The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment by Christopher M. S. Johns (review)

Among the discrete Enlightenments now abounding, the “Catholic Enlightenment” is one descriptive that commands widespread recognition and endorsement. The effort that Christopher Johns has put here into depicting its visual culture can only enhance its currency. As one might have suspected from his previous publications, Johns is actually dealing exclusively with Rome and the papacy between the mid-1720s and the 1760s so that his subject matter is more confined than the title suggests. He can, however, be forgiven that omission after producing a sumpuously illustrated volume that convincingly ties in his art object examples with those wider trends within the Church that constitute the Catholic Enlightenment: Christocentric, antibaroque, intellectually open, and socially aware. In chapter 2 Johns points out the declining supernatural presence in the paintings commissioned to glorify new saints (what Johns wittily calls the “sanctification industry,” p. 82); visions were outré, good works the mark of true holiness, with the supernatural elements in imagery downplayed in favor of social utility. Benedict XIV (1740–58), the enlightened pontiff par excellence, created only five new saints in his long reign. One of them, St. Camillus de Lellis, was painted by his favorite artist, Pierre Subleyras, and the portrait was presented to him by the Camillian order. He is shown amid hospital patients, aiding the helpless.

This was a papacy proud of its cultural inheritance and hanging on to it when foreign buyers wanted to buy much of it up. During the 1730s Clement XII issued anti-export decrees, restored the Arch of Constantine, and opened the Capitoline Museum in the Palazzo Nuovo (with the Albani Collection as its centerpiece) to the public and young artists. The museum was largely paid for by the re-establishment of the lottery in 1732. In chapter 4 Johns considers the museum’s expansion in subsequent decades, with Benedict XIV again emerging foremost as a pope at the center of many artistic and patronage networks, most of them converging on his retreat in the Quirinal gardens where the Caffeaus, his garden casino and “coffee house,” became a foremost place of homosocial exchange in the city. Benedict’s predecessor, Clement XII, had, in his own right, set the pace as a patron. His family—the Corsini—were known for their refined taste and largesse, and his classical preferences, fine library, and splendid commissions made Clement able to merge the magnificent Roman gentleman in the supreme pontiff. From these private spaces, Johns goes on to write about accessible ones in the city—churches and public works—such as Clement XII’s new façade for St. Giovanni dei Fiorentini, home of a confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, commissioned in the 1730s, and a precedent for his successors to imitate. The last themed chapter considers each pope’s use of personal gifts and endowments of pictures, statuary, and sacred objects to individual churches (especially former sees) as a Borromean reminder of prelatical good behavior that the Lateran Council of 1725 (the most important since Trent) had recently reaffirmed. Thus Benedict XIV made annual gifts to San Pietro in Bologna (he continued as archbishop after his election as pope until 1754) and bequeathed his library to his natal city.

Historians may be assured that Johns is under no illusions about the underlying instability of enlightened Catholicism. It had what he calls a “hybrid agenda” (p. 187) of tradition and contemporaneity that was not always easy to reconcile in such areas as the miraculous and the scientific. Nevertheless, the attempt was made with art and iconography used to promote it. Johns’s historical judgment is generally sure except, perhaps, in his rather compressed treatment of how the Catholic Enlightenment ends. His claim that the Portuguese earthquake of 1755 “vitiated belief in the Church as a guardian of a rational religion” (p. 318) is only partially persuasive, and his classification of Clement XIII as an enlightened pope and Clement XIV...