Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (review)

The title of this book does not entirely prepare the reader for the mix that it contains. Of the five chapters, the third, fourth, and fifth hang tightly together and comprise a thoughtful, nuanced study of the artmaking process of the Jesuits, their ways of addressing and involving their audiences, and the diffusion of messages and forms. To this core the author tacks on a chapter on the historiography of the idea of "Jesuit Style," and another defining and theorizing the term "propaganda." Getting even farther from the core, the author brackets the whole with an introduction and an afterward that stretch comparisons between Jesuit art and the propaganda of Nazi Germany.

Framing a study of Counter-Reformation religious art with meditations on Nazism, while provocative and trendy (in that it plays to the justifiably vivid obsessions of our own culture), is of dubious utility. Do we better understand Jesuit intentions, practices, and effects in the baroque era by tying them (with the flimsy cord of the shared but problematic descriptor, "propaganda") to those of the Nazis, who lived in a different epoch and had markedly different ambitions? As if aware of the shortcomings of the argument, the author is often selective or even manipulative in her application of comparative points and choice of examples. When she writes that the fact "that Speer and Hitler self-consciously modeled the domed Great Hall [for Berlin] . . . on a Roman building like St. Peter's . . . suggests that the historiography of the Catholic Baroque made it ripe for appropriation by a totalitarian regime" (2), Levy ignores the counterexamples of other secular progeny of Michelangelo's Vatican dome. In the end it is telling that Albert Speer (whose often austere stripped classicism is actually neither a rebirth nor a revisiting of the baroque) receives as many citations in Levy's index as the Jesuit General Gian Paolo Oliva, one of the Order's most active and interesting baroque-era propagandists.

As it moves forward from this start, though, the book becomes more serious. The chapter on the vexed issue of Jesuit style could stand on its own as an important historiographic essay (and indeed, one understands from the initial footnote for this chapter that the material was originally meant for separate publication in the acts of a conference). Levy's treatment of the formation of notions about "Jesuit style" against a nineteenth century background of liberalism and widespread anti-Jesuit sentiment is fascinating and compelling, as is her tracking of the decline of the same notions. While the answer to the eternal question "is there a Jesuit style?" remains elusive, the reader willingly joins in a different conclusion; that that the discourse of architectural history has, over the ages, always been inextricably connected to shifting political needs and desires.

In her next chapter, Levy turns to defining propaganda, notwithstanding her assertion in the introduction that "the legacy of Hitler and Goebbels has made it virtually impossible for propaganda to become a productive category of analysis." Differentiating between rhetoric and propaganda, she gives a "history of propaganda," by which she means more the history of a word than of a practice. For the Jesuits of the seventeenth century, "propaganda" carried a forcefully positive meaning, as Catholic missionaries fanned out across the globe propagating the faith and (they firmly believed) saving souls by doing so. In our own post-totalitarian age, however, the word carries a negative load, as publics look with ever-increasing suspicion on any messages that emanate from a central authority. Is Jesuit art propaganda? The conclusions, presented here and later in the book, are vexed and confused. As Levy herself demonstrates, words are moving targets; yet it is this very fact that pushes the reader to question how necessary it is to decide if (and by what definition) Jesuit art is propaganda.

With the third chapter, the author arrives at a close reading of individual artworks. Considering the message-making intentions...