In listening to Prof. Robert Greenberg’s lessons on Bach and the High Baroque, recorded for The Teaching Company (a course I recommend most highly) this morning, I heard the following:
Indeed, the splendor and scope of much Baroque art stems from this particular, political purpose: to awe, impress and stupefy everyone with the power of the absolute monarch. One merely has to look at Versailles. ? Versailles is a political statement; more than a piece of architecture, it is This is my power. It’s the same thing of a Gothic cathedral ? the joy, the awesome beauty of a Gothic cathedral, when one walks in and looks heavenward to the ceiling way above, it’s still stunning today. Can we imagine in the 14th and 13th Centuries the stunning effect that these cathedrals had? They are a worldly refection of the awe and power of the God that they represent, but they’re also a political statement, because This is what we can do. And frankly, if I’m thinking of objecting to a church, if I’m thinking of being a rabble-rouser, and I walk into a building this size, I’m suddenly reminded of my puniness against the power of which I have no real ability to overpower.
So there’s a political agenda in this kind of architecture. We all know it to be true. Go to any capital city anywhere; there are not nice, pretty little buildings in a capital city, there are big, ugly, awesome buildings that remind us of the power that that capital represents.
What sprung immediately to mind was the capital city of North Carolina and its infamous “Pink Palace”:
