VIERZEHNHEILIGEN
crossing. The ktter are set diagonally so as to guide the eye towards
the splendid high altar—a decidedly theatrical effect.
This is one of the chief objections against such churches. Its
validity has already been queried. Besides, why did architects and
artists so fervently strive to deceive and create such intense illusion
of reality? What reality was the Church concerned with? Surely
that of the Divine Presence. It is the zeal of an age in which Roman
Catholic dogmas, mysteries and miracles, were no longer, as they
had been in the Middle Ages, accepted as truth by all. There were
heretics, and there were sceptics. To restore the first to the fold, to
convince the others, religious architecture had both to inflame and
to mesmerise. But, it is brought forward as another argument
against Baroque churches, that they seem worldly as compared with
the churches of the Middle Ages. Now it is true that the character
of Baroque decoration in a church and a palace is identical. But is
not exactly the same true of the Middle Ages? The idea behind the
identity is perfectly sane. By the splendour of the arts we honour a
king; is not supreme splendour due to the King of Kings? In our
churches to-day and in those churches of the Middle Ages which the
ipth century restored, there is nothing of this. They are halls with
an atmosphere to concentrate the thoughts of a congregation on
worship and prayer. A church of the Baroque was literally the house
of the Lord.
Still, there is no denying the fact that we, observers or believers,
never feel quite sure where in a church such as Vierzehnheiligen the
spiritual ends and the worldly begins. The ecstatic ilan of the archi-
tectural forms at large is irresistible, but it is not necessarily a religious
&,an. There was, it is true, a real mania in Southern Germany and
Austria between 1700 and 1760 for building vast churches and
monasteries. However, not all this building was done entirely ad
majorem Die gloriam. Did a monastery like Weingarten near the lake
of Constance really need these far-stretched, elegantly curved out-
buildings which appear in a rebuilding scheme of 1723 (fig. 74) ?
This scheme was never carried out; but others—e.g. at Klosterneu-
burg, St. Florian and Melk, all three on the Danube—were. Melk
was begun in 1702 by Jakob Prandtauer (died 1726); it is in many
ways the most remarkable of the three (pL ixxm), shooting up
out of the rocks, steep above the river. The church with its undu-
lating front, its two many-pinnacled towers and its bulbous spires
is set back. Two pavilions of the monastery buildings, housing the
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