Enlightenment and Baroque Ceiling Paintings in Sacred Spaces: The Example of Austria

The paper questions the complex relations between Jansenism, Catholic Enlightenment, and visual culture in the second half of the 18th century in Austrian ceiling painting. On this basis, selected examples from Vienna and Lower Austria are compared with the characteristic features of the Enlightenment (e.g. purifying the religious practices of sensual excess). The aim of this study is to bring the following – hitherto largely neglected – question into new focus: Did the Enlightenment cause, provoke, or produce new artistic attitudes or should pragmatism, classicism, and simplicity be considered as parallel phenomena in the complex intellectual history of the second half of the 18th century