The Period of Transition . . .

When Martin Luther tacked his proclamations to the cathedral door in Wittenberg in 1517, the Roman Church was on the run, losing spiritual and material ground all over Europe much as its progenitor, the Roman Empire, had to the Barbarian. Ten years later, the city of Rome was sacked by the Spaniards - corpses rotted in the streets, nuns were raped in the Vatican; and Spanish horses were quartered in the Sistine Chapel. An optimistic, intellectually alert epoch had come to an end; an epoch which spawned the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

For the next sixty years, church decoration was austere, interiors were white-washed; and the Council of Trent set about addressing Luther’s protests with grim determination. It was the age of the great reformers: Saint Charles Borromeo – Bishop of Milan, Saint Ignatius of Loyola – founder of the Jesuit Order, Saint Teresa of Avila – barefoot nun of mystic proportions; and Saint Philip Neri – Roman cleric who ministered the poor and orphans.

These and others sat down to put to rights the German cleric’s accusations of spiritual and material corruption, laying down new laws of internal discipline and re-examining the doctrines which had been so devastatingly challenged. Painted between 1536 and 1541, soon after the Spanish sack, Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ still evokes the pessimism of the period relative to its earlier companion piece, the Sistine Ceiling.

At its last session in December of 1563, the members of the Council of Trent convened to define the role of the arts in the reformed Church. Seeking to counter the psychological effects of Luther’s Reformation, they decided that ‘by means of the stories of the mysteries of our Redemption portrayed by paintings or other representations, the people be instructed and confirmed in the habit of remembering, and continually revolving in mind the articles of faith.’

Thus a ‘Counter-Reformatory’ style developed – a style which dealt with the stories of Christ and the Saints with clarity, simplicity and intelligibility, in order to create an emotional stimulus to piety. As opposed to earlier Renaissance idealization, Christ was shown spat upon and bleeding, his skin torn, pale and unsightly. With their invariably nauseating effect on the modern beholder, the late sixteenth-century frescoes of martyrdoms in Santo Stefano Rotundo – one of the churches on our Early Christian tour – exemplify this period.

Yet the dilemma remained – how to sublimate the Church’s rules into a language of expressive power, and not just propaganda. And it was a problem which could only be solved by the artists . . .

The Tide begins to Turn

Just as something was happening with the guitar around the year 1970 – due to the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Peter Townsend – something was happening in the visual and plastic arts around the year 1600. As with Elvis and Chuck Berry, the tide had begun to turn fifteen years prior, during the brief but energetic pontificate of Sixtus V (1585-1590), who transformed Rome more radically than anyone before him save her pagan emperors. But Sixtus considered it his sacred duty to turn Rome into the most modern, beautiful city in Christianity. And his creation of long straight avenues, spacious squares, and his resurrection of ancient Egyptian obelisks and fountains as focal points for wide vistas, developed a stage-like setting which enabled the grim Counter-Reformatory style to develop into that of the celebratory ‘Catholic Restoration.’

Called the ‘Style Sixtus V and the Period of Transformation’ by its greatest art historian, it was in large part due to Sixtus V’s spirit that there even was a Catholic Restoration. And though the artists at his disposal were often less than mediocre, they laid the foundation for the revolutionary achievements of their successors, enabling the slow but continuous shift towards a fuller, more vigorous style of poetry and emotion. A style which has become known to history as the Baroque.

Born in Rome and heavily linked to the papacy, the Baroque was nevertheless a style which could not have been born without the concomitant birth of the artists who created it. And neither without the influence, the impact, the vibe and totality, of the city in which it was created.

For whereas Early Christian art and architecture marked an ideological revolution that yet preserved the iconographic tradition of paganism – and the Renaissance a balance between reason and escapism – the Baroque was born as a visual movement to counter the Protestant Reformation. And though terminology falls somewhere between the sycophantic and the dated, these terms are still useful, for the seventeenth century in Rome witnessed a more or less conscious desire to restore to the city the grandeur and authority of Imperial Rome in the name of ‘Christ’s Vicar,’ the new Caesar, the man bearing the same title as the high priest of pagan Rome, the ‘Pontifex Maximus,’ the Supreme Bridge Builder . . . the Pope.

And, again, more or less consciously, the artistic language of this movement, even more so than in previous periods, was essentially that of paganism; and the artists who created it had a cult-like fascination for the works of their ancient predecessors.

With their columnar facades and their interiors of rippling marble, their buildings presented a kind of quasi-logical conclusion to those of Roman Imperial architecture. And the extraordinary variety of marbles quarried by the ancient Romans throughout the Mediterranean basin were re-cut and recycled in the churches of the period, as were the endless supply of columns taken from pagan temples. Just so, the design of these churches takes its cue directly from the baths and basilicas, the public buildings, of ancient Rome.

THE MAGIC BECOMES THE MEDIA

Just as Roman Imperial architecture and state sculpture was rhetorical – intended to carry conviction and coerce belief – nowhere else can this be better felt and seen than in the art and architecture of the Roman Church during its Baroque phase. When the Church fought back against Luther’s Reformation, it set in motion the greatest propagandistic campaign in the history of art and architecture since Classical Antiquity. This came about under a series of enlightened and very worldly papal princes who lavished wealth upon Architecture, Sculpture and Painting. Yet to fully understand the import of these issues, we must realize that these three arts as defined by the Greeks were the ‘Magic’ for eleven thousand years of man’s history – a magic controlled first by Empire, and then by Church. This magic has only very recently – within the last century – become something very different, become the sublimate flashing of a radio, and then a screen; become the internet, computer graphics, or Hollywood special effects.

Thus, to fully detect the continuity of the ancient Roman Empire in the Roman Catholic Church, we must understand that Architecture, Sculpture and Painting are as strong a link in its chain as the political and social mechanisms there preserved. For these three arts were not only the Magic, but the Media for eleven thousand years of mankind’s history.

Booking information Back to main page