenge. Perhaps the most adequate interpretation of the Bavarian
rococo church
is provided by Bernhard Rupprecht in Die bayerische Rokoko-Kirche.
Given Rupprechts choice of paradigms-Steinhausen, Die Wies, and Johann
Michael Fischer's Zwiefalten (1744-65) there is no need to quarrel with
the criteria he establishes for the Bavarian rococo church:
1. A central space is formed, illuminated by mostly indirect light.
2. The boundaries of this space remain indefinite.
3. Traditional architectural forms are transformed, isolated, and
displaced.
4. An ornamental stucco zone is placed between fresco and architecture.
5. A point of view near the entrance is the most important; it
determines the perspective of the main fresco; at the same time it lets
us see the space in its entirety as a pictorial whole.[13]
Henry-Russell Hitchcock's Rococo Architecture in Southern Germany
questions these criteria. Hitchcock rejects one of Rupprecht's
paradigms, Fischers Zwiefalten (fig. 1). Of course, Hitchcock too
recognizes rococo elements in this church. These, however, are Said to
be contradicted by a strong tectonic emphasis. Caught between baroque
and rococo, the interior has a broken character. Like Rupprecht,
Hitchcock calls our attention to the striking pairs of columns an the
wall-pillars (fig. 2). But while both insist an the crucial importance
of this column motif, they offer very different interpretations of it.
According to Rupprecht it has a primarily pictorial function; together
with the high altar the paired columns help to establish the interior
as a coherent picture. Hitchcock, on the other hand, makes little of
this pictorialization of architectural space, which is perhaps the most
important theme of Rupprecht's analysis. He sees the columns as having
a tectonic significance that remains essentially baroque.[14] What
matters here is not who is right – I only want to show
how the interpreter's preconception of the essence of the rococo guides
even his description of what is seen. Hitchcock seems to think that we
can escape from such controversy by adopting a mode of analysis that
is, as he puts it, "not inductive, from supposed principles to more or
less perfect examples, but deductive." He claims to seek the essence of
South German rococo architecture in what is common in the major works
of its major architects.[15] But that Hitchcock himself cannot proceed
in this way is shown by his claim that the prolific Johann Michael
Fischer, perhaps the greatest of Bavaria's architects in the eighteenth
century, belongs less obviously to the rococo than Dominikus
Zimmermann. I do not want to deny this. The point I want to make is
only that we cannot arrive at a conception of the Bavarian rococo by
what Hitchcock calls deduction. Only if from the very beginning we
question the rococo character of Fischer's interiors, that is to say,
only if we have already decided what is to count as rococo, is it
possible to select those works that will allow us to "deduce" the
essence of the rococo. Our approach can in fact be neither deductive
nor inductive; some circularity cannot be avoided. We sense a certain
unity in the churches that were built in Bavaria throughout the better
part of the eighteenth century. Interpretation seeks to articulate
principles that will allow us to understand this unity, the structure
of this style. One goal of this book is to determine what we can call
the essence of
the Bavarian rococo church, but I am more interested in its origin and
eventual disintegration. Why do forms change? To say that the
Kunstwollen changes is to offer not an explanation, but a tautology.
Although the history of forms is in some sense autonomous, a formal
approach cannot do justice to the history of art. Art must be placed in
a wider context. The history of art must be understood against the
background of the history of ideas and, beyond that, of history. This
claim may seem questionable to someone who, committed to an aesthetic
approach, thinks of art as an autonomous realm ruled by its own laws.
Yet such a commitment is not based an a timeless truth, but must itself
be understood historically. "The miracle of creation" may indeed, as
Kimball claims, be "wrapped up in the mystery of personal artistic
individuality."[16] To speak of supraindividual forces may seem to
violate this mystery. But the importance of the individual is not a
constant in the history of art. Only when we keep in mind the
limitations placed an an artist's creativity by his historical
situation can we gain an understanding of what really is his own. The
limits of an approach that neglects the history of ideas become
particularly evident when we are dealing with religious art. A church
must be understood as an answer to the task of building a church. But
what is a church? We might answer by pointing to the activities that
take place in the church building, yet such an appeal to function would
not do justice to the way the Bavarian architects of the eighteenth
century understood their task. Thomas Aquinas's often-cited definition
of the church building is a better guide: Domus in qua sacramentum
celebratur, ecclesiam significat et ecclesia nominatur. "The house in
which the sacrament is celebrated signifies the Church and is called
'church'."[17] The Bavarian rococo marks a last successful attempt to
build churches as signs of the invisible Church. The playful way in
which this sign character is established shows that this is indeed a
last attempt. Although the history of ideas cannot be reduced to an
epiphenomenon of
social history, political and social factors do nevertheless play an
important role in the evolution of style. The influence of the Italian
baroque and the French rococo an the Bavarian rococo church cannot be
adequately understood without some understanding of the politics of the
Bavarian electors. Even more important, although less easy to trace, is
the relationship between economic and social conditions and the
flowering of the Bavarian rococo. It is remarkable that its centers
include not only Munich, the capital, and Augsburg, long a center of
the arts, but also Wessobrunn, a village, or rather a collection of
scattered farms assembled around an important monastery. The
artist-craftsmen from Wessobrunn made a decisive contribution to almost
all the masterpieces of German eighteenth-century architecture. How was
it possible to draft much of the male population into the
building trades and yet to preserve a level of accomplishment that
would fill one of our schools of art and architecture with envy? What
were the conditions that transformed peasants into artists? Why did
this happen not only here but also in other places in or close to the
Alps? (Together with Wessobrunn, Roveredo in the Swiss Grisons and Au
in the Austrian Vorarlberg are the best-known examples.) I have
hunches, but no adequate answers. The art of the Bavarian rococo cannot
be associated with a particular class; it unites all segments of
society. This genuinely popular character of the Bavarian rococo
contrasts with the urban and courtly art of the Renaissance that
preceded it and with the bourgeois neoclassicism that was to follow,
introducing a rift between popular art and high Art that is still with
us. The popular character of the Bavarian rococo is linked to the piety
and
backwardness of the Bavarians-proverbial in the eighteenth century.
Compared to Saxony or Prussia, let alone England or France,
eighteenth-century Bavaria was an unenlightened country. The church
remained the leading cultural force, more important than the court, far
more important than the Bourgeoisie. The country continued to be very
much a land of peasants, whose situation had changed little since the
Middle Ages. This backwardness is closely connected with the baroque
character of the rococo church. In it the Counter Reformation found its
last convincing architectural expression. When the Enlightenment did
come to Bavaria, late and as a foreign import, it had to place itself
in opposition to the forces that had sustained the rococo church. Newly
"enlightened" officials issued decree after decree in an attempt to
drag the reluctant population into the modern age. One of their targets
was the rococo church. The old and the new clash here with particular
vehemence and clarity. Long before this attack from without, the
precarious synthesis an which
the Bavarian rococo church depends had begun to disintegrate from
within. The source of this disintegration cannot be separated from the
specific beauty of the rococo church. The rococo church dies as the
aesthetic sphere claims and gains autonomy. A once coherent value
system splinters. One of the splinters is modern art.
THE PICTORIALIZATION OF ORNAMENT
French Origins
Labels are both helpful and dangerous: while they let us look in
certain directions, revealing aspects and connections that might
otherwise have remained hidden, they can also cover up what may be more
important. Such a label is "Bavarian rococo." The term rococo is, of
course, not derived from a study of Bavarian art or architecture, but
refers us to France, first of all to a French mode of decoration:
rococo is that style which makes use of rocaille or Shell work. Shells
and shell patterns had long been popular with decorators, and in the
first half of the eighteenth century the Shell motif gained central
importance as it was developed by such French designers as Nicolas
Pineau, Juste-Aurèle Meissonier, and jacques de Lajoue into
a new ornamental vocabulary, into "rocaille."[1] An important event in
the evolution of this goút nouveau or genre pittoresque was
the appearance in 1734 of Meissonier's Livre d'ornemens. The Shell is
here transformed into an almost abstract, endlessly malleable material,
out of which the artist molds landscapes and fantastic architectures.
In these engravings of the 1730s the forme rocaille has been said to
have its origin (fig. 3). Today rococo is often given a wider sense.
Its origins are sought not
with Pineau or Meissonier, but at the very beginning of the century
with Pierre Lepautre, designer in the office of Louis XIV's premier
architecte Jules-Hardouin Mansart. Characteristic of his ornaments are
flat bands that cross and interweave in delicate patterns, the
so-called bandwork.[2] But however the term is used, to speak of
Bavarian rococo is to suggest a local variation on an
eighteenth-century French theme. Against this it has often been urged
that what is called Bavarian
rococo architecture is fundamentally just baroque. This position claims
that the undeniable dependence of the Bavarians an French models was
comparatively superficial: rococo ornament was applied to an
architecture that remained baroque. Just as "rococo" points toward
France, "baroque" points toward Italy, toward Rome and Venice. Both
labels thus lead away from the at times quite different intentions of
the Bavarians; yet both labels are indispensable. The rococo label in
particular enables us to sketch some decisive developments of Bavarian
architecture in the eighteenth century. One such sketch is provided by
Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Provided Rococo architecture in southern
Germany is granted to have had
at least quasi-independent existence, it is not difficult to outline
its history. After the initial importation of the new French decorative
mode into Germany in the second decade of the eighteenth century, there
followed in the early and mid-twenties a short period of regional
interpretation – acclimatization, one might call it
– after which an increasingly autochthonous development
began. That development led during the thirties to stylistic maturity,
a maturity that lasted with little loss of vigour at least through the
fifties and even into the early sixties.[3] Although this is quite
plausible as a brief summary, one point
especially invites questioning. Hitchcock speaks here of "the new
French decorative mode," referring of course to that mode of ornament
initiated by Pierre Lepautre; Frangois de Cuvilliés's
introduction of rocaille into Bavaria, which occurred only in the
thirties, goes unmentioned. Still, the influence French ornament had an
Bavarian art in the second decade of the eighteenth century is so
striking as to suggest that we should look here for the origins of the
Bavarian rococo (fig. 4).
A glance at contemporary political events suggests an even more precise
date. Dreams of becoming emperor and an unfortunate alliance with Louis
XIV had led the Bavarian elector Max Emanuel into the War of the
Spanish Succession. In 1704, after Prince Eugene of Savoy and the duke
of Marlborough had defeated the allied French and Bavarians at
Blenheim, the elector had to flee Munich, which like all of Bavaria
came under Austrian administration. Only in 1715 was Max Emanuel to
return home from his French exile. With him came French-trained
artists: above all the architect Joseph Effner, who had been sent to
Paris in 1706 to study gardening, but had soon shifted to architecture,
studying and working with Germain Boffrand. Although nominally still
subordinate to the aging Enrico Zuccalli, it was Effner who was in
charge when building activity resumed at the elector's palaces in
Nymphenburg and Schleissheim. In 1724 he succeeded Zuccalli as the
elector's chief architect (Oberhof Baumeister). In matters of
decoration the highest authority was the Flemish sculptor and decorator
Wilhelm de Groff. He, too, had worked in Paris, but left the service of
Louis XIV to accept the offer of the Bavarian elector.[4] In Munich he
headed a large workshop, which included such French-trained artists as
the Tyrolean Johann Adam Pichler, whose boiseries form an important
part of many of the interiors created for Max Emanuel, and the sculptor
Charles Dubut.
The renewed building activity in Munich soon attracted many local
artists who were to mediate between the Paris-oriented artists at the
court and more traditionbound artists of city and country. Thus since
1715 the young Johann Baptist Gunetzrhainer from Munich was working as
ingenieur under Effner; in 1721 he was appointed assistant court
architect (Hofunterbaumeister). Gunetzrhainer provided an important
link between the court and a group of Munich architects that included
his stepfather Johann Mayr, his brother Ignaz Anton, and the great
Johann Michael Fischer, who was to marry one of Mayr's daughters.
Effner's choice of the stuccoer Johann Baptist Zimmermann to decorate
the great stairhall at Schleissheim (1720) proved even more fortunate.
Zimmermanns association with the court was to last until his death. As
the same time he remained in close touch with his native Wessobrunn, a
small community southwest of Munich, whose decorators and builders by
that time had already come to dominate much of South German
architecture. In the same stairhall another Bavarian, Cosmas Damian
Asam, painted the fresco Venus in the Forge of Vulcan. At Schleissheim
the two artists, who as we shall see were most responsible for the
emergence of a distinctly Bavarian rococo, were thus brought together.
In view of such connections, one is tempted to consider Max Emanuel's
return to Munich the real beginning of the Bavarian rococo.
Unfortunately this account is just a little too neat. Everywhere in
Bavaria the first decades of the century see a move toward sparser,
more delicate ornament. Johann Baptist Zimmerman's decoration of the
parish church in Schliersee, dating from 1714, is a particularly good
example of an early rococo, antedating the elector's return (fig. 5).
The stuccoed foliage of the severies and rib-bands still betrays its
origin in the baroque acanthus ornament that had come to be identified
with the decorators from Wessobrunn, but the leafy vines of 1700 have
flattened out and become bandlike. Zimmermann's subtle Jeployment of
yellow, green, and gray compensates for the diminished relief of his
stuccowork and reasserts the contrast between ornamental figure and
supporting ground; at the same time it integrates his frescoes into the
ornamental scheme. Especially forward looking are the cartouches that
mediate between the severies and the frescoes of the choir vault.[5]
The claim that it was only with the return of Max Emanuel that the
French influence made itself clearly felt in Bavaria also makes it
difficult to explain why this happened not only in Munich, the capital,
but at just about the Same time in other places as well, for instance
in the Swiss abbey church of St. Urban, presumably decorated by Franz
Schmuzer, another Wessobrunner. Hitchcock credits him with having been
the first one to have adapted French rococo decoration to "large-scale
church architecture, since Lepautre's work in France was restricted to
accessories."[6] Where did Franz Schmuzer gain his familiarity with the
new style emerging in France? Hardly in Munich, where he never worked,
and where the elector's artists were just beginning their work in 1716.
Clearly, the artists from Wessobrunn did not depend on the court art of
Munich for their knowledge of the new French style. They must have had
independent access. We do indeed know of artists from Wessobrunn active
in Paris in the seventeenth century. These contacts were never broken
off. "When Effner was sent to Paris to study modern French art, he met
there already the Wessobrunners. Wessobrunn gained the decisive
impulses for the transformation of late baroque forms into the rhythms
of régence and rococo in Paris."[7] The latter seems to me a
dubious claim. Far more important than such direct contacts were the
models provided by publications like Paul Decker's Fürstlicher
Baumeister (1711). The publishing houses of Augsburg played an
important role in spreading the new French style[8] (fig. 6).
Munich, too, had opened itself to French art long before the return of
Max Emanuel. Already at the court of his mother, Adelaide, we meet with French
artists, such as the painters Paul Mignaud, "Adelaide's Apelles," and
Jean Delamonce.[9] As early as 1684. Max Emanuel sent his chief
architect Enrico Zuccalli to Paris to acquaint himself with the newest
fashion, and in 1703 the French architect René Alexis
Delamaire was projecting interior decorations for the elector; it was
hoped that he would replace Zuccalli, and only the war prevented him
from coming to Munich.[10] In the Same year the Italian Pietro
Francesco Appiani decorated a number of rooms in the palace of
Nymphenburg with "leaf-work in the French manner."[11] It is therefore
misleading to distinguish an Italian phase of stucco decoration,
initiated by the decorative scheme of Munich's Theatinerkirche
(1663-88), from a French phase, starting with the early rococo
interiors created under Effner's direction beginning in 1715. The two
phases cannot be separated so easily. By the 1680s both French and
Italian influences make themselves felt, and not only in Munich, but in
Augsburg and Wessobrunn as well. [12] Influences are difficult to trace, especially when they are creatively
transformed rather than faithfully copied. In this connection it is
interesting to consider in more detail the ways in which St. Urban
anticipates the rococo architecture to come. Hitchcock points to the
pilasters, which are coupled rather than single as at Rheinau, are neither plain
nor fluted as in earlier churches but are decorated, rather like those
in many French secular interiors of the previous ten or fifteen years,
with panels outlined by moldings ending in a scroll decoration at top
and bottom and framing blank oval cartouches at mid-height. . . The
doubling of the pilasters, with the consequent widening of the solid
areas walling the nave, taken together with their surface decoration .
. . reduces notably the tectonic importance of the order.[13]
But how much of an innovation was this? The doubling of pilasters
– which at any rate would have to be credited to the
architect Franz Beer rather than to the decorator – is not at
all unusual with the architects from the Austrian Vorarlberg, of whom
Beer was one. We find it in the very first church with which Beer is
associated, the pilgrimage church on the Schönenberg near
Ellwangen (1682-86). And even then it was hardly a novelty. Like so
many features of Vorarlberg architecture, it can be traced back to the
church of St. Michael in Munich (1583-97). Similarly, the decoration of
pilasters with stuccoed panels was quite standard in Bavarian
architecture before it succumbed to Italian influences in the decades
following the Thirty Years War. We find it at Polling (1621-26) and
Weilheim (1624-31), and after the war again at
Niederschönenfeld (1658-62) and Kempten (1651-56). In none of
these churches do we find both the doubling of pilasters and their
decoration with stuccoed panels and, of course, in these early examples
a different ornamental vocabulary is being used. Nevertheless Franz
Schmuzer's pilaster decorations seem as much a renewal of a tradition
with which he must have been very familiar – both Polling
(fig. 62) and Weilheim (fig. 69) are within two hours' walking distance
from his native Wessobrunn – as an imitation of French
models. The encounter with the French rococo not only brought the
Bavarians something new; in this case, at least, it freed for them a
strand in their own tradition that had largely been covered up by the
dominant influence of Italian decorators and architects after the
Thirty Years War.
Régence and Rococo
While these observations establish that the rococo has its prehistory
in Bavaria, they do not challenge the assertion that it really begins
only with the importation of a new ornamental style in the second
decade of the eighteenth century. That view is challenged, however, by
the narrower definition of the rococo as the rocaille style, which
would force us to date its beginnings in Bavaria in the 1730s.[14] At
this point Hitchcock's failure to emphasize the distinction between two
quite different importations of French ornament becomes important. His
neglect of the introduction of rocaille might still be justified if one
could show that what we have here are closely related phases of what is
fundamentally one and the Same French development, which sent different
ripples into Bavaria. But do these two styles, characterized by
régence bandwork
and rocaille respectively, in fact stand in so close a relationship?
Are they even born of the same Kunstwollen? And even if such a
relationship holds for France, does it hold for Bavaria? That there is
a decisive difference, at least in the latter case, is suggested by
even a brief comparison of the Bavarians' use of rocaille and the
earlier ornament. The difference in the way in which ornament relates
to ornament support is evident. Early rococo ornament remains
subservient to the decorated surface. Kimball's characterization of
Pierre Lepautre's creation of the new style stresses this: In all his
work one of the most striking qualities was the abandonment
of plasticity: in architectural members and decorative motifs alike.
The column soon completely vanished from his work, the pilaster,
greatly attenuated and reduced in relief, survived only as a strip, its
cap and base dissolving. The wall panels, increased in height, had
their mouldings likewise diminished in projection. At focal points
their outline was further etherealized by taking on the swing of
arabesque bandwork with its adjuncts of acanthus. Interlaces and
scrolls of these elements invaded the panels themselves at top and
bottom and around the central rosette. Not the plastic baroque
cartouche, which survived only as a shield of arms, but a smooth
surface with surrounding bands and scrolls became the typical Field for
decorative enrichment.[15] This affirmation of wall or ceiling surface
links the French rococo to
the coming neoclassicism. While at the beginning and especially toward
the end of the Bavarian rococo we find the Same tendency to subordinate
ornament to ornament bearer, at the peak of the style the relationship
is often inverted: ornament attacks its Support almost aggressively; it
becomes three-dimensional and plastic. Consider a doorframe (1755) from
Maria Medingen by the Wessobrunner Anton Landes, a nephew of Johann
Baptist Zimmermann (fig. 7). Landes plays with traditional
architecture: the door's frame is crowned with a stuccoed entablature.
But normally rigid architectural forms seem to have become malleable;
the entablature foams upward into a wavelike rocaille an which a putto
is gaily riding. As it rises it becomes
more sculptural and freer. Rocaille is brought into a curious proximity
to water.
Nothing comparable is found in the Paris-inspired interiors created
under Effner's direction for Max Emanuel. Compared with Landes's
creation, the rooms in the Pagodenburg in the park of Nymphenburg
(1716-19) seem almost classically simple.
The Turn to Rocaille
This pictorialization of ornament, dependent on the model provided by
French grotesques, links Johann Baptist Zimmermanns decoration of the
library of Benediktbeuern and the work of Francois de
Cuvilliés. Since 1706 the young Walloon had been part of the
elector's entourage, at first only as a page. But his gifts were soon
recognized. By 1716 the former court dwarf was working as a draftsman
under Effner; four years later he was sent to Paris to familiarize
himself with the newest trends in French decoration. Shortly after his
return in 1724 he was appointed architect to the court (Hofbaumeister),
soon to be given a position equal to that of the older Effner. By 1730
Cuvilliés's was the decisive voice in architectural matters.
Just as the young Effner had pushed the older Enrico Zuccalli into the
background, Effner in turn had to give way to Cuvilliés. A
comparison of Cuvilliés's creations of the thirties,
especially the Reiche Zimmer of the Residenz in Munich and the somewhat
later Amalienburg in the park of Nymphenburg, with roughly contemporary
interiors by Bavarians emphasizes the French character of his work
(fig. 11). Fiske Kimball goes so far as to suggest that
Cuvilliés's best creations are little more than imitations
of French models – the Spiegelsaal (hall of mirrors) in the
Amalienburg, for example, mimicking Boffrand's Salon de la Princesse in
the Hótel de Soubise. As Hitchcock points out, a simple
consideration of the dates casts considerable doubt on this thesis.
Construction of the Hótel de Soubise was begun in 1735; the
paintings in the Salon de la Princesse were completed only in 1739 or
1740. Work on the Amalienburg started in 1734, and finished in 1739.
This makes the Amalienburg almost exactly contemporaneous with its
supposed Parisian model, making it "extremely unlikely, if not, indeed,
impossible that the Amalienburg Spiegelsaal derives from the executed
rooms in Paris."[19] A comparison of the two works bears out
Cuvilliés's originality. Hitchcock lists a number of
differences, not all of which are important in this context. But his
analysis of the differences between Boffrand's and
Cuvilliés's treatment of the ceiling should be noted. Above the
comice-line the ceiling of the lower salon in Paris is quite
flat and decorated only with a central ornament; the upper salon has
radial open-work bands linking the central medallion an the very
slightly concave surface with the cove at its edge. At the Amalienburg,
however, the ceiling is much more domical. Moreover, the putti and
other figures that perch on the cove-comice, somewhat as in the Salon
de la Princesse, are provided with rocky seats and backed by
naturalistic trees rising . . . against the plain plaster of the vault
which tells as an illusionistic sky (fig. 12).[20] The pictorialization
of ornament leads to a pictorialization of
architecture: the supporting ceiling becomes a sky. Cuvilliés's
reliance on French models is apparent, but these
models did not include Boffrand's Hotel de Soubise (fig. 13). As
Hermann Bauer has shown, we have to look to French publications of
ornamental designs, such as Meissonier's Livre d'ornemens, jean
Mondon's Premier livre de forme rocquaille et cartel (fig. 14), or
Lajoue's three Livres de cartouches. But "what French ornamental
engravings accomplished only on paper now appears in real decoration.
This is the decisive deed of the German rococo."[21]
This characterization of Cuvilliés's role invites
reconsideration of his French antecedents. Bauer ties the origin of
rocaille to the development of French grotesque ornament, a
characteristic of which is the joining of two different spatial logics,
one ornamental, the other pictorial. The grotesque depends on that
oscillation between picture and ornament which we find in the library
of Benediktbeuern and which is so essential to the decorations of the
Amalienburg. The forme rocaille arises when the shell motif, a common
element of the edges and frames of grotesques, becomes the center of
the composition, as happens with Meissonier, whose Livre d'ornemens
constitutes an important step beyond Bérain, Marot, and
Watteau (figs. 15 and 3).[22] Only with Meissonier does rocaille
ornament become an independent object that is depicted as if it were a
house or a tree or a rock. His fiántastie designs are
ornamental representations of ornament. Similar efforts soon followed,
including jacques de Lajoue's Livre nouveau de divers morceaux de
fantaisie (1736) and Cuvilliés's Livre de cartouches (1738),
created in obvious dependence on Lajoue. Bauer's comparison of a war
cartouche by Lajoue with one by Cuvilliés is particularly
striking (figs. 16 and 17). He goes on to suggest that to arrive at
Cuvilliés's decorative system in the Amalienburg we only
have to imagine one of his cartouches cut open and stuccoed out along
the cornice.
The stuccoed ceiling decoration of the Amalienburg
is inverted cartouche. . . Just as the war cartouche stands before and
at the same time in a landscape, so here the ceiling ornamentation
makes of the ceiling a landscape-like background. The ceiling becomes
air, water, space. A tree growing out of the rocaille cartouche edge
stands in a pictorial atmosphere.[23] This thesis that Bavarian rococo ornament has its origin in the frames
of Cuvilliés's and Lajoue's cartouches becomes especially
interesting when compared with Kimball's observation that the
decorative style initiated by Pierre Lepautre turned away from the
plastic cartouche of the Italian baroque.[24] Again one senses the
difference between early rococo ornament and rocaille. It would be a mistake to place too much emphasis on the part played by
the Amalienburg in the progressive pictorialization of ornament. In
this respect the decorative scheme of the Amalienburg is not too
different from Cuvilliés's own somewhat earlier work in the
Schatzkammer (1731-33) and the Reiche Zimmer (1730-37) of Munich's
Residenz.[25] The beautiful scenes of evening, night, and morning an
the ceiling of the elector's bedroom offer good examples (1731),
although the greater degree to which the pictorialization of ornament
has been carried in the Amalienburg is shown by the fishery group in
the Spiegelsaal (figs. 18 and 19): the garland of shells held by the
nymph, her leg, and the way she watches the putti below who are drawing
in their net, create a picture that plays over and helps to negate the
division of wall and ceiling. Nowhere in the Reiche Zimmer did
Cuvilliés go so far. But we need not confine ourselves to Cuvilliés. The
pictorialization of ornament had played an important part in the work
of his collaborator Johann Baptist Zimmermann long before Zimmermann
executed the stuccoes of the Residenz and the Amalienburg after
Cuvilliés's designs.[26] Consider once more the stuccoed
balconies on the ceiling of the library at Benediktbeuern. The
differences between Zimmermann's decorations at Benediktbeuern and
those he executed more than a decade later in the Amalienburg are
striking enough. The bandwork and grillwork of Benediktbeuern belong
quite obviously to an earlier period. More important, however, is
another difference. In Benediktbeuern it is not the empty ceiling that
is transformed by the pictorial quality of the stuccoed decoration into
the sky; rather, the stuccoed balconies are placed before a painted
background that an the one band helps to reinforce their pictorial
quality, but on the other creates the illusion of real balconies.
Zimmermann's balconies possess an architectural quality lacking in
Cuvilliés's ornaments. Participating in both the
architectural and the pictorial mode, they effect a mediation between
the two. In this respect the library of Benediktbeuern is a far more
typical example of Bavarian developments than the Amalienburg.
Provincial Rococo?
A revealing example of the way Bavarian decorators adapted and
transformed Cuvilliés's decorative scheme is provided by
five rooms decorated in the thirties in the Residenz of the prince
abbot of Kempten. Compared to these rooms, Cuvilliés's
somewhat later decorations in the Amalienburg seem very French indeed.
The use of paintings alone would give the rooms at Kempten a very
different tonality: warmer, darker, and more colorful than the
restrained yellow and silver or light blue and silver of the
Amalienburg; and the colors of the ceiling paintings are picked up by
the decoration. This use of color to bind architecture, fresco, and
ornament into an organic whole recalls the decoration of Schliersee. By
this time it had become quite common in Bavaria.
Equally significant is the way the decorations at Kempten play over and
conceal the separation of wall from frescoed ceiling. Something like
this also occurs in the Spiegelsaal of the Amalienburg, but there it
only slowly discloses itself as we explore the subtleties of the
decoration; the first impression we receive is that of a rather clear
separation of wall and ceiling marked by the undulating cornice. At
Kempten, on the other hand, the decoration attacks and submerges this
demarcation (fig. 21). In the prince abbot's bedroom, for example, a
Wessobrunner created a stucco zone that mediates effectively between
the architectural quality of the walls and the frescoed ceiling.[27] An
even more convincing solution to the Same problem is provided by Johann
Georg Üblhör's decoration of the Throne Room
(1740-42). Here an ornamental entablature helps to articulate the
fairly large space; but its cornice functions also as the base of a
stuccoed balustrade. Because ornament here possesses both an
architectural and a pictorial quality, it is able to draw together
architecture and fresco. Johann Baptist Zimmermann's balconies in the
library of Benediktbeuern provide an obvious antecedent, although, as
Hugo Schnell points out, the motif goes back to Bernini and even
Holbein.[28]
Compared to the elegant decorations Cuvilliés created for
the Bavarian elector, those at Kempten may seem provincial; yet their
greater vigor is undeniable (fig. 20). Noteworthy is the different
handling of doors. Cuvilliés's doors are framed by light, in
obtrusive moldings, those at Kempten by heavy pilasters; but their
tectonic weight is lifted by their ornamental treatment. Thus, in the
prince abbot's bedroom traditional architectural forms become
unexpectedly soft and malleable. Consider the way the sharp points of
the door frames's cornice are echoed by the lower frame of the
medallion, which at the same time furnishes the Base for a new
ornamental structure, including curtain and Baldachin, which becomes
part of the fresco frame. Playfully architectural elements are
transformed into ornament; ornament in turn assumes a pictorial quality
or claims for itself the part of architecture.[29] Such playful
metamorphoses joining architecture, painting, and ornament are among
the most characteristic features of the Bavarian rococo. Because the stuccoes at Kempten mediate between painting and
architecture, they cannot approach the status of the independent
pictures as do the decorations in the Amalienburg. Bavarian ornament
comes closest to such independence where the task of mediation is
unimportant or does not exist, as for example in Anton Landes's
doorframe in Maria Medingen or in Johann Anton Bader's astonishing
pulpit in Oppolding (fig. 124). There is little in eighteenth-century
art that matches its fragile strength. Ornament here has shed its
servitude and become a self-sufficient work of art.
Abstract Rocaille
Both similarity and distance between the Bavarian and the French rococo
are demonstrated by the corner cartouches in the prince abbot's bedroom
in Kempten (fig. 21). Here we already find the almost doughy plastic
rocaille forms that were to become perhaps the most characteristic
expression of the Bavarian rococo. Dating probably from the
midthirties, they force us to question Bauers claim that it was only in
1738, when Cuvilliés's first series of engravings was
published, that rocaille appeared in Germany.[30] But the exact date
matters little. The cartouches at Kempten suggest familiarity with
Cuvilliés's work. Even greater is their similarity with the
roughly contemporary, perhaps slightly later, cartouches that Johann
Baptist Zimmermann created in the now-destroyed convent church St.
Jakob am Anger in Munich (1737). Compared with the ornamental
vocabulary used by Cuvilliés, the cartouches in Kempten are
more abstract. The Part ornament has been assigned does not permit it
to become as pictorially independent as in the interiors created by
Cuvilliés. Characteristic of the Bavarian rococo is the way
these cartouches frame small pictures, bracket together walls and
ceiling fresco, spreading into the fresco and violating its frame, and
spill over the molding separating walls and ceiling. At the same time
each cartouche helps to fill and obscure the corner in which it has
been placed. Rocaille has here at least a threefold function: it
frames, it mediates between picture and architecture, and it obscures
tectonic features.
Even before the mid-thirties we find rocaille-like forms, usually
generated by the frames of cartouches or frescoes, as for example in
St. Emmeram in Regensburg. Closer anticipations of rocaille are found
at Diessen (ca. 1736). Especially interesting is a comparison of the
stuccoed "clamps" that seem to bracket the fresco to the arches of the
nave with the frames of the cartouches that decorate the pendentives of
the choir dome, where rocaille-like forms seem more expected (figs. 22
and 115). In their light the "clamps" can be seen as truncated
cartouches that were somehow forced open. We should recall Bauer's
thesis that it was by breaking open and stretching the cartouche frame
that Cuvilliés arrived at the ornament of the Amalienburg.
The responsible master at Diessen was, however, not
Cuvilliés but Franz Xaver Feichtmayr from Wessobrunn, then
in his early thirties, who was joined by his younger brother Johann
Michael and by the somewhat older Üblhör. Given the
prior Herkulan Karg's ambitious plans, the choice of Feichtmayr may
seem somewhat surprising. Together with Üblhör, the
two Feichtmayr brothers were to establish themselves as the leading
church decorators of the forties and fifties, but at this time they
hardly had the reputation of the other artists associated with the
church, who included the architect Johann Michael Fischer,
Cuvilliés, who seems to have been responsible for the design
of the high altar, and the painter Johann Georg Bergmüller,
director of the Art Academy in Augsburg. Feichtmayr's just-completed
decoration of the Cistercian abbey church in Stams in the Tyrol may
have called the prior's attention to the young decorator, whose
independent career had begun just a few years earlier with his very
successful refurbishing of the late Gothic parish church in
Walleshausen (1732).[31] The decoration of these early rococo interiors
has its center in large cartouches with vigorous frames that may
broaden into rocaillelike forms. Successful as they are, there is
little about these interiors that would lead one to expect the
brilliance of the achievement of Diessen. Perhaps
Üblhör, whose work at Kempten shows him to have been,
together with Dominikus Zimmermann, the most imaginative Wessobrunner
working at that time, deserves credit for the advanced character of
this decoration; we should not forget, however, that he had been
associated with Cuvilliés, who was just then exhibiting the
possibilities of his new decorative style in the Amalienburg. For the
development of the Bavarian rococo church Diessen had far greater
significance. It demonstrated how ornament could be used to provide
effective mediation between a large fresco and the architecture of the
church. Once again this mediating role prevents ornament from becoming
as fully pictorial as the ornament of the Amalienburg. As already
mentioned, Cuvilliés's decorations in the Amalienburg are
themselves so pictorial that a fresco not only seems superfluous but
would destroy the essence of his ornament. In a church such as Diessen
the stuccoer has to establish a modus vivendi with the painter. This
demands a more abstract ornament. The success of Diessen was such that
the artists associated with it
came to be in constant demand. The mature style of the Feichtmayr
circle is marked by a more complete domination of plastic organic
rocaille forms than that of other leading artists from Wessobrunn, such
as Joseph Schmuzer and the Zimmermann brothers. Compared to their work
the Feichtmayrs' seems abstract. Evident is the influence of Augsburg
engravers-both Feichtmayrs chose to settle in Augsburg rather than in
Munich.[32] A good example of this style is provided by Johann Michael
Feichtmayr's
decorations of the Benedictine abbey church at Zwiefalten (1747-58),
one of the greatest, and at the same time most characteristic,
achievements from the middle of the century. As at Diessen, the
architect was Johann Michael Fischer, who here created what is,
together with Ottobeuren, his largest interior. Much more than at
Diessen, the decorations of Zwiefalten are dominated by cartouches that
mediate between the vertical thrust of the wall-pillars, here faced
with paired scagliola columns, and the frescoes above. Such mediating
cartouches had already appeared at Walleshausen and again at Diessen,
but at Zwiefalten the individual cartouche has become asymmetrical,
although symmetry is reestablished when a cartouche is seen together
with the corresponding cartouche an the other side of the nave (figs. 2
and 23). Such asymmetry is often seen in Bavarian rococo churches: some
element of the decoration, here a cartouche, points beyond itself; an
answer is demanded and given by a complementary asymmetrical form.
Asymmetry thus becomes a powerful device against a compartmental or
additive approach to ornament and spatial organization. It serves the
organic unity desired by the Bavarian rococo better than more
symmetrical forms can. Toward the middle of the century we thus meet
with an increasing tendency to keep not only ornament, but furnishings,
such as side altars, asymmetrical: the open form of one object demands
& complementary open structure across the nave (fig. 152 ). Even
compared with the ornament of Diessen, the mature rocaille work of
Zwiefalten seems ephemeral, as if it could maintain these particular
shapes only for a moment (fig. 24). Along with this goes an organic or
dynamic quality no earlier ornament had matched. Rocaille hints not
only at shells, but now at water, now at flames, then again at
neverseen plants or coral. Where rocaille-like forms do appear at
Diessen they look as if they had been generated by a flattening out of
the cartouche frame; at Zwiefalten rocaille has emancipated itself from
this origin. Now the cartouche frames appear as almost incidental
by-products of the play of rocaille. The importance of frame and
ornament has been inverted. Although ornament still tends to form
cartouche-like patterns, it has become independent enough to strike out
an its own. Thus it envelops and obscures much of the frame of
Spiegler's gigantic fresco over the nave, invading even the fresco
itself and appearing to curve beneath the frame. The decoration of
Zwiefalten marks the high point of the development of
rocaille. Already in the fifties we meet with a tendency to limit its
exuberance and autonomy. Ornament is used more sparingly. Individual
rocailles become first thinner, then anemic. Cartouches return to
symmetry. But we shall consider this decay of rocaille in a later
chapter.
Frames and Frescoes
The tension between architectural space and the illusionistic space
created by the ceiling fresco helps to determine the style of the
Bavarian rococo church. The Bavarians' enthusiastic adoption of
rocaille has one root in their attempt to mediate between the two. To
achieve such mediation a third term was needed, not simply a frame, but
a framelike ornament capable of becoming either architecture or
picture. Rocaille filled this need admirably. Although working only an
paper, its originators showed how the new ornament could expand into
"architecture" or "picture." Recognizing this potential, the Bavarians
developed rocaille into a stucco zone that lies, both essentially and
literally, between architecture and frescoed ceiling. The most
important function of Bavarian rococo ornament is the mediation, not
the dissolution, of the tension of architecture and picture.
The significance of this function remains obscure. Why insist that the
tension between architectural and fresco space be mediated? Why not
resolve it by bringing the two into complete fusion, as the illusionism
of the Italian baroque attempted to do; or by rejecting illusionism
altogether, thus cutting the Bond between architectural and pictorial
space, as neoclassicism was to do? I shall return to these problems in later chapters. But a more easily
answered question poses itself. Only in the thirties did rocaille come
to Bavaria, offering a convincing answer to an already existing
problem. Should we not, then, expect earlier attempts pointing in the
Same direction? Many such attempts were indeed made. The most
successful is Dominikus Zimmermanns pilgrimage church at Steinhausen
(1730-31). Here, as Bernhard Rupprecht points out, we find for the
first time a fully developed stucco zone that both separates and links
fresco and architecture.[33] This zone is made up of a number of quite
different elements (fig. 42). Most important are the stuccoed gables
that crown the arches joining the ten pillars that carry the oval
vault. Especially in the east and west they have a tectonic quality
that joins them to the architecture below. At the same time these
gables project into the fresco, painted by the architect's Brother
Johann Baptist, that appears to lie behind them. This effect is
supported by the stuccoed balustrades to the north and south, through
which we see the fresco continuing. Like the later balustrade in the
Throne Room of the Residenz in Kempten or the balconies in Johann
Baptist Zimmermanns earlier library at Benediktbeuern, they are thus
seen as a pictorial foreground. Yet they also belong to the ornamental
zone framing the picture; they are both part of the picture and part of
its frame. The latter aspect is strengthened by the more free and
elaborate baluster-like forms given to the gables adjoining the
balustrades. They help to establish a smoother transition from
architecture to picture. At Steinhausen the quite traditional gable
motif shows itself to possess the Same potential of transformation into
architecture and picture that characterizes rocaille.[34] This analogy
forces us to agree with Rupprecht's conclusion that the Bavarian rococo
did not originate with the introduction of rocaille, but only adopted
rocaille out of an essential affinity.
The mature solution to the problem of mediation offered by the brothers
Zimmermann at Steinhausen is not without antecedents. Johann Baptist
Zimmermann's use of balconies in the library of Benediktbeuern has
already been discussed, although in Beneditkbeuern no real effort was
made to integrate the stuccoed balconies into the surrounding ornament.
The balconies remained just one motif among others, unable to transform
the total space. The Same is even more obviously true of the choir
fresco in Buxheim, where we find Johann Baptist using this device for
the first time (1711). [35] But there are more significant antecedents by other artists. Hitchcock
points to Metten, where the fresco is by the Austrian Wolfgang Andreas
Heindl, the stuccoed decoration by Franz Josef Holzinger; both began
work in 1722.[36] As at Steinhausen, the fresco fills most of the nave
vault; the stucco forms a zone mediating between fresco and
architecture. The mediation achieved, however, is far less successful:
for the most part the stucco remains merely ornament, too weak to
mediate between architecture and picture. Holzinger does not hit an
anything nearly as effective as Dominikus Zimmermann's use of the gable
motif. That Holzinger's intentions were related to Zimmermanns, however, is
suggested by the somewhat awkward stuccoed putti that play in the
valleys of the frame. Like the putti in the Hótel de
Soubise, these could perhaps be considered mere ornament-were it not
for the clouds on which they play, which relate them, if not altogether
convincingly, to the painted clouds of the fresco (fig. 25). The use of
stuccoed clouds is particularly interesting at the eastern end of the
fresco, where they connect with a mass of similar clouds that spill
over and conceal (somewhat ineffectively) the architectonic quality of
the choir arch. To these clouds correspond painted clouds that spill
over the fresco frame in its western corners. But while a first step is
thus taken toward the mediation between architecture and fresco, at
Metten it is no more than that. The too purely ornamental character of
most of the stucco work and the smaller frescoes set into the stucco of
the pendentive zone, which are Seen very much as framed pictures in the
traditional sense and in turn render the surrounding stucco pure frame
and ornament, prevents it. Especially when looking at the choir fresco, one has the feeling that a
vocabulary is being used that has not quite been mastered. Here, too,
the fresco spills over its frame and is in turn invaded by stuccoed
angels and clouds. But these mediating devices are countered by a
rather rigid handling of the frame, which traces a form suggested by
the architecture instead of becoming its full partner, as is the case
in Steinhausen. Metten thus presents us with a curious mixture of
progressive ideas and conservatism. Perhaps the former can be tied to Cosmas Damian Asam, who had been
approached to fresco the church. A plan of his, dating from ca. 1715,
has survived although it was never executed.[37] Asam did some work for
the church: the painting of the high altar is by him, as is the choir
fresco (1718), or at least its design. Thus, even if Asam was succeeded
by Heindl, it seems likely that his association with the church left
its traces. At any rate, the cloud motif in its twofold form, as fresco
spilling out of its frame and as stucco becoming picture, had for some
time been characteristic of the Italianate approach of the brothers
Asam.[38]
A more interesting approach to the problem of mediation is taken in
Aldersbach (1720-21), reflecting perhaps the influence of Cosmas
Damian's young brother, the sculptor Egid Quirin Asam. Here, as at
Metten, stuccoed clouds spill out of the fresco. In their pasty
heaviness they contrast with much of the stucco, which is comparatively
flat in the then newly popular régence mode. But they do
relate quite directly to the four cartouches that "support" the fresco,
and in their pink pastiness help to establish a transition between
ornament and picture (fig. 26). This is done more effectively by the
riband weaving in and out of the picture, twining itself around the
frame, and by the putti that carry it, riding on stuccoed clouds. Both
share in that ambivalence between ornament and picture that Bauer takes
to be essential to rocaille. Our Sense of ambivalence is further
strengthened by the scalloped frame, which is not only frame, weakened
as such by its form, but at the Same time the pictorial base of the
scene presented in Cosmas Damian's fresco. Again a balustrade, here
painted, helps to facilitate the transition from framing ornament to
picture. All of these devices deny closure to the fresco and open the realm of
St. Bernards Christmas vision to the space below in which we ourselves
stand. Pozzo's illusionism has been translated into Bavarian. Because
Egid Quirin Asam's stuccoed clouds are not only obvious downward
extensions of his brother's painted clouds, but at the Same time bear a
close resemblance in consistency and color to the stuccoed cartouches,
they possess not only pictorial but also ornamental status. The
illusionism of the fresco is threatened by these clouds, which at first
seem only an extension of it. Their ornamental status is transferred to
the fresco itself, which functions as ornament as much as it provides a
pictorial illusion. This ornamentalization of the fresco is
strengthened by the way the colored stucco of the church picks up the
colors of the fresco. The Asam brothers were too free, too playful, to
take Pozzo's illusionism altogether seriously. Nor were they alone in
this: such play with baroque conventions helps to define the style of
the Bavarian rococo.
What makes Aldersbach so significant for the subsequent development of
the Bavarian rococo is the Asams' treatment of the stucco zone framing
the fresco. More effectively than at Metten, it begins here to function
as a third mediating reality between illusionistic fresco and
architecture. In effecting this mediation Egid Quirin's pasty clouds
play an important part, anticipating, not so much in form as in
function, the rich rocaille work of later rococo churches. As we shall
see later, this emergence of the stucco zone mediating between
pictorial and architectural space is itself inseparable from
innovations Cosmas Damian introduced in the fresco. The Bavarian rococo
church developed as an original response to the illusionism of the
Italian baroque.
Ornament and Architecture
Hitchcock, too, discusses Aldersbach as a precursor of the Bavarian
rococo church, but has something quite different in mind: the Asams'
increasing appropriation of French régence forms, an
appropriation that translates this vocabulary into a more robust idiom.
At Aldersbach, for example, we can point to "the decorative panel-heads
on the sides of the wall-pillars; the treatment of many of the
transverse severies of the nave vaults; and, most conspicuously, that
of the eastern wall above the choir arch."[39] Next to the elegance of
these French-influenced forms – only a little earlier Cosmas
Damian Asam had been working under Effner's direction at the Neues
Schloss in Schleissheim the putti-carrying clouds seem not so much
anticipations of the rococo as rather heavy, almost embarrassing
offsprings of the Asams' Roman training. The contrast between the
delicacy of French régence forms and the pasty robustness
not only of the pink clouds but also of the cartouches is disturbing.
In each case ornament seems to follow very different laws. While the
régence forms subordinate themselves to the architecture,
the pink clouds and the associated ornament show much greater
independence. Thus, the latter can play over the former, but never the
reverse.
This distinction between two modes of ornament, one serving the
architecture, the other more closely tied to painting, can also be
drawn in the Asams' roughly contemporary churches in Rohr and
Weltenburg.[40]
With this tension between two very different modes of ornament the
Asams' churches of about 1720 show themselves to belong to a period of
transition. Ten years later at Steinhausen we no longer find such
tension, nor do we find it in the rococo churches following its
example. Only an echo of it remains in a tendency to continue to use
régence forms where the architecture demands a subordination
of the
ornament to it, as for instance in the decoration of intrados, while
rocaille is generally used to effect the mediation between fresco and
architecture. At Aldersbach the Asams did not quite achieve such
mediation. Their clouds and other similar devices play over the
architecture, which beneath it remains intact. While at Steinhausen
ornament becomes inseparable from architecture, at Aldersbach the
stucco finally is too weak to really mediate between fresco and church.
We are left with an uneasy tension between the Asams' brilliant
decoration and a rather uninteresting wall-pillar church that cannot
fully maintain itself in this competition and yet is not really
transformed either (fig. 27). That the Asams were moving in the direction of Steinhausen is shown by
their redecoration of the cathedral of Freising (1723-24). At Freising,
too, the Asams had to accept the space they were given – here
a five-aisled basilica, fundamentally Romanesque, altered in the
fifteenth century and again in the seventeenth. Indeed, the problems
they faced were greater than at Aldersbach, for the length of the nave
made it impossible to unify the space by means of one dominating
fresco, while the repetitive rhythm of the nave arcades provides a
tectonic emphasis at least as strong as that provided by Magzin's
wallpillars at Aldersbach. Given the Asams' earlier work, Cosmas
Damian's contribution is hardly surprising. More violently than in his
earlier churches, but in the Same Bacciccian manner, the frescoes
overflow their borders (which here are only painted, not stuccoed), and
in places also the rib-bands separating the different frescoes. No use
is made of the stuccoed clouds we find at Aldersbach. More significant is the contribution of Egid Quirin. The renovation of
1619-22 had already decisively altered the medieval space; tribunes
were built over the inner aisles. To lighten the tectonic weight of the
shallow pilasters of the nave wall, Egid Quirin covered their surface
with tripartite stuccoed marble panels, visually not so much supported
by the pilasters that bear them as floating between and held in place
by the arches of the double arcades, as are also Cosmas Damian's
frescoed panels, separating or rather joining the two series of arcades
(fig. 28). Thus while at Aldersbach the wall-pillars seem active and
define the spaces between them, at Freising the relationship seems
inverted: it is the empty spaces of the arcades that seem active and
assign to the panels an the pilasters their place. The supporting
pilasters remain white and almost immaterial. Hitchcock points out that similar treatment of tall, narrow surfaces
had been a characteristic of French secular interiors for a decade or
more, although by no means an so monumental a scale.[41] Thus, as the
Asams were decorating Freising, Effner was using similar panels at
Schleissheim. Earlier such panels had appeared both in the Pagodenburg
in the park of Nymphenburg and in the main castle. But the way in which
these panels relate to their supporting surfaces has become very
different. Consider how the galleries at Freising, together with Cosmas
Damian Asam's frescoed panels, form another row of tripartite
structures, echoing the narrower verticals of the pilasters. Read
horizontally, the frescoed panels form a band that has its place
between the band formed by the pilaster's pink bases and the greenish
frieze of the entablature. The long arcaded walls are thus held
together and unified by a grid of vertical and horizontal bands that
are made up of elements contributed by stucco, fresco, and
architecture. Their different modes are not respected. In just this
respect the Asams' ornamental approach at Freising provides an
antecedent to the Zimmermanns' decorative scheme at Steinhausen (fig.
29). Because of their different dimensions and greater intimacy, the upper
galleries demanded a very different approach (fig. 30). Egid Quirin
makes use of three distinct vocabutaries. The basic accents are set by
the heavy molding, following the frames of the frescoes, sometimes
marking, sometimes disguising the arrises of the severies. Asam
develops here a curiously hybrid form, somewhat in between rib and
frame, not unlike the ribs of late Gothic net vaults. Again we have an
ornament that mediates between architecture and fresco. The field
created by this molding that is not covered by frescoes is decorated
with very delicate bandwork – one is reminded of Rohr, where
the large field left vacant by the unexecuted fresco is filled with
ornament of similar delicacy. "This inner bandwork," Hitchcock
suggests, "is the most distinctly rococo element of the entire
decorative scheme."[42] The suggestion can be accepted only with
reservation: this bandwork is indeed closest to French ornament, but
given the goals of the Bavarian rococo, the ambivalence of the heavy
molding seems more decisive.
Yet a third element plays an important part: a leafy ornament somewhat
in between the heavy molding and the delicate elegance of the
French-derived bandwork. Here we find foliage reminiscent of the
acanthus ornament of the Wessobrunners. Visually this foliage belongs
most to the surface; it is closest to us. Thus, it can cover up both
bandwork and molding. The molding in turn can generate the leaf
ornament, which in places becomes altogether independent of the
supporting ceiling, assuming a fully three-dimensional sculptural
existence. Whenever the framemolding is interrupted as it curves toward
the center of the vault, the scrolls in which it ends become like buds,
breaking forth into leaves (fig. 31). The molding is thus given
something of the quality of living wood. This device, employed again
and again by the Asams, derives from French grotesques, but it also
recalls late Gothic developments-the almost frightening way in which
the ribs of two side chapels in the Marienkirche in Ingolstadt become
independent of the vault, for instance, forming a thorny thicket above
us (fig. 32). At Freising it is this foliage that is least bound to the
architecture, anticipating the freedom of much rocaille, but even
closer to the preceding acanthus ornament of the Wessobrunners. The
history of the Bavarian rococo is the history of a continuing
adaptation of French forms to at times very different ends. When these
ends are kept in view it becomes difficult to speak of a beginning of
the Bavarian rococo. Various beginnings can be suggested, and in each
case something significant is brought into view, yet they don't lead us
to what is most essential. To understand the Bavarian rococo church
– and the term itself may be unfortunate, since it leads
almost inevitably to the application of a measure that finally cannot
do justice to what the Bavarians were after – we have to
place it in a different context.
SPACE AND ILLUSION
A Modest Beginning
In one respect there is a decisive difference between the French and
the Bavarian rococo the Bavarian rococo church demands a frescoed
ceiling. Ceiling frescoes never gained the importance in France that
they had in Italy and later in Germany. The French apparently had a
very different attitude to the ceiling, a greater willingness to accept
it and its boundary instead of trying to negate it with pictorial
illusion. The point should not of course be exaggerated; frescoes do
play an important part in French baroque and rococo architecture. But
rarely in French rococo interiors do we find frescoes that seem to
break open the ceiling, and toward the end of the seventeenth century
emphasis shifts from the ceiling to the wall. The bare ceiling
predominates, perhaps broken by a not-too-obtrusive central ornament.
His tendency to spurn the use of fresco makes Cuvilliés's
interiors seem French in comparison with contemporary works by native
Bavarians.[1] Where Johann Baptist Zimmermann and Johann Georg
Üblhör, Cuvilliés's collaborators in the
Residenz, worked on their own, they tended to use frescoed ceilings. In
this turn to the fresco we have a decisive characteristic of the
Bavarian rococo, both a turn away from the French rococo and a return
to the Italian baroque. Hans Georg Asam, the father of the more famous
brothers, is often said
to have been the first Bavarian to use frescoes of relatively large
size to open the built church to an illusionistic space above. But we
have to go back further: the first church of the Bavarian baroque in
which ceiling frescoes play a significant part, although compared with
later churches this part may seem small enough, is the parish church
(1624-36) in Weilheim (fig. 69). Its three round frescoes occupy only
small areas of the vault. For this reason alone they tend to look
somewhat like accessories, like panel paintings that instead of having
been hung on a wall are fixed to the ceiling, where their darkness
rests somewhat uneasily in the surrounding white. Their perspective in
rendering the heavenly drama above reinforces this impression. Little
attempt has been made to take the spectator's point of view into
account. At first glance it seems as if the frescoes could be moved to
some other location, for instance to one of the walls, without too much
loss; and yet the artist, the local painter Johannes Greither, must
have intended something quite different.[2] Although ignoring our point
of view, he does attempt to make the frescoes appear as if we were
looking through holes cut into the vault into heaven above. The
illusion is reinforced by dark, half-moon-shaped strips at the eastern,
visually lower, edge of the frescoes, which suggest the thickness of
the vault into which the "holes" have been "cut." A few years earlier
the artist's father, Elias Greither, had painted a
now-destroyed fresco in the Residenz in Munich that had used the saure
dark half-moon to create an illusion of depth. More significant as an
early attempt at illusionistic ceiling painting was Hans Werle's
architectural fresco in the Schwarze Saal of the Residenz, it too a
victim of World War II. Werle was following a design by Christoph
Schwarz, the court painter of Wilhelm V, who, celebrated as Pictor
Germaniae Primus, appears as a key figure in transmitting Italian,
especially Venetian, ideas to the north.[3] The impact of this court
art is demonstrated by a comparison of
Johannes Greither's frescoes in the parish church of Weilheim with his
father's decoration of the late Gothic cemetery church in the saure
city, an octagon with one palmlike central pillar from which ribs issue
like branches (fig. 33). The older Greither's frescoes, his first major
work (1591), attempt to speak the language of the Renaissance, but that
language is no longer (or not yet) understood. We can detect echoes of
Schwarz and Mielich, hints of the Italian Renaissance, yet all of these
remain quite superficial. In the end Greither's decorative scheme
remains more Gothic than Renaissance. And yet, in spite of the more
advanced nature of the son's work in the
parish church, the cemetery church forms a more convincing aesthetic
whole. The frescoes of the parish church continue to function much like
panel paintings. But a panel painting has a certain autonomy: it is
experienced as an object that has been brought to a particular place
and that can be taken away again without serious damage to either
painting or architecture. In turning to panel painting the Renaissance
tended to make painting sufficient unto itself. The more pronounced
this self-sufficiency, the greater the threat such painting posed to
the unity of painting and architecture characteristic of the Gothic
church. Seen in this light, the cemetery church is pre-Renaissance. The
artist was content to let the ribs of the vault determine the shape of
the frescoes; as a result they belong in this church as no panel
paintings can, giving the Gothic interior a magical warmth. Taken out
of this setting they would lose their value. Only in the eighteenth
century were Bavarian architects to achieve similarly successful
unions of fresco and architecture, which, however, now presupposed
baroque illusionism.
The fascination of such early Renaissance painters as Masaccio and
Uccello with the possibility of using their newly gained mastery of
one-point perspective to create an illusion of space beyond the limits
imposed by the walls may be understood in part as an attempt to
integrate architectural and pictorial space. The younger Greither's
frescoes in the parish church of Weilheim are part of this tradition,
although hardly at its center. The provincial nature of Greither's art
is painfully apparent when one compares the Weilheim paintings with
Correggio's much earlier frescoes at Parma, where the new illusionism
celebrated its first triumphs. Correggio's achievement rests an a long
development that has its origin in first explorations by Masaccio and
Uccello and includes Mantegna, Melozzo da Forti, and Raphael. Greither
cannot draw on a similar tradition. There did indeed exist a native
German tradition of illusionistic painting; Holbein was admired for his
ability to create spatial illusions. But it is difficult to establish
any connection between this tradition, which at any rate concentrated
an exterior walls, and Johannes Greither's efforts. The development of
illusionistic devices has one root in the felt need to respond to the
destruction of the unity of painting and architecture threatened by the
Renaissance emphasis on panel painting.[4][5] He offers us no more than
pale echoes, twice removed from their Italian originals. And yet his
art marks a beginning, a first effort, significant for pointing in
what, in Bavaria at least, were new directions.
Heaven Made Visible
The parish church of Weilheim found no quick successors; the second
decade of the Thirty Years War had brought building activity to a
virtual standstill. This makes it all the more significant that the
first major church to be built after the war, the abbey church St.
Lorenz in Kempten, again makes use of frescoes, perhaps in dependence
on Weilheim.[6] Although the Kempten frescoes occupy a larger part of
the nave vault than those in Weilheim, the artist, Andreas Asper of
Constance, was even less able than Johannes Greither to extend the
architectural space below with the illusion of another space above. The
frescoes look more than ever like panel paintings set into the stucco.
There is no device corresponding to Greither's half-moons, and while
the heavenly drama Greither unfolds at least hints at the Italian
illusionistic tradition, Asper's frescoes fail to modify the space in
any significant way. The same is true of the paintings, usually small,
that appear with increasing frequency in church interiors during the
second half of the seventeenth century. In most cases they provide
little more than accents. The stuccoed decoration remains far more
important.
A decisive step forward was taken by Hans Georg Asam (1649-1711), first
at Benediktbeuern (1682-83) and then, more confidently, at Tegernsee
(1689-94). A student of the court painter Nicolaus Prugger, Asam had
learned in Italy about the possibilities of opening up architectural
space by means of illusionistic frescoes. Karl Mindera points to
Veronese's San Silvestro as a likely source of inspiration. But of at
least equal importance seems to have been the impression made an Asam
by the newly finished church at Garsten (near Steyr, Austria) which he
visited on his return from Italy.[7] The paintings at Benediktbeuern,
for the most part not frescoes but
done in tempera,[8] no longer appear as panels that can be moved from
place to place without loss. The perspective of each painting is such
that it demands to be seen from a point of view below and somewhat to
the west. Considered in themselves, these paintings are hardly
overwhelming. Asam is no Veronese or Correggio. And yet we can
understand Mindera's enthusiasm; given their context they must have
seemed absolutely astounding." For the first time in the Bavarian
baroque this world and the world above flow into each other; something
known only to faith is made visible."[9] Mindera has traced both
Italian and Flemish influences. The cloud podests are said to derive
from Pietro da Cortona, while other details
– such as the similarity of Asam's St. Cecilia to a Rubens
sketch for the Jesuit church in Antwerp, the conception of Christ in
the painting of the Resurrection, and the bishop of the St. Wolfgang
scene – suggest that Asam must have been familiar with the
Flemish painter's work in Antwerp. His son Philip was later to enter a
monastery in Brussels.[10] Yet while we can agree with Mindera that
Hans Georg Asam has carried
the fusion of the world below and the world above further than any
Bavarian painter before him, this fusion is not without tension. In
spite of the perspective, which demands that the pictures be seen from
below, their very heavy stuccoed frames make them look too autonomous.
This tendency is reinforced by their shape-elongated rectangles that
derive from the nave's division into bays (fig. 34). In light of the
illusionistic tradition of Italy another consideration
is more significant. Italian illusionism tends to follow one of two
strategies: (1) The real architecture is continued into the fresco. If
we place ourselves correctly, usually below or to the west of the
center of the fresco, it becomes difficult to detect just where the
real fresco begins and where the architecture leaves off. Through
openings in this illusory architecture above the shapes of heaven,
clouds, angels, and saints are allowed to enter. This type of
illusionism is associated with Andrea Pozzo, whose work was made
generally available by a publication of his designs that appeared in
Augsburg in 1702. (2) A more usual strategy, employed for example by
Correggio in his decoration of the cathedral at Parma, makes no attempt
to continue the built architecture into the fresco. The fresco appears
here much like an opening cut into the vault through which we are
allowed to look into heaven. It was this strategy that Greither was
trying to employ, if rather ineffectively, in the parish church of
Weilheim. The first approach offers this advantage over the latter: it
increases the illusion. At the same time, however, the fresco can only
be seen correctly from one particular spot; the further we move away
from that position the more decidedly the illusion is unmasked. Because
it avoids representations of architecture, which tend to fix a
particular point of view, the second approach allows more readily for a
change of place. Yet for the same reason it tends to leave our Sense of
a solid vault untouched, suggesting at best openings cut into it. The
quadratura of a Pozzo, an the other hand, can go a long way toward
eliminating our sense of the vault altogether, achieving a genuine
fusion of real and pictorial space. In Benediktbeuern Asam follows
neither tradition. Instead he offers
something like a synthesis, perhaps only an unhappy compromise between
illusionism and expectations tied to traditional panel painting. The
result is, given the criteria of Italian illusionism, an impossibility.
Illusionism demands that one point of view unite both real and
pictorial space into a whole. Only what could reasonably be expected to
appear above us could be allowed to appear on the ceiling; first of
all, of course, heaven with its clouds, but also a more or less
fantastic architecture, which could conceivably rest on the real
architecture. Within these restrictions, not every theme of traditional
religious painting could lend itself to such an illusionism. A
representation of Christ's baptism or crucifixion, for example,
requires the inclusion of landscape elements in the fresco. But a
strict illusionism rules this out-a landscape in a ceiling fresco
amounts to a pictorial contradiction. The artist had to look for other
themes better suited to illusionistic treatment, such as the saints in
their heavenly glory or the Assumption of the Virgin. At
Benediktbeuern, however, we are given representations of this world.
Asam does not shy away from representing the earth with its trees and
brooks. Indeed, as long as a ceiling painting is looked at as if it
were a panel painting there is no reason to exclude such elements. But
to illusionism they must appear an Unding, a visual paradox. Why did
the Bavarians accept this paradox, while Italian quadratura found few
wholehearted supporters? Why did Hans Georg Asam's impossibilities
appeal to the Bavarians as Pozzo's illusionism did not? At least one
reason is the Bavarians' insistence that the fresco preach to us, that
it tell of events and scenes that illusionism could not handle. But
besides this insistence on Story there seems to be something else at
work, an unwillingness to make space comprehensible. Perspective offers
us something like mastery of the infinite. Bavarian artists tended to
resist such mastery. I shall return to this point in chapter 4. At
Tegernsee Hans Georg Asam carried the achievement of Benediktbeuern
a step further. In spite of the fact that Tegernsee and Benediktbeuern
used to be attributed to the same architect, the spaces are quite
dissimilar and present the painter with different opportunities.[11]
Tegernsee is fundamentally still a Romanesque structure, which was
first changed in the fifteenth century and given its present form by
Antonio Riva. While Benediktbeuern is a wall-pillar church with
galleries, Tegernsee is a basilica with transept and a shallow-domed
crossing. At Benediktbeuern the vault is flatter; the individual bays
are rather narrow, forcing the painter to content himself with oblong
towel-like areas. Tegernsee, with its wider bays, gave Asam a happier
format, while the dome confronted him with a new task and provided him
with a much larger area than he had had to work with up to this time.
At the same time the interior of Tegernsee is more compartmentalized
than at Benediktbeuern. Our attention is divided between the nave, the
transept, the dome, the side aisles, and an entrance hall. The frescoes
of the nave follow the pattern set in Benediktbeuern,
although the effect is generally happier. In part this is because of
the changed format; more important, some of the stiffness of
Benediktbeuern is gone. Like the ceiling paintings in Benediktbeuern,
the frescoes in Tegernsee still recall panel paintings. Here, as there,
Asam does not hesitate to paint hills, trees, and brooks an the
ceiling. Very different is his approach to the shallow dome over the
crossing.
More than any earlier fresco in Bavarian baroque architecture, this one
affects the space. As our eye moves from the fresco's edge toward its
center, we appear to leave the darker circles of clouds, supporting
countless saints and angels, and rise into the light enveloping the
Trinity. Only with this fresco does Asam follow the Italian tradition
of Correggio. How little this tradition agrees with the approach in the
other frescoes is sensed as soon as one enters the church: the
Transfiguration with its hilltop appears beyond and therefore above the
heaven opening up over the crossing, which is thus revealed to be just
another picture. Its illusion would have been more effective had the
frescoes of the nave remained unexecuted. We are left with the tension
between panel painting and illusionism.
Impossible Illusions
Cosmas Damian Asam, who was to become the most important painter of the
South German rococo, inherited this problem from his father. But the
father only visited Italy; the son studied there. After the death of
Hans Georg, abbot Quirin Millon of Tegernsee made it possible for the
two brothers to complete their studies in Rome, where Cosmas Damian is
supposed to have worked with Pierleone Ghezzi, although the influence
of Giovan Battista Gaulli, Andrea Pozzo, and Carlo Maratti is more
apparent in his later work.[12] On March 23, 1713 he was awarded first
prize by the Accademia di San Luca.[13] Less than a year later we find
him back in Germany, at Ensdorf, like Tegernsee a Benedictine
monastery.[14] Indeed, the abbot who called Cosmas Damian to Ensdorf
came from Tegernsee, where he had seen the older Asam paint his
frescoes.
The tensions that mark Tegernsee are also found at Ensdorf. Here, too,
the frescoes filling the three bays of the nave retain many of the
panel-like qualities of the corresponding frescoes in Tegernsee,
although in this first major work the son already shows himself a far
more accomplished artist than the father. Gone are Hans Georg's
stiffness and dull colors. As at Tegernsee the shallow dome over the
crossing, here too given to a representation of saints and angels
adoring the Trinity, is treated in a very different manner, closer to
the illusionism of Correggio. There are, however, significant changes.
The son's more dynamic approach suggests careful study of Giovanni
Lanfranco's and Pietro da Cortona's Roman frescoes. Two spiral
movements lead us to the center of the fresco; greater identity is
given to individual groups. While clouds are allowed to spill out of
this fresco over the frame, as if to emphasize its more illusionistic
character, the frescoes of the nave, dealing with scenes from the life
of St. James, remain securely framed.[15] It seems that Cosmas Damian,
like his father, considered Italian illusionism just one possible
approach to the problem of fresco painting, to be employed only when
the theme permitted it, as for instance in representations of the Glory
of Heaven. When other themes were given to the painter, as in the nave
of Ensdorf, another approach, closer to panel painting, was employed.
In Bavaria (in Italy and neighboring Austria the situation was quite
different) [16] the painter had to subordinate himself to the program
furnished by the abbot or whoever else had invented it; not an artist,
at any rate, but an ecclesiastic. The literary dimension of the
frescoes remained more important than the requirements of illusionism.
The peculiar development of fresco painting in Bavaria can only be
understood if this insistence an the priority of the word is kept in
mind; and an interesting question is why in Bavaria the demand for
story was given such importance. At any rate it proved strong enough to
prevent the full dominance of Italian illusionism. Cosmas Damian Asam's
next major work in the Benedictine abbey church in
Michelfeld (1717-18) – here, too, the abbot had come from
Tegernsee
– brings some new developments. The church itself, a rather
plain rectangle of four bays without either crossing or clearly
marked-off choir, presented an unusual problem: if the easternmost bay
was to function as a choir, the decorators had to come to the
architect's assistance. Asam's fresco does just that. In Austrian or
Bohemian fashion the choir vault is completely given over to painting,
which raises the illusion of a dome-a real dome had originally been
plannedabove the choir bay (fig. 35). Perhaps it was this necessity of
giving the choir special importance, but whatever the reason, never
before had a German painter so effectively united real and fresco
space. None had come so close to the spirit of Italian quadratura. Only
a narrow rib-band, and even it invaded by clouds spilling out of
the choir fresco, separates choir and nave. The frescoes of the nave
resemble those of Ensdorf, although here they have become almost square
and take up a still larger part of the vault. From the narrow
rectangles of Benediktbeuern to the squarish frescoes of Michelfeld a
steady evolution leads to frescoes spanning two or more bays, such as
the large fresco Cosmas Damian was to paint a little later in
Aldersbach. But in Michelfeld, as in the earlier churches, we are left
with the tension between illusionism and panel painting. Indeed, due to
the increased illusionism of the choir fresco this tension has become
even more pronounced. From Michelfeld Cosmas Damian Asam was called to
yet another
Benedictine abbey, to Weingarten, to help decorate the immense church
that had just been built there, a wallpillar church with a full dome
over the crossing (1718-20). The very strength of this architecture,
the clearly articulated bays and the dome, make this very much a
baroque that is to say in this context backward-looking-church, in
spite of many forward-looking details, such as the French-influenced
delicate stuccowork by Franz Schmuzer. Given this space, it must have
been difficult for Asam to push further in the direction he had pursued
at Ensdorf and Michelfeld. There is little surprise in the dorre
fresco, another circular composition, showing the same spiral movements
already familiar from Ensdorf, although here the dome's lantern poses
an additional problem in that its strongly architectural quality breaks
the pictorial illusion that the fresco is trying to create. The Same
must be said of the dome's drum: the brightness of Asam's frescoed
heaven simply cannot compete with the bright windows below (fig. 36).
As if to compete with the architect an more favorable grounds, Asam
raises a second dome above the choir, which makes comparison between
the architect's and the painter's work almost inevitable. As at
Michelfeld, Asam is following here a design from Pozzo's Perspectiva
pictorum et architectorum (fig. 37). The rivalry between architecture and painting is carried further in the
nave. Given Cosmas Damian's earlier work one would expect another
version of the kind of fresco first created by his father in
Benediktbeuern. Instead Cosmas Damian seems here, too, to follow the
example of Pozzo. The middle fresco
– larger than the two adjoining frescoes, effecting a certain
centralization
– at first appears as just another exercise in quadratura
painting. Indeed, the relationship between the architecture of the
fresco and the real architecture in which we stand would seem to have
been carried to new heights, for the former is now not simply an
extension, but an imitation of the latter.[17] The massive pillars of
the church with their vigorous capitals reappear in the fresco, as do
the stuccoed rib-Bands joining them. Not that the imitation is
complete: in the fresco the very delicate concave galleries are
replaced with more robust little balconies, which now curve out, into
the space, while the place of the fresco itself is taken by an oval
opening that plays somewhat the part of the round illusionistic
frescoes of Tegernsee and Ensdorf (fig. 38). Through this opening we
see with St. Benedict the Glory of Heaven. This is an important change.
We see the saint seeing the Glory of Heaven; Benedict is seen by us
both as the spectator of a sacred theatre and as an actor in the play
the painter has staged above us. He mediates between us and heaven.
Again spiral movements draw us upward on cloudy paths, through the
opening in the painted architecture into the light above. Only in this
fresco is the frame broken by a group of devils, cast down by the power
of Benedict's cross. What is the point of this doubling of the real architecture in the
fresco?[18] Does it help to increase the illusionistic effect? Is Asam
trying to outdo Pozzo? If so, the fresco must be judged a failure, for
in its juxtaposition with reality imitation is revealed to be just
that. The illusion that the painted architecture above has the same
mode of reality as that architecture in which we stand is thereby
destroyed, just as it is by the juxtaposition of the real dome above
the crossing and the painted dome beyond.
But let us consider the fresco in somewhat more detail. The oval
opening in the fresco is analogous to the fresco itself; the fresco is
like an opening to heaven, the opening to heaven like a painting.
Instead of being permitted to remain captured by the illusion created
by the painter, we are reminded that it is an illusion, theatre. And
yet that reality in which we stand, Franz Beer's pillars and Franz
Schmuzer's stuccowork, is like that theatrical reality above, which
does in fact mirror it. Our space, too, is thus rendered theatrical:
theatre within theatre. (Imagine an actor who thinks his part done
walking off stage, only to discover that he is still on stage, still
acting, playing his part in a more encompassing play.) The two
adjoining frescoes – a representation of the
Assumption of the Virgin to the east, to the west the Blood of Christ
as a fountain of grace (and thus a celebration of the relic of the Holy
Blood that had made Weingarten an important pilgrimage place)
– appear rather closer to the panel-like frescoes of
Michelfeld and Ensdorf. But here, too, a decisive step has been taken.
True to their origin in panel painting, the earlier frescoes demand a
horizon parallel to the lower, (that is, eastern) edge of the painting.
The Holy Blood fresco follows this general scheme. But in the
Assumption fresco Asam attempts a very different spatial organization.
Perhaps it is best understood as an attempt to fuse the kind of
perspective that he had learned from Pozzo, a perspective that lent
itself to the representation of interior spaces that could conceivably
be above the spectator, such as a dome, with the models provided by his
father.[19] In many ways the perspective of the Assumption fresco is
related to that of the choir fresco. But instead of looking up into an
interior space we now look up from our place on the ground into an
architectonic landscape that demands a second ground above. The fresco
invites us to rise, quite literally, and to step into the landscape
above. Here we meet an important difference between the Bavarian rococo
and the Italian baroque. The illusionism of a Pozzo leaves us secure in
our point of view; the impossible illusionism of the Bavarians, with
its landscapes above, calls our point of view into question. We shall
have to return to this difference. Here I would only like to
suggest that there is a relationship between the spatial organization
of the St. Benedict fresco and the Assumption. To return to the former:
a doubling of the architecture suggests a doubling of the ground that
supports this architecture. A second ground is thus at least implicit
in the St. Benedict fresco as well. In this respect, it, too, breaks
with Pozzo. But why the doubling of this world by another? Why not
simply open up
the architecture to the heavenly sphere? What was Asam after? Perhaps
we do have here the result of the impossible attempt to fuse Pozzo's
illusionism with traditional panel painting. But such an account cannot
explain the decisive importance that Asam's innovations had for the
subsequent development of rococo painting and architecture. Spaces such
as that first created here, extended from one to several bays, were to
become characteristic of the Bavarian rococo church.
Beyond Illusionism
The step from a fresco filling just one bay to one covering three, thus
uniting the bays of the nave, was taken by Cosmas Damian Asam at
Aldersbach, his next major commission (1720).[20] This time it was the
Cistercians who invited him. It is not St. Benedict who appears here as
mediator, but St. Bernard, whose Christmas Vision is represented by the
main fresco. Again the painter does not attempt to open heaven itself
for us; instead he is portraying a vision. The heaven of Aldersbach is
a mediated heaven, a heaven seen through the eyes of the Cistercian
saint.[21]
Little remains that still recalls Pozzo: above all the heavy marble
balustrade that uses the fresco frame for a base. As is usual in
Bavarian churches, the point of view dictated to us is not below the
center of the fresco, but near the entrance. Thus the balustrade
becomes less and less visible as we look from east to west, that is, as
we look up; at the top it disappears altogether. This balustrade forms
something like a barrier preventing us from entering the fresco (fig.
39). Only at one point, at the bottom, where the Balustrade curves
toward us
in the form of a little balcony, is it broken. Here there is an opening
that invites us to step into the fresco. But the way is blocked; the
space through which we would have to pass is filled by the sleeping St.
Bernard. In the cartouche below him we read: Bernhardus Nascente ex
Verbo Infante Magistro Mellif luus Ecclesiae Doctor "Taught by the Word
become Child St. Bernard became the honet'-tongued teacher of the
church." His position and posture clearly separate the Saint from the
Christmas scene above. The scene itself uses few of the familiar
conventions. The stable has become a fantastic arch. Leading up to it
is a double stairway, shepherds hurrying up the steps toward the Child
in the center, a source of sunlike light. This scene is tied to St.
Bernard by an angel, who, "like a speaker in a play,"[22] seems to
beckon him to join the shepherds and to adore the Child. The shepherds
are joined by a group of angels on the right who are performing one of
St. Bernard's hymns: Nil Canitur Suavius quarr Jesus Dei Filius. This
reference in the fresco to St. Bernard is somewhat surprising, another
reminder that what we see here is not a representation of an historical
event, but of a vision of that event. The upper half of the fresco is
given to a heavenly assembly reminiscent of such compositions as Cosmas
Damian Asam's glory fresco in Ensdorf; yet it also bears a relationship
to the scene below: it, too, has a brilliant center, only God the
Father now has taken the place of the Divine Child. Upper closure is
provided by a brownish curtain carried by angels, which in its curves
parallels rather closely the rhythms of the stable architecture below.
The spiral movement, up the right stairway to Joseph and the Divine
Child, is paralleled by another such movement above, leading from the
angels carrying their Gloria in Excelsis Deo in a sweeping arc up to
God. Above and below there are corresponding supporting movements: the
group of the adoring shepherd and the Virgin below is paralleled by the
two angels carrying the Cross above, while the angelic musicians to the
right of the Child are paralleled by another group of angels above. The
whole fresco is thus organized around two centers that function
somewhat like the foci of an ellipse. Each becomes the center of what,
although oval, is Seen as a circular composition. The two centers are
joined by a reversed S: the C-like arc leading from the angels carrying
their Gloria banner to God above extends in another C-like arc below
and joins that group to the Christ Child. One detail merits special
attention. Why did Asam choose to bound the
fresco above by the group of four angels carrying a reddish-brown
drapery? Not only does it provide closure and a parallel to the
architecture below, it also serves to emphasize the theatricality of
this fresco: as if the curtain had just been raised to permit us to See
the sacred spectacle of God in his glory. And yet this angelic theatre
is itself part of a theatrical composition. Again: theatre within
theatre. The four angels above stand also in a relationship to the
angel below, mediating between St. Bernard and the Christmas scene.
Even visually this is apparent in the green of their dress. The angels
here appear as those who make St. Bernard's and our own vision
possible. They are the messengers of the holy. And yet these angels are
themselves part of a theatrical composition. The fresco thus operates
an several planes. St. Bernard and the balustrade are closest to us.
Next come the angels, clothed in the green of hope. Only through the
mediation of Saint and angels are we led to the twofold vision below
and above. In its treatment of perspective this fresco seems rather
close to the
Assumption fresco of Weingarten, although the great size of the
Aldersbach fresco posed new problems. Even more pronounced is a sense
that to see the fresco correctly we should rise. We seem to be in the
stable's cellar. As is usual in Bavarian rococo churches, the fresco
should be seen from a point of view near the entrance, but even from
the most privileged point of view available to us the architecture does
not quite seem to stand. It is impossible to see this fresco correctly.
Following Hans Geiger, Rupprecht suggests that Asam employs here the
device of the "inclined plane." Measured by the demands of Pozzo's
illusionism the fresco appears tilted out of its horizontal position,
as if it had been pushed upward at its western end: we sense that there
is a correct point of view, but that we should have to rise,
angel-like, to reach it.[23] This attributes to the painter a more
careful use of perspective than the fresco warrants. The free use of
multiple vanishing points leads to an architecture that, measured by
the laws of geometry, simply makes no sense. Cosmas Damian Asam's
surreal perspective, his references to the
theatre, his doubling of the familiar world by another above, all make
it difficult to speak of illusionism. just because the Aldersbach
fresco cannot be seen correctly from any point of view, it cannot be
said to extend that space in which we actually find ourselves
illusionistically. If it is a weakness of Pozzo's illusionism that only
from one particular place is the illusion powerful enough to take hold
of us, Asam presents us with an image that can never quite convince,
that will always remain theatre. The Bavarian rococo calls its
theatricality to our attention. But an illusion that advertises its
illusory character can no longer function as such. The illusion has
been unmasked. Why this tremendous production? Can it really be
dismissed as just
theatre? Or is it born of a more ambiguous response? No longer able to
take Italian illusionism quite seriously, the artists and their society
were yet not ready to give it up altogether. "Look at what I have
done," the painter seems to be saying, "but don't take it too
seriously; it is just play, just my attempt to render not what
transpired in Bethlehem, but the vision of the event given us by St.
Bernard." Notable is the stress on mediation, also a new historical
awareness. We see the Nativity through the eyes of the saint. And the
real Nativity? The artist has become too modest to attempt to capture
it; he is content with reflections, echoes. Illusionism has given way
to a play with illusion that unmasks itself. Should we still speak here
of illusionism? Rupprecht disputes Geiger's
claim that in Aldersbach Asam had gone beyond illusionism with the
argument that this has to be granted only as long as illusionism is
identified with the quadratura of Pozzo. Illusionism, he suggests, has
to be understood differently. The illusionistic principle is
fundamentally a question of the degree
of reality. In every case the illusionistic object and the
illusionistic space demand to be experienced as real to the same degree
as the actual space. Aldersbach shows that even without a constructive
connection with the space of the church, a visible, equally real sphere
in the fresco can be given.[24] I would question "equally real." What
is revealed by the Aldersbach
fresco does not possess the same degree of reality as our own world.
What we are permitted to see is a vision, and that vision is in one
sense less real than our world; as the sleeping St. Bernard and the
pictorial means chosen suggest, it has rather the reality of a dream.
And yet this dream puts us into touch with what is more real than our
world. Its irreality is a superreality. The art of Cosmas Damian Asam
is born of the conviction that what is truly real cannot be revealed by
illusionistic means, for that would make it too relative to our human
point of view. If we are to point to a higher reality that human point
of view has to be put into question. The Aldersbach fresco does this
quite literally through its use of perspective. The rejection of
baroque illusionism in favor of the tension between
our world and a double of that world above, thus threatening the unity
of the aesthetic space, was to become characteristic of the Bavarian
rococo church. Its frescoes therefore occupy a place somewhat in
between the paintings of the older Asam, which in spite of their
illusionistic perspective remain tied to panel painting, and Pozzo's
illusionism. This is reflected by a new attitude to the frame, which is
perhaps the most readily noted characteristic of the Bavarian rococo.
To understand this attitude a few general observations on the
significance of framing a picture are in order. The frame creates first
of all a barrier separating the picture from what supports it. The
reality in which the observer stands, and beyond this the familiar
world with its cares and concerns, are bracketed out. The frame thus
has its foundation in a need for aesthetic distance; the art work is
established as an autonomous reality. But perhaps the word
"established" is too strong here. Does the frame
establish the art object as an autonomous reality? Is it not rather
because the art object establishes itself as an independent reality
that it demands the barrier represented by the frame? Many a painting
is so obviously autonomous that the frame seems superfluous; the
painting is composed in such a way that its borders seem inevitable. In
such cases the frame is only an external expression of this
inevitability. Indeed, if the autonomy of the painting is sufficiently
secured from within, the frame may seem redundant. The picture no
longer needs a frame, as is the case with many modern paintings. A
framed fresco cannot function illusionistically. Illusionism thus has
only two options. It can try to merge the frescoed space and real space
so completely that it becomes impossible for the observer to tell where
one begins and the other leaves off. This, the method of Pozzo, has the
already-mentioned disadvantage that the illusion works only as long as
we occupy some determined point of view, usually right below the center
of the fresco. When this privileged point of view is abandoned the
illusion is destroyed. The results are at times grotesque, as Giovanni
Francesco Marchini's fresco in Balthasar Neumanns church in Wiesentheid
(1728-29), for example, shows. A second approach interprets what we see
in the fresco as higher realms glimpsed through openings cut into the
space that actually encloses us. Where this approach is taken we do
tend to find strongly articulated frames, but these frames are
experienced, not as an expression of the autonomy of the fresco, but
simply as the termination of the vault, where often this termination
can be read at the same time as the base of a merely painted
architecture in the fresco. Closer to Munich, the still earlier little
church in Kreuzpullach
(1710) deserves to be mentioned (fig. 81). The stucco here is by Johann
Georg Bader, the fresco by Johann Georg Bergmüller, who was to
become director of the Art Academy in Augsburg. Since it seems somewhat
unlikely that Asam knew the Franconian examples, Kreuzpullach could
have occasioned the shape given to the fresco in Aldersbach. More
convincingly, the scalloped frame can be traced back (fig. 40) to such
publications as Paul Decker's Fürstlicher Baumeister (1711).
But regardless of the antecedents, the scalloped frame of the
Aldersbach fresco is as important for the subsequent development of the
Bavarian rococo church as its playful transformation of Italian
illusionism. Both are indeed closely related. The mature rococo of
Bavaria tends to reject these solutions and with them illusionism. Not
that it returns to the frame in its traditional sense; it chooses
instead the scalloped frame, formed of different curved and straight
line segments-which Hitchcock quite correctly makes a defining mark of
the South German rococo.[25] It is impossible to credit Cosmas Damian
Asam with this innovation. In tracing the prehistory of the scalloped
frame Hitchcock points to Schloss Weissenstein in Pommersfelden and to
the Kaisersaal in Ebrach (ca. 1718), both of which are Said to reflect
Viennese influences.[26]
To understand this relationship we should ask ourselves: Why do frames
tend to come in a relatively limited array of shapes? Why do they tend
to be rectangular, less often circular or oval? Is it not because the
closing function of the frame is obscured by irregularity and
complexity, robbing the painting of its autonomy? The scalloped frame
is therefore a device to weaken the usual function of the frame without
surrendering it altogether. The picture is framed and yet the frame is
not secure. In this connection we should reconsider the
already-mentioned clouds spilling over the frame of the Aldersbach
fresco, as well as the riband weaving in and out of the picture. In the
last chapter I discussed these as prefiguring the stucco zone that in
the Bavarian rococo church mediates between architecture and painting.
The Bavarians' play with Italian illusionism holds the key to their
enthusiastic adoption of rocaille.
Mediating Frames
In his unwillingness to settle an a particular scheme, Cosmas Damian
Asam is unique among the fresco painters active in eighteenth-century
Bavaria. Every new commission seems to lead to a rethinking of the
problem of the fresco's relationship to the architecture and to new
solutions. I cannot begin to do justice here to the development of his
art, but we must consider the Nativity fresco in Einsiedeln
(1725-26).[27] With its many different compartments, the complex space Caspar
Moosbrugger had created had to resist the kind of unity at which the
Brothers Asam were aiming. There is therefore no unifying fresco as at
Aldersbach, nor could the painter draw the vault together as Cosmas
Damian had done in Freising (1723-24), with its painted clouds,
spilling over the frames, trailing from one fresco to the next. And yet
Einsiedeln does present us with a further development of ideas that
were already present in Aldersbach and Freising. Cosmas Damian's handling of the domed third bay especially demands our
attention. The dome itself is covered almost completely by a
representation of the Nativity; only the pendentives are given over to
framed medallions of allegorical figures of Mercy and Truth, Justice
and Peace. The fresco does not look framed; it simply ends where it
meets the dome's supporting arches and the medallions. All this recalls
Freising, where the frescoes extend similarly downward between the
severies of the vault to almost meet the cornice. And as at Freising,
where painted ornament takes the place of stuccoed decoration, so the
Nativity fresco in Einsiedeln can be divided into two quite different
zones: a pictorial center representing the Nativity and an outer
framing zone that is less pictorial than ornamental. Although at Aldersbach, too, Cosmas Damian Asam had painted the
Nativity, there are striking differences between the two frescoes. In
part they reflect the different tasks that had been set. In Aldersbach
the fresco serves to unite three bays; its shape is necessarily oblong,
a fact Asam exploits by organizing the fresco around two foci. In
Einsiedeln he was given instead a large dome that demanded a circular
composition. The western point of view so characteristic of the
Bavarian rococo therefore had to be modified: it does work for the
Nativity scene that occupies the area of the fresco just above the
choir arch, but different parts of the fresco demand different points
of view, roughly speaking diagonally below whatever part of the fresco
is being observed. Although the fresco does have two scenic centers
– opposite the Nativity scene the angels sing their Gloria to
the shepherds – spiraling patterns, already familiar from
other Asam compositions, establish the small lantern rising above the
dome as the real center of the fresco. In this little dome we see God
the Father, holding the olive branch of peace, and the dove of the Holy
Spirit. Both are linked to the world below by their downward motion and
by angels rushing from heaven to earth. The lantern's central
importance is further heightened by the orange-golden light falling
through its tinted panes, a device the Asam brothers had brought to
Bavaria from Rome. The real light of the lantern appears as the origin
of the painted golden light emanating from the Christ Child. The second outer zone, which in Freising is given mostly to rich
mosaique, is here elaborated into a fantastic scroll architecture, far
more ambiguous than the corresponding ornament in Freising in that it
functions as framing ornament and yet has an architectural quality that
makes it part of the depicted scene. Once again Paul Decker's
Fürstlicher Baumeister provides an obvious source. The
observer is not permitted to separate these two zones too sharply.
Although in its stuccolike forms and colors quite different from the
Christmas scene, the scroll architecture itself merges with the ruin in
which the Holy Family has found refuge. Included in this ornamental
zone are allegorical figures, which correspond to those of the
medallions below and in their plaster whiteness suggest the stucco
sculptures so popular at the time; but like the gesturing angel in the
Aldersbach fresco, they also relate to Joseph and to the shepherd
carrying his lamb to the Child, and thus become part of the picture.
Similarly, white "stuccoed" foliage is placed next to green plants. But
if the ornament of this framing zone thus tends to become part of the
picture itself, it also resembles the stuccoed scroll ornament of the
choir arch. More effectively than in any of their earlier churches, the
Brothers Asam have created a zone binding fresco and architecture
together. What in Einsiedeln is still a painted zone becomes stuccoed decoration
in Munich's St. Anna im Lehel (1729). The architect, Johann Michael
Fischer, had given the Asam brothers an ovalized, highly unified
interior. The vault, tentlike in its lightness, is carried by eight
fluted wall-pillars, which function much like the slightly later free
pillars of Dominikus Zimmermann's Steinhausen. Before the destruction
of World War II most of the vault was occupied by Cosmas Damian Asam's
large, roughly oval fresco of St. Anna in Glory, framed by a vigorously
scalloped molding.[28] The pendentive zone is mostly given to gold and
blue-gray mosaique, which mediates between the tectonic wall-pillars
and the fresco. What makes this mediation so effective is the way in
which segments of the frame molding are tied to the arches supporting
the vault: above the cornice of each wall-pillar spirals generate
stuccoed gables above the wider longitudinal and transverse arches. As
in the almost contemporary Steinhausen, the gables are Seen as both
part of the frame and extensions of the architecture. Especially these
volute gables suggest the painted scroll architecture of Einsiedeln.
Only now this framing zone is taken out of the fresco: the stuccoed
ornament forms a third mediating zone between architecture and fresco
(fig. 80). In St. Anna stucco is used effectively but sparingly. It becomes
elaborate only in the cartouche bearing the Bavarian arms, which almost
fills the stuccoed gable above the choir arch. Particularly interesting
is an easily overlooked detail: the Banner carried by the angel is
thrust into the fresco above so forcefully that just at this point a
piece of the stuccoed gable is missing. Instead we see the frescoed
ground. Has the frame been pierced by the angel, or was it this opening
that permitted the angel to leave the heavenly scene above and enter
the nave of the church? While the stuccoed gables appear like
extensions of the architecture, the angel appears more like an
extension of the fresco. Architecture and picture fuse. St. Anna is the
first church to show modestly, but flawlessly, that triple structure
which helps to define the Bavarian rococo church: the tectonic
verticals of the wall-pillars are led by a mediating stucco zone over
into the fresco.[29]
An Exemplary Rococo Church
More than Cosmas Damian Asam and his students Matthäus
Günther and the brothers Scheffler we associate Johann Baptist
Zimmermann with the rococo. His frescoes in Steinhausen and Die Wies,
incredibly light and airy with their pastel blues and grays, seem to
have realized possibilities only hinted at in the work of Cosmas Damian
Asam. Given this on-the-whole correct impression one is surprised to
discover that Zimmermann, born in 1680, was six years older than Asam.
Zimmermann was almost forty when the Aldersbach fresco was painted, and
just fifty when he started an his first major fresco in Steinhausen.
Although it is false that Zimmermann had taken up painting only after
he had reached the age of fifty, as is reported in a recent survey of
baroque architecture,[30] his earlier efforts hardly suggest that his
would be a major contribution to Bavarian fresco painting. We have no certain knowledge of where he studied painting; perhaps in
Augsburg, which had become the most important center for painting in
southern Germany, rivaling Vienna and Prague.[31] But in the first half
of his life Zimmermann appears as a decorator who also used painting.
His first frescoes function first of all as accents in a larger
decorative scheme, significant only for their colors, which already at
this time tend to be lighter than those of his local rivals.[32] In
none of his early churches do his frescoes have the importance that
they had almost thirty years earlier in Benediktbeuern or Garsten (see
fig. 5). As already mentioned, in 1720 Zimmermann was called to Munich to help
with the decoration of the elector's palace in Schleissheim. His work
there brought him into close contact with the two most significant and
innovative painters then active in southern Germany, Cosmas Damian Asam
and Jacopo Amigoni (1675-1752), a much-traveled Venetian. Like
Zimmermann, Amigoni had worked in Ottobeuren before being called to
Schleissheim.[33]
In Schleissheim Asam painted two major frescoes: the somewhat cramped
Venus in the Forge of Vulcan (1720) in the dome above the Stairhall and
a Martyrdom of St. Maximilian (1721) in the palace's Great Chapel.
Amigoni's much more extensive work (1723-25) includes the large
frescoes Dido Receives Aeneas in the Dining Hall and Aeneas and Turnus
Battle for the Hand of Lavinia in the Great Hall (fig. 41). More than
Asam, the cosmopolitan Venetian impressed and influenced
Zimmermann.[34] New, at least in Bavarian fresco painting, is Amigoni's
resolute turn toward landscape. Greens, blues, silvery and brownish
grays gain a new importance. It is as if a window had been opened. By
comparison Asam's slightly earlier and thematically related fresco
above the Stairhall seems dense and cluttered. The novelty of the
fresco in Steinhausen is at least in part due to
Zimmermann's adaptation to a church ceiling of the model provided by
Amigoni's secular frescoes at Schleissheim. In Zimmermann's art the
atmospheric sky above a landscape merges with the heavenly realm of God
and His angels. Heaven is brought, usually quite literally, down to
earth. In the church frescoes of the mature rococo the darker and
warmer golden and orange tones of the baroque give way to lighter blues
and grays. Again Aldersbach may be taken to anticipate this new
approach, but in the Asam church blue still plays only a minor part. It
triumphs only in Steinhausen. This triumph is of iconographic interest:
in Zimmermanns art the idea of heaven is naturalized, which is not
necessarily the Same as secularized. The rococo church presupposes this
naturalization (fig. 42).[35] Unlike Cosmas Damian Asam, who never
settled on any one solution,
Zimmermann remained faithful to the fresco style he had worked out in
Steinhausen. In his later frescoes we find the Same pastel colors
hinting at a sunny day in late spring or early summer. Blue is given an
important role; below we find green, gray, and brown tones; groups of
figures provide more colorful accents, as do architectural props. The
older glory compositions have left their trace near the center of the
fresco, where we often find spiraling representations of the angelic
realm. There the blue changes to more golden tones. This general
description applies not only to Steinhausen, but to many of the
frescoes that followed it
– to Prien (1738), where large ships sail across the vault
(we see Don Juan defeating the Turk at Lepanto); to Berg am Laim
(1743-45), where the largest fresco represents a pilgrimage to the
sanctuary of St. Michael an Monte Gargano; or to Schäftlarn
(1754-56), where a magically transformed Isar valley witnesses the
founding of the monastery (fig. 92). Many of these frescoes attempt to
represent particular places and events. I return to this in chapter 5.
What gives Steinhausen, and later Die Wies, a special place in this
series is the way in which architecture, stucco, and fresco have fused,
a fusion that was made possible only by the close collaboration between
Johann Baptist Zimmermann and his brother Dominikus. In many ways
Steinhausen recalls St. Anna. In both churches the strongest
architectural accents are provided by the verticals of the white
pillars-wall-pillars in St. Anna, freestanding pillars in Steinhausen.
In both churches an ornamental zone, which in Steinhausen has become
much more elaborate, mediates between architecture and fresco. Details
such as the stuccoed gables also suggest St. Anna. The gables are most
simple above the choir arch and above the corresponding arch beneath
the organ. Here they only echo the outline of the arch below, a curve
that is picked up again by the painted architecture at the eastern end
of the fresco. The adjacent arches are crowned with volute gables that,
in spite of their rich decoration, resemble those of St. Anna. As we
move toward the middle of the nave these gables lose their
architectural quality and begin to resemble ornamentally transformed
balustrades. Both spatially and in appearance they lie halfway between
the stuccoed gables and the balustrades stuccoed into the fresco. The
stucco zone in its entirety thus seems to undergo a metamorphosis that
transforms the architectonic into the pictorial. In the balustrades
ornament becomes pictorial foreground. As such it belongs to the
picture, while at the same time it continues to belong to the
ornamental zone framing the picture – it is both part of the
picture and part of its frame. With its gables and gable-like forms
this ornamental zone also repeats and joins in the rhythm of the arches
joining the pillars.
The relationship between fresco and architecture is further enhanced by
the fresco's composition. Each of the pillars seems to extend itself
into the fresco, most energetically in the tall trees standing in the
Garden of Eden in the west, and in a corresponding garden, the hortus
conclusus of the Song of Songs, in the east,[36] but also in the four
groups of figures symbolizing the four continents. Only the two pillars
in the middle of the nave have no painted extensions in the fresco;
their place is taken by the already-mentioned stuccoed balustrades,
which in this way, too, are brought closer to the pictorial reality of
the fresco. These painted projections of the pillars, most developed in
the east and west, also serve to achieve a transition between the oval
shape of the fresco and the more nearly circular central composition,
representing Mary as the queen of heaven. It is this interplay of
architecture, ornament, and fresco that makes Steinhausen an exemplary
rococo church.
ARCHITECTURE AGAINST ARCHITECTURE
Indirect Light
Dependent as it is on frescoes, the Bavarian rococo church requires a
great deal of light. Ideally this is an indirect light. Next to a
bright window even the brightest fresco will seem dark, even the most
exuberant painting of heavenly glories all too material (fig. 36). An
obvious way of meeting this demand is to hide from view the exterior
walls and the windows cut into them by surrounding a central space with
a visually indeterminate, lightfilled mantle. This is the first of
Rupprecht's five criteria to determine the essence of the Bavarian
rococo church.[1] But we should not interpret the indirect light so characteristic of the
Bavarian rococo church exclusively, or even primarily, in relation to
the fresco. At least as important is the way in which the White walls
and pillars of the interior absorb this light, become immaterial and
radiant. Light and matter fuse as stone and stucco are transformed into
an ethereal substance. The light of a church like Schäftlarn
lets us forget the heaviness of the material with which it is built and
helps to establish the sacred character of this architecture (fig. 43).
Compare a typical New England church. It, too, is filled with light,
but it remains a natural light. Bright as it is, it lacks the power to
dematerialize the architecture. The alchemy sought by the Bavarian
rococo does not take place.
We also cannot limit Rupprecht's first criterion to the rococo church.
Bavarian builders had explored the magic of indirect light long before
the eighteenth century. Instead of claiming that it is the rococo
fresco that bends architecture to its demands, it is more correct to
say that a characteristically, although by no means exclusively,
Bavarian approach to matter, light, and space continues to shape the
Bavarian rococo church and forces fresco and ornament into its Service.
The Bavarian rococo church must be understood as an eighteenth-century
variation on quite traditional themes. And such understanding
presupposes a knowledge of these themes.
Renaissance Interlude and Gothic Prelude
Perhaps the Best way to gain an overview of the development of Bavarian
art is to walk through Munich's Bayerisches Nationalmuseum.
Particularly striking is the rupture that occurs in the first decades
of the sixteenth century. As we leave the rooms devoted to the Middle
Ages and enter the section given to the Renaissance we step into a
different world, less tied to religion, less provincial, but also less
sure of itself, less original. The self-confident strength of a
Leinberger is gone. In the sixteenth century German artists appear to
be trying to speak a foreign language that they have not quite mastered
and that prevents them from expressing themselves with ease. A good
part of post-medieval Bavarian art, indeed, can be understood as
the product of an ongoing struggle with imported vocabularies. To be
accepted, learned, and appropriated as they were, these vocabularies
must have seemed superior to what the past had to offer. The reasons
for this have less to do with purely artistic considerations than with
that general dislocation of which reformation and skepticism, the
peasant wars and scientific discoveries were expressions. Yet native
traditions continued to live, if often submerged, and more in peasant
villages than in the cities and at the court, where one was more likely
to measure artistic achievements by the accomplishments first of the
Italians, later of the French. The Bavarian rococo church is witness to
this life. The affinity between the art of the fifteenth and early
sixteenth
centuries and the later baroque and rococo has long been recognized.
Churches like Dominikus Zimmermann's Die Wies have been said to fulfill
the promise of late Gothic hall churches, while Altdorfer's and
Leinberger's art has been called Gothic baroque.[2] This suggests the
possibility of viewing the Renaissance, at least in Bavaria, as an
interlude, an artistic dislocation, followed by a gradual
reappropriation of one's origins. At first this dislocation brought
with it a new freedom, a new excitement, an up-to-then unknown openness
to what others were doing; but increasingly it also brought a somewhat
anxious casting about for models to follow. The religious base of
medieval art had been lost. The late fifteenth century and the first
two decades of the sixteenth
knew an intensity of church-building activity matched only two hundred
years later. This activity ceased suddenly and almost completely in the
1530s. In Upper Bavaria more churches were built in the first two
decades of the sixteenth century than in the remaining eight put
together. The almost complete cessation of church building did of
course not mean that art itself came to a halt. But it did mean a shift
to different sources of support and to different tasks. The clergy
became less important than the wealthier Burghers, the nobility, and
especially the court. A new self-understanding led to a new art that
sought its models elsewhere. As one would expect, the Renaissance first
makes itself felt in the
larger cities whose trade put them in close touch with Italy and
Italian developments, above all in Augsburg, where the Fuggers aspired
to Medicean grandeur. Here we find what is often considered the first
monument of Renaissance architecture north of the Alps, the Fugger
Chapel of St. Anna (1508-18), unthinkable without Italian models, yet
still covered by a Gothicizing rib vault. The dukes of Bavaria soon
followed the lead of the Fuggers. From Augsburg, from the ducal
residences Landshut and Munich, and from other smaller cities and
courts, a mannered renaissance spread to the country, if not to the
peasants. Castles dating from the sixteenth century still dot the
Bavarian countryside. But all this building activity had little impact
on church architecture. The few churches that were built continued to
adopt the inherited Gothic style. The cemetery church in Freising and
the parish churches of Bairawies, Leonberg, and Thann offer examples.
None of these are important. It is difficult to exaggerate the poverty
of Bavarian church architecture between the Reformation and the
building in Munich of St. Michael (1583-97). What building took place
tended to follow late Gothic models; but it was completely overshadowed
by the secular architecture of city and court. And yet we have to keep
this decaying Gothic tradition in mind if we are to understand not only
the achievement of St. Michael, but the ways in which the example it
provided was received and transformed. The difference between the
secular architecture of the court and the
Gothicizing religious architecture of the countryside cannot be written
off as a difference in ornamental vocabularies. Presupposed are very
different conceptions of the function of ornament, of the relationship
of ornament to ornament support, especially to the ceiling. These again
presuppose different attitudes to the boundaries of a space. Earlier,
to an ornament that respects and serves the surfaces that support it, I
opposed another that tends to disguise and even to dissolve them. The
former is characteristic of the Renaissance and Mannerist architecture
of the court, and since the renewal of Catholicism in the late
sixteenth century is a renewal from above, inseparable from the
confessional absolutism of the WitteIsbach rulers, it is this
fundamentally Italian approach that furnishes the vocabulary for the
church architecture of the Bavarian baroque; but not without undergoing
modifications and transformations in which a very different, in many
ways still late Gothic sense of space remains alive. Late Gothic
architecture in Central Europe took an increasingly
decorative approach to the rib vault. With the proliferation of
tiercerons and liernes, the ribs lose much of their structural
significance and become ornament, an ornament that tends to let us
forget the architecture of the vault as we become absorbed in the ribs'
linear play. We are reminded of intertwining branches. This
often-remarked-an turn from the tectonic to the organic finds what is
perhaps its most beautiful expression in the work of Benedikt Ried,
especially in the Vladislav Hall of the castle in Prague.[3] With its
span of forty-nine feet, made possible by wrought-iron tension bars and
bracing ribs, the vast royal hall represents an extraordinary
engineering feat. Even more extraordinary is the linear play of the
ribs, which lets us forget the vault and its weight. Although each bay
is decorated with the same rosette pattern, the total effect is not
that of different compartments strung together. The curvilinear ribs
move and intertwine in a way that negates the division of the space
into bays. It is indeed misleading to speak of rosette patterns; it
puts at the beginning what we see as generated (fig. 44). Our attention
is drawn to the treelike piers. They are the generative centers of this
space, sending upward S-shaped ribs like swaying branches. Their curves
reach up to the peak of the vault, only to bend back to the earth.
Returning, the ribs divide; one branch terminates abruptly, as if it
had been cut off with a knife. "The cut, open end of the rib bleeds
lines of force from the vaulted surface. Nothing remains of static and
self-contained mass."[4] When Marc Antoine Laugier, perhaps the leading
architectural theorist
of the eighteenth century, emphasizes the analogy between ribs and
branches, Gothic columns and tree trunks, this not only anticipates a
romantic naturalism; it is another expression of a deep affinity
between late Gothic and eighteenth-century architecture.[5] That the
identification of rib and branch rests on more than a later
misunderstanding is shown by those two side chapels of the Frauenkirche
in Ingolstadt, where the ribs of the net vault generate a thicket, as a
rose's old wooden branches put forth new shoots. Out of this thicket
emerge strange thorny flowers (fig. 32). Although unique, these strange
creations are nevertheless quite characteristic of late Gothic
interpretations of the rib as somewhat like a wooden branch that can
generate new growth. The common use of painted vines and tendrils to
decorate the fields of a net vault points in the Same direction.
Especially where ribs join or cross they send forth stalks, leaves, and
flowers. As shown in the first chapter, the decorators of the Bavarian
rococo were to use related ornaments. Built into this turn to the
organic is a particular attitude to time.
In the early and high Middle Ages the beautiful was thought to partake
of the eternal. Artists tended to avoid forms, colors, and materials
that would tie their creations too closely to time. Figures that look
as if constructed with compass and ruler lack the directionality, and
thus the temporality, of configurations that recall handwriting.
Similarly there are colors, for instance grays, greens, or blues, that
hint at specific times of day or year, while pure primary colors
minimize such associations, as does the gold background of medieval
painting. Portrayed against such a background, events gain a timeless
significance.
The discovery of the beauty of the temporal is generally characteristic
of late Gothic art, and nowhere is the fascination with time more
pronounced than in Bavaria. One only has to think of a drawing by
Albrecht Altdorfer or Wolf Huber, of Erasmus Grasser's
Moriskentänzer, or of Hans Leinberger's St. James. Enough has
been said already to suggest that in this respect, too, late Gothic
architecture anticipates the rococo. Inseparable from the fascination with time is a fascination with the
irrational and elusive. We can grasp only what stands still and abides;
the organic will always finally escape us. A similar elusiveness marks
Altdorfer's rising rocks and trees, the cascading folds of Leinberger's
madonnas, and the ribs of Benedikt Ried's vaults. Where there is motion
there is also a lack of closure. Only apparently do the starlike
patterns of Benedikt Ried's vaults let the motion of the rising ribs
come to rest. We find it difficult to remain with these stars; the
motion that leads us to them also lets us return to the ground, where
the play begins anew. This play is essentially a play of lines. The
vault that supports it is rendered curiously insubstantial. We meet a
very similar attitude toward the supporting architecture in the
churches of the Bavarian rococo.[6]
St. Michael and the Wall-Pillar Church
Nothing in the small churches that continued to be built in Bavaria
after the Reformation shows even a trace of the originality of a
Benedikt Ried. Their net vaults offer modest and uninspired repetitions
of late Gothic patterns that had come to be taken for granted. Yet when
the Counter Reformation came to Germany and restored to church
architecture its lost base, it was not only to Italy that artists
turned, but also to their own Gothic past. This is particularly true of
the Rhineland, where even the Jesuit churches follow in the tradition
of the late Gothic basilica with galleries. The situation was similar
in the diocese of Würzburg. Here, too, Renaissance spaces were
given a Gothicizing dress.[7] Compared to the Mannerist churches of the Rhineland and Franconia,
Munich's St. Michael (1583-97) is much more of a piece. In this Jesuit
church the Counter Reformation's victory in the north and Duke Wilhelm
V's self-interpretation as the Catholic faith's most loyal defender
found their triumphantly monumental expression. At first glance the
spacious white interior with its Italianate ornament appears to have no
antecedents north of the Alps. The break with local tradition seems to
have been complete. Yet it would be a mistake to see St. Michael simply
as a foreign import. Its originality is not diminished by a comparison
with Italian examples, for instance with Il Gesù in Rome,
which, as the mother church of the Jesuit order, provided an obvious
model for the Munich church. When we compare the façade of
St. Michael to Giacomo della Porta's slightly earlier façade
we are struck more by what separates than by what links the Bavarian
church to its Italian precursor (figs. 45 and 46). In both churches
entablatures provide strong horizontals; but in St. Michael the broad
attic of the Roman church is missing. Its place is taken by the second
of three stories, the whole crowned by a steep gable, which lets the
house of God look not altogether unlike an oversized burgher house.
Gothic verticality triumphs over the horizontal. No attempt is made to
follow the by-then-familiar scheme, first introduced by Alberti, that
models the façade's first story on a triumphal arch and
places on it a second story that only has the width of the nave, where
large volutes are used to link the two stories and to hide the lean-to
roofs of the aisles. Indeed, no such attempt could have been made in
this case, for Alberti's scheme assumes a basilica. St. Michael,
however, unlike Il Gesù and its predecessors, is a
wall-pillar church. In this respect is takes up and transforms a native
late Gothic tradition.
In the typical Gothic church the load of the vault is concentrated on
the ribs and led down the piers. The thrust is spread to exterior
buttresses, be they the flying buttresses of French cathedrals or the
more modest step buttresses characteristic of fourteenth-century German
brick churches. Brought inside the church, these buttresses become
wall-pillars.[8] The most obvious advantage of the wall-pillar is that
the vulnerable brick buttressing is now protected from the destructive
action of ice and snow, an important consideration, given the wet, cold
winters of Bavaria. If the wall-pillar is something of a constant in
Bavarian late Gothic and post-Gothic architecture, it is first of all
to the weather and to the building material that we have to look for an
explanation. But important, too, is the way in which the wall-pillar
scheme meets liturgical requirements. Just as the veneration of saints
and their relics played a secondary, but nevertheless important, role
in worship, the niches formed by the wall-pillars provide in a
strikingly simple and effective way for side chapels, which accompany
the nave focused on the high altar. The presence of internal buttresses
is not sufficient by itself to
define the wall-pillar church. Wall-pillars, sometimes joined by
galleries, are found in several of the large Gothic hall churches of
Bavaria (fig. 47). The wall-pillar church eliminates the aisles of the
hall church and thus simplifies and unifies the space, a natural step,
given the quite modest size of all the late Gothic wall-pillar churches
of Bavaria. A comparison of the plans of Elsenbach (late fifteenth
century) and Perlach (1728-32) shows how Small the distance can be
between late Gothic and early rococo architecture (figs. 48 and 49).
The well-proportioned interior of St. Maria in Elsenbach reveals the
essential properties of the wall-pillar church. Given a point of view
near the entrance, wall-pillars projecting into the nave obscure the
outer walls with their windows. The nave is provided with a
light-filled mantle. Its boundary is rendered indefinite. Similarly,
the play of the ribs obscures the vault, which functions as the
inactive ground of the ornamental figure of the ribs. This figure
counteracts the division of the nave into separate bays. Both the
obscuring of spatial boundaries and the unification of the nave by the
decoration of the vault remain essential features of the Bavarian
rococo church. In Elsenbach the tension between the flowing pattern of
the ribs and the architecture of the nave is most easily grasped in the
abrupt way in which the net vault is cut off where the nave terminates
and meets the choir. Just as the cut-off ribs of Benedikt Ried "bleed
lines of force," this violent termination of the vault suggests a
movement that extends indefinitely beyond the choir arch. This handling
of the termination of the vault returns in many churches built in the
seventeenth century and even in the eighteenth.[9] It, too, gives us
insight into the (in many respects) quite constant artistic intention
of the Bavarians. St. Michael is separated from such modest late Gothic
precursors as
Elsenbach or St. Johann in Neumarkt first of all by its much larger
dimensions. The spaciousness of its nave, with a span of about
sixty-five feet, had no local antecedents, and must have overwhelmed
contemporaries.[10] Without precedent in Italy or Germany is the way
the barrel vault rests on the transverse barrels joining the
wall-pillars (fig. 53).[11] Simpler and more expected, given not only
Italian practice but late Gothic tradition, would have been to lead the
stress of the vault to the wall-pillars by severies cut into the
Barrel, a device that allows for better lighting and permits a
shallower vault, but at the price of monumentality. A glance at the
floor plan suggests other obvious differences. The
Bavarian wall-pillar churches of the fifteenth century join a simple
choir to the nave. The same was true of the original design for St.
Michael (fig. 50). But this design was changed after the collapse of
the tower (1590), which the duke interpreted as an admonition by the
archangel to build him an even larger, more splendid church. There is
little doubt that the cruciform plan, according to which the church was
finished, should be credited to Friedrich Sustris, the son of an
Amsterdam painter associated with Titian. Sustris studied with Giorgio
Vasari. Like so many foreign artists, he came to Munich by way of
Augsburg and the Fuggers (fig. 51).[12] Compared to Il Gesù
(fig. 52) the cruciform plan, which
commended itself to the architects of the Counter Reformation as
particularly Christian, finds only a very modest realization in St.
Michael. The transept, which does not project beyond the outer walls of
the church, does not provide a very effective transverse axis. Its arms
are too shallow to be experienced as much more than large niches.
Similarly, the vertical provided in Il Gesù by a dome over
the crossing in missing. As a result the crossing tends to become part
of the nave, instead of being experienced as an independent centralized
space, a third spatial unit, placed between choir and nave. In St.
Michael the triumphal arch that frames the choir strengthens the
bipolar character of the interior. Curious, given Renaissance practice,
is the way the pilasters of the
wall-pillars reach only the height of the galleries, not much more than
half the distance to the foot of the vault. The remaining part of the
wall-pillars is structured by an extremely tall and quite unorthodox
attica, which provides a weaker repetition of the pilaster order below
and at the same time offers a transition to the vault (fig. 53).
Compare the surprisingly feeble action of the cornice in St. Michael
with the strength of its counterpart in Il Gesù, where it is
a dominant motif, effectively separating the church into two zones
(fig. 54). Given the Roman model, the handling of the cornice in St.
Michael is likely to appear a somewhat awkward reminder that the
Italian vocabulary had not yet been mastered; the overly tall attica
seems a not quite convincing attempt to fill that part of the
wall-pillars not structured by the Corinthian pilasters, which could
not be stretched further without losing all proportion. But to make
this criticism is to do an injustice to the intention that speaks to us
in this space. What links St. Michael to its Gothic precursors is above
all the dynamic integration of wall-pillars and vault, which gives the
church an organic quality that its Roman model does not possess.
In St. Michael, too, we sense something of the tension between
Renaissance and late Gothic that characterizes the contemporary
Gothicizing mannerism of the Rhineland and Franconia. But in the Munich
church no attempt is made to clothe the space in a Gothicizing dress.
Here it is the surface that is most obviously dependent an Renaissance
models, while the space, especially the nave, retains something of the
spirit of Gothic architecture. And yet to point this out is to do small
justice to the transformation of this spirit. The originality of St.
Michael invites us to forget its precursors. Just as the Counter
Reformation can be understood as a repetition of the old faith, but in
a new key, so St. Michael repeats the traditional wall-pillar scheme,
but with a difference that manifests itself both in the post-Tridentine
spaciousness of the interior and in its Italianate decoration that
recalls the coffered ceilings of the Renaissance rather than the
flowing net vaults of late Gothic architecture.[13][14]
An Influential Adaptation
The Bavarian baroque begins with St. Michael. The spacious splendor of
its interior called forth numerous imitations, while its monumental
scale assured that such imitations would offer reductions of the
solution that had been found there; reductions in size and also,
inevitably, in architectural complexity. That in these reductions the
native Gothic tradition should manifest itself more strongly than in
the Munich church is to be expected. Of all these successor churches
the Studienkirche in Dillingen
(1610-17) is historically the most significant.[15] Its location helps
to explain its importance. In 1546 the prince bishop of Augsburg,
Cardinal Otto Truchsess von Waldburg, had founded here a school to
better train the clergy of his diocese. Only five years later it became
a university, which in 1563 was entrusted to the Jesuits. Quickly it
established itself as one of the intellectual centers of the Counter
Reformation, rivaling nearby Bavarian Ingolstadt. Many of those
responsible for the churches that were to be built throughout Southern
Germany received their education in Dillingen and carried with them the
image of the church in which they had once worshiped. More significant,
however, is the way the Dillingen church simplified
and reduced the model provided by St. Michael. This reduction, which is
at the same time a translation into a more familiar idiom, helps to
account for its impact an the church architecture of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in Southern Germany. Much of it can be
considered a variation of the theme provided by the Studienkirche. A
glance at the floor plan shows how the architect (the extent to which
it is the work of Hans Alberthal has been questioned) [16] simplified
the plan of St. Michael, where such simplification is also a return to
the scheme exemplified by churches like Elsenbach or St. Johann in
Neumarkt. Gone is even a rudimentary transept. The choir is not much
narrower than the nave. As a result the Studienkirche offers us a more
unified interior than St. Michael (fig. 55). Very different in the two
churches is the treatment of the
wall-pillars. In St. Michael their breadth, coupled with the galleries
and the expanse of the vault, provides the nave with comparatively firm
boundaries. The side chapels are experienced as dark niches cut into
the nave wall, while the similar niches above the gallery function as
bright light cells. The wall remains alive in the wall-pillar. In
Dillingen, on the other hand, it is once again the pillar in the
wall-pillar, which in Gothic fashion triumphs over the wall (fig. 56).
The elimination of galleries in Dillingen contributes to this effect.
No longer do their horizontals impede the upward thrust of the
wall-pillars. The vault of the Studienkirche is less monumental and
more traditional than St. Michaels. As in countless earlier and later
churches, severies cut into the Barrel, which is much shallower than
its Munich counterpart. Rather as in a hall church, the peak of the
side chapels is not much lower than the peak of the nave vault.
Proportionately much larger windows fill the church with a strong
light. The present appearance of the interior is determined by the
rococo
decoration of 1750. Its success shows how easily the baroque space is
adapted to rococo taste. Characteristic is the elimination of the
central rib-band at the later date, allowing for a fresco spanning the
central two bays of the nave, which further unifies the interior.
Equally characteristic is the way the wall-pillars now function like
the wings of a theatrical set. The effect is heightened by the side
altars placed before them. Together these altars form a zone of
painting, framed by sculpture and ornament, analogous to the similarly
framed fresco zone of the vault yet separated from it by a white zone
that has its center in the gleaming entablature. The large high altar
is both focus and climax of the altar zone and at the same time
furnishes a ladder linking it to the painted heaven of the vault.
Constitutive of the rococo church is the primacy of a point of view
near the entrance, which allows the church's interior to be seen as a
pictorial whole that has its center in the high altar. To be sure, in a
church like Dillingen, this pictorialization of architecture, which
lets us almost forget that the wall-pillars must have substance and
solidity to bear the weight of the vault, is largely the work of the
decorators of the eighteenth century. But imagine St. Michael dressed
up in a rococo gown. There can be no doubt that its architecture would
have resisted such transformation. The wall-pillars there, to give just
one example, could never have gained the winglike appearance of their
counterparts in the Studienkirche; it would have been impossible to
construct a similarly effective altar zone. Not that the decoration of
the Studienkirche is in any way extraordinary. Most of the larger
rococo churches follow a similar pattern
– a particularly successful example is provided by the
interior of Diessen, which I consider in some detail in chapter 5. Here
I am more interested in the common languages of Bavarian baroque and
rococo architecture. By translating the achievement of St. Michael into
the vernacular, the Studienkirche in Dillingen did much to establish
that language. The wall-pillar scheme continues to dominate the church
architecture of
the eighteenth century. Giovanni Antonio Viscardi's abbey churches in
Neustift and Fürstenfeld, both begun just after the turn of
the century, provide the splendid beginning (fig. 57). The festive
grandeur of the latter recalls St. Michael, as do many details; the
placement of the cornice and the tall attic deserve to be singled
out.[17] Less imaginative architects were content to repeat with little
change a time-honored model: Holy Cross in Landsberg am Lech (1752-54),
another Jesuit church, can serve as an example.
Architecturally undistinguished, yet pleasing in its spacious harmony,
its indebtedness to Dillingen is apparent. Results were much more
exciting where the wall-pillar church offered only a point of
departure, a basic theme that could be varied, for instance, by
reintroducing galleries, a transept, perhaps even a dome; or by playing
with the width of the bays or the depth of the wall-pillars. I shall
have to return to some of these variations. Here I would like to recall
the five criteria that Bernhard Rupprecht establishes for the Bavarian
rococo church.[18] The three that pertain most directly to its
architecture, as opposed to fresco and ornament, are readily met by a
wall-pillar church of the Dillingen type: it provides for a central
space, illuminated by indirect light; it leaves the boundaries of this
space indefinite; and it gives special significance to a point of view
near the entrance. All three criteria give special emphasis to the eye.
In such late Gothic wall-pillar churches as Eisenbach or St. Johann in
Neumarkt the observer's point of view is already very much taken into
account; that theatricality, which triumphs in rococo architecture,
makes an appearance (figs. 1, 27, 43, 112).
Transformations of the Hall Choir
A feature of the Studienkirche that deserves special mention is its
hall choir. A radical departure from the model provided by St. Michael,
it inaugurated a tradition that culminated in the choir of Die Wies.
The hall choir, too, has its origins in late Gothic architecture. It
can be traced back to such Austrian Cistercian churches as
Heiligenkreuz and Zwettl.[19] The choirs of Heiligkreuz in
Schwäbisch Gmünd (1351-1410), of St. Sebald (1361-79)
and St. Lorenz (1439-77) in Nürnberg, and of the Franciscan
church in Salzburg (1408 – ca. 1460) are well-known examples
(figs. 58 and 59). Especially the last deserves a few comments here.
This late work by Hans von Burghausen [20] reminds us once again of the
extent to which the spatial imagination of the Bavarians remains
constant beneath stylistic change, and raises the question of how to
account for such constancy. In what way do climate and landscape shape
the spatial imagination of a people? And to what extent is it possible
to separate spatial and religious imagination? Are the patterns of
Bavarian piety linked to this landscape before the Alps, with its wet,
cold winters and that peculiar sense of distance, granted by mountains
that are present even when weather conditions are such that they cannot
be seen? The term genius loci points to a phenomenon
that still awaits adequate analysis.
The Salzburg church exploits the contrast between the dark, earthbound
nave, dating from the early thirteenth century and still Romanesque in
feeling, and the choir, in comparison almost weightless, that attracts
us with its light, beckons us forward, and yet remains visually too
remote to encourage entry (fig. 60). Long before the Asam brothers'
Weitenburg (fig. 99) Hans von Burghausen has pictorialized
architecture; here already the altar room has become stagelike. Two
motions rule this space: forward in the nave, upward in the choir. We
participate in the first, horizontal motion, as we approach the high
altar; vertical motion belongs to a sacred realm, which we are allowed
to glimpse, but from which we are excluded. Drawn to the bright choir,
the eye is led upward by its rising columns. The unusually tall and
narrow choir arch lets us see only part of the choir. The implied whole
remains hidden from view and mysterious, its boundaries indefinite.
Visually the choir lacks closure. Together with its mysterious light,
this lack of closure functions as a sign of transcendence. Here we have
a key not only to that fascination with different possibilities of
rendering spatial boundaries indefinite that is something of a constant
in the sacred architecture of Bavaria, but to the way this fascination
finds its natural focus in the choir, which possesses its center in the
high altar
– in the case of the Franciscan church in Salzburg an
impressive baroque construction by the greatest architect of the
Austrian baroque, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1709) –
and a spatial autonomy that establishes it as a sacred other to the
nave. Within the sacred architecture of the church, the different
spatial quality of nave and choir mirrors the distance that separates
the human and the divine. The choir's numinous quality is enhanced by
the choir arch, which not only limits what we can see and thus renders
the architecture of the choir elusive, but, like a frame, pictorializes
it and renders it unreal. Built two hundred years after the choir of the Salzburg church, the
hall choir of the Studienkirche is much more modest and less
theatrical. Its width serves to assimilate it to the nave. The dramatic
juxtaposition of choir and nave has been subordinated to a baroque
insistence on unity. The decoration and furnishing of the rococo
strengthen this unity by interpreting it in pictorial terms. Yet within
the picture that presents itself to us as we enter the church the choir
appears as a sacred other, distinguished from the nave by its hall
form, suggested perhaps by the traditional association of that form
with sacred architecture.[21] It is easy to overlook that the choir is
a hall. Only as the eye travels upward toward the vault does this
become apparent. While at ground level the walls joining the pillars
provide for closure and darkness, above the galleries the space opens
up. Bright and without definite boundaries, this inaccessible upper
zone contrasts dramatically with the more confined, darker space below
(fig. 61). This ascent from dark to light prepares for the upward
movement of the high altar with its painting of the Virgin ascending to
heaven. The two-storied choir of the Studienkirche provides a much imitated
model. We find its successors especially among pilgrimage churches,
which have to furnish a path that leads the procession of the faithful
around the venerated image. One solution is to exhibit the sacred image
an a gallery leading around the choir. The late Gothic church of
Andechs had such a gallery.[22] When the Augustinians of Polling
redecorated their church in the early seventeenth century, they adopted
this model. The ancient and much venerated image of the Crucified was
raised above the main altar. Much more theatrical than in Dillingen is
the use of light (fig. 62). Recalling the choir of Dillingen, the three
bays of the old choir are transformed into a two-storied space that
with its arcaded upper story opens to the sacristy and a chapel. Like a
proscenium, this comparatively dark space both links and separates the
nave and the new light-filled altar room (fig. 63).
Following the example set in Dillingen, the hall choir retains its
popularity through the seventeenth century. We find it thus, a few
years after Polling, in the nearby and also Augustinian Beuerberg
(1629-35). After the Thirty Years War it returns in Gars (1661-62).[23]
Especially the architects from the Austrian Vorarlberg liked to employ
it. Schönenberg, Obermarchthal, and Irsee present it in
particularly convincing fashion. In each of these Swabian churches the
hall choir is separated from the wall-pillared nave by a strongly
articulated transept.[24] Spiritually and geographically closer to
Polling is the pilgrimage church in Vilgertshofen (1686-92), built and
decorated by the Wessobrunner Johann Schmuzer (fig. 64).[25] Dominikus
Zimmermann's church in Günzburg and Die Wies demonstrate the
affinity between the rococo church and the hall choir (fig. 65).
Despite the last two examples, the hall choir is more characteristic of
baroque than of rococo architecture. What makes me dwell on it here is
not so much the particular solution it provides as the intention of
which it speaks: the desire to establish the sacred quality of the
choir by treating it as a quasi-autonomous entity, possessing a more
elusive, more pictorial spatial reality than the nave. That intention
continues to shape the rococo church. To use Wölfflin's
terminology, more than the nave the choir tends toward painterly,
atectonic, open forms. Often, as in St. Johann in Neumarkt and again in
Polling, a darker proscenium is interposed between the stagelike altar
room and the nave. The former is rendered elusive by its indefinite
boundaries and the mysterious presence of light. Here the vertical
triumphs more completely over the horizontal than in the nave.
This bipolar conception of the church leaves little room for a strong
transept, crowned by a full dome that gathers together nave and choir.
Where a transept appears in a Bavarian church of the baroque or rococo
it tends to be weakly developed, a somewhat wider bay that may function
as a proscenium (see fig. 51 ). This helps to explain the Bavarians'
resistance to the model provided by Santino Solari's cathedral in
Salzburg (1614-28), a cruciform basilica with a full dome over the
crossing. For the first time in the region the tradition that lead from
Alberti's St. Andrea in Mantua to Il Gesù had found a
convincing, if somewhat chilly, representative. After the Thirty Years
War Agostino Barelli's Theatinerkirche in Munich (1663-88) confronted
the Bavarians with an even stronger demonstration of the power of the
dome above the cross (figs. 66 and 67). It met with the same reception.
In part, no doubt, Bavarian resistance to the dome is to be explained
by the same climatic conditions that argue for the wall-pillar. But the
Bavarians' bipolar and theatrical conception of the church also has to
be kept in mind. This preference shows itself when we examine those
isolated cases where Bavarian architects did adopt the Italian motif of
the dome. We encounter a tendency to raise the dome not above the
crossing, but above the choir. An early, not altogether successful, but
nevertheless revealing example
is provided by the parish church in Weilheim, in many ways one of the
most interesting (which is not to say most successful) churches of the
early seventeenth century.[26] Once again nave and choir possess a very
different spatial quality. The broad and heavy barrel vault emphasizes
the horizontal, while the slender choir arch directs us toward heaven
(figs. 68, 69, and 70). Its upward thrust is answered by the very
modest eight-sided dome above the altar, which remains totally
submerged beneath the large roof of the church and therefore lightless
and ineffective. Here, too, a proscenium-like antechoir joins nave and
altar room. A much later and stronger example of the choir dome is
provided by St.
Jakob (1717-24) in Innsbruck, the work of Johann Jakob Herkommer and
his nephew Johann Georg Fischer, both from Füssen. The choir
dome, one of the few full domes erected by a German architect in the
seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, is all the more remarkable here
because St. Jakob follows a cruciform plan, which leads one to expect a
dome above the crossing; but there we find only a shallow saucer dome.
Its darkness makes it difficult to understand the crossing as the
center of this interior.[27] Although Cosmas Damian Asam did paint an
illusionistic architecture in the place of the missing dome, it offers
little more than a foil for the real dome beyond. Someone standing in
the nave is given only hints of the latter's existence and shape. As in
the Franciscan church in Salzburg or in the parish church of Weilheim,
the choir is conceived as a quasi-autonomous space, governed by a
vertical movement that terminates in an indefinite beyond. Standing in
the nave we are allowed to glimpse this space, but are excluded from
it. The light that floods the choir from above helps to enhance its
sacred character. St. Jakob is an isolated example. Especially in the
eighteenth century
Bavarian architects avoid the full dome. The Bavarian rococo demands
less compartmentalized, more unified spaces. And yet this desire for
what
Wölfflin calls "unified unity" had to be reconciled with the
demand that the choir be established as more sacred than the nave. The
attempt at reconciliation of the desired homogeneity and the
heterogeneity demanded by the separate functions of nave and choir
helps to define the Bavarian rococo church. The privileged point of
view near the entrance easily lets us forget the tension between the
two considerations: to someone entering the church the interior
presents itself as a picture that has its center in the vertical of the
high altar. But as we step forward this pictorial unity weakens.
Especially in larger churches the choir will increasingly assert its
autonomy and be experienced as a pictorial whole. The choir of the
Bavarian rococo church presents itself to us as a picture within a
picture.
What was said in the first two chapters about the rococo fresco and its
frame of stuccoed ornament does indeed fit the large frescoes that span
and help to unify the naves of the churches of the Bavarian rococo. In
these frescoes we tend to find landscape elements that demand a horizon
distinct from the horizon implicit in our own standpoint. The world of
the fresco presents itself to us as a second world, parallel to the
world in which we live. This pictorial parallel helps to support the
horizontality of the nave. But the choir frescoes tend to follow a very
different type. Here the more illusionistic glory compositions of the
Italian baroque continue to provide the model.[28] The fresco is
experienced somewhat like a hole cut into the vault that permits us to
glimpse the heavenly realm, which appears, not as a second world
paralleling our own, but as the extension of our world into heaven. In
the choir the vertical triumphs over the horizontal. A ladder links the
here and now to the beyond. Once again Steinhausen is typical. In the choir johann Baptist
Zimmermann painted God the Father and the Holy Spirit, surrounded by
archangels and a heavenly orchestra, awaiting the Son. The painted
balustrade strengthens the illusionism of the fresco. In characteristic
fashion it provides the terminus, itself indefinite, for the strong
vertical that links the tabernacle, the much venerated Gothic
Pietà,
the high altar painting of the Deposition, and the smaller painting in
the altar gable showing Christ rising triumphantly toward heaven (fig.
71), one of many rococo variations an the theme stated by the
Franciscan church in Salzburg. To give just one more example (to which I return in chapter 5): At
Diessen the fresco of the choir's saucer dome has a strong ringlike
frame. Unlike the scalloped frame of the main fresco, this lets us see
the painting as a circular opening through which we are allowed to
glimpse something of the glory of heaven, in this case a heavenly
assembly of those members of the house of Diessen and Andechs who are
counted among the blessed and saints (fig. 115). As the floor plans of Steinhausen and Diessen make clear (figs. 72 and
113), the choir's quasi-autonomy is recognized not only by the fresco
but by the architecture. In Steinhausen the oval architecture of the
nave is separated by the easternmost pair of pillars from the
transverse oval of the choir. In Diessen, too, the choir is treated as
a centralized space that possesses its own integrity. Typical of
Bavarian developments is the way the choir is divided into two parts: a
square bay covered by a saucer dome is placed like a proscenium before
the semicircle of the apse filled by the high altar. Like the church as
a whole, the choir is articulated as a two-part structure: nave is to
choir as antechoir is to altar room (fig. 73).
A glance at the floor plans of rococo churches shows that such
treatment of the choir is not at all unusual; indeed it is the norm, at
least in larger churches.[29] Again and again we find saucer domes or
designs that exploit the centralizing power of octagon, circle, or
oval. The different spatial quality of nave and choir is emphasized by
the choir arch, which, like a proscenium arch, transforms the choir
into a stage, the nave into an auditorium. That this reference to the
theatre is intended is shown by the common practice of decorating the
choir arch with a stuccoed curtain, as in Diessen. The use of indirect
light and the obscuring of spatial boundaries, either by placing them
in a way that hides them from someone standing in the nave or by
obscuring them beneath fresco and ornament, help to transform tectonic
into painterly values. The average village church, which joins a rectangular nave to a
narrower choir, does not permit such elaborate solutions. And often an
older, usually late Gothic structure was redecorated. The success of
many of these interiors shows that, while the Bavarian rococo has
indeed produced a distinctive architecture, ornament, fresco, and
furnishings are sufficient to let us speak of a rococo church. Crucial
is the turn from tectonic to pictorial, or should we say to theatrical,
values. The difference between choir and nave is interpreted in a
manner that suggests the difference between stage and auditorium. To
the choir's quasi-autonomy corresponds the quasi-autonomy of the nave.
Versions of the Centralized Nave
The desire to centralize not only the choir but also the nave is a
defining characteristic of the Bavarian rococo church. It leads to the
demand that the nave vault be treated as a unified whole. By itself, of
course, this is hardly novel. Already the netvaults of such late Gothic
churches as Elsenbach or St. Johann in Neumarkt counteract the division
of the nave into bays. And while the Italianate decoration of churches
like St. Michael or the Theatinerkirche subordinates itself to and
reinforces the articulation of the nave into bays, Bavarian decorators
never seem to have felt quite comfortable with such
compartmentalization.
Their very different intentions become clearer when we compare the
decoration of St. Michael with that of the Augustinian church (ca.
1630) in Beuerberg (fig. 74). Its dependence on the model provided by
the Munich church is evident. But in Beuerberg the simple stuccoed
frames spread evenly across the vault and somewhat in the manner of
late Gothic net-vaults help to unify the nave. Not that rib-bands have
disappeared altogether; in expected fashion they rise from the
pilasters of the wall-pillars. But instead of meeting at the peak of
the vault to form a series of arches, separating bay from bay, they
broaden into fields that straddle and thus join adjacent bays. By their
repeating rhythm these stuccoed fields create a motion that extends
itself indefinitely. As already in such late Gothic churches as
Elsenbach, this creates a problem where the vault terminates. Given the
pattern of the decoration, there is no reason why it should end just
where it does. This unresolved tension between an ornamental pattern
that extends itself indefinitely and its actual termination is common
in Bavarian architecture of the seventeenth century.[30] It should be
noted that such tension is quite easily avoided if one is willing to
subordinate the decorative scheme to the articulation of the nave into
bays. The Bavarians' refusal to do so becomes intelligible only when it
is understood as an expression of a different artistic intention which
resists the organization of the nave imposed by a succession of clearly
defined spatial compartments. The Bavarian rococo, too, resists
compartmentalization of the nave. But
it goes beyond the just-mentioned example in treating the nave vault as
a centralized whole. The large frescoes so characteristic of the rococo
church provide for such centralization. But long before Cosmas Damian
Asam demonstrated the centralizing power of the large fresco by
spanning several bays at Aldersbach attempts had been made to effect
such unification by other means. Just after 1700 the vault of the
Benedictine convent church at Holzen was treated as a centralized
whole. Here for the first time an attempt is made to organize the
decoration around the center of the vault. A fresco, still rather
small, is used to mark that center.[31] As the conflict between the
Asam brothers' decoration and the
architecture of Aldersbach shows, fresco and ornament often do not
satisfy the demand for a centralization of the nave (fig. 27). Beyond
what the decoration can furnish this demand invites architectural
solutions. One obvious response is to ovalize a rectangular nave by
rounding off its corners. Hitchcock considers the ovalized rectangle a
defining feature of the rococo church, and suggests that it makes what
is perhaps its first appearance in Bavaria in the unusually interesting
parish church (1710) in Kreuzpullach (fig.81).[32] Hitchcock emphasizes
the part played by Johann Georg Fischer "in maturing a spatial form
which quite a few other Germans had for several years been approaching
without as yet realizing that form in a larger church interior."[33]
But it is misleading to place too much emphasis on the ovalized
rectangle. I cannot agree with Hitchcock's characterization of Johann
Georg Fischer's St. Katharina in Wolfegg as "one of the finest
interiors of the opening years of mature rococo architecture in the
mid-1730's" (figs. 75, 76, and 77).[34] Yet it is easy to understand
what leads Hitchcock to praise the church' and its architect. If we
agree that the rococo can be characterized by its tendency away from
the more articulated and tectonic architecture of the baroque toward
roomlike spaces, where ceilings are kept quite flat and sharp corners
and harsh transitions are avoided, it seems reasonable to argue that,
following his teacher and uncle Johann Jakob Herkommer, Johann Georg
Fischer arrived at a rococo architecture at a remarkably early date.
Given the paradigm of the French secular rococo, this seems plausible
enough. But the Bavarian rococo church speaks of very different
intentions. It hardly takes roomlike clarity for its ideal. Just the
opposite: the room form conflicts with the intention to obscure such
spatial boundaries as walls or ceilings. In spite of the profusion of
ornament and the enormous size of the fresco, in Wolfegg the
pictorialization of architecture that is a defining characteristic of
the Bavarian rococo church does not take place. The spacious broad nave
speaks too strongly for this to happen. The wall-pillars are too weakly
developed to wrap the nave in a spatial mantle. This lack of an
effective mantle distinguishes the church in Wolfegg most decisively
from the great churches of the Bavarian rococo.
The Bavarian rococo seeks not simply the ovalization of the nave, but
the creation of an ovalized central space within a larger, usually
rectangular space. The difference between the two provides for the
desired mantle. Johann Michael Fischer's St. Anna im Lehel furnishes a
good example (figs. 78 and 79). Eight white pillars, really
wall-pillars, define the central oval; they give the eye its first
orientation and provide a moment of stability in an interior rendered
restless by the wealth of color and indefinite by the uncertain outer
boundaries. The shape of this oval is determined by two interlocking
circles, their centers separated by their radius. But what determines
our experience of this interior is not the simple geometry that governs
it, but the way the white elements, the eight pillars and the arches
joining them supported by the stuccoed frame, define a screen or figure
on a much less definite ground or background. It is this pictorial
figure-ground relationship that enables us to consider St. Anna im
Lehel a rococo church, while in comparison the interior of
Kreuzpullach, in spite of a number of striking anticipations of the
rococo, seems quite baroque (figs. 80 and 81). Dominikus Zimmermann's
Steinhausen, almost exactly contemporary with
St. Anna im Lehel, invites a similar analysis. Ten free-standing
pillars here define the central oval, which is placed, not within a
rectangle, but within a larger oval (fig. 72). If St. Anna illustrates
the ovalization of the wall-pillar church, Steinhausen, and later Die
Wies, illustrate the ovalization of the hall church (fig. 103). More
commonly it is not an oval but an octagon that is placed inside a
larger rectangle. The parish church in Murnau offers a typical and
influential early example (1717-34). Eight compound pillars carry a
large saucer dome (fig. 82). The architect of the church is unknown.
Enrico Zuccalli and Johann Mayr, the father-in-law of Johann Michael
Fischer, have been suggested.[35] Recalling designs by Giovanni
Viscardi, the interior states a theme on which such architects as
Johann Baptist Gunetzrhainer and Johann Michael Fischer were to create
numerous variations.[36] Fischer's churches in Ingolstadt, destroyed in
the Second World War, Aufhausen (fig. 83), and Rott am Inn (fig. 84)
rank with the Best creations of the Bavarian rococo. Fischer's work
also illustrates how effectively this basic scheme could
be applied to churches of very modest dimensions. The Small church in
Unering is particularly impressive. The plan recalls that of Murnau
(fig. 85). Even the cruciform layout of the Murnau choir finds a modest
echo. When we actually enter the church, however, it is not so much
Murnau that comes to mind as St. Anna im Lehel. Built in 1732, the
church in Unering was finished before the Munich church. Considering
its much smaller dimensions and the limited means available it is
astonishing how well Fischer succeeded in creating an interior that
exhibits many of the key characteristics of the Bavarian rococo as well
as many of the larger churches. To be sure, the fresco is rather
disappointing and there is little stucco ornament. Yet I cannot agree
with Hitchcock when he claims that there is little "early Rococo
feeling.'"[37] Once again such disagreement presupposes a different
assessment of what is essential to the Bavarian rococo church. It seems
to me that what matters is not so much fresco or ornament as the
pictorial quality of the space. Compare the way the white of the eight
strongly articulated compound pillars combines with the white band of
the scalloped picture frame to form an abstract ornamental figure set
off against the more restless background with the way pillars and
picture-frame function in St. Anna (fig. 86).
Well into the seventies many of the best churches follow this scheme of
centralizing the nave by means of the octagon, often in direct
dependence an the work of Johann Michael Fischer.
Yet another way of centralizing a wall-pillar nave is demonstrated in
exemplary fashion by the Premonstratensian abbey church in
Schäftlarn (fig.43). Although Cuvilliés and Johann
Baptist Gunetzrhainer were involved in the planning, once again
Fischer's contribution would appear to have been decisive.[38] Here the
centralization of the nave is achieved by varying the width of the bays
and the depth of the wall pillars (fig. 87). A look at the plan shows
the bipolarity of the church. The bay before the choir functions as a
very weak transept, or rather as a proscenium-like joint linking nave
and choir. In the church Simon Frey built for the Augustinians of Suben
(1766-70) Schäftlarn found a worthy successor.
Diaphanous Walls and Weightless Vaults
Hans Jantzen has spoken of the diaphanous structure of the Gothic
cathedral. The term calls attention not only to the increased
penetration of its nave walls, but to the ways piers and galleries,
columns and arches form a seemingly weightless screen, a
quasi-sculptural figure placed before a ground that may remain dark or
appear as a foil of colored light.[39] The Bavarian rococo church
invites a similar analysis: architectural, ornamental, and painted
elements join in picturesque figures set off against a lucent, white
ground; seemingly weightless pillars support tentlike vaults
– an appearance heightened by the collusion of architect,
decorator, and painter. As we have seen, a central space wrapped in a
light-filled mantle provides a ready frame for such play.
But only churches of a certain size allow for the required complexity;
the simple, more or less rectangular nave of the average village church
rules out such solutions. Yet here, too, we find the Same artistic
intention at work. That the part of the architect would be much
reduced, that of the decorator correspondingly greater, is to be
expected: furnishings, ornament, and fresco join to place pictorial or
ornamental figures before the paper white ness of the walls. More even
than larger structures, these modest interiors show how important the
plain white wall is to the Bavarian rococo church, or rather, how
important it is to transform walls into an all-but-immaterial
background, sensitive to every change of light outside. Everything is
avoided that would lead us to experience the wall as solid boundary.
The Bavarian rococo church thus resists articulation of the nave wall
by pilasters and an entablature that would call attention to the wall
as architecture. Where pilasters do appear they tend to play an
ornamental part. Johann Michael Fischer's paired scagliola columns in
Zwiefalten illustrate a common strategy to achieve such
ornamentalization: pedestals and entablatures are kept simple and
white; this isolates columns or pilasters
– they begin to float, exchanging their tectonic for a more
purely ornamental function (fig. 1).[40] Decisive is the contrast
between marbled, usually red, scagliola and a white that lets us forget
that the rococo church, too, is built with bricks and mortar; its walls
are spiritualized as they appear to absorb the light pouring in. Is it
too farfetched to link the rococo's intoxication with light to the old
Christian interpretation of the cosmos as a veil diffused with divine
light, and to interpret the gleaming white of its churches as a
repetition and reflection of the light of heaven?[41] The Bavarian rococo church demands many and large windows. Windows,
however, tend to call attention to the walls into which they have been
cut. This is less of a problem where it is possible to conceal windows
by wrapping a central space in a mantle of light. But even when it is
impossible to hide windows from view, their architectural reality can
be obscured by treating them as if they were ornaments. Almost as much
as the scalloped frame, the ornamental window is part of the vocabulary
of the rococo church. Dominikus Zimmermann especially liked to give his
windows ornamental shapes, most unforgettably in Die Wies: the windows
grouped around the side altars form a figure of light, and the wall has
little more substance than paper supporting an ornamental fantasy.[42]
It would be easy to continue. Especially Bavarian Swabia furnishes
delightful examples: Franz Xaver Kleinhans's Liebfrauenkirche in Bobingen (1749-51) and Hans
Adam Dossenberger's Theklakirche in Weiden (1756-51) deserve to be
singled out. Or consider the windows of St. Michael in Berg am Laim
(1738-51). Compared with Zimmermann's extravagant window forms, Johann
Michael Fischers may at first seem rather sober and uninteresting. But
this is a false impression. Faison calls our attention to the way
"great lights are daringly cut right through the pendentive supports of
the central space, and then by a stroke of genius contrasted with the
smaller stucco reliefs of similar shape (representing the Church
Fathers) in the lower choir space, which gets a strong sidelighting.
"[43] Both the daring and the parallel contrast serve to dematerialize
the architecture, one by supporting the impression of almost weightless
vaults, the other by inviting us to look at the large windows as if
they were ornamental niches. The Bavarian rococo church depends on such
metamorphic play that transforms architectural into ornamental or
pictorial elements (fig. 88). Schopenhauer insisted that it is absolutely necessary for an understanding and aesthetic enjoyment
of a work of architecture to have direct knowledge through perception
of its matter as regards its weight, rigidity, and cohesion. . . If we
were told clearly that the building, the sight of which pleases us,
consisted of entirely different materials of very unequal weight and
consistency, but not distinguishable to the eye, the whole building
would become as incapable of affording us pleasure as would a poem in
an unknown language.[44]
The Bavarian rococo church is such a poem; its style is defined by the
architectural lie. Consider its frescoed vaults: painting and
decoration join to let us forget the materiality of the vaults and
their supports. Particularly revealing is another Fischer church, the
Premonstratensian abbey church of Osterhofen (1729-35). Once again the
decoration is by the Asam brothers; as at Aldersbach, the middle three
of the five bays of the nave of this wall-pillar church are united by
one large fresco, here more rectangular and occupying an even larger
part of the vault. But to speak of it simply as "more rectangular"
misses the contribution made by the fresco's shape. To appreciate its
originality a more detailed comparison with Aldersbach is instructive.
In Aldersbach the first and the fifth bays have round, securely framed
frescoes; clearly articulated rib-bands separate these bays off from
the middle three and give them a certain unity of their own. In
Osterhofen, too, we find such rib-bands, but now they no longer respect
the architectural division of the nave into bays; they deviate from the
positions that division would lead us to expect, pushing instead toward
the center (fig. 89). This push seems to have "caused" the concave
indentations of the main fresco, while the deflection of the rib-bands
seems to have its "cause" in turn in an expansion of the smaller
quadrilobed frescoes of the first and fifth bays, which have penetrated
into the adjacent bays. But to give such a description is to speak of the frescoes as if they
were merely fields an the vault. The perspectival art of the painter
does not let us see them as such. We experience the deflection not as
horizontal, which of course it is, but as vertical; the space has begun
to breathe, to lift itself; and since architecturally this lift makes
no sense, we are left to feel that somehow the tectonic had here cast
off its heaviness, as if the vault had become a sail lifted by some
mysterious wind. I know few churches where fresco and stucco join so
effectively to negate the heaviness of the vault. In many later churches this look of weightlessness is enhanced by the
widespread practice of constructing vaults not of stone, but of timber,
lath, and plaster. In Bavaria the technique goes back at least to
Johann Jakob Herkommer's St. Mang in Füssen (1710-17), but as
Christian Otto remarks, "It was not until the 1730's that lath and
plaster vaults came into their own. . . The aesthetic
consequence of this procedure can be demonstrated at Die Wies, where
the Zimmermanns carved away and hollowed out the lower zone of the
vaults to produce a hallucinatory effect in terms of stone technology
(fig. 65)."[46] The architects of the Bavarian rococo like to do just
what Schopenhauer would not have them do: presupposing expectations
based on a much heavier and more difficult-to-use material, a church
like Die Wies has to seem unnaturally light; its perforations and
penetrations make for a magically diaphanous architecture that, while
very sensuous, yet appears to have freed itself from the heaviness of
matter (fig. 90).
Pictorialization and Sacralization
Rupprecht rightly makes the pictorialization of the interior a defining
characteristic of the Bavarian rococo church. The Bavarian rococo
church is architecture that turns against architecture, that puts
itself into question by becoming picture. But emphasis an its pictorial
character should not lead us to overlook its equally essential, if
quite traditional, bipolarity. This bipolarity dictates that the degree
of pictorialization not be the same throughout the church. Choir and
nave should possess different degrees of reality: the pictorialization
of the choir is more developed than that of the nave-raised to the
second power, one might say.
In the Bavarian rococo church pictorialization is inseparable from
sacralization; pictorial distance fuses with the distance that
separates the sacred from the profane, a fusion that may let us wonder
to what extent the Bavarian rococo church presupposes a willingness to
sacrifice the sacred to the aesthetic. In this aestheticization of the
sacred the death of an essentially sacred architecture begins to
announce itself. By itself the bipolarity of the church is hardly characteristic of the
Bavarian rococo alone. As we have seen, it has a long prehistory,
especially in Bavaria. Nor is the pictorial or theatrical treatment of
the choir peculiar to the rococo. It is equally characteristic of the
baroque and can be traced back to the late Gothic period. In this
respect, too, the Bavarian rococo only takes up and develops a quite
traditional theme, but the way in which it takes up and plays with this
theme is peculiar to the time and to the region. To understand the
Bavarian rococo church we have to understand the nature of this play.
THEATRUM SACRUM
A Lesson of Two Tournaments
The use of ornament to create a mediating zone between fresco above and
white architectural elements below helps to define the Bavarian rococo
church. But why is such mediation demanded? Our analysis of the
Bavarian rococo fresco provides at least a partial answer: unlike the
illusionistic creations of a Pozzo, who uses his mastery of perspective
to open the real space of the church to the glories of heaven above,
the large frescoes of Bavarian rococo churches tend to raise a second
earth, with its own heaven and its own horizon, above the earth to
which we belong. To make this other earth seem real, the Bavarians
adopted some of the devices of Italian illusionism, but such adoption
had to remain incomplete. A consistent illusionism fuses pictorial and
real space; the inconsistent illusionism of the Bavarians establishes a
distance between the two and, in this respect, retains something of the
character of panel painting. This marriage of illusionism and panel
painting is never without tension. As the frescoes increase in size and
the illusion becomes more convincing, it becomes more and more
difficult to see them as panel paintings; and yet the appearance of a
horizon an the frescoed vault makes it impossible to see the space of
the painting as an illusionistic extension of the space in which we
stand. As has been shown, this tension or ambiguity requires a new
approach to the frame: illusionism demands that the frame be abolished,
while panel painting invites it. The Bavarian rococo does neither.
Instead it creates an ornamental framing zone that is weaker than the
traditional frame in that it links the world of the fresco to the space
in which we stand, but strong enough to create some distance between
the two. While this account answers some questions, it raises others.
How are we
to understand the ambiguity of this response to illusionism? It is
almost as if artists like the Asam or the Zimmermann brothers could not
take baroque illusionism quite seriously; so they began to play with
it. This suggests that the rococo, at least in Bavaria, can be
understood as a playful potentiation of the baroque that at the same
time implies its negation. In the rococo the baroque destroys itself.
To give some plausibility to this thesis let us consider two examples
that may at first seem far removed from the rococo church. Throughout
the baroque and rococo period, tournaments continued to play an
important part in the self-representation of the nobility and
especially of the ruler, in spite of the fact that with the Invention
of gunpowder armor had become useless and tournaments an anachronism,
"a romantic masquerade."[1] But precisely because the tournament had
lost touch with everyday reality, it could acquire a more ideal
significance. Instead of a sport that really tested the skill of the
competitors, it became a ritual play in which the nobility presented to
itself its own knightly ethos. As the play character was emphasized,
increasing effort was spent an the theatrical frame that would help to
establish the tournament's higher meaning, until finally this frame
became more important than the tournament itself, which was now little
more than an occasion for a theatrical transfiguration of the life of
the court. Munich witnessed such a tournament for the first time in
1654, two
years after the marriage of the elector Ferdinand Maria to Adelaide of
Savoy, who did so much to bring the high baroque to Bavaria.[2] The
tournament was introduced by a dramatic presentation. Mercury and Mars
claim special rights to the virtuous Elidauro, prince of Florida. To
support his case Mercury points out that the prince had gained glory
and honor by devoting himself diligently to the study of the arts and
letters. Mars, he charges, is deflecting the prince from his path by
tempting him with the promise of military glory and, even worse, by
seducing him to the ways of love. Unmoved by these complaints, Mars
exhorts the prince to battle in honor of love. Passionately enamored of
Edilaleda, the cavaliere di Marte challenges Celidoro, the prince of
Erida, known as a devotee of science and an enemy of love. The discord
of Mercury and Mars offered thus the mythic Background for the
tournament, in which the elector himself took the part of Elidauro,
leading a party showing the blue and white of Bavaria, while the part
of Celidoro was taken by the elector's brother, Duke Max Philipp, whose
followers sported the white and red of Savoy. The intent to glorify the
elector is evident. The virtue and fame of this in fact rather boring
ruler were shown to be such that they move even the gods to jealous
squabbling. Not surprisingly, neither side gained a decisive victory.
Sitting on the imperial eagle (it had been hoped that the emperor would
attend the festivities) Jupiter bids Mercury and Mars, Elidauro and
Celidoro, be friends. The harmonious ending shows how in the true ruler
love, arms, and letters are inseparably joined. The difference between
baroque and rococo becomes tangible when we
compare this tournament with another, held in 1723, eight years after
Max Emanuel, his imperial dreams shattered, had returned to Munich from
his French exile.[3] This time the frame was of a quite different sort:
a carnival procession introduced the tournament, led by Count de Costa
and Alois Fugger, dressed as Bacchus and Silenus. The tournament judges
appeared as parliamentarians, while the two contesting parties were
dressed, not as knights, but as hunters, peasants, moneylenders, Jews,
old men an crutches, fools, and apothecaries. The procession included
Scaramuccio and Brighella, Hanswurst, Pierrot and Harlequin. A school
class, complete with teacher, brought up the end. In keeping
with the character of the event, the orchestra played an an odd mixture
of toy and real instruments. Of course, we have to keep in mind the
time of the year: It was carnival! But that was also true of the
earlier tournament. Carnival had long offered a welcome occasion for
the celebration of elaborate festivals. But only in the eighteenth
century did the tournament turn into a playful parody. The theatrical
performance with which the court had transported itself into a more
ideal sphere and exhibited to itself its knightly ethos had ceased to
convince. The rococo plays with the theatricality of the baroque which
it can no longer take quite seriously. Theatre becomes meta-theatre.
That there are similarities between the Bavarian rococo's playful
heightening and negation of baroque illusionism and this rococo
tournament is too obvious to require discussion. Rococo religious art
appears to have become an aesthetic game, suggesting that what had long
been thought of utmost importance could no longer be taken seriously.
How close the religious art of the rococo could come to parody is shown
by an example to which Wilhelm Messerer calls attention: flanking the
high altar of Berg am Laim we see the archangel Gabriel, his mouth
opened to announce to the Virgin that she will bear the Son of God.[4]
But the Virgin's place has been taken by a putto, who mimicks her
traditional gesture, expressing humility and acceptance. In an open
book we read ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI, "Behold the handmaid of God" (fig.
91).
Should we interpret the religious rococo of the Bavarians, too, as a
playful parody of the sacred theatre of the baroque? I shall return to
this question. But enough has been said already to show that the
Bavarian rococo is not simply theatrical in the baroque sense, but
plays with its theatricality. It is the nature of this play that must
be understood if we are to understand the nature of the Bavarian rococo
church.
Frescoes as Theatre
By now it has become a commonplace to speak of baroque and rococo art
in terms of the theatre. And yet there is a sense that to do so is
somehow to discredit that art. Wittkower, for example, after having
demonstrated the proximity of the theatre to Bernini's Cornaro Chapel,
a work that had a profound impact an the Bavarian rococo, feels that he
has to defend Bernini against the charge of theatricality. "To be
sure," he admits, "Bernini used effects first developed for the stage
in works of a permanent character and in religious settings; the
concealed light in the Cornaro Chapel or the carefully directed light
in his churches may be recalled." But Wittkower denies that such
devices suffice to support the widespread insistence that Bernini's art
is theatrical in a deeper sense. What is, however, generally meant by referring in
this context to the theatre is not that the experience gained in the
one field
was successfully applied to the other – a procedure
well known to students of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
– but that, through the borrowing from the theatre, religious
art itself became 'theatrical'; that in short the Baroque enthusiasm
for the theatre infected even religious art. Wittkower considers this conclusion "entirely fallacious; it was
arrived at when people mistook emphatic gestures and emotional
expression for the declamatory and oratorical requisites of the stage.
lt denies to the Roman Full Baroque precisely those qualities of deep
and sincere religious feeling, which are its most characteristic
aspect."[5] Given such works as the Cornaro Chapel, I would not
hesitate to say that here the theatre "infects" religious art (although
"infects" is a rather unfortunate term, suggesting, as it does,
disease). The Asam brothers brought Bernini's sacred theatre to
Bavaria. Their work, in turn, helped to determine the undeniable
theatricality of the Bavarian rococo church. But does theatricality
deny "deep and sincere religious feeling"? Does rhetoric imply
insincerity?
The Bavarian rococo church, at any rate, must be understood as an art
that is self-consciously theatrical. That it was seen, and meant to be
seen, in this manner is suggested by the language of a sermon an the
occasion of the consecration of the just completed Augustinian church
at Baumburg on August 30, 1758. The Jesuit Ignatius Bonschab likens the
vault, which Felix Anton Scheffler had decorated with scenes from the
life of St. Augustine, to a stage, each fresco to an act.[6] This is
indeed how we see the frescoes. We experience what we see not as simple
representations of
events drawn from the life of the saint, but as representations of a
theatrical performance of scenes from that life. The frescoes represent
a play glorifying St. Augustine and the Augustinians, a "theatrum
honoris," not unlike the theatrical performances glorifying the rulers
of the baroque.[7] What kind of theatre are we dealing with? Johann
Baptist Zimmermann's
main fresco at Schäftlarn (1755) offers a quite characteristic
example (fig. 92). As so often in Bavarian rococo churches, this fresco
represents the founding (1140) of the church. At the same time it
places this event in the context of the divine plan. Just as in the
case of the tournament the action of the gods formed the theatrical
background for a highly stylized representation of the actions of men,
so here the heavenly assembly gathered around the Lamb of God provides
the background for an idealized rendition of the story of the
monastery's founding. Even the landscape indicates the nature of this
idealization. There is no relationship between the landscape the
visitor walking to this church has just experienced and what he now
sees, not a real landscape, but a stage set. Similarly, no attempt is
made to portray the founders. Instead we see
actors playing the parts of these founders. Someone familiar with the
story of the monastery's founding will recognize in the splendidly
attired bishop Otto of Freising, who here hands a document to the
monastery's first prior, Engelbert. Behind the bishop his brother, Duke
Leopold, strikes an elegantly theatrical posture. But no attempt is
made to render historic personages; we see actors in rococo dress. The
Isar has turned into a theatrical river. A ship carries a
Premonstratensian. The frailty of that ship is answered by the strong
vertical of the tower that supports a rococo St. Norbert, the founder
of the Premonstratensian order, whom we see raising the Holy Sacrament,
blessing the landscape spread out beneath him. The beacon-like tower is
the strongest link between the oval of the landscape below and the oval
of heavenly clouds that support angels and the patron saints of the
church, Dionysius and Juliana. This link is reinforced by the light of
the Sacrament, a feeble echo of the burst of light emanating from the
sacred emblem of the Heavenly Lamb, which occupies the center of the
fresco. Only this heavenly theatre, which furnishes the events an earth
with a divine background, recalls the glory compositions of the
baroque. And even here there is a striking difference: the composition
of the heavenly assembly has become much airier and lighter. The
fresco's blue is not so much the color of heaven as the color of the
familiar sky. This atmospheric blue makes it difficult for us to think
that we are allowed a glimpse of heaven itself. What we see is a
theatrical representation of an Arcadian landscape, spanned by a blue
sky and the arc-like zodiac. In this sky what remains of baroque glory
compositions seems quite out of place, a strange appearance that
reminds one of the machine theatre of the baroque. This theatre in the
sky seems to have been staged not so much for us, nor for the founders
of the church, nor for the Premonstratensian in his frail boat. We and
they seem to belong to a different sphere. Only St. Norbert belongs to
both spheres, and thus links heaven and earth. The theatre in the sky
is his vision. The fresco thus proclaims that it is through St.
Norbert, and through the order he founded and that built this church,
that we, who are standing in it, are linked to heaven.[8] If the glory
compositions of the baroque let the heavenly realm break
into the church, if an artist like Pozzo wants to overwhelm us with the
verisimilitude of his painting, blurring the boundary that separates
reality and theatre, the Bavarian rococo no longer aims at such fusion.
It does not let us forget that what the painter furnishes is no more
than theatre. To make this reminder explicit and to exhibit the
theatricality of their art, the painters of the Bavarian rococo liked
to introduce curtains into their already theatrical compositions.
Divine transcendence becomes manifest only as a play within a play.
Good examples are found in Steingaden, another Premonstratensian
church, whose vaults were frescoed only a few years before
Schäftlarn by Johann Georg Bergmüller. Here two
frescoes tell the story of the founding of the church. In the eastern
fresco we see an angel who presents the plan of the monastery of
Steingaden to St. Norbert. Another angel has already begun to dig the
foundations. The real architects and builders of the monastery are the
angels. Like Schäftlarn, Steingaden is another Bethel, a place
where the earth is joined to heaven. And as in Schäftlarn it
is the vision of St. Norbert that establishes the ladder linking heaven
and earth. An angel lifts a curtain and lets us (or rather St. Norbert)
see a crucifix, bathed in light, descending to earth. St. Norbert's
vision is represented as an angelic theatre, set within a theatrical
fresco (fig. 93).[9] The device of the curtain appears again in the
fresco above the organ.
Here, however, the curtain is pushed to the upper left in such a way
that, given Bergmüller's perspective, it seems to belong to a
plane lying before both the scene showing the actual founding of the
church by Duke Welf VI and the visionary appearance above it. Instead
of presenting itself to us as part of the fresco, establishing a
theatre within the fresco's theatre, here it helps to establish the
theatricality of the fresco in its entirety.
Altar and Stage
The theatrical quality of the rococo church is most readily apparent in
its altar compositions.[10] Once again the Asam Brothers pointed the
way with the high altars at Rohr and Weltenburg (1721-24). Both are
witness to the debt the Bavarian rococo owes the Roman baroque: Bernini
and, even more, Pozzo provide obvious antecedents – one
senses the importance which the latter's decoration of the Jesuit
church in Vienna (1703-05) had for all of Southern Germany. Already in Munich's Theatinerkirche the mensa of the high altar had
been detached from and placed before the altar's column architecture.
No longer a piece of furniture, the altar had become architectural. But
in the Theatinerkirche the theatrical potential of such integration is
not yet exploited. Given the altar's lack of depth, its paired columns
continue to function rather like a picture frame. In Rohr this frame
becomes a stage architecture, complete with a blue drapery that shows
the Bavarian coat of arms and functions as a backdrop (fig. 94). The
altar's scagliola columns seem to have the same kind of reality as the
columns of the crossing; similarly, the entablature continues that of
the nave. Only its darker tonality resists complete integration and
establishes some distance, reinforced by the dark choir stalls
encircling the mensa, which help to give the altar the Look of a raised
stage and separate it from the tabernacle (see fig. 100). Enacted an
that stage is the Assumption of the Virgin. In some ways Egid Quirin
Asam remains closer to Titian than to Rubens or to Peter Candid [11] or
even to Pozzo's dramatic high altar painting in the Jesuit church in
Vienna. Like Titian, Egid Quirin organizes his drama in three zones.
Gathered around the empty sarcophagus we see apostles, their dramatic
gestures expressing bewilderment and astonishment at what is happening
(fig. 95). Above them the Virgin floats upward, supported by two large
angels, toward the heavenly realm that fills the altar's broken
pediment with its gold and light. Like the dove of the Holy Spirit
above, she seems suspended in midair. Her ascent recalls the fantastic
flights that the baroque theatre liked to conjure, often with
incredibly elaborate machinery. Here it is only a carefully concealed
rod (fig. 96).
Especially theatrical is the use of light. Frontal illumination is
provided by the large window broken into the façade. Windows
in the apse, concealed from our view, light the composition from the
sides, a theatrical effect the younger Asam had learned from Bernini.
The large oculus above the altar provides a very visible third source
of light. This time, however, light is not used to illuminate the
drama, but is itself part of it. To represent the heavenly realm the
sculptor fuses stuccoed clouds and a burst of golden rays with the warm
light entering through yellow panes. Real light and the golden rays
representing light are made part of one pictorial whole. Once again the
boundary between art and reality is obscured, or rather becomes the
object of artistic play. In this respect Rohr points both forward to
the rococo to come and back to the high baroque of Bernini,
particularly to the Cathedra Petri.[12] Even if the high altar at Rohr is obviously "infected" by the theatre,
it is impossible to speak here of illusionism. As Hitchcock remarks,
the altar "preserves aesthetic distance, despite all the realism of the
astonished apostles' poses and their existence, life-size, in our own
space, by the abstract whiteness of the figures, as in the present-day
work of George Segal."[13] This whiteness recalls the marble whiteness
of Bernini's sculptures, although here the material is not marble, but
stucco; in this respect the decoration of the Theatinerkirche and the
work of the Wessobrunners provide more obvious antecedents. This
whiteness, which was to become characteristic of subsequent rococo
sculpture, plays an important part in the play with illusionism that
provides one of the keys to the Bavarian rococo. Even more theatrical
is Weitenburg. In his Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum Pozzo had
recommended opening the apse to a light-filled stage (fig. 97). Cosmas
Damian Asam follows that recommendation and extends it to the nave
vault, into which an oval has, quite literally, been cut that allows us
to see the heavenly theatre painted an the flat ceiling above (figs. 98
and 99). The nave's darkness contrasts with the light that floods the
two "stages" of the main fresco and the high altar from concealed
windows. The altar's Bernini columns provide less a stage architecture
than a proscenium arch. Similarly the gilded statues of St. Martinus
and St. Maurus, which flank the polychromed central group, are not
actors in a play, but Part of the frame, although they are also
speakers, mediating between us and the sacred spectacle. St. Maurus on
the right is also a portrait of Maurus Bächl, the abbot who
had called the Brothers Asam to Weitenburg and to whom we therefore owe
this heavenly theatre. Cosmas Damian's fresco of the Immaculata furnishes a bright backdrop;
the concealed windows, their light intensified by a hidden reflecting
mirror, let us experience this image not so much as lit as itself a
source of light. Silhouetted against this light, St. George an his
charger possesses all the fragile elegance of a rococo knight. The
glittering dragon and the elegant princess hint at fairy tales-magical,
but not quite to be taken seriously. Once again it is impossible to
speak of illusionism. Aesthetic distance is established by the pedestal
that makes this St. George a representation of a statue, recalling a
host of such statues, including representations of heroic emperors and
kings and of even more heroic Christian saints. A strange kind of play:
the princess and the dragon threatening her are separated by a statue
that does not possess their kind of reality; their colors contrast with
his gold and silver, their engagement, underscored with parallel
S-curves, with his seeming disregard of her plight and even of the
devilish beast, which is pierced by his flaming sword. This is a remote
St. George, in a trance rather than heroic. And indeed, the strength
that slays the dragon is not his; the real victory belongs to her whose
light illuminates him (fig. 100).[14] Dominikus Zimmermann's Johanneskirche in Landsberg (1750-54.) offers a
high rococo counterpart to the theatre the Asam brothers had staged at
Weitenburg. Once again the darker nave contrasts with a bright choir,
illuminated by hidden windows, although in the Landsberg church
everything has become lighter. White and pastels dominate. As at
Weitenburg, a figural group, here representing Christ's Baptism, is
placed before a painted windows, their light intensified by a hidden
reflecting mirror, let us experience this image not so much as lit as
itself a source of light. Silhouetted against this light, St. George an
his charger possesses all the fragile elegance of a rococo knight. The
glittering dragon and the elegant princess hint at fairy tales-magical,
but not quite to be taken seriously. Once again it is impossible to
speak of illusionism. Aesthetic distance is established by the pedestal
that makes this St. George a representation of a statue, recalling a
host of such statues, including representations of heroic emperors and
kings and of even more heroic Christian saints. A strange kind of play:
the princess and the dragon threatening her are separated by a statue
that does not possess their kind of reality; their colors contrast with
his gold and silver, their engagement, underscored with parallel
S-curves, with his seeming disregard of her plight and even of the
devilish beast, which is pierced by his flaming sword. This is a remote
St. George, in a trance rather than heroic. And indeed, the strength
that slays the dragon is not his; the real victory belongs to her whose
light illuminates him (fig. 100).[14]
Dominikus Zimmermann's Johanneskirche in Landsberg (1750-54) offers a
high rococo counterpart to the theatre the Asam brothers had staged at
Weitenburg. Once again the darker nave contrasts with a bright choir,
illuminated by hidden windows, although in the Landsberg church
everything has become lighter. White and pastels dominate. As at
Weitenburg, a figural group, here representing Christ's Baptism, is
placed before a painted backdrop. Figures and the landscape background
both are the rather uninspired work of local artists. Far more
interesting is Zimmermann's curious rocaille architecture. Very much
like rocaille ornament in contemporary Augsburg engravings, it
simultaneously provides a frame for Johann Luidl's figures and
functions as a scenic object. Once again we meet with the ambivalence
of the frame so characteristic of the Bavarian rococo.[15] At Diessen,
the integration of altar and architecture is carried even
further than at Rohr. As at Weltenburg, the columns of this altar
function not as a stage architecture, but as a framing proscenium arch
(fig. 101). Joachim Dietrich's large, somewhat academic statues of the
church fathers are part of this frame. This suggests that the real
theatre is provided by Balthasar August Albrecht's painting of the
Assumption of the Virgin (1738). Missing in the painting, however, is a
representation of the realm of heaven. The painted drama is incomplete.
It demands the sculptural group of the Trinity, which here, as at Rohr,
is placed above the altar's cornice. But if dramatically these
sculptures belong with the painting, aesthetically they are part of the
frame and belong with the church fathers below. This play with the
frame, which is also a play with aesthetic distance, is analogous to
the play that the ornamental framing zones of rococo frescoes help to
inaugurate. In one respect Diessen goes beyond what was attempted at
Weltenburg:
the high altar painting can be lowered to reveal what is now quite
literally a narrow stage, complete with movable sets that allow for
representations of the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Entombment, and
the Resurrection, depending an what high holiday is being celebrated.
Faison calls attention to the "little concealed staircase (for
trumpeters?) leading to a platform behind the top of the altar. Here
indeed is a Theatrum Sacrum!"[16] Wherever we find a rococo altarpiece
the theatre is not too far away.
The high altar at Rottenbuch, the work of the Weilheim sculptor Franz
Xaver Schmädl, furnishes a good example.[17] Although
unusually elaborate, in keeping with the importance of the Augustinian
Rottenbuch, it may stand for countless other altars that show the
influence of Bernini as mediated by the brothers Asam (fig. 102).
Behind the freestanding mensa with the tabernacle, flanked by gilded
statues of Peter and Paul, rises a typical column architecture,
supported by a massive pedestal and crowned by a broken pediment.
Characteristic, too, is the Korde of putti who frolic in this altar, as
they do throughout the church. The theatre is suggested not only by the
dramatic placement of the main figures and by the way the altar's
columns provide a stage architecture, but by the curtain motif, which
appears here not once, but twice, suggesting once again theatre within
theatre. Putti draw these curtains, or rather play with them. Their
playfulness makes it difficult to take the theatre which they present,
and over which they seem to preside, too seriously. In the gable we see
God the Father, surrounded by more putti, bathed in that golden Bernini
light the Asam brothers brought to Bavaria. His right hand raised in
blessing, He looks down from His height. Below, before a small, empty
bed that forms the painted backdrop, Joachim and Anna, their heads and
hands raised in humble expectation, await the imminent birth of the
Virgin. The central part of the altar attempts to unveil the mystery of
that birth. Above the bed the Virgin as child descends on a cloud,
enveloped in gleaming rays. In this child divine grace and human
expectation meet; heaven and earth are gathered together. Putti carry
the familiar symbols of the antiphon: "Who is this that looks forth
like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army
with Banners?" Another putto points to a pearl in an open shell, the
traditional symbol of miraculous conception. The birth of the Virgin is
the dawn that announces the coming of the sun, of Jesus Christ. The
mensa below reminds us of His redeeming sacrifice. The curtain of this
play within a play is supported by a large
half-shell, a familiar Marian symbol, which at the same time functions
as God's throne. The Virgin, who bears Him Who bears all things, is the
throne of God.[18] A second half-shell in the gable forms a sheltering
baldachin. Together these two half-shells enclose the Deity. Thy Makers
maker, and thy Fathers mother; Thou' hast light in darke;
and shutst in little roome, Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe.[19]
The child we see below is the mother of Him Who sent her forth. To this
paradox the theatre cannot do justice. The sculptor's scenic
approach has to break down before the central mystery of the Virgin's
birth. Just as the fresco painters of the rococo were often content to
express the central mystery of their faith with the geometric symbol of
the Trinity, so in the very center of the altar we see no longer
theatre, but the monogram of the Virgin, its crown signifying that she,
who is both child and mother of God, is also His bride and queen of
heaven. Fascinated as they were by the theatre, those who were
responsible for
this altar were aware of the inadequacy of all theatrical
representations of the mysteries of faith. Despite their fondness for
rhetoric, for grand gestures, they remained aware of the superficiality
of their art, of their inability to carry us to the core of what
matters. In this diffidence born of faith the play with the theatre has
its foundation. Emphasis on the theatre's theatricality is a device to
prevent us from taking it too seriously. That device is raised to a
higher power when the more profound mysteries of faith are presented as
theatre within theatre. And further, this second theatre, pushing
closer to the central mystery, has to become emblematic and less
scenic. The Image of the child is thus joined to the symbol of the
shell. Together, they point to the mystery that finds expression in the
narre Maria.
Stages Within Stages
Likening wall-pillars to the wings of a theatrical set is more than a
simile. To enter a Bavarian rococo church is to step onto a splendid
stage, although, as we take our place in the nave, this stage is
transformed into the orchestra; the stuccoed curtain that so often
decorates the choir arch and loges that establish the antechoir as a
proscenium transform the altar room into a stage. Upon that stage the
high altar appears as yet another stage: a stage within a stage within
a stage.[20] Playing with the theatre, the Bavarian rococo church
forces us to
acknowledge its theatricality. In this respect it may seem to differ
from the baroque. Is not baroque illusionism supposed to make us forget
that what we are seeing is just theatre? But who was ever convinced by
an illusionistic fresco that the heavenly scenes above him were
reality? The illusionism of a Pozzo does not so much lead us to mistake
illusion for reality as it makes us wonder where one leaves off and the
other begins: what is three-dimensional architecture and what
two-dimensional painting? The painted ceilings of the baroque do not
lead us to mistake theatre for reality; instead, they make us wonder
whether reality is more than theatre, more than a dream surrounded by
silence. The theatricality of the baroque church is symbol of the
theatricality of the world.[21] In this respect the rococo church
remains very much part of the
baroque. Its play with the theatre, the delight it takes in theatres
within theatres, is familiar from Shakespeare and Calderón.
The rococo church can indeed be interpreted as a more effective
realization of baroque theatricality than the illusionism of a Pozzo.
That illusionism is limited by the necessity of assigning the spectator
a specific point of view. Only for a moment do we wonder where reality
ends and deception begins. A few steps and the illusion collapses; the
quite different realities of architecture and fresco reassert
themselves. Pozzo's illusionism owes both its power and its limitations
to perspectival painting, which here threatens to triumph over the
baroque theatre. The consistent employment of one-point perspective
establishes a distance between spectator and painting. Illusionism
invites us to forget this distance, which is yet preserved and remains
unchanged. So is the boundary separating reality from illusion. Theatre
that subordinates itself to the logic of perspective may let us forget
ourselves and our reality, but it is unable to put that reality into
question. Such questioning, however, is inseparable from the baroque
sense of theatre. It demands theatre that plays with aesthetic
distance, theatre that is also about theatre. Pozzo's illusionism fails
as theatre precisely because it succeeds so well as perspectival
painting. Such painting can transform the worshiper into a spectator of
a sacred play, but it does not assign him a part in that play. Just
this is the goal of the Bavarian rococo church. Its play with the
theatre and with perspective denies us a firm point of view that would
leave us outside the play that delights us. The baroque view of the
theatricality of the world finds here a last effective expression.
Consider Johann Baptist Zimmermann's judgment fresco in Die Wies
(1753-54). As in any successful rococo church, the fresco lacks the
kind of integrity and unity that would make it into a self-sufficient
whole; it is essentially incomplete. To do justice to it one has to
consider the contribution it makes to the architectural whole, the
greatest achievement of the painter's brother Dominikus (fig. 105). The
church fuses successfully the hall church scheme with an oval design, a
fusion that has its precursor in Dominikus's earlier Steinhausen (fig.
103). As in Steinhausen, this fusion is motivated at least in part by
the special requirements of a pilgrimage church. A space had to be
created that would allow the pilgrims to walk around the sacred image.
Zimmermann solves the problem by enveloping both the oval central space
and the roughly rectangular choir with an aisle or mantle, which not
only functions as an ambulatory, leading the pilgrims around nave and
choir, past the miraculous image of Christ in the high altar, without
disturbing those praying, but also obscures the boundaries of the
church. Here, too, ornament both separates and mediates between
pictorial and architectural reality, furnishing a frame that negates
itself (figs. 65, 90, and 104). Thus, the rainbow that spans the
frescoed ceiling has to be seen together with the piers below and the
stuccoed ornament that provides the connecting link. The large
cartouches and the stuccoed balconies above provide transitions that
let us see this ensemble of painting, ornament, and architecture as a
portal or triumphal arch. The fantastic throne that rises in the fresco
just above the choir is the keystone of a second arch set inside the
first. Painted blue drapery heightens the theatrical quality of the
throne; at the same time it connects it with the stuccoed vases and
cartouches, which in turn are seen as extensions of the piers that
support pulpit and abbot's loge. Inside this arch the columns of the
high altar help to define yet a third arch. Its keystone is the
apocalyptic Lamb with the Seven Seals. Again blue drapery, now stuccoed
rather than painted, mediates between it and the altar's red columns.
To appreciate this theatrical arrangement of arches within arches-and
it would be easy to pursue this theme much further-we have to stand
near the entrance. Yet that point of view cannot be said to do justice
to the church, not even to the main fresco. Its perspective demands
that we walk around it. Die Wies is theatre that demands not passive
spectators, but active participants. Changes in point of view enable us
to make new discoveries. Die Wies is full of surprises
– here I only want to call attention to the curious openings
in the
upper ambulatory, which reappear, fantastically transformed, below the
choir vault, providing shifting frames for the ambulatory's small
frescoes (figs. 90 and 104).
Looked at as self-sufficient works of art, most of the frescoes of the
Bavarian rococo are disappointing. They demand the interplay with
architecture. As the arch motif in Die Wies illustrates, the rococo
fresco helps to pictorialize architectural space, but as we move
through this space, we reassert the primacy of architecture and reduce
the fresco to an ornamental accessory-which yet refuses such
subservient status, reasserts itself, and pictorializes the
architecture. Ornament is the medium of this unending play or strife.
The iconography of the main fresco of Die Wies gives it a deeper
meaning (fig. 105). Two angels with open books and the trumpet-carrying
angels below the ends of the rainbow tell us that the throne rising
above the choir arch is the throne of the Last judgment. But not yet
has the judge descended from his rainbow. Its colored arc is still the
reassuring sign of God's continuing covenant with the earth: there
still is time, although the portal that looms up over us in the fresco
as we prepare to leave the church bears the warning inscription: Tempus
non erit amplius (Ap. 10, 6), "There should be time no longer." The
emblem of the snake biting its own tail makes this the gate of
eternity. Chronos has fallen to the ground; the hourglass has dropped
from his hands. What lies beyond time lies hidden behind the gate's
closed doors (fig. 106). Representations of the Last judgment tend to oppose the Glory of Heaven
to the torments of the damned. The absence of the latter in Die Wies is
surprising. Color and composition make this a joyous painting. But how,
given its theme, can this joy be justified? Where are the damned? To be
sure, the judgment has not yet been made; there still is time. But
where are those to be judged? The answer is obvious enough: we
ourselves, standing in the church, are necessary to complete the
picture.[22] At Birnau this attempt to make the spectator part of the picture led
Gottfried Bernhard Goez to introduce a real mirror into the fresco.
Given the correct point of view, we can see ourselves literally in the
fresco.[23] Here the device is too obvious, the integration of the
spectator into the fresco too artificial. The Zimmermann brothers play
a more subtle game. Of course we know that what we see above us is just
a picture. We are real in a quite different sense; we belong to the
three-dimensional space that shelters us. And yet, that space proves
elusive and transforms itself into picture. We cannot keep our distance
from the theatre that is being performed for us; we are drawn into it.
Inseparable from that interplay between picture and architecture that
helps to define the Bavarian rococo church is the interplay between
actor and spectator. The irreality of the fresco affects us: "We are
such stuff as dreams are made on."
Aesthetic and Religious Play
Ever since the eighteenth century rococo art has been criticized for
its lack of seriousness, for its frivolity. The obvious playfulness of
this art makes it difficult to simply reject that charge. Consider
again the rococo parody of the baroque tournament. Such parodies do
indeed suggest some recognition of what Hauser terms "the unreality of
court life, which is nothing but a party game, a brilliantly staged
theatrical show."[24] Hauser interprets this sense of unreality as a
function of social changes that had robbed the nobility of its former
significance. The baroque embraced the theatre with such enthusiasm to
cover up these changes. Medieval themes return; there is a new
aristocratization of society and a fresh
renaissance of the old chivalrous-romantic concepts of morality. The
real
nobleman is now the "honnéte homme" who belongs to the
birthright nobility and acknowledges the ideals of chivalry. Heroism
and fidelity, moderation and self-control, generosity and politeness
are the virtues of which he must be master. They are all part of the
semblance of the beautiful, harmonious world, clothed in which the king
and his entourage present themselves to the public. They pretend that
these virtues really matter and, deceiving even themselves at times,
they pretend that they are the knights of a new Round Table. [25] The
rococo is no longer able to take this theatre seriously. It knows
that reality lies elsewhere – thus, while the masquerade of
the baroque tournament conjured up an idealized world of gods and
knights, the rococo parody borrows its masks from the peasantry and the
middle class. But such borrowing is tied to a Jeep-rooted conservatism.
Even as the nobility discovers the bourgeois values of privacy and
artless sincerity, even as it learns to prefer the intimacy of small
rooms and gets bored by etiquette and ceremonial, recognizing the
artificiality of its own life and ideals, it refuses to relinquish
them. Unable to embrace inherited conventions, it is yet unable to
break with them and to adopt the ethos of the rising middle class.
Instead it exploits the tension by making it the subject of its own
aesthetic games. The rococo's play with the theatre of the baroque
betrays an aestheticism that is inseparable from the decay of the old
order. It is possible to offer a similar analysis of the religious
rococo. If
one can speak of an anachronistic return of knightly ideals in the
baroque period, can one not also speak of an anachronistic return of
essentially medieval patterns in the religious life, and especially in
the religious art of the Counter Reformation? What necessity still
links spiritual content and artistic expression? Immediacy of
experience seems to have given way to rhetoric, what once was genuine
to theatre. The playful theatre of the rococo betrays a recognition of
the hollowness of the baroque theatre, but such recognition does not
lead to revolution, to an overthrow of what has been inherited. On this
view the religious art of the rococo has to be seen as an essentially
aesthetic play with the inherited religious tradition and its images.
In spite of the undeniable suggestiveness of such an interpretation, we
should not be too quick to apply an analysis based an the aristocratic
rococo, especially of France, to the Bavarian rococo church. Almost any
village church built in the seventeen-forties or fifties should make us
wonder. Or take the curious, almost disturbingly organic ornament in
the choir of Die Wies. Is this the product of a tired aestheticism? It
may be possible to analyze the French rococo in terms of the tensions
between a tired aristocracy and the rising bourgeoisie, and such an
approach retains its suggestiveness when applied to the rococo at the
court of Max Emanuel and Karl Albrecht; but it fails to do justice to
the Bavarian rococo church. In spite of all its sophistication, the
Bavarian rococo church retains its foundation in what remains a peasant
culture. Its creators lived in a world that had changed little since
the Middle Ages. In that world miracles still happened and were taken
for granted. In this context it is well to consider the events that led
to the
building of Die Wies.[26] In 1730 Hyacinth Gassner, the abbot of
Steingaden, had introduced the Good Friday procession into the area;
for it he needed an image of the flagellated Christ. In an attic filled
with paraphernalia a head was found, then a chest, arms, and feet. The
parts did not quite fit together but they would do: rags were used as
stuffing and the whole was covered with canvas and painted. For three
years this simple image was carried in the procession, until something
better was demanded and the statue was stored away, together with other
props that might find use in future theatrical productions. Finally it
was given to a local innkeeper, who had taken a liking to it. His
cousin, a peasant woman who lived an hour's distance from Steingaden,
"in der Wies," in the meadow, begged him to let her have the statue. A
month later she found tears on its face. When the miracle recurred, the
terrified woman called her husband. A simple chapel was built and soon
there were miraculous cures. The monastery appears to have been not at
all pleased with what was
happening out "in the meadow" – was it not the eighteenth
century? The monasteries were in the forefront of a rather modest
Bavarian enlightenment. So the peasant woman, Maria Lori, and her
husband, Martin, were questioned and publicity discouraged. But the
number of people who made the pilgrimage to the humble statue increased
rapidly. Soon the provisional church that had been built proved
insufficient. There were days on which several thousand pilgrims
arrived from as far away as Bohemia, the Rhineland, and Switzerland.
Given such success, which translated into funds, and given increasing
complaints about the inadequacy of the existing shelter, the abbot
decided to build a large and costly church. The peasants to whom the
church owes its origin contributed their labor. lt was the piety of the
people, a piety that centered more an
pilgrimages than an the liturgy, that gave rise to many of the best
rococo churches, and the piety extended to the builders of these
churches. When his wife died Dominikus Zimmermann asked to be allowed
to spend the rest of his life in the Premonstratensian monastery
Schussenried, where one of his sons was a monk; a daughter was abbess
in the nearby Gutenzell. His request was refused, in part because the
monastery could not quite forgive him how much more than expected
Steinhausen, Zimmermann's other great pilgrimage church, had cost it,
but also to avoid difficulty with its own architect. So he built
himself a house right next to Die Wies, where another son, Franz
Dominikus, who had assisted his father, had married the widowed Maria
Lori. The life of the Asam brothers was similarly linked to religion.
Two of
Cosmas Damian's daughters entered convents. Next to his house in
Thalkirchen he built himself a chapel. Religion played an even greater
role in the life of the unmarried Egid Quirin. St. Johann Nepomuk in
Munich, the Asamkirche, has its origin in his resolve to build a church
in honor of the newly elevated saint. How many other architects
sacrificed their wealth to build a church? The more one learns of
religious life in eighteenth-century Bavaria the
more difficult it becomes to accept an interpretation that would have
us understand the rococo church as no more than an aesthetic play with
a religious past that could no longer be taken seriously. At the same
time we cannot deny that the rococo of the court and the rococo of the
church belong together. Not only does the latter draw much of its
language from the former, but more significant, both have to be
understood as responses to the preceding baroque and both betray an
inability to take the illusionistic theatre of the baroque quite
seriously. But what accounts for this inability on the part of the
church? Could it be that the rococo plays with the sacred theatre of
the baroque as it does precisely because it takes the theatre so
seriously?
The Insufficiency of Perspective
Defending Bernini against the charge of theatricality, Wittkower
contrasts the theatre with an art that expresses "deep and sincere
religious feeling." The expressiveness of his art is supposed to have
saved Bernini from the theatre. Presupposed is the familiar stance that
the theatre deals with surface appearance: the actor is not himself;
and art that is theatrical pretends to be something that it is not.
Similar presuppositons let Jacques Maritain claim that all
post-medieval art places us "on the floor of a theatre," that "with the
sixteenth century the lie installed itself in painting, which began to
love science for its own sake, endeavoring to give the illusion of
nature and to make us believe that in the presence of a painting we are
in the presence of the same as the subject painted, not in the presence
of the painting."[27] In spite of its exaggeration and oversimplification –
Maritain is quick to admit that great artists, artists like Raphael and
Greco, Zurbarán and Watteau, or even Bernini, "purified art
of this lie" – the passage yet points to a condition with
which the visual arts have been struggling ever since the Renaissance:
the triumph of perspective. For although Maritain speaks of the
theatre, it isn't the theatre as such that is at the heart of the
problem. There is, after all, a ready answer for those who would
criticize the art of the Counter Reformation for its theatricality. Is
the liturgy not in its very essence dramatic action? At a very early
date that action was elaborated to include dramatic presentations,
particularly at Christmas and Easter. Processions offered further
occasions for theatrical productions. With their turn to the theatre
baroque and rococo develop and continue practices that go back at least
to the early Middle Ages and that may well be inseparable from
religious life. But when Maritain speaks of the theatre he is not thinking of medieval
mystery plays; nor does he want to condemn the theatricality of baroque
oratorios. Indeed, he is thinking not so much of dramatic actions as of
pictorial illusions that invite us to mistake them for reality, letting
us forget their merely artificial being. This presupposes that the art
of faithfully representing appearance has been mastered. The lie that
is said to have "installed itself in painting" is inseparable from
mastery of perspective; instead of signifying a higher reality art now
presented a second reality. When Alberti likens the artist to another
God this is more than a rhetorical flourish:[28] the artist's work is
to possess the same kind of unity and integrity that tradition
attributes to God's creation. With the turn to perspective painting
enters a development that will lead it to art for art's sake.
Medieval art possesses a twofold inadequacy. First of all it is
inadequate to the appearance of our world. From that appearance it
draws abstract "images" of a transcendent reality. But these "images"
may not be considered more or less literal representations of that
reality. It is this second inadequacy that lets them function as signs
that preserve the transcendence of the divine. Perspective, having its
measure in the beholder, cannot be separated from a secularization of
the visible. Thus, it proves an obstacle to attempts to use the visual
arts to point to transcendence. This is the condition faced by the
religious art of the Counter Reformation: Shut off from transcendence
by its subservience to perspective, it still seeks to use the magic of
perspective to incarnate transcendence. But is the power of such
incarnation given to the artist? Can such attempts result in more than
an illusionistic theatre? Such considerations led Plato to condemn all mimetic art as an
imitation of mere appearances, thrice removed from reality. To the
extent that the artist accepts the rule of perspective, he surrenders
all claim to serve the truth. In his ability to create a second world
the artist may well seem like a godlike magician; yet the power of his
magic depends an the infirmity of our senses. To us, as Plato points
out, the same object appears straight when looked at out
of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes
convex,
owing to the illusions about colours to which the sight is liable. Thus
every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that
weakness of the human mind an which the art of conjuring and of
deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes,
having an effect an us like magic.[29] Similarly, the Renaissance saw the artist as brother to the magician,
art as akin to thaumaturgy, which John Dee defined as "that art
Mathematicall, which giueth certaine order to make strange workes of
the sense to be perceiued, and of men greatly to be wondered at."[30]
When Brunelleschi demonstrated the power of his system of perspective
to make the spectator, seeing a painted panel, feel that he was
actually looking at the exterior of San Giovanni in Florence, he
established himself as such a magician. And the same is true of the
great stage designers of the baroque, of a Torelli da Fano or an Andrea
Pozzo. But although one has to grant the delight that Pozzo claims is
furnished by such deceptions, what place do they have in a church? Is
not Maritain right to mourn the turn of Renaissance and
post-Renaissance art to the magic of Illusion? The development of
perspective has given special weight to Plato's attack an imitative
art. How, if art is ruled by perspective, can we take seriously the
claims of art to serve reality? And more generally, if the visible as
such is subjected to that rule, must not all art be just "a kind of
play or sport," the artist a follower of Daedalus, who created
marvelous statues that with their motions imitated the appearance of
living things? Like Daedalus, he can create another labyrinth, but can
he help us find the way out of the labyrinth of the world? How can such
games have a religious significance? A hint of the answer is provided by an art form that, while it never
had more than peripheral importance, yet made perspective and the
problems connected with it thematic: anamorphic composition. Seen in a
normal way such compositions show one thing; given a second, quite
different point of view, they reveal another, hidden meaning. An early
example, and perhaps the most famous, is Holbein's Ambassadors, where a
shift in point of view transforms the curious shape in the lower half
of the painting into a skull. A change of place lets the splendid
appearance of the ambassadors give way to the power of death. Such
optical tricks were especially popular in the first half of the
seventeenth century. And, somewhat surprisingly, it was a religious
order, the Minims, that pursued these experiments with particular
enthusiasm.[31] Large anamorphic frescoes were painted, of which only
one has survived, Emmanuel Maignan's St. Francis di Paola in the
cloister of the Minim monastery in Rome.[32] Why should such
perspectival games be given space and time by a religious
establishment? How are we to understand this interest in anamorphosis?
Simply as a playful concern with perspective, devoid of deeper
significance? Facing such paintings one Sees little more than arabesques suggesting a
landscape, but not coherent enough to be seen convincingly as
such-riddles in search of an answer. That answer is given when the
normal point of view is given up; a different point of view lets us
recognize the painting's real significance. Anamorphosis would thus
seem to function first of all as a metaphor for the fact that the world
presents itself to us in labyrinthine confusion. Only a change in point
of view reveals its deeper meaning. But another point must be made: the
very fact that such compositions call attention to the power of
perspective prevents us from taking the second point of view too
seriously. By playing one point of view off against another, anamorphic
composition is perspectival art that proclaims the insufficiency of
such art. In this respect it resembles a theatrical performance, where
the Illusion is broken by someone reminding us that what we are
watching is only theatre, as Egid Quirin Asam does when he places his
brother's portrait before the fresco at Weltenburg (fig. 107)."[33] And
yet this play with perspective, which is at the Same time a play with
aesthetic distance, is itself part of a theatrical performance.
Anamorphic painting should not be taken too seriously. It is born of a
love of tricks and games. But it is precisely this lightness that gives
it a particular adequacy in an age that had despaired of the adequacy
of the visible to the divine. Like the rapidly changing images of the machine theatre of the baroque,
anamorphosis is an emblem of the illusoriness and the unreliability of
the world. Here we have a key to the theatricality of the baroque. The
baroque theatre is itself an emblem of the finitude of human existence,
caught in changing perspectives.[34] Far from simply placing the power
of perspective at the service of dramatic presentations, the baroque
theatre uses a multipliciry of perspectives to put the rule of
perspective into question. I would suggest that this is how we have to understand the
theatricality of the Bavarian rococo church as well. Its play with
perspective is more than an aesthetic game; it is part of a last
successful attempt to create a genuinely religious art in an age that
knows about the insufficiency not only of art, but of the visible. The
Bavarian rococo's unwillingness to simply adopt the illusionism of a
Pozzo does not stem from an inability to take the theatre seriously.
Quite the contrary. Because the Bavarian rococo continues to take the
theatre so seriously, because it is unwilling to subject it to the rule
of perspective, it cannot accept that pictorialization of the theatre
which fascinated a Pozzo or a Gaulli.
Theatre and Reality
Dramatic action and pictorial spectacle place quite different demands
an the theatre. It is not necessary to think of theatrical performances
as moving pictures; and yet, when thinking about the theatre, we take
the primacy of the eye for granted. Thus "in producing a play, we begin
by extinguishing the house lights, so that the only visible part of the
theatre is the stage; we assume that the primary way to control the
audiences's attention is through its eyes. And, a logical corollary, we
always say that we are going to see a play, never to hear it."[35] This
darkening of the house seems so natural to us that it is surprising to
learn that only Gustav Mahler, following the example of Richard Wagner,
dared to do this at the conservative Vienna Hofoper, where baroque
traditions were stronger than elsewhere and one went to the theatre not
only to see the theatre an the stage, but also and more important the
theatre of the world in which one was oneself one of the actors. We are
reminded that at least in certain respects we have carried that
pictorialization of the stage, which had begun in the Renaissance with
Serlio and Peruzzi and been perfected in the baroque, even further. The
extent to which the theatrical tradition of the baroque continues
to live is shown by our understanding of the opera as a building type.
We still expect a pictorial stage, opposed to an auditorium with
galleries, often divided into boxes. The pictorial quality of the
operatic spectacle is underscored by a frame-like proscenium arch that
separates the spectators and the reality to which they belong from the
artificial world of the stage. Raised stage and orchestra pit
strengthen that separation.[36]
Although we owe this building type to the baroque, we should keep in
mind that the baroque knew many other forms of theatre. Thus, like
their medieval precursors, the sacred plays that were put on as part of
the great religious festivals did not require a special stage: the
church, a square in front of it, or a marketplace would do. The
nobility found convenient theatres in its arcaded courtyards. Often one
had to be content with a large room: a few boards would represent the
world, a curtain behind which the actors could change and from which
they could emerge would be the backdrop. Only in the late Renaissance
do we meet with attempts to apply the
mastery of perspective to the theatre. At first the scene that was to
be represented an stage was actually reconstructed with canvas-covered
frames. Lope de Vega mourns that the carpenter is becoming more
important than the poet, that the theatre is becoming a matter of
rag-covered frames.[37] Such frames had the disadvantage of making
changes of scenery very difficult. They were therefore better suited to
the French drama, which retained them long after the Italians had
turned to more flexible staging. In Italy the unity of the theatrical
performance had been progressively weakened. Just as the tournament
became an occasion for theatrical elaboration, so the play became an
occasion for intermezzi that eventually developed into full-fledged
opera. The demand for more rapid changes was met by the introduction of
periacti, three-sided prisms covered with canvas, which could be
rotated to effect a change of scenery. It was an such a stage that the
first opera, Peri's Dafne, was performed in Florence in 1594. By the
time Inigo Jones introduced this new form of stage design into England
Giovanni Battista Aleotti had already replaced the periacti with
movable wings. His theatre in the Accademia degli Intrepidi in Ferrara
established the form of the baroque theatre: a deep stage with movable
wings and an auditorium with galleries and boxes.[38] It is impossible
to interpret this development simply as an increased
pictorialization of the stage. What motivated it was rather the demand
for rapid changes of scenery. The interest was not so much in pictures
as in their change. Delight in the evanescence of beauty –
fireworks were an essential part of the festal culture of the baroque
– mingled with the dread of time's passing. The point was not
so much to make pictorial illusion more convincing as to underscore its
ephemeral and dreamlike quality. In the flow of images the
transitoriness of life finds symbolic expression. Given the intimate
connection between the evolution of stage design and the rise of opera,
it is not surprising that Paris never rivaled Florence, Venice, or
Bologna as a center of innovative stage design. From Venice the new art
spread to Vienna and to Munich, where in 1654 Francesco Santurini built
a theatre in the new style, the first building in Germany to function
purely as a theatre. A new step, heralding the rococo, was taken by
Ferdinando
Galli-Bibiena. Bibiena abandoned the symmetrical designs of the high
baroque with their central vanishing point, shifting it instead to the
side of the stage. In 1703 the scena per angolo is used for the first
time in the Accademia del Pesto in Bologna, which by then had become
the center of theorizing about perspective (fig. 108). Ferdinando's son
Giuseppe lets the stage appear as only an accidental part of a much
larger space into which we are allowed to peek from without (fig. 109).
In keeping with the intention of illusionism, baroque stage design
sought to join the pictorial space created by the stage designer to the
real space of the auditorium by giving the former the axis of the
latter. The distance that separates pictorial from architectural
reality is thereby blurred. The scena per angolo asserts that distance;
theatrical and real space are divorced. Rupprecht links this shift from
high baroque theatre design, which like
illusionistic fresco painting had culminated in the work of Pozzo, to
the scena per angolo and the shift from the baroque to the rococo
church. Cosmas Damian Asam, familiar with the revolution in stage
design, is said to have based his own approach to fresco painting an
it.[39] Its first mature expression is the fresco at Aldersbach (fig.
39). Here, too, the fresco space is no longer experienced as a mere
extension of the real space. The two spaces possess a very different
reality. The means by which this is accomplished and the significance
of Cosmas Damian's work for the subsequent development of fresco
painting in Bavaria have already been discussed. Asam's interest in the
theatre is obvious enough. In 1711 Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena had
presented his innovations to the public in his L'architettura civile.
Filippo Juvarra, another important figure in the evolution of the new
approach, had been a teacher at the Accademia di San Luca when Asam
studied there. That there were other factors that tended to lead him in
the Same direction has been shown. Rupprecht is right to emphasize the
relationship between Bavarian fresco painting of the rococo and the new
fashion in stage design. Both imply a rejection of baroque illusionism.
Illusionism rests an the primacy of the eye. As we have seen, a certain
distance from life is implicit in this primacy. Paradoxical as this may
sound, for the sake of the eye baroque illusionism surrenders the
integration of theatre and reality that characterized the ritualized
theatrical spectacles that played such an important part in the
religious life of the period. For while illusionism may succeed in
fusing pictorial and real space for the person occupying the right
place, the illusion has to collapse when that place is left. lf it is
to succeed the spectator must remain in his place, passive, a mere eye.
The further pictorialization of the stage achieved by the scena per
angolo only makes the loss of reality inseparable from the reduction of
the spectator into an eye more pronounced. The other side of this loss
is a heightening of the purely aesthetic character of the events an
stage. Changes in the theatre architecture of the eighteenth century
correspond to this change. Characteristic of the high baroque is the
participation of ruler and nobility in theatrical performances, in
tournaments, masques, and ballets, which generally concluded when the
aristocratic performers left the stage to rejoin the court and to lead
it in a grand ball.[40] To this fluid boundary between actor and
spectator corresponds the fluid boundary between stage and auditorium.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century these boundaries tend to
become more rigid. The introduction of the court box, placed in the
back of the auditorium, which not only gave the ruler a much better
view of the events an stage but also removed him from the Burghers who
had come to furnish an ever-increasing part of the audience, is a
significant symptom. lt makes an early appearance in the Dresden opera
house (1664).[41] The ruler's place had been in the center of the
auditorium, in the midst of the aristocracy. As the ruler withdraws
into his box he is no longer there to represent himself to the
nobility; he becomes part of the audience. Implicit is a growing
conviction that the theatre is just theatre, just art. It had been much
more than that. To be sure, the baroque's attitude to the theatre had
always been
ambivalent. It knew about the connection between the theatre and the
lie and recognized that to play his part well the actor had to deny
himself. Thus, the professional actor, successor to the traveling
minstrels, jugglers, acrobats, and magicians of the Middle Ages, was
denied a place in society. His, and especially her, immorality was
almost taken for granted.[42] At the same time, the theatre was valued
for its educational potential.
It was the Jesuits who first made Munich a center of the baroque
theatre. They emphasized the educational value of acting as well as of
watching an edifying play. The young noblemen entrusted to the care of
the Jesuits were asked to act, because by so doing they would learn how
to behave, how to speak, how to move.[43] Playing the part of a
nobleman, a student prepared himself for the part he would have to play
in life. Taking the parts of heroes and demigods, aristocrats raised
themselves to an "ideal realm between heaven and earth, a realm of high
humanity and of heroic virtue."[44] Orgel contrasts the aristocratic
masquer with the professional actor thus: Masquers are not actors; a
lady or gentleman participating in a masque
remains a lady or gentleman, and is not released from the obligation of
observing all the complex rules of behavior at court. The king and
queen dance in masques because dancing is a perquisite of every lady
and gentleman. But playing a part, becoming an actor or an actress,
constitutes an impersonation, a lie, a denial of the true self" [45]
And yet, as Jakob Bidermann's Cenodoxus shows, the distance between the
aristocratic masquer who plays his part well and the professional actor
who in acting betrays his true self is not so easily maintained.
Cenodoxus is the play of a Faust-like Parisian doctor whom everyone
admires and considers a saint and who is yet damned. He has played the
part the world assigns to man all too well; the part assigned by God he
has betrayed. We get a sense of the effectiveness of Jesuit theatre
from the fact that after one performance of Cenodoxus fourteen Bavarian
noblemen, crushed by what they had seen, asked the jesuits to permit
them to join them in their exercises.[46] An echo of the play's impact
is preserved in the Asam brothers' St. Johann Nepomuk. Above a
confessional we see the unfortunate dissembler, reminding us of the
deceptiveness of outer appearance and of the necessity of death,
recalling us to our true selves. To play the part demanded of us by
society do we have to betray the
part we have been assigned by God? It is a question that suggested
itself especially to the aristocracy, which, as Hauser points out, had
come to at least half-recognize the artificiality and hollowness of the
order that defined its ethos. But how was one to escape from this
artificiality? By recovering within oneself that natural man of whom
philosophers were speaking? Did reason point the way out of the baroque
theatrum mundi? The theatrical culture of the baroque loses its
foundation when man begins to believe that he is able to seize reality,
as it is, without divine grace. As this sense is lost – as
reality is freed from the theatre
– the theatre is freed from reality; it becomes mere theatre,
mere art. The aesthetic sphere begins to emancipate itself –
and we should keep in mind that such emancipation marks the birth of
aesthetics in the eighteenth century. Rupprecht's discovery of the
connection between the scena per angolo and the development of the
rococo fresco points in the direction of such emancipation, as does
Bauer's interpretation of rocaille. Rococo ornament, too, retreats to
the merely aesthetic. (Chapter
1 has shown the strength of this suggestion.) We must agree with
Rupprecht and Bauer: the rococo no longer takes
seriously that fusion of reality and theatre aimed at by baroque
illusionism. And yet, illusionism is not simply rejected; the rococo
preserves it by playing with it, and this play still has such power
that we easily forget that it is just play. But how are we to
understand this play? Bauer's interpretation of the rococo would place
it on the threshold of a quite modern aestheticism. The Bavarian rococo
church invites, yet resists, such interpretation. If the Bavarian
rococo church cannot accept the illusionistic theatre of the baroque,
this is not because it wants to carry the pictorialization and hence
the aestheticization of that theatre still further, but because baroque
illusionism has gone too far in this direction already, and threatens
to deny the worshiper the role of an actor. In this connection it is
important to keep in mind that the Bavarian
rococo church almost never has only one fresco. Besides a large fresco
spanning the nave, there is at least one other over the choir. In
larger churches, especially in medieval churches redecorated in the
eighteenth century, this number is greatly multiplied. Thus, while it
is true that the rococo church places special emphasis on a point of
view near the entrance (rightly one of Rupprecht's key
characteristics), it is equally true that this point of view is usually
unable to do justice even to the main fresco, let alone to the fresco
scheme as a whole. That discloses itself only to someone who is willing
to change his point of view, to walk through the church. Think of the
small frescoes that in so many churches accompany us as we circle the
nave. The multiple perspective of the large frescoes of Bavarian rococo
churches similarly presupposes a moving spectator. The popularity of
processions must be remembered. We can do justice to a church like Die
Wies only if we keep in mind how it functions as a pilgrimage church.
Processions and pilgrimages make those who join them both actors and
spectators. The saure is true of the mass. It is this very traditional
theatricality of religious life that denies not only a sharp boundary
between spectator and spectacle, between nudience and actor, but also
that illusion of a fusion of picture and reality accomplished by
illusionism. The frescoes of the Bavarian rococo church embody this
twofold denial. The obvious connections between the rococo of the court
and the rococo
church should not lead us to overlook dissimilarities that betray their
very different foundations. For the rococo of the court Hauser's
analysis may well be right: its play with the theatre suggests a merely
aesthetic playing, the tired art of a class that had already lost much
of its leadership to the Bourgeoisie. But that analysis does not ring
true when applied to the rococo church. Churches like Steinhausen and
Die Wies, let alone countless small village churches that were built or
redecorated in the fourth and fifth decades of the eighteenth century,
demand a very different interpretation, which locates this art not only
between the baroque and the Enlightenment, but also between the baroque
and the Middle Ages. The Bavarian church rococo is the art of a society
that remained in important ways closer to what had existed in Bavaria
before the Reformation than to what went an in Paris or London. This
helps to account for the deep affinity between rococo and late Gothic
art.
TIME, HISTORY, AND ETERNITY: THE TEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF THE ROCOCO
CHURCH
The Church and Religious Action
Before its rediscovery in the late nineteenth century the Bavarian
rococo had long been considered a sad aberration in the history of art.
Given what aestheticians have demanded of art, it is indeed difficult
to justify this architecture. In a successful work of art nothing is
supposed to be superfluous, while it should be impossible to add
anything without weakening or destroying the aesthetic whole. Excess is
to be avoided. "Less is more." This leaves little room for a style as
intoxicated with ornament as the rococo. Not only the rococo church,
but all religious art has to reject the
ideal of aesthetic self-sufficiency. As Louis Dupré points
out, religion "cannot survive as a particular aspect of life."[1]
Religious art dies when art claims autonomy. It is impossible to
reconcile religious art with modernity, at least if modernity is
understood to imply the splintering of a once coherent value system
that finds expression in such slogans as "war is war," "business is
business," "art for art's sake." Religion and art for art's sake have
to be enemies. All genuinely religious art has to be aesthetically
incomplete in order to remain open both to life and to the higher
dimension which it serves. What makes the Bavarian rococo church unique
is therefore not that it is incomplete and preserves openness, but the
way in which it plays with the aestheticism implicit in the progressive
pictorialization of the visual arts ever since the Renaissance, and
playing with it, puts this aestheticism in its place. The aesthetic
approach also cannot do justice to architecture. The
architect has to take into account the uses to which his work is to be
put; and those using it cannot keep aesthetic distance from it. As long
as we measure buildings by the aesthetician's conception of what
constitutes a complete work of art, architecture has to appear, as Kant
considered it, deficient and impure, a not-quite-respectable art. To
succeed as architecture, a building must be aesthetically
incomplete.[2] To do justice to successful architecture we have to
refer it to the actions that alone can complete it; to do justice to a
church we have to keep in mind the function that it serves. A church is
a house in which the congregation joins the priest in holy
celebration: the mass is more than a drama of sacrifice and
thanksgiving enacted before the faithful in grateful commemoration of
the passion. Christ's sacrifice must also be the sacrifice of His
people, who in this drama are both spectators and actors. A church may
be no more than a structure hallowed by the action it serves. But often
it will be more than a perhaps decorated shelter, providing a stage for
the sacrifice of the mass. Especially the church of the Counter
Reformation seeks to prepare the individual for this sacrifice. Such
preparation takes time; it implies a movement out of the secular and
everyday into a sacred and festal dimension. This movement is first of
all a movement of the body. The worshiper approaches the church, enters
it, sits down, rises, steps forward. To understand a baroque or rococo
church we have to understand how it links this movement of the Body to
a movement of the spirit. Our progress through the church prepares us
for the mystery of communion. Every church approaches this task in its
own way, and yet there is
general pattern. To point to that shall first sketch the movement
suggested by St. Michael in Munich, the church that more than any other
determined the course of Bavarian church architecture in the ensuing
two centuries. This sketch will be followed by an examination of Johann
Michael Fischer's Augustinian priory church in Diessen, which will
enable us to appreciate not only the extent to which the rococo church
is just a variation an a baroque theme, but also what separates it from
the baroque.
The Triumph of St. Michael
Even though it is the precursor of countless churches, St. Michael
remains unique.[3] In part this uniqueness is explained by the
extraordinary contribution made by its builder, Duke Wilhelm V, to the
Catholic cause. The complicated program governing the façade
still speaks of the duke's aspirations (fig. 95). Especially the
statues tell a story that joins secular and sacred history and helps to
prepare us for what awaits us within. With its rows of rulers this
façade has no immediate precursors, just as it found no
successors.[4] One has to go back to French cathedrals with their
galleries of kings, which similarly merged theological and dynastic
considerations.[5] The key to this merger lies in the politics of the
time, which placed the dukes of Bavaria in the forefront of the
increasingly militant Counter Reformation in Germany. The role played
by Wilhelm V, by Albrecht V, his father, and by Maximilian, his son, in
preventing the total victory of the Protestant Reformation in Germany
cannot be overemphasized. In the Bavarian dukes the Jesuits found their
most valuable German allies. The façade's program goes back to
Wilhelm V himself. Three
rows of rulers were framed, above, by the statue of Christ holding a
golden globe that once occupied the niche just beneath the golden cross
that still crowns the entire faqade, and below, between the two
portals, by Hubert Gerhard's statue of St. Michael defeating the devil.
The duke's confident self-assertion expresses itself in his decision to
place three early rulers of Bavaria, associated with the
Christianization of the land, in the top row, above Charlemagne and
other emperors. One senses Wilhelms refusal to yield first place to the
emperor in Vienna. We see the duke himself, holding a model of the
church he founded, in the center of the second story, next to his
father, Albrecht V. If the political statement made by the
façade cannot be
misread, it is more difficult to understand its justification: why
should rulers appear an the façade of a church? The question
was both asked and answered by the Trophaea Bavarica, a learned
commentary an the church published at the time of its consecration,[6]
which tells us that these rulers are St. Michaels fellow fighters,
protecting the church against its enemies. We are reminded of the
military iconography of early Romanesque churches, which often found
its focus in the western part of the church, which was conceived as a
bulwark against the onrushing hordes of the devil, defended by St.
Michael leading the angelic host.[7] But here the angels have become
Christian rulers. In their forefront we see the founder of the church,
whose actions are placed by the façade in the context of a
history understood as the ongoing struggle against evil. The special
significance of St. Michael for Bavaria –
and for her duke, who had been born an the archangel's feast day
– is hinted at by the Golden Fleece, which we see below the
statue of the angel. St. Michael and the Golden Fleece are linked in a
story told by the Byzantine historian Nicephorus, which provided the
authors of the Trophaea Bavarica with an introduction. At a place near
Constantinople called Sosthenium the Argonauts had once been put to
flight by Amycus, when a man with eagle's wings appeared to them,
renewed their courage, and foretold victory. In thanksgiving the
Argonauts erected a shrine with a statue of their unknown helper.
Centuries later Emperor Constantine visited the old sanctuary. After
that visit St. Michael appeared to the emperor and revealed that he had
been the unknown helper of the Argonauts. Just as he had come to their
assistance, he now would help the emperor in his first fight against
godless tyrants. Repeating the action of the Argonauts, Constantine too
buht a sanctuary, the Michaelium. Wilhelm V repeats this action for a
second time. St. Michael in Munich is the new Michaelium, the duke the
new Constantine. But he also belongs with the Argonauts, who, braving
danger, had succeeded in rescuing the Golden Fleece from the dragon.
Wilhelm V had in fact just been decorated with the Golden Fleece, the
highest order of the House of Hapsburg, for his help against the Turks
and his effort in the victorious struggle against the former archbishop
of Cologne, who had turned Protestant and had sought to transform his
diocese into a worldly principality. For the duke it was a happy
intervention. Religious and political interests coincided: for the next
two hundred years the archbishops of Cologne were to be members of his
family, the House of Wittelsbach. The façade glorifies these
deeds by presenting them as a
reenactment of a mythical archetype. The present is given deeper
significance by being placed in the context of sacred history; at the
same time it gains mythical significance. Time is transformed into a
mythical present. Characteristic of the Bavarian baroque and rococo is
both this transformation and the way it depends an words, an
interpretations that open up dimensions at which what we see barely
hints. Like all emblems, these churches remain fragments unless this
verbal dimension is taken into account. The façade invites
us to liken the ruler both to Christ and to St. Michael. But the ruler
also exemplifies the human condition. We all have been created in the
image of God and are all called to battle; and like the duke we can
count an the assistance of "the unknown helper" of the Argonauts. The
interior of the church surprises with its monumental spaciousness.
The light choir, dominated by the three-storied high altar, draws us
forward and upward to the altar's apex marked by the golden disc of the
sun with the initials IHS. Much more decisive than an the
façade is the victory of the vertical over the horizontal,
prefigured by the more difficult victory of the nave's rising
wall-pillars over the horizontals of the entablature, and interpreted
by Christoph Schwarz's painting of St. Michael's victory over the devil
(fig. 110). The battle theme of the façade is thus carried
into the church, but it now sounds a different, more psychological
note. If in the high altar and the architecture the vertical appears to
triumph, the earthbound horizontal dimension is given special emphasis
by our own progress through the church. We belong to the horizontal, to
time, not to the triumphant verticals, which lack the power to cancel
the burden-character of our own existence. The Images that accompany
our progress recall us to the battle within our own selves. More
dangerous than infidels or apostates, more serious than the enemies
without, are the enemies that dwell within us, threatening a worse kind
of death than weapons can inflict. St. Magdalen and St. Ursula, to whom
the first two chapels were once consecrated, demand repentance and
purity.[8] As we move on, St. Andrew and St. Sebastian call on us to
follow Christ even unto martyrdom and death. Of death speak the relics
of saints and martyrs that accompany our progress. Tota domus tumba
est, superis commune sepulchrum.[9] The whole church is a tomb, a
sepulchre. The Trophaea Bavarica speaks with special pride of the
relics: the complete bodies of eight saints, relics of almost all the
apostles, a relic even of the Virgin. That our progress through the
nave is a journey unto death, and in this respect an image of human
life, was made still clearer when the beginning of this journey was
marked by the Christ Child at the portal and its end by the altar of
the cross, whose base was meant to represent Golgotha, and by Giovanni
da Bologna's crucifix rising behind it, which together dominated the
crossing. It was here that Duke Wilhelm V asked to be buried.[10] The
church is not only the tomb of saints; it is his tomb as well. In the
contrast between the founder's proud image an the façade and
the grave monument in the crossing (never completed), the triumph of
death would have found another striking
expression.
But the triumph of death is only one theme. Just as verticals triumph
over horizontals, eternity triumphs over time. The scepter of death is
broken by Christ's free submission to it, repeated by the martyrs'
imitation of his example. The Instruments of the passion, the arma
Christi carried by the large angels that occupy the niches of the
wall-pillars and accompany our progress through the nave, are the only
weapons that can defeat death. Sacrifice turns death into triumph. The
theme of sacrifice, stated in the nave, becomes explicit in the
paintings Antonio Viviani created for the two side altars of the
crossing, reminding us of the sacrifice of the old and new covenants,
of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac and of God's sacrifice of His Son. The
choir arch, which once framed Giovanni da Bologna's large cross, now in
the eastern arm of the transept, proclaims the transformation of death
into victory. Choir and nave belong to different domains. The nave is to be walked
through, but our progress leads only to the crossing, only to the
cross, to death, not through the triumphal arch into the light choir,
from which we are separated by seven steps. With its ascending rows of
apostles, saints, and angels, the choir represents the Glory of Heaven.
The nave belongs to time, the choir to eternity. The crossing joins the
two, just as the cross joins vertical and horizontal, heaven and earth.
Journey to a Bavarian Heaven
The tensions between vertical and horizontal that give St. Michael a
heroic cast seem resolved in the deceptively simple façade
Johann Michael Fischer designed for the Augustinian priory church
(1732) at Diessen (fig. 111 ).[11] Geometric order based on the
equilateral triangle helps to account for its balanced harmony. Its
gentle undulations, which shift from concave to convex and back,
recall, if only from a distance, work by Borromini and Guarini. More
immediate antecedents are provided by the churches Christoph
Dientzenhofer built in Bohemia.[12] But none of them show the
effortless ease of this façade. Not that tension is
altogether absent. Fischer, too, plays off verticals against
horizontals. The vertical impulse is strongest at the
façade's center, where the force generated by the dark
portal extends beyond the Small oval niche that holds a bust of the
Virgin to bend upward the center of the windowsill above. Reinforced by
the masterly grouping of the windows, this force proves strong enough
to dent the horizontal of the entablature's architrave; in the large
rococo cartouche that bears the priory's coat of arms it Hoods into the
broken pediment; continuing into the gable, it bends and Breaks through
a second cornice with the large niche that holds a statue of St.
Augustine, only to come to rest in the semicircular arcs at the peak of
the gable.
But is it quite right to speak here of "rest"? Like an Italian
fountain, Fischer's façade generates its own downward
movement. From the eye of God, which crowns the gable, it flows down
the terminal cornice and comes to a preliminary rest in the two vases
that mark its endpoints; from there it descends through small volutes
to the broken cornice, follows it a brief distance, cascades down
concave arcs to the two large vases that frame the attic, to return to
the earth in the outer pair of pilasters. This circular motion of
ascent and descent gives the façade an unending life. The dark
low space beneath the organ tribune that first receives the
entering visitor is not part of the picture that presents itself to him
(fig. 112). Like a darkened auditorium it only lets him focus his
attention an the bright, stage-like interior, from which he is
separated by an iron grille. Hitchcock has criticized this interior for
its uneasy marriage of tectonic baroque and decorative rococo elements.
Especially the architecture he considers baroque: "Fluted pilasters and
tall entablature blocks give strong tectonic character to the
wall-pillars, and this tectonic emphasis is even stronger at the choir
arch, which is narrower than the nave, and either side of the choir,
where pairs of engaged columns reinforce the piers." Diessen does
indeed have its place in that tradition of wall-pillar halls
inaugurated by Munich's St. Michael and developed by the architects
from the Austrian Vorarlberg, although the omission of tribunes over
the side chapels owes more to that Gothic variation of the wall-pillar
scheme renewed by Hans Alberthal with the Jesuit church in Dillingen;
an omission that, according to Hitchcock, "strongly emphasizes . . .
the wall-pillars as important structural elements (fig. 113).[13] Their
"unmistakable structural significance" is Said to make them the
interior's "most conspicuous inherited Baroque elements" and to stand
in the way of the homogeneity desired by the rococo and of its
"emphasis on continuous surface framed by decoration." This "stylistic
ambiguity," Hitchcock claims, "definitely lessens the value of the
whole as a consistent aesthetic, or even religious experience."[14] But
is this really how we experience this interior?
Bergmüller's frescoes, which cover most of the vault, prevent
us from seeing that vault as a firmly established architectural
boundary, let alone as a mass requiring massive supports. The
impression they give of billowing sails is heightened by the arrises
formed by the intersections of the transverse vaults of the side
chapels and the main vault; in Bohemian fashion they sway inward in
three-dimensional arcs. Together the frescoes form a unified zone of
color, interrupted only by the choir arch and the rib-band separating
the large fresco covering the three central bays of the nave from the
smaller fresco beyond. A second such zone is formed by the altars of
the church. The brown, yellow, and gold of their architecture dominates
over the colors of the altar paintings; white sculptures provide
accents and at the same time establish a link to the white ground
provided by the architect. The unity of this zone is enhanced by the
careful pairing of the altars, each pair the work of a different
sculptor-decorator. The lightest and most elegant of these is the
second, the work of Johann Baptist Straub, distinguished not only by
paintings by the Venetians Pittoni and Tiepolo, but by the altars'
elegant asymmetry, which invites us more insistently to See the pair as
a single whole. The altars' asymmetry lets them become brackets that
help to give unity to the interior. This device, often particularly
effective in such small village churches as Hörgersdorf or
Eschlbach (fig. 152), is one of the most characteristic and revealing
features of the rococo church. From this point on the paired altars
increase in size and complexity.
Architectural elements become more important. The columns of the paired
altars flanking the choir arch reappear in more monumental form in the
high altar. This shift to columns parallels the already-mentioned shift
from the fluted pilasters of the nave to the columns of the choir and
of the triumphal arch that is its gate. In both cases columns are used
not because of their tectonic significance, but because of their
festive appearance, appropriate to the sacred character of this part of
the church. They have a symbolic and pictorial rather than an
architectural function. The altar zone below is quite as pictorial in
its way as the fresco
zone above. Characteristic of the rococo church is the Separation of
these two zones, each of which possesses a certain integrity of its
own. At Diessen their separation is emphasized not only by the strong
cornice with its modillions, but also by the way the foot of the tall
attic, reminiscent of both St. Michael and Fürstenfeld, curves
outward, mirroring the cornice's own outward turn. The only place where
this separation breaks down is in the high altar, which thus links the
two zones. The pictorial quality of this space makes us pause but does
not
discourage us from entering it, as it would if the picture were a more
complete whole. But here too much, including the main fresco and the
fresco above the choir, has remained half or completely hidden. As we
enter and walk through the church its pictorial quality, so strong as
long as we remain near the entrance, begins to disintegrate; the
architecture begins to speak more strongly as architecture. Only now do
we see the large windows that were first hidden by the wall-pillars,
and experience the walk that bound this space. There is indeed tension
between pictorial unity and Fischer's architecture. But in assessing
that tension we have to keep in mind that the point of view near the
entrance cannot be given too much emphasis if the church is to function
as a church. That point of view can only be a beginning, the experience
that it grants can only be an overture that demands further
development, demands that we move through the space that has presented
itself to us as a picture. It is not simply the pictorialization of
architecture that is characteristic of the Bavarian rococo church, but
the unending play between pictorial and architectural reality that it
establishes. If a standpoint in the West, near the entrance, lets us
See the
interior as a picture having its center in the high altar, walking
through the church we become more conscious of the difference between
nave and choir; the latter remains inaccessible and pictorial. In the
preceding chapter I called attention to the way the choir arch, with
its stuccoed curtain, helps to transform the choir into a second stage.
The inaccessibility of the altar room, which goes along with its
pictorial quality, is underscored by two steps and a marble balustrade
that bar us from entering the fifth bay. Separated from the altar room
by three more steps, this bay becomes a transitional zone, very much
like a proscenium. As in St. Michael, our progress through the nave is
accompanied by
reminders of our mortality (fig. 114). Of death and hell speak the
paintings of the first pair of altars, representing the death of Joseph
an the right, the fall of Lucifer an the left. The second pair,
including Tiepolo's Death of St. Sebastian and Pittoni's Death of St.
Stephen, links death to martyrdom. And yet that linkage also ties death
to that ecstasy that allowed St. Stephen to say: "Behold I see the
heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God"
(Acts 7:56). The third pair opposes St. Augustine in ecstasy to the
repentant Mary Magdalen. The last two altars, with paintings of Christ
an the Cross and St. Catherine and St. Dominic Receiving the Rosary
from the Virgin, represent a climax to this series, and yet, as the
balustrade that separates us from them makes clear, they belong already
to that more sacred space that finds its culmination in the high altar.
Time, in the clock (now broken) above the choir arch, presides quite
literally over our progress through the nave.[15] A stone in the
pavement below calls our attention to the vault beneath the choir in
which the founders of the church lie buried. Like St. Michael, this
church does not let us forget that it is the grave of saints. Just
before the Balustrade stops us, this sepulchral character of the church
asserts itself most forcefully: in glass shrines we see the Bones of
St. Rathard, an ancestor of Count Berthold I who founded the priory in
1132, and of the count's daughter, St. Mechthild. In one rococo church
after another such bones fascinate and disturb the
modern visitor. What is their place amidst all this elegance and
beauty? But like the clock above the choir arch, they state a theme
that is to prevent us from losing ourselves in the merely aesthetic:
Memento mori! Gravestones similarly not only commemorate, but have a
symbolic significance, especially when they recall the death of someone
as powerful as Count Berthold I. Again and again this church calls our
attention to the House of Diessen and Andechs, before its tragic end
one of the leading families of the Middle Ages, and more important, a
family that could boast of twenty-eight blessed and holy men and women,
among them St. Hedwig, the patron of Silesia, and St. Elizabeth of
Hungary. The names and relics of members of this family, once so
powerful, speak of the triumph of time, but also of a saintliness that
triumphs over time. Although dead, they live, and live in this church.
The building attests to that continuing life. If the authors of the
Trophaea Bavarica could call St. Michael Imago
coeli, and defend this claim by pointing to the relics that had been
assembled and let the apostles be present in the church, Diessen
deserves to be called the Image of a quite Bavarian heaven. The saints
who are present in this church are, first of all, Bavarian saints. The
history that culminated in the present building could be cited as proof
that theirs is a living presence. This emphasis an a church's unique
history inseparable from the genius loci is a characteristic feature of
the Bavarian rococo. The historical dimension, which in St. Michael was
relegated to the façade, is now brought right into the
church. Most often frescoes spell out this history, as they do in
Diessen. In the eastern part of the main fresco we see the founding of
the
priory and its confirmation by Pope Innocent II (fig. 22). Interesting
is a small detail: the founder points to a design showing Fischer's
rococo church, an anachronism that seems to say that the six-hundred
years that have elapsed since the priory's founding did not matter. The
rebuilding of the church is deliberately confused with its first
building.[16] The past is appropriated in a way that lets it be
present. Once again we encounter an attempt to heighten the
significance of present events not simply by placing them into the
context of history, but by annulling that history. The priory's
founding and the life of its founders are not events that we are now
done with. They are still happening. This appeal to the past, which at
the same time conflates past and present, echoes the temporality of the
mass, which not only commemorates a sacrifice that took place long ago,
but brings it into the present. Similarly the fresco invites us to
consider temporal events sub specie aeternitatis. Time and eternity are
reconciled. The western part of the fresco shows St. Mechthild as a
young girl
entering the convent of St. Stephen. The frescoes of the adjoining bays
add scenes to this historical play: the smaller fresco over the choir
arch represents the founding of the Augustinian priory's predecessor in
815 by St. Rathard (fig. 115 ), while the fresco over the organ gallery
tells of the discovery of the bones of St. Rathard in 1013. As so often
in the churches of the Bavarian rococo, all these events are presided
over by the Virgin, whom we see in the center of the main fresco as
queen of heaven, surrounded by the patrons of Diessen. This central
group possesses a different degree of reality than the rest of the
fresco. Once again one is tempted to speak of theatre within theatre.
Significant is the way this representation of the Virgin differs from
that of the high altar. There we see the Virgin ascending; here she
seems to come down. Again the circle of descent and ascent: heaven
comes down to earth so that we may participate in the ascent from earth
to heaven. In this Virgin the nave possesses its real center. She is
the real theme of the events portrayed. Especially the large fresco,
spanning as it does the three central bays
of the nave, helps to counteract the primacy of a point of view near
the entrance and the orientation toward the east, toward the high
altar, that it entails. To be sure, those parts of the fresco showing
the priory's founding and the Virgin in heavenly glory demand a point
of view in the West, as does the smaller fresco showing the founding of
the priory's predecessor. But the scenes along the main fresco's long
sides are Best seen when we stand right beneath it, while the Mechthild
scene and the fresco above the organ demand that we turn around and
face west. This use of multiple perspectives helps to give the nave a
certain autonomy. Johann Baptist Straub's splendid pulpit, while it
does not compete with the high altar, nevertheless provides the nave
with a secondary focus. The nave invites movement; the choir
discourages it. Not only do steps
and Balustrade inhibit us from going further; a certain distance is
established by Fischer's choice of a vocabulary that helps to mark the
choir as a more sacred zone. The curtain of the choir arch and the
shift from pilasters to columns deserve to be singled out, but we
should also note the way the semi-ellipses of the arcs spanning the
nave give way in the choir to more festive semicircles: the almost
organic movement of the arrises in the nave is stilled, and instead of
the scalloped frames of the nave we have now a ring-like circle, which
functions less like a frame than it suggests a hole cut into the vault,
placing the painted heaven behind or above it. The bipolarity of the
church interior finds here a particularly convincing articulation (fig.
115). The large inscription circling the dome of the choir recalls St.
Peter
and other Roman churches. But these Roman reminiscences are given a
local significance. As the inscription tells us, what the fresco
represents is not simply the glory of heaven, but "the glory of the
saints and blessed of Diessen and Andechs." The same saints whose bones
have found a resting place in and beneath the church, whose activities
an earth are celebrated by the frescoes of the nave, are now seen
gathered in heaven with Christ. This representation of heaven gains
special significance when we remember that it rises right above the
founders' burial vault. Visually and symbolically the fresco thus helps
to establish a vertical axis that transforms death into triumph. This
transformation, however, is only theatre. Moreover, the strength of the
fresco's circular frame and the painting's darkness prevent us from
taking this illusion of heaven too seriously. We are given no more than
a prelude for the mediation which only the high altar can provide. Only
here at the place of the divine sacrifice are heaven and earth truly
united. Only in the representation of the Assumption of the Virgin, to
which the church is consecrated, are the two zones, which have been
kept more or less separate up to this point, really brought together.
The interplay of ascent and descent that governs the façade
reveals here its deepest significance.
At the time of its consecration the church at Diessen was being
celebrated as "a new heaven"; as "an incomparably holy new Jerusalem."
In support of this interpretation of the church as an image of heaven
one could point to the Korde of angels and putti, 397 in all, that are
found in this church. But no more than St. Michael can this church be
understood as a more or less literal representation of heaven. Rather
it points to and means heaven, and it does so in different ways. In the
nave heaven and its queen appear as a force presiding over time
and transforming what would otherwise be meaningless events into sacred
history. Special emphasis is placed an the part played by Diessen and
its founders in that history. To stage this play – a play
written by his employer
– the painter had to raise a second earth above and
paralleling our own, distinguished by its peculiarly ideal and
dreamlike sense of place and time, which blurs here and there, past and
present. The fresco of the choir bay presents us with an illusion of
heaven.
That Bergmüller here retains the illusionistic approach is no
peculiarity an his part. We find the same difference between nave and
choir frescoes in countless other rococo churches. The reason for this
is obvious enough: the choir should appear closer to heaven than the
nave. But it should not only appear so. We must keep in mind that our
progress toward the choir is a figure of man's progress toward death.
The power of death makes it difficult to take this theatrical
presentation of heaven too seriously. Only the divine sacrifice
promises to defeat that power.
Even Kings Must Die
Just after entering St. Johann Nepomuk in Munich, in the place usually
given to an image (say a St. Magdalen) admonishing us to repent, we see
an top of the confessional a sculptural group showing a corpse,
entwined by snakes, one arm raised in anger, the mouth opened in a
scream. Towering over the restless corpse a man, perhaps a monk, raises
his right arm in a gesture that does not so much extend help as
establish distance. This gesture is echoed by the putto below, who uses
one of his wings to shield his eyes from the disturbing vision. MORS
PECCATORUM PESSIMA, proclaims the inscription above: "The death of
sinners is the worst." Egid Quirin Asam's contemporaries would have had
no difficulty
recognizing in this group a representation of the last scene of Jakob
Bidermann's Cenodoxus.[17] The play closes in heaven. After a very
sudden death, the doctor of Paris, who with Faust-like pride had sought
to raise himself beyond the human condition, is called before God's
judgment throne and condemned to eternal suffering. Meanwhile, an
earth, those mourning the death of this honored man are frightened by
the corpse's refusal to lie still. Three times it raises itself and
speaks, the first two times to report an the trial taking place in
heaven, the third time to tell of the judgment and to curse both the
mother who bore him and himself. One of those watching this terrifying
spectacle, a certain Bruno, recognizing the vanity of what the world
thinks important, leaves society and becomes a hermit. Friends follow
his example (Bruno is the founder of the Carthusian order); their
example in turn was followed by members of the audience. The theatrical
performance spilled over into life. It is a typically baroque
conclusion. The obsession with time and
death, the emphasis an pride that refuses to acknowledge man's
mortality, are thoroughly Christian, and especially baroque. And yet,
as the doctor's sudden and unexpected end dramatizes, death is the reef
an which all pride must suffer shipwreck. Vain are all our attempts to
secure our existence, to hold onto things, to hold onto our own life.
In his Sand-clock poem Góngora reflects upon the futile
attempt to build time prisons of glass that would allow us to hold it
in our hands, and thus to master it. Even the most powerful are not
masters of their lives. Life is like smoke, pulled apart by a strong
wind; or like a carnival play, or like a firework that, hardly begun,
is already over. In poem after poem, play after play, we hear the same
refrain: Vita enim hominum, / Nil est, nisi somnium, as Bidermann's
Chorus mortualis sings. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." For
Descartes, who in this respect belongs very much to his age, the
deepest root of the suspicion that life may be nothing more than a
dream, of our inability to seize reality as it really is, is our
subjection to time. Man cannot escape its tyrannical rule. Even kings
must die. But death is not only frightening, it also possesses healing
power.
Otherwise death could not be considered the just and fitting punishment
for original sin. It is fitting because to open oneself to the
unavoidability of death is also to recognize that the snake's promise,
"You will be like God," is vain. In his pride Cenodoxus suppressed such
recognition, thus doing violence to man's essentially finite being. The
doctor's damnation is inseparable from his refusal to acknowledge his
own mortality. The memento mori that his unhappy end shouts at us calls
on us to repent and to tame our pride. Thus it calls us back to our
true selves, and, by forcing us to acknowledge our impotence, prepares
us to receive the divine sacrifice. Egid Quirin Asam's representation
of the end of Cenodoxus is only a
particularly striking example of the countless ways in which the rococo
church restates the baroque theme of mortality and repentance. In
church after church clocks sound the same call. Large and small, we
find them most often above the choir arch, but also above the organ, in
the high altar, or even in the fresco. Their memento mori is repeated
by altars, by grave monuments, and, most disturbingly perhaps, by the
jewel-bedecked bones of martyrs and saints. They are the trophies of
time. And yet, the seriousness with which the old Egid Quirin Asam
makes
Bidermann's theme his own seems to belong to the seventeenth century
more than to the eighteenth. For even if the rococo church does not let
us forget tyrannical time, its celebration of color and form, of the
mysteries of changing light, its joyful acceptance of the visible in
all its evanescent beauty, prevent us from taking this memento mori too
much to heart. In these interiors death seems to lose its sting. The
rule of time is recognized, but has lost its terror. It is perhaps in
this respect that the rococo church may most truly be called Imago
coeli. In this world it lets us glimpse something of a world that is
not subject to aging and death. Not that the Bavarian rococo
experienced the world as paradise. But better than most periods-better
certainly than the baroque, which placed so much emphasis an the gap
between heaven and earth, an the irreality of this life and the
necessity of preparing for the next, an the struggle against death and
devil-the Bavarian rococo knows that all has not been lost with Adam's
fall. Within itself our world carries a piece of paradise. Here we have
a key to the presence of countless putti in these churches. The play of
these "children without age" points to an existence that does not
suffer from the burden of time and does not know the rift between time
and eternity.[18] The Bavarian rococo church presupposes the ability to
accept human
temporality. The sacrifice of Christ appears not so much to open a gate
to a reality beyond time, and thus life, as to redeem them. It is this
accepting attitude toward time, so much more difficult for us to
understand than the baroque's dread of it, that triumphs over every
memento mori. Herein lies the profound difference between the Bavarian
rococo church
and those artificial ruins that began to be built at about the Same
time all over Europe. To be sure, as Hermann Bauer has insisted, rococo
and ruin architecture are closely related phenomena.[19] How closely is
suggested by the first artificial ruin in Bavaria, the Magdalenenklause
(1725-28), which Joseph Effner built for Max Emanuel in the park of
Nymphenburg. Here the aging elector, who had known both pride and the
vicissitudes of fortune better than most, may have found comfort and
edification meditating an St. Magdalen (fig. 116). The Magdalenenklause
is not without predecessors. Hermitages, places
that invite meditation an the vanity of life, had long played a part in
the life of the baroque court. The inconspicuous location of the
building, tucked away in a corner of the park, the rustic simplicity of
the interior, and the rock and shell work that transform its chapel
into an artificial grotto had become standard elements of such
buildings.[20] What is new and forward looking, however, is that the
building is now given the look of a ruin: in places plaster seems to
have fallen off; the walls are furrowed by very visible cracks. At
first there may seem nothing very surprising in all of this. Ruins had
long been experienced as "the trophies of time" and as signs of the
limits placed an man and his work.[21] In his Tower of Babel Brueghel
had contrasted the huge tower that tries to reach heaven, and precisely
because of the enormity of the undertaking must remain a ruined
fragment, with small houses that surround it; some of these cling, like
swallows' nests, to the tower, which even as work continues an it seems
to revert to nature. These houses suggest a very different conception
of building and dwelling, a more intimate, less prideful, and more
trusting relationship to time.[22] But if the ruin had long been a
motif in literature and painting, it did not occur to Brueghel's
contemporaries to actually build ruins, to anticipate the ravages of
time in this way. This became popular only in the eighteenth century.
The built ruin is architecture that turns against architecture, and it
does so in a number of different ways. First of all, it subjects
architecture to the logic of painting. Architecture becomes a
picturesque motif. As Bauer has emphasized, the aesthetic approach that
betrays itself in this pictorialization of architecture also marks
rococo architecture.[23] The ruin also challenges architecture by its
incompleteness. Time and nature appear to have triumphed over man. And
yet this appearance is itself managed by man. In this ruin architecture
man is to experience his own impotence. But far from feeling depressed
by this, he enjoys it, for he senses that it is in this more natural
environment rather than in the artificial realm of the court, with its
rulebound behavior, its rulebound architecture and gardens, that man is
truly at home. The ruin beckons the aristocrat who has grown tired of
his aristocratic existence to a more natural life. Thus from the very
beginning the Magdalenenklause was placed in a "jardin sauvage," which
avoided the geometry of the French park and offered the delights of
serpentine paths and the natural look that were to become
characteristic of the English park.[24] We should, however, bear in
mind that this attack an artifice is itself
highly artificial and betrays distance from rather than proximity to
nature. The trophies of time have become human creations. How much more
natural is a church like Die Wies, lying in its meadow before the Alps,
belonging to this landscape. Even more than the miraculous statue which
a contemporary pamphlet calls flos campi, flower of the meadow, the
church invites such metaphors suggested by the Song of Songs (fig.117).
The Bavarian rococo church does not owe its origin to that nostalgic
distance from nature that gave rise to ruin architecture. It knows
little of the tension between artifice and nature so characteristic of
the rococo of the court. We should also keep in mind that the
Magdalenenklause in its
artificially natural setting remained, spiritually and literally, on
the periphery of courtly life. Members of the court, and especially the
tired elector, enjoyed playing here the part of hermits, as elsewhere
they enjoyed playing the part of peasants. In such games, too, a
contradictory attitude to the artificiality and ceremonial of court
life finds expression. The Magdalenenklause certainly cannot be
interpreted as a serious attack on it. It is itself artifice, a game
that hints at the possibility of a more natural mode of existence
– that may even, if we look far enough ahead, hint at the
revolution that was to overthrow the old order
– but it does no more than that. There is a deep connection
between the parody of the baroque tournament, discussed in the
preceding chapter, and this architecture. Just as the tournament of
1723 distances itself from the baroque tournament, becoming an ironic
play with its conventions, so the ruin distances itself from past
architecture, even as it plays with it. In this connection the
historicism of the Magdalenenklause must be mentioned. Not only the
Italian baroque, but Moorish and Romanesque motifs are quoted. This
play with the architecture of the past presupposes that architecture is
beginning to lose its place in the architectural tradition. This loss
of place betrays itself at about the saure time in Fischer von Erlach's
Entwurffeiner historischen Architectur (1721), the first history of
architecture, and in his attempt to create a "historical" architecture,
most convincingly realized in the Karlskirche in Vienna (1715-25 ).
Different as they are, the Karlskirche, built less in honor of St.
Charles Borromeo than as a monument to Emperor Charles VI, and the
Magdalenenklause both give a weight to the historical dimension that
points forward to the historicist architecture to come and to that loss
of style inseparable from it.
But do the baroque and rococo church not also insist an the importance
of the historical dimension? In this respect one can liken the
Karlskirche to St. Michael, the Magdalenenklause to Diessen. The
comparison, however, hides more than it illuminates: St. Michael and
Diessen invoke history only to idealize and transfigure it. Historical
time is transformed into a repetition of events that possess a
significance transcending time.
ECCLESIA AND MARIA
The Church as Symbol of the Church
In a side chapel of Munich's Frauenkirche is the gravestone of Johann
Michael Fischer. Its inscription tells something of the ethos that
governed his work. It deserves to be quoted in full. Here
rests an artful, industrious, honest, and upright man (Job 1:1), Johann
Michael Fischer, proven architect of three most excellent princes, also
municipal master mason in Munich; who never rested, building with his
artful and tireless hand 32 churches, 23 monasteries, besides very many
other palaces, but edifying many hundreds with his old German and
honest uprightness, until finally, on May 6, 1766, in his 75th year, he
put down for a foundation stone of the last building of the house of
eternity (Eccles. 12:5) that stone which is the firm comerstone of the
church (Eph. 2:30) The references to the Old and New Testament call our attention to what
we might otherwise overlook: the significance of Fischer's life is
assured by its scriptural background. His life is prefigured by that of
Job, while the churches he built prefigure that house of eternity which
is man's true home. Characteristically baroque is the wordplay on
"building." Fischer is presented as a builder in three quite different
senses; he built (erbauete) churches, monasteries, and palaces; he also
edified (erbauete) many hundreds by his character; and finally he laid
the foundation stone of the house of eternity. We are likely to see in
such wordplay little more than equivocation. For us to build is no
longer to edify, nor are we likely to see a strong connection between
the many churches the architect built and the house of eternity. But in
the eighteenth century – at least in Catholic
Bavaria architecture still helped to articulate man's place in a larger
order, his ethos. It still possessed that ethical or moral function
hinted at by our use of the word "edify." In the preceding chapter I tried to exhibit the moral or tropological
meaning of the rococo church. A church like Diessen speaks to us of who
we are, how we are to live, what we are to heed. In this chapter 1 want
to examine the allegorical significance of the rococo church as a
figure of the Church and, intertwined with it, its anagogical
significance as a figure of "the house of eternity." Like its
precursors, the Bavarian rococo church continues to be understood as a
figure of that spiritual community which St. Paul describes with an
architectural metaphor in the passage to which the inscription of
Fischer's gravestone refers us at the very end: So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow
citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built
upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets; Christ Jesus
himself being the main comerstone, in whom the whole structure is
joined together and grows into a holy temple of the Lord; in whom you
are also built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit [Eph.
2:19-22] The church building is understood as a figure of the community of
saints. Thomas Aquinas gives succinct expression to this understanding:
Domus, in qua sacramentum celebratur, ecclesiam significat et ecclesia
nominatur.[1] The house in which the sacrament is celebrated is not
just called "church," but signifies the Church. To build a church is
thus not simply to erect a structure that serves certain functions.
What the Thomistic definition demands is not satisfied by a
functionalist approach that insists only that the church building
provide a suitable frame for the liturgical action. A church must be
more than what has been called a prayer-harn, a serviceable shed to
which decorations may have been added. The church must present itself
to us as a symbol of the Church.
Hieroglyphic Signs
How can this signification become visible? Perhaps the most common
response has been to exploit the conception of the faithful as members
of the City of God.[2] Just as the Church in history, this "pilgrim
city," as St. Augustine calls it, points toward the eternal glory of
heaven, so the churches man has built are figures of the city that is
described in Revelations as a new Jerusalem, "coming down out of heaven
from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (Rev. 21:2).
Built as a perfect square of pure gold, this city is not in need of sun
or lamp. Lit up by the Glory of God, "its radiance is like a most rare
jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal" (Rev. 21:11). At least since
Clement of Alexandria the church has thus been understood analogically
as a representation of the Heavenly City. The traditional language of
the dedication ritual makes this understanding explicit and
authoritative. It governs the Bavarian rococo church quite as much as
the medieval cathedral. But if the church is "mystically and
liturgically an image of
heaven,"[3] this still does not say how this image character is to be
understood. The key passage from Revelations speaks of a splendid city;
but how literally is this to be taken? Does the spirituality of the
conception not render all attempts to build its earthly image
inappropriate? In this connection it is important to keep in mind that
as the figure ór image of the Heavenly Jerusalem the church
is itself prefigured by other historical places and structures. To
understand the Christian church we have to understand it as pointing
not only forward to what is to come, but also backward to what has
been, especially to that place where in a dream Jacob saw heaven open
and linked to the earth by a ladder. A new Bethel, the church, too, is
"none other than the house of God" and "gate of heaven" (Gen. 28:17).
Similarly, it is prefigured by such divinely inspired structures as
Noah's ark, Moses' tabernacle in the desert, and, most significant
perhaps, the temple Solomon built in Jerusalem.[4] As sermons and
treatises demonstrate, well into the eighteenth century the authority
of these paradigmatic buildings, to which one can add such visionary
structures as the temple of Ezekiel, is taken for granted.[5] These
biblical paradigms are supplemented with Christian structures. St.
Michael thus invokes Constantine's Michaelium, Diessen St. Peter in
Rome.[6] But even when spelled out in this way, the definition of the
church as
signifying the Church provides no more than hints that invite
imaginative elaboration and widely different responses. The early
Christian basilica which, according to one interpretation, imitates a
Roman city, complete with entering gate and arcaded streets, represents
one such response; its golden or starred ceiling functions as a
metaphorical device, designed to show that what is being imitated is
not simply a city, but the City of God, ruled over by Christ as
king.[7] The church architecture of the early Middle Ages rests an very
different presuppositions. Here the idea of a city seems to have
suggested a place of peace, a refuge, offering protection from the evil
and insecurity reigning in the world. The outside of the church now
gains often a fortress-like appearance, while the inside with its
mosaics and murals "is to make us forget that we find ourselves in a
building of stone and mortar, since inwardly we have entered the
heavenly sanctuary."[8] Similarly, Hans Sedlmayr has interpreted the
Gothic cathedral as an
illusionistic image of the light-filled Heavenly City.[9] Challenging
that interpretation, Otto von Simson has shown that the sense in which
the cathedral is an image of the Heavenly City must be given a less
literal interpretation. Responding to the qualities of light and order
associated with the City in Heaven, the architect could try to create
an analogous work here on earth. Such a response is reinforced by the
traditional association of the abode of the saints with the superlunar
world and its unchanging harmony and order. Simson's discussion of a
passage by Abelard helps to make clearer some of the presuppositions
that guided Gothic architecture and remained active throughout the
Renaissance. After identifying the Platonic world soul with world
harmony, he first
interprets the ancient notion of a music of the spheres as referring to
the "heavenly habitations" where angels and saints in ineffable
sweetness of harmonic modulation render eternal praise to God. Then,
however, Abelard transposes the musical image into an architectural
one; he relates the Celestial Jerusalem to the terrestrial one, more
specifically to the Temple built by Solomon as God's "regal palace." No
medieval reader could have failed to notice with what emphasis every
Biblical description of a sacred edifice, particularly those of
Solomon's Temple, of the Heavenly Jerusalem, and of the vision of
Ezekiel, dwells an the measurements of these buildings. To these
measures Abelard gives a truly Platonic significance. Solomon's Temple,
he remarks, was pervaded by a divine harmony as were the celestial
spheres. [10] Abelard's discussion points to the "dual symbolism of the
cathedral,
which is at once a 'model' of the cosmos and an image of the Celestial
City."[11] Since the order of the visible world, especially that of the
heavens, is itself supposed to be analogous to that of the City of God,
this dual reference is to be expected, although emphasis an this
duality should not let us overlook that the divine order which informs
the cosmos as well as the Heavenly Jerusalem also speaks to us in the
archetypal structures of the Old Testament as it does in the Body of
man, the microcosm, especially in the Body of the perfect man, Christ,
which also means the Church. That this understanding of the
signification of the church building
survives well into the eighteenth century is shown by the countless
sermons and treatises that were published to help celebrate the
consecration of the more important churches. As Bernhard Rupprecht
points out, in Bavaria at least the rococo church continued to be
understood as a sign of Jerusalem, heaven, the City of God, and the
cosmos.[12] But if the basic meanings that helped to shape church
architecture from the early Christian basilica through the Middle Ages
remained thus very much alive, this leaves open the question of how
this understanding of the signifying function of the church now
translates into architectural terms. Can the rococo church still be
understood as the image of heaven? Are we to think of the Heavenly
City, which needs neither sun nor lamp because lit by the Glory of God,
when we respond to the magic of the indirect light that spiritualizes
the architecture of the rococo church? Does the profusion of gold
represent the City in Heaven, which was built "as a square of pure
gold"? Such associations were no doubt present to those who built these
churches and those who worshiped in them. But what was said above about
the rise of perspective and the resultant secularization of the visible
[13] makes it difficult to take such associations very seriously. The
gap that has opened up between the visible and the spiritual,
between picture and reality, makes it impossible for the church of the
Counter Reformation to simply return to the medieval understanding of
the church as a more or less literal representation of the divinely
established order of the Heavenly City or the cosmos. I fail to be
convinced by Gisela Deppen's suggestion that, like the Gothic
cathedral, St. Michael is a representation of both heaven and the
cosmos: the light-filled nave represents the sun, the darker and
smaller side chapels the six planets. The interpretation seems
farfetched. Citing and endorsing it, Herbert Schade points to the text
of the Trophaea Bavarica, which does speak of the church as a coelum
creatum, a created heaven, as Imago coeli, an image of heaven.[14] But
what are we to make of such supporting evidence? To what extent did
such conceptions, while undoubtedly very much in the mind of the
learned authors of the Trophaea Bavarica, actually shape the
architecture? Do we see the church as an image of heaven? To be sure,
the angels that are found in such great numbers in this church have a
more than merely ornamental function; they signify heaven. And so do
the sun discs with the monogram IHS and the rose of angels that before
World War II took the place of the missing dome above the crossing, an
ornament which to Schade recalls Dante's image in the Paradiso (fig.
110). But such intimations of significance cannot establish the
architecture of St. Michael as an image of heaven in the sense in which
Simson, let alone Sedlmayr, interprets the medieval cathedral as an
image of the Heavenly City. When the Trophaea Bavarica calls the church
an image of heaven it does
not speak of how the church looks, but of the numerous relics that have
been assembled there. These relics, which, the Trophaea Bavarica
asserts, let the chorus of the apostles become a present reality, make
the church an image of heaven. We may well wonder what this has to do
with the appearance of this particular church. Pamphlets like the
Trophaea Bavarica force us to ask to what extent the traditional
meanings of the church, while undoubtedly still very much in everyone's
mind, still helped to shape and are realized by the architecture. In
this connection we should note the importance of the commentary. Not
only does it explain in what sense the church is to be understood as an
image of heaven, but it plays a significant part in establishing these
meanings. The interpreting word gains this importance precisely because
the church no Tonger provides an illusionistic or even analogous image
of the City of God or of heaven. The signifying function of the church
has become hieroglyphic. The church still signifies the Church, but the
mode of signification has changed. In an early baroque church like St.
Michael ornament plays an important
part in establishing this hieroglyphic character. In the rococo church
this part is taken first of all by frescoes. But in both cases what is
seen is incomplete without the interpreting word. This need for
interpretation is of course not peculiar to the Counter Reformation
church. Suger's De consecratione ecclesiae sancti Dionysii shows that
treatises like the Trophaea Bavarica have their place in a long
tradition. But I doubt whether any earlier period was equally insistent
an accompanying architecture with explanatory texts. Not that the
interpretation furnished by interpreting sermons or tracts is simply an
ingenious ex post facto construction: if the church seems incomplete
without the interpreting word it is because it presents itself to us as
possessing meanings demanding interpretation. We sense that the
building and decoration of the church attempt to translate a text into
visible terms. This translation depends an images that, like
hieroglyphs, are signs rather than pictorial representations. A baroque
or rococo church presents itself to us as an emblem awaiting
interpretation.
Emblematic Play
Andreas Alciatus's Emblematum Tiber, first published in Augsburg in
1531, established the emblem as an art form that joins pictura and
scriptura, image and text. Alciatus's emblems are first of all pictures
whose hieroglyphic character lets us see them as signs. This sign
character is further emphasized by the motto that heads each emblem and
helps to establish it as a sign calling for interpretation. This
signification is spelled out by the explanatory text that follows the
picture. This triple structure of inscriptio, pictorial res
significans, and explanatory subscriptio defines the emblem. The emblem
presupposes a still medieval understanding of the things of
nature and of historical events as signs or figures. Alan of Lille
summed up this view of things in the often-repeated lines:
Omnis mundi creatura
Quasi liber et pictura
Nobis est et speculum;
Nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,
Nostri status,
Nostrae sortis
Fidele signaculum.
All the world's creatures are like a book, a picture, and a mirror to
us, the truthful sign of our life, death, condition, and destiny.[15]
Bestiaries, herbaries, and lapidaries are the dictionaries that help us
to read these signs, which have their foundation not in human
invention, but in God's two books, Scripture and Nature. The art of the
baroque and rococo remains indebted to this tradition,
but the insistence an enigmatic images and ingenious interpretation
suggests a changed attitude. It has become much more difficult to
decide where discovery becomes free invention. Hovering between the
two, emblematic art and its interpretation are necessarily playful.
This is so because God's two books are thought to have been written in
a language man does not fully understand. The signs given us by God
have become hieroglyphics. Here it is of more than historical interest
that the emblematic tradition, while it presupposes the medieval view
of the spiritual significance of things, has another and more immediate
root in the Renaissance preoccupation with Egyptian hieroglyphics.[16]
Why such interest at that time? I have suggested earlier that the new
subjectivism and rationalism has to lead to a secularization of the
visible. This has to call into question the understanding of nature as
a text addressed to man. The visible threatens to lose its spiritual
meaning. By insisting on the sharp distinction between res cogitans and
res extensa Descartes accepts this loss: if things have hidden
significations it is not given to man to decipher them. This
understanding of the being of nature is incompatible with the art of
the emblem, which refuses the Cartesian separation. To understand the
importance of the emblem for the arts of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries one has to keep in mind that the emblem expresses an
understanding of reality that has its place between the figural
understanding characteristic of the Middle Ages and the literalism of
the moderns. In this respect the emblem belongs together with the
baroque theatre. Like the emblem, the theatre joins picture and text,
the art of the painter with that of the poet. This led to arguments for
the superiority of the drama as a living and speaking picture over
either painting or poetry.[17] Important is the emphasis an image and
text. To be genuinely emblematic the drama must do full justice to the
rights of the eye. It must understand itself as Schauspiel, where the
spoken words help to interpret the emblematic character of the images,
just as words, not only sermons and pamphlets, but much more important
the words of the mass, interpret the meaning of a baroque and rococo
church. It is this play that links the eye and the ear, image and text,
which has to be recovered if full justice is to be done to such a
church. The modern visitor, no longer at home with the tradition in
which these
churches have their roots, will find it difficult to respond to such
play. In a rococo church we find ourselves somewhat in the position of
someone who hears a poem in a language of which he understands only a
few words. Given this difficulty we are likely to respond in the way
which is most readily available to us: we experience the church as an
aesthetic phenomenon. The spiritual dimension is neglected. But just as
we cannot appreciate an emblem by responding only to its picture part,
ignoring the motto and interpreting text, so we cannot appreciate a
baroque or rococo church without an understanding of its motto and
without a recovery of the interpreting text.
Marian Piety
Nowhere is the emblematic character of the baroque church more apparent
than in the Hofkapelle of the Residenz in Munich (1601-30).[18] Here
the threefold structure of the emblem – picture, motto,
explanatory text
– governs the decorative scheme. Stucco reliefs provide
images that are traditional figures of the Virgin, many of them taken
from the Song of Songs. Each is accompanied by an inscription. Together
they constitute a litany to the Virgin (figs. 118 and 119). The two
foci of this decoration are provided by the monogram MRA, at the center
of the nave vault, and the monogram IHS at the center of the choir
vault: Per Mariam ad Jesum, through Mary to Christ. The monogram of the
Virgin is bracketed by verses that interpret the whole scheme for us:
the plants, heavenly bodies, temples, and houses that we see above are
signs given to us by the prophets, icons of the hidden nature of the
Virgin to which the monogram points. The architectural images deserve special attention. Many of them
– the City of God, Solomon's temple, the Gate of Heaven, for
example –
we have already encountered as figures of the Church. Their presence
here should not surprise us. The Virgin herself is a figure of the
Church. This allows us to say that the Hofkapelle, too, not only is a
church, but signifies the Church. It does so, however, not as a quite
direct representation of heaven or of the City of God, but by
presenting emblems of the Virgin. We can assume that the program of the Hofkapelle was not the work of
the artist responsible for this decoration, Hans Krumpper, but was
handed to him by his noble patron, Elector Maximilian, who relied
presumably on his Jesuit advisers. Following the Council of Trent the
veneration of the Virgin had become a central theme of Counter
Reformation piety. Even Descartes made a pilgrimage to the Virgin of
Loreto, in thanksgiving and to reassure himself of the legitimacy of
the method that had come to him. Nowhere was the power of this Marian
piety more visible than in Bavaria, whose ruler consecrated his chapel
Virgini et mundi monarchae
Salutis aurorae
"to the Virgin and queen of the world, dawn of salvation." To her he
pledged his life and to her he entrusted his country.[19] We still see
the Patrona Boiariae, the work of Hans Krumpper, on the
façade of Maximilian's Residenz under the inscription:
Sub tuum praesidium confugimus
Sub quo secure laetique degimus.
"We seek refuge under your protection, under which we live secure and
happy." Similar madonnas appeared on the houses of the burghers. Yet
these were not happy times. In the name of the Virgin Maximilian
gained victory in the Battle of the White Mountain, which fueled the
Thirty Years War.[20] Not to own a rosary became a crime. But it would
be a mistake to overemphasize the extent to which the veneration of the
Virgin was imposed by Maximilian and such post-Tridentine orders as the
jesuits and the Capuchins an a population that had almost been lost to
Catholicism. The vigor and spontaneity of the popular response argues
differently. A population suffering from war, disease, and hunger,
inclined to interpret these as signs of God's anger, turned to the
Virgin as a child seeks refuge under her mother's coat. This was the
theme of the rapidly growing cult of the Maria Auxiliatrix
Christianorum, focused on the copy of a Cranach painting that had been
placed in a chapel above Passau in 1622. To her, who was thought to
have been the real victor over the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto, one
turned for deliverance from the Swedes and, later in the century, from
the Turks.[21] In the Kappier eighteenth century this cult has its
counterpart in that of the Schöne Maria, the Fair Mary of
Wessobrunn. Their juxtaposition reveals something of the difference
between baroque and rococo.[22] That this Marian piety is as much a
renewal of medieval attitudes as a product of the Counter Reformation
is shown by the many medieval, usually late Gothic, images of the
Virgin that still form the venerated center of otherwise baroque or
rococo
altars and churches, as in Steinhausen and Andechs.
Given this Marian piety, which even contemporaries found particularly
characteristic of the Bavarians,[23] it is not surprising that the
model provided by the Hofkapelle, so unlike anything Bavaria had seen
up to this time, was soon imitated. The decorations of the Hofkirche in
Neuburg (1616-19) and of the Stiftskirche in Hall in the Tirol
(1629-30) offer good examples, as do such smaller churches as
Aufkirchen (1626), Feldkirchen (ca. 1630), and Essenbach (ca.
1670).[24] Such Marian programs become particularly popular in the
eighteenth century, and it is no accident that the church that, as we
have seen, for the first time exhibits all the essential
characteristics of the Bavarian rococo church, the Zimmermann brothers'
Steinhausen, is a pilgrimage church consecrated to the Virgin. Marian
piety is a presupposition of the Bavarian rococo church.
The Church as Symbol of the Virgin
Comparing the decoration of the Hofkapelle with the way Steinhausen
realizes a very similar Marian program, one is struck first of all by
the part the rococo church assigns to the painter. In a manner that
recalls devotional pictures of the baroque (fig. 120) Johann Baptist
Zimmermann's main fresco gathers familiar Marian symbols to form a
coherent composition (fig. 121). As in the Hofkapelle or in Neuburg, in
Steinhausen, too, the program derives at least in part from the
Lauretanian Litany. Following its invocations the fresco shows Mary as
queen of heaven, standing an the crescent moon, circled by angels
carrying lily and rose, olive and palm branch, attended by patriarchs
and prophets, apostles and martyrs, confessors and virgins. All the
world, here represented by the four continents, praises her. Without
antecedents in Southern Germany and of decisive importance for
subsequent developments is the way the fresco joins traditional Marian
symbols in an Arcadian landscape that recalls the Venetian rococo.[25]
This striking appearance of landscape and the airier and looser
composition that distinguish Zimmermann's frescoes from the work of
Cosmas Damian Asam, in comparison still baroque, are motivated by the
intent to establish the church, especially its nave, as a figure of the
Virgin. We should recall here that the Book of Revelation likens the
New Jerusalem to a bride. The simile points back to the bride of the
Song of Songs, which is read as a figure of both the Church and the
Virgin. The Song of Songs is the sacred text that legitimates the
fresco's garden imagery. Like the motto of an emblem, the inscription
of the cartouche above the choir arch expresses this intent in
unmistakable fashion:
HORTUSCONCLUSUS
ES DEI GENITRIX
FONS SIGNATUS
Above the inscription we See a fountain in a garden that recalls
contemporary parks. In this park grow cypress and cedar, they too signs
of the Virgin. The meaning of these signs is enriched by the juxtaposition of this
garden with another at the opposite, western end of the fresco, less
tidy, a bit more like an English garden. Adam and Eve, whom we see
beneath the tree at its center, make this the terrestrial paradise,
suggesting that the Barden above the choir arch is the paradise to
come. Not only in this case do juxtapositions within the fresco
encourage interpretation. The correspondences established by the
painter engage us in a hermeneutic game.[26] Rupprecht's interpretation
of the fresco and its function in the church traces some of the
relations: Because the Symbol hortus-Barden has been taken literally and made into
a concrete object, it can be placed into a readily seen relationship to
the historic garden of paradise. In this juxtaposition the visible
fountain oscillates between being object and Symbol. It is a garden
fountain and yet it is juxtaposed with the forbidden fruit and Eve. The
tree thus becomes a symbol. As the source of evil it stands opposite
the fons signatus = Mary. Eve, however, standing opposite the fountain,
lets us personify it. Mary = fountain as the second Eve.[27]
Not only in this fresco do we find that oscillation between literal and
symbolic meanings that lets Rupprecht speak of a "rococo of
hermeneutics." It is inseparable from the way the rococo church
signifies the church by signifying the Virgin. Consider, to give just
one other example, the fresco that Zimmermann's student Martin Heigl
painted for another pilgrimage church, Marienberg near Burghausen (fig.
122). Here we see above the chronogram Deo ac Virgineae Coelitum
Reginae – "to God and to the virginal Queen of Heaven"
– a large ship. Pope, cardinal, and bishop make this the ship
of the Church. Cistercians invite us to board it. Its blue-and-white
pennant beneath a star inscribed with the name of the Virgin points to
the close relationship between her and the Church. We see her, close to
the mast, providing a link between the ship and God at the fresco's
center. This ship is juxtaposed with a path decorated with roses an
which we see the blessed journeying toward the Gate to Heaven. Another
chronogram interprets this part of the fresco: Maria Deipara secura
Coeli Ianua
– "Mary, mother of God, secure Gate of Heaven." A much more
involved interpretation would be required to even begin to do justice
to the many traditional symbols of the Virgin found in this fresco,
including garden and fountain, cedar and rose, the Tower of David and
the ark. But enough has been said to point to the central
constellation: entrusted to and protected by the Virgin, the ship
(navis = nave) of the Church is at the Same time a figure of her who is
the Gate of Heaven and the garden of the Song of Songs. Church = ship =
garden = Virgin. Given the purpose of this chapter, one aspect of this
equation deserves
to be singled out: the ship, that is, the nave of the church, is a
figure of the Virgin. We get here a hint of the foundation of that
analogy that has suggested itself a number of times: Mary is to Christ,
as nave is to choir.[28] Like much baroque poetry, the frescoes of
Steinhausen and Marienberg
presuppose a then-well-known vocabulary of symbolic images. What makes
the frescoes of the Bavarian rococo distinctive is not the presence of
such images, but the way in which they become the material of a play
that lets the painted objects hover between their literal and their
symbolic significance, where the latter tends to proliferate into a
multiplicity of significations established by the many relations in
which any part of the fresco stands to others. Consider again the ship
in the fresco of Marienberg; all the other images may be taken to
unfold its significance. Often the motto or inscription of such a
fresco is provided by one or more large cartouches. Sermons or
treatises furnished the interpretation that made the emblem complete.
Many such sermons have survived. As Rupprecht points out, like the
frescoes of the Bavarian rococo, they delight in a logic that to us may
seem exasperating and surreal. To give just one example: trying to
establish the identity of the Bavarian Gotteszell with Shiloh,
mentioned in the Old Testament as a sacred place of peace and rest,
prefiguring the peace that shall reign in heaven, a sermon appeals to
the commentator Cornelius à Lapide, according to whom Shiloh
was that mountain an which the ark found its resting place. He refers
to it as tabernaculum Dei. But translated into German this becomes
Gotteszell: and the Cistercian convent in Bavaria and the Old Testament
mountain are thus shown to be one and the same place. The sermon is not
content to claim that the latter prefigures the former; it insists an
identity.[29] We noted a similar confusion of the now and then, the
here and there in the main fresco of Diessen.[30] Such confusions are
indeed inseparable from that sacralization of space and time attempted
by the rococo church in which, as in any church, events that took place
long ago in a faraway place are to become present reality. We may find
it difficult to take seriously the rococo frescoes' playful
combinations, the sermons' obvious delight in ingenious and fantastic
argumentation. How are we to reconcile them with our understanding of
religion as something sublime and very serious? But has it not become
playful precisely because art is here still taken to have its center in
mysteries that we cannot seize without destroying?
Marian Naturalism
Given Thomas Aquinas's definition of the church building as signifying
the Church, how does the rococo church establish this signification?
The preceding discussion of the main frescoes of Steinhausen and
Marienberg suggests the answer: The Bavarian rococo church signifies
the Church by signifying the Virgin. Often it is the fresco over the
nave that helps to establish this signification. Our discussion has centered on two churches consecrated to the Virgin.
Can we generalize and claim that the Bavarian rococo church, especially
its nave, is to be interpreted as a figure of the Virgin? This much at
least must be granted: The main fresco of Steinhausen inaugurated a
type of fresco that helps to define the Bavarian rococo church. Crucial
is the introduction of landscape elements that suggest a garden in late
spring. In Steinhausen these have to be understood as figures of the
Virgin. I would suggest that this remains true even when a fresco is
not obviously governed by a Marian program. Consider the landscape
elements in the main fresco at Schäftlarn. As we saw in
chapter 4, it represents the monastery's founding (fig. 92). After
Steinhausen it is difficult not to see the theatrically idealized Isar
landscape as an emblem of the Virgin. Whenever the frescoes of the
Bavarian rococo suggest a garden in late spring we should think of the
Song of Songs. Representing a garden the fresco means both the Virgin
and the Church. This is not the only, nor even the most obvious, way in which the
rococo fresco signifies the Church: at the center of nearly every main
fresco we find a glory composition with angels and saints. In this
respect, too, Steinhausen is quite characteristic. Zimmermann here
returns to a by-then-quite-traditional representation of the Church.
But compared with earlier glory compositions – and one does
not have to go back to the ecstatic visions of Correggio or Lanfranco
or Pietro da Cortona, but only to the glory compositions of Cosmas
Damian Asam
– Zimmermann presents us with little more than a theatre in
the clouds. In good part this is a function of the way we read the blue
rising above the garden landscape as a quite earthly sky. This
threatens to reduce the clouds of the glory composition, in spite of
the yellow and golden hues that have not quite lost the metaphoric
force of the gold backgrounds of medieval paintings, to merely
atmospheric phenomena. What we see is a strange apparition in the sky,
possessing a very different and more remote degree of reality from that
of the garden below. If the fresco as a whole has its center in the
Virgin, this heavenly theatre has its center in the luminous Name of
God. The fresco may thus be said to have two centers: the Virgin and
God. The same is true of the church as a whole. As pointed out before,
choir and nave possess different degrees of reality. In keeping with
that difference the choir fresco is free of all landscape elements.
While the main fresco, with its impossible perspective, raises a
second, idealized earth above our heads, the choir fresco, more
faithful to Italian illusionism, offers us a spectacle set in heaven:
ranged around God the Father and the Holy Spirit, an angelic orchestra
is awaiting the Son. While the spiritual center of this fresco is the
absent Christ, the main fresco has its spiritual center in the Virgin.
The bipolarity here reveals its significance: nave is to choir as the
transfigured earth is to heaven, as the Virgin is to Christ. Joining
the two, the church hints at the wedding of the Song of Songs, which is
both, the wedding of Mother and Son and of the Church and Christ.
Another symbol of this wedding is the Assumption of the Virgin. Small
wonder that so many of these churches are consecrated to it. There is nothing surprising about the Marian character of the main
fresco of Steinhausen. Unusual, however, is the elimination of the
traditional architectural symbols taken from the Song of Songs. In the
fresco we see neither the Tower of David nor the Temple of Solomon,
neither the Gate of Heaven nor the City of God. Symbols that belong to
the sphere of the garden are singled out for special emphasis. This
allows the painter to create a symbolic landscape that betrays its
origin in the secular rococo. It is an origin that Zimmermanns art and, beyond that, the art of the
Bavarian rococo never quite cast off. Hans Sedlmayr has suggested that
in the régence period all the arts gravitate toward the
realm of Pan. In the work of Watteau this world "with its dryads and
oreads, its copses and hills, nymphs and shepherds, merges with an
idealized state of social being and with elements from the dream-world
of the theatre, until nature, art, and love combine to form a mystical
paradise an earth in which eternal youth, brightness, beauty and
transfigured sensuousness deny age, infirmity, sin, and death."[31]
Much of this can also be said of the work of Zimmermann. How small the
step is from sacred to secular art is shown by the large fresco
Zimmermann painted twenty years after Steinhausen for the elector Max
III Joseph in the Great Hall of Nymphenburg (fig. 123). How important
is it that this fresco celebrates, not the Virgin, but the Olympian
gods? Zimmermann's art threatens to blur the world of Pan with the
garden of the Song of Songs. The distance that should separate Christ
and the Virgin from pagan deities does not manifest itself. This
returns us to the suspicion that the Bavarian church rococo, too,
unable to take inherited meanings seriously, uses them as material for
a charming but only aesthetic play. Are we to conclude, then, that such blurring of the sacred and the
profane, the Christian and the pagan, betrays a superficiality possible
only when religion is no longer being taken very seriously? Are we to
say, disregarding the considerations advanced in chapter 4, that such
confusions are just another expression of rococo decadence?
But such confusions are by no means confined to the rococo. In this
respect, too, the Bavarian rococo only takes up and develops a baroque
theme. Perhaps the most moving evidence is provided by the Latin odes
of the Jesuit Jakob Balde, in which he celebrated the Marian pilgrimage
churches of the region, about a hundred years before Steinhausen was
built.[32] Reluctant to use the name Maria, Balde does not hesitate to
describe the Virgin in figures borrowed from antiquity. Descriptions of
nymphs and nereids are now applied to her: associated with the moon she
is Diana; juxtaposed with Venus, the destructive mater saeva cupidinum,
she is the mater blanda cupidinum.[33] There is something highly
artificial about such neo-Latin poetry that celebrates the Virgin in
Horatian measures, always playing with the model provided by the Roman
precursor, trying to pour Christian wine into a pagan vessel. But this
artificiality not only lets us become aware of the inadequacy of the
words the poet has inherited to say what he has to say, but this very
inadequacy lets us recover the experience to which this poetry is a
response. Still capable of moving the modern reader are those poems in
which Balde ties the Virgin's presence to a particular place as its
genius loci. Three stanzas from his ode to Maria Waldrast (Forest
Rest), a pilgrimage church almost lost in the forests and mountains of
the Tirol, can stand for others.[34]
Spirat ex antris pietas et horror
Conscius Nymphae. Locus ipse gratum
Terrect ac mulcet Superique per prae
cordia fusi.
Sive nimbosas quatit Auster alas
Sive brumali Boreas minatur
Ninguidus cornu, niveae tenemus
Virginis aulam
O quies semper memoranda Silvae,
O tuum vere meritura nomen,
Da frui fessis aliquando vera,
Silva quiete.
Grace and awe breathe down from the grottoes.
The nymph nearby. The place
Frightens and soothes the welcome visitor and gods
Move through the heart.
Let the west beat its cloudy wings,
Let the north threaten us winter
With its horn full of snow, we hold fast to the court
Of the snow-white Virgin
Forest rest, ever memorable
Truly will you deserve your name,
Let the weary some day enjoy true,
Forest, Rest.
A particular landscape is experienced as a numinous maternal presence.
Inseparable from the Marian piety of the Bavarian baroque and rococo is
a sense of still being at home in nature. It is this that lets nature
become a figure of the Virgin and of paradise, of the paradise that was
and of the paradise to come. This Marian naturalism helps to explain
the anticlassical, even anti-architectural cast of the Bavarian rococo
church. More is at stake here than simply an aesthetic preference for
organic forms. If the church means heaven, heaven is now thought of not
as a city in heaven nor as a cloudy realm but in the Image of the
terrestrial paradise, that is to say, as a garden. There is little
place for architecture in that garden. Adam did not need a house in
paradise. And just as paradise is not sought beyond the earth, so it is
not sought beyond time. The turn to nature goes along with an
acceptance of time. There may be something pagan about a naturalism
that recognizes the power of death and yet refuses to take seriously
the fall that has set spirit against nature and alienated man from the
earth. But faith in the Virgin's immaculate conception and assumption
implies faith that such alienation does not have the last word. It
should not surprise us that in the beauties of nature the Bavarian
experiences the proximity of the Virgin. It is this Marian naturalism that has to be kept in mind if we are to
understand a church like Steinhausen. It justifies the importation of
the Arcadian sphere into Johann Baptist Zimmermann's fresco. With much
greater immediacy it expresses itself in the architecture of his
brother Dominikus, in the pillars that have been likened to rising tree
trunks, in their sheltering oval, and in the stuccoes. Here we are no
longer dealing with an idealized landscape. Fox and squirrel, beetles
and bees, birds and flowers are taken directly from the landscape
outside. The spring of the Song of Songs has become a German spring.
The Wedding of Sky and Water
Hans Sedlmayr has suggested that if régence art revolves
around the world of Pan, the central figure of the style rocaille is
Venus as Boucher painted her. Her attributes –
rock and conch, coral and reed, water, wave, and foam
– constitute the treasury of rocaille
ornamentation. Her element, water, determines the fluidity of forms.
Its movement, the wave, suggests the pattern of surging and plunging;
its colors, the deep cool blue of the sea and the white of the
glistening spray, together with the roseate hue of the conch and the
iridescence of mother of pearl, produce a typically rococo color
harmony. [35] Sedlmayr is of course thinking here first of all of the French secular
rococo. But the Bavarian rococo church also comes to mind. Consider the
consonance of blue and white in Die Wies; or the pulpit in the church
in Oppolding, which, no longer ornamented, has itself become an
ornament, surging upward, dissolving, scattering spray (fig. 124), or
the doorframe in Maria Medingen, which I used in the first chapter to
illustrate the revolt of rococo ornament against its merely ornamental
status (fig. 7). It would be difficult to deny that rocaille here
remains faithful to its origin in the realm of Venus.
Again the question: What place does this realm have in sacred
architecture? Does not Venus stand for that eternal power of the
sensuous that Eve's transgression has made into a threat? But here we
should not forget that Mary is the antitype of Eve. As the vesper hymn
Ave maris stella suggests, accepting Gabriel's Ave, the Virgin overcame
sin and turned around the narre of Eva. With this reversal the sensuous
and feminine is redeemed. There is no longer a reason to radically
dissociate the figures of Venus and of the Virgin. Indeed, the seashell is associated with the Virgin quite as much as it
is with Venus. This association has one source in the old myth of the
origin of the pearl in the wedding of sky (of dew or lightning) and
water that takes place inside a shell.[36] The myth can become a figure
for the immaculate conception as well as for the incarnation.
Accordingly, the pearl can stand either for the Virgin or for Christ.
It is the latter interpretation that makes the Shell a figure of the
Virgin. As the learned jesuit Théophile Raynaud, who
compiled one of those typically baroque dictionaries of Marian
metaphors, argues: just as the pearl forms inside a lowly mollusk's
shell without any outside influence, so Christ developed within the
Virgin without a created father (fig. 125). This interpretation is brought to mind by the large stuccoed shells
that so often cover the apse vault of Bavarian baroque churches,
sheltering the altar beneath. We find them in Steingaden and Maria
Birnbaum, in Obermarchthal and Unter-Windach, in the cathedral of
Freising and Schliersee. The decoration of the apses in Murnau and
Weyarn translates this shell motif into a delicate rococo ornament. To
be sure, there is a more obvious interpretation of its significance.
Originally a symbol of the life-giving womb, the Shell signifies birth
and rebirth. Granting life after death, the Shell became a symbol of
heaven. Shells have long appeared above apses and niches, exalting,
like a baldachin, what they shelter.[37] One can also point to the way
these shells mediate between what they shelter and the architecture,
helping to bind the two together. In this respect they have somewhat
the Same function as rococo ornament. But these interpretations do not
preclude the interpretation of the shell as a figure of the Virgin
bearing Christ within her womb. Alive in that figure is the older
meaning of the shell as a sign of the victory of life over death, of
deathless life. Perhaps this gives us another reason for the Bavarians' enthusiastic
appropriation of rocaille. Inseparable from this ornament's origin in
the Shell is its ambiguous evocation of both Venus and the Virgin.
Earlier I argued that the Bavarian rococo church requires an ornament
that can mediate between the heaven opened up by the fresco and an
earthbound architecture; its protean nature, which allows it to become
either picture or architecture, predestines rocaille for this mediating
role. But this mediating function can itself be taken as a figure of
the Virgin, who is Scala coeli, the ladder of Jacob's dream joining
heaven and earth, Stella maris, star of the sea, and the Shell, the
miraculous site of the wedding of sky and water.
ROCOCO CHURCH AND ENLIGHTENMENT
An Ominous Mandate
In 1770 Elector Max III Joseph issued the following general mandate: In
order to prevent all exaggeration when a new country church needs to
be built, and so as not to leave the planning of the church to the
self-centered whim of some priest or official, but rather to assure
that a thoroughgoing uniformity in church architecture be observed as
much as possible, following the example of Italy, we shall let
experienced and skilled architects provide different model floor plans
and elevations, depending on the number of parishioners, together with
an estimate of the total cost, as accurately as this can be done, so
that in this way a pure and regular architecture may be preserved,
eliminating all superfluous stucco-work and other often nonsensical and
ridiculous ornaments and showing in altars, pulpits, and statues a
noble simplicity appropriate to the veneration of the sanctuary.[1]
This is not the only such document that has come down to us. Similar
orders were issued at about the saure time in Hungary and Silesia. They
show something of the impact of neoclassicist aesthetics; more
important, they betray the uneasiness with which the rococo church,
with its extravagant decoration, filled an enlightened intelligentsia.
How could such extravagance be justified? In the name of reason the
Enlightenment challenged the culture of the rococo. The rococo church
could not meet that challenge. The elector, passionately devoted only
to the pleasures of music and
the hunt but filled with good intentions, had some right to consider
himself an enlightened ruler. His paternal care for his subjects, which
brought him the honorific epithet of der Vielgeliebte, the much loved,
expressed itself in his attempt to popularize the potato as much as in
his emphasis an education as the means of leading his subjects into a
brighter and better age. One of his teachers had been the once-famous
Johann Anton Ickstatt, a student of the rationalist philosopher
Christian Wolff and one of those who worked tirelessly to bring the
Enlightenment to the Bavarians.[2] It was no easy matter. The same
conditions that allowed the
eye-intoxicated theatrical culture of the rococo to thrive here as in
no other part of Germany made Bavaria inhospitable to the
Enlightenment, with its reverence for the clear and distinct and the
solid letter. There was no vigorous middle class. To be sure, there
were cities, but for the most part they had remained small. Even the
free imperial city of Augsburg, whose art academy, painters, and
engravers had made it a center of the Bavarian rococo, had long since
lost that European importance that belonged to it in the sixteenth
century, when a Fugger financed the emperor. The centers of a
middle-class culture that in Germany, too, had begun to assert itself
were not Vienna, Munich, or Augsburg, but Zürich, Hamburg, and
Leipzig. For its models it looked less to Italy than to France and,
increasingly, to England. The literary culture that was to destroy the
world of the Bavarian rococo was supported by a bourgeoisie that had
found its Weltanschauung in the work of Wolff and Gottsched.[3] Bavaria
had remained a land of peasants. A Protestant visiting Bavaria
in 1785 felt, not altogether unjustly, that the clock had been turned
back one hundred and fifty years.[4] The Church, especially the large
monasteries, still dominated the economic and cultural life of the
country. More than half of the land was in its possession. At the same
time the Church had retained or regained its popular base. Most of the
parish priests and quite a few of the monks were of peasant stock. A
career in the Church offered a son of a peasant a chance to break out
of an otherwise rigid class structure and to meet aristocrats as an
equal.[5] This helps to explain why the Bavarian rococo church never
lost its
popular base. Churches like Steinhausen or Die Wies, Rottenbuch or
Ettal are the work of local craftsmen who remained very much part of a
peasant society. The phenomenon of Wessobrunn is instructive. From
before 1600 this village of scattered farms sent its masons and
plasterers throughout Germany and far beyond.[6] We know of well over
six-hundred artists. Names like Zimmermann and Schmuzer, Feichtmayr and
Üblhör hint at their importance: Wessobrunners were
involved in the creation of almost all the masterpieces of the German
rococo, usually in leading positions. Artist-craftsmen from Wessobrunn
made a decisive contribution not only to Die Wies, Ottobeuren, and
Vierzehnheiligen, but to such masterpieces of the courtly rococo as
Karl Albrecht's Amalienburg or Frederick the Great's Sanssouci. This
astonishing success would not have been possible without the
Benedictine monastery in whose shadow many of these artists were
raised. Faced with a scarcity of land to feed its subjects, the
monastery encouraged them to become masons and stuccoers, employed
them, and helped to secure commissions. At the same time it helped to
educate them and saw to it that they knew about the latest developments
in Italy or France. If the Bavarian rococo church ignores the Split
between high and popular art, if it ranks with the Best art of the
eighteenth century and yet in a profound sense remains folk art, it
owes this to the integrative power of the Church.[7] The elector's
mandate heralds the coming change. A small literate elite
now insists on norms that have no popular foundation. A new
spirituality and a new aesthetic were to triumph over the rococo, which
continued a modest life among the peasants. The delightful painted
houses of Mittenwald, Oberammergau, and the Leizach valley, dating from
the seventies and eighties, illustrate this transformation of the
rococo into mere folk art.[8]
Bavarian Enlightenment
Not surprisingly, given the way Bavaria's intellectual culture had its
centers in the monasteries, it was here that the Enlightenment made its
first appearance. In 1722 (when Amigoni and Zimmermann were working in
Schleissheim) three Augustinian monks, Eusebius Amort, Agnellus
Kandler, and Gelasius Hieber, founded the journal Parnassus Boicus in
the hope of fostering the growth of the arts and sciences in
Bavaria.[9] Supported by such monasteries as Polling or St. Emmeram in
Regensburg, this first and very modest Enlightenment was not at all
anticlerical, but sought to clarify and reconcile the claims of
religion with the new philosophy of Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff: Its
partisans were interested in history and natural science and became
concerned about the lack of spirituality in popular religion, which
seemed to content itself with spectacle and to make no distinction
between superstition and genuine faith. This concern developed into law
in the decree of 1746, renewing traditional condemnations of
superstition, magic, witchcraft, and other devilish doings.[10] But it
was reform rather than revolution that was desired by this monastic
Enlightenment, and among the motives for such reform was the
conservative fear that without it religion itself would collide with
the new spirit.
The absolutist regime of the elector not only recognized the usefulness
of these efforts, but provided them with a focus. With the foundation
of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1759 the Enlightenment became
the servant of the state. Members of the academy were to be among the
main supporters of efforts to subordinate the church to the state, an
effort of particular urgency in Bavaria where the holdings of the
Church made it difficult to dismiss characterizations of the Church as
a state within the state. The attempt to establish the absolute rule of
the elector seemed an essential step toward dissolving a still-medieval
status-oriented
society.
As elsewhere, the Bavarian Enlightenment saw its task as pedagogic
above all. A good part of the work of the academy was focused on
education, which was seen as the most effective way of breaking the
hold of traditions that were obstacles to economic and spiritual
progress. The attack an the culture of the Counter Reformation reached
a first climax with the dissolution of the Jesuit Order in 1773, which
had controlled most of higher education. Its assets were to be used to
educate and better the lot of the elector's "children." A period of
reaction in the eighties was followed by a more vigorous affirmation of
the ideas of the Enlightenment by the administration of Count
Montgelas, minister of state to another Max Joseph, who was to become
the first Bavarian king. The secularization of 1803 brought the
expropriation and destruction of all the old monastic communities. Many
churches were now declared useless. Some were actually torn down; to
salvage at least a fraction of the wealth that had built and furnished
them, their inventory was auctioned off. The Benedictine abbey church
of Wessobrunn was lost at that time, although the intense resistance
which such destruction met from the part of the local population (it is
to this resistance that we owe the survival of Die Wies) shows what
these churches continued to mean to the people. Compared with these later developments, the elector's mandate of 1770
seems to have but little significance. Part of a flood of paper
decrees, it does not seem to have been taken very seriously. But as a
symptom it deserves consideration.
A Waste of Time?
Max III Josephs mandate links pragmatic, aesthetic, and spiritual
considerations. The economic argument against the extravagance, not
only of the rococo church but of the culture that supported it, is
especially a recurrent theme of the Bavarian Enlightenment. And indeed,
how could one justify the enormous expenditures required by rococo
architecture, expenditures that were often out of all proportion to the
available resources? Zimmermann's two masterpieces, Steinhausen and Die
Wies, offer perhaps the Best-known examples. In Steinhausen the costs,
which rose from an initial estimate of 9000, guilders to over 40,000,
forced Didacus Ströbele, abbot of the Premonstratensian
Schussenried, which was sponsoring the project, out of office.[11] Die
Wies cost the staggering sum of 180,000 guilders, and in spite of
generous gifts from the many pilgrims the monastery of Steingaden,
which after initial doubts had supported the undertaking, was left with
a huge debt.[12] In other monasteries, such as Rott am Inn, the
Situation was similar. Cost overruns were the rule rather than the
exception. And even where the available resources or a more modest
building project allowed a monastery to avoid debt, the strain placed
an its economy was almost always severe. It would be interesting to
know what percentage of the gross national product of Bavaria was spent
at this time on religious spectacles, such as processions, theatrical
performances, vestments, and the like, to say nothing of churches. Even
more revealing and more directly the target of the electoral
mandate was the situation in the villages. Just two examples: 12,000
guilders were spent for Johann Schmuzer's impressive church in
Garmisch. To be sure, Garmisch was a comparatively large village and
the population growth in this part of the Alps had made the existing
church too Small. But did the populace really need this ornate a
church? And we know that the local priest, Marquard Schmid, had hoped
for something even more splendid. As often in such circumstances,
higher authorities did not give permission to go ahead. Here it was the
bishop of Freising who refused to approve a plan for a church with two
towers, with the remark that an out-of-the-way place like Garmisch did
not need a cathedral.[13] The case of Bertoldshofen is similar. Here,
too, it was the local
priest, Johann Ulrich Julius, who pointed to the popular fraternity of
St. Anthony that had been established in the village in 1685, to demand
a church an the model of San Antonio in Padua with its five domes. With
remarkable perseverance, begging for building materials and for funds,
refusing to yield to the misgivings of higher authorities, he had his
way. Even with generous donations of time and materials Johann Georg
Fischer's church cost 14,000 guilders.[14] It was the same story
everywhere: priests and abbots, bishops and
princes had been possessed by the Bauwurm, by an irrational desire to
build, as Johann Philipp von Schönbom, prince bishop of
Würzburg, said of himself. Very much tied to a desire,
essentially still baroque, for public spectacles, for visual
representation and dramatization, the Bauwurm cannot be reconciled with
the rationality of the Enlightenment, which found its proper
architectural expression in intimate interiors and in an often sober
and functional public architecture. It is symptomatic that in the
sixties and seventies no really
significant building projects were initiated by the Bavarian court.
Cuvilliés's delightful theatre in the elector's Residenz
(1751-53) and Johann Baptist Zimmermann's Great Hall in the palace of
Nymphenburg (1755-57) were the last major creations of the courtly
rococo in Bavaria. The fact that both served the elector's passionate
interest in music is telling. In Bavaria, too, architecture was about
to yield its place as queen of the arts to music and literature. The
ear was becoming more important than the eye. This shift also had
social significance. Even in Bavaria cultural leadership was soon to
pass to the middle class, as it already had in the Protestant part of
Germany, not to speak of other parts of Europe. Yet just in the fifties
building activity in the Bavarian countryside
reached an absolute peak. These were the years of Die Wies, Andechs,
and Schäftlarn. Just as, a generation earlier, Max Emmanuel
had competed with the emperor in Vienna and the king of France in
representing his own majesty to the world, so villages now competed
with one another, to be sure ad maiorem Dei gloriam, although it is
never easy to separate religion from all-too-human motives. Are this
sensuousness and theatricality really compatible with the inwardness
and spirituality demanded by the Christian faith? Was the elector's
mandate not right to insist that sober simplicity is more appropriate
to the House of God than theatrical ostentation? Especially so in the
hunger years 1770 to 1773, when in some communities the infant
mortality rate rose to over 80 percent.[15] The gay splendor of
the rococo has cast a light over this period that
too easily lets us forget its misery. The reformers in Munich saw
things differently. In all this splendor they saw mostly waste, a waste
of funds and a waste of time. Would it not have been better to grow
potatoes? Indeed, a key objection to popular religion was that it kept
people from more productive activity. The reformers were concerned
about the fact that half of the year was taken up by religious
holidays. In one area of Lower Bavaria there were no fewer than 204
days on which work was forbidden.[16] The attempt to reduce their
number goes back to the Middle Ages, but it was pressed with increased
vigor by the Enlightenment. Austria led the way: in 1771, acceding to
the wishes of Empress Maria Theresia, Pope Clement reduced the number
of religious holidays to fifteen, not counting Sundays. A year later
Elector Max III Joseph succeeded in having the reduction extended to
Bavaria. Such decrees met with local resistance, as is shown by efforts
to
ensure that the villages did not keep the demoted holidays as they
traditionally had. In 1785 the festive decoration of altars and
churches on such days was proscribed, high mass could not be
celebrated, and devotional exercises were forbidden, as were gambling
and drinking in the local inn, at least before six in the evening. The
association of devotion and drinking, of church and inn, is
revealing. The reformers were not altogether wrong when they saw in the
eagerness with which the peasants clung to their processions and to
their holidays, which often lasted two or three days, more than
expressions of religious devotion. Leisure and devotion were
inseparably intertwined. Both, at any rate, kept people from working,
and it was industry above all that the reformers in Munich hoped to
teach the Bavarian peasant. Given this emergent work ethic popular
religion seemed mostly a refuge of laziness and superstition. But it
was not laziness that built the rococo churches and let the
peasants cling to their saints and their holidays; it was a very
different understanding of man's life on earth and the place of work in
it. The peasant knew himself to be in the hands of higher powers, and
this knowledge made him uneasy about attempts to use a merely human
science to secure human existence (fig. 126). Lightning rods, for
example, were often felt to be on arrogant interference an the part of
man in a sphere that belonged to God.[17] The same mentality found
expression in the tradition of ringing bells when a storm threatened,
to drive away those evil and destructive spirits to which God had
granted power to molest man. Again and again, in 1788, 1791, 1792,
1800, 1804, and 1806, the authorities forbade this superstitious
practice.[18] Nature was still experienced as a Spirit-filled presence,
which could be benign or destructive. Abundant crops were not so much
something that one could take credit for as a gift from God; and it was
God's wrath that showed itself in famine, disease, or war. In the face
of disasters that left the individual helpless, prayerful invocation of
some saint, especially of the Virgin, for intercession on man's behalf
seemed a more appropriate response than planning, which, no matter how
careful, could never secure human existence. And was the effectiveness
of such intercession not attested to by countless miracles? One begins
to understand why the peasant was so reluctant to give up
his religious holidays and pilgrimages. They gave him a sense of
security, of being in harmony with the earth and the powers that
preside over it, that must elude those who have decided to pursue the
Cartesian dream of rendering man the master and possessor of nature.
This sense of attunement, this trusting turn to higher powers, is
indeed the greatest obstacle to all human attempts to better man's lot.
The reformers of the Enlightenment were quite right to See in this
popular religion mingled with superstition the main obstacle to making
Bavaria a modern state. What a waste of time that could have been spent
so much more productively.[19] Today we have become ambivalent enough
about modernity and its project
of securing human existence by conquering nature to look back
nostalgically to a culture that did not burden man with the task of
securing his place. And it is a burden, made heavier by our knowledge
about the final vanity of this attempt. We find it difficult to make
peace with nature and time. As Nietzsche knew, the rancor against time
is the deepest source of our inability to be at peace with ourselves
and with nature; and part of our love of the rococo is a longing for
what escapes us. In a church like Die Wies, which in spite of all its
artificiality belongs to nature, more specifically to this landscape
before the Alps, we recapture something of that sense of well-being
that let abbot Marian Mayr of Steingaden, who with this church had
nearly bankrupted his monastery, take the stone of his ring to etch
these words into a windowpane of his summer quarters right next to the
church: Hoc loco habitat fortuna, hic quiescit cor. "In this place
fortune dwells; here the heart finds rest."[20]
What separates the Enlightenment from this popular religion is first of
all its very different understanding of time. Precisely because he knew
about the precariousness of human existence, because of his intimacy
with disaster and death, the peasant experienced more strongly and
thankfully the miracle of growth and life. The victory that light
gained every morning over the forces of darkness, the yearly triumph of
spring over winter, which hinted at the Immaculata's conquest of the
devil, supported his trust in the final victory of life over death. The
religious year, with its many holidays, attuned him to the spiritual
order. What sense did it make to him to speak of a waste of time? The
concept of wasting time presupposes a very different understanding of
life. Time is now seen as a scarce resource that, like money, must be
spent prudently. Inseparable from this understanding is the emphasis on
industry, on the glories of hard work. To this rhetoric the peasant was
deaf. It was to open his Bars that the Enlightenment attacked so
relentlessly the religious year with its many holidays. And yet work
has its end outside itself; it is for the sake of something else.
Because of this, a life reduced to work becomes itself a waste of time.
It is with good reason that Martin Heidegger, whose philosophical work
has some of its roots in the Catholic baroque, can make the seemingly
curious assertion that the authentic man always has time.[21] But this
is just to say that to be truly at one with ourselves we cannot oppose
ourselves to time as if it were a resource to be used ill or well. The
specific beauty of the rococo church is inseparable from the fact that
it speaks of freedom from the rancor against time.
The Critique of Opera
When the elector's mandate attacked the elaborate decoration of the
rococo church, demanding "a noble simplicity appropriate to the
veneration of the sanctuary," its point was not simply that such
decoration is unnecessary, but that it fosters a false religiosity;
that by focusing the worshiper's attention on what he can see, it
obscures the real content of religion, which can be grasped only by the
spirit. The tie between religion and theatrical spectacle, so crucial
to the rococo church, is to be broken. To the Enlightenment this still
baroque theatre, whether claiming to serve the majesty of the ruler or
the majesty of God, had become mere theatre, detached from the reality
that it professed to serve, offering only an empty shell, not the
kernel; a highly artificial entertainment that led man away from the
real business of life. The anti-theatrical attitude of the reformers in
Munich expressed
itself in a mandate that preceded the mandate against the rococo church
by only a few months. Passion plays (a distorted echo of this tradition
has survived in the passion play of Oberammergau) and the unusually
elaborate Good Friday processions were forbidden. The injunction was
renewed in 1788, 1792, and 1793.[22] The two reasons given hardly come
as a surprise. For one, it was argued that the mysteries of religion
are no proper subject matter for the stage. True devotion is hindered
rather than fostered by productions that focus attention on what is
superficial and external. There was also the second reason, that such
plays kept people from more productive work and led to other excesses.
The orders were soon extended to forbid all plays with a religious
content; and, when in their passion for the theatre the peasants turned
to secular plays, theatre was forbidden altogether. These were hardly
unusual or idiosyncratic measures. The baroque
theatre had long been one of the main targets of enlightened guardians
of the arts. Opera, which had played such a central part in the festive
culture of the baroque, was found especially objectionable. The
critique of opera is of interest here because many of the reasons
advanced against it apply equally to the rococo church. Perhaps the
most respected of its German critics was Johann Christoph Gottsched,
who, as he himself wrote, had been taught by the rationalist
philosopher Christian Wolff "to see order and truth in the world, which
before had seemed to him like a labyrinth or a dream."[23] Typical of
the Enlightenment is the way Gottsched appeals to reason and nature to
support the demand that the artist confine himself to representations
of what is probable. This insistence on probability is taken for
granted by most of the theoreticians of the time. Unnatural and
irrational are perhaps the most popular terms in the critical
vocabulary of the Enlightenment. Once this emphasis on nature and
reason has been granted, the attack on opera or, for that matter, on
the rococo church is easy enough. If popular religion is attacked for
being superstitious, opera is attacked for having drawn too much from
"old romances and bad novels," which, while they cater to our longing
for the marvelous and exotic, have very little to do with life. The
artificiality of opera is a particular target: "Our operas have made
everything musical. Persons have to laugh, cry, cough, and sniff
according to notes, nobody dares to say good morning to another without
keeping time. And the angriest person is forced to bite his tongue as
long as his adversary is not finished with his trill."[24] Indeed, who
could deny that in opera people "think, speak, and act very differently
from the way one does in common life"? It is not truth that we gain
from opera. Its artificial charms have more to do with magic. There
were other charges. Opera was rightly said to have disregarded
the Aristotelian unities-although one may wonder to what extent these
unities, particularly as expounded by Aristotle's French students, are
compatible with nature. But the Enlightenment was not so much for
nature as for nature subjected to reason, nature made manageable. It is
possible to argue that the baroque theatre with its endless variety and
change offers us a better figure of life than a play such as
Gottsched's once-much-praised The Dying Cato, timidly based on plays by
Addison and Deschamps.[25] More serious was the charge that opera could
not be used to improve
morals. Gottsched saw art first of all as a teaching tool. Art should
moralize. The reason opera is unlikely to make us better persons is,
according to Gottsched, that the soul of opera is love – one
thinks of Kierkegaards much later discussion of Mozarts Don Giovanni
– and love is the enemy of morality, a "dangerous and
tyrannical passion" that does not let us keep to the path dictated by
reason.[26] With it an irrational force manifests itself and claims the
individual. To understand the opposition between rococo and
Enlightenment, it is well to remember Sedlmayr's claim that the culture
of the rococo centered an Venus. Gottsched might have agreed. And here
we come to the heart of the struggle. It is not so much the unnatural,
artificial character of the rococo that is objectionable-surely, if
anything is natural, love is. But nature manifests itself here as a
force that does not easily accommodate itself to the reason and
morality of a Gottsched. Despite all its artificiality, the rococo may
well be closer to nature than the Enlightenment. To make the test,
compare paintings by Greuze and Fragonard. Fragonard's art may be
theatrical and artificial, but precisely because we cannot take this
theatre too seriously we come under the spell of the goddess that
presides over this art. A similar point is made by a comparison of Die
Wies in its self-conscious theatricality with the serene simplicity of
a classicistic church like D'Ixnard's St. Blasien in the Black Forest
(figs. 127 and 128). The almost natural and at times irrational
spontaneity of the rococo church contrasts with the cool rationality of
an architecture that looks back to the Roman Pantheon. To be sure, the
parallel should not be pushed too far: it is not Venus that presides
over the Bavarian pilgrimage church, whose altar shelters the
miraculous image of Christ bound to the column, somewhat in the way the
Virgin, whom we see above in the painting of the upper altar, holds her
child. Theatre and artifice, no doubt. But they do not prevent this
architecture from becoming as natural as architecture can become.
Architecture and the Demands of Reason
A comparison of Die Wies and St. Blasien is instructive because the two
churches are in some ways quite similar. Both join a long rectangular
choir to a circular or oval nave; in both cases the architecture of the
choir and the nave could be said to hark back to Gothic hall churches,
although the open expanse of the nave, which reduces the aisles to a
mere mantle, distances the eighteenth-century churches from such
antecedents. But this similarity makes the different character of the
two churches all the more apparent. As the exterior already makes
clear, D'Ixnard's St. Blasien contrasts simple, and therefore easily
grasped, geometric shapes. In no case is an attempt made to soften
these contrasts with mediating ornament. Geometric forms are allowed to
retain their elemental force. The nave is a simple circle, the choir a
strongly articulated rectangle. Dominikus Zimmermann, an the other
hand, generates his oval out of two interlocking circles and uses
ornament to obscure the spatial organization of the choir. The same
contrast shows itself when we compare D'Ixnard's twenty white columns
with their Corinthian capitals and the curious paired pillars that
Dominikus Zimmermann used in Die Wies (fig. 129). Or compare the strong
modillioned cornice that rings the clearly articulated dome of St.
Blasien with the much weaker cornice in Die Wies, where the fresco
helps to take away any sense of definite boundary. In St. Blasien
architecture has regained its priority. Fresco and ornament play only a
very minor part. We have a splendid example of that serenity demanded
by the elector's mandate.[27]
The mandate's demand for simplicity and its invocation of the model of
Italy suggest where we have to look for the spiritual sources of its
critique of the rococo church: to Rome, where in opposition to baroque
architecture Winckelmann had called for a return to the "noble
simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the ancients. But it would be a
mistake to place too much emphasis on Winckelmann and the group of
artists and theorists that had gathered in Rome, and to view
neoclassicism as a style that was to replace the rococo. In many ways
rococo and neoclassicism are parallel developments, presenting
competing claims, deriving their strength from different social strata,
which helps to explain their different reception in different
countries. If the rococo has both an aristocratic and a truly popular
base, neoclassicism is very much associated with the Bourgeoisie. Thus
it is more strongly represented in the Protestant countries of Europe
than in the Catholic south. It is not at all surprising that most of
the group of neoclassicists that had gathered in Rome did not come from
Italy. Never did France carry the rococo to such extremes as did
Bavaria. By
the time rocaille triumphed in Bavaria it had ceased to be a very
important artistic force in France, where classicistic and antibaroque
sentiments had a long tradition. Thus before Winckelmann Boffrand and
Blondel had demanded noble simplicity and had insisted that the bizarre
not be confused with genius.[28] The Encylopédie only sums
up widespread tendencies. Baroque, adj., in architecture, is a nuance
of the bizarre. It is, if
one wishes, its refinement or, if that is possible, its Superlative.
The idea of baroque carries with it that of the ridiculous carried to
excess. Borromini has provided the greatest models of the bizarre and
Guarini can pass as the master of the baroque. [29] The article is
directed against the Italian baroque. But the same key
words recur in critiques of the rococo. Inseparable from this
repudiation of what was then still an ongoing
architectural tradition was the search for new foundations, which
reason and nature were to furnish. To exhibit these foundations the
ex-Jesuit Marc Antoine Laugier, perhaps the most widely read
architectural theorist of the age, attempted to reconstruct the
primitive hut.[30] It is supposed to be the archetypal building, Born
only of man's need for shelter. Laugier's thinking here is close to
political philosophers like Hobbes or Locke, who in their attempt to
establish the foundation of political authority imagine the natural
condition of man in order to generate the state from it. In similar
fashion Laugier assumes a state of nature. Guided only by his needs and
his reason, forced to find shelter in a world that is not always
friendly to him, primitive man builds his hut. Four supports are laid
out in a rectangle, other pieces of wood are laid across them, then a
roof is erected and covered with leaves. It is this house, which,
according to Laugier, furnishes all architecture with its basic
vocabulary. The authority of the primitive hut does not depend an
whether there
ever has been such a hut, just as the authority of the social contract
does not require there ever to have been such a contract. Regardless of
the testimony of history, it is an idea at which reasonable human
beings, open to nature and especially to their own nature, must arrive.
The little hut which I have just described is the type on which all the
magnificences of architecture are elaborated. It is by approximating to
its simplicity of execution that fundamental defects are avoided and
true perfection attained. The upright pieces of wood suggest the ideas
of columns, the horizontal pieces resting on them, entablatures.
Finally the inclined members which constitute the roof provide the idea
of a pediment.[31] On Laugier's account, too, the building is
legitimated by being
interpreted as a reenactment of an archetypal structure. This recalls
interpretations of the Christian church as a repetition of such
structures as Solomon's temple. But while these structures gained their
authoritative status because they were thought to have been divinely
inspired, Laugier's hut is supposed to derive its authority from human
reason. Given this claim, it is remarkable how much this hut turns out
to look like a Greek temple, which may make Laugier's reflections seem
more like a rationalization of neo-classicistic aesthetics than the
product of unalloyed reason. On this point we have to agree with
Laugier's Italian critic, Carlo
Lodoli.[32] Lodoli, too, felt that architecture had lost its way, that
it was basing itself on preconceptions that constituted a perversion of
true architecture. The weight of the past had gotten the better of
common sense. Even the ancients should not be copied slavishly.
Sanmicheli and Palladio are accused of having followed them
unthinkingly, without first inquiring into whether this architecture
really served human needs. And for Lodoli it is function that should
govern architectural form. The requirements of this functionalism even
Laugier's hut could not satisfy, and it mattered little to Lodoli that
Laugier could claim the canonic testimony of Vitruvius in support of
his views. Is Laugier's claim that only column, entablature, and
pediment are essential to architecture really reasonable, even if one
adds, as Laugier did, walk, windows, and doors? Why rule out arches and
arcades? According to Lodoli the Vitruvian conception of architecture
was unduly hampered by thinking that all building must have its origin
in wood construction. Do Etruscan and Roman architecture not teach us
better? Indeed, if Greek architecture translates a timber vocabulary
into stone, do we not have here architecture that in a very obvious way
violates the Jemands of functionalism, and thus of reason? Lodoli
demands of a truly functional architecture truth to materials. Here we
have come to another demand that leaves no room for rococo
architecture with its love of masquerade, of the architectural lie.
Think of Egid Quirin Asam's high altar at Rohr, where the Virgin seems
to rise heavenward, defying gravity, supported by a carefully concealed
metal rod. Or of the vision of heaven Cosmas Damian Asam conjured an
the vault of Weltenburg: the church's dome seems to float above us
without any visible support. In Die Wies, too, the vault possesses a
tent-like lightness, made possible by the construction of the vault of
timber, lath, and plaster rather than of stone. Given expectations
formed by masonry vaults, the columns that support the vault seem much
too week, more ornament than architecture. The architect's "deception"
creates the illusion of an almost weightless, immaterial construction.
This repudiation of architectural values is carried through the entire
church. Thus the unusual shape of the columns-a combination of round
column and square pillar that is particularly sensitive to changes of
light-helps to dematerialize the architecture, as does the bizarre
shape of the windows. We have seen how essential such play is to the
Bavarian rococo church. To insist with Lodoli an what we can call a
realism of materials is to leave no room for this architecture. But it
matters little whether we follow Laugier or Lodoli. Once
architecture is seen as a reasonable answer to natural needs, its
symbolic function is denied. This denial rules out an architecture that
still seriously considers the Jemand that the church building signify
the Church. This denial also denies any place for a symbolic function
of ornament. Ornament, if tolerated at all, becomes something added to
architecture, at best a pretty dress thrown over a functional body. The
building becomes a decorated shed, a formulation that invites criticism
by those who would reduce architecture to what is essential.
The Impropriety of Rocaille
Rocaille and its unruly freedom particularly provoked the enlightened
critics of the time. We meet with such criticism almost as soon as
rocaille makes its first appearance in Germany. The reviewer of
Cuvilliés's first book of engravings, writing in 1742 in
Gottsched's Neuer Büchersaal der schönen Wissenschaft
und freien Künste, speaks of "wild and unnatural shapes,"
lamenting that these ornamental fantasies delighted in presenting what
was improbable and impossible. What made matters worse, he complained,
was that these ornaments were imitated, that their offspring could be
seen an important buildings, a disgrace both to art and to his own "so
enlightened age."[33]
Reiffstein, the author of this review, who could count Winckelmann
among his friends, expanded his critique four years later in a
discussion of recently published collections of ornamental engravings
by Karl Pier, Cuvilliés, and Lajoue (fig. 130).[34] Even
Reiffstein could not dispute the technical excellence of these
engravings, and he was sensitive to the spontaneity of the designs. But
this very spontaneity made them guilty of what Reiffstein took to be
the cardinal fault of all such art: its improbability. An unfettered
imagination here outstrips nature and reason. How, for example, can
children, weighed down with flower garlands or a huge cornucopia, float
in the air even though they lack wings? How can a heavy cannon be
suspended in space as if it had no weight? Again and again the engraver
fails to obey the law of gravity. And Reiffstein
is right: these engravings do indeed present us with "concrete
impossibilities."
John Canaday used that phrase to describe René Magritte's
Castle in the Pyrenees.[35] The Belgian surrealist's castle rests
firmly on a huge boulder, but despite its obvious solidity, this rock
floats, somewhat like a balloon, in a sunny sky over an academically
painted sea. The rococo engravers offer similar surprises, although the
ornamental quality of their creations makes us more ready to accept
their impossibilities. Reiffstein also objects strongly to creatures
that look as if they were
products of an illicit union between man and fish. In these ornaments
an imagination no longer restrained by reason gives birth to monsters:
almost anything found in nature or art can serve the artist as material
for combinations that follow no rule. Traditionally such monstrous
creations have been associated with the demonic. The natural order is
subverted by human willfulness. The Romanesque monsters condemned by
St. Bernard come to mind, or the devilish creatures of a Bosch or a
Grünewald, as do their successors in twentieth-century
surrealism. The latter especially invite us to ask whether it is indeed
just willfulness that is at work here. Could it be that a more profound
understanding of reality is groping for expression (fig. 131)? But are
we not taking the ornamental engravings of the rococo too
seriously when we place them in this company? To be sure, there is a
certain similarity. But these eighteenth-century designs do not demand
to be taken seriously as pictorial representations. In them the logic
of ornament playfully competes with that of pictorial representation;
or, one might say, ornament usurps the more dignified place of
painting. This play helps to account for the disregard of proper scale
in these
engravings, another target of Enlightenment criticism.[36] How can an
entire landscape find place within a single shell? But to make this
point is of course to refuse to deal with these creations on their own
terms and to overlook the way the Shell is not only an object
represented in the engraving, but functions also as frame. No one would
think of measuring the ornament of a frame by the spatial logic of the
framed picture. The difficulty is, however, that these engravings
deliberately obscure the boundary between frame and framed picture. The
frame, we can say, has entered the picture. This willful confusion of
framing and pictorial function is particularly clear in Neues Caffehaus
(1756), a work by Johann Esaias Nilson, professor at the academy at
Augsburg (fig. 132).[37] A rather ordinary gabled house is framed by
rocaille, but this rocaille not only spreads out and becomes the earth
that supports the house; it also envelops the house with a vine-like
growth, curling around its corners. The ornament of the frame thus
enters and becomes part of the picture. To obscure the relationship
between frame and framed picture still further Nilson places the flag
on top of the coffeehouse in such a way that it appears to be in front
of the rocaille frame. Even more revealing is a later engraving,
created by Nilson after he
had accommodated himself to the change in taste and exchanged his
rocaille for a more classicizing vocabulary. In Der liebe Morgen (fig.
133) of 1770, cow and cowherd are placed before a stone structure that
looks like the slightly cracked base of some monument. Behind or on top
of this monument – the spatial relationship is left ambiguous
– we see a small house. Out of an open window a girl looks at
the cowherd who has come with his horn to offer her a morning greeting.
The spatial organization is further complicated by a broken octagonal
frame, placed on top of the stone block in such a way as to frame
window and girl. In spite of the difference in vocabulary, the
ambiguity of the rococo engraving is retained, indeed made more
striking. The ruined monument together with the broken frame has taken
the place of rocaille (see fig. 131). The new vocabulary adopted by
Nilson made it impossible to let the frame enter into the picture as
easily as in the earlier engraving: instead the frame is represented
quite literally. This representation lets it become an object in the
picture. Its essence –
and, if we take aesthetic distance to be constitutive of the aesthetic,
the essence of the aesthetic
– becomes the theme of the picture. Art becomes a
self-conscious preoccupation with art. It is this aestheticism which
accounts for the playfulness, the lack of seriousness in the
engraving.[38]
Reiffstein would no doubt have deplored such play as lacking in the
truth and moral significance that art must possess to be more than
frivolous entertainment. And we may well wonder what place similarly
playful ornament has in a church. We have seen that it is precisely its
ambiguous status between ornament and picture that allows rocaille to
play the mediating role between architecture and fresco assigned to
ornament by the rococo church. Reiffstein wants no part of this. He is
of course aware of the framing function of rocaille. But, he asks, how
can such a disorderly ornament provide an effective frame? A painting
can hardly present itself properly "locked into such disorderly
borders."[39] Reiffstein is of course right. As pointed out in the second chapter,
the irregular concave and convex curves of rococo frames cannot frame
as effectively as a simple rectangle or a circle. And this
ineffectiveness is increased by the pictorial quality of an ornament
that has to lessen the distance between frame and what is framed. But,
as we have seen, the Bavarian rococo church turns to rocaille precisely
because the fresco is not to "present itself properly." The
impossibility to which a Reiffstein would object in the name of reason
and nature is indeed present already in the fresco. The symbolic
landscapes that rococo churches conjure up above us are as impossible
as their perspective. Their creators lightly disregard what proper
perspective demands. These "improper" paintings demand "improper"
frames. It is clear that such impropriety cannot be defended by someone
who understands the demands of reason and nature as the enlightened
critics of the time did. But this is not to say that it must be
understood as a merely aesthetic game, although again and again the
Bavarian rococo church will invite such interpretation. When the
Bavarian rococo church plays with perspective it remains bound,
although precariously, by a higher perspective that demands that we see
through natural things and derive from them a significance that eludes
the probabilities of human reason. Reiffstein objects to the ornamental art of the rococo not only because
of its disregard of the probable and possible, but also because of its
affinity for the lower elements, for the sphere of earth and water and
its creatures, mollusk, fish, and snake. Another Saxon critic of
rocaille, F. A. Krubsacius, makes this criticism with a caricatured
rocaille (fig. 134) made up of such things as withered flowers and
straw, shell fragments and fish scales, hair and feathers, the whole
inhabited by dragons, snakes, and other vermin.[40] Once again the
criticism points to something important and again the parallel with
surrealism suggests itself. Rocaille is the product of a fantastic
chemistry. Its creators are alchemists who break nature into fragments,
distill from them a new matter, which in turn generates not only
familiar plants and animals, but also altogether new forms and shapes.
This character becomes more striking when we turn from engravings to
the work of a stuccoer like Anton Landes or Dominikus Zimmermann.
Nowhere can it be studied better than in the ornament of the choir of
Die Wies; nowhere do we find rocaille in more imaginative variations,
now shell-like or plantlike, now assuming the Look of earth, fire, and
water. Out of this protean matter grow leaves and flowers. The stucco
reaches a climax in those strangely beautiful, but also disturbing,
almost threatening forms that suggest giant caterpillars (fig. 90).
Reiffstein remarks quite correctly on the origin of rocaille in the
forms of certain seashells, but he is also quick to point out that
there is little concern about truth to nature. The creators of rocaille
are so free in their use of these forms that this origin is obscured.
Indeed, instead of a distinctly shell-like material we have a substance
that can have the look of water
– the pulpit at Oppolding or Landes's doorframe at Maria
Medingen offer good examples – but also of earth, or even, as
Die Wies shows, of fire. But we should not make too much of such
likeness: most of the rocaille found in Bavarian rococo churches is
quite abstract. As pointed out in the first chapter, the strength of this ornament is
such that it tends to shed its merely ornamental role and to assert
itself as a self-sufficient aesthetic object. We can observe the Same
tendency in the ornamental engravings that Augsburg produced in such
profusion. Following French examples, ornament here becomes the subject
matter of art, becomes an object in a picture. But given the period's
understanding of painting as essentially representational, what room is
there for this abstract ornamental matter in the picture? lf we accept
the Enlightenment's interpretation of the way the authority of nature
and reason had to rule the visual arts, there is no room at all. Even
the Augsburg engravers attempt to interpret rocailles increasingly as
more or less natural objects. Rocailles are made to Look as if they
were bizarre formations of earth, stone, or wood. The Enlightenment's
understanding of painting as essentially representational leads here to
what we can call a naturalization of rocaille. Bauer points to an
engraving by J. W. Baumgartner, one of a series devoted to the
elements.[41] The earth here raises itself in a fantastic arch-like
structure. This structure is of a substance with the earth that
supports it (fig. 135). Rocaille is presented literally as earth. To be
sure, the identification of earth and rocaille is motivated here by the
task that Baumgartner had Set himself. But even where there is not such
motivation we find rocaille acquiring this earthlike appearance. Bauer
points out that by the middle of the century earth rocaille had become
the dominant form. "The most significant Augsburg engraver, J. E.
Nilson, knows in his oeuvre only this form, which preserves hardly a
trace of the old Shell-matter."[42] Nilson gives his rocailles the look
of curious objects that nature might have produced. Although perhaps
not probable, they do at least have the look of being possible (fig.
136). Even more naturalistic are the inventions of Gottlieb Leberecht
Crusius, whose rocailles look like the surfaces of broken tree trunks
(fig. 137).[43] Rocaille here appears like organic matter in a state of
decay, like rotten or splintered wood. Given such engravings, Krub
sacius would not seem to be altogether off the mark with his suggestion
that rocailles turn not simply to the organic sphere, but to objects
that are the products of disintegration and decay. That this cannot be
said of the rocailles of the Bavarian rococo church has already been
noted. Here rocaille seems more like an abstract figure of nature in
spring.[44] Yet the association of rocaille and decay does make sense
given designs like those of Crusius. In chapter 5 I spoke of the relationship between the Bavarian rococo
church and the ruin architecture of the period. The work of the
Augsburg engravers helps to support the suggestion that there is a deep
link between rocaille and decayed matter. This also raises a question.
Architecture in ruins may be said to recall man to nature as to his
real home. But in many of these engravings nature presents a rather
sinister face. No longer do we think of the realm of Venus, of love and
of birth. Why does rocaille, which may be considered a metaphor of
life, approach matter in a state of disintegration as it becomes less
abstract and more representational? The turn to representation is easy
enough to understand. The aesthetics of painting at the time simply had
no place for a nonrepresentational art. As the Augsburg designers
claimed for their ornaments the kind of self-sufficiency associated
with paintings, it must have seemed only natural to them to give to
initially abstract forms the look of natural objects. But this does not
explain why the pictorialization of ornament should show this
preference for nature in a state of decay. To understand this
preference it is necessary to keep in mind the demand that the artist
represent, if not what is probable, at least what is possible, what
nature might conceivably have produced. But when does nature come
closest to producing abstract organic forms resembling rocaille,
objects which, while no longer organisms, yet have the look of being
organic? The answer is obvious: when organisms disintegrate. Subjected
to the reasonable aesthetics of the Enlightenment the spring-like
beauty of rocaille has to approach that caricature of it that
Krubsacius offers to us.
The artists associated with the Augsburg academy could not long
disregard what had been happening in the larger world of art. After
1750 the distance that had separated designers like
Cuvilliés from critics like Reiffstein began to narrow. As
if to prove this point, just at the time the elector issued his general
mandate Nilson published an engraving that shows a man standing next to
a classicistic urn, tearing a rocaille (fig. 138). "It is," in Bauer's
words, "a public 'peccavi' by which the professor of the Academy
distances himself from his life's work."[45] Even in the Academy of
Augsburg, which had trained so many rococo painters, the Enlightenment
had triumphed. Little concerned about theory, the stuccoers of Wessobrunn were more
resistant to such developments. But they could not escape them. Neither
the elector's decree nor other political events destroyed the Bavarian
rococo church. They were only aspects of a larger development that
permitted its flowering and necessitated its death.
THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE ROCOCO CHURCH
Transition and End
It is striking how church building activity ebbs in the last third of
the eighteenth century. Long before the secularization of 1802 and 1803
destroyed the monasteries, the economic base of the Bavarian church,
increasing financial pressures and, perhaps more important, the
prevailing spiritual climate made most monasteries hesitate to embark
an large building projects. Johann Michael Fischer's touching but
somewhat stiff and chilly Brigittine abbey church of
Altomünster (1763-73) and the church Simon Frey built for the
Augustinian canons of Suben (1766-70), an effective sequel to
Schäftlarn, stand at the end of a development that had given
Bavaria much of its best architecture. After 1770 examples become
scarce: in 1780 Schlehdorf, poorer than such neighboring monasteries as
Benediktbeuern and Rottenbuch, finally managed to finish the church
that it had begun sixty years earlier, now in an uninspired style
halfway toward neoclassicism. In Ebersberg a fire necessitated the
reconstruction and redecoration of the central aisle. A comparison with
the side aisles, where the rococo decoration from the middle of the
century survived, illustrates not only the stylistic change that has
taken place, but also the drop in quality (fig. 139). A much more
successful example of this transitional style is provided by the choir
of Ettal (1776). But these were all cases where an already existing
structure had to be redecorated or completed. Only Asbach, a
Benedictine monastery in a remote corner of Lower Bavaria, decided to
replace its perfectly serviceable church with a more fashionable
structure; only here we still find something of the building mania that
had earlier produced churches like Die Wies. The younger
Cuvilliés is credited with this coolly elegant structure
(1771-84).[1] A somewhat different situation prevailed to the west, in
Swabia, where political conditions were not yet so inhospitable to
church architecture. Here the political independence of such abbeys as
Neresheim, Oberelchingen, Rot an der Rot, and Wiblingen still allowed
them to build churches that by this time had become impossible in
Bavaria proper.
Neresheim and Wiblingen are the grand finale of the South German rococo.
In the villages, too, few churches were built in the last two decades
of the century. And indeed, what need was there for more churches? Were
there not more than enough already? The secularization then tried its
Best to do away with what was thought to be an unreasonable excess.
What earlier generations had built now began to be torn down, usually
for economic reasons, to make some money by selling the furnishings of
a church and anything else that would find a buyer – although
the passion with which some officials tried to assure that a rococo
masterpiece would be destroyed suggests ideological motivation. The
case of Rottenbuch is typical. On March 21, 1803 Franz Xaver
Schönhamer, judge in Schongau, declared that the monastery had
ceased to exist. The church was plundered part of its inventory was
sent to Munich, and what remained was put up for auction, although the
judge complained that it was difficult to find buyers for the church
itself, for its free-standing tower, and for the monastery buildings.
That the small local parish should get such an expensive and splendid
church seemed to him unreasonable. What would the parish do with it?
Did it not already have its own, quite adequate church? Why should it
even want the larger church, which would be much more difficult to
maintain? But the parish did want the church and the government in
Munich finally decided that its aesthetic merits were such that it
should be preserved and become the new parish church. So it was the old
parish church that was auctioned off, for 250 guilders. The judge still
did not give up. In spite of local protests even valued relics were
sold off to the highest bidder, and a buyer was found for the church's
particularly splendid organ, which the judge felt drowned out the
singing of the congregation. Fortunately that deal fell through, as did
the plan to use the proceeds from the sale to tear down the church's
side aisles and choir (Schönhamer thought them in need of
repair and, given the size of the parish, quite unnecessary anyway).[2]
Only rarely did the Schönhamers get their way. Not only in
Rottenbuch did popular protest help to preserve what enlightened yet
blind officials wanted to destroy. At times this protest became so
violent that it had to be met with force and the protesters jailed. But
it did not go unheard. To it we owe the survival of churches like
Fürstenfeld and Marienberg.[3] There were, however, serious
losses, the destruction of the abbey church and of large parts of the
monastery of Wessobrunn perhaps most saddening.[4] After a visit to a
place like Wessobrunn, where what remains-a quarter
of the monastery buildings and the small parish church-still testifies
so eloquently to what the secularization destroyed, it is tempting to
dramatize and to claim that the Bavarian rococo was slain by a cultural
invasion that, with the blessings of an enlightened court, gained
control of the bureaucracy and imposed its middle-class values an a
largely unsympathetic rural population. Given that view the mandate of
1770 assumes the significance of an ominous sign. There is some truth
to this, but it certainly is not the whole story. Long before 1770 the
Bavarian rococo church had begun to disintegrate, as is manifested by
the churches that were being built. The Bavarian rococo died not
violently but gradually, fading away to lead a kind of posthumous life
in folk art. And while this slow process of disintegration makes for a
less dramatic-and much more complicated-story, it is only when this
story is told that we begin to understand that what ends with the
Bavarian rococo church is not just another style, but an attitude to
art and to life that lies irrecoverably behind us.
Autumnal Rococo
The rococo church dies when reflection an the essential difference
between architecture and painting leads to the demand that the irrpure
alliance between architectural and pictorial space be dissolved.
Architecture is asked to reaffirm its own essence and to pursue
tectonic rather than pictorial values. But, as we have seen, the latter
are inseparable from the Bavarian rococo church. Not that it follows a
strict illusionism and accepts the primacy of the picture. The
irreducible tension between architectural and pictorial space is
recognized, but only to become the object of a subtle play that both
disguises and insists on it. The Bavarian rococo fresco does not let us
forget that what may at first seem like an illusionistic extension of
architectural space into a heavenly beyond cannot really be that. These
landscapes above us, with their trees and streams, oceans and ships,
become impossible when seen illusionistically. But the rococo church
does not take the step that to neoclassicism will seem so inevitable:
it will not treat the fresco simply as a picture. Rather, it assigns it
a quasi-architectural function. By its pictorial illusion the fresco
denies us a sense of the vault, which is rendered tentlike, almost
weightless. As we have seen, it is this ambiguous attitude to baroque
illusionism that helps to account for the preference for week,
scalloped frames and for the way the Bavarian rococo church exploits
the possibilities offered by rocaille to create a mediating ornamental
zone joining architecture and picture in an endless play that now
obliterates, now preserves the tension between them. By the middle of the century there is a certain resistance to the
ambiguities resulting from such interplay. A good example is furnished
by Birnau (1746-50). Hitchcock does not hesitate to consider this "the
highest rococo achievement of the mid-century", excepting only the
fresco – he would have preferred a lighter, airier
composition, by someone like Johann Baptist Zimmermann (fig. 140).[5]
Breathtakingly situated above Lake Constance, Birnau is indeed one of
the greatest achievements of the international rococo. More
questionable is its success as a church. Norbert Lieb wonders whether
what he considers "a certain profanity" of the space should be
considered a symptom of the impending end of the culture of the
ecclesiastic baroque, while Hugo Schnell senses here the beginning of
neoclassicism.[6] Given Hitchcock's criteria, there can be no doubt
concerning Birnau's rococo character; it is equally clear that it does
not fit criteria arrived at by an analysis of the Bavarian rococo
church. This raises once more the question raised in the first chapter:
How is what has been called the Bavarian rococo church related to the
rococo? Schnell's suggestion that in Birnau we already sense something
of the impending neoclassicism raises another: How are rococo and
neoclassicism related? Is it perhaps the way it remains bound to the
culture of the Counter Reformation that separates the Bavarian rococo
church both from the secular rococo and from neoclassicism?
Birnau, of course, does not belong to the Bavarian rococo. To be sure,
the stucco work is by Joseph Anton Feuchtmayer, a member of one of the
leading families of the Bavarian Wessobrunn, while the large fresco is
by one of the leading painters of Augsburg, Gottfried Bernhard Goez.[7]
But its architect, Peter Thumb, is from the Austrian Vorarlberg, which,
rivaling Wessobrunn, had sent hundreds of builders and decorators all
over Southern Germany and beyond. Characteristic of their work is a
preference for beautifully proportioned but often rather conventional
variations of the wall-pillar scheme as it had been established by St.
Michael and the Studienkirche in Dillingen. In Birnau, however, the
wall-pillars have shrunk to mere pilasters. The nave resembles a large,
flat-ceilinged room, expanding in the curved side chapels. The
boundaries of this space seem much more definite than in a Bavarian
rococo church. No longer is a mantle placed around a central space. The
delightful gallery that encircles this space has a more purely
ornamental function. The play of indirect light, so essential to the
Best creations of the Bavarian rococo, has yielded to direct
illumination. Nor is there an ornamental zone that effectively mediates
between fresco and architecture. Hitchcock considers this fresco, with
its quadratura architecture that recalls much earlier work by Pozzo and
Cosmas Damian Asam, "retardataire." But we need only imagine one of
Johann Baptist Zimmermann's in its place to realize that this fresco is
at home in this church as much as are Zimmermann's frescoes in the
churches of his brother. Not that in Birnau we have the Same kind of
interplay between architecture below and fresco above; it is
discouraged by the room-like space, which gives prominence to the
windows. The fresco here is not the equal partner of the architecture,
but first of all ornament-and how well Goez's browns and pinks, with
their blue and green accents, serve this interior. The
ornamentalization of the fresco is supported by the way the place of
mediating stucco ornament is taken by a painted ornamental parapet in
the fresco that provides something like an inner frame. This framing
architecture in the fresco may recall Pozzo or Asam, but the lack of an
effective relationship to the architecture makes it difficult to
interpret it illusionistically; the difficulty is enhanced by the way
the fresco is divided into two quite distinct parts, each governed by
its own point of view, and separated by a painted rib-band. Measured by
future developments, Birnau has to be considered a more
advanced church than Die Wies. This becomes particularly clear when we
look back to the organ. The nave presents itself to us as a splendidly
decorated box (fig. 141). At the same time the Swabian character of the
church is brought out. The dissolution of spatial boundaries sought by
the Bavarians had always met with a certain resistance in Swabia. The
point could be illustrated by a comparison of the way the wall-pillar
scheme was adapted by Bavarian architects like Johann Michael Fischer
with its adaptation by architects from the Austrian Vorarlberg. But it
is better supported by a comparison of village churches in the two
areas: the Swabian rococo interior tends to be more like a
flat-ceilinged room. That once again we have to do with Jeep-seated
spatial preferences is suggested by the fact that large late Gothic
churches in Bavaria tend to be hall churches, while in Swabia we find a
preference for the basilica, and that means for more clearly bounded
spaces. This preference for clear boundaries makes the transition to
neoclassicism seem much more natural in Swabia than in Bavaria. How
easy it is to move from a church like Birnau to neoclassicism is shown
by a comparison of Birnau with a village church that Peter Thumb's
student, Johann Georg Specht, built (1797-1806) in Scheidegg in the
Allgäu (fig. 142).[8] But if we find in Birnau the first signs of
a turn to neoclassicism, we
also have to agree with Hitchcock: this turn at the same time leads to
an architecture that may be considered a purer realization of an
essentially secular rococo than any of the great Bavarian rococo
churches that were being built at the same time. In comparison, they
seem still baroque. Decisive is the different treatment of walls and
ceiling, which at Birnau are experienced once more as the boundaries of
the space in which we stand. At the same time ornament gains a new
freedom and exuberance. There is a sense in which the South German
rococo church not only has its origin in the essentially secular French
rococo, but returns to this origin as the precarious synthesis it had
fashioned disintegrates. In Bavaria, too, the move toward classicism
announces itself first of
all in a reassertion of the primacy of architecture and the tectonic at
the expense of the interplay between fresco and architecture. It is not
surprising that the mason Johann Michael Fischer shows himself more
receptive than the decorator Dominikus Zimmermann to the dranging
spiritual climate. (We also should remember that Fischer worked out of
the capital and had links to the world of the court, while Zimmermann
had made his home in provincial Landsberg.) Consider the difference
between Die Wies and Rott am Inn (figs. 84, and 103). In Rott am Inn
forms have become more simple and sharply defined. The circle of the
fresco frame contrasts with the right angles of the pillars that define
the central octagon (fig. 143). The rococo has begun to freeze. In
keeping with Fischer's emphasis an the tectonic, stucco now plays a
much reduced part. No longer is there a mediating ornamental zone. Only
the four large cartouches, binding the fresco to the arches below, hint
at it. No attempt is made to carry the movement of the rising pillars
into the fresco representing the glory of the Benedictine order, one of
Matthäus Günther's best efforts. The cartouches
themselves, by the Wessobrunner Jakob Rauch, act rather like giant
clamps that force together what is really quite separate, in spite of
their pink putti-populated clouds that recall Aldersbach. But how
discrete, tame, and decorative they have become! As the floor plan
suggests, in spite of a new clarity that goes along
with the hardening of forms and Separation of functions, with Rott am
Inn Fischer offers us yet another brilliant solution to the problems
that had preoccupied the Bavarian rococo: an octagon, framed
symmetrically by square spaces, is enveloped by a mantle that obscures
spatial boundaries and provides for a wonderfully bright light, mostly
indirect. Although in Rott am Inn the rococo has begun to freeze, such
freezing does not mean in any way a qualitative decline; quite the
opposite. More than any other rococo church this one recalls the words
of Revelations: "like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as
crystal." Rott am Inn stated themes that were to dominate the autumn of
the
Bavarian rococo church, which still produced a number of beautifully
clear yet subtle village churches. The most prolific architect of the
last decades of the eighteenth century was Leonhard Matthias Giessl.
His churches at Starnberg (1763-70), Bettbrunn (1774), and
Schwindkirchen (1782) demonstrate the continuing strength of this late
rococo.[9] Reminiscences of Fischer's Rott am Inn and
Altomünster are particularly evident in the octagons Franz
Anton Kirchgrabner created in Eschenlohe (1765) and Egling (1767).[10]
The latter has a façade of almost cubist simplicity (fig.
144,). Still unburdened by theory, it has a distant affinity with the
new aesthetic that manifests itself in the visionary utopian designs of
a Ledoux. My favorite among these churches is Inning (1765-67), with
its wonderfully elegant tower and exquisitely furnished bright interior
that ranks with the Best of the Bavarian rococo (fig. 145).[11] The
carved supports of the organ gallery are unforgettable. I would like to
think that Brancusi admired their form during his walk from Munich to
Paris. A remarkably successful example of a very late rococo church is
Kirchgrabner's church in Lippertskirchen, like so many of Bavaria's
better rococo churches a centralized wall-pillar church, decorated only
in the late nineties.[12] The out-of-the-way location of this small
pilgrimage church at the foot of the Alps may account for the fact that
here we still encounter rocaille forms in that green that is so
characteristic of the last phase of this ornament; elsewhere, where
artists were more susceptible to the changing fashion, ornament had by
this time become neoclassical. Schwindkirchen, Maria Dorfen (1782-86),
and Albaching (1790) effectively represent this classicizing
rococo.[13] In all of these churches one Benses the approaching end.
The
Gesamtkunstwerk of the rococo church disintegrates as architecture
reclaims its dominant role. Delivered from its mediating function
ornament at first gains a new freedom and claims for itself the
self-sufficiency and autonomy of a work of art; but this is a quickly
passing phase. After 1760 ornament tends to become increasingly thin
and anemic. Often it is replaced with painted rocaille. Content to
serve the architecture, it has no longer the power to transform space
or to mediate between architecture and picture. Indeed, such mediation
is no longer desired. As architecture gains a new purity, painting,
too, becomes autonomous.
Given the central part played by the adaptation of Italian illusionism
in shaping the Bavarian rococo church, this shift back to clearly
framed paintings needs to be considered more carefully.
The Secularization of Light and Landscape
Ecclesia ecclesiam significat. As we have seen, the Bavarian rococo
church still can be understood as a symbolic representation of the
Church, where the burden of establishing it as such a symbol falls
first of all an the painter. Perhaps his most obvious strategy is to
represent the Church in heaven. The glory compositions of the baroque
thus return in the rococo church: circling the Deity, attended by
angels and led by the Virgin, we see patriarchs and prophets, apostles
and saints assembled an cloud banks whose golden hues hint at the
transcendent. First of all it is the choir fresco that offers such
sights. The main fresco is more likely to present historical events,
demanding a terrestrial setting.[14] More often than not it will also
include some representation of the heavenly sphere: the glory
compositions of the baroque return, much reduced, in the fresco's
center. The tension between earth and heaven, which finds one
expression in the tension between earthbound architecture and light,
airy frescoes, is iterated in the main fresco, where special care is
taken not only to show that these two spheres are linked, but to
exhibit the part played by the Church in effecting this linkage, and
not simply by the Church in the abstract, but very concretely: by a
particular order and its founder, or by a particular saint, where this
work of mediation needs to be completed by the Virgin and finally and
centrally by her Son. The rococo fresco thus represents the ladder of
Jacob's dream; it invites us to understand the church as a new Bethel.
But it is this new Bethel only because of its history. To represent
this meaning of the church this history has to be made visible. Here we
have one reason for the refusal of the Bavarians to adopt a rigorous
illusionism and for their turn to the terrestrial sphere. In the fifth chapter I tried to show that this turn is also supported
by the Bavarians' Marian piety, which links Christian devotion to an
appreciation of the divine presence in nature. A church like
Steinhausen signifies the Church by signifying the Virgin. The Virgin
in turn is signified by images suggested by the Song of Songs and its
evocation of a garden in May. This organic character of the rococo
church, with its intimation of the endlessly recurring miracle of the
return of light and life, of the defeat of darkness and death, touches
even the modern nonbeliever with its promise of an existence free from
the rancor against time. Yet the turn to the organic, which is also a
turn to landscape, is not without its problems. I am not thinking now
of the impossibilities of these landscapes above the observer to which
rationalist critics objected. What renders the rococo church
problematic, at least as long as one insists that a church should be a
sign of the Church, is rather that a concern with what is represented
should overshadow concern with the fresco's symbolic function. The turn
toward historical and landscape painting is one of the key aspects of
the waning of the Bavarian rococo church.
The prolific Christian Winck's frescoes in the parish church of Inning
may stand for countless others (fig. 145). The main fresco (1767) shows
john the Baptist preaching in a charming sylvan setting. The greens,
grays, browns, and Blues of Dutch landscape painting dominate. In
keeping with this is the handling of light and shade. Winck paints a
particular event. The Same is true of the choir fresco, showing the
Baptism of Christ. Unlike the emblematic frescoes of a Zimmermann,
these works preserve the unity of time and place. In them there is no
room for even a residual glory composition. Bauer speaks of the
painterly quality of the work of Winck and of his greater
contemporaries Maulbertsch and Zick, where by a painterly approach he
understands not simply one that emphasizes the play of light, shade,
and color more than outline, but one that insists an the autonomy of
the painting.[15] Although Winck's frescoes still take into account the
observer's point of view, we no longer see these paintings in any way
as illusionistic extensions of architectural space. They have become
self-sufficient aesthetic objects, which rule out that interplay
between fresco and architecture so important to the Bavarian rococo
church. A particularly striking example of this turn to landscape are the
frescoes that Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner, once the leading artist in
Augsburg, created for the chapel of Baitenhausen. Spiritually and
geographically close to Birnau, this chapel too Shows that the
disintegration of the ecclesiastic rococo yields phenomena that may be
considered more purely rococo than even Die Wies. Like the pilgrimage
church in Steinhausen, the chapel owes its existence to a miraculous
late Gothic image of the Virgin. To this image Marquard Rudolph von
Rodt, prince bishop of Constance, attributed his escape from a storm
that had surprised him and his companions journeying across Lake
Constance. In thanksgiving he ordered a new chapel to be built. Franz
Conrad von Rodt, his nephew and successor, completed the work with the
present late rococo decoration, dating from 1760.[16] As one would expect, the frescoes develop a Marian program.
Representations of the Nativity in the choir and the Pietà
in the nave frame the main fresco, which celebrates the Assumption and
Coronation of the Virgin. Of special interest are two frescoes in the
transept of the cruciform church. Here the painter was given the quite
traditional task of illustrating lines from the Song of Songs which
were referred to the Virgin, who is "fair as the moon" and "bright as
the sun." In the painting to the left we see the moon rising over Lake
Constance (fig. 146). Superimposed on it is the monogram of the Virgin.
In boats and on the skore men point to and gaze at the wondrous sight.
The city is obviously the nearby Meersburg, which still looks much as
it did then; in the distance we See Constance and the chain of the Alps
dominated by the Säntis. lt is of course possible to
understand Constance still as a sign of the Heavenly Jerusalem, as has
been suggested.[17] The boat that we See in the distance, making its
way toward the city, can then be understood as a symbol of man's
precarious journey toward heaven. But even if such an interpretation is
perhaps intended, the literalism of the representation makes it seem
farfetched. Similarly, the fresco an the right shows the sun, again
with the superimposed Marian monogram, over a landscape that quite
faithfully represents what we still See as we step out of the chapel
(fig. 147). Are we to understand this landscape as a symbol of the Virgin? Perhaps.
But instead of giving us a symbolic landscape such as Zimmermann
painted in Steinhausen, Baumgartner literally represents sights
familiar to all those entering the church. The painted sky is precisely
that, a painted representation of the sky that can in no way be read as
a representation of heaven. The symbolic function of the fresco has
been reduced to the superimposition of the Marian monogram on the
heavenly body. The garden that is indeed a familiar symbol of the
Virgin has become a quite terrestrial landscape. The light that
illuminates this landscape is very much a natural light. The secularization of light and landscape is also found in the main
fresco. It might at first seem that Baumgartner offers us here just
another variation an a familiar theme, which had found its most
spectacular realization in the high altar of Rohr. Behind an altar we
see the bishop of Constance praying to the Virgin: "Hear the prayer of
your people!" Very much like stage props, architectural elements
provide the setting. Above, the Virgin is about to be crowned. Putti
carry ribands with inscriptions taken from the Lauretanian litany,
commending Mary to those in need. Of particular interest are the
fragmentary landscapes that occupy the sides of the painting and
underscore the theatrical artificiality of the central representation
which, like the Marian monograms an moon and sun, seems superimposed an
the landscape in the background. The mother to the left with her
newborn Child refers us to the Nativity represented in the choir,
although this is a peasant woman, the house an ordinary farmhouse; the
mountain in the background is once more the Säntis. To the
right men and women implore the Virgin for help. Perhaps it is the ship
caught in the Storm that we see in the background that prompts these
prayers. Undoubtedly we are also to think of the bishop, who, having
been saved from just such a storm, vowed to build the Virgin a new
house. It has been suggested that we See this same bishop also in the
closest boat of the Meersburg fresco and once more in the companion
fresco to the right, kneeling at just the place where he was to build
the new chapel. If in Steinhausen we can speak of a Marian naturalism, such talk is
even more justified in Baitenhausen. Peaceful and fruitful nature
offers a symbol of the Virgin, as the four medallions surrounding the
choir fresco make clear. The rising sun, rain falling on the earth,
Noah's ark, and a fruit-bearing tree furnish symbols of the life and
peace that Mary grants. Both Steinhausen and Baitenhausen establish a
metaphoric link between nature and the Virgin. But in Steinhausen it is
nature that speaks of the Virgin. In Baitenhausen the Marian theme
offers the painter an occasion to represent nature. We are an the
threshold of the transformation of the Marian piety of the rococo into
a romantic naturalism. This should not surprise us. From the very
beginning an undercurrent of a pre-Christian naturalism had been
present in Marian devotion. (I remind the reader of the Marian poetry
of Jakob Balde.) As the contents of religion become ever more spiritual
and abstract, this undercurrent reasserts itself, until finally, when
these contents evaporate altogether, only this naturalism remains.
Consider once more the monogram of the Virgin superimposed on moon and
sun. How close this is to the sun discs with the Marian monogram so
popular especially at the beginning of the Bavarian baroque! And yet,
now the sun in the fresco has become a literal representation of the
sun, making it difficult for us to accept what we see as a symbol. To
be sure, the monogram imposed on the sun forces the representational
and the symbolic functions together. But the strength of the
representation lets us see this imposition as forced. Baumgartner's sun
and moon are still presented as metaphors, but the vehicle emancipates
itself from the tenor and becomes the real center of our attention The
secularization of Marian symbols leaves us with representation of the
maternal earth. Along with this process goes a secularization of light. The light of
sun and moon has become very much terrestrial illumination. How
different is the quality of the light in Zimmermann's main fresco in
Steinhausen! What lets us refer his Arcadian landscape and the blue
surrounding the glory composition at the fresco's center to heaven,
even if the heavenly sphere here encompasses nature, is not just the
idealization to which he subjects his landscape, but more important,
his use of light. Direct illumination incarnates what it strikes; it
gives substance and solidity. This is as true of painting as it is of
architecture. Compare how differently Zimmermann and Baumgartner render
the clouds swirling around the Virgin. Admittedly, Baumgartner is
simply the better painter. But Zimmermann is less interested in
painterly values than in the symbolic and architectural values of his
frescoes. In Steinhausen the divine name is not superimposed on the
sun, but is the light that illuminates the fresco; and unlike
terrestrial light, it does so not from without, casting clear shadows,
but from within. It would have been strange for Zimmermann to have
worried about what shadows are cast by his clouds. If the symbolic function of the rococo fresco is beginning to evaporate
in Baitenhausen, so is its architectural function. Much more than
Zimmermann's frescoes, we experience Baumgartner's frescoes as painted
on the vault. The integrity of the vault is no longer threatened by the
fresco; it becomes difficult to speak of an interplay between
architecture and fresco. One would expect this development to announce
itself in a changed attitude to ornament and frame. And indeed, in
Baitenhausen we no longer find ornament mediating between architecture
and fresco. But this is not to say that we have once again firmly
framed autonomous paintings. Quite the reverse – the smaller
landscape frescoes have no closed frames at all. In each case a
fragmentary frame is provided by a stretched-out earth rocaille merging
with the painted landscape and providing something like a base; the
separate functions of picture and frame have been deliberately blurred.
The inscribed ribands above provide additional closure. One is reminded
of painted china of the period. The close connection of the fresco to
contemporary Augsburg ornamental engravings, for which Baumgartner was
well known (fig. 135), is obvious enough. Like these engravings,
Baumgartner's frescoes oscillate between being picture and ornament. A
new appreciation of the bare wall corresponds to this more ornamental
approach to the fresco. Once more one senses the affinity between
rococo and neoclassicism. Just as Hitchcock discusses Birnau as an almost perfect example of
rococo art, it is possible to consider Baumgartner's frescoes in
Baitenhausen as such examples. It would be easy to come up with a
definition of rococo that would justify such a judgement. But once
again we have to remind ourselves that the Bavarian rococo church, at
any rate, aims at something quite different. It tries to fashion
frescoes and architecture into genuine partners, with ornament assigned
the task of mediating between the two. In Baitenhausen the
ornamentalization of the picture does not effect such mediation. By
reducing the picture to a mere ornament, it reasserts the integrity of
the ornament bearer. The priority of the architecture is no longer
challenged. When ornament is experienced as ornament, as something
added to the architecture, the call for a purer architecture is not far
away. A somewhat different analysis is demanded by Baitenhausen's main
fresco. Here a simple molding forms an effective frame, despite its
rather complicated shape. There are echoes of the past: the inscribed
riband at the top weaves in and out of the picture in a way that may
recall Aldersbach. The band of the beggar on the left overlapping the
fresco frame had become a standard device, here used rather timidly, to
break its closure. Some Integration between architecture and fresco is
achieved by the way the curves of the frame follow that of the choir
arch. But in spite of such reminiscences, fresco and architecture go
their own ways. The fresco is beginning to assume the status of an
independent aesthetic object. These tendencies were in the air. Only one year later Winckelmann's
friend Anton Raphael Mengs painted his insipid, yet epoch-making,
Parnassus on the ceiling of the Villa Albani. Here we find a rigorous
break with illusionism; the autonomy of the painting is affirmed
without compromise. It is hardly surprising that the painters of the
eccIesiastic rococo took their time with the new fashion. Even the
classicizing Januarius Zick, who had studied in Paris and Rome and who
in Wiblingen (1778-83) and Rot an der Rot (1784) still created works of
real strength, made only a half-hearted adjustment to the new style he
had come to admire. In Bavaria the transition from rococo to
neoclassicism is illustrated by the frescoes in Maria Dorfen (1786).
They are the work of Johann Joseph Huber, who in 1784 had become
director of the academy in Augsburg. The frescoes
– now firmly framed, one to each clearly articulated by
represent scenes from the life of the Virgin. In spite of their
perspective, still weakly illusionistic, these frescoes lack the
strength to open the vault of the church to a higher dimension. Nor is
this intended. Each fresco has become an autonomous painting. No longer
do we meet with that easy disregard of the unity of time and place in
which the Bavarian rococo had delighted and to which rationalist
critics objected with such vehemence. Huber's frescoes tell their story
simply and directly. Nothing is left of the emblematic or hieroglyphic
character of the rococo fresco. No longer does the church symbolically
represent the church. We have come to the end of a tradition almost as
old as Christian architecture itself.
Autonomous Ornament
With the disintegration of the rococo Gesamtkunstwerk, its elements
regain their independence: architecture reasserts the priority of
tectonic over pictorial values; the fresco gains pictorial autonomy as
it sheds first its symbolic, then its decorative function. As
architecture and painting go their separate ways that mediation between
the two which rocaille had served so well is no longer wanted. In
response to this changed situation rocaille evolves in two quite
different ways: ornament acknowledges once more the hegemony of
architecture, while an the other hand, it, too, claims autonomy. The
first development poses few problems. From the very beginning
rocaille had been used to soften or obscure too sudden transitions. We
tend to find it in the coves joining wall and ceiling, or where two
moldings or different surfaces meet. Rocaille continues to be used in
such places until the very end of the eighteenth century, although
increasingly it loses much of its former life and plasticity.
Outstanding examples of this late rococo are the exquisitely delicate
decorations Franz Xaver Feichtmayr created for Elector Max III Joseph
in the Residenz in Munich in the early sixties. Feichtmayr's ornament
is much more sparse than Cuvilliés's had been. Compared to
the doughy rocailles Johann Baptist Zimmermann had created a few years
earlier in the Great Hall of Nymphenburg, it seems aristocratic, very
elegant, and just a bit tired. This ornament still has an organic look,
although the decoration of a corner of what was once a conference room
hints more at decay and disintegration than at growth (fig. 148). The
molding invites comparison with a broken branch, the rocaille itself
with splintered wood. The fragile autumnal quality of this ornament
recalls Augsburg engravings of the same period.
It is unnecessary to trace here the history of this last phase of
rocaille. How long this ornament retained its popularity, particularly
in areas less in touch with and thus less subject to shifts in fashion,
is shown by the ornamentation of Lippertskirchen (fig. 149). The
Wessobrunner Franz Doll created these delicate, somewhat anemic
rocailles in 1796. By this time an artist associated with the court
would have long shifted to a classicizing vocabulary. The reed-like
character of Doll's elongated rocailles is emphasized by their green
color. Little is left of the breathtaking vigor with which a Johann
Michael Feichtmayr had created his rocailles in the fifties. In no way
does ornament now challenge the priority of the architecture; in its
reticent way it only helps to articulate the structure of the space.
Far more interesting is another development: as rocaille matures in the
fifties it increasingly claims our interest as a self-sufficient
aesthetic presence. Artists like Johann Michael Feichtmayr,
Üblhör, and Landes created in these years ornament on
the threshold of abstract art. The beauty of this ornament has little
to do with the context in which it appears. To be sure, we may find
these free forms in churches, but what does their uninhibited
spontaneity have to do with this? The aesthetic has always been an
close but uneasy terms with the sacred. At the very height of the
Bavarian rococo it threatens to divorce itself from it. The elevation
of rocaille from mere ornament to a self-sufficient
aesthetic object is intimately connected to that disintegration of the
rococo synthesis that I outlined in the preceding pages. As genuine
mediation of architecture and painting is no longer desired, ornament
is granted a new independence. Rauch's cartouches in Rott am Inn thus
possess more integrity than Feichtmayr's in Zwiefalten; which is not to
make a qualitative judgment. More than Feichtmayr's stuccoes, Rauch's
seem applied. To a much greater degree they make us aware of the
difference between supporting architecture and applied ornament, a
difference that is illustrated so charmingly in Nilson's Neues
Caffehaus (fig. 132). In the eighteenth century Europe was not yet
ready to accept a totally
abstract art. Only as long as rocaille presented itself as just
ornament and as such dependent on the ornament bearer was it allowed to
remain abstract. Sculpture and painting were thought to be
representational in their very essence; which leads one to expect that
as ornament begins to shed its dependence it, too, will turn from
abstraction to representation. Such aspirations are evident in the work
of Meissonier or Lajoue, whose rocailles acquire the look of objects in
the world. The insistence that art represent only what is probable,
i.e. things that nature might have produced, subjects ornament to that
naturalization so characteristic of the work of engravers like Crusius
or Nilson (figs. 136 and 137). The decorations Cuvilliés created
in the Amalienburg carried
this pictorialized ornament into architecture. In the Bavarian rococo
church, because rocaille had to remain a framing and mediating
ornament, it could develop into a protean abstract substance. Only as
the precarious synthesis achieved by the rococo church falls apart,
only as architecture and painting strive for a new purity, does its
ornament, too, gain independence. And as ornament moves toward autonomy
in the fifties and sixties we also meet with a turn from abstraction to
representation that parallels what was taking place in ornamental
engravings. Somewhat as
Jackson Pollock toward the end of his life let abstraction generate
representational elements, so here the play of abstract forms condenses
into images. A similar desire to elevate ornament into a
representational art led Mathias Obermayer, an unusually imaginative
stuccoer from Straubing, to transform the framing of the side altars at
Windberg into delightful representations of the attributes of their
saints. The altar of St. Catherine, the patron of philosophers, for
example, is framed with bookshelves, inkwells, and drawers (fig. 151).
I will give just two examples. Especially in smaller churches it had
become customary to give the wooden framing architecture of altars the
look of marble by painting it with abstract patterns suggesting the
expensive stone. In a number of churches around Erding the painters who
created this marbling-perhaps bored with their routine work, perhaps
aspiring to the glory of "real" painters, at any rate unwilling to
produce merely ornamental patterns-let little scenes, representations
of landscapes, architectures, ships, even Christ an the Cross, emerge
out of swirling abstractions (fig. 150).[18][19] There are, however,
also cases where decoration becomes almost
autonomous and yet remains abstract. A clock, a stove, a vase; an altar
or a pulpit; something had to be ornamented. Characteristic of the
fifties and sixties is a tendency not just to ornament such objects,
but to turn them into ornaments. As a result they tend to look rather
like free sculptures. A comparatively early example is the high altar
that Dominikus
Zimmermann created for his Johanneskirche in Landsberg am Lech (1752).
Gone is the column architecture that since the beginning of the baroque
had been standard in altar compositions, offering first a frame, later
both frame and stageset; it has been replaced with free rocaille forms.
The fantastic rocaille architectures of ornamental engravings have
become three-dimensional reality. The color scheme suggests the
precious artificiality of china. (The china factory at Nymphenburg had
just been founded; Franz Anton Bustelli was about to create figurines
that capture the essence of the aesthetic culture of the rococo.) In
Landsberg aesthetic interest triumphs over the theatre of the baroque.
Although extreme, this is hardly a unique example. Much better known is
the fantastic altar that Johann Michael Feichtmayr and Johann Georg
Üblhör executed after a design by Küchel in
the Franconian Vierzehnheiligen (1764). In Bavaria proper the little
altar of the chapel in Kempfenhausen near Starnberg deserves to be
mentioned. Its late date (1777) betrays itself in the way rocaille is
yielding here to reedlike vines and flower garlands. More engagingly
original are the altars that Johann Anton Bader created in
Hörgersdorf, Eschlbach, and Rappoltskirchen, with their
asymmetries and delightful surprises (fig. 152).[20] To this until
recently unknown craftsman, working out of the provincial Dorfen, we
owe one of the high points of the Bavarian rococo, the pulpit of
Oppolding, which foams up in a rocaille of unusual strength and grace
(fig. 124). A spontaneity unburdened by theory has here created an
almost abstract work of art that has something of the inevitability
that we associate with nature. The pulpit of the little church in
Oppolding is both a culminating
achievement of the rococo and a sure sign of the disintegration of that
synthesis which had been the goal of the Bavarian rococo church. In
this respect it belongs with Peter Thumb's Birnau or with Baumgartner's
frescoes in Baitenhausen. In all these works the aesthetic side of the
rococo church threatens to overwhelm its sacred character. Sacred art
approaches here the threshold of art for art's sake. Has it crossed the
threshold? We may want to insist that what prevents
it from doing so is the continuing insistence that beauty not be
created for beauty's sake. No matter how free it is permitted to
become, ornament here still serves the traditional task of building a
church hallowed, not simply by its use, but more essentially as a sign
of the Church. The beauty of rocaille is still offered in praise, ad
maiorem Dei gloriam, and still hints at a life unburdened by time.
And yet the beauty of the pulpit-like all beauty is too ambiguous to
let us give this answer with much conviction. Instead of presenting
itself to us as a symbol of a life unburdened by time, its beautiful,
self-sufficient presence may fascinate us so completely that for a time
the burden of time seems to have been lifted.
CONCLUSION: THE DEATH OF ORNAMENT
The Ethical Function of Ornament
What dies with rocaille is not just another ornament, but ornament
itself. As ornament emancipates itself from its merely ornamental
function and gains aesthetic autonomy it becomes a kind of abstract
art; but at the same time it loses its justification. In works like the
pulpit of Oppolding ornament perishes of its
own beauty.
Closely tied to an appreciation of the autonomous beauty of rocaille is
the discovery of the beauty of the naked wall. A self-sufficient
ornament can only stand in an accidental relationship to the ornament
bearer. Like the ornamental skin of Nilson's Neues Caffehaus, it can be
stripped off without serious loss to the supporting structure. How
Small the step is that separates the rococo church from a purer
architecture that spurns the assistance of fresco or stucco is shown by
Balthasar Neumann's Hl. Kreuz in the Franconian Etwashausen (1741-45).
In accord with the wishes of the prince bishop of Würzburg,
Friedrich
Carl von Schönborn, Neumann left the white interior completely
free of
ornament (fig. 153).[1] Although still unmistakably rococo,
architecture here has gained an almost classicistic purity. Neumann's
church has its only somewhat less successful Bavarian parallel in the
church that Ignaz Anton Gunetzrhainer built for the Carmelites of
Reisach an the Inn (1737-39).[2] Here it was the ascetic Carmelite
ethos, which shuns extroversion and ostentation, that led to the
rejection of fresco and stucco. Both churches show how close the South
German rococo could come to neoclassicism, how Small the step is from
superabundant ornament to a pure and naked architecture. But even if
the conceptual point is granted – if one admits
not only that ornament cannot become a self-sufficient work of art and
continue to function as ornament, but also that, especially in the
fifties and sixties, rocaille approaches this point of autonomy, that
ornament here negates itself –
does this justify the claim that what dies with rocaille is ornament
itself and that it is the aesthetic approach that is responsible for
this death? Indeed, how can one claim that ornament dies in the
eighteenth century? Do the facts not refute the assertion? In spite of
the arguments of a Lodoli, in spite of the idea of a pure architecture
projected by the designs of Boullée and Ledoux,
nineteenth-century architecture once more relied heavily an ornament.
And while it is true that the attack on ornament was renewed with
greater vigor by some of the leading modern architects, we should not
forget that most domestic architecture disregarded that attack and that
there had always been a strong countercurrent, which in recent years
has claimed increasing attention. Robert Venturi's call for a return to
ornament has symptomatic significance. There is a ready reply which can
itself be stated as a question: Has
the nineteenth century in fact produced a living ornament?[3] Labels
like "neoclassicism," "neogothic," "neorenaissance," "neobaroque" make
one wonder. To be sure, buildings continued to be decorated, but with
borrowed forms. Most nineteenth-century ornament suggests the museum;
this makes it difficult to speak here of living ornament. And has the
twentieth century succeeded where the nineteenth failed? Even art
nouveau does not provide a good counterexample. We do indeed have here
decoration born of an attempt to create a new and distinctly modern
ornament. But if this ornament owes less to the past than most of its
nineteenth-century precursors, its aesthetic character, so removed from
the realities of the day, made it artificial and arbitrary. It is
difficult to dismiss Adolf Loos's remark: "The ornament that is
manufactured today has no connexion with us, has absolutely no human
connexion, no connexion with the world order. It is not capable of
developing. What happened to Otto Eckmann's ornament, or van de
Velde's? . . . Modern ornament has no parents and no progeny, no past
and no future."[4] With the rise of the aesthetic attitude ornament
degenerates into mere
decoration, and, as Hermann Broch observes: In all decoration, even in
the most harmless, slumbers cynicism
– itself the product of rationalist thinking
– slumbers skepticism, which knows, or at least suspects,
that what is being played is only a game of coverup. Where decoration
is not naive, but emerges from rationalism, it is not free creation,
but pretense, sometimes successful, still pretense. And since it is
also skeptical it has no support of its own, but needs examples.
Rationalism belongs to this world and looks for the recipes offered by
this world.[5] To speak of ornament degenerating into mere decoration
is to assume
that we can draw a distinction between the two. Not that this
distinction is easily justified by an appeal to ordinary language. We
tend to use "ornament" in a way that makes it synonymous with
"decoration" and opposes it to what is essential. Somewhat like a fancy
dress, ornament is what we can really do without. But, as the Oxford
English Dictionary reminds us, ornament can also be used in a different
sense. When we speak of the ornaments of a church, we do not mean just
its decoration, but "the accessories or furnishings of the Church and
its worship." Such ornament would include chalice and vestments, organ
and altars, and can include decoration, but placing it in a larger
context. Decoration is ornament in this sense only if it exists not for
its own sake, but stands in the Service of the Church and its worship.
Accordingly I would like to understand ornament as decoration that has
a ceremonial and festal function. As St. Thomas observes, ornament
helps to mark out special places and special times. Now man's tendency
is to reverence less those things which are common,
and indistinct from other things; whereas he admires and reveres those
things which are distinct from others in some point of excellence.
Hence, too, it is customary among men for kings and princes, who ought
to be reverenced by their subjects, to be clothed in more precious
garments, and to possess vaster and more beautiful abodes. And for this
reason it behoved special times, a special abode, special vessels, and
special ministers to be appointed for the divine worship, so that
thereby the soul of man might be brought to greater reverence.[6] A
merely aesthetic approach cannot do justice to this function of
ornament, which presupposes a recognition of what deserves to be
ornamented, a sense of what is more and what is less significant.
Ornament presupposes and helps to establish a rank order. Thus, the
central part of a façade requires special ornament, as does
the choir.[7] Ornament is appropriate only if the different parts of
some larger whole are not of equal importance; if there are patterns of
Subordination, if one part governs the others. Like the human body, a
baroque or rococo church may thus be said to have a head and a heart.
Following Vitruvius, architects had long considered the proportions of
the perfect human Body-for the Christian the Body of Christ-as a
model.[8] Like the Body, a building should be a hierarchically ordered
organic whole. Ornament helped to articulate that hierarchy. Toward the
end of the eighteenth century this anthropomorphic approach
to architecture "was abandoned by all progressive minds" and beauty was
sought not in the Subordination but the coordination of parts, the
latter expressing itself in "simple repetition" or "dramatic
antithesis."[9] But what function does this leave for ornament? The
death of ornament and the demise of the traditional theory of
proportions belong together. Both are granted a posthumous existence.
Our own domestic architecture attests to this. Rococo ornament still
assumes that a successful building is a
hierarchical order that assigns to each part its proper place, and it
assumes that society is such an order. Ornament contributes to the
articulation of that order. A palace should not look like a farmhouse;
the House of God should not look like a house of men. In this sense
ornament can be said to possess an ethical, not merely an aesthetic
significance; ethical in the Sense of helping to establish the ethos of
a society, which assigns to persons and things their proper places. The
transformation of ornament into mere decoration denies this ethical
function. Inseparable from the ethical function of ornament is its
essentially
public character. If it is to articulate the ethos of a society,
ornament may not be the property of an individual or a particular
group. Like ordinary language, it must be shared by the society in its
entirety. If ornament, in this sense at least, has indeed died, should
we mourn
this death? What I have said here should not be construed as a plea for
ornament. If ornament loses its point to the extent to which society
and life are no longer organized hierarchically, should we not accept
its death as a necessary part of mankind's coming of age? Is
hierarchical organization not an affront to humanity? We begin to
understand the connection between the social revolution that overthrew
the old order in the eighteenth century and the death of ornament.
The Case Against Ornament
No one has stated the case against ornament with more passion than the
Viennese architect Adolf Loos in his notorious and revealing manifesto
"Ornament and Crime."[10] The incompatibility between modern
architecture and ornament here finds strident voice. The title itself
is a provocation. What does ornament have to do with
crime? The association of the two must have seemed especially
provocative in the Vienna of 1908, which still clung to its baroque
heritage. Architecture at that time was caught between the
école polytechnique and the école des beaux arts,
between functional considerations and a concern for beauty that found
its models in the past. Ruskin's insistence that we carefully
distinguish between architecture and building, that the architect is an
artist only when he concerns himself with what is useless and
unnecessary but precisely because of this beautiful, points in the Same
direction, as do the widely imitated neobaroque and neorenaissance
structures of Gottfried Semper: functional skeletons dressed up in
borrowed garments. But why associate ornament with crime? It may be
possible to criticize
nineteenth-century architecture's uneasy compromises between form and
function on aesthetic grounds, and it is easy to sympathize with
Gropius's demand that buildings once more be of a piece, complete. But
does this justify the condemnation of all ornament? To call something a
crime is to suggest that it constitutes a serious offense against the
public welfare. Does ornament constitute such an offense? Loos insists
that it does. Those enlightened officials who a hundred years earlier
wanted to tear down masterpieces of rococo architecture in the name of
reason expected understanding and thanks from the local peasants, for
was it not their well-being that the officials had in mind? And did
they not – does Loos not have reason an their side? Is
ornament not frightfully wasteful of time and money that would be
better spent an food, medicine, and education? With malnutrition and
illiteracy as widespread as they were in eighteenth-century Bavaria,
how can ornament be defended? Indeed, what is ornament good for? Reason
demands utility, and Utility, as Ruskin knew, argues against ornament.
Do gingerbread men or marzipan pigs provide more nourishment than plain
bread? We can let children enjoy such things, but adults? Loos links
architectural ornament to cookery exhibitions that value the ornate
appearance of food over its nutritional value. Both, if Loos is right,
have become anachronisms. They really have no place in the modern world
and should have disappeared long ago. Loos took it to be his great
discovery, a discovery he was eager to
pass an to the world, that "the evolution of culture is synonymous with
the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects." This discovery, he
felt, should bring joy to the world. When it met with a hostile
reaction he was unhappily surprised. The message seemed so obvious. How
could reasonable persons disagree? How could they cling to what Loos
considered the unhappy inheritance of the eighteenth century, which
weighed especially an Austria and helped to account for her comparative
backwardness? If two people live side by side with the saure needs, the
saure demands
an life and the same income but belong to different cultures,
economically speaking the following process can be observed: the
twentieth century man will get richer and richer, the eighteenth
century man poorer and poorer. I am assuming that both live according
to their inclinations. The twentieth century man can satisfy his needs
with a far lower capital outlay and hence he can save money.[11] The
point is difficult to deny. In the late eighteenth century similar
arguments had been advanced, contrasting the increasing backwardness of
Bavaria with a far more progressive Prussia. Loos found his shining
examples of truly modern societies in England and even more in the
United States. Even their culinary culture (or should we say their lack
of one?) provided a valuable model. If we are to believe Loos, a person
who is truly of the twentieth century should prefer his vegetables
boiled in water, perhaps with a little butter; should prefer a slab of
roast beef to bœuf bourguignon. Haute cuisine and ornament
both are crimes that inflict "serious injury an people's health, an the
national budget and hence an cultural evolution."[12] Cultural
evolution, as Loos understands it, is inseparable from
economic success. Here we have the key to his attack an ornament. Given
economic considerations ornament is simply wasteful. How could the
Viennese ever catch up with the English as long as they remained caught
up in their baroque love of ornament? Architecture should serve life.
In this it resembles a machine. The builder should be governed by the
same concerns as the engineer. But the engineer has no use for
ornament. A functionalist approach to architecture demands the death of
ornament. Loos's emphasis on the economic argument against ornament
does not
fully explain his resistance to it, however. His writing communicates a
more personal distaste. Loos finds ornament obscene. His comparison of
ornament to graffiti smeared an lavatory walls is telling, as is the
suggestion that the willingness to accept the naked wall provides us
with a measure of cultural evolution. To find ornament obscene suggests
a connection between it and the erotic sphere, and at least in the case
of rocaille we can indeed trace such an affinity. Rocaille never loses
all connection with the realm of Venus. Krubsacius was not altogether
wrong when he sensed something obscene about it. I cannot consider here
the more general thesis of the erotic meaning of
all ornament, but only suggest that Loos's claim that ornament should
be considered the erotic "baby talk of painting" deserves to be taken
seriously. The child's libidinous relation to itself and to its
environment finds an expression in the way in which every empty wall
invites spontaneous decoration. But while the child's sexuality remains
polymorphous and unfocused, cultural progress demands focusing, demands
repression. Loos can accept ornament when it is produced by children or
persons who have not yet caught up with modern civilization, but
otherwise it is said to betray either the criminal or the degenerate
aristocrat. The vehemence of Loos's response to ornament suggests,
however, that there is something that still has a hold on him. We
consider obscene only what moves us, but in a way we think we should
not be moved. The demands placed an us by our own nature conflict with
our self-image and accepted morality. Precisely for this reason they
need to be repressed. Even though Loos claims that modernity leaves no
room for ornament, he
is not insensitive to the positive significance that ornament continues
to have for many people and, as a self-proclaimed aristocrat, he does
not want to impose his values an those not yet ready for them. It would
be cruel to deprive them of something that they need. He claims to
understand the Kaffir who weaves ornaments into his fabric according to
a
particular rhythm that only comes to view when it is unravelled, the
Persian who weaves his carpet, the Slovak peasant woman who embroiders
her lace, the old lady who creates wonderful things with glass beads
and silk. The aristocrat lets them be; he knows that the hours in which
they work are their holy hours. The passage is telling. The creation of
ornament is here said to give
work something of the quality of worship. It attunes its creator to a
larger order. Such attunement does not require justification. The
activity justifies itself. Traditionally aesthetic experience is
discussed as experience that does
not serve some other end, but justifies itself. There is, however, an
important difference. Aesthetic experience is opposed to work. Loos's
Kaffir or Persian, the Slovak peasant woman or the old lady, knowing no
such opposition, can fashion their ornaments without giving it much
thought. Genuine ornament occurs only where the aesthetic sphere has
not yet been separated off from ordinary life-which is also to say
where economic considerations have not yet gained that importance which
they have for us-and in such cases the objection that the work is
inefficient misses the point. The people who built Steinhausen or Die
Wies could not have been expected to understand the charge that all
this work was just a waste of time and money better spent an education.
But is this lack of understanding really a failure? Is it so clear that
the Slovak peasant woman stands an a lower rung of the cultural ladder
than the aristocrat Adolf Loos? What does he have to offer her? What
did the enlightened reformers have to offer the Bavarian peasants who
clung so tenaciously to their ornamented churches? To be sure, we can
cite a great deal, above all better health and better education. And
yet today, seventy years after Loos's attack an ornament, when
modernity is coming under increasing critical scrutiny, it is difficult
not to be disheartened by modern man's inability to generate once more
a living ornament, for this inability betrays the fragmentation of our
life. And with the whole we have lost the holy. For how many of us are
the hours of work holy hours? The uneasiness that raises such questions
is not laid to rest by the assurance that the national economy would be
greatly strengthened by the willingness to abandon all ornament. Loos
recognized the force of such concerns. He knew very well that life
would be empty without activities that are more than means to some end,
activities that we engage in for their own Bake. Here questions of
efficiency are out of place. Loos also knew that our enjoyment of
ornament is intimately tied to its superfluity, which challenges a
thinking that approaches things only as means to some end. Ornament
helps to lift the burdensome character of human existence. Thus the
visual culture of the Bavarian rococo helped to transfigure lives
shadowed by war, hunger, and disease. But do we not today have more
effective ways of dealing with these old enemies? And, Loos would add,
we have art. After the toils and troubles of the day we can go to
Beethoven or to
Tristan. . . But anyone who goes to the Ninth Symphony
and then sits down and designs a wallpaper pattern is either a
confidence
trickster or a degenerate. Absence of ornament has brought the other
arts to
unsuspected heights. Beethoven's symphonies would never have been
written by a
man who had to walk about in silk, satin, and lace. Anyone who goes
around in a
velvet coat today is not an artist but a buffoon or a house painter. We
have
grown finer, more subtle. The nomadic herdsmen had to distinguish
themselves by
various colors – modern man uses his clothes as a mask. So
immensely strong is his individuality that it can no longer be
expressed in articles of clothing. Freedom from ornament is a sign of
spiritual strength."[13] The passage invites challenge; it also demands
to be taken seriously.
Significant is the claim that for us an art that has separated itself
from ordinary life has taken the place of ornament. Art for art's sake
is the ornament of modern life. If Loos is right our highest
experiences are of an aesthetic nature. Such experiences alone justify
themselves and, where God is dead, there is no other justification. We
work to have more time for art. Accepted is that disintegration of life
which finds expression in phrases like "art for art's sake," "business
is business," "war is war." Art for art's sake is a splinter of the
traditional value system that has become autonomous.[14] Important,
too, is Loos's suggestion that the replacement of ornament
with art for art's sake is inseparable from the introversion that
characterizes modern man. In spite of ready counterexamples, there is
truth to the claim that we use clothing or houses less to represent
ourselves and our place to others than to hide behind their protection.
And where a dress or an extravagant house does become a personal
expression, it expresses the individual in his individuality, not his
place in society. Along with the disintegration of life into autonomous
spheres goes the disintegration of the community into atomic
individuals. Ornament both assumes and serves to strengthen a way of
life that
integrates rather than separates spirit and Body, work and leisure,
individual and society. It is easy to understand why it is so
difficult, especially for a Viennese or a Bavarian, not to look back
with nostalgia to the baroque and rococo. Such nostalgia finds its
architectural expression in the borrowed ornaments of historicist
architecture.
Aesthetic Purity
If we are to believe Loos, we no longer need ornament, because we have
something better. Instead of ornament we have our art; and art could
rise to its present height only because ornament had died. A
provocative claim: the rise of modern art is linked to the death of
ornament. I have argued for a related thesis: the aesthetic attitude
that carries rocaille beyond its merely ornamental function toward
artistic autonomy also lets it perish. But to show the essential
incompatibility of that attitude with all ornament it is necessary to
consider more carefully what it involves. As pointed out in the
preface, we owe the term aesthetics to Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten. Like Gottsched a follower of Leibniz and Wolff,
Baumgarten is another characteristic representative of the German
Enlightenment. Modern aesthetics originated in the same circle that
generated Reiffstein's and Krubsacius's attacks on rocaille. Our
aesthetic understanding of art is part of the legacy left to us by the
Enlightenment. One of Baumgarten's similes helps to characterize this
understanding: a
successful poem is said to be like the world, more precisely like the
world described by Leibniz. In that world nothing is superfluous, nor
is anything missing; it is a perfectly ordered whole having its
sufficient reason in the divine artist. The same ought to be true of
the work of art: its integrity should be such that to add or subtract
anything would be to weaken or destroy the aesthetic whole. Quite
traditional in its suggestion that the artist is a second God,
Baumgartens simile seems innocent enough. After all, ever since
Aristotle unity has been demanded of works of art. To be sure, to
demand unity is not to deny complexity, tension, and incongruity, but
in the end order should triumph. In a successful work of art what may
at first appear to be discordant elements are in the end recognized as
absolutely necessary, so that nothing is superfluous, while it is
impossible to add anything without weakening or destroying the
aesthetic whole. It is evident that such an aesthetic leaves little
room for ornament. Certainly works of art do not tolerate additional
ornament. Such an addition cannot be reconciled with the required
unity. Nor can ornament become a work of art in its own right without
casting off its subservience to the ornament bearer. Beauty, which
Baumgarten understands in typical eighteenth-century fashion as
sensible perfection, demands that art cast out ornament and that
ornament become absolute. As we have seen, much rocaille is an the
threshold of such emancipation. It is precisely the aesthetic character
of rocaille that makes it ornament that threatens the destruction of
ornament. To the unity of the work of art corresponds the
self-sufficiency of the
aesthetic experience. We do not need art to survive. Art so understood
does not so much serve life as it compensates for life's deficiencies.
From this aesthetic view it follows that art cannot be the servant of
religion or of the state and succeed as art. Emphasis an the
self-sufficiency of the aesthetic experience leads to an assertion of
the aesthetic sphere as an autonomous realm. Art is for art's sake. If
beauty demands aesthetic purity and if aesthetic purity denies a
place to ornament, it is also difficult to see how architecture can
ever be beautiful in this sense. A building has to be more than an
object for aesthetic contemplation; the architect has to take into
account the uses to which his work will be put, while those using it
cannot keep their distance from it. To the extent that we measure
buildings by the aesthetic conception of what constitutes a complete
work of art, architecture has to be considered deficient and impure, a
not quite respectable art. It is hardly an accident that with the rise
of the aesthetic approach not only ornament, but architecture, too,
enters a period of uncertainty and crisis. Both are essentially
dependent art forms; the ideal of aesthetic self-sufficiency has to
threaten their essence. just as in the eighteenth century attempts are
made to create ornament that approaches the self-sufficiency of a work
of art, so there are attempts to elevate architecture to the status of
a pure art. The designs of Ledoux offer the most obvious examples. The
architect here has become an abstract artist who casts his forms, his
cubes, pyramids, and spheres, into the void. Not surprisingly, Ledoux's
most daring designs, like so many ornamental designs, remained an
paper. The pursuit of purity leads the architect to utopian fantasies
unlikely ever to be realized. Reality demands compromises; aesthetic
vision has to be tempered by extra-aesthetic considerations. As long as
the theory of architecture remains subject to the aesthetic approach,
it is in no position to do justice to the essence of architecture. This
would be of little importance if it were only a matter of a few
theoreticians speculating about the essence of architecture. But such
speculation is only an aspect of a more deeply rooted change in
sensibility that in the narre of reason divorced pragmatic and
aesthetic considerations and placed the architect uneasily between the
two. On the one hand the uses of architecture were emphasized; on the
other architecture was supposed to be beautiful. And who could quarrel
with the demand that architecture be both practical and beautiful?
Unfortunately, the hopes of functionalists notwithstanding, there not
only is no assurance that an economical and efficient solution to a
practical problem will also be aesthetically pleasing, but given the
aesthetics of purity, there is no chance that the marriage of engineer
and architect will be free of tension and compromise. What passes for
such marriage is usually architecture that has the Look of
functionality rather than being truly functional. Given the aesthetic
approach, beauty has to appear as something added an to what is
dictated by necessity, decoration that is given a special value
precisely by its superfluity. Seen in this context, Nilson's Neues
Caffehaus, with its easily peeled-off skin of rocaille, points forward
to iron skeletons that in the nineteenth century wore neo-renaissance
or neo-baroque skins. The tensions that result from this mingling of
pragmatic and aesthetic considerations are readily experienced and rule
out aesthetic completeness. Aestheticians have thus tended to
understand architecture as an impure art of compromise.[15] Indeed,
subjected to the aesthetic approach architecture has to appear
fundamentally incomplete. The demands of the aesthetic and of life are
too heterogeneous to permit a synthesis. Given the essential
incompatibility between the aesthetic approach and
the essence of both architecture and ornament, it may seem curious that
just these two provide the first anticipations of the revolution that
was to culminate in the abstract art of the twentieth century. That the
revolution of modern art can be traced back to the architects of the
French Revolution has been shown by Emil Kaufmann and, following him,
by Hans Sedlmayr.[16] That this architectural revolution is anticipated
by the evolution of rocaille has been shown by Hermann Bauer and,
following him, by this study. In the eighteenth century ornament
approaches the status of a completely free art. Only in the twentieth
century were painting and sculpture to aspire to a similar freedom. The
traditional understanding of both painting and sculpture as arts of
representation helps to explain this time lag. The aesthetic approach
tends toward abstract art. Already in Kant's
Critique of Judgment, which offers the most searching philosophical
analysis of the aesthetic, the requirements of a completely free beauty
and of representation are shown to be incompatible. To appreciate a
free beauty we may have no concept of what sort of thing the beautiful
object is supposed to be. The beautiful pleases by its form alone. The
self-sufficiency demanded of the aesthetic experience implies the
demand that there be nothing about the aesthetic object that refers the
observer beyond itself; it may not represent or signify anything else,
or even have a meaning. That such an approach leaves little room for an
understanding of the church as an artwork signifying the Church is
evident. How much this view remains in force today is suggested by the
way in
which Frank Stella describes his artistic goals: I always get into
arguments with people who want to retain the old
values in painting- the humanistic values that they always find an the
canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there
is something besides the paint an the canvas. My painting is based an
the fact that only what can be seen is there. It really is an object.
Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this
finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he's
doing. He is making a thing. All that should be taken for granted. If
the painting were lean enough, accurate enough, or right enough, you
should be able to just look at it. All I want anyone to get out of my
paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see
the whole thing without confusion. . . What you see is what
you see.[17] Distancing himself from what he calls "the humanistic
values" of a more
traditional approach to painting – the parallel provided by
the way the revolutionary architecture of the eighteenth century
distances itself from an older, more humanistic approach should be
noted – Stella projects the ideal of an art that would force
us just to look at it, that would not allow us to "avoid the fact that
it is supposed to be entirely visual."[18] The spectator is to be
reduced to a pure eye, the work of art to an absorbing visual presence.
Why this fascination with presence? Why should, as Michael Fried
claims, the authentic art of our time aspire to "presentness"?[19] That
Fried speaks of "presentness" and not simply of "presence" is
significant, for it suggests that the aesthetic experience is to
deliver us not simply from meaning and representation, but from the
burden of time. If the work of art is to be all there, if nothing is to
be absent and lacking, it must place the observer beyond memory and
expectation, beyond hope and fear, beyond interest and boredom. It is
this continuous and entire presentness, amounting as it were to
the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of
instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a
single brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to
experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever
convinced by it.[20] We begin to see more clearly what informs the
aesthetic project: the
hope to negate time within time. The pursuit of presence is born of the
hope to create an art that would deliver us from the burden of time. "
Presentness," writes Fried, "is grace. " Minimal art provides the most
obvious examples, although Fried suggests that there is poetry and
music that similarly lets time stand still "because at every moment the
work itself is wholly manifest."[21][22] The author of this grace is no
longer God, but the artist. No longer able to turn to God or the Virgin
to be freed from the dread of time, modern man turns to beauty to
discover in it a fleeting substitute for that eternity for which he can
no longer hope. But if presentness is indeed grace, grace is denied to
man. Man cannot escape the temporality of his situation. The more
single-mindedly art pursues presence and purity, the more decisively
will it take its leave from reality. If Kant's conception of free
beauty can be argued to demand an abstract
art, the art of Kant's day left this demand pretty much unmet.
Searching for examples of a manmade free beauty all that Kant could
come up with were instrumental music and (given the theme of this study
this deserves special emphasis) ornament. "Delineations à la
grecque, foliage for borders or wall papers, mean nothing in
themselves; they represent nothing – no object under a
definite concept – and are free beauties."[23] When Kant here
brackets the architectural function of ornament, he follows as thinker
the same aesthetic approach that. had led to the creation of works like
the pulpit of Oppolding. Such bracketing lets ornament appear as a
self-sufficient aesthetic presence. Insistence on the autonomy of the
aesthetic sphere has to put into
question the role of ornament in architecture. While Kant thus
discusses ornament as an example of free beauty, he shares the
Enlightenment's uneasiness about the function of ornament in
architecture, especially in church architecture. "We could add much to
a building which would immediately please the eye if only it were not
to be a church. We could adorn a figure with all kinds of spirals and
light but regular lines, if only it were not the figure of a human
being."[24] Given Kant's conception of what constitutes the essence of
a church or of man, such decorations seem not only inessential, but
altogether out of place. lf the essential autonomy of the aesthetic
sphere demands an art free from all servitude, free even from all
representation and thus abstract, the sacred character of a church or
the moral dignity of a person are difficult to reconcile with
decoration. Religion and morality must keep their distance from the
aesthetic; the latter is denied what I have called an ethical function.
Historically speaking the late rococo of the pulpit of Oppolding leads
nowhere. Given the aesthetics of the eighteenth century, no
justification for such an autonomous art could be given; to the critics
of the Enlightenment it had to seem irrational and frivolous. But if
the pulpit represents a splendid dead end, this dead end can be read as
a figure of modern abstract art. I have suggested that the aesthetic
approach demands both the transformation of ornament into an autonomous
art and the liberation of painting from its representational function.
Here we have the twin roots of abstract art which may be understood
either as the result of an ornamentalization of painting or as ornament
developing into an independent aesthetic object. A look at the
development of painting in the years preceding the First
World War supports this suggestion. To establish it would require a
separate study; here I will only call attention to certain aspects of
what happened in Munich at that time. The dominant figure is of course
Kandinsky, but Kandinskys achievement was not that of a genius working
in isolation. His turn to abstract art has to be seen in the context of
Jugendstil art. Endell especially had been calling for an art "with
forms that signify nothing, represent nothing and recall nothing, but
will be able to excite our souls as deeply as only music has been able
to do with tones."[25] Before the turn of the century Adolf Hoelzel had
begun to experiment with nonrepresentational forms; he called his
creations abstract ornaments.[26] Just as Loos was trying to banish
ornament from architecture, ornament became self-sufficient and
autonomous. The parallel to developments in eighteenth-century art is
evident. More important than any possible causal relationship between
these
developments [27] is their inner affinity, which is explained by the
logic of the aesthetic approach governing both. Just as ornament can
become aesthetically pure only by shedding its dependent status,
destroying itself as ornament, so art, to the extent that it submits to
the rule of the aesthetic approach, has to strive for a purity
incompatible first with representation and finally with all meaning. As
Kant knew, an art offering completely free beauties is an
impossibility. All art is essentially a more or less successful
realization of some purpose or intention. The observer who approaches
an object as a work of art has to assume such an intention-works of
art, when seen as art, can never simply "be there," but always refer us
beyond themselves to a governing intention, to intended meaning. But
the loss of such meaning is demanded by that pursuit of purity and
presence which characterizes so much modern art. Kant already wrote
that beautiful art should look as if it were the product of nature;
similarly, Clement Greenberg insists that what confers presence is "the
look of non-art. "[28] On such an interpretation modern art has its
hidden telos in its own negation. The self-destruction of ornament in
the eighteenth century would appear to prefigure the self-destruction
of art for art's sake. One may object that the account that has been
offered here fails to
justify talk of a death of ornament. Did ornament not survive by
reaffirming its dependent status? The last stage in the development of
rocaille, when it turns flat and anemic and the hegemony of
architecture is reasserted, can be taken to illustrate the inevitable
retreat from ornamental autonomy. Similarly in our day art seems to be
retreating from the ideal of aesthetic purity. Thus there is increasing
interest in representation. Here, too, one can speak of a reversal. But
as long as our attitude to art remains governed by the aesthetic
approach, this reversal will lack conviction. For inseparable from the
aesthetic approach is the severing of the aesthetic sphere from
religious, ethical, and practical concerns. Given that approach
ornament can be no more than something, perhaps beautiful, but
inessential, added to a building. Ornament can regain its ethical
function only if the architecture it serves reclaims that function for
itself, and this is to say, only if the aesthetic approach is overcome.
Similarly, as long as the aesthetic approach remains dominant, art can
be no more than a perhaps beautiful, but nonessential, ornament of
life. Here, too, a genuine reversal assumes an overcoming of the
aesthetic approach. Once again Kant is illuminating. As interesting as
his recognition of
the inevitable failure of man's search for a completely pure art is his
reluctance to give to that art which comes closest to the creation of
free beauty
– instrumental music and ornament – a very high
place. Art, Kant insists, should aim at more than just beauty; it
should edify. Art should speak to man of his essence and vocation. If,
liberated from this ethical function, the aesthetic sphere forms an
autonomous province that fails to illuminate the world of human
practice but only offers an escape from it, must we not repeat the
criticism that the Enlightenment leveled against rocaille and direct it
against all art? Kant's own analysis of the aesthetic makes it
difficult to return to art its ethical function, although he struggles
to do so.[29] The difficulty is indeed rooted in the nature of the
aesthetic, where the autonomy granted to the aesthetic sphere needs to
be understood as the other side of an interpretation of reason that
makes it the sole custodian of reality. Given that characteristically
modern interpretation, art must seem to
deflect man from his real vocation. Consider once more Adolf Loos's
arguments against ornament. Must not these same arguments also
challenge an art that exists for its own sake? Imagine two persons,
living side by side, with the same income, but one of the two insists
an satisfying a passionate interest in art
– would that person not become poor and the other rich? Loos
did not see that his attack an ornament is easily rephrased to put into
question his aristocrat's support of a purer art. Is the pursuit of
such an art not a crime in a world where millions continue to suffer
from hunger, war, and disease? This is not to deny the charms of an art
for art's sake, the lure of its promise to lift, if only fleetingly,
the burden of time. But we may well wonder whether that promise does
not lead man out of reality. And if his vocation is to realize himself
in this world, this would make it a temptation to be resisted.
Art and the Sacred
There is today a widespread suspicion that the arts have lost their
way. In such situations it makes sense to review the direction in which
one has been traveling; in this case that means to rethink the
aesthetic approach, its presuppositions and its implications. The
Bavarian rococo church can help us with such reflections. Not that it
furnishes a paradigm inviting reappropriation. It never had much of a
future; it presents itself to us as a splendid anachronism incapable of
development. The Bavarian rococo church still presupposes an almost
medieval figural understanding of reality that in the more progressive
parts of Europe had been rendered impossible by the Reformation and by
the new philosophy and science;[30] its beauty can still be understood
as a symbol of the beauty of heaven or of that bride of whom the Song
of Songs and the Book of Revelation speak and who is identified with
the Virgin. But if it permits such understanding, it does not demand
it; someone committed to the aesthetic approach is likely to insist on
its irrelevance. And would not the phenomenon presented by the rococo
church support him? What sense can we still make of talk of beauty as a
symbol or sign of a transcendent beauty? We may try to recover the
historical context that will open up the figural dimensions of the
rococo church for us, but can such recovery ever become genuine
appropriation? Must it not reduce the rococo church to an occasion for
a scholarly hermeneutic game threatening to replace what is actually
experienced with cerebral construction? But if the Bavarian rococo church captivates us by its seemingly
self-sufficient aesthetic presence, surely it also points beyond
itself, not only to the intentions of those who built it, but to
something that still moves and concerns us
– even if we can no longer accept the way in which the
rococo,
following the tradition, interpreted this meaning, where the
playfulness of these interpretations shows that even their authors did
not take them too seriously. Is there not a way in which what is
articulated when the beauty of the church is likened to the beauty of a
bride or of a garden in May still claims us, even if we are unable to
translate it into a clear and distinct discourse? If so, does this not
suggest that the aesthetic approach cannot do full justice to our
experience with art? Does not all genuine beauty capture our attention
by its sensuous and seemingly self-sufficient presence, only to be
experienced as a figure of a reality that transcends us and assigns us
our place? That view, at any rate, has a long tradition. Already the
Greeks understood the beautiful as both a captivating presence and as a
sign of man's true home. Similarly, Christian thinkers interpreted the
pleasure granted by the beautiful as a foretaste of paradise, a taste
so sweet that it easily lets one forget what is signified and promised.
Threatening such forgetting, beauty tends to obscure its tie to the
sacred. The Bavarian rococo church especially can teach us that beauty
invites its own secularization. That the concept of secularization does
in fact provide a key to the aesthetic approach is suggested by Fried's
pronouncement that "presentness is grace". The rhetoric here still
hints at the traditional understanding of the beautiful as a figure of
the sacred, but at the Same time it refuses such an interpretation.
Aesthetic presence is given a dignity that does not belong to it, and
the attempt to seize it shows only an empty silence. But to suggest that beauty tends toward its own secularization is to
give only a very one-sided interpretation of the rise of the aesthetic
approach. That tendency goes unchecked only when man no longer turns to
art to articulate his place, when his understanding of reality and of
his vocation has become such that reason alone is thought to provide
proper access. The age of reason was to loosen the bond that once had
tied the aesthetic, the ontological, and the ethical function of art
together.
The Bavarian rococo church invites us to rethink this development, its
rewards and its price. At the same time our own response to it gives us
some understanding of where we stand in the process (fig. 154). In this
sense it may become for us a picture or a mirror of our condition and
destiny.
NOTES
Introduction
1 See Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical
Interpretation (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968)
and "Hegel and the Future of Art," The Review of Metaphysics 27, no. 4
(Dune 1974): 677-96.
2 The term Bavarian is somewhat misleading; most of the churches
discussed are located within Bavaria as it existed in the eighteenth
century and in the adjacent Swabian territories. The religious centers
of this region were Augsburg and Freising, although Salzburg,
Eichstätt, Regensburg, and Passau, were also important; its
political center was Munich; its artistic centers were Augsburg and
Munich. I am not concerned with the larger region that makes up modem
Bavaria, which includes Franconia. But Franconia forms an artistic
landscape with its own identity. The Franconian rococo, which
culminates in the work of Balthasar Neumann, invites independent
treatment. See maps, p. 274 below.
3 Emil Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and
Post-Baroque in England, Italy, France (New York: Dover, 1968), pp.
141-80.
4 For this view of the rococo as a last style, as also for the view of
rocaille as the last living omament, I am indebted to Hans Sedlmayr's
Verlust der Mitte (Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1959). See especially pp.
141-46. Sedlmayr's suggestive remarks have been developed by Hermann
Bauer in Rocaille: Zur Herkunft und zum Wesen eines Ornament-Motifs
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962). Those familiar with this study will
recognize the extent of my debt to it.
5 The comparison is Arnold Hauser's. See The Philosophy of Art History
(Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1963), p. 210.
6 See Hans Tintelnot, "Zur Gewinnung unserer Barockbegriffe," Die
Kunstformen des Barockzeitalters, ed. Rudolf Stamm (Bern: Francke,
1956), pp. 1391.
7 Fiske Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo (New York: Norton, 1964),
p. 5. See pp. 3-7 for a more extended discussion of the term rococo.
8 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 3 (New York: Vintage,
1951), p. 34.
9 Kimball, Creation of the Rococo, pp. 172-73, 179, 227-32.
10 See Bauer, Rocaille, p. 76.
11 One might object that someone who thinks that a negative answer must
be given to this question should look for a different term to describe
what has been called "the Bavarian rococo church." S. Lane Faison has
suggested, somewhat facetiously as he admits, barococo, "to describe a
creative amalgamation of two styles: Roman-Viennese Baroque and
Parisian Régence-Rococo." But by now "Bavarian rococo
church" has become so well established that attempts to replace it with
another label are likely to fail. See Faison's review article in
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 29, no. 2 (May
1970): 198.
12 See Norbert Lieb and Franz Dieth, Die Vorarlberger Barockbaumeister
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1960),
p. 60 for a full discussion of various proposals for the chronology of
baroque and rococo architecture. For an English paraphrase of that
discussion, see Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture in
Southern Germany (New York: Phaidon, 1968), pp. 4-5.
13 Bernhard Rupprecht, Die bayerische Rokoko-Kirche, Münchener
Historische Studien, Abteilung Bayerische Geschichte, ed. Max Spindler,
vol. 5 (Kallmünz: Lassleben, 1959), pp. 55-56. Some of
Rupprecht's basic insights are anticipated in Adolf Feulner,
Bayerisches Rokoko (München: Wolff, 1923), which, despite its
early date, remains the Best introduction to the Bavarian rococo.
14 See Rupprecht, Rokoko-Kirche, pp. 42-46 and Hitchcock, Rococo
Architecture, pp. 192-97.
15 Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, pp. 12-13.
16 Kimball, Creation of the Rococo, p. 6.
17 Summa theologiae, I1I, 83, 3 ad 2m.
Chapter 1. The Pictorialization of Ornament
1 In the seventeenth century "rocaille" is used to refer to those heavy
incrustations of rocks and Shells that decorated grottoes and
fountains. Already in 1734 we find the term used to characterize the
work of Meissonier. By 1736 it has become well enough established to
appear in the title of a series of ornamental engravings by jean Mondon
fils, his Premier livre de forme rocaille et cartel of 1736. See
Hermann Bauer, Rocaille: Zur Herkunft und zum Wesen eines
Ornament-Motifs (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962), pp. 16-19, and Fiske
Kimball, The Creation of the Rococo (New York: Norton, 1964), pp. 3-4
and 160.
2 See Kimball, Creation of the Rococo, pp. 109-11.
3 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture in Southern Germany (New
York: Phaidon, 1968), p. 175.
4 Friedrich Wolf has suggested, not altogether convincingly, that it is
indeed de Groff who has to be considered the leading artist at the
court of Max Emanuel. Effner, according to Wolf, was mainly an
administrator, and much of what has been considered his work should
actually be credited to de Groff. See "Francois de Cuvilliés
(1695-1768)," Oberbayerisches Archiv 89 (1967): 25-28 and "Wilhelm de
Groff (1676-1742). Der Dekorkünstler des Kurfürsten
Max Emanuel," Oberbayerisches Archiv 90 (1968): 52-61.
5 See Sixtus Lampl, Johann Baptist Zimmermanns Schlierseer
Anfänge. Eine Einführung in das Bayerische Rokoko
(Schliersee: Sixtus Lampl, 1979), pp. 4066.
6 Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, p. 131 and p. 125.
7 Hugo Schnell, "Die Wessobrunner Baumeister und Stukkatoren,"
Wessobrunn. Kunstführer, Grosse Ausgabe, 13, 2nd ed.
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1960),
p. 20.
8 Christina Thon seems to me right when she considers the adoption of
French bandwork by decorators from Wessobrunn a development initially
independent from but paralleling that of the court art of Munich. See
J. B. Zimmermann als Stukkator (München, Zürich:
Schnell & Steiner, 1977), pp. 230, 233, and 234.
9 Luisa Hager, Nymphenburg (München: Hirmer, n.d.), p. 16.
Georg Hager, "Die Bauthätigkeit und Kunstpflege im Kloster
Wessobrunn und die Wessobrunner Stuccatoren," Oberbayerisches Archiv 48
(1893-94): 380. Norbert Lieb, München. Die Geschichte seiner
Kurst (München: Callwey, 1971), p. 149, and Max Hauttmann, Der
kurbayerische Hofbaumeister Joseph Effner (Strassburg: Heitz, 1913),
pp. 9-10.
10 Hauttmann, Effner, p. 13.
11 L. Hager, Nymphenburg, p. 15, and G. Hager, "Wessobrunner
Stuccatoren," 399.
12 Georg Hager already demonstrated that the acanthus ornament of the
Wessobrunners owed as much to French as to Italian models. The ceiling
decorations of the Aula Tassilonis in Wessobrunn (ca. 1700), often
taken as the paradigm of Wessobrunn stucco, have French antecedents.
Thus, the way the acanthus vines play over hare and hound derives from
Jean Lepautre's series of trophies, published in 1680 and widely known
in Bavaria. See "Wessobrunner Stuccatoren," 379.
13 Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, p. 131.
14 Bauer, Rocaille, p. 39
15 Kimball, Creation of the Rococo, p. 110.
16 For an excellent discussion of these rooms See Thon, Zimmermann, pp.
44-46, 85-87. The balustrade motif in the comer frescoes of the library
in Ottobeuren recalls the ceiling of the Great Hall of the Palazzo
Costabili in Ferrara (after 1500). In Bavaria it had made an early
appearance in the illusionistic painting above the Kaisertreppe in the
Residenz in Munich (1616), now destroyed.
17 Compare Bauer, Rocaille, p. 47.
18 Kimball, Creation of the Rococo, p. 179 n.
19 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, German Rococo: The Zimmermann Brothers
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), p. 60.
20 Ibid., p. 61.
21 Bauer, Rocaille, p. 40.
22 Ibid., p. 11.
23 Ibid., p. 40.
24 A review that appeared in the Mercure for March 1734 calls the new
engravings (to describe them the reviewer speaks of rocaille!) "dans le
goút d'Etienne la Belle." Since then the cartouches of
Stephano della Bella have often been cited as one of the sources of the
style rocaille. The mature rococo may be said to have combined the
plasticity of the baroque cartouche with the omamental logic of
Mannerist and régence grotesques.
25 See Thon, Zimmermann, p. 102.
26 Thon suggests that his decorations in Benediktbeuern and Steinhausen
make it likely that Zimmermann not only executed, but influenced,
Cuvilliés's designs. See Zimmermann, pp. 125 and 214.
27 The Fürstäbtliche Zimmer were decorated from 1732
to 1735. They are thus roughly contemporary with the Reiche Zimmer of
Munich's Residenz. Some details suggest that the decorators of Kempten
were very familiar with Cuvilliés's most recent work. We do
not know who was in charge of the decoration of the Kempten rooms; the
prince abbot's court painter, Franz Georg Herman, has been suggested.
Johann Georg Schütz, a student of Dominikus Zimmermann,
appears to have been the leading stuccoer. The quality of the
decoration and some details suggest Johann Georg
Üblhör, who is said to have worked under
Cuvilliés's direction in the Residenz and who is known to
have been the author of the decoration of the splendid Throne Room. See
Michael Petzet, Stadt und Landkreis Kempten. Bayerische Kunstdenkmale,
Kurzinventar (München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1959), pp.
26-34. Also Hugo Schnell, Die fürstäbtliche Residenz
in Kempten (München: Schnell & Steiner, 1947), pp.
14-15, and Komelius Riedmiller, Führer durch die
Prunkräume der ehemals fürstäbtlichen
Residenz in Kempten (Allgäu) (Kempten, 1968), p. 10.
28 Schnell, Die fürstäbtliche Residenz, p. 57. See n.
16.
29 Hugo Schnell points out the similarity to altar compositions by
Dominikus Zimmermann. See Die fürstäbtliche Residenz,
p. 42.
30 Bauer, Rocaille, p. 39.
31 For a discussion of this church see Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture,
pp. 191 and 192.
32 G. Hager, "Wessobrunner Stuccatoren," 440-41.
33 Bernhard Rupprecht, Die bayerische Rokoko-Kirche, Münchener
Historische Studien, Abteilung Bayerische Geschichte, ed. Max Spindler,
vol. 5 (Kallmünz: Lassleben, 1959), p. 31
34 How easily the gable motif could join rocaille is shown not only by
a glance at French ornamental engravings of the thirties, but also by
the Zimmermanns' Die Wies (1746-54). See also Cuvilliés's
use of the Same motif in the Reiche Zimmer of the Residenz.
35 Here the balustrade is only painted. See Thon, Zimmermann, p. 224,
n. 114.
36 Ernst Guldan has shown that the author of these frescoes is not
Innozenz Waräthi, whom Hitchcock cites, following the earlier
literature. See Wolfgang Andreas Heindl (Wien, München:
Herold, 1970), pp. 42-47
37 Ibid., p. 44; see also Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, p. 40.
38 We find these clouds already in Ensdorf (1714), Cosmas Damian Asam's
first major work. Recalling Gaulli's fresco in Il Gesu, the main fresco
here spills over the frame, offering the spectator a way into the
composition, connecting the space in which he stands with the space
above. The same device recurs
in Munich's Dreifaltigkeitskirche (1715), at Michelfeld (1717) and at
Weingarten (1718-19).
39 Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, p. 43
40 At Rohr, however, the presumably intended frescoes remained
unexecuted. As a result the stuccoed clouds seem rather pointless.
41 Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, p. 53
42 Ibid., p. 54.
Chapter 2. Space and Illusion
1 The decoration of the Grüne Gallerie in the Residenz in
Munich (1733), which includes frescoes, recalls the library and the
Festsaal of Benediktbeuem. Most of this decoration was lost in World
War II. The recently completed reconstruction did not extend to all of
the frescoes. As a result some of the framing ornament now seems
somewhat pointless.
2 Willi Mauthe, Die Kirchen in Weilheim (Weilheim: Kirchenverwaltung
Mariä
Himmelfahrt, 1953) pp. 8-11. Almost a hundred years earlier
illusionistic frescoes made an appearance an the ceilings of the
Bavarian dukes' Stadtresidenz in Landshut. But it is difficult to
connect these frescoes (1542-43) by Hans Bocksberger the Elder from
Salzburg, Luwig Refinger from Munich, and Hermann Posthumus, probably
from Holland or Italy, with Greither's work. Influenced by the Palazzo
del Té, they constitute an isolated if remarkable
achievement, so remarkable indeed that they made Hans Tintelnot claim
that the daring foreshortening of Hermann Posthumus's paintings
"anticipates around 1545 already everything that we admire in
Guercino's Ludovisi fresco." Die barocke Freskomalerei in Deutschland
(München: Bruckmann, 1951), p. 25. See also Hans Thoma,
Herbert Brunner, and Theo Herzog, Stadtresidenz Landshut. Amtlicher
Führer (München: Bayerische Verwaltung der
Staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Seen, 1969), pp.
8-9.
3 Emst Bassermann-Jordan, Die dekorative Malerei der Renaissance am
bayerischen
Hofe (München: Bruckmann, 1900), p. 130, pl. 88, and p. 134,
pl. 90. Tintelnot, Freskomalerei, pp. 26-31.
4 Werner Horstmann, Die Entstehung der perspektivischen Deckenmalerei
(München: UNI-Druck, 1968), p. 4
5 See Margarete Baur-Heinhold, Süddeutsche Fassadenmalerei vom
Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (München: Callwey, 1952).
6 A dependence an Weilheim is suggested by the octagonal dome over the
choir,
not over the crossing, here nonexistent. The model provided by the
cathedral
in Salzburg would seem to be more distant. From 1645 to 1654 the
artist's father,
Hans Konrad Asper, was court architect in Munich. See Norbert Lieb,
Münchener Barockbaumeister (München: Schnell
& Steiner, 1941), p. 46.
7 Karl Mindera, Benediktbeuern. Kunstführer, Grosse Ausgabe,
no. 23 (München: Schnell & Steiner, 1957), p. 25. See
also Mindera, "Die Frühzeit des Hanns Georg Asam in
Benediktbeuem und sein Erstlingswerk," Das Münster 3, no. 5/6,
(1950): 145-56 and Engelbert Baumeister, "Zeichnungen von Hans Georg
Asam," ibid., 156-61. For a discussion of the church in Garsten see
Josef Pemdl, Pfarrkirche in Garsten. Kleine Führer, no. so3
(München: Schnell & Steiner, n. d. )
8 This was discovered in the course of a thorough restoration of the
church
(1962-73). Hans Georg Asam's first fresco is the Nativity above the
high altar.
The fresco is unusual also for its perspective, which anticipates later
work
by Cosmas Damian Asam. See Leo Weber SDB, Benediktbeuem. Kleine
Führer, no. 34, 3rd ed., (München, Zürich:
Schnell & Steiner, 1974).
9 Mindera, Benediktbeuem, p. 26.
10 Mindera, "Die Frühzeit des Hanns Georg Asam," 146-47
11 See, for example, A. M. Zendralli, I Magistri Grigioni (Poschiavo:
Menghini, 1958), p. 122, where both churches are attributed to Antonio
Riva. This mistake is repeated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Rococo
Architecture in Southern Germany (New York: Phaidon, 1968), p. 22. The
architect in Benediktbeuem was in all probability Caspar Feichtmayr.
See Mindera, Benediktbeuern, p. 22. For a good illustration see
Hitchcock, pl. 16.
12 See Erika Hanfstaengl, Cosmas Damian Asam (München: Neuer
Filser Verlag, 1939) and Bemhard Rupprecht, Die Brüder Asam:
Sinn und Sinnlichkeit im bayerischen Barock (Regensburg: Pustet, 1980),
the latter accompanied by superb photographs by Wolf Christian von
Mülbe. For a good account in English see Hitchcock, Rococo
Architecture, pp. 19-88.
13 The award-winning picture, recently discovered by Helene Trottmann
(see "Die Zeichnungen Cosmas Damian Asams für den Concorso
Clementino der Accademia di San Luca von 1713," Pantheon, 38, [1980]:
158-64) is excellently reproduced in Rupprecht, Die Brüder
Asam, p. 59.
14 See Hans Zitzelberger, Ensdorf. Kleine Führer, no. 721, 2nd
ed. (München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner,
1968); Hanfstaengl, Cosmas Damian Asam, pp. 28-31; and Rupprecht, Die
Brüder Asam, pp. 60-65.
15 Asam's clouds recall the work of Gaulli. Similar devices, however,
were not
unknown to the older Asam. See Mindera, "Die Frühzeit des
Hanns Georg Asam," p. 150.
16 Hermann Bauer, Der Himmel im Rokoko. Das Fresko im deutschen
Kirchenraum des 18. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg: Pustet, 1965), p. 55, now
also avail.
able in Hermann Bauer, Rokokomalerei (Mittenwald: Mäander,
1980), pp. 81-91. See also Bernhard Rupprecht, Die bayerische
Rokoko-Kirche, Münchener Historische Studien, Abteilung
Bayerische Geschichte, ed. Max Spindler, vol. 5 (Kallmünz:
Lassleben, 1959), pp. 25-26.
17 In St. Jakob in Innsbruck Asam similarly reiterated the architecture
in the
fresco. See Hanfstaengl, Cosmas Damian Asam, pp. 42-43, and Rupprecht,
Die Brüder Asam, pp. 70-74; also Tintelnot, Freskomalerei, p.
60.
18 Rupprecht interprets the reiteration of the architecture below as an
important
step preparing for the autonomous existence of the fresco space, which
he takes
to be characteristic of the Bavarian rococo church. Rokoko-Kirche, p. 5
and
Die Brüder Asam, p. 33
19 Already in Benediktbeuem Hans Georg Asam employs a similar
perspective, attempting a first fusion between the panel tradition and
Italian illusionism.
20 The Aldersbach fresco has a precursor in Johann Michael Rottmayr's
ceiling fresco in the Jesuit church St. Matthias in Wroclaw (Breslau)
(1704-1706). See Eberhard Hempel, Baroque Architecture in Central
Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 114, pl. 66 A. Born in Laufen
an the Salzach, then belonging to Salzburg, Rottmayr (1654-1730) went
to Venice, where he studied with Carl Loth, son of the Weilheim painter
Ulrich Loth. On his retum from Italy he established himself as the
leading painter active in Austria. Although it unites the nave even
more forcefully than Asam's fresco in Aldersbach, a very different
approach to space governs Rottmayr's work. The fresco in Wrocław is
very much a baroque work, closer to Pozzo than to Asam.
21 The following analysis is indebted to Rupprechts searching
discussion. See Rokoko-Kirche, pp. 6-8, and Die Brüder Asam,
pp. 82-83. Also Michael Hartig and Hugo Schnell, Aldersbach. Kleine
Führer, no. 698, 5th ed. (München, Zürich:
Schnell & Steiner, 1970), and Hanfstaengl, Cosmas Damian Asam,
pp. 49-52.
22 Hanfstaengl, Cosmas Damian Asam, p. 50.
23 Rupprecht, Rokoko-Kirche, p. 7.
24 Ibid.
25 Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, p. 6.
26 Ibid., p. 7. Since Aldersbach was founded by monks from Ebrach
(1146), its connection to the Franconian monastery was particularly
close. Still, I doubt whether the Franconian examples Hitchcock
mentions had any influence an Asam's work. Nor do we need to postulate
such influence to account for the scalloped frame in Aldersbach. By
this time the scalloped frame was very much "in the air."
27 Kuno Bugmann, Einsiedeln. Kleine Führer, no. 538 6th ed.
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1981);
also Hanfstaengl, Cosmas Damian Asam, pp. 70-76, and Rupprecht, Die
Brüder Asam, pp. 37, 144-55. For an illustration see
Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, pl. 50.
28 The reconstruction of this interior has retumed to Munich its most
beautiful
rococo interior. For a full account see Dominikus Lutz, OFM, Die
Klosterkirche
St. Anna in München (München: Franziskanerkloster St.
Anna, 1977).
29 In spite of the fact that it was consecrated only in 1737, four
years after Steinhausen, St. Anna has a slight priority. The foundation
stone of the Munich church was laid in 1727, one year before work began
in Steinhausen. The vault was decorated in 1729, antedating the
decoration of the vault in Steinhausen by two years. There is, however,
one key element present in Steinhausen and lacking in St. Anna: Cosmas
Damian Asam's St. Anne in Glory lacks the landscape elements, so
striking in Johann Baptist Zimmermann's large fresco in Steinhausen,
that were to become a standard part of Bavarian rococo interiors.
30 P. C. Cannon-Brookes, Great Buildings of the World. Baroque Churches
(London, New York, Sydney, Toronto: Paul Hamlyn, 1969), p. 181.
31 Founded in 1710, the Art Academy of the free imperial city of
Augsburg became the center of fresco painting in Southem Germany. From
1730 its director was Johann Georg Bergmüller, who had
received his training from Johann Andreas Wolff in Munich, then from
Carlo Maratti. Among his students we find such accomplished painters as
Johann Evangelist Holzer, whose early death put an end to a career of
unusual promise, and Gottfried Bernhard Göz. Matthäus
Günther, Cosmas Damian Asam's best student, settled here, as
did Christoph Thomas Scheffler. But the list is much longer. Together
with the engravers and the publishing houses of Augsburg these painters
made Augsburg, even more than Munich, the real center of the decorative
arts of the Bavarian rococo. See Herbert Schindler, Grosse Bayerische
Kunstgeschichte, vol. 2 (München: Süddeutscher
Verlag, 1963), pp. 294-301.
32 See Edelstetten (1710), the Carthusian monastery church in Buxheim
(1711), Schliersee (1714) (fig. 4), the cloister of the cathedral in
Freising (1716), Maria Medingen (1719-22). For plates and descriptions,
see Henry-Russell Hitchcock, The Zimmermann Brothers (Baltimore:
Penguin, 1968).
33 Amigoni, however, had already entered the elector's service in 1717.
From Munich he was called to Ottobeuren in 1719, where he worked, with
many interruptions, until 1729. See Hugo Schnell, Ottobeuren.
Kunstführer, Grosse Ausgabe, no. 2 (München,
Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1955), Pz1. Christina Thon
suggests that it was Amigoni who, impressed by what he saw of
Zimmermann's work in Ottobeuren, recommended him to Effner (J. B.
Zimmermann als Stukkator [München, Zürich: Schnell
& Steiner, 1977], p. 17). From Ottobeuren Amigoni went to
London. In 1736 he moved to Paris. Three years later he retumed to
Venice. He spent the last years of his life in Madrid, as court painter
of the king of Spain. Amigoni's work in Schleissheim was preceded by a
large fresco covering the ceiling of the Hall of the Badenburg in the
park of Nymphenburg. Unfortunately it was almost completely destroyed
in World War II. The present reconstruction is unsatisfactory.
34 From 1720 to 1725 J. B. Zimmermann received 6680 guilders for his
work in Schleissheim. He had ample opportunity to observe the work of
the two painters. See Johannes Mayerhofer, Schleissheim, Deutsche
Bibliothek, vol. 8 (Bamberg: Buchnersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1890), p.
58, and Thon, Zimmermann, pp. 302-07.
35 Although a strict illusionism forbids the appearance of landscape an
the ceiling, the violation of this rule has a long history. Pietro da
Cortona did not hesitate to paint a naval battle an the ceiling of the
Sala di Marte in the Palazzo Pitti (1646)– a theme that
became popular in eighteenth-century Bavaria, which liked to glorify
the Virgin with representations of the victory over the Turkish ileet
at Lepanto, which was attributed to her assistance. Still closer to the
spirit of the Bavarian rococo church is Luca Giordano's Triumph of
Judith (1704) in S. Martino in Naples. In this connection the frescoes
Amigoni painted in the Benediktuskapelle and the Abstkapelle in
Ottobeuren (1725-28) must be mentioned. That the fresco of the Bavarian
rococo church more especially its refusal of a rigorous illusionism,
inseparable from the attempt to represent not just a second world but
landscape an the ceiling – has its roots in Italy, more
especially in Venice, is suggested also by the fresco the young Tiepolo
painted in the Palazzo Sandi in Venice (1724-25). Bauer, Der Himmel im
Rokoko, p. 56, and Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy,
1600-1750 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 254 and 324.
36 See Rupprecht, Rokoko-Kirche, pp. 24-25, 32-37
Chapter 3. Architecture Against Architecture
1 Bemhard Rupprecht Die bayerische Rokoko-Kirche, Münchener
Historische Studien, Abteilung Bayerische Geschichte, ed. Max Spindler,
vol. 5 (Kallmünz: Lassleben, 1959), pp. 55 and 56. See p. 4
above.
2 See, e. g., Erika Hanfstaengl, Cosmas Damian Asam (München:
Neuer Filser
Verlag, 1939, p. 2; Carl Lamb, Die Wies (München:
Süddeutscher Verlag, 1964), pp. 99 and 109; Georg Lill,
Deutsche Plastik (Berlin: Wegweiser, 1925), pp. 127-36; and Adolf
Feulner, Bayerisches Rokoko (München: Wolff, 1923), p. 67.
3 Ried's vaults look back not so much to Bohemian as to Franconian and
Bavarian
antecedents; more important than the Parler tradition is that of Hans
von Burghausen
and Stefan Krumenauer. It has been suggested that Ried came from a
village of
that name in the Innviertel, then still Bavarian. Duke Hans Georg the
Rich of
Landshut may well have recommended the brilliant young architect to his
royal
Brother-in-law in Prague. See Götz Fehr, Benedikt Ried: Ein
deutscher Baumeister zwischen Gotik und Renaissance (München:
Callwey, 1961) and James H. Acland, Medieval Structure: The Gothic
Vault (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. zog-15.
4 Acland, Medieval Structure, p. 221.
5 See Hans Jakob Wömer, Architektur des
Frühklassizismus (München, Zürich: Schnell
& Steiner, 1979) pp. 43-48.
6 See pp. 107-114 below.
7 St. Petri in Münster, the first Jesuit church in the
Rhineland (1590-97), has a significance for Rhenish Mannerism that
parallels that of St. Michael. The Jesuit churches in Koblenz, Aachen,
Cologne, Münstereifel, Coesfeld, Bonn, and Siegen followed its
model. The most impressive example of Franconian Mannerism, the
Julius-Stil – named after Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn,
prince bishop of Würzburg and a leader of the Counter
Reformation in Germany - is the pilgrimage church at Dettelbach
(1610-13).
8 See Acland, Medieval Structure, pp. 178-81. Here also a good
discussion of how the building material, in Bavaria usually brick,
limits and directs the architect's imagination.
9 See p. 103 below.
10 The Gothic cathedral in Albi and such Catalan churches as St.
Catherine in Barcelona come to mind. A remark Nikolaus Pevsner makes
about Il Gesù remains suggestive when applied to St.
Michael: "The extreme width of the nave under the powerful tunnel-vault
degrades the chapels into mere niches accompanying a vast hall, and it
has been suggested that the choice of this motif was due to Francesco
Borgia, the Spanish General of the Jesuit Order, and thus ultimately to
the tradition of the Gothic style in Spain as already presented in Rome
by the Catalan church of S. Maria di Monserrato (1495). If the
suggestion is accepted, there is here yet another instance of
post-renaissance return to medieval ideals." An Outline of European
Architecture, 5th ed.(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 172. The
Jesuits in Munich had very close connections with both Rome and Spain.
We can assume that these helped to influence the architecture of their
church.
11 Hauttmann speaks of it as a Verlegenheitslösung, a
substitute for the basilical solution which the German builders did not
dare. Max Hauttmann, Geschichte der Kirchlichen Baukunst in Bayern,
Schwaben und Franken 1550-1780 (München: Weizinger, 1923), p.
113.
12 Norbert Lieb sees in Sustris the creator of the entire church. See
Münchener Barockbaumeister (München: Schnell
& Steiner, 1941), pp. 13 and 219 n. io, and München.
Die Geschichte seiner Kunst (München: Callwey, 1971), p. 94.
Supporting Hauttmann, Erwin Schalkhausser's analysis of the nave denies
Sustris a decisive role in either its construction or its decoration.
See "Die Münchener Schule in der Stuckdekoration des 17.
Jahrhunderts," Oberbayrisches Archiv für
vaterländische Geschichte, 81-82 (München, 1957) 5-27.
13 The decoration of St. Michael - after the destruction of the Second
World War it is only now (1981) being reconstructed - is not of one
piece. We can easily distinguish four quite different vocabularies: (1)
The decoration of the nave vault recalls the wooden coffered ceilings
of the Renaissance. (2) A different decorative system is employed in
the somewhat later choir. If the geometric panels of the nave appear
rather like wooden panels fixed to the vault, leaving empty strips
between them, here the stuccoed bands look applied to the vault,
somewhat in the way the rib-Bands of the nave separate the different
bays. (3) A third decorative scheme appears in the intrados of the
transeptal arches. Here we find Beschlagwerk, an ornament which, as the
German term suggests, derives from bandlike metal fittings. (4) The
characteristic Wessobrunn stucco in the Maria Haar Kapelle dates from
1697.
14 The architect of the nave remains unknown. See Herbert Schade, St.
Michael in München. Kleine Führer, no. 130, 6th ed.
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner 1971),
pp. 8-9.
15 For the importance of the Dillingen church for the magistri
grigioni, that
remarkable group of architects from the Italian-speaking Grisons that
dominated
architecture in Southern Germany for the better part of the seventeenth
century,
see A. M. Zendralli, I magistri grigioni-architetti e crostuttori,
scultori,
stuccatori e pittori-dal 16° al 18° secolo (Poschiavo:
Menghini, 1958). Hans Alberthal (Giovanni Albertalli), to whom the
Studienkirche is usually credited, belongs to this group, although it
is not clear whether he was Born in Roveredo or in Eichstätt.
Friedrich Naab and Heinz Jürgen Sauermost call attention to
the fact that a series of small wall-pillar churches was built in the
vicinity of Bellinzona in the seventeenth century. They suggest a
connection with Pellegrino Tebaldi's S. Fedele in Milan. See
"Möglichkeiten des Wandpfeilersystems," Vorarlberger
Barockbaumeister (catalogue of the exhibition in Einsiedeln and
Bregenz, 1973), pp. 85-86. None of these wall-pillar churches, however,
antedates the Studienkirche.
For an account of the importance of the Studienkirche for the work of
the architects
from the Austrian Vorarlberg, who in the second half of the seventeeth
century
came first to rival and then to replace the magistri grigioni, see the
above
and Norbert Lieb and Franz Dieth, Die Vorarlberger Barockbaumeister
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1960),
pp. 28-33.
16 Three artists associated with Augsburg, Matthias Kager, Joseph
Heintz, court painter to Emperor Rudolph II, arid Elias Holl, the
leading German architect of the period, have been suggested. See
Vorarlberger Barockbaumeister, p. 147.
17 FürstenfeldprovidesanimportantlinkbetweenSt. Michael and
the wall-pillar churches of Johann Michael Fischer. Fischer's treatment
of comice and attica in Diessen recalls Fürstenfeld, as does
the column motif of Zwiefalten.
18 See p. 4 above.
19 For an overview of the development of the hall choir see Kurt
Gerstenberg, Deutsche Sondergotik. Eine Untersuchung über das
Wesen der deutschen Baukunst im späten Mittelalter (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), pp. 152-62.
20 Better known as Hans Stethaimer. The latter was in fact the nephew
of Hans von Burghausen; he succeeded his uncle as architect of St.
Martin in Landshut.
21 That association determined the hall character of the Hofkirche in
Neuburg an the Danube built by the Protestant duke Philipp Ludwig of
Neuburg as an answer to Munich's Catholic St. Michael. The church
council criticized the plans submitted by Joseph Heintz for their many
"angles," which, while perhaps appropriate in a Catholic church with
its proliferation of altars, were felt to conflict with the spirit of
the Protestant service. The hall church of the nearby Lauingen was to
provide the example. The church's anti-Catholic rhetorical stance was
lost when Philipp Ludwig was succeeded by his son Wolfgang Wilhelm, who
had converted to Catholicism and entrusted the new church
to the Jesuits. See Albert Lidel, Hofkirche Neuburg/Donau, Kleine
Führer, no. 989 (München, Zürich: Schnell
& Steiner, 1973, and
Hauttmann, Geschichte, pp. 119-20.
22 See Lamb, Die Wies, p. 65, and Hauttmann, Geschichte, p. 124.
23 The church in Gars, too, was built by the Augustinian Canons. Why
this Augustinian preference for the hall choir? Hauttmann suggests that
a similar solution had already been found in the Augustinian Hl. Kreuz
in Augsburg (1492-1508). Hauttmann, Geschichte, pp. 123-24.
24 Lieb and Dieth, Die Vorarlberger Baumeister, p. 35.
25 See Michael Hartig, Wallfahrtskirche Vilgertshofen, Kleine
Führer, no.
484, 2nd ed. (München, Zürich: Schnell &
Steiner, 1965) and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture in
Southern Germany (New York: Phaidon, 1968), p. 128.
26 The most obvious precursor of this not-altogether successful
experiment is
provided, not by the cathedral in Salzburg, often mentioned in this
connection,
but by the Kreuzkapelle of St. Michael in Munich (1592). In that
chapel, too,
we find the narrow choir arch that separates as much as it joins the
nave and
the centralized choir with its dark submerged dome. The Weilheim dome
found
an impressive successor in Michael Beer's exciting if strangely
barbarian choir
dome in St. Lorenz in Kempten (1652-56). See Hugo Schnell,
Stadtpfarrkirche
St. Lorenz in Kempten, Kleine Führer, no. 423, 3rd ed.
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1971).
27 The comparison of St. Jakob with Herkommer's St. Mang in
Füssen
(1701-17) is instructive. In Füssen, too, there is tension
between
expectations raised by the basilical plan and the devaluation of the
crossing with its lightless hemispherical dome, which forces the eye
forward to the brightness of the choir and prevents the crossing from
functioning as the center of the interior. This devaluation of the
crossing invites its elimination or its transformation into a dark
antechoir joining altar room and nave.
28 See pp. 54-66 above.
29 The choir of Diessen recalls the choirs of Johann Georg Fischer's
churches, for instance his slightly earlier St. Katharina in Wolfegg.
But, as Heinz Jürgen Sauermost points out, it would be a
mistake to conclude from the obvious similarities that Johann Michael
Fischer owed the solution found in Diessen to Johann Georg. Such
solutions lay in the air. See Heinz Jürgen Sauermost, Der
Allgäuer Barockbaumeister Johann Georg Fischer (Augsburg:
Verlag der schwäbischen Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1964), p. 156.
30 Good examples are provided by three village churches, now within the
city
limits of Munich: Schwabing (1654-60), Forstenried (1672), and
Oberföhring (1680).
31 See Michael Hartig, Kloster Holzen. Kleine Führer, no. 452,
3rd ed. (München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner,
1970).
32 Rarely visited, although an the outskirts of Munich, this small,
beautiful
church, attributed to Philipp Köglsperger, deserves to be
better known. As Hitchcock points out, in Kreuzpullach we find not only
the ovalized rectangle, but also the scalloped fresco frame (Rococo
Architecture, pp. 49 and 115). Here already the ovalization of the nave
answers a certain centralization of the choir. But the originality of
the church should not be exaggerated. Once again we are dealing with
tendencies that were in the air. Ovalized rectangles are a
characteristic feature of the churches the Erding architect Anton
Kogler built in the second decade of the eighteenth century. Bockhom
(1712 ff.) and Tading (1714-19) are characteristic examples. In Itzling
(1716) such centralization is coupled with a centralization of the
choir that anticipates the Asam brothers.
33 Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, p. 116.
34 Ibid., p. 115.
35 Norbert Lieb, Murnau Obb., Kleine Führer, no. 476, 3rd ed.
(München, Zürich: Schnell&Steiner 1961).
36 Viscardi's pilgrimage church in Freystadt (1700-08) and his
Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Munich (1711-15) must be mentioned. The impact
of the latter is felt in Johann Baptist Gunetzrhainer's remarkable
Schönbrunn (1723-24), although the way the plan of this church
joins
cross and ellipse recalls Austrian churches as well. Hitchcock mentions
it as perhaps the first church to employ the oval (Rococo Architecture,
p. 117), while Feulner claims that here, for the first time, we meet
with that dissolution of a central space that was to become
characteristic of the mature rococo. After such advance notice, one is
likely to be somewhat disappointed by Schönbrunn. Schliersee,
although
architecturally much less ambitious, already has a much more pronounced
rococo character.
37 Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, p. 180.
38 See Lieb, Barockkirchen, p. 93.
39 Hans Jantzen, Kunst der Gotik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957), pp. 71-73
40 Compare, for example, the handling of the wallpillars in the
Studienkirche in Dillingen or in Maria Steinbach.
41 Cf. Sixtus Lampl, Johann Baptist Zimmermanns Schlierseer
Anfänge: Eine Einführung in das Bayerische Rokoko
(Schliersee: Sixtus Lampl, 1979)
pp. 49-50
42 Rupprecht, Rokoko-Kirche, p. 40. In this respect, too, Die Wies
invites comparison with Johann Schmuzer's Vilgertshofen.
43 S. Lane Faison, review of Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture, and of
Hempel, Baroque Art and Architecture in Southern Europe, Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians, 29, no. 2, (1970):198.
44 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1,
tr. E. F. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), P. 215.
45 See Bernhard Rupprecht, Die Brüder Asam: Sinn und
Sinnlichkeit im bayerischen Barock (Regensburg: Pustet, 1980), pp.
176-99. Alastair Laing minimizes Fischer's role in the decoration of
his churches, especially of St. Anna im Lehel and Osterhofen ("Central
and Eastem Europe," in Anthony Blunt, ed. , Baroque and Rococo
Architecture and Decoration [New York and London: Harper & Row,
1978], pp. 219-52). Osterhofen, in particular, is said to appear "to be
wholly the work of the Asams who decorated it, rather than of Fischer,
who built it" (p. 228). Rupprecht, an the other hand, emphasizes
Fischer's contribution (Die Brüder Asam, p. 178). A comparison
of St. Anna im Lehel as it looked after the first reconstruction after
the war with its appearance before the war or today not only
demonstrates the crucial contribution made by the decoration, but also
strongly suggests that Fischer must have had some such decorative
scheme in mind when he designed the church. A comparison of St. Anna
and Osterhofen with the more modest church in Unering Supports that
suggestion.
46 Christian F. Otto, Space into Light: The Churches of Balthasar
Neumann (Cambridge: The Architectural History Foundation and M.I.T.
Press, 1979), pp. 44-45.
Chapter 4. Theatrum Sacrum
1 Richard Alewyn and Karl Sälzle, Das grosse Welttheater. Die
Epoche der höfischen Feste in Dokument und Deutung (Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1959), p. 16.
2 Eberhard Straub, Repraesentatio Maiestatis oder churbayerische
Freudenfeste.
Miscellanea Bavarica Monacensia, vol. 14 (München: Neue
Schriftenreihe des Staatsarchivs, 1969), pp. 191-96.
3 Ibid., pp. 299-300.
4 Messerer denies that the sculptor Johann Baptist Straub had done
anything improper. He explains that three archangels were to be
represented in the high altar, not scenes from the life of the Virgin.
The putto expresses only an attribute of the angel. And yet it is
difficult to imagine this playful transformation of traditional
representations of the Annunciation before the rococo. See Wilhelm
Messerer, Kinder ohne Alter: Putten in der Kunst der Barockzeit
(Regensburg: Pustet, 1962), pp. 33-34
5 Rudolf Wittkower, Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman
Baroque (London: Phaidon, 1966), p. 27.
6 Bernhard Rupprecht, Die bayerische Rokoko-Kirche, Münchener
Historische Studien, Abteilung Bayerische Geschichte, ed. Max Spindler,
vol. 5 (Kallmünz: Lassleben, 1959), p. 17.
7 Hermann Bauer, Der Himmel im Rokoko: Das Fresko im deutschen
Kirchenraum des
18. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg: Pustet, 1965), pp. 9-14.
8 Thirty years before Bergmüller Cosmas Damian Asam had
already used this device in his Christmas fresco at Aldersbach. See p.
62 above.
9 Cf. Sigfrid Hofmann, Die Kirchen der Pfarrei Steingaden (Steingaden:
Katholisches Pfarramt, 1960), pp. 6-8.
10 For a survey of the changing approaches to the high altar in Bavaria
see Richard Hoffmann, Der Altarbau im Erzbistum München und
Freising in seiner stilistischen Entwicklung vom Ende des 15. bis zum
Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts. Beiträge zur Geschichte,
Topographie und Statistik des Erzbistums München und Freising,
ed. Martin von Deutinger, vol. 9 (München: Lindauersche
Buchhandlung, 1905).
11 In 1620 Candid painted his enormous Assumption for the high altar of
Munich's Frauenkirche, where it remained until 1858. It now hangs above
the entrance to the sacristy.
12 It is important to keep in mind that this elaborate high altar
composition is essentially incomplete. This incompleteness finds
expression in the empty choir stalls. The dramatic scene presented by
the sculptor demands the fulfillment provided by the dramatic
celebration of the liturgy. See Johannes Zeschick OSB,
Benediktinerabtei Rohr, Keine Führer, no. 1015
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1974).
13 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture in Southern Germany
(New York: Phaidon, 1968), p. 45.
14 The high altar compositions at Rohr and Weltenburg are just about
contemporary. By 1724 both appear to have been completed. See Norbert
Lieb, Barockkirchen zwischen Donau und Alpen, 2nd ed.
(München: Hirmer, 1958), pp. 33-46, 149-50.
15 See Hermann Schmidt and Hugo Schnell, Landsberg: Stadtpfarrkirche
und Johanneskirche, Kleine Führer, no. 88, 2nd ed.
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1961),
and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, German Rococo: The Zimmermann Brothers
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1968) pp. 78-79.
16 S. Lane Faison, review of Anthony Blunt, ed., Baroque and Rococo:
Architecture and Decoration, Journal of the Society for Architectural
Historians 39, no. 1, 72.
17 My interpretation is indebted to that found in Jakob
Mois, Die Stiftskirche zu Rottenbuch (München: Schnell
& Steiner, 1953), pp. 81-85. See also Hugo Schnell, Rottenbuch,
Kleine Führer, no. 8, 15th ed. (München,
Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1964).
18 See Ernst Guldan, Eva und Maria (Graz, Köln:
Böhlaus, 1966), pp. 39-41.
19 John Donne, Annunciation, in The Poems of John Donne (London, New
York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 290.
20 As a device to facilitate the transition from nave to choir the
stuccoed curtain was first used in Bavaria by the brothers Asam in the
cathedral of Freising (1724). This paradigm, unfortunately
laterdestroyed, was soon picked up by other decorators. Christina
Thon's suggestion that formally considered the curtain motif functions
as a device to join different spatial compartments must be accepted; at
the same time it is impossible to overlook the reference to the
theatre. See Thon, J. B. Zimmermann als Stukkator (München,
Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1977), pp. 110 and 255, n.
466.
21 See Alewyn and Sälzle, Das grosse Welttheater, p. 62.
22 I am following Rupprecht's analysis. See especially Rokoko-Kirche,
p. 42.
23 Bauer, Der Himmel im Rokoko, p. 35.
24 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, tr. Stanley Godman, vol. 2
(New York: Vintage, n. d.), p. 189.
25 Ibid.
26 See Carl Lamb, Die Wies (München: Süddeutscher
Verlag, 1964), pp. 23-25.
27 Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers of Poetry,
tr. Joseph W. Evans (New York: Scribner, 1962), p. 52.
28 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, tr. John R. Spencer (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1956), p. 64.
29 Republic X, 602 c and d, tr. B. Jowett.
30 Quoted in Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 30.
31 See jurgis Baltru"saitis, Anamorphoses ou perspectives curieuses
(Paris: Olivier Perrin, 1955)
32 For illustrations see the catalogue of the exhibition Anamorphoses:
Games of Perception and Illusion in Art (New York: Abrams, 1976),
plates 23-26.
33 S. Lane Faison has suggested to me that we think of Egid Quirin's
portrait of his brother as we would of Dürer's seif-portraits
in some of his altarpieces. But the specific theatricality of this
church with its many levels of reality, its play with aesthetic
distance, needs to be considered when interpreting this image of its'
creator. Cosmas Damian presents himself to us as a magician who
delights in his creation. He seems more real than the figures of the
fresco, among whom he included his younger and more devout brother,
whom he painted as an angel. Visually this sculpture belongs with the
princess of the high altar who needs to be saved from the dragon. To
insist an the playfulness of this art is not to question its
seriousness.
34 Albrecht Schöne, Emblematik und Dramatik im Zeitalter des
Barock (München: Beck, 1964), p. 227.
35 Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the
Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califomia, 1965),
p. 17.
36 See Edmund Stadler, "Raumgestaltung im barocken Theater," in Die
Kunstformen des Barockzeitalters, ed. Rudolf Stamm (Bern: Francke,
1956), p. 191.
37 Margarete Baur-Heinhold, Theater des Barock: Festliches
Bühnenspiel im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (München:
Callwey, 1966), p. 118.
38 Besides the already-mentioned works by Stadler and Baur-Heinhold see
also Donald C. Mullin, The Development of the Playhouse (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of Califomia, 1970).
39 Rupprecht, Rokoko-Kirche, pp. 12-13. On the Bibienas see Rudolf
Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750 (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973), p. 574, n. 47. Adolf Feulner calls attention to
Ferdinando Bibiena's S. Antonio at Parma as a precursor of Weitenburg:
Bayerisches Rokoko (München: Wolff, 1923), p. 23.
40 Orgel, Illusion of Power, p. 30.
41 Baur-Heinhold, Theater des Barock, p. 18o. 42 Orgel, Illusion of
Power, p. 39.
43 Straub, Repraesentatio Maiestatis, p. 84. 44 Ibid., p. 99.
45 Orgel, Illusion of Power, p. 39.
46 Benno Hubensteiner, Bayerische Geschichte (München: Pflaum,
n. d.), p. 191.
Chapter 5. Time, History, and Eternity
1 Louis Dupré, The Other Dimension (Garden City: Doubleday,
1972), p. i.
2 See Karsten Harries, "The Dream of the Complete Building," Perspecta
17 (198o): 36-43.
3 The following account relies heavily an P. Herbert Schade S. J., "Die
Berufung der Jesuiten nach München und der Bau von St.
Michael," Der Mönch im Wappen: Aus Geschichte und Gegenwart
des katholischen München (München: Schnell &
Steiner, 1960), pp. 209-57. See also P. Herbert Schade S. J., St.
Michael in München. Kleine Führer, no. 130, 6th ed.
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1971).
4 Fischer von Erlachs Karlskirche in Vienna (1715 ff.) can be cited as
a distant successor. See Hans Aurenhammer, J. B. Fischer von Erlach
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 136.
5 Schade, "Berufung der Jesuiten," p. 239. See Otto von Simson, The
Gothic-Cathedral (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1964),
p. 141.
6 Lengthy excerpts in Schade, "Die Berufung der Jesuiten."
7 Unlike its Romanesque predecessors, however, and unlike most baroque
and rococo churches, St. Michael faces south instead of west. In this
willingness to sacrifice the traditional orientation of the church for
the sake of a dramatic presentation of the fagade, a modern, secular
understanding of space betrays itself.
8 Schade, "Die Berufung der Jesuiten," p. 247.
9 Ibid., p. 238.
10 Ibid., p. 249.
11 See Lieb, Barockkirchen zwischen Donau und Alpen (München:
Hirmer, 1953), pp. 60-66 and Ills. 61-81 and Diessen/Ammersee. Kleine
Führer, no. 30, 6th ed., (München, Zürich:
Schnell & Steiner, 1973).
12 See, for example, St. Clare in Cheb, illustrated in Christian
Norberg-Schulz, Late Baroque Architecture (New York: Abrams, 1971),
ill. 113.
13 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture in Southern Germany
(New York: Phaidon, 1968), p. 182.
14 Ibid., pp. 189 and 256.
15 Lieb, Diessen, p. 11.
16 Bernhard Rupprecht Die bayerische Rokoko-Kirche, Münchener
Historische Studien, Abteilung Bayerische Geschichte, ed. Max Spindler
(Kallmünz: Lassleben, 1959) pp. 21-23.
17 Jakob Biedermann, Cenodoxus, ed. Rolf Taròt
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1963). The play had its first performance
in Augsburg in 1602. In 1625 Joachim Meichel translated the popular
play into German (München: Hanser, 1957).
18 Messerer, Kinder ohne Alter: Putten in der Kunst der Barockzeit
(Regensburg: Pustet, 1962), p. 69.
19 Bauer, Rocaille: Zur Herkunft und zum Wesen eines Ornament-Motifs,
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962), pp. 26-27.
20 Luisa Hager, Nymphenburg (München: Hirmer, n.d.), pp. 26-27.
21 Johann Doerig, "Die spanische Barockliteratur," Die Kunstformen des
Barockzeitalters, ed. Rudolf Stamm (Bern: Francke, 1956) p. 299.
22 See Gaston Bachelard's discussion of "nests." The Poetics of Space,
tr. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 90-104.
23 Bauer, Rocaille, pp. 71-74.
24 The affinity of the Magdalenenklause and its "wild setting" with the
English park and its picturesque architecture forces one to question
Emil Kaufmanns claim that Robert Morris's views an landscape
architecture "show him far ahead of his continental contemporaries."
When Morris writes of natural surroundings, where "in the cooler Hours
of Reflection, a Man might retire, to contemplate the Important Theses
of Human Life," he expresses a sentiment well known to the continental
baroque and rococo (see Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and
PostBaroque in England, Italy, France (New York: Dover, 1968), p. 27).
One wishes that Dora Wiebenson, The Picturesque Garden in France
(Princeton: PrincetonUniversityPress,1978), had included a fuller
account of its early history.
Chapter 6. Ecclesia and Maria
1 Summa theologiae, 111, 83, 3 ad 2m. See Dagobert Frey, "Der
Realitätscharakter des Kunstwerkes," Kunstwissenschaftliche
Grundfragen: Prolegomena zu einer Kunstphilosophie (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), p. 115, and Günter
Bandmann, Mittelalterliche Kunst als Bedeutungsträger (Berlin:
Mann, 1951), p. 11.
2 Although by no means the only one. An obvious response is tied to the
understanding
of the church as the body of Christ, which can lead to attempts to
relate its
proportions to those of the perfect man. Important especially to
Renaissance
theorists of architecture, this fusion of Christian and Vitruvian ideas
had,
as far as I can tell, little impact an the Bavarian rococo church. See
Otto
von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (New York and Evanston: Harper
& Row, 1964), p. 36, n. 38, and Joseph Rykwert, On Adam's House
in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1972), pp. 118-20.
3 See Simson, Gothic Cathedral, p. B.
4 On the importance of the Solomonic Temple see Simson, Gothic
Cathedral, pp. 37-38, 95-96 and Rykwert, Adam's House, pp. 121-40. It
is worth noting that only after the Middle Ages are attempts made to
discover how exactly the Temple of Solomon must have looked. To be
sure, the understanding of this temple as a figure of heaven and as the
archetypal church was common throughout the Middle Ages, but only in
the baroque do we find attempts to actually reconstruct it, beginning
with Juan Bautista Villalpanda's highly influential attempt to recover
that lost archetype of the church, supposedly based an a plan that God
Himself had authored. Not too surprisingly, given Villalpanda's
association with Philip Il of Spain and his architect Juan de Hererra,
Solomon's temple tums out to look in some ways rather like the
Escorial, and serves to legitimate this residence-monastery of the
Spanish king, who (resembling Solomon in this respect too) bore the
title "king of Jerusalem" (Rykwert, Adam's House, p. 122). Not everyone
was convinced by the efforts of the Spanish Jesuit. But the vigor and
duration of the discussion that ensued show that Villalpanda was not
alone with his concern about how the temple really looked, a concern
that is foreign to the Middle Ages. Just as Luther insisted an the
simple sense of God's word, so Villalpanda appeals to an unfortunately
lost divine plan, a plan that, he reasoned, could be recovered by
interpreting the clues found in the Bible in the light of Vitruvius,
that is, in the light of reason. The long-lasting authority of this
reconstruction is suggested by the fact that when the great Austrian
architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach illustrates the Solomonic
temple in his Entwurff einer historischen Architectur (Wien 1721) he
follows Villalpanda. In such attempts a quite modem literalism betrays
itself, which, as one would expect, had more of an impact an the theory
of architecture than an its practice. The Bavarian rococo church, at
any rate, shows no trace of it.
5 Bernhard Rupprecht, Die bayerische Rokoko-Kirche, Münchener
Historische Studien, Abteilung Bayerische Geschichte, ed. Max Spindler
(Kallmünz: Lassleben, 1959), pp. 20-21.
6 Worth noting is that in those cases where we know which building
provided the model, there is little resemblance. The popular Loreto
chapels provide an obvious exception, but usually one is content with
allusions that help to place the church in a particular context. While
these allusions do not lead to literal imitation they can have
considerable architectural significance. For instance, only if we keep
in mind that in Bertoldshofen the model of St. Anthony in Padua was
prescribed do we understand the otherwise inexplicable proliferation of
domes. That the architect, Johann Georg Fischer, and his patron were
content with what seems to us a superficial resemblance shows that what
was wanted was not a literal representation, but some feature that,
reappearing in the successor church, allowed it to be interpreted as a
sign of its model.
7 Bandmann, Mittelalterliche Kunst als Bedeutungsträger, p. 89.
8 Simson, Gothic Cathedral, p. 9.
9 Hans Sedlmayr, Die Entstehung der Kathedrale (Zürich:
Atlantis, 1950).
10 Simson, Gothic Cathedral, p. 37.
11 Ibid.
12 Rupprecht, Rokoko-Kirche, pp. 20-21.
13 See pp. 146-50 above.
14 P. Herbert Schade S. J., "Die Berufung der Jesuiten nach
München und der Bau von St. Michael," Der Mönch im
Wappen: Aus Geschichte und Gegenwart des katholischen München
(München: Schnell & Steiner, 1971). For Schade's
discussion of the analysis of St. Michael advanced by Gisela Deppen in
"Die Wandpfeilerkirchen des deutschen Barock. Unter
besondererBerücksichtigungderbaukünstlerischenNachfolge
von St. Michael in München," unpublished diss.,
München 1953, esp. pp. 244-45.
15 J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina, vol. 210,
579 A.
16 Albrecht Schöne, Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des
Barock (München: Beck, 1969), pp. 34-42.
17 W. A. P. Smit, "The Emblematic Aspect of Vondel's Tragedies as the
Key to Their Interpretation." The Modern Language Review 52, (1957):
555- Schöne, Emblematik und Drama, pp. 205-14.
18 Erwin Schalkhausser, "Die Münchener Schule in der
Stuckdekoration des 17. Jahrhunderts", Oberbayerisches Archiv
für vaterländische Geschichte 81-82 (1957): 28-38.
The decoration of the nave is by Hans Krumpper (1614). That of the
choir (1630) is, according to Schalkhausser, the work of a lesser
artist.
19 Benno Hubensteiner, Vom Geist des Barock: Kultur und
Frömmigkeit im alten Bayern (München:
Süddeutscher Verlag, 1967), pp. 115-22.
20 Kurt Pfister, Kurfürst Maximilian von Bayern und sein
Jahrhundert (München: Ehrenwirth, n. d.), p. 208.
21 Hubensteiner, Vom Geist des Barock, pp. 86-88.
22 Ibid., pp. 154-55
23 Ibid., p. 101.
24 Schalkhausser, "Die Münchener Schule," 50-53, 75-78, 82-89.
25 See pp. 68-69 above.
26 Rupprecht speaks of a "Rokoko der Hermeneutik," Rokoko-Kirche, p. 24.
27 Ibid.
28 See pp. 170 and 182 above.
29 Rupprecht, Rokoko-Kirche, p. 19.
30 See p. 168 above.
31 Hans Sedlmayr, "The Synthesis of the Arts in Rococo," in the
catalogue of the exhibition, The Age of Rococo (München: Rinn,
1958), p. 26.
32 Jakob Balde, Dichtungen. Lateinisch und Deutsch. Ed. and tr. Max
Wehrli (Köln und Olten: Hegner, 1963). See Hubensteiner, Vom
Geist des Barock, pp. 159-172.
33 Balde, Dichtungen, pp. 117-18.
34 My translation is indebted to Wehrli's German translation (pp.
92-95). In my selection of these three stanzas 1 follow Hubensteiner.
35 Sedlmayr, "Synthesis of the Arts in Rococo," p. 26. 36 Friedrich
Ohly, "Die Geburt der Perle aus dem Blitz," Schriften
zurmittelalterlichen Bedeutungsforschung (Darmstadt:
WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft,1977), pp. 274-311.
37 A. A. Barb, "Diva Matrix," Warburg Journal 16 (1953): 205-7.
Chapter 7. Rococo Church and Enlightenment
1 The text in Norbert Lieb, Münchener Barockbaumeister. Leben
und Schaffen in Stadt und Land (München: Schnell &
Steiner, 1941), p.11.
2 Benno Hubensteiner, Bayerische Geschichte (München: Pflaum,
n. d.), pp. 233-37
3 See Richard Benz, Deutsches Barock. Kultur des achtzehnten
Jahrhunderts, part 1 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1949),pp. 307-40.
4 Dorette Hildebrand, Das kulturelle Leben Bayerns im letzten Viertel
des 18. Jh. im Spiegel von drei bayerischen Zeitschriften. Miscellanea
Bavarica Monacensia, vol. 36 (München, 1971), p. 19.
5 Hubensteiner, Bayerische Geschichte, p. 238.
6 See Georg Hager, "Die Bauthätigkeit und Kunstpflege im
Kloster Wessobrunn und die Wessobrunner Stuccatoren," Oberbayerisches
Archiv 48(1893-94): 195-521 and Hugo Schnell, "Die Wessobrunner
Baumeister und Stukkatoren," Wessobrunn (München,
Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1960) pp. 13-21.
7 See Hubensteiner, Vom Geist des Barock (München:
Süddeutscher Verlag, 1967), pp. 139-58.
8 Baur-Heinhold, Süddeutsche Fassadenmalerei vom Mittelalter
bis zur Gegenwart (München: Callwey, 1952) and Alois J.
Weichslgartner and Wilfried Bahnmüller, Lüftlmalerei
(Freilassing: Pannonia, 1977)
9 For a discussion of the Bavarian enlightenment see Hans Grassl,
"Münchener
Romantik," Der Mönch im Wappen, Aus Geschichte und Gegenwart
des katholischen
München (München: Schnell & Steiner 1960) pp.
223-360 and Richard van Dülmen, "Zum Strukturwandel der
Aufklärung in Bayern," Zeitschrift für bayerische
Landesgeschichte, vol. 36, no. 2, (1973 ): 662-79.
10 Anita Brittinger, Die bayerische Verwaltung und das volksfromme
Brauchtum im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, diss. München,
1938, p. 8.
11 Norbert Lieb, Barockkirchen, p. 111.
12 Hugo Schnell, Die Wallfahrtskirche Wies. Kunstführer,
Grosse Ausgabe, no.1, 10th ed. (München, Zürich:
Schnell & Steiner, 1960), p. 5.
13 Hugo Schnell, St. Martin/Garmisch. Kleine Führer, no. 20,
3rd. ed. (München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner,
1964), pp. 3-4.
14 Hugo Schnell, Bertoldshofen. Kleine Führer, no. 647
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1957),
pp. 3-4.
15 Fintan Michael Phayer, Religion und das gewöhnliche Volk in
Bayern in der Zeit von 1750-1780. Miscellanea Bavarica Monacensia, vol.
21 (München, 1971), pp. 20 ff.
16 Brittinger, Die bayerische Verwaltung, pp. 49-54
17 Ibid., p. 16.
18 Ibid., pp. 14-15.
19 As Phayer points out, the Bavarian state correctly saw the
incompatibility of Catholic baroque culture and capitalism. The
secularization of everyday life was a necessary condition of Bavaria's
entry into a recognizably modern world. An important part of this was
the secularization of sexual life. Toward the end of the eighteenth
century the traditional relation between property and children, which
forced a high degree of abstinence upon the impecunious, was inverted,
which invites an interpretation of the erotic character of the popular
rococo-think of the cult of the Virgin-as a sublimation of what one was
forced to repress. As a result of the Enlightenment these restraints
collapsed. The number of illegitimate children increased dramatically.
By the early nineteenth century from one-third to one-half of the
children are illegitimate. It should be noted that in Bavaria, at
least, the collapse of traditional morality appears not as a result,
but as a presupposition of industrialization. The spiritual revolution
here preceded the economic. See Religion und das gewöhnliche
Volk, pp. 105-44.
20 Schnell, Die Wies, p. B. According to Carl Lamb the words were
inscribed by Gilbert Michel, the last abbot of Steingaden, who retired
to Die Wies after the secularization had destroyed his monastery. Die
Wies (München: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1969), p.115.
21 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7th ed. (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1953), p. 410.
22 Brittinger, Die bayerische Verwaltung, pp. 43-44. Increasingly it is
no longer the village community that plays. The average person has
become a mere spectator.
23 Cited in Benz, Deutsches Barock, p. 315.
24 Cited from Gottsched's joumal Vernünftige Tadierinnen by
Benz in Deutsches Barock p. 235. See also Johann Christoph Gottsched,
Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1751), p. 740.
25 Benz, Deutsches Barock, p. 323.
26 Gottsched, Versuch, pp. 740-43
27 Hans Jakob Wömer, Architektur des Klassizismus
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1979),
pp. 79-109, and P. Schleich SJ., St. Blasien/Schwarzwald, Kleine
Führer, no. 555, 20th ed., (München, Zürich:
Schnell & Steiner, 1973).
28 Emil Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason (New York: Dover,
1968), pp. 130-34.
29 Quoted in Tintelnot, "Zur Gewinnung unserer Barockbegriffe," Die
Kunstformen des Barockzeitalters, ed. Rudolf Stamm (Bern: Francke,
1956), p. 14.
30 See Joseph Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the
Primitive Hut (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1972) pp. 43-48.
31 Cited in ibid., p. 44.
32 Ibid., pp. 49-51
33 Cited in Bauer, Rocaille: Zur Herkunft und zum Wesen eines
Ornament-Motifs (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962), pp. 63-64. This section
depends an Bauer's searching analysis.
34 Ibid., pp. 42-45.
35 John Canaday, Embanled Critic (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy,
1962), p. 107.
36 Bauer makes this "micromegalic structure" constitutive of rocaille
and relates it to the way the rococo plays with the different modes of
reality that belong to omament and picture. Such play creates the
impression of "an irony, that in the final analysis is a play with the
possibilities of art, with art pure and simple." Rocaille, p. 21.
37 Ibid., pp. 56-57 and 66-68.
38 Applied to the work of engravers like Crusius or Nilson Bauer's
analysis of the aesthetic character of this art is completely
convincing. More questionable is its extension to the omament of the
rococo church. Still, we cannot deny that again and again its omament
carries the rococo church to the threshold of aestheticism.
39 Bauer, Rocaille p. 42.
40 Extensive excerpts of the text ibid., pp. 65-66.
41 Ibid., p. 52.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., pp. 53-55.
44 See p. 195 above. Ornamental engravings from the thirties and
forties carry the same association, although spring is here tied to
Venus rather than to the Virgin. Designs by jacques de Lajoue, Jean
Mondon fils, and Frangois Boucher offer good examples.
45 Bauer, Rocaille, p. 63.
Chapter 8. The Disintegration of the Rococo Church
1 See Hans Jakob Wömer, Architektur des
Frühklassizismus in Süddeutschland (München,
Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1979), pp. 112-15 and
plates 56-59.
2 Jakob Mois, Die Stiftskirche zu Rottenbuch (München: Schnell
& Steiner, 1953), pp. 55-62.
3 Fürstenfeld was declared structurally unsound, and closed.
To save demolition costs cannons were assembled an a nearby hill. Only
the initiative of the citizens of Bruck saved the church. See Lorenz
Lampl, "Zur Geschichte von Fürstenfeld," 700 Jahre
Fürstenfeld, Kunstführer, Grosse Ausgabe. no. 39
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1963),
p. 28.
The events at Marienberg paralleled those in Rottenbuch. Here, too, a
judge fought for the destruction of the church with a zeal that today
is difficult to understand. The opposition of the local population led
to the imprisonment of fourteen men. Only a visit by Crown Prince
Ludwig finally assured the survival of the church. See M. Jordan,
Marienberg (Neuburg: Oefele, n. d. ), p. 6. The desire to drag the
local population into a more enlightened age that filled Montgelas and
his officials made these very common occurrences.
4 Norbert Lieb, Hugo Schnell, J. Klem. Stadler, Wessobrunn: Geschichte,
Bedeutung. Führung, Kunstführer, Grosse Ausgabe, no.
13, 2nd ed. (München, Zürich: Schnell &
Steiner,1960).
5 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Rococo Architecture in Southem Germany (New
York: Phaidon, 1968), p. 165.
6 Norbert Lieb, Barockkirchen zwischen Donau und Alpen
(München: Hirmer, 1953), P. 134 and Hugo Schnell, Birnau am
Bodensee, Kunstführer, Grosse Ausgabe, no. 16, 2nd ed.,
(München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner 1955), p.
9.
7 While Hitchcock speaks of the "retardataire character of Goez's
frescoes," Schnell sees Goez as the rnost modern of the major artists
associated with Bimau. Like Lieb, he emphasizes that it was Goez who
decided the color scheme of the entire church. Credit for the interior
belongs at least as much to him as it does to Thumb or Feuchtmayer.
From Moravia, but a Bergmüller student, Goez carried the
decorative approach associated with Augsburg engravings (he was himself
well known as a creator of ornamental fantasies) into fresco painting.
The advanced rococo character and unusually high quality of his art is
shown by the frescoes he painted two years after Bimau in Schloss
Leitheim. They rank with the very best created by the Bavarian rococo.
8 Alfred Volkert and Hugo Schnell, Scheidegg-Allgäu, Kleine
Führer, no. 871 (München, Zürich: Schnell
& Steiner, 1967).
9 See Wümer, Architektur des Frühklassizismus, pp.
59-60, 129-31, 147-48, 260.
10 Ibid., pp. 60-63.
11 Kirchgrabner is documented as Palier; Giessl is usually listed as
the architect, an attribution that is strengthened by the fact that the
frescoes are by Christian Winck, who often collaborated with Giessl.
See Hermann Bauer and Bernhard Rupprecht, Corpus der barocken
Deckenmalerei in Deutschland (München: Süddeutscher
Verlag, 1976), p. 327.
12 Given the late date it is not surprising that the newly enlightened
church authorities in Munich refused to make funds available for side
altars, stuccoes, and frescoes. The charming late rococo decoration was
made possible by benefactors. See Joseph Vogt, Lippertskirchen. Kleine
Führer, no. 830 (München, Zürich: Schnell
& Steiner, 1965).
13 Wörner, Architektur des Frühklassizismus, pp.
146-148. Schwindkirchen is once again by Giessl. Maria Dorfen and
Albaching are the work of Matthias Rösler. Wörner
mistakenly attributes the former to Giessl.
14 As already mentioned, the Situation was different in Austria, where
one was less willing to accept the impossibilities so characteristic of
the Bavarian rococo fresco. See Hermann Bauer, Der Himmel im Rokoko.
Das Fresko im deutschen Kirchenraum des 18. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg:
Pustet, 1965), p. 55. Perhaps it is worth noting that Zimmermann's
fresco in Die Wies preserves a trace of landscape with the setting it
provides for the gate of eternity.
15 Bauer, Der Himmel im Rokoko, pp. 65-711.
16 Elfriede Schulze-Battmann, Baitenhausen. Kleine Führer, no.
923, (München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner
1969).
17 Ibid., p. 3.
18 Arthur Rümann, Schlüssel zur unbekannten Heimat
(München: SüddeutscherVerlag, 1962), pp.17477
19 P. Norbert Backmund O. Praem., Prämonstratenserabtei
Windberg, Kleine Führer, no. 473, 2nd ed., (München,
Zürich: Schnell & Steiner, 1963).
20 Valentin Niedermeier and Bernhard Schütz,
Hörgersdorf, Eschlbach. Oppolding, Kleine Führer, no.
934 (München, Zürich: Schnell & Steiner,
1970). See also Josef Blatner, "Barock und Rokoko," Im Zeichen des
Pferdes: Ein Buch vom Landkreis Erding (Erding, 1963).
Conclusion
1 Hans Reuther, Die Kirchenbauten Balthasar Neumanns (Berlin: Hessling,
1960) and Christian F. Otto, Space Into Light: The Churches of
Balthasar Neumann (Cambridge: The Architectural History Foundation and
M.I.T. Press, 1979), pp. 88-92. See also Neumanns parish church in
Gaibach.
2 Hugo Schnell, Kloster Reisach am Inn, Kleine Führer, no.
154, 6th ed. (München, Zürich: Schnell &
Steiner, 1978).
3 Hans Sedlmayr, Die Revolution der modernen Kunst (Hamburg: Rowohlt,
1955,
pp. 46-48 and Bauer, Rocaille, p. 74.
4 Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime," Programs and Manifestoes an
zoth-century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, tr. Michael Bullock
(Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1975), p.22.
5 Hermann Broch, "Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit," Essays, vol. 1
(Zürich: Rhein, 1955), p. 44
6 Summa theologiac I-II, 102, art 4, reply.
7 Fischer's use of columns in Diessen offers a good example. See p. 165
above.
8 Emil Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason: Baroque and
Post-Baroque in England, Italy, France (New York: Dover, 1968), p. 91.
See also Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the
History of Taste (New York: Norton Library, 1974), p. 159
9 Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason, p. 141. The shift from
patterns of subordination to patterns of coord(nation provides a key to
the change in aesthetic sensibility in the late eighteenth century: It
can be traced not only in architecture, but in the other arts as well.
It found its philosophical justification in Kant's rejection of
Baumgartens analysis of the beautiful in terms of perfection (where
perfection implies the governing role of a theme or purpose to which
the different parts of an aesthetic object are subordinated), for which
he substituted his own analysis of the beautiful as "purposiveness
without a purpose."
10 Loos, Programs and Manifestoes, pp. 19-24.
11 Ibid., p. 21.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 24.
14 See Hermann Broch, "Der Zerfall der Werte," Essays, vol. 2, pp. 5-43.
15 Immanuel Kant, e.g., discusses architecture as an essentially impure
art. See Critique of Judgment, tr. j. H. Bernhard (New York: Hafner,
1951), par. Si, p. 166.
16 See Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason, p. 266, n. 439,
where he discusses the relationship of Sedlmayr's work to his own. Also
pp. 110-67 and Sedlmayr, Der Verlust der Mitte (Berlin: Ullstein, 1959)
and Die Revolution der modernen Kunst, pp. 46-48.
17 Frank Stella, quoted by Bruce Glaser, "Questions to Stella and Judd"
Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York:
Dutton, 1968), pp. 157-58.
18 Ibid. , p. 158.
19 Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Minimal Art, pp. 146-47.
20 Ibid., p. 146.
21 Ibid., p. 145.
22 Ibid., p. 147.
23 Kant, Critique of judgment, par. 16, p. 66.
24 Ibid.
25 Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 34.
26 Ibid., pp. 40-47, and the catalogue of the exhibition Adolf Hoelzel:
Aufbruch zur Moderne, 1 April - 1 June, 1980 in the Museum Villa Stuck
in Munich.
27 Arthur Rümann reports that Gabriele Münter told
him of Kandinsky's interest in the curious painted marbling father and
son Zellner created in several churches near Erding. See
Schlüssel zur unbekannten Heimat (München:
Süddeutscher Verlag, 1962), p. 177 and p. 304. (See fig. 150
of this book.) It would indeed have been curious if artists like
Endell, whose work was condemned for its "rococo" character, had not
been intimately familiar with the work of the Bavarian rococo.
28 Clement Greenberg, "Recentness of Sculpture," Minimal Art, p. 185.
29 See especially Kant's discussion of the "Ideal of Beauty" and of
"Beauty as the Symbol of Morality." Critique of judgment, pars. 17 and
59.
30 Even Kant considered this figural understanding of beautiful nature
a fact
requiring interpretation. His own interpretation relies an the analogy
between
aesthetic judgment and moral feeling, although he is quite aware that
his account
"seems far too studied to be regarded as the true interpretation of
that cipher through which nature speaks to us figuratively in her
beautiful form? (Critique of Judgment, par. 42, p. 143)
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