with anxiety comes abstraction

....Whence this anxiety, this restlessness, this continuous search for novelty? If we take a look at the knowledge of the time, we can find a general answer in the “narcissistic wound” inflicted on the humanist ego by the Copernican revolution and successive developments in physics and astronomy. Man’s dismay on discovering that he had lost the center of the universe was accompanied by the decline of humanist and Renaissance utopias regarding the possibility of constructing a pacified and harmonious world. Political crises, economic revolutions, the wars of the “iron century,” the return of the plague: everything concurred in reinforcing the discovery that the universe had not been specifically tailored for humanity, and that man was neither its artifice, nor its master.

Paradoxically, it was the enormous progress of knowledge that caused this very crisis of knowledge the search for an evermore complex Beauty was accompanied, for example, by Johannes Kepler’s discovery that celestial laws do not follow simple Classical harmonies, but require a steadily growing complexity

- Umberto Eco

Andreas Cellarius - Harmonia macrocosmica (1660)

With crisis in knowledge, realism shifts to new forms of abstraction:

Francesco Borromini - Cupola di san Carlo alle quattro fontane