A "Living" Baroque Exemplum of Dying

"Dieu seul est grand!" were the irrefutable first words of Jean Baptiste Massillon's funeral oration for the "Roi Soleil," Louis XIV. At the feet of his court chaplain, his French subjects, and before all of Europe, the once great "Sun King" lay in death. It was 1715. Only a few years before in another part of Europe, the splendid Habsburg Imperial residence-city of Vienna throbbed with the violent tenor and enthusiasm of the European Baroquea phenomenon which in the preceding century had flourished with enormous extravagance at both the court of Louis XIV and that of his rival Viennese cousin, Leopold I. But by 1705, Leopold lay flat and secure in the "Kapuzinergruft" (the Capuchin Imperial Vault) with the rest of the Habsburg royalty, encased in a massive sarcophagus adorned with fitting emblems of an obsessive Baroque weltanschauung that emphasized the transient nature of things, human equality in mortality, and the vanity of earthly glory. In life Leopold's pompous son, Charles VI, was heir to the Baroque flamboyance of his father: Charles' corpse followed the Baroque monarch's (and that of his brother, Joseph I) in another lead sarcophagus upon which were mounted four regally crowned skull's heads. The crown of one sunken-eyed skull was a replica of the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Emperor, thus symbolizing that death reigns supremely over all men. Leopold himself had erected the monumental plague-pillar in Vienna, edifying death's supremacy: a sculptural memento mori for his 70,000 fellowmen who succumbed to the devastating plague in 1679. "Leute sterben heute, die noch nie vorher gestorben sind!" is a typically sardonic Viennese saying,' emphasizing paradoxically the exclusiveness of each man's experience of dying and the uncanny "democracy" of death: all men must die. Despite the universality of this experience, Jacob Boehme, the "Einige reisset die Pest also augenblicklich hinweg, wie ich anno 1679 selbst