The Room That Shouldn’t Stand Up
Walk into one of the pilgrimage churches of rural Bavaria — the Wieskirche, say — and something goes slightly wrong with your eyes. The dome overhead does not appear to rest on anything. The walls beneath it have dissolved into scrollwork and gilt. Ornament peels off the surfaces and reaches out toward you. A thick column, crusted with decoration, holds up a rail so slender it looks like an afterthought. Nothing is quite where the weight should be.
This is the Rococo: the style that took over European interiors between roughly 1710 and 1750, first in Paris, then in Germany, Austria, Sicily, Spain, Portugal, and their colonies in the Americas. Curved, asymmetrical ornament. Gilded plasterwork, mirrors, sprays of leaves, and everywhere the scallop shell that gave the style its name, from the French rocaille — rockwork, or shell-work. It liked small things: a mirror frame, a writing desk, a sconce, a soup tureen. It came after the Baroque, and next to the Baroque it was playful.
For most of its afterlife it has also been on trial.
Three Centuries of Bad Reviews
Denis Diderot opened the case around 1740, prosecuting on behalf of a newly rationalized classicism. Adolf Loos reopened it with “Ornament and Crime,” and modernism kept the verdict. A second charge accumulated along the way: that the style was too soft, too feminine, too fond of pleasure to be taken seriously. Where the Baroque had been grand and public, the Rococo curled inward, nesting — as Bennett Gilbert puts it in a fine phrase — the way a small animal nests in its home.
Art history has spent decades overturning that verdict, and it did so largely by following the money: the Parisian luxury trade, the marchands merciers who commissioned and assembled and sold the stuff, the patrons, the market. On this account the Rococo is the first genuinely commodified phase of Western culture — an empirical style, worked out by trial and error in pattern and color and material, in the business of making rich people comfortable. Gilbert says plainly that this scholarship is excellent.
Then he proposes something almost perverse. His essay in the journal Scenari argues that this most material of styles doubts the reality of matter.
A Paradox in Plaster
He is not claiming that gilders and cabinetmakers were reading philosophy. He is claiming that the style’s underlying logic is the visible shape of an idea being worked out at the same moment — idealism, the view that what is finally real is mind, and that matter is not the solid, self-standing stuff it appears to be. George Berkeley published his New Theory of Vision in 1709. Giambattista Vico published his Scienza Nuova in 1725 and revised it twice, the last time in 1744. The Rococo’s high tide runs from about 1710 to 1750. The dates line up almost uncomfortably well.
Two words carry the argument, and both are worth slowing down for.
Rocaille is the shell-and-rock motif — but Gilbert reads it as an imagined substance rather than a decoration. Some art historians think eighteenth-century viewers pictured it as a kind of molten rock thrown up from inside the earth: spongy, ancient, and capable of being pushed into any shape at all. A stuff with no shape of its own.
Atectonicity is an architect’s word for structure that hides how it stands up. The floating dome. The impossible column. The staircase that seems to hang in the air.
Put them side by side and you have a picture of the world. Rocaille is what things are made of; atectonicity is how they are held together. Neither behaves like ordinary matter under ordinary causes. And when the ornament comes off the wall toward you, the line between the thing out there and the mind in here starts to give. Distance stops behaving like distance.
The Philosopher Who Said the Grid Was a Fiction
Gilbert’s philosophical center of gravity is Berkeley, and specifically what Berkeley says about seeing.
The seventeenth century had mapped the visible world onto a grid — the coordinate lattice, inherited from Descartes, on which everything real could be assigned a place. Berkeley’s answer is that the grid lines are not there. We do not see planes and solids arranged in objective depth. We see color, shifting and inconstant, and then we judge. What we take in are not substances but signs; vision, in his formula, is the language of the Author of nature. A room, on this view, is not a pile of expensive objects. It is closer to a sentence.
Behind that sits an older doctrine called continuous creation: God did not make the world once and step back, but remakes it at every instant, since otherwise it would wink out. Gilbert traces its descent with real care — from pseudo-Dionysius through John Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century Irish philosopher who held that every existing thing is an appearance of God, so that in creating the world God creates himself, and on to Nicolas Malebranche, for whom God is the only genuine cause of anything at all. Malebranche’s universe is sustained instant by instant, and nobody inside it can make a thing. Berkeley’s revision is where the argument turns: enough of that creative power is handed to us that history, volition, and art become possible.
And here the essay names the other half of its own claim and moves on. Berkeley, Gilbert says, is easier to address for present purposes than Vico.
Naples, 1730
That sentence is the most useful thing in the piece, because it points straight at a book nobody has written.
Vico’s best-known principle is verum factum: we can truly know only what we ourselves have made. Which is the atectonic idea stated in words. Human institutions have no natural foundation. They stand because people keep making them stand, and their apparent solidity conceals the labor holding them up.
The setting is even better. Vico spent his entire life in Naples, and Naples in his lifetime was turning into a Rococo capital. While he was revising the Scienza Nuova, the architect Ferdinando Sanfelice was building the open, double-ramped staircases of the Palazzo Sanfelice and the Palazzo dello Spagnuolo — flights of stone that appear to hang unsupported in a courtyard. Charles of Bourbon arrived in 1734 and made Vico royal historiographer the following year; the same court founded the Capodimonte porcelain works in 1743. The philosopher and the objects shared a patron and a city. Someone should write that book.
How an Idea Gets Into a Soup Tureen
The harder question sits underneath all of this: how does a philosophy end up in a piece of furniture when nobody involved intended it? Gilbert sets it aside by design and calls the relation a para-causality — a name for the puzzle, honestly given, and held over for a longer piece.
Vico, as it happens, wrote the longer piece. Senso comune is his term for judgment shared across a whole people, arriving without anyone reflecting on it or deliberately passing it down. Alongside it sits his account of poetic wisdom, in which early peoples thought in images and did real cognitive work that way, entirely outside propositions. Gilbert notes near the close that both Berkeley and Vico were trying to explain how non-propositional thought produces meaning. An essay turning senso comune into a working account of how a style carries an idea would hand his argument the mechanism it wants — using a thinker already in his cast.
Did the Theology Travel With the Shells?
One more study waits, and it would work as a test. The Rococo moved unevenly. Britain bought the silver, the chairs, and the pattern books, but never built the Rococo church. Bavaria, Sicily, Portugal, and Spanish America built little else. If the continuous-creation idea is doing the work Gilbert says it is, that split should be legible — the shells traveling everywhere, the theology only to some places. A survey of sermons and devotional prints across those regions could confirm the pattern or complicate it, and either result would be worth having.
What holds all three projects together is the wager the essay stakes: that you can read a shift in what people believed about reality off the shape of their furniture, and that this is a way of seeing what a culture held before it could say so. Gilbert closes on a line worth keeping. An ontology is meaningful, he suggests, insofar as what is real to our senses matches what is real to our hearts. The Rococo, on this account, was an argument that the two need not be enemies — made in plaster, gilt, and shell, by people who could not have written it down.
Gilbert, Bennett. “Rococo Ontology.” Scenari, no. 24 (2026): 93–112. https://doi.org/10.7413/24208914238.
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