"More discreetly, abbots, bishops and archbishops, often of royal lineage, sought to offer God and His followers palaces expressing their faith in ecstatic, even voluptuous, terms."

During the 1985/86 autumn/winter semester, Jacques-Edouard Berger gave a lecture series entitled "Baroque and Rococo Splendors". For the purposes of this program, we have chosen the lecture he gave on February 11, 1986 - "Rocaille and Rococo II: the putti's dance-in-the-round in honor of the greatness of God" - as an attempt to pay tribute to the great art historian that he was. Indeed, beyond sparking enthusiasm for art in general, it was in that role that he inspired appreciation for what, still today, is all too frequently considered a bastardized art movement, namely the Rococo style. What Mannerism is to the Renaissance, Rococo may be to the Baroque. In any case, Rococo inspired a virtuoso explosion with felicitous consequences for those princes and bishops who could indulge in the luxury of building or transforming their palaces and churches. Besides the greats of the period known to everyone, such as Caravaggio or Bernini, our overview highlights less familiar names such as Bergmüller and Sturm, to mention but one each of that era's great painters and sculptors.