In this concise article from 1997, author Pamela M. Jones explores the transitional period in Italian art that took place place between 1590 – 1630 and the paths it crossed contemporaneously with the era of the “Counter-Reformation”, alongside differing academic/scholarly approaches to addressing the art and culture of this time.
Pamela Jones is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her scholarship centers on early modern Italian art and religion, patronage and collecting, and reception.
Pamela Jones, ‘The Age of Caravaggio: Early Modern Catholicism’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 86, No. 341 (Spring 1997), 33 – 42. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30092396
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The debate about what to call the phase of Roman Catholicism following the Council of Trent – Counter-Reformation, Catholic Reformation, Catholic Restoration, post-tridentine era, Confessional Age – is germane to our topic because these terms betray interpretations. Art historians have clung tenaciously to “Counter-Reformation”, seemingly indifferent to its connotations.
The term Counter-Reformation was first used precisely in late eighteenth-century Germany: it referred to diplomatic, military, and political actions against Protestantism in local German centres, and was understood to extend from the beginning of the Council of Trent in 1545 to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Thus, the term Counter-Reformation had the combative connotation of Protestant action and Roman Catholic reaction. In the late nineteenth century the term began to be used in the singular form to suggest a unified effort and began to be extended well into the eighteenth century. Along the way, it took on increasingly pejorative and reactionary cultural associations, calling to mind the Inquisition, the Index of Prohibited Books and a plethora of artistic abuses. Using the term Counter-Reformation made it impossible to acknowledge that far from being a simple response to Protestant developments, Roman Catholicism of the period was developing its own long, rich, independent tradition. The term made it difficult to admit that Roman Catholic culture of the era was creative or progressive.
Scholars seeking a more just view of Roman Catholic culture devised new terms, such as ‘Catholic Restoration’, ‘Catholic Reformation’, and ‘Confessional Age’, to promote more positive interpretations of the period. Yet, as John O’Malley has demonstrated, in the seventeenth century ‘reform’ itself was associated with the institutional church and conciliar legislation. As a result the term Catholic Reformation connotes combativeness and restricts itself to the institutional Church and does not encompass other kinds of religious and lay movements.
If historians use any of the terms mentioned above, they need to decide which ones best express their own interpretations of their topic. Whereas some Roman Catholic initiatives were taken in direct response to Protestantism and were combative, others were taken independently of it and were not combative, while still others no doubt arose from a combination of the two impulses.
In addition to breaking away from monolithic conceptions, scholars now increasingly shift attention from official church history to the history of Christianity: this concerns the aspirations and thoughts of women and men of the era. Our choice of terms should reflect this shift of interest. Earlier scholars formulated their terms to express their ideas about causality and influence – what caused the Reformation and what influence it exerted. Yet as O’Malley put it, historians now ask the question ‘What was Catholicism like?’ It is time to find a term for the period that does not invoke causation and influence. O’Malley suggest the term ‘Early Modem Catholicism’.
Because we can no longer see any individual period as the product of a perfect consensus of ideas and actions, we can no longer pin the label ‘Counter-reformation’ on any given artistic style…Nor is it possible to conceive of a particular artistic style as the vehicle and even the creation of a single religious order. Until 1951, when Carlo Galassi Paluzzi, himself a Jesuit, discredited the theory, many saw the Baroque as a Jesuit style. Political, religious and aesthetic biases were such that many who regarded Baroque art as a tasteless debasement of Renaissance classicism were pleased enough to label it a tool of the Jesuits. This theory suffered not only from biases, but also from a monolithic conceptualization. The restored reputations of the Jesuits and of Baroque art along with historical distance make this old theory untenable. However, the theory’s existence has the merit of raising two- points: first, the study of Italian Baroque art began as the province of embattled ideologists; and second, the role of style has long been a thorn in the side of art historians seeking to understand the relationship between sacred art and early modem Catholic culture in Italy.
Art historians concur that the early Baroque style began in Italy around 1580 to 1590, making it the leading style during these years. There was of course some stylistic pluralism in this transitional period, but the most progressive artists, such as Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio, were producing works that were more natural and emotionally appealing than those of their immediate predecessors…Artists were seeking greater naturalism at a time when various ecclesiastical writers – such as Gabriele Paleotti, Bishop of Bologna, and Federico Borromeo – were calling for a move away from artificial and abstruse subjects in sacred art. Yet a move away from the older artificial style was not necessarily inspired by ecclesiastics. Secular theorists such as Federico Zuccaro and Giampaolo Lomazzo wrote also of a decline of art and the need for renewal.
Following the classical studies of art and the Counter-Reformation written in the early twentieth century, scholars saw the need for more focused studies of individual artists and patrons. This monographic approach provided a foundation for a deeper understanding of Italian religious art of the early modern period. This model, which seeks to determine both artists’ intentions and external influences on their works, has clarified artists’ religious beliefs, identified their works with particular patrons’ religious views and connected the iconography of their works with doctrines, devotional practices, liturgies and the like. Nevertheless, this approach alone will not give one a full appreciation of art in the light of early modem Catholic culture. The documentary evidence available seriously affects the monographic approach as it does any other…
…Annibale Carracci, the Bolognese painter who worked in Rome from 1595 until his death in 1609 is one of the creators of the early Baroque style. By 1583 Carracci had broken with the contorted poses, hard textures of flesh and detached emotions of figures painted by his older contemporaries in the artificial miniera style; instead, Caracci painted natural poses, accurate textures and emotions with which viewers could easily empathize. In 1974 Anton Boschloo attempted to prove that the new naturalism of Carracci’s painting was directly inspired by the ideas of his Bolognese bishop, Gabriele Paleotti, set out in his 1582 book Discorso intomo alle imagini sacre e profane (Discourse on Sacred and Profane Art). But scholars were not convinced by Boschloo’s method of linking individual iconographic and stylistic features in Carracci’s paintings with individual passages in Paleotti’s tract; the points he raised were not unique to Paleotti’s book; he could marshall no documentation directly linking the two men or indicating that Carracci had read the bishop’s tract; he had no evidence concerning Carracci’s own religious attitudes. Boschloo faced a stumbling block with which most scholars are familiar: a lack of documentation proving causation.
Gianlorenzo Bernini, the great sculptor-architect (c.1609-90) merits attention here because there is extensive evidence for his religious beliefs. No scholar deserves more credit for work on Bernini and religion than Irving Lavin, who, in a 1972 article on Bernini’s death, explored the artist’s concern with the art of dying well in connection with two works that he made shortly before his death. Lavin’s evidence was a foundation for his interpretative work: he knew that Bernini went to the Gesu every day and partook of the Eucharist twice a week, that he was an active member of the confraternity of Bona Mors, performing its devotions, and that he was influenced by his Oratorian nephew’s writings on death. Lavin proved the direct influence of Roman Catholic spirituality – specifically Jesuit and Oratorian – on Bernini’s production and use of two works to prepare himself to die well.
Michelangelo da Merisi, called Caravaggio, like Annibale Carracci, was a North Italian who became famous in Rome around 1600 and was an originator of the Baroque style. Today Caravaggio is arguably the most widely known Italian Baroque artist due to his strikingly powerful paintings and his turbulent life. Since the 1970s Caravaggio has been reinterpreted as a man for our time, particularly among English-speaking scholars and artists. They have not sought to interpret his religious paintings in an historical context but instead have focused on the attractions of his early secular paintings and his personality (especially his sexuality and his violence)…Caravaggio has also entered the popular imagination through recent newspaper articles about two religious paintings. Caravaggio’s magnificent Taking of Christ, painted in Rome in 1601 for the Mattei family, was for centuries known only through copies until it was rediscovered in a Jesuit residence in Dublin in 1990…
…The problem of trying to understand Caravaggio’s sacred art in the context of early modern Catholic culture is similar to that of trying to understand Carracci’s art: we lack evidence of the artist’s own religious beliefs. Nevertheless, various contextual studies, for example Adrienne von Lates’s 1994 article on the St Matthew paintings in the Contarelli Chapel, have successfully argued that certain works by Caravaggio depict religious activities connected with their settings, in this case the conversion of Jews at San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. As Caravaggio painted sacred subjects for a range of different religious orders and for a variety of private patrons, both clerical and lay, it is difficult to argue even by inference, that any one religious attitude particularly influenced his art…There is an additional complexity – Caravaggio’s aggression, which culminated in a murder in 1606. Scholars have asked how Caravaggio could have painted moving sacred works while living such an immoral life. Psychoanalytic theory, close study of trial documents, early biographies, and an analysis of the paintings themselves have thrown light on Caravaggio’s intentions (mainly subconscious) but have not answered this important question.
Perhaps Caravaggio will never be understood, but what about his art? One could pursue several avenues of study to illuminate his religious work. First, although there are detailed iconographic and contextual studies of several of Caravaggio’s individual Roman religious commissions, comparably rigorous research has yet to be done on his later paintings made in Naples, Malta and Sicily. Second, little attempt has been made to get an overall synthesis of existing studies of his sacred paintings: the ways in which his paintings resemble or depart from other artists’ treatments; the dissimilarities among his own paintings on the same theme for different patrons. This proposed new research follows monographic approach. Yet another approach to the study of Italian sacred art could deepen our knowledge of Catholic culture of the era.
What would happen if, instead of employing a monographic approach, we were to start with a different question: ‘What did early modern Catholic viewers (patrons, artists, the general public, etc.) in Italy want out of sacred art, in what contexts did they understand and appreciate it?’…Starting not with an individual artist or sacred artistic object but instead with the religious culture that conditioned viewers’ appreciation of art can be fruitful. Part of the problem in trying to understand early modern Catholic art is that religious culture of this period in Italy is itself insufficiently studied.
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Tracts on sacred history, preaching, art theory, devotional practice and so forth were of course written for an educated audience; yet the information they contain was not uniformly unknown among the uneducated nor was it irrelevant to their appreciation of sacred art. For example, art theorists discussed how to address illiterate viewers through art in public churches. Also, the cultural phenomena in which the general populace participated more fully (sometimes as originators) – such as cult practices, confraternal activities, songs, plays and material in chapbooks – also merit examination. Studies of such written and visual material do exist, but more are needed that deliberately aim at interpreting cultural phenomena as indicators of viewing expectations. To take the study of art theory as an example, Paola Barocchi’s editions of both secular and ecclesiastical art tracts of the late sixteenth century can be used as a foundation on which to base interpretative studies. These and seventeenth-century texts have much to offer scholars interested in reception, for they address art’s didactic, devotional, thaumaturgic and documentary functions; art’s powerful, indeed indelible, impression on the viewers’ memory; the way this power should be channelled to ensure the desired viewer response; even how and where to display art to best effect.
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In the last thirty odd years, historians have become more interested in what Catholicism was like, and scholars in general have undertaken more interdisciplinary case studies. Much progress has been made in the study of Roman Catholic art in early modern Italy. But the fact that there are still no up-to-date synthetic studies of major artists such as Carracci and Caravaggio as specifically religious painters, nor comprehensive investigations of responses to sacred art of their era indicates that there remains much exciting work to be done.
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