Aesthetics
The Bloomingburg Reformed Protestant Dutch Church is similar to the style of churches that began to appear in New England after 1800, as well as some of Charles Bullfinch's designs. It was common to copy church designs at the time, usually from other nearby examples. The steeple appears to be some similarity between the Bloomingburg church and a pattern for a rural church in Asher Benjamin's influential 1797 The Country Builder's Assistant.
But unlike the other designs, there is no small pediment on the front of the tower, matching the larger pediment on the front face, nor is there any sign there ever was. The three-bay front is a variant found more frequently in New York, as opposed to the five-bay facades found in New England. Also unusual is the placement of the altar at the front of the church, later changed.
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Famous quotes containing the word aesthetics:
“For aesthetics is the mother of ethics.... Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe—not empirically, alas, but only theoretically—that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)
“Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man—and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“What is the use of aesthetics if they can neither teach how to produce beauty nor how to appreciate it in good taste? It exists because it behooves rational human beings to provide reasons for their actions and assessments. Even if aesthetics are not the mathematics of beauty, they are the proof of the calculation.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)