Feudal Masterpieces
From Baroque to Rococo. By Nicholas Powell. (Faber, 50s.) Italian Villas and Palaces. By Georgina Masson. (Thames and Hudson, £4 4s.)
UNTIL a year ago the English reader had a far better chance of studying the arts of the Fiji Islands than some of the very greatest masterpieces of Euro- pean architecture—the palaces and churches of Austria and Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now at last a flood of books on these wonderful achievements seems to be on the way. Following Mr. Bourke's excellent guide to the Baroque Churches of Central Europe comes Mr. Powell's From Baroque to Rococo. The area covered is much the same, though Mr. Powell also discusses secular buildings and carries the story up to the beginnings of neo-classicism. His book will be of the greatest possible use both to students and travellers, but it is deliberately austere and concentrates exclusively on the architecture itself. Mr. Powell rightly refers to the extreme import- ance of symbolism and colour, but devotes only a rare glance to the equally vital cultural and social framework within which these buildings were designed.
Sooner or later we will have to tackle the problem of how such an astonishing architec- ture flourished at this time. And it is a most com- plex problem. The fantasy and brilliance of decorative, detail, which have so often in the past been quite wrongly taken to indicate frivolity, are in fact usually the outward manifestations of the most rigorous intellectual planning and in intricacy of religious symbolism unknown since the late Middle Ages. Extremely lavish architecture of this kind seems to flourish best in feudal conditions, where the curiously similar tastes of aristocrat and peasant can meet with no interference from the intellectual middle class. It is significant that when Leibnitz was told that the Emperor was planning to build a great library in Vienna he wanted only one thing, that the books should be accessible with- out his having to use a ladder—not a problem that worried the Emperor much. Considerations of this kind played little part in the courtly and mystical civilisation which developed out of that earlier 'economic miracle' which followed the ravages of the Thirty Years' War. While the Enlightenment was already well under way in France and England, South Germany was ruled by princes and monastic orders in a manner more like the fourteenth than the eighteenth century. The
• heavily taxed inhabitants of these regions can scarcely have appreciated their luck in having among their number some of the greatest of European architects--Balthasar Neumann, J. M. Fischer and many others. It is a pity that there are not more illustrations in Mr. Powell's book to give us a chance to appreciate the full measure of their greatness.
Italian Villas and Palaces looks at first sight like
one of those all too familiar books of hackneyed plates with scrappy notes on coloured blotting paper. But this impression is entirely misleading. The photographs are of the very highest quality and the notes are extremely informative. The range of buildings described and illustrated is very wide and includes some superb examples that are unobtainable elsewhere and that will be unknown to all but the most thorough experts.
FRANCIS HASKELL
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