Thomas Trummer In Austria's history there is no date with serious ...

and flattened to spaceless stucco reliefs. In artistic respect, however,
their tortured bodies are more than ornamental accessories.
Aesthetic leanings and fashionable pleasure are the reasons why
artists from the Baroque period devote more time to the twisted bodies
that are distorted with pain than to the statue-like motionless
bodies that they associate with the past. Unlike in the Renaissance
period, artistically there is no longer a focus on balance and the reconciliation
of different forces, but on dynamics and dominance,
as well as, in political respect, on a sense of power, rule and control
and hierarchical differences. Thus the Turks always appear to
be muscular and strong, but defencelessly forced into architectural
spandrels. They are everywhere where there is really no space any
more, where confinement and wretched pushing and shoving dominate.
According to Baroque conceptions, Turkish warriors are suitable
for peripheral, marginal borders, for doorknobs and for plinths,
for embellishments of statues which pose above them, for doormats
for other people’s soles, crushed by the machinery of war and humiliated
by emblems that quickly pick up these things. Their position
in space remains iconographically constant, and so does their
appearance. In the marble hall of the Lower Belvedere the creator
of the frescos shows them bald, but with long beards and chained
legs, fitted into the small groin between moulding and ceiling.
The eroticism of the pictures is just like their position. The figure of a
sumptuously decorated saviour, equipped with the insignia of power
and of Mars, the god of war, and in addition with a conspicuous armour-plating
of his sexual organ – this figure triumphs over the naked
bodies of his enemies. The potentates proudly demonstrate their
potency, the generations that will succeed to the throne point out the
seat of matter that legitimizes them. Kapfer, who never leaves out allusions
to male sexuality, focuses on the main areas of well-endowed
males by particularly concentrating on details this time. Knowledgeably
he captures the play of forms and the subtle way in which
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