a bite of baroque

This morning, I got onto Tumblr and reblogged this picture from Ken's blog!
Baroque painting and architecture has intrigued me ever since I was a little girl. Walking under these fascinating ceilings strips your identity of a 'Singaporean tourist' and immediately instills in you a sense of awe, reminding how human you really are.
I used to wonder: "Who painted these? Did the artists ever fall to their deaths while painting them? How tall was the ladder? Maybe it's fake. But we paid so much to come in. Is heaven really like that?"

Today I started to wonder what inspired this cultural movement.
These large-scaled, luxurious paintings resulted from a 'competition' that dates back all the way to 17th Century Europe between the Catholic church and the Divine Right of Kings (or Protestants). It was especially important to appeal to viewers who looked upon (and up at) these paintings and to fill them with wonder, hoping to provoke their senses and thoughts.
The Church's aim was to portray their message about the truths of God and to win the people's trust over through these paintings. The ceilings and walls would be illustrated with biblical scenes which partly denoted Catholic theoretical dogma, while the Kings would assert their authority in the palaces they ordered to build, which were decorated with murals and other mediums of art.
These murals were painted using the latest 'quadratura' and trompe l'oeil painting techniques, artistic techniques that create the 3D optical illusion of transforming the ceiling and walls of the building to look like it's opening up into the sky.
Discussing the topic of "Catholic Church vs Divine Right of Kings" throws lots of people into a historical debate about where the divine right of kings originated from, who the first King to be ordained by God was and such.

All this really puts me into the mood to look up and relearn the Apologetics, since I've forgotten most of it even after having learned it in Sunday School. I think it's very important to research about your own religion and though Catholics and Christians serve the same God, to find out what the differences between Catholicism and the teachings of Christianity are.
Which also brings me to the point about how people can misunderstand who God really is. In a way, the murals tell us a lot about human pride and the way humans try to 'outdo' each other by asserting their authority through manipulating God's Word. Pride is kind of... colourful though. And very detailed indeed.