Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565-1610 (review)

This unassumingly titled book is a revelation. It is the first, and probably definitive, survey of Jesuit painting in Rome before the Baroque. While the Jesuit hand in seventeenth-century Roman art and architecture has been long appreciated and extensively studied, Bailey warns us that 'nothing in the history of Italian painting may be as detested as the religious painting of the last four decades of the 1500s'. Criticisms of Jesuit painting cycles in this period include claims that they were slick and manipulative, melancholy, more concerned with iconography and propaganda than 'quality', anti-intellectual, anti-classical, penny-pinching, and generally constrained by the wagging finger of Trent.

In his introduction Bailey mounts a formidable challenge to the anti-clerical orthodoxies of the art-historical establishment, but his book is more than a vindication of the quality, diversity, and pioneering aspects of the paintings commissioned by the Jesuits in Rome in the later Cinquecento. It is an initiation into the internal and public cultures of the Society of Jesus in its formative period. It is a major work of original scholarship, which meticulously reconstructs the lives of half-forgotten artists, theoreticians, patrons, and institutions from a wide variety of archival sources, in the process shedding much light on the relationship between the Jesuits and other religious orders (notably the Oratorians and Franciscans), contemporary theological debates (e.g., the cult of the Seven Archangels) and their translation into popular piety, and local and social history. (The reviewer was amazed at the quantity of material garnered from the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus – a notoriously difficult place to access documents in a hurry!)

Bailey brings the Jesuit programmes to life, interpreting them not only through art historians' eyes – he acquits himself admirably on that score, from noses and poses through to broader movements such as the Palaeochristian Revival – but also through those of a highly informed religious and cultural historian. He helps us to 'read' these paintings with reference to, inter alia, Ignatius's Exercitia Spiritualia, the writings of Jesuit theologians and theorists of devotional imagery, printed and painted emblematica, illustrated martyrologies (both Catholic and Protestant), and manuals of martyrological instruments. The influence of printed books, e.g. Nadal's Evangelicae historiae imagines (Antwerp, 1593), on the Jesuit cycles and the subsequent dissemination of those cycles in print proves a rich theme. Bailey's powers of ekphrasis are all the more remarkable when we learn that nearly half of the paintings discussed in his book no longer exist.

Disposing in his introduction of the debris of modern debates over period styles (e.g., the relationship of Jesuit pre-Baroque art to 'Mannerism'), Bailey proceeds in his book to explore every inch of the Roman monuments: from the Novitiate of S. Andrea al Quirinale and the Infirmary, through the Collegio Romano, Seminario Romano and German-Hungarian College, to the Collegiate Church of S. Tommaso di Canterbury and the Novitiate Church of S. Vitale, culminating in the Church of the Gesù, 'one of the most crucial buildings in late Renaissance Italy'. The tour is exhaustive but never exhausting, thanks to Bailey's lapidary prose and eye for splashes of local colour (the unruly student-inmates of the Seminario Romano; the 'sharp bickerment' which broke out between the English and Welsh residents of the Venerable English College …). Our guide reappraises works that have been falsely characterized (the murals in the Novitiate 'recreation room' were not particularly bloodthirsty) or simply never considered (the extraordinary frescoes of the Infirmary, in their range of subjects and evocation of classical medical erudition quite unlike anything else in the Italian tradition of hospital decoration); he ventures new attributions; he uncovers a 'revolution in Roman painting' in the landscape martyrdoms of S. Vitale and S. Cecilia. If the book were not so generously proportioned it would make a wonderful handbook for the modern visitor to some of these institutions (at...