Bavarians know how to rock the rococo

What adjectives spring to mind when I say "German"? Precise. Efficient. Logical. Controlled. Now, let's think about the words usually associated with the artistic movement called rococo: Frivolous. Bombastic. Playful. Extreme. Put two and two together, and you'd assume the Germans would have nothing to do with the ornate, late-18th century decorative style born in France and Italy.

You'd be wrong. Very wrong. Indeed, if you want to see rococo at its peak, my latest travels have convinced me you need to go to Bavaria.

Often working with Italian artists, and usually funded by the deep pockets of ambitious Wittelsbach rulers eager to make a splash on the world stage, German craftsmen took the style to a whole new level.  In religious spaces, they created lip-smackingly succulent visions of heaven, populated by gorgeous saints and frolicking putti wreathed in gold.  Secular versions are downright sexy, often swapping the Catholic stalwarts for scantily-clad Greco-Roman deities getting up to no good.  It's all riotously over-the-top, and tends to divide opinion.  If you're a sober-minded fan of clean lines and uncluttered spaces, Bavarian rococo may push you towards nausea.  I confess to loving it. I can't remember a holiday during which I've had so many instances where the simple act of walking into a room kindles pure joy, triggered by the playfully gleeful scene before me.

Let me take you on a tour of my favourite spots.

We'll start at Munich's Asamkirche, officially the church of St. Johann Nepomuk. This is technically late baroque, just on the threshold of rococo.  Gold, silver and marble, everything soaring upward to a painted vision of heaven ... it's all the glory of Rome's St. Peter's distilled into an architectural stock cube.  Unbelievably, this was a private chapel built by two craftsman brothers who lived next door; they could peek in on mass through a window in the upper story.  The Asams were multi-disciplinary builders (design, plasterwork, decorative paintings, etc.) who used the church to show off their skills.  Clearly, they did very well at their trade, because this is as lavish as any royal commission.  The brothers were masterful with their use of light and colour.  The dark wood pews sit in shadow mirroring life in this world. The higher your eye moves, the brighter things get, until you're emotionally sucked in to the swirling saints and sunshine of heaven above.  If I only had one hour in Munich, this is what I'd see.

The Bavarian Rococo hits its full, glorious stride in the Wieskirche, a pilgrimage church in the countryside south of Munich.  (Pictured top) In a region most famous for the royal residences of Neuschwanstein and Linderhof, this is what UNESCO flagged as a World Heritage site. You'll understand as soon as you walk through the door, and your jaw drops at the confection displayed before you.  While the Asams and the baroque played with light and dark, full rococo does away with the latter altogether.  This is a world of bright whites, frothy pastels and lashings of sunlight. Ironically, this is officially the Church of the Scourged Saviour, and there is a dark, medieval, pathos-filled statue of the bleeding Christ at the centre of worship here.  But he's totally upstaged. This isn't about the pain and suffering needed to get to heaven. It's giving you a moment in which you're already there. The church is essentially round, with a bit extending off the far end for the towering flourish of an altar. The shape exacerbates your feeling of floating, as if you're joining the saints and angels floating up the columns around you.

The outside is as beautiful as in, but in a totally different way. Plain cream walls rise out of a green field, topped with trademark Eastern European domes. A few quintessentially Bavarian buildings cluster nearby to provide services to pilgrims and tourists, but otherwise it's meadow, farm fields and forest stretching to a ring of high hills that cuts the valley off from any sign of "civilisation".  Peace permeates the place. It's a feeling you'll take home, as long as you can dodge the busloads of chattering tourists.

Next stop: Dillingen an der Donau, home territory of the Bencard family and well off the beaten tourist track.  It's worth an hour's detour just to see the Goldener Saal, or Golden Hall, here.  This was the main audience chamber of the powerful Jesuit university that once dominated the city, and it makes one hell of a statement.  Like so much of rococo architecture, it relies on the surprise of contrast. You'll approach up a fairly sedate staircase, white walls only moderately decorated with some gold stucco work. The more ornate doors hint at what's inside, but once you're through them all restraint disappears beneath the towering vision of heaven rising above.

Once again, dawn-lit clouds swirl to infinity as saints and the great and good convene. But in this partially secular space they mix more with the human world.  The building you're in rises on one side of the painted ceiling, the building across the street on the other.  Scenes of hunting and everyday life take up the lower edges, mixed with all sorts of neoclassical allegory.  In what we came to understand is a classic feature of the Bavarian rococo, bits of the scenes ... a snake's head, a horn, a dirty foot ... are modelled in plaster and jut out from the painting, making the illusion of depth and reality even better.  This is the best trompe l'oeil ceiling I've ever seen.  We spent ages debating whether certain elements were real or painted, and it was hard to believe that the ceiling didn't extend upwards for multiple stories.  Unfortunately, because it's little known and inside a working university, opening hours are limited and there's no tourist information in English.  I would have loved to know more about all the symbolism and the messages going on up there, but we could only guess.  Don't leave without going to the end of the block to poke your head into the Student's Church, an early rococo gem that's credited with inspiring churches all over Germany because of its influence on all the priests who studied here.

I think rococo reaches its greatest glory in secular buildings where, free from religious constraints, it can indulge in the frivolity and sensuality it does so well. And there was no better place to see this on our trip than at Nymphenburg Palace.  The Palace itself is classified as baroque, has many ornate rooms, an expansive folly-dotted park and is worth several hours of exploration.  It's just two bits I'll call out in my rococo ramblings: the main hall or Steinerner Saal and the Amalienburg hunting lodge.

The former is the first thing you see on your tour. It's a soaring, three-story, light-drenched space. Like the Wieskirche, the decoration is fairly restrained and mostly white on the lower levels, forcing your eye upwards for an explosion of colour.  But in this domestic space we can have scenes of hedonistic indulgence.  Apollo drives his chariot across the sky. Romantic trysts play out in multiple spots. Scantily clad nymphs (after which the palace is named) cavort with abandon.  All wreathed with sinuous gilded plasterwork and refracted through numerous crystal chandeliers.  My first reaction was, quite simply, to giggle with glee.

Even more childishly, once inside the Amalienburg I wanted to dance.  That's what rococo does to me.  I believe it's an essentially feminine style, which is perhaps why this lodge built for a holy Roman empress, Maria Amalia, reaches the climax of the style.  I saw many halls of mirrors on this trip but none beat the one here, an oval concoction of powder blue, white and silver flooded with light from arched floor-to ceiling windows reflected in the mirrors.  It's the silver that makes this place so unique, lightening the tone even more than the usual gold. You're overlooked by scantily-clad neoclassical figures who are modelled in high relief, silvered and set to frolic around the tops of the walls.  This was a place built for joyful partying, and every element of the decor reinforces it.

Side rooms continue on the same themes in different shades of Easter egg pastel, all maintaining the silver gilt.  The best rooms after the main hall are the two most functional ones.  The Delft tile kitchen is a riot of European Chinoiserie, made even crazier by the fact that the tilers messed up the installation so many of the flowers and animals don't go together quite as they should.  The empress must have liked the effect, however, because it remained.  Even more delightful is the kennel room.  A glorious blue-and-white number, here the decoration is delicately painted hunting trophies on wooden paneling.  It's a room fit for an empress, but it's meant for the hunting dogs who could bed down in a series of niches built into the walls. (See below) I'd wager a large bet they all had collars in pastel shades covered with silver filigree.

This was just the tip of the rococo sightseeing iceberg.  The guidebook offered many more star attractions in Bavaria than we could fit into our two weeks.  I enjoyed everything we did: the castles, the mountains, the beer gardens.  But on the top of my list for reasons to return?  The Bavarian Rococo.