Die Nobilitierung der Form

Decorative paintings are an important type of picture in courtly interior decoration of the rococo. In them a profound change in the understanding of art takes place: subject matter loses importance, and painterly form becomes the true subject of the picture.

Decorative paintings in courtly wall schemes form a type of rococo picture that has received little scholarly attention and whose status is deliberately ambiguous: neither autonomous panel painting nor mere ornament. It was precisely this ambiguity that allowed patrons and artists to explore new avenues of design. Drawing on paintings in German and Austrian palace interiors, Micaela Kranich shows how subject matter loses its expressive weight while the formal side of painting gains enormously in importance. What emerges is a fundamental shift in the understanding of art – one that, with its meta-artistic strategies and its aesthetics of form, anticipates modernism.