After touring the inside of the monastery, Joseph somewhat understood why people had moved it intact from Bavaria.
The monastery's decorations were exceedingly lavish, and it even had a magnificent baptismal font. It was hard to believe this was a monastery in a small town.
There was nothing particularly special about the font's shape—it was an ordinary octagon—but its interior was inlaid with golden mosaics. Life-sized sculptures stood around it, all gilded. On the second floor was an organ adorned with golden reliefs of angels.
This font could baptize not only infants; adults could walk down the steps into it as well. On the wall directly opposite it was a rose window, something a small monastery could never have afforded. Perhaps only the rose window of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame could rival it.
Just as secular literature described, a poor place often had a greedy bishop. Before the Reformation, corruption within the Church had indeed been quite severe.
A bad person could never become a good Franciscan friar. The Franciscan Order wore brown robes, while the Benedictine Order wore black. Some even said that monks brought fewer benefits than corpses. At least dead bodies could fertilize the land, while monks only ate greedily and exhausted the soil's fertility.
Building a monastery like this required a great deal of money, though it did not need the painstaking craftsmanship or centuries of construction required by Cologne Cathedral or St. Peter's Basilica.
To draw visitors, they either had to house holy relics or build the church into something resembling a work of art.
When Leonardo da Vinci was in the refectory of a Dominican Order monastery, he deliberately painted eels.
Artists were like that—more or less cynical and resentful of the world. He seemed to have wanted to mock the Church, princes, and