Immersion Into Noise

Anti-Noise Vision of Linear Trompe l'oeil Perspective

The Renaissance is linked with the rediscovery of classical culture. Consequently, with the revived interest in antiquity came a new repertoire of Pagan subjects for art and this interest in Pagan matters facilitated the re-emergence of the grotto within the Renaissance pleasure garden.

Concurrent with the Renaissance pleasure grotto, however, is what came to dominate the Italian Quattrocento: the development of rational, linear point-perspective, the technical perspective rendering of a scene from one fixed and tapered eye-point. [200] As Robert Romanyshyn describes in his book, Technology as Symptom and Dream, linear perspective vision “achieves a kind of geometrization of the space of the world, and within that space we become observers of a world which has become an object of observation”. [201] This "objective" rendering, with its emphasis on the horizon-line and vanishing point, formed the pictorial ideals for painting and drawing, of course, but also it formed them for the Italian, French and German Renaissance garden itself. Walking into a Renaissance garden, such as the Ville d'Este, Château de Champs at Marne-la-Vallée, the Château de St. Germain-en-Laye, or any of the sumptuous gardens of the châteauxs of the Loire Valley (such as at Chambord, Blois, or Azay-le-Rideau), one has little question about the key values they amplified: human reason and power justified by a godly transcendence in reunion with classical antiquity. These values are articulated by what Romanyshyn sees as the central function of linear perspective, its “celebration of the eye of distance” which becomes elevated into a cognitive methodology. [202]

By looking over the orderly formal garden through a tightly focused perspective, a sense of visceral but distant scopic power becomes evident. Samuel Edgerton, in his The Renaissance Discovery of Linear Perspective, characterizes this focus as “a means for organizing the visible world itself into a geometric composition, structured on evenly spaced grid co-ordinates”. [203] Unfortunately, with geometric organization any sense of intimate sacred/aesthetic noise vision/contemplation is lost in favor of the metaphysics of scopic power. The strict formal gardens of the Renaissance represent a major step, then, in the domineering, framing and rectilinear boxing-in of noise vision, and a repression of the scope of immersive propensity which we have been exploring thus far. Worse, according to William Ivins, this repressing framing tendency moved “from its discovery or invention as a quasi mechanical procedure to a logical scheme or grammar of thought”. [204] Moreover, according to Norman Bryson in his Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, perspective thought followed the logic of the fixed gaze rather than the unstable and shimmering glance, thus yielding a visuality that was reduced to a settled and single point of view and in this sense the fabrication of linear perspective was, and is, anti-immersive and anti-noise in disposition. Romanyshyn supports Bryson's contention. [205] Clearly this reduction of our actual wobbly vision [206] into one absolute point of view can only be achieved by negating the beholders’ peripheral visual attention. Only by establishing the fiction of the viewer's partial absence and lack of glance can enthralment by fixed perspectivism be secured. [207] The perspectivist viewer is thus excluded from immersive participation in the art, held at bay as it were, and excluded in the interests of objectivity through the methods of exclusion and voyeurism. Correspondingly, the noisy world as seen by this immobile and atemporal gaze becomes stagnant, reified, fixated, inert and deadened.

In the Renaissance ideal of linear trompe l'oeil perspective, infinity, mathematics, and theology met on a unified plane whose grandeur and rational perfection symbolises a faraway, mighty and incomprehensible God. This perspectivist symbolization is explained in Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form as the ideal image of infinite distance. The theoreticians of the Renaissance went so far in pursuing this ideal as to expurgate Euclid, omitting from their translations his 18th theorem which was inconvenient to their theory of ocular perspectiva artificials. However, the theory of perspectiva artificialis not only shored up the Quattrocento religious ideal of a distant Godly infinity but, as a result, enhanced the detached spectator, who (like God) exists and observes distance now from afar by isolating and cutting ambient vision off at its edges and retracting it to a frame. Viewing through the Renaissance intentional window, the onlooker holds an exclusive singular viewpoint and hence space becomes geometrically isotropic and rectilinear. We now have a detached transcendental subject constructed by ignoring the optic characteristics of immersive noise space and by repressing peripheral attention to the encircling atmosphere.

But not only supposedly transcendental in its ideological origin, this rectilinear vision also represented a nascent scientific understanding of the world that motivated the dissecting of optical immersive space. [208] The fragmentation of the noisy immersive world is now underway as the geometric grid divides and subdivides sight and the world into smaller and smaller manageable portions. [209] Of course, the vast majority of media images (and most visual art) produced today still cleaves to this horizon-line based Quattrocento framing operation, as opposed to the immersive noise span where horizon and frame dissolution is desirable. The invention of photography, and the astounding rapidity with which it spread, is closely connected to the fact that perspective, and its specific corresponding intellectual configuration, had pervaded visual habit since the Renaissance. [210] Renaissance linear perspective however, it must be remembered, is only a convention which, as Panofsky argued, is a cultural attribute comprehensible only for a quite specific sense of space or perception of the world and definitely not an absolute perceptual truth. [211]

Though Christianity primarily shaped the ideology of the period, no solitary philosophy or ideology dominated the cerebral liveliness of the Renaissance. Interest in neo-Platonic theories, the occult, sorcery, and astrology were widespread even as the authoritatively endorsed subjugation of magic began during the Renaissance. At the same time, Renaissance proto-humanist scholars and critics proclaimed that their age had progressed beyond the brutality of the past and had found its inspiration, and its closest parallel, in the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. By the 15th century, intensive study of Greek as well as Latin classical history gave Quattrocento scholars a more sophisticated view of antiquity and eventually Renaissance ideology spread north of the Italian Alps to all the courts of Europe.

However, we must keep in mind that the high Renaissance style in art (created by primarily Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Donato Bramante, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphaël Sanzio, and Tiziano Vecellio Titian) endured for only a brief period, from about 1495 to 1520. To periodize, we can say that the High Renaissance ended when Mannerism began (about 1525) but this is only partly accurate, for all movements in European art up to J. M. W. Turner, [212] Impressionism, and particularly Paul Cézanne (1819–1877) depended on Renaissance spatial ideas, [213] a hegemony maintained for centuries by the widespread institution of the Art Academy.

One rare aspect of the art of the High Renaissance which has noise characteristics similar to those we previously saw in the Apse of Lascaux, is its search for a general, unified effect of sfumato composition, a smoky technique used for decreasing the separating dramatic force and physical presence of isolated figures in a work of art through immersing them in a fumey, semi-imperturbable equilibrium. Sfumato is the subtle, smoothly imperceptible, gradation of dark colors which approaches a smoggy unity useful in the creation of psychological atmospheric effects evocative of the immersive display in the Apse of Lascaux. Through sfumato, complimentary contrasts (contrapposto) find a unity previously absent and it is this unity that lends Renaissance vision its most significant self-alternative to the soon hegemonic point-perspective. This is so as sfumato invites and promotes an expanded, diaphanous, dilated focus and necessitates a more expansive field-of-view (which as we have seen is consequential for experiencing immersion into noise). Thus an immersive (anti-perspectivist) characteristic of high Renaissance art was sfumato unity, particularly because it depended upon a balance achieved as a matter of intuition and hence was beyond the reach of rational knowledge or technical manoeuvres. With sfumato, we see the seeds of an immersive noise counter-tradition in opposition to the crisp, detached, geometricized optics of point-perspective. This oppositional optic practice of sfumato visualization, which brings receptive vision to a state of sympathetic languor, Leonardo da Vinci taught to his students in his Treatise on Painting. There he encouraged languid attention to the ambiguous grubbiness of cracks and smudges on decrepit walls, which may suggest faces and forms to the viewer in order to aid artistic imaginative and visionary ability. Thus sfumato offers another type of management of vision and an expenditure of the incognizant exploration of immersive noise excess.

However, a far more overriding artistic strategy was the pursuit of the ideal of "true" point-perspective which developed during the early-15^th century (the early Quattrocento) in Florence. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) [214] is traditionally accorded the accolade of being perspective's pragmatic designer, as he created a sense of depth that integrated (by implication) the spectator outside the framed pictorial space. Brunelleschi was certainly the first to carry out a series of optical experiments that led to a mathematical theory of perspective. Unquestionably, Brunelleschi in 1425 contrived the first painting in "true perspective" when he insisted that his friends stand exactly where he himself had stood while painting the panel of the Baptistery of St. John in the Piazza del Duomo of Florence, and directed them to look upon the original scene he had painted. Then he held the painting up with its backside directly in front of the viewer's face. A tiny eye-hole was drilled through the middle of the panel. Gazing through the eye-hole, a viewer simply witnessed the original scene. But if a mirror was held up in front of the painting, the viewer now beheld the painting instead, and it was so accurately done in perspective that it was supposedly indistinguishable from the original.

Moreover, Brunelleschi analyzed human vision mathematically and by so doing discovered the suppositional central vanishing-point that the horizon-line passes through (which is also the line on which two-point perspective is defined by the oblique vanishing points). With this schematization begins the emanation of a perspectivist scheme for envisioning and depicting range that remains paradigmatic to this day. Such a trompe l'oeil, linear perspective casts a system of single-point co-ordinates over the actual far-reaching manifold sphere, in the fabrication of an illusionism which deceives visible perception. This perspective tradition, according to Hal Foster, “was based upon the premise that the spectator's eye was singular, rather than as double as with normal binocular vision”. [215] Hence, it represents vision through geometric perspective by projecting and holding holonetric 360° vision to a single, fixed-eye point and it is just these fixed rules of perspective that construct an anti-immersivism and creates and expresses anti-ambient divisions between the subject and the space.

Leon Battista Alberti is avowed as perspective's inaugural theoretical interpreter with the 1436 publication of his text De Pictura (On Painting). According to Edgerton, from that point on Western artists conceived of their subjects in terms of an imposed spatial homogeneity as determined by the horizon-line and the fixed gaze. [216] While it is possible to indicate the sources for perspective in Euclidean optics and geometry and in late-medieval/gothic versions of (and commentaries on) Arabic works on optics, the application of such theoretical material into the creation of a working system, and its transfer from the realm of physiology, philosophy and theology to that of painting’s conceptual window is what constitutes Alberti's achievement. This achievement, however, also formulated a restricting boundary between the self and the richness of the noisy sensual world. Indeed this window, which was at first conceived as being open, eventually closed and became grilled with a grid [217] and it is just this closed and grilled optical perspective which, according to Romanyshyn, has become the cultural visual hegemony of the modern world. [218] As a result, John Berger summarizes Alberti's window in disparaging terms as a “safe let into a wall, a safe into which the visible has been deposited”. [219]

Curiously, it is interesting to discover that Alberti designed grottoes modelled explicitly after ancient classical ones, which certainly cuts across any overly simplistic explanations of artistic ideals. However, Panofsky adequately demonstrated that Alberti and Brunelleschi, for the most part, tried to forget and obliterate the spherical allocentric visual noise field of the ancients, in favor of an angular-linear perspectivism by ignoring the bumbling of noise and glance.

So let’s turn underground, shall we? When immersed within the sfumato ambience of the fecund and grisly baroque/neo-baroque Cimitero dei Cappuccini located beneath the chapel Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome (circa 1626 to 1870) [220] , I found myself tipsy with a morose and peculiar noise vision of death: overwhelmed, engulfed, and supersaturated by an extremely dark lapidary style. [221] The mises en scène of this art-ossuary are arranged from innumerable human bones (the skeletons of over 4,000 monks) displayed by their survivors, the Alinari Brothers, in an unashamedly ornamental attack on the simplicity of death. The abominable, dank, subterranean syntax is so rich and evocative as to border on logorrhea. The style so purple as to spill over into ultraviolet.

This immersively opulent cove resonates with a beguiling virtuosic uneasiness which reaches far beyond its material circumference. And yet, at a time when our critical abilities have been systematically bastardized by media saturation and bludgeoned by decades of commerciality, the Capuchin monks' convoluted baroque visual style is to most merely disturbingly freakish. More to the pity, because the Capuchin crypt spoke to me with an art noise voice both compelling and concerted. Indeed the crypt is such a powerful immersive noise space that it thrashed me out of my scepticism about the limits of eerie fantasy as I felt about me a disembodied, skinless, and offensive silent stillness from where countless skeletons seemed to stir and quiver and seethe about abhorrently. The elaborate unity and horrid continuity effect was not one of melodramatic gloom, however, but of comic/tragic reconciliation formed under the aegis of a totalized noise excess.

Figure 6

Side ossuary in the Cimitero dei Cappuccini located beneath the chapel Santa Maria della Concezione (Rome)

The Cimitero dei Cappuccini's flower-arrangement-like nihilism is another example of the immersive noise dissolution of representation through negative hyper-promiscuity as discussed in relation to the Apse of Lascaux's occupied sfumato. Here, this promiscuity is further enhanced by emphasizing our human disintegration anxiety as the crypt collapses human identity into a construction made up of literally dead distinctions between selves and signs. This fabrication speaks to the fact that we are all but schematic information (genetic code) immersed within the millenarian field.

Equally, the crypt made me sense that the precarious glittering life of today's representations are made up simply of all the previous images they have succeeded in disintegrating and recomposing. The eye can scan and emotionally identify meaning in the perceptual field of the crypt only because its structure is the sfumato, concave side of our own personal ego-image. The crypt is in a sense, then, like the Apse, another noise representation of all representations. And, as such, it is an attempt to represent the unlimited immersive field of representation. Therefore, it urged on me the idea of an immersive noise space in which images no longer have any identity or distinctive place. Rather, here in the crypt's semi-chaos and ferment, lay great hidden forces. Forces of vital emotional release, where things and bodies are represented only from the madness and ecstasy which animate them. Here all are equally joined in the great flow of life and death as, in the depths of this compactness, blood, excrement, and doom join in noise obscurity. Bound now inescapably and tightly together, human forms—and the blank space that usually isolates them and surrounds their outline—interpenetrate each other in an immersive folly far more horrific than transcendental. Anything less strident, less terrifying, less crazy, less intoxicated, less contaminating to our perspectivist gaze would not be able to de/re-compose it, as it must be if we are to achieve the vacuole basis of noise cognition.

I followed up this dire saturation by visiting the usual early Christian catacombs in Rome and I found them powerful but entirely too barren to say more to this noise study. However, after perilously flying back into Paris in fear for my life through what in France is called a tempète (wind storm), I immediately went to visit the Catacombs of Paris, which I found rich in associative noise material that addressed existential anxieties in Baroque fashion.

Figure 7

Detail of a section of the Parisian Catacombs (Paris)

The Parisian Catacombs were begun in 1785 following the decision to excavate all of the city cemeteries, stemming back to Gallo-Roman times, and move the remains to one central location, an abandoned Montrouge quarry from which the stones that built Paris were dug. Between five and six million skeletons were thereupon transferred to this location and stacked systematically according to body part (seemingly endlessly) against the walls. The walk through the resulting macabre grandeur, with its repetitive super-coded/anti-coded rigor, is stunningly beautiful. A noise rhythm of great discord is established, necessarily entailing a process of intimidating sublime ideas which foresee us in expiration along with our own minuscule insignificance. This is immersion into noise incapable of maintaining racial or sexual differences and, as such, is the animated crumbling of the normal monuments to human differences we construct daily. The Catacombs' tottering bone-lined promenade works against the completing, reassuring, mystifying representations of ideology and, as such, it ponderously invites the ultimate integration of form through an immersively indiscriminate account of human existence, complete with resultant long, painful, beautiful washes of commingled feelings and realizations of our ultimate maggot destination.

On returning to the light of day so as to inspect characteristics of baroque metaphysical noise space (clearly the Baroque is an ebullient Catholic art practice rather than a restraining Protestant one), I observed that the Baroque is saturated with the power of deception, with make-believe and trompe l'oeil effects. Indeed, it is teeming with the gilded complexities of ethereal flowers, throbbing stars, false arches, dripping fruit, twisting leaves, winding columns, floating virgins, spinning clouds, and resplendent angels. In Baroque noise vision, artistic expression was predisposed to try to break out of bodily place and architectural space by superseding forms of constraint by over-saturating the norm.

A good example of this noise tendency is the late-Baroque Catholic church in the tiny Mexican village of Santa Maria Tonantzintla in that it is an Indian version of Baroque flourish. Here, an all-over excessive decorative web dances around one in unrestrained profusion and forms seem to explode with pleasure as everywhere foliage glistens, leaves shine, angels hover, and carved fruit exude thick drops of dark honey. Such syncretistic excess is typical of the Late-Hispanic-Baroque, which is also called the Churrigueresque, after the Spanish architect José de Churriguera (1665–1725). This period has been called an exaggeration of the Baroque to such an extent that it concluded it. [222] Other fine Mexican examples of this tendency are the altar retablo in the former Jesuit seminary in Tepotzotlàn and the Rosary Chapel in the Church of Santo Domingo in Puebla. Here a decorative web extends beyond the retablo through the use of what is called yeseria, a type of interior plaster work which was used to cover vast areas in ornamental moulded relief. This technique evolved into what is called argamasa and was utilized widely in the Hispanic Querétaro style, which was basically Rococo by then. Both yeseria and argamasa provided a good base for the application of vivid color, a taste Mexican architects satisfied fully through their use of glazed ceramic tiles which were used to cover everything from building façades to entire domes and cupolas. [223]

Figure 8

Rosario Chapel in Santo Domingo Church (Puebla, Mexico)

As we have already seen, in the absence of previous framing restrictions, the Baroque is fraught with immersive noise challenges which may produce ecstasy in some or bafflement and mystification in others. Although it tolerated and accepted, even celebrated, the individual unique aspect of life, it transfigured all of its dispersed elements into a single unifying will. Hence, the noise world of the Baroque is a diverse one of contrasts while remaining essentially one unified (Roman Catholic) world. Most importantly, 17th century Baroque art flaunted a prismatic rejection of Protestant visual simplicity, thereby undermining the, by then, conventional clarity of perspectivism in that perspectivalism, as previously explained, sequesters the subject from the environment by constructing the subject as supreme and the space of vision as detached.

Central to our noise concerns is the baroque niche's format which links us back up to the grotto and all that it represents in terms of noise contemplation. Baroque niche-space continues the immersive noise impulse and the immersive disposition towards filling and overflowing peripheral ambient vision with noise excess which implicitly returns perspectivalism to its legitimate province as a narrow and contingent intellectual convention.

What interests in the High Baroque is just this scopic all-over tension, as it emanates a forced, but fine spun grace in a vigorous noise continuum. The High Baroque's multiple, disjunctive strands of meaning are presented to the spectator simultaneously and it is for the viewers' swift, sophisticated mind to create a single tissue of meaning from it, even as the body is engaged in movement and in opposition to the disinterested static gaze of the dominant but petrified Renaissance beholder. As we have seen, Renaissance space tended to be torpid and planar, its harmoniousness achieved through a cumulative addition of clearly defined cognate elements, while Baroque totality is achieved (at the expense of clearly defined elements) through the subordination of individual elements into an activated whole. In the Baroque niche, it is the inter-interpreting spectator, not solely the artist, who may be regarded as the agent who affects meaning-laden synthesis on the rhythmically continuous but diverse component parts inextricably interwoven there.

Also among the prevailing characteristics of the Baroque niche relevant to the immersive noise intention are its feelings for a stirring dynamism and a wide gesticulation. Emblematic of that Baroque ideal is the sensation of theater (involving the motion of the spectator) which is evoked.

This is the Baroque way to reshape bucolic experience by increasing seductive opulence while at the same time seeking fine and intimate sensations of diversity in the moving sensuousness of its unified means. With it, an aspect of the Baroque achieved a partial overthrow of the dominant Renaissance scopic order and the immersive is elevated to a position of momentary superiority. It is precisely this pernicious dereification of visual stasis that prepares the way for, and celebrates, the implications of the phantasmagorical aspects of immersion into noise, as in the Baroque period there existed a characteristic demand for phantasmagorical illusions which required that an interior space, in churches principally, consummated a remarkably effulgent sense of Gesamtkunstwerk totality by blending the elements of architecture, sculpture, painting, ornament and lighting together. The aim of this Gesamtkunstwerk fusing was to orchestrate an otherworldly consciousness, which was to enhance the beholder's faith through the creation of an effect of unitary intensity in opposition to a continuation of consciousness' normal segmenting function. Consequently, the phantasmagorically affected Baroque atmosphere of indeterminate apparition was considerably concerned with a seductive noise style which functions best as whole Gestalt composites which convey a sense of awesome grandeur, spatial complexity, and an interest in excess.

Though primarily Latin in sensibility (in service of the Roman Church's parsimonious and authoritative inducements), there are fine examples of the Baroque taste for unrestrained, phantasmagorically inclined ecclesiastical Gesamtkunstwerks in Germanic countries as well, including the Abbey Church at Melk, Austria by Jakob Prandtauer (1660–1726) and the Benedictine Abbey Church at Zwiefalten, Germany by Johann Michael Fischer (1691–1766). Secular architecture, too, aspired to the ideal of attaining Gesamtkunstwerk union between all of its parts and the building's surroundings as in the case of Gartenpalast in der Rossau (1711) which today serves us as the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna. The patron of the building, the prince of Liechtenstein, planned out both the building and the gardens with unified Gesamtkunstwerk intent. However the juiciest noise spaces are the sacred ones, as in the aesthetic overture of the Baroque, religious doctrine became the modus operandi of inducement. Hence noise affect was permitted to function through constructed illusions and through the enlargement of artificial inclination.

Previously, Renaissance church architecture had been principally sympathetic to an orderly architectonic system based upon the aesthetics of gracefulness. Beauty consisted in a prudent adherence to mathematical proportions in all sections of the building. In comparison, the Baroque church as a medium sought to establish a heightened perceptual instrumentality between the visualizing subject and that of an entangling magnum opus. It is this union of apportionment with visually stimulating interchanges that make up the sturdy but fine corpulence of the Baroque's exorbitant proposition. In contrast to the lucid, linear, fixed, sealed framework of the Renaissance perspective and world-view, in the Cinqueccento Baroque we observe a complication of spatial levels so ambiguously interrelated and so multiplied as to leave no one single immutable plane of reference the spectator can grasp.

Philosophically, this Counter-Reformational submission to vertiginous noise experiences of rapture are indicative of the Baroque propensity for self-consciously eschewing the model of intellectual clarity in favor of a language of multiple ambiguities and shifting excess. We must recall that the Reformation was the reform of the Roman Church in the early 16th century which came from those who protested against its excesses. The various Protestant churches set up as a result of this reform ideal profoundly influenced the nature and scope of art where they flourished, and this impacted heavily upon the employment of artists. In reaction against the opulent (and hence expensive) excessive aura of the Latin (Mediterranean tinged) Church, Protestants favored strict simplicity. Hence church commissions declined. One can see how this would (or could) break up the artistic employment structure which was capable of producing immersive installations. Still, as immersive noise art in the North shrivelled, the Roman Church retaliated with the Counter-Reformation agenda, a vigorous counter-offensive running from about 1560 through 1648 which offered the public a new, even more, energetically excessive program of immersive abundance. With it, church construction and embellishment boomed, offering artists in Catholic countries a wealth of work. This counter-offensive initiated a revival of confidence in immersive noise experience which the Catholic Church, as it was now called, lavishly funded. Thus artists in Catholic countries worked, albeit attendant upon the narrow ideological objectives that allowed the art to exist. Happily, these objectives generally display a wider enchantment with nebulous noise propositions which it ostensibly attempts to delineate by making the actual physical medium almost nowhere admit to being only what it is, preferring to simulate other media such as tapestry and/or bas-relief sculpture. Thus, we are presented here with an illusionistic noise experience which shifts itself in a softly focused, multiple and perforated manner.

Accordingly, the unrestrictedness of the Baroque visual/intellectual situation goes beyond ideology towards a noise multivalence by way of a smoothed disjunction that supplies a unity of vision and fills the air with an attitude where space altogether ceases to be conceived as a void and becomes nearly palpable in its fused and responsive ether. Thus Baroque spatial composition results in creating not a clear, unproblematic, ideological art, but rather a dazzling and disorienting deftness by blending a surplus of images and forms into a majestic noise art. This Baroque dexterity inevitably weds suavity to grandeur through an implied sense of manifest splendor where elaborate conflicting contrapposta appears poised in equilibrium. Hence it provides a fluency and fullness to space which, when conceived of skilfully, becomes lyric and vibrant. As such, it creates a sensuous impression (though languorous) through an implied transition from analytic to synthetic comprehension of pictorial form which fundamentally marks the mentality of the Cinqueccento Baroque atmosphere: a détente mood to bind and unify forces. In this synthetic noise sense, then, the Baroque's rhizomatic visual injunction prepares art for the re-emergence of the immersive noise formation, in that it weans art away from the fiction of a "true" perspectivist visionality and reveals instead the possibilities which open up for inventing new scopic arrangements (and rediscovering lost ones).

Such a reduction in perspectivist constructs in favor of synthetic noise ideals comes together most vividly and succinctly in Baroque manifestation in the bel composto (beautiful assemblage) niches of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) which were constructed in the various baroque chapels he created in Rome in the late-1600s. Giovanni Careri's book, Bernini Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion, beautifully articulates what I have been feeling internally when struggling to define precisely what it is I mean by the instinct for noise in art. Careri analyses the synthesizing character of three Baroque chapels which Bernini assembled, often in terms of the montage film technique pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) in the early part of the 20^th century. My main concern, however, is with his analysis of the Fonseca Chapel within San Lorenzo, Lucina in Rome and the immersive noise which Bernini articulated through the, at that time new, bel composto mixed-media technique. If fact, my interest is precisely located in the upper third portion of this composition, the segment concerning the relationship between the angelic bodies and their position in and relation to space, weight, and light. The way in which the angels first depicted in the top third in painting are extended beyond the limits of the painting into the garland of putti—which floats in the vault of the dome, linking the painted sky with the sculpted one, up into the central oculus, which reveals the actual sky—presents an interesting progression in the expansion of the frame and invites issues of immersive noise to come forth.

In order to understand how noise ecstasy is represented in the rippling undulation of the bel composto, we must see how painting, sculpture and architecture are “linked together in a fluid ensemble designed to create the experience of an overall expanding frame of reference” based on inter-relationships assembled between “miscellaneous hierarchical arborescent perceptions” [224] in correspondence with their position in the sum synthetic-noise-total, as well as the contingent location of the spectator. These correlations, which guide us “through the composto by the montage of the arts”, [225] were explicitly announced by Bernini himself on his pronouncing that things in the Fonseca Chapel do not appear only as they are, but also in relation to what is near them—a relationship that changes their appearance.

To best understand the noise issues at work here, we need to look again at the metaphysical underpinnings driving the artistic expression, specifically, the metaphysical ideology behind conceptions and representations of angels. Far from being the quibblings of cloistered theologians which bore no relationship to life, these concerns involved the very bedrock of the Church's theological, cosmological, and philosophical structure and teachings, as the figure of the angel was a primary representation of the human's position concerning relationships between space and matter in expansive/immersive terms. As such, a consideration of the angel's efficacy in an idealized condition sets down an influential model for human potentiality.

The term angel is derived from the Greek word angelos which means courier. In that the messages delivered are airborne and move, angels fly and are winged. When we say that an angel is in a place, we mean that (s)he has applied virtus (an inherent power and potential) to that place. Virtus means both the potentiality and the capability to generate special effects. In the Koran, every angel is the key to a different endless ocean of knowledge which has no beginning and no end. Yet the exact composition and material quality of angels' bodies and how they relate to the space of the world and the celestial space of heaven, had remained an urgent concern and of great debate in the Christian Medieval Ages between Augustinian Franciscans, followers of Saint Augustine (AD 354–430) and the Aristotelian Dominicans, followers of Thomas Aquinas (the Italian theologian who largely adopted the neo-Platonic ranking of angels believed to have been written by Dionysius the Areopagite). Augustinian Franciscan Saint Bonaventure (1221–1274) argued against the Aristotelian Dominicans that no pure form existed in creation and that the angels were composed of hylomorphic matter, matter bound up with the principles of otherness and mutability. Thus, since matter contains the principles of mutability, angels posses a quasi-material body (what to me seems to be an evocation of the fat-light of white noise). This fat white noise angelic body cannot be circumscribed by place, however, because place is a quality whereas quantity is endowed with position, unlike the quantum nature of light. Following the Bonaventurian model, the angels portrayed in Bernini's Fonseca Chapel imply in fat-light fashion that their bodies are constructed from a hyper-sensitive semi-materiality, fabricated of hylomorphic semi-transparent matter.

Primary to the Bonaventurian angelology of the 17^th century were the above distinctions, distinctions which were meant to also counter the Protestant critique of the Holy Eucharist. Hence, angels became the paradigmatic representation of immaterial hylomorphic substance. The main point of the Bonaventurian/Augustinian angelology—and what is at the hub of this reflection—is the idealization of the semi-transparent hylomorphic flesh of the angel and its location and existence in space as being material yet virtually interfacable with immaterial spatiality, in other words its possession of white noise viractuality. [226]

The permeable quality of an angel's hylomorphic white noise body is represented in Bernini's Baroque Fonseca Chapel's bel composto by the child-like winsome figures' semi-transparent relationship to their painted background, which conceptually spills over into the painting's sculpted frame and into the architecturally domed space from which the angelic figures emerge and return towards a light which constantly re-defines them with every fluctuation in its intensity. From the painted portion of the composto (by Giacinto Gimignani (1611–1681)) the garland of hylomorphic angels is transposed into relief sculptures that overflow the frame and expand the painting as if they were released from it into the space of the architecture en route to, and from, the circular domed light source which dominates the composition and both physically clarifies and luminescently dissolves the depicted hylomorphic forms.

This conveyance of semi-transparent hylomorphic entering and exiting by preternatural means is the role the angels play in the Annunciation narrative, which depicts and explains the forecoming pregnancy of the virgin Mary below. The inference of these hylomorphic childish forms emerging from and returning to a central radiant hole stresses the narrative of female sexuality and reproduction (just as in the Pagan grotto) and hence again brings forth immersive noise issues.

On entering the church on a bright Italian day and approaching the dim Fonseca Chapel, the dilation of the pupil of the eye in reaction to the abundance, then semi-absence, and then increased presence of light within the sombre enclave (in parallel with the circular overhead oculus (reminiscent of the Pantheon) from which the heads and faces of angels peek) harmonizes spectacularly with the dilation process of the female sexual aperture that precedes and precludes sex and birth. In the Fonseca Chapel's bel composto, childish figures emerge out of the oculus and paintings, and float in a gravity-free environment in which their tiny nude bodies break free from, or are consumed by, light. The individual hylomorphic bodies that construct the spiral of cherubs which leads to and from the oculus in the dome grow progressively diminutive in relationship to their location near the oculus, creating the impression that their bodies are penetrating the stucco material creating the dome, as if the architecture had no more physical density than a hylomorphic fat-cloud. The hylomorphic materialization of the cherubs reaches maximum transport the closer it is situated near the light emitting perforation, and it is precisely here in the Fonseca Chapel's bel composto where white noise viractuality beckons the flesh to go outside of itself breath-like and for spirit to abandon the sheath of rational flesh in ecstasy. Here the membrane of ecstatic and swooning flesh is submitted to luminous pressures from within and infusions from without as it resists not the sacred/orgasmic passion of expanding and then re-assembling the self in a continual, mobile, dilation-immersion into noise into ex-stasis (which literally means gone outside itself as standing still) typical of the symbolism of the cave/grotto. As Careri asserts, “in contemplation, the composto tends to go outside itself, in its own ecstasy becoming the vehicle of an experience that goes beyond all images”. [227]

This ecstasy of going outside of self (with its breath-like mercurial countenance) defines one important art noise ideal. Aesthetic immersive noise spaces (as we have seen particularly in the Apse, the grotto, and now the niche) give license to this particular dynamic dialectic of going outside of self in a way the perspectivist tradition seems incapable of doing, as the immersant is better arranged in symbolic space to voyage the unveiling circuits which are employed in the encouragement of ecstasy than when facing the pictorial. For when positioned within an immersive/expansive noise field, the immersant's ambient vision is already being drawn peripherally outside itself and outside its commonly restricted (framed) edges.

Hence the Fonseca Chapel's encouragement of floating transference is the tension of a representation outstripping itself and, as such, it produces a noisy rapturous effect as it continually over-leaps the scope of image and concept and identity and space where one capacity turns against another in supernatural contradictory fashion, reminiscent of the ecstatic writings of Saint Theresa of Avila (1515–1582) and her descriptions of an engaging mystical union with Christ. While Saint Theresa describes this mystical union as a wave-like experience that cannot be related outside of the terms of incomplete and opposing images, she nevertheless stresses the experience as being one of a dynamic, intense and convulsive nature. [228] These attributes, as codified in the Carmelite spiritual tradition, became another semi-transparent model on which Bernini based his teeming composition's rippling and pulsating operational mechanisms, including his Cornaro Chapel bel composto sculptural niche in San Maria della Vittoria which embraces his famous Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1652): what, frankly, appears to be a woman, tucked into her grotto, in the throes of orgasm.

Consequently, within Bernini's Cornaro Chapel niche, the boundaries separating the ecstatic noise realm from the unecstatic realm are transgressed convulsively by St. Theresa's semi-transparent relationship to wave-like space and omnijective-like corporeality. In the Cornaro Chapel niche, the writhing St. Theresa represents human (quasi-sexual) ecstatic potential as opposed to our relatively inviolable demeanour. Here, too, by being able to pierce solid matter in analogy to the way veins web marble, the angelic cortege is privileged to escape the rules of containment that matter imposes upon the non-hylomorphic human body. In trespassing the mortal boundary, Bernini's angels are again unplatitudinously associated with a broad electromagnetic spectrum of fat white noise and hence stand in opposition to containment. This makes the hylomorphic angel the site of hyper-real hyper-planarity and the perfect model to analyse art in terms of noise and extensions of the subject into an implicit space reminiscent of what in magic is called entry into the imaginable-world. This imaginable-world is more subtle than the earthly world and yet denser than the angelic world (thus open to white noise-like interactions) and, hence, an art noise zone of connections and ecstatic flights of release, even as the body is clamped to the heavy, round, earth realm which is holding everything down with its transparent gravity.

Rococo Noise: Between Opulent Habitat and Non-Place

Figure 9

Rococo interior of the Ottobeuren Abbey (Bavaria)

We shall now switch epochal emphasis from the time of the rich fullness and dynamic noise extravagance of the Counter-Reformationist Baroque period to that of the Rococo. Even more than with the Baroque, the Rococo spills its vast organized commotion over the viewer, assaulting the immersant with commands for his or her aesthetic involvement in its artificiality and elaborate unreality. Unfortunately, photography flattens what in the Rococo is a complex but light application of ornamental splendor by overemphasizing details that are only part of a whole fluid spatial strategy, which serves to create a sense of amazement—a sense which these spaces still exude today.

Assuredly, amazement is the initial impression. Nevertheless, turgid or ecstatic noise seem to be the other two ways of interpreting the density of extensively adorned rococo space, according to taste. What is factually agreed upon is that the term Rococo came into usage in the closing years of the 18th century, although it was not acknowledged officially by the Académie Française until as late as 1842 when the Académie Française's supplement to its dictionary defined it as ornament characteristic of the reign of Louis XV (1710–1774) and the beginning of that of Louis XVI. The term was originally a derogatory one, most likely derived from the term Rocaille, which, as I described in the portion pertaining to the grotto, was a stylistic extenuation of craggy design used to fabricate interior grottoes and which tended to spread throughout the entire space. Briefly to recap: the florid sprawl that appears in the classical Greek nymph's sacred grove developed into the Italian grotto, which developed into the Renaissance interior grotto, which then passed into the fully all-over immersive noise attributes of the rocaille style. What interests me especially about the flamboyant vine-like sprawl of the Rocaille/Rococo interior, is how it suggests the viney rhizomatic shrubbery of the grotto entangled with our own bodies' thalamo-cortical system (the reticular activating system and the thalamus which links with the cortex, the basal ganglia, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus), as linear complexity is the motivating principle leading to the immersive noise effect in the Rococo room.

In majestic Rococo rooms, exuberant linear ostentation pushes visual logic mercilessly to its limits via opulence in an effectual fusion of intensity with grace. That is their raison d'être and their oppositional stance in relation to the coherent monocular geometricalization of the Renaissance point-perspective precedent. In fact, the sumptuousness of Rococo sensorial space is, one could say, the first mature historical paean of ecstatic noise, as in its architectural interior decoration the Rococo exhibits a fondness for the expanding all-over. With the ubiquitous asymmetrical curves of its surface structure, it wraps itself around and transforms an interior into a noise confection of delicately colored vines and ribbons, reminiscent of espousal pastry, and, only slightly removed, of the sacred grove of the nymph.

In 1683, the Premier Architecte du Roi (chief architect to the King of France) was Jules Hardouin Mansart (1646–1708), the architect who created the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. It was in his studio and under his name that the Rococo style began to emerge, most keenly through specific motifs and innovations of his designers Pierre Lassurance I (1655–1724) and Pierre Le Pautre (1660–1744). By the beginning of the 18th century, the intermixture of the Baroque with elements of Classicism (which had characterized the royal art of Louis XIV) gave way to the lighter, more gleeful art of the Rococo, a spatial art which demonstrated a heightened immersive opulence. The spatial conception of Rococo architecture under Mansart began to show fundamental changes from the assured building of the Baroque. Where Baroque walls, piers and columns had been massive and forceful and where the space was tenaciously focused while being multifarious, Rococo spatial ideals, envisioned space as delicately unified while being diffused with an abundance of light. Stylistically, while the Rococo protracted the complexities of Baroque surface arrangement, it treated it as homogeneous ornamentation, justified only insofar as it charmed the eye. This stylistic shift away from the legacy of the rich Italian Baroque interiors of Pietro da Cortona (as first introduced to Paris by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli in his work of 1644 for Cardinal Jules Mazarin) began to introduce a lighter style (subsequently called Rococo) into the remodelling schemes of some of the rooms at Versailles. In the last year of Louis XIV's reign, this Rococo style was adapted in many interiors which involved Le Pautre's leading participation, including Parisian hôtels particuliers (private mansions) such as the Hôtel de Pontchartrain interiors built in 1703 and the chapel at Versailles, finished in 1710.

With Louis XIV's death in 1715, the characteristic phase of Rococo called Régence emerged. The all-over rippling watery feel introduced by Pierre Lassurance I and Pierre Le Pautre under Jules Hardouin Mansart was coupled with a new flashy plasticity consisting of curvaceous forms, mirrors, and oval hemicycles mixed with fluttering ribbons and/or acanthus leaves scrolling outward around a chamber. This trait is seen, for example, at the Hôtel d'Assy of 1719 which was constructed under the new Premier Architecte du Roi, Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672–1742). Another bold régence style Rococo interior, known for its playful lightness, is the Hôtel de La Noiseilliére (now the Banque (Bank) of France) constructed by François-Antoine Vassé (1681–1736) who became the chief designer on Le Pautre's death in 1716. Further developments in the style were made by Condé architect Jean Aubert (1719–1785) who remodelled the Grand Château at Chantilly. In the Chambre de Monsieur le Prince and the Salon de Musique, Aubert extended gold filigree across the expanse of white panelling, along with a spidery scrollwork that spumed out onto the ceiling above the cornice at the corners and mid-points of the walls, creating a decisively noise effect.

Following the régence style of Rococo is what is called the Rocaille (the most extravagant expression of the Rococo) even as this term predates the emergence of the Rococo and suggested to it its name. As stated, Rocaille had originally referred to the shell-work employed in garden grottoes, but as of 1736 the term began to be used differently to designate a High Rococo, total, over-all design which included complimentary furniture and porcelain. La Pautre's basic concepts had been little embellished by Jean Aubert until Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier (1695–1750) and Nicolas Pineau (1684–1754) goosed the design concept into an even finer feathery network of gilt filigree that became ever more total while remaining light in spirit. Meissonnier, who was trained as a goldsmith, found his greatest fascination and inspiration in the asymmetrical. Although he produced only a small amount of work (his mark in fact has been found only on one piece: a gold and lapis lazuli snuff-box (1728)), his influence was widespread due to the favor of Louis XV and the posthumous publication of his designs in 1751 as the Oeuvre de Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier. In actuality, he had been responsible for only a handful of interiors: one for Léon de Brethous in Bayonne (1733), the apartment of Baronne de Bézenval in Paris (circa 1736) and a cabinet for Count Franciszek Bielinski in Dresden (1734).

Nicolas Pineau, on the other hand, was responsible for the more high-profile interiors of the Hôtel de Rouillé (1732), Hôtel de Villars (1733), Hôtel de Roquelaure (1733), and Hôtel Mazarin (1736) in Paris. Following the publication of Rocaille theoretical treatises, ornamental pattern sheets and suites of engravings by the Augsburgian publishers Martin Engelbrecht (1684–1756) and Johann Georg Hertel (1700–1776), the Rocaille ideal rapidly diffused throughout Europe and developed into what amounted to an international style. But by 1740 the Rocaille Rococo had reached its apogée in France and was universally accepted and hence underwent no further development. The most important works undertaken in this late phase are interiors by Germain Boffrand (1667–1754), who executed them late in his life. Notable was his creation of the Salon Ovale for the Princess at the Hôtel de Soubise (1739) where he blended a rhythmic succession of arched mirrors with extending tentacles of filigree with a series of painted panels by Charles-Joseph Natoire (1700–1777) placed in the spandrels and undulating coving, all spiralling around a central rosette.

Beginning around 1725, the Rococo held sway in Germany with even more strongly inscribed noise peculiarities than existed in France. This Bavarian Rococo is fantastic and more varied in form than its French inspiration, while being less courtly. The first Germanic architects of this style were Johann Balthazar Neumann (1678–1753) (particularly good examples are his amazing chapel at the Prince's Residenz at Würzburg (1741) and his church in Vierzehnhiligen) and François de Cuvilliés (1678–1768) (his odium in the Residenz is outstanding as is his pavilion at Amalienburg) in Bavaria and Georg Wenzel von Knobelsdorif (1607–1753) and Carl von Gontard (1738–1802) in Berlin. In Bavaria and Austria, the Rococo survived until the end of the century, while in France it had given way to the new austerity of Neo-Classicism by the 1770s. Very anti-noise.

A significant theme in Germanic Rococo counter-reformational excess is certainly an extenuation drawn from the Baroque expanse and its immense trembling flair for the plethoric but now taken to an even finer sugary spun artiificialia. For example, in the Church of the Assumption in the unassuming village of Rohr in Bavaria, trompe l'oeil theatrical curtains divide to disclose an absorbed Virgin Mary floating aloft, wanting any discernible means of support, reminiscent of the thinly veiled grotto theme of the Fonseca and Cornaro chapel niches. The Bavarian Rococo offers many such voluptuous grotto scenarios embedded within an architecture where structure melts into a bewildering myriad of curves and illusionistic spaces which give us pause, not just in the elaboration of viractual action, but in the congruent blending, flowing and folding of spatial pleats which forms an intrinsic part of a realm of experience recognisable as immersive noise.

Another marvellous example of Bavarian Rococo is the St. Johann Nepomuk Church in Munich (1746) which is better known as Asamkirche (Asam Church) after its architect Egid Quirin Asam (1692–1750). With his brother, the painter and architect Cosmas Damian Asam (1686–1739), he created a masterpiece of sumptuous noise at 32 Sendlinger Straße.

Figure 10

Interior view of Egid Quirin Asam’s Asamkirche (Munich)

On entering the vestibule of the church, I encountered a consummate example of Bavarian excess. In this hybrid space, painting, sculpture and architecture work together in fabricating something between a prodigal odium, a playhouse, and a quixotic grotto. I was overwhelmed by a devastating folly of munificence and the giddy embellishment of silver and gold extravagance.

The Asam brothers also worked on the interior of the lush Einsiedeln Abbey south-east of Zurich. Another fine example of Bavarian rococo interiors can be seen at the Schloss Nymphenburg, near Munich, which was designed by Johann Baptist Zimmermann (1680–1758).

Further pertinent insights into immersive visual noise under the Bavarian Rococo are best characterized by the Wieskirche (1746–1754) designed by Dominikus Zimmermann (1685–1766) with its elaborate (possibly ostentatious) spectacular interplay of painted and sculpted forms. This church can stand representative of a dozen such 18th century whipped-cream ornamental eruptions in obscure villages, deep within the Bavarian, Swabian, and Franconian countryside: villages such as Ottobeuren, Weingarten, Osterhofen, Wallfahrsirche, Neresheim, Bobingen and Vierzehnheiligen.

The Neo-Rococo Noise of the Dream King

Typical of 19th century Neo-Rococo noise vision is the belief that all aspects of a comprehensive architectural scheme—from its landscape setting and the building itself, to the interior decorations, right down to the utensils—should be orchestrated as a seamless and homogeneous whole under the direction of one overriding design. This is the most enduring legacy of Rocaille style as its all-over objective became preserved and further elaborated in the Neo-Rococo. As we will see, it is a noise vision ideal that entwines its way through Fin-de-Siècle (1880–1899) architectural theory into one of the 20^th century's driving art objectives. This complete integration within a constructed space of the broadest concepts on down to the smallest details (each reinforcing the other) is what is referred to as the Gesamtkunstwerkkonzept (concept of the total-artwork), a term adapted from Wagnerian operatic theory. The philosophical understanding of the canon of the Gesamtkunstwerk was the proclivity towards an integration of all related elements into a single aesthetic statement, resulting in a self-contained immersive world of total design.

King Ludwig II of Bavaria was born crown Prince on the morning of August 25th, 1845, eldest son of King Maximillian II (1811–1864). It is significant that he was born, and spent some of his early years, in the previously mentioned Nymphenburg Schloss replete with its rococo rooms, grottoes and frescoed scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. In 1857, at age 12, Prince Ludwig heard of Lohengrin, the operatic production by Richard Wagner (1813–1883) which was in production in Munich. That Christmas, Prince Ludwig received a copy of Wagner's 1851 text Opera and Drama from one of his tutors and soon after became captivated by all of the composer's published theories, including "Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft" (The Art of the Future) in which Wagner theorized the Gesamtkunstwerk. [229] This Gesamtkunstwerk ideal, in one way or another, affected the aesthetics of every one of Wagner's works from The Valkyrie on; including Siegfried, Twilight of the Gods, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers, and Parsifal. It is this Gesamtkunstwerk desire for what Wagner saw as total drama [230] that was passed on to Prince Ludwig.

In 1861, Prince Ludwig saw his first production of Wagner's opera Lohengrin which made a profound impression on him (as it did on Wassily Kandinsky [231] (1866–1944)) instigating a long and intense admiration and eventual supportive role for the composer and his Gesamtkunstwerkkonzept ideals. [232] When Prince Ludwig was nineteen, his father, King Maximillian II, died unexpectedly, marking the beginning of the reign of King Ludwig the II of Bavaria, the Dream King, palace builder and generous patron to Richard Wagner.

After visiting his creations, it is safe to say, I believe, that King Ludwig desired a noisily decadent art for himself in ways of taste and state of mind. His aim of creating an inorganic world of excess and luxuriating in its rarefied artificiality was well articulated in 1884 with the publication of Joris-Karl Huysmans's (1848–1907) decadent novel A Rebours (Against Nature), a story of a reclusive art worshiper who yearns for new sensations and perverse pleasures within a transcendental artificial ideal. Decadent French theory, which is almost equivalent to Fin-de-Siècle Symbolist theory, aspired to set art free from the materialistic preoccupations of industrial society.

Linderhof, one of King Ludwig's decadent fantasy palaces, was built in neo-Rococo style by Georg von Dollmann (1830–1895) to resemble the Petit Trianon of Versailles; Marie-Antoinette's (1755–1793) famous royal playground that was designed to resemble rural Austria (an impressive immersive work in itself) which included an adjacent Temple of Love. Linderhof is the only one of Ludwig's palaces that was actually finished. Of Linderhof, King Ludwig said in a letter: “Oh! it is essential to create such paradises, such poetical sanctuaries where one can forget for a while the dreadful age in which we live”. [233] Located close to another of the King's castles, Neuschwanstein (designed by Eduard Riedel (1813–1885)), the King often retired to Linderhof to indulge in his decorated isolation. Linderhof owes a large part of its charged enchantment to the sublime natural beauty of its mountain setting and to its admirable prim French gardens. In the middle of its grounds, an embellished fountain emits a 30 meter high (about 100 foot) water-jet bathing a golden statue of Flore. The interior of Linderhof is a melée of neo-Rococo ostentation and mirrors (Bavarian Neo-Rococo is based on Bavarian Late-Rococo, an already plenteous noise style) and the glitter of gold is prevalent throughout. The King's Throne Room, modelled on an abstract Byzantine basilica, requires brief comment as King Ludwig oversaw every detail of its conception and execution. Its walls are arcaded on two levels and the ceiling suggests the immersive umbrella of a star studded cerulean stratosphere, with indigo, porphyry and gold as its predominant colors. Yet the most dazzling of the rooms are the Mirror Room and the King's bedroom (which were based on designs by Eugen Drollinger (1858–1930)).

However, it is another extraneous space—close by his lavish polyglot palace at Linderhof—which holds the most noisily significant (and cheeky) of King Ludwig's decadent dream realizations: the flamboyant Venus Grotto (a reference which brings us back to sacred nymphaea).

Figure 11

Fidelis Schabet’s decadent Venus Grotto, 1877 (Linderhof)

The 9.9 meter high (33 foot) Venus Grotto was designed by Fidelis Schabet (1813–1889) and fabricated in 1877 of garnished grout. [234] It was equipped with artificial arc-lighting, an ersatz rainbow, a wave machine and central heating, all set in harmonious action to recreate the phenomenon described in Wagner's first act of Tannhäuser. [235] The Venus Grotto was first intended to be built at Neuschwanstein, but due to lack of a suitable site, it was moved to Linderhof by a December 15th, 1875, Royal decree and the work was carried out in 1876 and 1877. Dr. Michael Petzet, writing in Wilfrid Blunt's book The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria, describes the grotto's space as one which allows the visitor an encircled mirage where “stage and auditorium are blended into one”, creating a total theater as it “did not separate the onlooker from the stage”. [236]

The Venus Grotto is furnished lavishly with fake stalactites, giving the impression that one has entered a Lascaux-like sacred noise space. According to Naomi Miller, this artificial grotto, compared to all others, “most nearly simulates the experience of exploring large cavernous spaces” [237] even as garlands of roses are strung throughout its 9.9 meter (33 foot) high cupola expanse (which extends hundreds of meters/feet inward). The grotto also contained a cascade and a fully functional artificial moon, and could be illuminated by electric lights colored to suit the mood of the King. The explicit models for the Venus Grotto were the Blue Grotto at Capri (Richard Hornig, the King's equerry, was sent twice to Capri to check the precise shade of blue) and King Maximillian's tiny grotto at Hohenschwangau, in which Ludwig had played as a prince.

In the Venus Grotto, five distinctive lighting effects could be made to play for ten minutes in turn by automated means, concluding with the appearance of a spectral rainbow just over the Tannhäuser set painting. It was very modern in that it was the first electrically illuminated installation in Bavaria. Of it King Ludwig said, “I don't want to know how it works. I just want to see the effects”. [238]

King Ludwig had installed in his den (a study filled with paintings illustrating the erotic aspects of the Tannhäuser fable) a clandestine inlet which discharged him into his cherished Grotto of Venus. The Grotto of Venus is entered by a sharply angled antechamber which leads to the principal chamber. The first entity that one notices is a diminutive lagoon (replete with painted water nymphs, dryads and flying harpies) fed by a pattering cascade. As mentioned, the lights could be controlled to change colors, for instance to the cerulean of Capri or crimson to evoke the Grotto of Venus in the Hörselberg grotto where Tannhäuser dallied with the Goddess of Love. Exit from the grotto is made by way of a prolonged serpentine, stalactite-filled corridor which leads to a dolmen-like shaft that swings unclosed.

By gliding in the enchanting flamboyant cockle-boat over the face of the lagoon, King Ludwig could site himself in the midst of the grotto's ambience and surround himself entirely on every side, even if he was only experiencing a presentation that incorporated the variance of colored lighting effects. On the lagoon, which could be ruffled by an artificial wave machine, the King kept two swans, symbols of eternal bliss and immortality, along with his enchanting cockle-boat in which he would be rowed by a lucky servant.

Wilfrid Blunt, in his book The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria, reports that there was a staging of the first act of Tannhäuser in the grotto but that the sound of the waterfall rendered subliminal the singers voices in a thick din mixture of sound and by an acoustical space described as “freakish”. [239] This noise concert, however, Blunt mentions, may be fictitious.