Renaissance; when it came
into the world it bore the birthmark of mannerism on its forehead.

This mannerism in its fulness and maturity is the Rococo. The burly men
and women bubbling over with life, in whom the stormy spirit of the age
of discovery and invention, of social revolution and religious
reformation, had not yet spent itself, finding the forms of the antique
too confined and yet not wishing to give them up, pulled and stretched
them, added to them scrolls and crossettes, nay, even shattered them to
fragments and then held fast to their ruins, indeed even went so far as
to find these caricatures and ruins more beautiful than the original.
The Rococo is violent in chains, insolent in constraint, drunken in
sobriety. It is the art of a rich, voluptuous, mystic, restless age.

Then came war and desolation, poverty and misery. Decadent men become
dry and pedantic. Oppression and tyranny without engender pedagogism
within. Thus the art of the Rococo became in the eighteenth century
poor, sober, squeezed into rules, deprived of every passionate impulse
which formerly might have reconciled us to its efflorescence. Mannerists
of genius can glitter alluringly, pedantic ones are deterringly boring.
The Pigtail is the dried-up Rococo, trimmed according to academic rules.
The luxurious Rococo flora, composed of all kinds of plants, poisonous
herbs, and weeds is presented to us, in the age of the Pigtail, as a
dead herbarium on blotting-paper.

The periods of the history of art are measured only in round numbers.
Thus the plastic artist may well say that the Renaissance belongs to the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Baroque to the seventeenth, and
the Rococo and the Pigtail to the eighteenth. But for the historian of
culture, on the other hand, this calculation is a little too round.
German literature during a good part of the Rococo period already
belongs to the Pigtail, and it frees itself from the Pigtail in the very
densest Pigtail period of the architect and the sculptor. Palestrina and
Orlando di Lasso represent the aftermath of the Middle Ages in the
period of the Renaissance; Haendel and Bach, in the eighteenth century,
would have stood much closer to the Rococo than to the Pigtail, if they
had not been such original and peculiar geniuses that one cannot quite
classify them under these heads at all.

And yet the Rococo strikes a key-note which resounds through the whole
history of culture of the seven