THE ART OF THE ASAMS
against all this glitter. Rohr was built in 1718-25, Weltenberg in
1717-21. They are early works of the Asams.
In their best later work they endeavoured to achieve more than a
Trasparente effect. Egid Quirin owned a house at Munich; when he
approached the age of forty he began to think of a monument that
he might proudly leave behind after his death. So he decided in 1731
to build on a site adjoining his house a church as his private offering.
The church was built from 1733 to about 1750 and dedicated to St.
John Nepomuk. It is a tiny church (pi. LXXI) less than thirty feet
wide, relatively tall and narrow with a narrow gallery all the way
round,-a-ground-floor altar and a gallery altar. The gallery balancing
on the fingers of pirouetting termini or caryatid angels sways for-
ward and backward, the top cornice surges up and droops down,
the colour scheme is of sombre gold, browns and dark reds, glistening
in sudden flashes where light falls on it, light which comes only from
the entrance, that is from behind our backs, and from concealed
windows above the cornice. The top east window is placed in such
a way that a group of the Trinity appears against it; God holding the
Crucifix, and the Holy Ghost above, the whole again surrounded
by angels—wildly fantastic, yet of a superb magic reality. What
raises St. John Nepomuk above the level of Rohr, Weltenberg and
the Trasparente is the co-operation of strictly architectural com-
position with the merely optical deceptions to achieve an intense
sensation of surprise which may turn easily into religious fervour.
But sensational it is all the same, sensational in a literal sense: no
artists before Bernini, the Asams and Tom6 have aimed at such
violent effects. And are they therefore debauched, unscrupulous and
pagan as our Pugins and Ruskins have made them out ? We should
not accept their verdicts uncritically, lest we might deprive our-
selves of a good deal of legitimate pleasure. We may indeed, up here
in the North, where we live, find it hard to connect Christ and the
Church with this obtruding physical closeness of presentation. To
the Southerner, in Bavaria, in Austria, in Italy, in Spain, where
people live so much more with all their senses, it is a genuine form
of religious experience. While in the North during the lifetime of
Bernini, the Asams and Tom6, Spinoza visualised a pantheism, with
God pervading all beings and all things, Rembrandt discovered the
infinite for painting in his treatment of light and his merging of
action into undefined but live background, and Newton and Leibniz
discovered it for mathematics in their conception of the calculus,
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