The Cathedral, designed by the Archbishop Markus Sittikus von Hohenems and the architect Santino Solari, was capable of holding the total population of the city several times over. Salzburg was imagined as an empire when it was nothing more than a town enriched by the trading of salt from its mines. The same enormity and disproportion of the city was traced in the imposing spatial polyphony of Heinrich Franz Biber, the composer who designed the perfect soundtrack to such excess. Biber’s Salzburg represented one possible side to the Baroque, that of contradictions and a lack of proportion; the simultaneous search for theatricality and Affekt on the one hand, and systems capable of containing them on the other. The portrait is of a period in which while the basis of the positivistic and rational explanation of the world were being laid, a long process was initiated that would eventually lead to the consideration of art as the expression of unique personal dramas and the biography of the artist as the first—and perhaps most important—of all his works.