Baroque Visual Rhetoric Quotes

“Our inability to understand the sublime or cope with the absolute is also a hint of its undoing; magnificence, like magnanimity, stands always on a precipice, ready to crumble.”
― Vernon Hyde Minor, Baroque Visual Rhetoric

“The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that "Great Art" is "truth-disclosing," and therefore, following the thinking of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Heidegger asserted that Great Art only existed in the past. Indeed, even Heidegger would have wavered on whether Great Art - or Hegel's "art and the absolute" - survived into the seventeenth century, the time of St Peter's and the baroque. Just the same, Heidegger reasoned that in the modern era Great Art is dead; art may still exist but it is not great. It cannot be great because it is propelled by aesthetics rather than truth. Without truth there is no philosophy of art.

To be true, art must, in Hegel's and Heidegger's terms, be accepted by a culture as a whole. I believe we can say with some certainty that the Catholic world as a whole accepted this building and saw it much as worshippers and pilgrims experienced Chartres Cathedral, for instance, in the thirteenth century: it is the Heavenly Jerusalem come to earth.”
― Vernon Hyde Minor, Baroque Visual Rhetoric