Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (review)

The word "propaganda" summons up such a negative resonance that it could well turn a reader away from this book. That would be a mistake, for it is a learned and imaginative work. The author brings critical theory, sociological insight, cultural history, a discerning eye, and the nuances that only wide and deep knowledge of actual works of art can provide.

An introduction and a concluding "postscript from Berlin" on Nazi architecture serve as the bookends of the study. Nazi architecture produces a troubling "affect," as propaganda. Jesuit architecture and art on the other hand no longer do so, since they have been neutralized as the "political heat," especially of the nineteenth century, on the Society of Jesus has vanished. But are art and propaganda two distinct and unrelated possibilities, two mutually exclusive categories? How did the "propagandistic" art and architecture of the Jesuit Baroque actually function? Five chapters deal with those questions. Levy argues that what was at stake there and then was, to use Louis Althusser's term, "interpellation," or in "subject formation" the exchange of message between two partners.

The first chapter deals with the emergence of the so-called "Jesuit Style" as a pejorative term in the anti-Jesuitism of the 1840's, especially in Germany and France. The "Jesuit Style" proved to be a tenacious idea because of its political currency. The second chapter deals with propaganda and rhetoric, both as forms of persuasion. In some way this and the fourth chapter on the message of propaganda are the most difficult ones in the book because of the way they use theoretical constructs.

The third chapter on the propagandist deals with the Jesuit corporate culture of architecture and the individuals involved therein. How the chapel of Saint Ignatius, 1695-1699, in the church of the Gesú in Rome was designed amply demonstrates their interplay.

As the fourth chapter explains, the goal of a message is more important than its specific content in defining propaganda, a definition that includes a strong emotional appeal. Propaganda is "directed communication." The aim of the Church's message in the Baroque, to use Althusser's insights on ideology, was essentially the forming of subjects in their own responding to that message and in holding a mirror up to themselves. A series of examples makes this clear. The first ones come from the various editions of Ribadeynera's biography of Saint Ignatius where "Ignatius becomes virtually synonymous with the form of the Society of Jesus itself." Other examples of images that produce subjects and saints are cultic sites in Rome associated with Ignatius. Excellent illustrations accompany the text here as also earlier and later in the book. One could wish they had been printed in color; perhaps the publisher thought it too expensive.

Finally the last chapter considers the diffusion of propaganda. It deals with architecture and the work of subject formation and of architecture as theology. In addition, Jesuit forms and Jesuit identity, the means of their diffusion in prints, and subsequent copies and imitations, come in for detailed treatment, again illustrated by examples. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography and an excellent index.

This is not a work for easy reading, in part because one of its great strengths is also a weakness; it is almost overfilled with one original insight after another through which it marches with great rapidity. But it is surely a volume that any library concerned with art history and/or the Jesuits should have on its shelves and of which anyone interested in those subjects should take serious account.