Volume 30, Number 18 · November 24, 1983
The Last Ornament?
By Joseph Rykwert
The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism
by Karsten Harries
Yale University Press, 282 pp., $37.50
We all know a piece of rococo when we see it. Paul Morand, nastily but accurately, wrote about a grande dame of his day, 'buried in pink pillows and lace, sick with a stalactitic cold,' and complained that 'even her colds are rococo.' His readers of the 1920s would have had no difficulty in recognizing the style from the symptoms: soft pillows and pastel shades, lace and stalactites and great ladies—all the expected ingredients appeared in Morand's gibe, and it was always associated with the Paris of those two great ladies, Pompadour and du Barry.
Review, 3453 words
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