 Today we're going to move north and talk about the Baroque in Central Europe, and particularly we're going to talk about how the legacy and the spatial devices of Guarino Guarini were received in a Northern climate. Baroque manifests itself in different ways in different countries. In Italy we saw that the Baroque was an extension of the classical language of architecture and it gained its characteristic expression through these elaborate counter-puntle incatenations of different rhythms, different surfaces, different ideas about how an articulation or an order was marked. And as we went farther north, and farther north could even mean Turin, the Turin of Guarino Guarini, the language became less knowable from the point of view of classical sources and more and more particularized, often based on the superposition of different forms that resulted in a kind of weird looking form that could be traced back to some kind of provenance, but tended to be curvilinear and almost vegetal in the way forms unfolded, like leaves or like vines. And as you continue moving north, particularly moving north into Bavaria, let's say, or moving north into Austria, this predilection for vegetal forms or for the asymmetrical and the curvilinear begins to take over, so much so that all memory of the tectonic is more or less lost or at least suppressed by the time we get to the Rococo. As we mentioned last time, Guarini's work found very little resonance in Italy. People returned back toward a more conventional classical language, architects like Yuvarra, for example, exemplify that return toward a language of classical architecture. Let's look at this drawing that we showed last time, which is more or less a field of circles. It's a strange idea for a plan, but in many ways the space that Guarini operates in is an extensible field of potentialized circles that can be activated upon as a single center that then begins to sponsor a elaborated perimeter, or it can be acted on in a serial fashion so that longitudinal churches can be shaped out of the intersection and the overlap of domed spaces. For example, here in Santa Maria della Divina Providenza in Lisbon, we see an example of the latter strategy, the strategy adopted for longitudinal churches, a center, a center, a center, a center, and even the perimeter becomes a series of ovalized spaces, as if they somehow genetically derive from the centric space. We also saw that Guarini played fast and loose with the language of architecture. If we look at the section here, we'll see the repertoire of forms are not things that could have been pulled from an archeological visit to the Roman Forum, things like little classical addicules, even simple geometric forms derived from a platonic idea about what counts as ideal, squares, circles, rectangles with ideal proportional systems, but instead these two seem to be free form and driven by some kind of idea about either natural form or the superimposition of different forms that yield something complex. It's also possible to say that some of the oddness of Guarini's work comes from the fact that Guarini in many ways is the most modern character that we've looked at so far. Unlike other provincial architects whose work was really limited to say Tuscany if they're a Florentine, or Lazio if they're a Roman, or if they're an exceptional character like Alberti, maybe moving up and down a couple of hundred miles in either direction, but Guarini traveled far and wide as a papal legate and has built work all over, in Portugal, in France, in Bohemia, in Sicily, in northern Italy, and so some of the images that get folded into Guarini's work are surprising. For example here we see a kind of eclecticism coming into play where Islamic sources such as the Mirjad dome and the great mosque of Cordoba could have been used to inform something like Guarini's dome at San Lorenzo in Turin. We see this overlapping interlacing eight-pointed star of ribs that reminds us very much of what we saw in Cordoba, with the exception that Guarini is structurally more risk-taking than the architects in Cordoba, and he begins to pull his dome toward the vertical and make possible elaborate perforation to let light rake in. There's a sense of awe, there's a sense of the overwhelming quality of a space that cannot be understood rationally in Guarini's work, and it seems as though some of that is coming from his ability to examine and fold in certain values that one would get from Islamic and Gothic sources, the idea of the rib, the idea of the basket weave, the idea of pattern that becomes three-dimensional and becomes inundated with light. We see here the dome of his space is a paraboloid. When we move north, some of the impulses we already saw in Guarini really take a final form, or at least become documentable. This is a work by Fischer von Erlach, Austrian, and it's got a fancy German title, which basically means treatise on historical architecture. This is a funny title. When we were looking at the Renaissance there was a certain obsession you might say with a historical, but it was a very focused idea of history. History was something that could be retrieved by looking at classical antiquity, and classical antiquity was solely contained on Roman soil. They didn't even look at Greece, they looked at Roman antiquity as the source from which the truths could be pulled. And suddenly Fischer von Erlach, at the beginning of the 18th century, is writing a treatise and looking at as many different historical architectures as possible. He's looking far and wide, and it's not that he's necessarily traveled to these places. To a large extent Fischer von Erlach's understanding of historical architecture comes from literary descriptions, literary descriptions that are being sent back by missionaries like Jesuit priests, literary descriptions from old sources like Herodotus. And so we find things, okay, lots of temples, even exotic-looking temples, but even things that seem really unbelievable, at least unbelievable in terms of the kinds of sources architects were looking at before, the colossus of roads. I don't know if it was really a giant man holding in his lap a little village, the temple of Diana at Ephesus. This is still sort of classical, but look over here. Over here we have the temple of Olympian Zeus, which you might say Fischer von Erlach got wrong in so far as there would not have been a barrel vault in a Greek structure. However, here we see something quite unusual. It's a little pagoda, and this is not the only example of a little pagoda in the works of Fischer von Erlach. Here we have four Chinese views, pagoda, a gateway, and some amazing landscapes. Look at this bridge, look at this rockery. The repertoire of possibilities is increasing, and also if you see things like the twisted form of this rockery, it is not so very symmetrical, is it? The idea that natural form and the variability of natural form could become a source if not for building planning, that at least for ornament, is an opportunity introduced by this wide-ranging eclecticism, or at least this wide-ranging engagement with history, ushered in by Fischer von Erlach. Pyramids, nice. Agia Sophia, big pagoda in Nanjing. So what Fischer von Erlach is doing with his treatise on historical architecture is really opening up a level playing field, and saying when we look for precedent, it's no longer the case that there is only one source that we can look at. It's no longer the case that the architecture of classical antiquity is privileged above all other architectures, but rather we can be eclectic. We can pull, we can put together, we can pick a choose, we can make new things happen based on the meanings we want to express. Let's see how this translates into Fischer von Erlach's own work. Here we have the Karl's Kirche. This is Fischer von Erlach's most famous church, his most important church, and it's a church on the outskirts of the city walls of Vienna. It was built to commemorate the end of a plague, but it was also built to commemorate the triumph of the Austrian forces against the forces of the Ottoman Empire. The forces were at the very gates of Vienna, and a siege took place there for a long period of time. Have you ever wondered why you drink coffee? Have you ever wondered why you eat croissants? Well, to a large extent, that has to do with this moment in history when the Turks were at the gates of Vienna, and if you're being besieged by a Turkish army, you get very sleepy, and you smell this delicious thing that the Turks are drinking, and you think, oh, I want some of that. So coffee drinking was initiated at this period as something common in Europe, although it had caught on in the Middle East before, and also croissants were cooked by the bakers of Vienna, or at least so it is said, these little crescent-shaped pastries that were the symbol of the Ottoman Empire, the crescent, and when you ate the crescent-shaped pastry, you were symbolically vanquishing your foe by devouring its symbol, and it makes a delicious breakfast. Let's look at the architecture of Fisher von Erlach. It's a strange plan, isn't it? You look at this thing, and you have to say, wow, it barely hangs together. We see here something like a wall almost completely detached from the volume of the building. If you think about the particular site of this building at the edge of the city of Vienna, it makes a lot of sense that it would have a plan like this. It's a billboard really seen from far away, though it projects its image in a rhetorical Baroque fashion. We know the façade doesn't necessarily need to adhere to the building, but this is the most extreme detachment that we've seen yet. The façade of the building seems to completely detach from the volume of the building, and this is something we've seen in the Roman Baroque, particularly in works by Borromini, where the detachment and slippage of the façade from the volume of the building seems to be thematic. Here in the case of Fisher von Erlach, it really seems as though there's an interest in pumping this thing up to the biggest scale possible, so that from within the walls of Vienna, you can look back at this and you read it in all its glory. It does seem like a kind of eclectic assortment of pieces, even more radically eclectic than the pieces at Juvares la Superga. For example, okay, we have ourselves a little classical temple, we have ourselves a Roman Baroque dome, but what are these things? What do these things look like? Any takers? Yes. They look exactly like Trajan's columns. Trajan only had one. Now we have two. So what does it look like when you have two tall pointy things flanking a religious building? It kind of looks like minarets. It kind of looks like they're taking another symbol of vanquished foe and claiming it as their own. So with these Trajanic columns that are now not talking about Trajan's conquests, but the victory over the Turks, they're kind of modeling the Turkish architecture of minarets and making it their own. If you look at the plan, it seems really kind of similar to the strategy that we saw in La Superga. And that is you take a nine square grid and you begin to just explode the thing or you begin to disembowel the nine square grid in such a way that pieces individuate themselves and take on different qualities. We have some idea of an ideal condition over here and a displaced cell over here and then a kind of marker of an edge that's completely moved away from volume and become surface. The plan is almost more schizophrenic in its collection of different types and different sources than the elevation where we see the façade pull forward almost as an autonomous billboard behind which the church exists. And it's kind of interesting to look at, say, Fischer von Erlach's Karlskirche versus Boramini's San Carlo alle Quatro Fontane. In both cases, there's the superposition of an oval and a cross and in the case of the Boramini, there's still this Roman Baroque impulse towards synthesizing, toward taking these complex forms and forging a new thing. In the case of San Carlo alle Quatro Fontane, a squashed ovalized jelly bean. But a thing, these undulating surfaces that connect everything together. Here it seems like Fischer von Erlach is happy to let you see the dissonance in the system, happy and in fact insistent that you read the different symbols and that there can be no confusion about the fact that this is a sign of the church, this is a sign of the great vault of heaven, this is a sign of the cross and so forth. All of these symbols are autonomous and superimposed and legible. The plan is also incredibly eclectic or let's say the plan is a superposition of multiple plan types. On one level we see centralized church, but this is a centralized church that has been extended in a longitudinal way. We also see here centralized church superimposed by cruciform church. Now in the case of Roman Baroque we had a similar idea that an ovalized church plan and a cruciform plan were superimposed, but in that case there was a synthesis into a new form. It seems here as though Fischer von Erlach is happy to allow you to see the disruption or the disjunction between these different forms and you might even say it's a serial cruciform plan of a cross and a cross and a cross and a cross as you move back through this church along the axis into the various spaces, forms that are derived from chinoiserie, from Chinese sources, from Portugal. The section is really great, it's a really really tall church. This Baroque trick of a large drum to elevate the dome as high as possible so it can be seen at a great distance is going on here too. So too is the technique of a double dome where a dome with a fairly shallow slope is perceived from the underside and a taller slope is perceived from above. What's really cool about the dome is that for the last let's say seven years or so they've been restoring the fresco painting on the ceiling and you can climb up the scaffolding actually you can take an elevator up to the top of the scaffolding and walk on this little rickety surface 10 feet underneath or even less underneath the surface of the dome and see the frescoes close up. If you ever go to Vienna it's something you absolutely should do because at a certain point you start taking for granted the fact that there are paintings up on the ceiling but in fact it's a miracle that there are paintings up on the ceiling. It's a miracle in several senses. One people have to be way up there painting them and two people have to play with perspective in really precise ways to allow those images to be perceived from a very low vantage point and to still make sense and let's even say three painting things on a curved surface is different from painting things on a flat surface so there is a virtuoso of perspectival space being depicted on these things and at the Karlskirche in Vienna you have a chance to appreciate that. Magnificent. In Fischer front airlocks Karlskirche we still get something that seems fairly closely related to the Roman Baroque in terms of its plasticity in terms of the clarity of what the pieces are we can call this a Corinthian plaster we can call this a pediment we can call this a niche carved into the wall as we move farther into this period the language becomes increasingly less plastic. Let's look at another building by Fischer front airlock or rather let's look at a palace and the palace gardens of Schloss Schönbrücken in Vienna. Schloss by the way is just the German word for country palace it's sometimes translated as castle but I don't think that does a very good job because this is certainly not fortified this is not some kind of castle clothes used for protection but rather it is a country palace of leisure out in the gardens and more about opening itself up to the landscape than hunkering down as one would think a castle might do. By now we're familiar with this kind of plan the plan of Baroque palace the essential lineaments of the Baroque palace plan are to make this strong difference between figural void at the point of entry courtyard and figural object addressing the axis of the garden by this point everybody who's trying to be Louis the 14th everybody is trying to do a little Versailles and here Fischer front airlock at Schloss Schönbrücken is no different look at the axis wham moving down moving down into space but not simply moving down into space this idea of displaced center the idea of constantly fixing you and reorienting you to the point that you've been at before is played out here quite systematically this is the garden facade of the Schloss Schönbrücken we're looking down an axis connecting it into the city of Vienna magnificent notice how the building begins to pavilionize a little chunk of it pops out to address the garden axis and even the corners begin to individuate themselves with their own rhythm of columniation and their own expression and separation from the wall of the building is this little element which you can barely see here and it's marked here in plan it's called the glori at and it's almost like a wall of the castle the wall of the Schloss that's been pulled into the garden so if you have a desire to think that there's a kind of deformation of tugging pulling along the axis the bar bends up pulls along the axis and even that bar bends up and pulls along the axis there's incredible tension between the glori at which is the dimension of this facade and this facade as you see a piece of the building hurled into the landscape hurled into the landscape in a transparent way so that rather than terminating your view it allows the view to pass through great also notice this this is quite a chakaroo this is an interior from Schloss Schönbrücken and look at the language here this is quite a different language than the language we saw even at the Karl's Kirche because one of the things that the Baroque does is continues the program of classical language although in a more highly concatenated elaborated fashion and one thing that classical architecture does is articulate and express the tectonic system of the building tectonic system of course means the constructional system the constructional logic of the building a lot of classical ornament is aimed at showing you the constructional logic is we can see that in the glori at we can see columns we can see arches and we understand this elaborated moment of the column capital in the imposed block as having to do with providing sufficient structure for this system if we look down here at this interior space it seems as though the ornament is more aimed at obscuring connection rather than revealing connection this gold leaf curly q or malou stuff begins to creep above the cornice and creep down in a way that seems like a veil or a layer of disguise that the architecture is wearing even the idea of the wall seems less about plasticity and carving and more about framing and flattening there are these exaggerated frames that seem to say the wall is no different from a picture hung on the wall here's another interior from schloschenblum and we can see this same language that we saw in that earlier view the idea of the flattening the idea of the disguise of the ornamental properties through these gratuitous asymmetrical curly cues that go on everywhere this is the beginning of a moment that we might call rococo more about that later just want to show you one more fabulous early 18th century building in vienna and this is upper belvedere palace really not so far from carls kirche also outside the historical city wall very dramatic pavilionization of center pavilionization of corner and it's quite a narrow quite a small palace and it gets its grandeur by really pumping up the scale of certain moments like look at the stair great this is kind of guarini asked or something like that where a dome begins to detach itself from a rectangular space and coagulate in the middle so that you can simultaneously read the rectangular volume of the room and the ovalized volume of the dome in the center there's also this great moment in the stairs where you have these giant herms these human figures trapped in stone holding up the vaults magnificent a lot of this shift in language as we move into the 18th century has been given a name and the name is rococo rococo is one of those style names like baroque or like gothic that was originally applied in a pejorative sense to say uh what is this stuff rocari the french word for rococo means shall work rococo represents this kind of shall work everything looks curly kiwi like a shell everything looks decorative not so much about structure more about ornament for the sake of ornament in the history of the word rococo is this idea that it is purely decorative purely additive purely frivolous a couple of terms to note one is the word stucco and stucco has to do with this plaster work i mean stucco is plaster quite frankly but in the 18th century in in northern countries germany austria bohemia stucco plaster work as a method of architectural ornament became highly developed and we see some of it here in the upper belvedere palace where all of this kind of elaborated surface decoration comes again not through structure but through something which is by its very nature secondary adhered to a different material and that is the plaster the stucco by stucco i mean it's not real material it's not stone it's not marble it's not even wood it's just all surface and stucco has the potential to be smooth or to be frothed up into a pink little angel it's all the same material also you have the idea of the fresco we saw the fresco when we were looking at renaissance and baroque architecture in italy we saw it in the sistine chapel we saw it in the barberini palace with a magnificent pietro da cortona frescoed ceiling and we see it here too as cello aperto as an open ceiling where the fresco work typically takes as its point of departure the notion of extending the architectural space of the room michelangelo's sistine chapel is very clear about the ontological distinction between paintings on the ceiling and the space of the chapel below but already in pietro da cortona's barberini chapel there's a blurring there's a sense that the room is opening up and people are flying up out of the space of the room these painted corners directly spring from similar elements on the architecture and it is this impulse that gets carried forward in the idea of the rococo fresco here at schoenblum we have people standing on the corners and then rising up to heaven there's a lot of fake perspective going on here there are certain vantage points where everything makes sense and other vantage points where nothing makes sense worth mentioning is another building type which is common in northern places and that's the wall pillar church different typology it's an eyeless tunnel vaulted church with internal buttresses connected by small transverse tunnel vaults springing up at the same level as the main vault some other terms here are tectonic versus a tectonic and we discussed this a little bit earlier tectonic it's core word in the middle of architecture this tect stuff has to do with putting the pieces together and kind of clearly revealing the system of putting the pieces together so tectonic reveals the constructional logic a tectonic a means not doing that it's sort of like tectonic not to put it in the language of uks is that makes sense to you whatever not at the end of it and the a is baffling if something like the pantheon is tectonic because we see the structural system we see the joints we see how pieces relate then something like a rococo interior becomes a tectonic because those pieces are all subsumed into the froth of a polychromatic stucco tectonic has to do with expressing the structural and constructional logic of the building a tectonic has to do with masking it this is a lovely picture this is a rococo lady painted by monsieur genre honoré fragonin look how fabulous she is she's so pink her color palette is the color palette of rococo architecture pastel colors lots and lots of lacy curly q things even a very lacy curly q dog there and also this image gives us a glimpse into what it is to be in the rococo period it's a period where society is shifting it's not simply a shifting of architectural styles during the rococo period certain architectural developments came into their own such as the corridor the idea that you might want to have privacy and not have everybody marching through your bedroom is a rococo invention these are just some nice things you would have if you were living at that time period crazy so you can see why this rocci shellwork idea came into play because it really seems as though even something as straightforward in its structural sense as the leg of a chair becomes elaborately voluted for for no apparent reason except for the reason of making ornament these are some historical ways of looking at rococo and as i said before it arose as a pejorative term as a way of somehow deprecating the qualities of this architecture the oed is the oxford english dictionary and if you're trying to find a dispassionate source that gives you just the facts the history of the word the definition of the word there is no more authoritative source than the oed and this is what it says having the characteristics of louis the 14th or louis the 15th workmanship such as conventional shell and scrollwork and meaningless decoration excessively florid or ornate so i would say the oed is not so dispassionate here the oed is taking a strong stand about this stuff and it's making judgments even arnold hauser who wrote a book on mannerism that really began to say this is not bad renaissance this is a different thing and the thing that it is is good states that rococo is the art of a frivolous tired and passive society and maybe he's right look at her she's ridiculous there is an early work on the rococo church that tries to individuate how it is something different from baroque the book by ruprecht it's quoted by a very interesting author called karsten harrys who's actually a philosophy professor at yale who becomes very very interested in the bavarian rococo the qualities that define rococo are a central space is formed illuminated mostly by indirect light the boundaries of the space remain indefinite traditional architectural forms are transformed isolated and displaced an ornamental stucco zone is placed between fresco and architecture and a point of view near the entrance is 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 one more term to introduce is the notion of gesamtkunstwerk great term german lots of syllables what could be wrong with that and gesamtkunstwerk means total work of art and this is something that arises in the baroque period and that becomes a recurring theme as we move into into modernity total work of art means architecture is a fusion of painting sculptural decorative arts and even music and this is a little detail from a monastic church zweifalten where you see the stucco work just going nuts angels pulling out of the curly cues angels climbing out of the paintings pulling up the drapery that this painted person is wearing so that they can climb out into the world this is really great stuff but also notice the asymmetry that this is not about articulating this is really about ornamenting in a very very different sense it's about the ornament becoming an autonomous thing developing its own themes and its themes almost are contrary to the clarity that one might expect in an architectural structure karsten harry's as a philosopher is interested in the bavarian rococo because he thinks it marks the last successful attempt to build churches as signs of the invisible church what he means by that is its architecture about a transcendental reference it's about something spiritual and not simply about the discourse of architecture the suggestion is that as you move even a few decades farther into history architecture becomes so involved with the eclectic project of pulling sources from different places of establishing meaning in architecture in a literary sense that it doesn't behave in such an unmediated way as the rococo did harry's continues to say the playful way in which the sign character is attempted shows that this is indeed a last attempt let me just show you this image because this is a fairly important image this is a drawing from the linguistics book by felonin de socios where he's talking about sign and signifier and for your convenience he's doing it in latin the word arbor is tree in latin the word aqueus is horse in latin the tree is the thing in the world and arbor is the word the horse is the thing in the world aqueus is the word he's suggesting that in the rococo period there is still some immediate connection between the sign and the signifier a third element has not come in to break that kind of clarity now let's look at balthus our neumann and neumann i think could probably better be characterized as late baroque than rococo because neumann is still interested in the tectonics of the architecture the expression of plasticity but he's moving away from that toward this more decorative attitude about ornament balthus our neumann he's so important he's on the money or at least he used to be on the money this is an old 50 mark note with balthus our neumann's picture on it and this is the back side of that where we have a number of his plans i think his most spectacular church is a pilgrimage church near wurzburg not so near wurzburg but let's you don't even know where wurzburg is but i'm trying to help you the pilgrimage church called fjord sain heiligen 14 saints and if you would like to call it 14 saints for my purposes that is fine if you like german you can call it fjord sain heiligen here it is and we're like a mile away or farther you know you can see it from from far far away it's a giant thing and as as you can see from these images the scale of the facade and the scale of the building volume behind it are not commensurate it the facade operates like the west work of agatha cathedral and by that i mean it becomes as large as possible to be seen from as far away as possible to become as rhetorical as possible and notice also from this partial plan noiman has been learning from the roman baroque or or maybe from the roman baroque as revisited through the eyes of guarino guarini there is this inner penetration of concave and convex volumes that synthesize together to give us an undulating facade as a point of comparison i want to show you again guarini's santa maria de la divina providenza in lisbon that we looked at before we have this strategy being used by guarini and producing a facade not so different from the undulating facade that we saw in the noiman church we have the strategy of shish kababing together spaces shish kababing together ovalized and convex spaces interpenetrating the spaces these are diagrams from christian norberg schultz by the way if we compare guarini's church over here with fjord sain heiligen by balthus our noiman we see that there is a lot of similarity guarini introduces the idea of the church plan as a latin cross comprised of serial domes serial ovalized domes and we get the same thing going on here a dome a dome a dome even the transept in both churches is developed as another opportunity to place domes in the space by the way programmatically fjord sain heiligen is a little bit different from many churches it's a pilgrimage church because there was said to have been a holy vision on the side of the church legend has it that in 1445 a shepherd was wandering in the fields belonging to a nearby cistern monastery and he saw a small child crying in the field when he went to pick up the child the child suddenly disappeared magically and a short time later he saw the child again this time with two candles burning next to him and again the child disappeared a year later he had his third and final sight in this time the child was there with a red cross and 13 other children and the children spoke to him saying we are the 14 holy helpers we would like you to help us and erect a chapel on this site for us and if you help us we will help you they built the chapel and suddenly there were recoveries and cures for horrible diseases and from that point forward it became an important pilgrimage site please take note of this list because i'm sure all of you could benefit from someone to pray for when you have a headache or a sore throat or if you would like to keep your family safe from discord or someone to take care of your pets here's a reliquary a place to hold relics in the middle of the church you have these different domes being assigned quite different functions the dome for the altar the dome for the reliquary the dome well kind of kind of for the congregation it's not a parochial church so services don't happen quite in the same way people are moving around moving through a lot of things are similar in the two churches for example as we said plan typology system of serial domes similar but i would have to say much as i love guarini the noiman church spatially is more interesting i might say that because i've been to the noiman church and the guarini church fell in a earthquake in 1733 and nobody's been there lately but also i just would like you to look at the relationship between the space of the aisles and the space of the nave in both churches in the guarini church it's really clearly delimited you understand that you're in the aisles you understand that you're in the nave and there's no blurring it's really really clear here it is almost as though the structure for the central dome has pulled away from the walls and begun to give you a specialized figure within the volume of the church now in part this could be that there are different plan typologies at play there could be some idea of the wall pillar church here that invites noiman to conserve the rectangle of the building while simultaneously giving us a dome there could be some idea of the basilica plan here that invites guarini to be very clear about the idea of center and perimeter however the effect is that you walk in here and you feel like you can simultaneously experience the interior volume of the central dome and the exterior figure of the central dome this double double figureality it's something you really don't see until say high modernism this is an axonometric i find this extremely hard to read i hope you have more luck with it and what it's trying to show you is the way that this edge is developed and the edge is incredibly complex and how the series of vaults are developed what's so amazing about this church is that light pours in through this plenum on the side and the central figure is actually quite dark so you get this sense of a kind of glow further isolating and individuating the space of the nave from the space of the perimeter and here again we see things that we spoke about before the idea of the gizamt kunstwerk the playing together of all the different arts here are little pink angels crawling out of the pink angel land of the fresco here we see the steppe work asymmetrically masking the tectonic connection between this field that we know is hard to hold up but we have no knowledge of how it's done surface is held together by these little tendrils this is the reliquary in the center of the church quite spectacular and many of you by now are probably thinking that all the architectural ideas going on in neumann are really great but you just can't get get past the glop you think the glop is just overwhelmingly excessive and you just wish that there would be some way to appreciate this space without that that's because you don't know anything yet this is great glop look at the little angels they're getting off that ceiling they're getting off all over the place so one time i drove all the way to lichtenfeld's to see fjord saint heiligen and the church was under construction and so this is what i saw instead so if you'd like to imagine the space of fjord saint heiligen as a perfect translucent museum box here it is which is better you be the judge this is better this is one of the domes at the transept where it really coagulates away from the space of the nave and becomes its own element with its own center one reason that i'm suggesting that we call neumann late baroque is that the orders are still so clear and the tectonics are still so clear in spite of the fact that the structure of the dome becomes ambiguous and the play of the stucco work further veils the clarity here's a reflected ceiling plan this is the basic guts of the plan and this is what happens on the upper story where all of this elaborate work comes into play one more of all this are neumann church for your convenience this is an abbey church called narasheim which i think is great and again giant thing you can see it from far away with a facade detaching itself from the volume of the building and having this characteristic undulation derived from let's say san carlo ale quattro funtane or or guarini or both i really like this church because it's more monochromatic and it might be that they just didn't have as much money or because it was a monastic church they were trying to be less ostentatious but there's something about the whiteness of this church that i think lets you read the space better the polychromy at fjordstein heiligen gets in the way a long nave and an interesting idea about a latin cross plan putting the crossing of latin cross in the center so that you simultaneously have a centralized church and the latin cross church fabulous and it's a monastic church also so the notion that there would be extended spaces beyond the crossing makes sense in that typology here's the dome it's a really great illusionistic perspective taking the space of the church as a point of departure notice how some people are falling into the church and other people are rising up to heaven and these illusions only work from certain vantage points i might add here we are looking toward the organ and here we are looking toward the altar a lot of the qualities of this church are similar to the qualities at fjordstein heiligen that is to say we have this illuminated plenum of space that's washing the center with light from a source that we are slightly pulled away from and there's the thinnest space in here you can walk through it but just barely that gives you again the notion of domed figures floating inside of a hall church super similar again in this shish kebab of space neumann in the town of wortsburg also did a palace for the elector the residents that's what you call the palace a sedance one thing that i think is spectacular about it and as good as architecture gets is the stairway this is giant this the stairway takes up this entire space or you might even say takes up this entire space since you land here and start here here we go this is the entry piece right in here you move up the stair here's a landing you move up the stair here's a landing and you can also walk along the sides of it so it becomes theatrical it becomes like boxes in a theater that let you look down and watch different people move up through the space it's really quite amazing and another thing that's so great about the grand stair at the residence in wortsburg is that the ceiling painting is not done by some ordinary painter but rather by a very important painter kieh polo this is an example where you have all of the arts at the highest level you have neumann's stair orchestrating a procession that's incredibly intricate and you have tia polo ceiling painting looking at the plan typology this reminds us of things we've seen before pop it in get a court pop it out get a pavilion and allow the court to organize the relationship to the town and allow the pavilion to sponsor the development of an axis into a garden here's the stair and as you see the stair you can see the play of this cornice and these the pictorial elements within the space of the fresco one of my favorite moments is where the dog gets out of the painting and stands on the cornice or tired people stick their legs over on the cornice it's really really great we've seen this plan typology before we saw it for example as early as the barberini palace by materno in Rome where there is this kind of carving way of space for an entry and popping out of a volume at the far end garden facade and maybe this is a better section of the amazing space the amazingly theatrical space of the stair what makes it so amazing is the view through the space the view across the space you get these incredibly long views you get this sense of gaze sense of engagement with remote people or remote remote objects through the space this is some other moments within the vortsburg palace you see that spatial technique that we've seen before of a dome cohering in the middle of an orthogonal space and leaving this little plenum of light drenched space that surrounds the darker domed figure in the center and this is a chapel that neumann did attached to the residence in vortsburg it's the hofkapella it's what we've seen before right a dome and a dome and a dome a serialized dome that gives us this undulating ceiling plan and that gives us this separation of these figures within the rectilinear field however since it's the hofkapella since it's the royal chapel the materiality becomes more exuberant more expensive more elaborate and a lot of these beautiful rich fancy marbles are not really beautiful rich fancy marbles they're fake you have these illusionistic artists that not simply paint heaven on the ceiling but they also paint marble graining and wood graining and all kinds of elaborate material textures on on elements within the church next time we'll look at some more rococo churches like steinhausen by dominicus zimmermann