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 their work that established their reputations in Rome.

Because he was given free reign on the project, Borromini’s design of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome is among the works that best exemplified the manifestations of his imagination, skill, and innovative concepts. Construction began in 1638 and quickly became famous (or infamous) for its unique design which combined a traditional, standard Greek cross plan with an oval dome--- a new and rarely used stylistic choice--- and a wavy, undulating facade. The overall plan was both traditional, practical, and geometric, but novel and edgy as well. The design took the Renaissance ideals of perfect geometric form, i.e. the circle, and condensed it. Borromini was still using mathematics and the rationale behind anthropometry, but with his own creative interpretation.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Vittoria is the sculpture done by Bernini that reaffirmed his prestige as an architect in Rome from 1652 when it was completed. It illustrates the moment at which St. Teresa’s heart was pierced with the flaming arrow, and she experienced a moving and powerful sensation from the intensity of this spiritual awakening. The event chosen was in and of itself a theatrical, and one might say Baroque scene. Bernini’s interpretation however emphasizes its explosivity. The beaming golden rays of heavenly light that stream down behind the figures of the angel, who is actively drawing back the arrow to plunge into the heart of Teresa, and the limp figure of Teresa herself, cloaked in her heavy Carmelite habit. The sculpture has many traditional aspects of Baroque style--- the sense of movement, the drama, the illuminating golden background, and the complexity and size of the sculpture itself.

Another work that was important to the Baroque period was Bernini’s first free-standing fountain, Fontana del Tritone. This work is an example of the more whimsical, less reverent sculpture representing the restoration of the Acqua Felice aquaduct by Pope Urban VIII, a major patron of the arts during his reign. The fountain was Bernini’s interpretation of a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses that described Trition revoking the Universal Deluge. Here we see the importance the papal family and the patronage, highlighted in the papal tiara, crossed keys, and the famous Barbarini bees, carved into the fountain on either side to remind the public with this grand Baroque spectacle that it was, in fact, their Pope who gave them this gift of water.


Finally, at the Villa Farnese, we were able to peek inside the personal quarters of the Cardinal Alessandro and the Papal family and see the series of secular, mythological images frescoed in the Palazzo. The series of quadro riportati depicted scenes of sexuality, violence, and comedy, showing that even during a period of conservatism and simplicity in painting, the love for secular, and somewhat scandalous Renaissance imagery was never lost.

 It is bittersweet to reach the end of the course and the end of the program. I have learned more than I could have imagined about art and architecture, Jesuit cultural policy and education, and about the cultural and political history of Rome. I am excited, however, to return to New Orleans and take the knowledge I now have with me and explore the art and history of my home as well as wherever my travels take me in the future.
Arrivederci, Roma!
Maggie McGovern

Summer 2017

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