Tacito Predicatore : The Annunciation Chapel at the Madonna dei Monti in Rome

Trent could not have been clearer. Images were permitted in churches to instruct the faithful and confirm their faith. And bishops should approve only those commissions and depictions that would serve such purposes. Late in 1563, the council's twenty-fifth and final session explicitly advised that "stories of the mysteries of our redemption... in paintings and other representations" enable visitors to reflect on articles of the faith challenged at that time by Protestants less well disposed to the use of images. Trent, to be sure, issued guidelines. Nudity was frowned on. Ambiguity ought to be avoided. Scriptural stories should be presented simply, as they had been told. The council aimed to answer reformers' complaints and to counter Reformation iconoclasm. Prelates in attendance echoed Pope Gregory I's sanction of images—his characterization of art as scripture for the illiterate—while instructing artists on their religious obligations. And no bishop took the council's decrees on images more seriously than did Gabriele Paleotti, who attended the last session before returning to his see of Bologna.¹

Paleotti's Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane impressed on prelatical patrons the importance of controlling what the faithful see. Unlike the widely read post-Tridentine treatises on art by his colleagues Carlo Borromeo and Giovanni Antonio Gilio, Paleotti's Discorso was particularly attentive to the susceptibilities of simple folk (gl'idioti).² Sermons tended to confuse them, Paleotti suggested; auditors could not help but form attachments to preachers that interfered with the transmission of the mysteries their words tried to convey. Words also interfered. Auditors must know language's subtleties fully to understand what was said from the pulpit or on the printed page, and few auditors have the necessary learning. But everyone perceives and immediately apprehends images. Paleotti insisted that there were no better way to present mysteries and no better leverage for that claim than the Incarnation. God gave his son in the flesh, his Word and his image made flesh, palpable, pictorial. And the mystery of the Annunciation was better served by images as well. The irony, of course, is that the angel Gabriel announced the Incarnation with words, which it might also be prudent to depict. The Discorso was circulating in Rome, as elsewhere, soon after 1582, carrying Paleotti's conviction that painters were uniquely effective as "silent preachers." Six years later, the Annunciation chapel at the Madonna dei Monti was completed to confirm the faith of gl'idioti, if Paleotti's counsel held, specifically, to confirm the new faith of the conversi.³ (Fig. 1 and cover illustration)