Next to the market place is the Old Town Hall, built in 1737 in Rococo style, under the rule of Clemens August of Bavaria.

It is sometimes called Galant, Rococo, or pre-Classical, or at other times early Classical.

The library interior is exquisitely realised in the Rococo style with carved polished wood, stucco and paint used to achieve its overall effect.

Rococo ( or ), less commonly roccoco, also referred to as " Late Baroque ", is an 18th-century artistic movement and style, which affected several aspects of the arts including painting, sculpture, architecture, interior design, decoration, literature, music and theatre.

In the book The Rococo, it is written that there was no other culture which " has produced a wittier, more elegant, and teasing dialogue full of elusive and camouflaging language and gestures, refined feelings and subtle criticism " than Rococo theatre, especially that of France.

The word Rococo is seen as a combination of the French rocaille, meaning stone, and coquilles, meaning shell, due to reliance on these objects as motifs of decoration.

While there is still some debate about the historical significance of the style to art in general, Rococo is now widely recognized as a major period in the development of European art.

Although Rococo is usually thought of as developing first in the decorative arts and interior design, its origins lie in the late Baroque architectural work of Borromini ( 1599 – 1667 ) mostly in Rome and Guarini ( 1624 – 83 ) mostly in Northern Italy but also in Vienna, Prague, Lisbon, and Paris.

The delicacy and playfulness of Rococo designs is often seen as perfectly in tune with the excesses of Louis XV's reign.

The development of Rococo in Great Britain is considered to have been connected with the revival of interest in Gothic architecture early in the 18th century.

In Germany, late 18th century Rococo was ridiculed as Zopf und Perücke (" pigtail and periwig "), and this phase is sometimes referred to as Zopfstil.

It is not surprising, then, that French Rococo art was at home indoors.

The word ' Rococo ' is derived from the French " rocaille ", a word used to describe the rock and shell work of the Versailles grottoes.

The Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo is one of the northernmost Rococo buildings

In those Continental contexts where Rococo is fully in control, sportive, fantastic, and sculptured forms are expressed with abstract ornament using flaming, leafy or shell-like textures in asymmetrical sweeps and flourishes and broken curves ; intimate Rococo interiors suppress architectonic divisions of architrave, frieze, and cornice for the picturesque, the curious, and the whimsical, expressed in plastic materials like carved wood and above all stucco ( as in the work of the Wessobrunner School ).

The Rococo palette is softer and paler than the rich primary colors and dark tonalities favored in Baroque tastes.

Rococo plasterwork by immigrant Italian-Swiss artists like Bagutti and Artari is a feature of houses by James Gibbs, and the Franchini brothers working in Ireland equalled anything that was attempted in Great Britain.

Here, on the Kentian mantel, the crowd of Chinese vases and mandarins are satirically rendered as hideous little monstrosities, and the Rococo wall clock is a jumble of leafy branches.

In general, Rococo is an entirely interior style, because the wealthy and aristocratic moved back to Paris from Versailles.

Jean-Antoine Watteau ( 1684 – 1721 ) is generally considered the first great Rococo painter.

Étienne-Maurice Falconet ( 1716 – 1791 ) is widely considered one of the best representatives of French Rococo.

An interesting illustration of the hostility sometimes aroused by this style ( similar to that of early Modernists to High Victorian style ) can be found in the critical view of Rococo taken by the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, especially on the unsuitable nature of Rococo for ecclesiastical contexts.

His style sometimes appears to befit the decorative Rococo more than of his time.

Both Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin ( 1699 – 1779 ) and Jean-Baptiste Greuze ( 1725 – 1805 ), were important French painters of the Rococo era who are considered Anti-Rococo.

These buildings are now considered the most important buildings of the late Baroque and Rococo in all of the Rhineland.

Naturalism can be considered a reaction to the Rococo style and embodied characteristics like unaffected, honest, simple and people in natural settings / jobs < ref name =" hoa ">“ History of Art: Study Guide 14th Century to the Present .” 18th Century Naturalism and The Enlightenment Era Natural Painting.

In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical austerity and severity, heightened feeling chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime.

Rococo remained popular in the provinces and in Italy, until the second phase of neoclassicism, " Empire style ", arrived with Napoleonic governments and swept Rococo away.

In the 18th century, Baroque Art was replaced by the more elegant and elaborate Rococo style.

Renaissance architecture was keen to revive the classical vocabulary and styles, and the informed use and variation of the classical orders remained fundamental to the training of architects throughout Baroque, Rococo and Neo-classical architecture.

The style was used in bronze by Bernini for his spectacular St. Peter's baldachin, actually a ciborium ( which displaced Constantine's columns ), and thereafter became very popular with Baroque and Rococo church architects, above all in Latin America, where they were very often used, especially on a small scale, as they are easy to produce in wood by turning on a lathe ( hence also the style's popularity for spindles on furniture and stairs ).

Scenes from ancient history had been popular in the early Renaissance, and once again became common in the Baroque and Rococo periods, and still more so with the rise of Neoclassicism.

Cultural works, fine arts and architecture flourished, with more elaborate styles that were influenced by the Baroque and Rococo movements in Europe.

The Rococo developed in the early part of the 18th century in Paris, France as a reaction against the grandeur, symmetry and strict regulations of the Baroque, especially that of the Palace of Versailles.

In such a way, Rococo artists opted for a more jocular, florid and graceful approach to Baroque art and architecture.

Unlike the more politically focused Baroque, the Rococo had more playful and often witty artistic themes.

Italian architects of the late Baroque / early Rococo were wooed to Catholic ( Southern ) Germany, Bohemia and Austria by local princes, bishops and prince-bishops.

Inspired by their example, regional families of Central European builders went further, creating churches and palaces that took the local German Baroque style to the greatest heights of Rococo elaboration and sensation.

Rococo still maintained the Baroque taste for complex forms and intricate patterns, but by this point, it had begun to integrate a variety of diverse characteristics, including a taste for Oriental designs and asymmetric compositions.

The lighthearted themes and intricate designs of Rococo presented themselves best at a more intimate scale than the imposing Baroque architecture and sculpture.

Rococo architecture, as mentioned above, was a lighter, more graceful, yet also more elaborate version of Baroque architecture, which was ornate and austere.

Whilst the styles were similar, there are some notable differences between both Rococo and Baroque architecture, one of them being symmetry, since Rococo emphasised the asymmetry of forms, whilst Baroque was the opposite.

The styles, despite both being richly decorated, also had different themes ; the Baroque, for instance, was more serious, placing an emphasis on religion, and was often characterized by Christian themes ( as a matter of fact, the Baroque began in Rome as a response to the Protestant Reformation ); Rococo architecture was an 18th-century, more secular, adaptation of the Baroque which was characterized by more light-hearted and jocular themes.

Architects who were renowned for their constructions using the style include Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, an Italian architect who worked in Russia and who was noted for his lavish and opulent works, Philip de Lange, who worked in both Danish and Dutch Rococo architecture, or Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann, who worked in the late Baroque style and who contributed to the reconstruction of the city of Dresden, in Germany.

Rococo architecture also brought significant changes to the building of edifices, placing an emphasis on privacy rather than the grand public majesty of Baroque architecture, as well as improving the structure of buildings in order to create a more healthy environment.