The Weirdest Church I have ever seen.

The HOT sizzling 75 degree day in Salzburg was only surpassed by the HOTNESS of our architecture professor, Dr. Christian Otto.

Here he is. Woo! I dutifully followed him around to three more Fischer von Erlach designed Baroque churches yesterday. I probably would have followed him anyway.

The weirdest one (I know I spell that word wrong, by the way, but I always have and always will) was the Franciscan church, which had been build sometime in the 14th century (maybe earlier) but was strangely altered lated at the end of the 17th century. Those Baroque people just couldn't leave things alone.

Now up there is a lovely Romanesque capital from one of the columns, for example. the whole church until you got up to the choir part was simple, white, with high Gothic type arches and these lovely Romanesque columns, but then when you got up to the altar, POW!

There in the middle of this plain and simple church they plastered these Baroque chapels and this fancy ornate altar. this picture doesn't really do it justice. It was the most strangely juxtaposed pair of styles I have ever seen. Chris said it was "delightful" and laughed at it.

We also went to the main Cathedral which has a slightly earlier Baroque style of some crazy ornate stucco fruits and leaves and things all over it. He described this as looking like fungus growing all over the interior and once I looked at it I realized he was right. I asked if this was an architectural term but he said he just called it that. I guess it's like the way I call the pantokrator the "big scary Jesus" or the primordial substance "some kinda slime." These things aren't real terms but they take on a life of their own. From now on Baroque Fungus will be in my teaching vocabulary. I told him if he ever got a student at Cornell who used that term he would know where they came from.

Here is the interior of the cupola. Can you see the fungus? Those are lovely paintings of the four evangelists in the corners, by the way. Very lovely. The whole thing was very beautiful; don't get me wrong. You know how much I love these churches.