The efflorescence of High Baroque in the Habsburg lands possessed, of course, its own close antecedents before the 1680s and its own artistic logic. But it was conditioned then by two main historical factors. One was the heady military and political success of the dynasty and its attendant aristocracy, which yielded a reckless and extravagant wave of building and decoration, as if to persuade the world—and themselves—that Austrian great power had come to stay. Contemporary perceptions of the function of the visual and representational in central European baroque culture at its climax are well illustrated from the pages of one of its best-known handbooks, Georg Christian Lüning’s Theatrum Ceremoniale: “Most people, especially the lower orders (Pöbel), are so constituted that sensual impressions and imagination accomplish more with them than wit and understanding; and they can therefore be moved rather by such things as tickle the senses and strike the eye than by the most compelling and clearest arguments. This wonderment yields respect and reverence, whence come subordination and obedience.”

From R.J.W. Evans’ Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Essays on Central Europe, c. 1683-1867, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 57.