The shop windows were filled with portraits
of the Emperor and the Empress, and the Prince-Regent and the ladies of
his family; the German and Bavarian colors draped the facades of the
houses and festooned the fantastic Madonnas posing above so many portals.
The modern patriotism included the ancient piety without disturbing it;
the rococo city remained ecclesiastical through its new imperialism, and
kept the stamp given it by the long rule of the prince-bishops under the
sovereignty of its King and the suzerainty of its Kaiser.
The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as
wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they
were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There
area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which
approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque
style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and
sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot deny that
there is a prodigiously effective keeping in it all. This interior came
together, as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers had
felt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo.
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