THE STAIRCASE OP BRUCHSAL
is the newel staircase elongated into an oval shape (Madcrna in-
cidentally kept to this in the Barberini Palace (fig. 63)). The
Baroque -of the iyth century,- especially in France, enriched the
current types (see p. 177). That of the Escorial became in many
variations the hall-mark of princely magnificence. Neumann's
Wtirzburg staircase with its Tiepolo paintings belongs to it.
But the staircase at Bruchsal is unique. Words can hardly re-
evoke the enchanting sensation that one experiences in walking
up one of its two arms. They start in the rectangular vestibule.
After about ten steps one enters the oval. On the ground floor
it is a sombre room, painted with rocks in the rustic manner of
Italian grotto imitations. The staircase itself then unfolds between
two curved walls, the outside wall solid, that on the inside opened
in arcades through which one looks down into the semi-darkness
of the oval grotto. The height of the arcade openings of course
diminishes as the staircase ascends. And while we walk up, it grows
lighter and lighter around us, until we reach the main floor and a
platform the size of the oval room beneath. But the vault above
covers the larger oval formed by the outer walls of the staircase. Thus
the platform with its balustrade separating it from the two staircase
arms seems to rise in mid-air, connected only by bridges with the
£wo principal saloons. And the vast vault above is lit by many
windows, painted with the gayest of frescoes and decorated with a
splendid fireworks of stucco. The spatial rapture of the staircase is in
this decoration transformed into ornamental rapture. It culminates
in the cartouche over the door leading into the Grand Saloon (pL
ixxvn). The cartouche is not Neumann's design. It is by a Bavarian
stuccoist, Johann Michael Feichtmayr. The contract was made in
1752. These Bavarian stuccoists nearly all came from the same
village of Wessobrunn, where boys were as a matter of course
trained to become proficient in stucco work, just as the decorators
of Romanesque churches so often came from certain villages round
the North Italian lakes, the makers and vendors of plaster-of-
Paris statuettes in the ipth century from Savoy, and the onion-men
of to-day from Brittany. Feichtmayr travelled about from job to
job, and, when he worked for a monastery, still received wages and
board just as the workmen did seven hundred years ago. Neumann
must have met him on some job and have recognised his immense
-wealth of ornamental inventiveness. He appears at Vierzehnheiligen
as well as at Bruchsal. In his stucco ornament not one part is sym-
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