Jesuit Art by Mia M. Mochizuki (review)

A volume in the series Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies, edited by Robert Maryks, this book offers a review and overview of recent work on the history of Jesuit art and to some extent more broadly on Jesuit topics, especially Jesuit culture, from papal approval of the Society of Jesus in 1540 to its suppression in 1773.

The author does a good job of showing how even if scholars continue to associate Jesuit art with the Baroque period, they also agree more and more that there is no single Jesuit style: in artistic production as in many other areas, Jesuits responded to varied circumstances and needs. There was no typical kind of Jesuit art. Jesuit art did appeal very frequently to the emotions and to the five senses. Jesuit-produced and/or Jesuit-commissioned works were intended to instruct viewers or hearers in the Catholic faith, and to move them to repent for sin and to embrace a life of virtue, a life nourished by the Church’s sacraments, and by heart-felt imitation of Jesus and the saints.

Already in the first decades of the Society of Jesus, Jesuits were spreading out across the globe, and Mochizuki devotes much of her fine discussion and extensive bibliographies to the global reach of Jesuit art, how it brought European art to the rest of the world, and how Jesuits engaged with and collaborated with the art of other continents though hybridization. If they returned to Europe, Jesuits often brought non-European art back with them, thus fertilizing and broadening the European artistic imagination.

A book like this is enhanced by judicious use of images, reproduced clearly and when appropriate and possible in color. The author and the publisher merit praise for a large number of high-quality images. A stunning color photograph of the Church of the Gesù, in Rome (p. 41), is but one example. Another is a detailed photograph (p. 137) of a seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary that includes a copy of the anonymous Salus Populi Romani, a painting of the Madonna and child, much appreciated by St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, a painting long housed in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore basilica.

Though painting, and to a lesser extent architecture, dominate this book, prints and images in printed books do also share in the author’s attention. Many scholars have studied Jerónimo Nadal’s Evangeliae historiae imagines, published in 1593 in Antwerp, a work focused on the life Jesus, and intended as an aid for Jesuits and others in doing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. With 153 folio images, the multi-volume work connected biblical texts with images in a way designed to help a kind of prayer in which imagination (“composition”) of place was central, indeed foundational (pp. 78–99).

The one disappointment in this book is that it offers almost nothing beyond the late eighteenth century, except for a 2013 image of Pope Francis (p. 14) in prayer before the Salus Populi Romani. Pius VII had restored the Jesuits in 1814, and since the 2014 bicentennial of that seminal event, significant numbers of scholars of Jesuit history have been turning more and more to the period 1814 to the present. What about art history? Mochizuki states that in recent times art historians have moved beyond a singular focus on masterpieces of elite art to a more inclusive study of material and visual cultures (p. 29). Does not such an approach deal with the modern era of the Society of Jesus? If not, why not?