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In eras of decline, what is beautiful tends to be kept within the castle walls.

Withdrawn into those dim spaces, artworks become like thermometers: they somehow grow warmer to our touch, the more we hear news of the world outside dissolving. Our collections of ornaments, they rattle and seem each to murmur to us more and more loudly as distant armies assemble to cross and recross the continents.

This is the cruelty of ornament. What is filigreed is what is private: the eye withdraws inside the ornate curl or fold, which otherwise would more advisably be melted down as scrap or traded. Each ornamented thing within the castle walls represents, after all, some work which did not feed someone outside. This will turn out to be the premise and solution of the riddle of the baroque, what remains magnetic in it, the secret of the human warmth within the well-wrought trinket: that is a stolen warmth, a kind of sacrifice or transmutation.

writing by Andy Haas