Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (review)

It would be splendid to have a fearless book on the arts of totalitarian propaganda in the twentieth century, and a history of the intellectual and visual antecedents of those dark arts. It would also be fascinating to have a book on how – making use of every literary, visual, musical, festal, and pedagogic medium – the early Society of Jesus conducted its propaganda campaign to establish itself as a central force of Catholic Christendom despite being new, socially fluid, and internationalist within a society which prized ancient precedent, social stability, and familiar and local networks of power. Unfortunately, this book attempts to discuss totalitarian propaganda and Jesuit visual arts together, without taking account of the intellectual or architectural history of the intervening centuries.

In its opening pages, this work reveals the problems which attend its whole conception. The reader is invited to look at the Nazi architect Albert Speer's 1930s Reichskanzlei and to consider it as a work of propaganda.The next page offers another Speer project (with a dome this time) in juxtaposition to Carlo Maderno's façade of St Peter's in Rome. The problem is that these illustrations do lead the informed eye to a set of highly relevant architectural and artistic precedents, to a troubling continuity rather than an isolated aberration. The visual language is precisely that of Bertel Thorwaldsen's Museum in Copenhagen and the grandiose (and seldom realized) architectural projects of the French Revolution, rather than that of early modern Rome. But the names of Thorwaldsen (who designed unequivocally sinister neoclassical propaganda for Napoleon), Etienne-Louis Boulée, and Claude Ledoux are as absent from the text and index of this book as is that of Karl Schinkel. Indeed the idea that twentieth-century totalitarian regimes of all kinds troped visually to 'Enlightenment' neoclassicism is striking here by its absence. To trace the visual roots of totalitarian propaganda to the coercive arts of the French Revolution would have been an action of audacious historical imagination. The connections are there to be found, and the contradiction is a fascinating one: a movement which at least thought of itself as born in a renewal of civic innocence created the visual vocabulary used by the most oppressive regimes of the twentieth century. (In short, how innocent is the innocence of the Enlightenment?)

With the early modern material there is a different problem. Evonne Levy is absolutely right to identify much of the effort of the Jesuit arts as being directed to the promulgation of propaganda, but she has inexplicably elected to focus only on architecture and decoration, rather than considering these as part of a whole involving written controversy, emblemata, festival, drama, and the arts which accompanied education. This, simply, is a false apprehension of the past. The Protestant ascendancies of Europe or America barely noticed the Jesuit visual arts as distinct from the general run of Catholic image-making. But there is no doubt that the most powerful rulers and thinkers of the Protestant world were quite literally losing sleep over Jesuit education and the controversial literature which it generated two centuries after the foundation of the Society.

While this book contains real discoveries and much writing of great value, its essential premises remain problematic as much for the author as for the reader. It ends up being, in all senses of the word, a partial account. With so much of the historical middle ground omitted, this book falls into the trap of its title.Vehemence is not a substitute for scholarship, nor is anger a substitute for careful reflection on contexts. Academics who forget this themselves do much to damage and undermine the liberal academic community whose protection they claim.

That being said, there is much in this book which is worthy of praise. Levy has made excellent use of her researches in Poland as well as in Rome. The material here on the Jesuit architect and designer Andrea Pozzo's work in Rome is of the first interest and is clearly presented. The...