state­hood in the Baroque, my cent­ral ques­tion per­tains to the way in which those new im­ages of space in the arts, in par­tic­u­lar in the early mod­ern and mod­ern era, refer to a mod­i­fied civil­iz­ing “prac­tice of space.” A re­cur­rent ques­tion, e.g. in the ana­lys­is of build­ings, re­gards aes­thet­ic ar­tic­u­la­tions of bor­ders and trans­itions, pro­cesses of open­ing and clos­ure, the open, closed and per­meable char­ac­ter of bod­ies and sur­faces, and also ques­tions of the scal­ing and me­di­ation of dis­tance and prox­im­ity. If it is true that the arts are “a his­tor­ic­al grade of the aware­ness of space,” then the ana­lys­is of the works of art may well con­trib­ute to an­swer­ing farther reach­ing ques­tions of civil­iz­a­tion his­tory and cul­tur­al sci­ences.