Abstract

This essay contributes to the project of interpreting rococo ornament by demonstrating how the visual techniques of open-endedness, apparent incompleteness, and spatial complexity found inside one rococo church answer to a complex social network of institutional conflict over divinity and authority. The church in question is the Gardekirche, built in Vienna, Austria, between 1755 and 1763 by the Austrian-born Italian architect Nikolaus Pacassi. Through a close analysis of the church's ornamental program, this essay demonstrates that rococo ornament could and did harness semantic potentiality as a political tool. Although the rococo conveyed an openness of meaning to its viewers, that freedom was never infinite and it never granted the viewer total agency. The social relationships evoked in the Gardekirche's interior decoration routed its viewers along certain predetermined paths, while simultaneously giving them the conception, however misleading, of agency.

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