Art of the Gesăą Exhibition Brochure
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Fairfield University DigitalCommons@Fairfield Treasures of the Gesu: Bernini and His Age - Ephemera Treasures of the Gesu: Bernini and His Age 2018 Art of the Gesù exhibition brochure Fairfield University Art Museum Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/treasures-ephemera Recommended Citation Fairfield University Art Museum, "Art of the Gesù exhibition brochure" (2018). Treasures of the Gesu: Bernini and His Age - Ephemera. 13. https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/treasures-ephemera/13 This item has been accepted for inclusion in DigitalCommons@Fairfield by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Fairfield. It is brought to you by DigitalCommons@Fairfield with permission from the rights- holder(s) and is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses, you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE HOLY NAME Art of the Gesù: Bernini and his Age Fairfield University Art Museum February 2 – May 19, 2018 THE HOLY NAME Art of the Gesù: Bernini and his Age he church of the Gesù in Rome is the mother church of the Society of Jesus, the T religious order founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540 in the charged religious and political climate of the incipient Counter-Reformation. This was a period when the Catholic Church undertook to reassert its authority and hegemony in the wake of grievous challenges posed by the Protestant Reformation in the north, the ongoing Turkish threat from the east, and the cataclysmic sack of Rome—the seat of papal authority—by rampaging Imperial troops in 1527. Rising in the very center of the city in the shadow of the ancient Forum and Capitoline Hill, its imposing profile dominating the surrounding urban landscape, the Gesù was intended as a formidable symbol of the Church resurgent, and a testament to the power and prestige of the new Jesuit order. The Gesù’s great benefactor was the immensely wealthy and powerful Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-1589), grandson of Pope Paul III (r. 1534-1549), who funded its construction and, with a frequent disregard for the Jesuits’ expressed preferences, dictated many of its architectural features. His beneficence is recorded on the façade in the commemorative inscription that surmounts the shield with the IHS Christogram, symbol of the Society of Jesus, over the central portal (the name FARNESIVS, not accidentally, hovering directly above it). The Gesù was understood by contemporaries to be a Farnese “property”—a print in the exhibition refers to it as the “Farnese Temple” and the Farnese heraldic fleur de lis is ubiquitous in the interior and exterior—and was regarded as such by Cardinal Farnese himself, who is buried before the high altar. One of his many acts of largesse was the gift to the church of a splendid chasuble embroidered with gold and silver threads—a highlight of the exhibition (fig. 1). This ecclesiastical vestment was worn by the priest celebrating Mass before the high altar, which housed a monumental altarpiece also commissioned by the Cardinal. Though later members of the Farnese family, primarily Cardinal Odoardo Farnese (1573-1626), continued to favor the Gesù with their patronage—an altarpiece from his private chapel by the seventeenth-century Bolognese painter Domenichino is in the exhibition (fig. 2)—their hereditary benevolence, if not their proprietary claims to the church, dwindled dramatically over the course of the seventeenth century. The restrained yet handsome façade of the Gesù, designed by Giacomo della Porta (1532- 1602) at the behest of Alessandro Farnese, heralds elements of the Baroque architectural style that flourished in Rome in the seventeenth century, while its interior by the Farnese’s Church of the Gesù, Rome architect of longstanding, Jacopo Vignola (1507-1573), the appearance of which was recorded and disseminated in numerous engravings and illustrated books, was an extremely influential and enduring model for Jesuit churches throughout Europe (fig. 3). Consecrated in 1584 (though already in use while still under construction, as contemporary sources record), the Gesù had frescoes, wall paintings and altarpieces in some of its private chapels by the end of the sixteenth century. (Some of these early works executed during the first phase of the Gesu’s interior embellishment are reproduced in prints in the exhibition; fig. 4.) Its nave, dome and apse, however, remained barren and unadorned for nearly a century. This was partly owing to a chronic shortage of funds, but also reflects the fact that the Jesuits had no saints (and also, therefore, no cults to promote), which meant that the hagiographic repertoire they had to draw on for visual imagery was limited. That all changed in 1622, when the Order’s founders Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier were canonized—a long hoped-for, seismic apotheosis that led to a flurry of activity around the two lateral altars dedicated in their honor. Two of the masterpieces from the Gesù, both from the altar of Saint Ignatius—a shimmering gilt bronze sculpture of Saint Teresa of Avila (fig. 5) by the versatile painter, draftsman and sculptor Ciro Ferri (1634-1689), and the sumptuous, jewel- encrusted lapis lazuli, silver, and gilt bronze cartegloria (the framed Latin text of the mass), a consummate example of Roman Baroque goldsmith’s work (fig. 6)—relate to this important campaign to outfit the church’s two new principal chapels, as does the bronze relief of Jesuit saints by Alessandro Algardi (1598-1654), a variant of the relief on the funerary urn of Ignatius in the Gesù. Other important works assembled for the exhibition are also connected with the altar projects (figs. 7 and 8). The vast, long-empty central expanse of the Gesù’s interior was finally decorated in the later seventeenth century through the offices of the Superior General Gian Paolo Oliva (1600- 1681), who selected from among the pool of contenders for the prestigious commission to fresco the dome (and, subsequently, the nave and apse) the barely established, Genoese-born painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli (sometimes referred to by his nickname, il Baciccio; 1639- 1709). Gaulli rose to the charge with the glorious vision of an expansive heaven suffused with a celestial radiance and populated by the blessed—a whirling vortex of color and light from which expelled demons tumble forth—that persuades the viewer of the immanence of the Divine. His luminous oil sketches for different parts of the Gesù frescoes, presented together in the exhibition and united for the first time with his monumental painted wood model for the apse, offer a virtual if condensed recreation of the sweeping, grandiose pictorial scheme (figs. 9, 10 and 12). Populating the frescoes and other works of art throughout the Gesù and in the exhibition are angels—divine messengers and agents, whose presence at every moment of human life, from birth to death, is a central tenet of Jesuit spirituality. In his deliberations, Oliva was undoubtedly swayed by his friend Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), the fiery genius who transformed the artistic topography of Rome in the seventeenth century. Bernini was attached to the Jesuits and the Gesù for much of his long career, beginning with the funerary monument of the Jesuit Cardinal and theologian fig. 1 2 3 Roberto Bellarmino in the apse of the church. His splendid portrait bust of Bellarmino from the now lost tomb, which seems to be inhabited by the animating spirit of the world-weary prelate it depicts, the marble metamorphosed into fabric and flesh, is the highlight of the exhibition (cover illustration). Bernini also designed the church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale for the Jesuits in the late 1650s, produced frontispieces for the published volumes of Oliva’s writings, and looked over Gaulli’s shoulder as he worked on the dome of the Gesù. His oversight of his disciple is recorded in a group of drawings for this project including two in the exhibition (fig. 11), and there is some thought that the stucco figures surrounding the Triumph of the Holy Name of Jesus in the nave reflect his input as well. These are some of the many narrative threads explored in the exhibition. The more than fifty paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, historical documents, illustrated books, and precious objects are grouped into sections that recount the founding and early success of the Society of Jesus under the patronage of Pope Paul III and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (coinciding in part with the tenure of the future saint Francis Borgia as Superior General); the long and at times challenging campaign to build the Gesù and embellish its interior; the commanding personalities of Bernini, Bellarmino and the politically savvy Oliva; the imperative to formulate a hagiographic lexicon and imagery celebrating the order’s newly canonized founders and other early Jesuit saints and beati and promoting their cults; and the expansion of the Jesuits’ presence in Rome through the construction and embellishment of their second great church Sant’Ignazio, a project most closely associated with the painter, architect and scenographic designer Andrea Pozzo. Art of the the Gesù also highlights the extraordinary creative energies of the many painters, sculptors, architects, designers and craftsmen—Vignola, Giacomo della Porta, Bernini, Gaulli, Ciro Ferri, Carlo Maratti, Pozzo and others—who gave form and visual expression to the Jesuits’ most profound spiritual and devotional precepts and who together realized this vast, ambitious and glorious project. Linda Wolk-Simon, PhD Frank and Clara Meditz Director and Chief Curator fig.