THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C. l6OO-£. 1760
metrical. The main composition is a zig-zag, from the alluring young
angel on the right, up to the cupid or cherub higher up on the left,
and up again to the cherub at the top. The forms in detail seem to be
incessantly changing, splashing up and sinking back. What are they ?
Do they represent anything ? Sometimes they look like shells, some-
times like froth, sometimes like gristle, sometimes like flames. This
kind of ornament is called rocaille in France, where it was invented
in the lyzo's by Meissonier, Oppenord and a few others of pro-
vincial or semi-Italian background. It has given the Rococo style
its name, and rightly so; for it is a completely original creation, not
dependent on anything of the past, as the ornament of the Re-
naissance had been. It is abstract art of as high an expressional value
as any that we are offered to-day so much more pretentiously.
Bruchsal with its perfect unity of space and decoration was the high-
water mark of the Baroque style. It was also its end. For only a few
years after it had been completed and Neumann had died, Winckel-
mann published his first books, initiating the Classical Revival in
Germany. Between Neumann's world and that of Goethe there is
no link. The men of the new world no longer thought in terms of
churches and palaces. No church designed anywhere after 1760 is
amongst the historically leading examples of architecture. Napoleon
built no palaces*
The English nobility, it must be admitted, did; right into the
Victorian age. But they had nothing of the unreflecting attitude of
the Baroque. This change from a style binding for all and understood
by all to a style for the educated only, did not take pkce in Germany
and Italy until 1760. In France and Britain it had come about earlier.
But then neither France nor Britain (nor the north of Germany,
Holland, Denmark and Scandinavia) had ever accepted the Baroque
withallitsimplications. Their world—it is in many respects the modern
world—is that of Protestantism. In Roman Catholic countries
mediaeval traditions lived and flourished down to the i8th century.
In the North the Reformation had broken that happy unity. But
it hadalso opened the way for independent thinking and feeling. The
Protestant countries (and one should include here the France of the
Galileans, Jansenists and Encyclopaedists) had created Puritanism,
Enlightenment, the modern predominance of experimental
science, and finally the Industrial Revolution in the material and the
symphony in the spiritual world. What the cathedral had been to
the Middle Ages, the symphony was to the ipth century.
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