Spectacle, Patronage, and the Jesuits in Baroque Rome- post 4

Ciao!

As this week was our last week of excursions, it was bittersweet and very eventful.  We were fresh off from our weekend trip to Florence and Assisi, which was a breath of fresh air and extremely enchanting.  As birthplace of the Renaissance, Florence is still a gorgeous and lively avenue for artist and art lovers.  An Assisi was charming, relaxing, and had stunning scenery.  The Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi was amazing and it was one of the only Gothic churches on our tour.  Its unique architecture contains two levels that are comprised of an upper church and a lower church.  St. Francis’ crypt was beautiful and created a space to meditate.  The walls of both levels are decorated with several frescos from medieval artists. Our other main excursion for the weekend took us to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  The museum contains priceless pieces from some of Italy’s most talented and brightest artists of the Renaissance.  The weekend was packed full of art and history, which prepared us well for the excursions to come.https://scontent-ams3-

             
            After the weekend, we returned to Rome in order to continue studying the spectacle, patronage, and the Jesuits in baroque Rome.  One of our first stops in the morning was to visit the Fontana del Tritone.  The baroque fountain was created by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and commissioned by Pope Urban VIII.  The fountain was an influential gesture by Pope Urban VIII to illustrate that he appreciates the people and wants to be remembered well by provided them access to a water source through an aqueduct.  The fountain contains a larger than life version of Triton, the sea god and son of Poseidon.  He is depicted as a merman and sitting upon four large fish or dolphins that are entwined with the papal tiara and crossed keys.  The fountain is Bernini’s first freestanding fountain and his last major commission before his death.

           
Our next stop after the fountain was to the Santa Maria della Vittoria in order to catch a glimpse of Bernini’s sculpture, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. The sculpture is a very good example of a piece from the High Roman Baroque period.  The sculpture was commission by Pope Innocent X and the sculpture dramatizes the Carmelite, Teresa of Avila, and her powerful religious experience with an angel piercing her heart.  It resides in a one of the transept of the church. 



            We then traveled to another baroque church called, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, in order to examine Francesco Borromini’s design and architecture. He was commissioned to design the church in the 17th century by Cardinal Francesco Barberini.  The exterior has a concaved-convex façade that reveal it to by non-classic design.  The complexities of the interior and exterior have lead to the understanding that it was constructed in a way to convey balance, rhythm, and harmonic qualities.  The church also emphasizes the structure of the building and not art of decorations.  The stark whiteness of the walls lead the eye to focus on the intricate geometric shapes on the ceilings and the congruence of the architecture.  Our adventures then took us to the San Vitale, an ancient basilica that was consecrated by Pope Innocent I and then rebuilt by Pope Sixtus IV.  The church walls are frescoed with images of martyrdom and extremely below street level due to its age. 

            Our last excursion for the day and the trip included a visit to the Palazzo Farnese, one of the most important palaces of the High Renaissance. Initially built for the Farnese family when Alessandro Farnese because Pope Paul III.  Italian artists, such as Michelangelo and Annibale Carracci, worked on its creation and frescos.  Carracci’s dynamic combination of the baroque and classical styles created an innovative and fresh way to create Renaissance art.  When Cardinal Farnese, the grandson of Pope Paul III, lived in the palace he increased the size of the palace and employed Michelangelo.  His status is an example of the cardinal nephew practice, which entails the elevation of status to cardinal due to familial relations to a pope.  The Hercules room and The Love of the Gods are two rooms that hold exquisite examples from this time period.  The sculpture of Hercules is massive and illustrates some of the labors in the myth.  Carracci’s fresco’s of The Love of Gods is immense and illustrates his dynamic approach by illustrating how human bodies can dance or illustrate more natural movement, compared to Michelangelo’s contorted figures.

That’s all for now, folks!!

Thank you for an amazing and unforgettable trip!

Love from Rome,


Kelsey Nicolosi    

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Spectacle, Patronage, and the Jesuits in Baroque Rome Our final week in Rome was exciting and hectic as we have been winding down on assignments and trying to fit in the last few great meals we can find around the city. Finishing our course work, we traveled to Baroque churches and monuments and went out with a bang studying a few of Rome’s most notable works that embody the theatricality and style of the Baroque period. Baroque art, as we should be very familiar with by now, is a style of art that came about after the Mannerist movement and after the Catholic Reformation. It focused on grandiose, theatrical presentations of art and similarly dramatic portrayals of these traditional motifs and iconographies. In the Baroque period, two of the most prominent artists and architects of the period were Francesco Borromini and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The contemporaries were both peers and rivals, Bernini being the more sociable, amiable of the two. This week we saw examples of both of...
Read more

Spectacle, Patronage, and the Jesuits in Baroque Rome-Teresa Berner

Image
Here we are, the last blogpost of this four week series. The time I spent here in Rome was one the most educational experiences of my life.  Actually being in the presence of these works of art that I have learned about over the course of my life has been surreal. This week was no different. This week was all about the spectacle, patronage, and the Jesuits in Baroque Rome. The most evident spot of Jesuit patronage and spectacle that we went to this week was the church of S. Vitale. It is an ancient church that was renovated by the Jesuits during the Catholic Reformation. The Jesuits knew that they had to educate people about the reforms of the Catholic Church. They thought that by reminding the public about Catholic martyrs who showed the ultimate sign of faith by dying for their beliefs, people would be inspired to come back to the church. Along the walls of the nave are paintings of different martyrs. There are paintings of the martyrdom of St. Vitale in the apse of t...
Read more

Final - Alaina Fontenot

Image
Rome is home to some of the world’s oldest and most influential works of art. This past month, in Art/Jesuits in Early Modern Rome, we covered an impressive amount of ground looking at work spanning from the 15th all the way to the 17th centuries. What’s maybe the most impressive, though, is the range of ceiling paintings that spanned these centuries. From the Allegory of Divine Providence by Pietro da Cartona in the Palazzo Barberini, to the Apotheosis of Saint Ignazio by Andrea Pozzo in the Chiesa di Stant’ Ignazio, to the Triumph of the Name of Jesus by Giovanni Battista Gaulli in the Gesù, each painting seemed more grandiose and mind-boggling than the next.  Each painting mentioned above is its own example of quadratura painting in the Baroque era. The Baroque movement in art came after the Renaissance and later Mannerism painting where there was an emphasis on going back to the Classical art and architecture of the Hellenistic period and Classical Rome. The art was very c...
Read more