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The Impact of the Counter-Reformation on Art: Baroque Art in Catholic Europe (Italy, France, Belgium) Robert Baldwin Associate Professor of Art History Connecticut College New London, CT 06320 robert.baldwin@conncoll.edu (This essay was written in 1997 and was last revised Sept. 2008.)

Contents 1. Council of Trent 2. Rise of Jesuits 3. Counter-Reformation Piety as Triumphalist Catholicism 4. Absolutist Church and State in an Age of Empire 5. Counter-Reformation Catholicism as Visual Piety 6. The Problematic Body in Catholic Art 7. Rhetorical Piety: Emotion, Ecstasy, and Mystical Marriage 8. Martyrdom, Torment, and Violence as Exemplary Image, Affective Piety, and Mobilizing Device 9. Sacramental Piety / Eucharistic Piety / Penitential Piety 10A. The Institutional Politics of Mary in the Counter-Reformation 10B. Immaculacy, Triumph, and the Nexus of Perfection and Power 11. The Counter-Reformation and the Politics of the Saints 12. Counter-Reformation History and the Myth of Early Christianity 13. Penitential Self-Examination and the Creation of a Catholic Self 1. The Council of Trent: Correct Doctrine, Narrative Clarity and Religious Content. To deal with the challenges of the Reformation, Pope Paul III convened a church council which met on and off for twenty years (1544-1566). The Council of Trent reaffirmed correct church doctrine on a wide variety of issues and even accepted a few Protestant complaints by forbidding the sale of indulgences. Among other things, the Council of Trent issued guidelines for religious art, asking for greater clarity, realism, emotional drama, dogmatic instruction, and the avoidance of genital nudity. Biblical subjects were supposed to show maximal fidelity to the Bible and to Christian history, avoiding legendary saints and events invented in the middle ages. (This concern ran into the artistic problem of painting any literary subject, especially Biblical subjects which came with minimal description.)

The focus of the Counter-Reformation on teaching and religious content inspired a reaction against Mannerist aesthetic complexity and "art for art's sake" seen in the religious works of Bronzino and others. The ideal Counter-Reformation painting had a simpler, more legible composition which told a story and aroused religious feeling, not just aesthetic admiration or dogmatic belief. Even large, crowded compositions showed a new focus on major figures as seen in Pozzo's huge ceiling fresco of the Triumph of St. Ignatius. Counter-Reformation spirituality also placed a new emphasis on artistic subjects tied to religious calling, miracles, and conversion, teaching and missionary work, martyrdom and ecstasy, divine providence and world history (history as a coherent series of great epochs leading to the end of time), religious authority and hierarchy, and church triumph over false belief. 2. The Rise of the Jesuit Order as Vanguard of the Counter-Reformation and the Conversion of Europe and the World Major shifts in religious life are usually accompanied by new groups spearheading the changes in religious culture. This was true of late middle piety with the rise of preaching orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans. And it was true for the Counter-Reformation which was led by a brand new, highly influential religious order, the Jesuits. Approved by Paul III in 1540, the Jesuit order was founded by Ignatius of Loyola, a soldier turned monk. By the 1570s, the Jesuits had installed themselves on a grand scale in Rome with a large church, Il Gesu, with other churches built later such as S. Ignazio. In contrast to earlier orders, the Jesuits fostered a new kind of monk and priest, well educated, less corrupt, and devoted to Catholic education and missionary work. The Jesuits built schools and universities all over Europe and the New World, making a more Catholic version of the Renaissance humanist curriculum. They also became the spiritual advisors and confessors to most of the powerful princes and nobles in Europe, expanding their spiritual authority with strong ties to secular rulers. With its aggressive, missionary, conversion-oriented Christianity, the Jesuits emerged as the leading edge of the Counter-Reformation as a movement in Europe and abroad. Early Jesuits preachers traveled all over the world, making inroads in the Far East (especially China) and setting up missionary outposts and colleges. Playing catch up in the new age of Catholic empire were the older preaching orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, which also played major roles in spreading Roman Catholicism in the New World. The Jesuits were also famous for adapting Christianity to local religious, social, and political cultures. Rather than trying to impose European Christian values without compromise on native peoples, leading Jesuits missionaries studied foreign languages, customs, and culture to preach Catholic values more persuasively to different audiences. While the Dominicans and Franciscans had marginal success in the East in converting the Chinese and the Indians, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci adopted Chinese clothes, studied Mandarin and Confuscianism, and spread Christianity among the Chinese by arguing its similarities to Confuscian belief. The Jesuit missionary, Roberto de' Nobili, lived in India like an Indian ascetic and converted many Brahmins to the Mother Church by arguing Christianity was a superior form of Hinduism.

The Jesuits, and to a lesser extent, the other preaching orders, also worked hard to spread the Catholic faith within Europe to the rural and urban masses largely neglected in the earlier sixteenth century. This local missionary effort greatly strengthened Catholicism throughout Europe and converted many Protestants back to the Catholic fold in parts of France and Germany. With the Calvinist and Lutheran church offering a religious faith largely purged of any material splendor, sensual beauty, emotional excitement, theatrical imagery, outward miracles, heroic saints, and loving Madonnas, the Reformation was hard pressed to compete against a new, missionary, highly-educated Roman Catholicism. Protestantism also lacked any sense of human dignity or free will, especially in Calvinism which claimed that salvation or damnation was predestined by God before birth. In Calvinist piety, human beings were helpless to improve their chances for salvation. With its austere view of the human relation to God, Protestant piety left many worshippers spiritually deprived. The fierce, often violent conflicts between Protestant sects indirectly strengthened an increasingly united Roman Catholic church. By the midseventeenth century, many Protestants in some regions had converted back to Catholicism including important writers such as the Dutch poet, Vondel, and monarchs such as Queen Christina of Sweden. In the Dutch Republic where public Catholic worship was forbidden and where the official state religion was Calvinism, one third of the population remained discreetly Catholic. Through a combination of grass-roots Catholic missionary work in the countryside, religious war and persecution, and political coercion from above, Catholic missionaries, church officials, and secular rulers managed to roll back Protestantism in significant areas of Northern and Eastern Europe by 1700. (In 1685, Louis XIV ended ninety-five years of tolerance for Protestantism by outlawing it altogether and forcing 200,000 French Protestants to emigrate.) Some areas in Northern Europe had always remained Catholic including Hapsburg Austria , parts of Poland, ,Hungary, Bohemia, France, Southern Germany, and the Southern Netherlands. By 1700, the lands reclaimed for Catholicism included most of France, all of Southern Germany and territories around Cologne, all of the Southern Netherlands, and most of Eastern Europe. 3. Counter-Reformation as Triumphalist Catholicism The Counter-Reformation (or Catholic Reform as it is often called today) was the official Catholic response to the Reformation and emerged in the decades after the Council of Trent (1564). On the one hand, it tried to undermine some Protestant trends by enacting an internal Catholic reform. On the other hand, it also responded directly to the Protestant attack on core Catholic values by reasserting them in a far more aggressive manner infused with a more combative and triumphal spirituality. In general, the Catholic church responded to the Protestant threat by developing a more militant piety. Central to this development was an expansion of the earlier High Renaissance revival of triumphal imagery to express the absolute, all-conquering power of the papacy, the Roman Church, the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, the Virgin as Queen of Heaven, the saints, the "True Faith", and the cross, redefined as a standard of victory.

In the years following the Sack of Rome in 1526, triumphal imagery had declined somewhat along with other "pagan" forms. (One striking exception was Michelangelos Campidoglio where the equestrian Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, figured the universal dominion of the Roman Church and of Pope Paul III.) Later sixteenth-century Catholic triumphal imagery took on a more Christian appearance tied to the historic triumph of the early Christian church under the emperor Constantine. (This theme already featured in Raphaels frescoes of the Life of Constantine painted for Pope Leo X around 1513-14.) As the Counter-Reformation church and its secular allies in Spain and Germany accumulated a series of political, military, and religious victories, an even more assertive, military, and classical rhetoric of Christian triumph returned in seventeenthcentury Catholic art. Heralding the new imagery were two engravings from a book published in Rome in 1588. One showed the triumphant Pope Gregory XIII born aloft in apotheosis, while the other celebrated the ceremonial transportation of an important painting of the Madonna and Child from one church to another. While this engraving referred to one image in particular, it also shows the new "triumph" of art and of images as the central medium for the expression of Counter-Reformation ideology. Among many images and texts of the triumphal church in the late 16th century, two can be mentioned here. One is Titians Triumph of the Church painted as an altarpiece in the 1570s for the chief political officer in Venice, Doge Grimani. Flanked by soldiers and a prophet, the armored Doge Grimani kneels obediently, struck by a spectacular vision of the church rising in glory over Venice, the Eucharistic chalice extended as a trophy of Catholic victory over Muslims and heretics. (The Venetian navy had just won a major victory against the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto, 1571.) In Titians painting, Ecclesia (the Church) also holds a cross against the brilliantly lit sky recalling the famous vision of the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine. In Christian legend elaborated during the Counter-Reformation, Constantine had a dream the night before a decisive battle in which a cross appeared in the sky with the words, Conquer under this sign. Converting to Christianity, he marched under the standard of the cross to glorious victory against a rival emperor. In 313 AD, he proclaimed Christianity the new religion of the Roman empire. Already featured in Raphaels frescoes on The Life of Constantine (1513-14), the Constantinian cross as standard or trophy of victory became one of the leitmotifs of Counter-Reformation religious art and triumphalist piety. Among many examples, one text and one image deserve special mention. The text comes in the second chapter of Tasso's Creation of the World in Seven Days (1594). Tasso was the author of the great, Counter-Reformation epic, Jerusalem Liberated (1575), which used the crusades to represent a victorious Catholic empire over the whole world. His Creation of the World was written to honor the election of his patron, Pope Clement VIII, who planned to make Tasso "poet laureate". In the chapter on the second day of Creation describing God's creation of the planets and stars, Tasso launched into a hymn to the triumphal cross of universal Catholic victory. This cross was visible in the stars established by God, in the early Christian empire of Constantine, in ancient Egyptian culture, and, by implication, in the modern empire of Clement VIII. Only that Cross, on which his murdered Son defeated after death the Stygian realm, [Hell]

he printed in high heaven, forming it with those four luminous and cloudless stars which ancient people failed to scan at all ... ... It is that sign of victory which, flaming high above, Helena's noble and unvanquished son [Constantine] saw in the midst of his most pious fight when from the Tiber's crumbling bridge he made the novel Pharoah plunge into its waves, and thus freed Rome from her oppressing yoke, scattering her proud idols on the ground. It is the sign that, flashing through the clouds, struck his successor's most unworthy gaze, and vanishing then at once as fiery smoke into the dusty regions of the air. It is the trophy of eternal light shining above forever as a symbol, immutable and fixed, of endless empire a symbol of the laws whereby the King of heaven binds the vanquished and the victor, pardon and glory granting onto them. Well ancient Egypt saw the worth of this in the profoundest darkness of its night when to the number of its well-known signs it also added a mysterious cross the cross the heavenly Maker wished to shape with the four farthest corners of the world, making its form and soon dividing it with East and West, and then with North and South. 1 The triumphal cross also appeared in many Catholic images after 1580. Its greatest artistic expression came in Rubens's The Raising of the Cross executed in 1610 as an altarpiece for a Jesuit church in Antwerp but based on a Roman imperial cameo depicting the raising of a trophy under the coronation of Augustus. 4. Counter-Reformation: Absolutist Church and State in an Age of Empire The triumphant Counter-Reformation Church also strengthened political ties with the great Catholic nation states of France and Spain who were colonizing the newly "discovered" lands in North and South America, Africa, and the East Indies. This advantageous alliance allowed Catholic monarchies in France and Spain to colonize "savage" and "primitive" peoples in the higher name of Christianity. Conquest became refashioned as salvation and an uplifting enlightenment and civilization.

While Protestants did some preaching in the New World, the focus of Counter-Reformation Catholicism on aggressive missionary work, preaching, religious education, and a theatrical, empirical piety of the five senses led to the successful conversion of most of the New World. South America, Central America, and Mexico were colonized by Catholic Spain while large parts of North America were colonized by Catholic France. These areas included much of the southern central area what is now the United States which France later sold to the United States and another large territory which now forms the eastern half of Canada. Even if secular powers have always used religion to cement political order, the alliance of Catholic church and state was more possible in the seventeenth century in a new age of absolutist politics and absolutist church culture. Church authorities insisted that secular rulers were God's representatives on earth and that political obedience was divinely commanded. In the eyes of St. Ignatius of Loyola, blind obedience was a transcendent and universal virtue in the heavenly and earthly spheres without which order and unity were impossible. . . . order is not achieved without the necessary bond of obedience between subjects and superiors. This we can see from the whole natural order, the hierarchies of angels, and well-ordered human constitutions. These are united, preserved, and governed through subordination, So holy obedience is the ideal I hold up to you. 2 Writing at a time when monarchs ruled all of Europe except the Netherlands and Venice, the seventeenth-century French political philosopher, Bossuet, commented A king's throne is not the throne of a man, but the throne of God Himself ... Royal power is sacred: God raises up kings as his ministers and reigns through them over nations ... Obedience to princes is therefore an obligation of religion and conscience ... An inherent holiness exists in the character of a king and no crime can efface it." 3 If Catholic authorities cultivated ties with secular rulers, emperors, monarchs, and high nobles promoted the power of Catholic officials, especially popes and bishops, restored church lands, renovated the old orders and patronized new ones, above all the Jesuits. 4 In seventeenth-century France, Louis XIV successively named two cardinals - Richelieu and Mazarin - as his chief ministers of state. This helped unify church and state under the all-powerful authority of a single monarch. The close alliance between political and religious (Catholic) authority was further strengthened by the Jesuit order's devotion to education and the founding of hundreds of high quality schools for ruling elites. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Jesuits had a near monopoly on the education of the Catholic aristocracy and most Catholic princes chose Jesuit priests as personal confessors. Capitalizing on the missionary possibilities of the new age of empire, the Catholic church played an active role in converting, "saving," and "civilizing" the "savage" peoples of the New World and other colonized areas in Africa and the Far East. Its missionary orders - especially the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans - established leading outposts and fortifications, seized lands, established slave plantations, and used preaching and education to convert indigenous

peoples to the Catholic faith. The missionary orders also built church, schools, and hospitals, to imbed the new religious values permanently into the social, institutional, and material fabric of local life. In contrast to secular authorities for whom violence was a normal part of colonization and statecraft, Counter-Reformation missionaries stressed the peaceful means of preaching and missionary work and transforming local infrastructure. Jesuit missionaries were also famous for learning the local languages and adapting Catholic spirituality to speak more effectively to those outside Christendom. Nonetheless, the more peaceful means adopted by the Catholic Church masked a more subtle kind of cultural violence when a powerful colonizing force entered a weaker region, convinced of its superiority, and worked aggressively to convert and civilize the local savages. Nor did occasional Catholic attacks on slavery interfere with the rapidly expanding slave trade and the slave-based plantation economies established throughout the East and West Indies. Catholic authorities could reject violent conquest in part because this unpleasant job had already been taken on by secular institutions and forces. Church and State as a Universal Feature of Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Monarchies To be fair, the strategic union between church and state transcended Catholic thinking and was typical of all Christian monarchs in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. The rise of the modern, centralized nation state depended on close cooperation between secular and religious authority. One of the most striking documents of early modern religious empire appeared a few decades before the start of the Counter-Reformation. Known as the Requirement, this Spanish document was produced in 1513 by Catholic theologians for the Spanish crown and was supposed to be read to people in the New World (despite the fact that none of them could understand Spanish). Predating the Counter-Reformation by thirty years, it describes a single world created by the Catholic God where all people were subject to the lawful authority of the Catholic church and to Catholic monarchs. The indigenous peoples of newly colonized lands could convert peacefully and be redeemed and civilized or force would be used, lands and properties seized, and locals enslaved. Although a later king of Spain modified this document and officially condemned the use of force in 1573, the reality of force continued behind the smokescreen of a more benign official policy. In any case, most native peoples had died of European diseases by 1573 and the plantation economies set up in the New World imported slaves from African. The best example of church and state uniting came in Protestant England. In 1534, Henry VIII dramatically increased his power by breaking with the Catholic church and proclaiming himself head of a new Protestant Church of England. English political and religious authority were now fused into a single person. His chief religious spokesperson, Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a series of sermons to be read regularly at every English pulpit, which drove home the monarchical idea of a single, unified, orderly cosmos with every creature ranked in their proper place in the hierarchy, kings over ministers, nobles over commoners, masters over servants, men over women, parents over children, and humans over animals. Working in the late 16th century for Queen Elizabeth, the Anglican court humanist, John Case, extended these ideas with elaborate cosmologies reinforcing Elizabeths divine rights as Gods earthly monarch presiding over church and state. The frontispiece to Cases Sphaera Civitatis (1588) depicts Elizabeth ruling over a spherical cosmos with the planets and virtues ranked in their traditional order.

5. Counter-Reformation Catholicism as Visual Piety. Christian Visual Piety Before the Counter-Reformation Despite a few periods of iconoclasm in the early Christian church, images were generally welcome in Christian worship from the start. One of the distinguishing features of Christianity compared to Judaism or Islam, the Christian embrace of images was directly related to the strange idea of a god born into the human flesh and made visible in the external world of physical appearance. An incarnate god sanctioned the material world of religious images. Despite the acceptance of religious images in worship and church ceremony, the medieval monastic Christian opposition between body and soul fueled an iconoclastic tendency within the larger spectrum of Christian spirituality. To combat iconoclastic thinking, theologians traditionally defended religious images on three grounds: teaching, remembering, and moving. Images were compared to books and especially to the Bible as an effective method of teaching Christian stories and doctrines to the illiterate masses. Images were also hailed for their mnemonic and affective power. In contrast to the word, the image was said to impress itself more permanently on the soul and to rouse human emotion more deeply. At the same time, the very defense of the image presumed its inferiority to the higher world of literature. Because the image was tied to the teaching of illiterates and to the lower world of emotion, Medieval and Renaissance writers often looked down on images as an inferior medium suited for uneducated persons or as a valuable but lower starting point as the mind as it ascended from illusory, carnal things to transcendent spiritual realities. The Protestant critique of Catholic piety gave full rein to the iconoclastic element within Christianity. In general, Protestants denounced what they saw as the whorish carnality of the Roman church with its outward splendor, images, processions, ceremonies, miracles, and visual focus on altars. Instead of the religious image, Protestant writers stressed the more inward Word of the newly translated Bible. Each Protestant sect developed its own take on the image. Calvinists generally removed all church art and whitewashed the interiors. Anglicans removed some Catholic images and stressed a new simplicity in church art. Lutherans stopped commissioning new works of church art and were told to ignore the images already present. Despite such variations, the major Protestant sects all devalued the religious image in church worship while sanctioning the religious image outside church where it served more secular, teaching purposes. If the Counter Reformation redefined what was central to Catholic spirituality and propagated it with new force and consistency in a wide range of media, the religious image took on even greater importance. To combat the heresy of Protestant thinking, the Catholic Church developed a new visual rhetoric which was grand, powerful, heroic, dramatic, emotionally affective, and ornate. This piety of the senses, and especially vision, transformed the full spectrum of visual media including architecture and the visual arts (painting, sculpture, tapestry, stained glass, and prints), liturgical costumes and sacramental practices, church ceremonies, religious festivals, processions, and theater, and triumphal entries for church officials and rulers.

The new Counter-Reformation visual piety also produced an outpouring of subject matter where visuality was itself a major theme. This included depictions of Christians worshipping images, trompe loeil images depicting religious paintings (like Jan Bruegels images of the Madonna of the Garland), Baroque statues which come to life by leaping out of their niches, narratives of conversion or faith tied to visual experiences (Simeon in the Temple, Longinus at the Crucifixion, the doubting Thomas, the Supper at Emmaus), paintings of miraculous visions and revelation, a new interest in gruesome martyrdoms which offered gripping and exemplary images of the true faith triumphing over anti-Catholic persecution, and an increasingly theatrical representation of religious conversion and ecstasy. Here the human soul outwardly displayed its surrender to a larger and more powerful divinity. None of this new visual piety meant that verbal communication was forgotten. The CounterReformation church also exploited the new technology of printing (especially illustrated books) and put a new stress on preaching, missionary work, education, scientific inquiry, and spreading the word of god. Nonetheless, the most striking aspect of Counter-Reformation Catholicism was its massive investment in visual worship and faith, in a new Catholic visuality. Rooted in the common belief that images spoke more powerfully than words, Catholic Counter-Reformation art reached out aggressively to the viewer with an ornate, rhetorical visual culture to spread the true faith and combat the Protestant "heresy". As with the Late Renaissance, grand, beautiful forms were generally employed in the belief that beauty led the viewer hierarchically to contemplate divine beauty. As elsewhere, the militant Jesuits led the way in emphasizing the image and all of the five senses in spreading Catholic doctrine. Its chief handbook, St. Ignatius's The Spiritual Exercises, recommended a direct, emotional, physical, and personal relation to God. (Don't miss the modern aspects of this piety which even overlap in some ways with the humanist and Protestant notion that the self is increasingly the locus of faith.) Here is a typical seventeenth-century Jesuit defense of art from Luois Richeomes anti-Calvinist tract, Discours des images (1589). "the mind is stimulated by (sight). Abstract ideas weary the intellect too much if they are not rendered accessible to the senses". "Images ... teach us teach us painlessly and penetratingly. The ease is due to the fact that they can impress countless items of information on our minds, with their colors and lines, in a fraction of a second, while the ear needs a lot more time. The eye ... rivals the mind in quickness ... while the other senses (are) ... inferior and more material ... For this reason painting, with its colors and living lines, can instruct the mind more easily". 5 At first, the Counter-Reformation stressed simple, direct, naturalistic presentations of Mary, the saints, bloody martyrdom, and graphic Passion scenes purged of the erotic qualities so conspicuous in Mannerist art. The emphasis was on compositional simplicity, clarity, and a gutsy naturalism, all in reaction to the excessive artifice of Mannerist artists like Bronzino, Parmigianino, Rosso, Salviati, and Vasari. As one Jesuit writer complained in describing Mannerist religious art,

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"in the Adoration of the Magi, they trouble themselves making a marvelous camel, or a black man loaded with gifts, and to him they give the most beautiful place in the picture, so much so, that one can hardly see where the sacred child is who is to be adored". 6 Note how similar this is to the complaint of Bishop Antonine made in later fifteenth-century Florence cited in my notes on Ghirlandaio's Adoration. Church officials made the same complaint about Veroneses Last Supper in 1573 when they attacked its many secular details including German soldiers eating and drinking, clowns and dwarfs with parrots, and numerous servants some forty-six courtly figures packed into a huge palace. To some extent, this was a recurrent problem generated by a developing naturalism in religious art after 1400. In each century, the extension of the prevailing naturalism generated occasional worries about a traditional sanctity disappearing amidst worldly details and description. One problem for all religious art after 1400 was the struggle to retain a visual grip on the transcendent, the supernatural, the sacred, to use the new naturalism to intensify rather than dilute the sacred. Catholic Visual Culture as Absolutist Spectacle On the one hand, we should see the new visual piety of the Counter-Reformation as the continuation of a well-established tradition of visual worship which went back to the late Middle Ages as seen in the new naturalism of Giotto. This tradition continued into the Early Renaissance with its one point perspective which made a new aesthetic system out of human vision and ennobled perception with mind, raising it to a higher level. Seeing was now believing and thinking. This tradition was further developed in the more rhetorical art of the High Renaissance with its new grandeur, drama, and emotional affect. With this long historical shift in mind, one should see the new Counter-Reformation version of Renaissance visual culture as an extension of visual rhetoric, pushing the innovations of High Renaissance art further. On the other hand, this approach risks losing sight of the distinctive qualities of CounterReformation visual culture by locating it within a long, historical continuum. For all its debts to earlier Catholic culture, Counter Reformation Baroque art was distinctly different from the Catholic imagery of Renaissance Europe, much less that of the later middle ages. In placing a new faith in visual culture, the Counter Reformation did more than strengthen what had been a core element of Catholic piety for five hundred years. It also defined a new, increasingly visual and empirical piety and endowed this visual culture with a more aggressive and dramatic rhetoric meant to impress, overwhelm, and intimidate the worshipper. There was, in a word, a new sense of visual culture as spectacle. And in this new visual spectacle, we see within Catholic culture the counterpart to the dazzling visual spectacles of seventeenth-century court art with its absolutist politics (the best example being Versailles). Seventeenth-century painted ceilings miraculously dissolved into dazzling visions of celestial glory to celebrate secular princes in palaces and Catholic saints in churches. Church and courtly hierarchy informed the new taste for spectacle and the visionary naturalism of the Baroque. While the visionary could be applied to the humble individual in a quiet domestic setting as seen in the Catholic art of La Tour, its absolutist politics were writ large and clear in the giant altarpieces and ceiling paintings of Baroque art where visions were reserved for saints and others elevated above the common lot. 7 It is no surprise to learn that during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ties between the church and the high nobility increased considerably. Whereas people of modest social origins had risen through talent and patronage to high church office in the later Middle Ages and

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Renaissance, the high nobility secured a monopoly over all high church offices by the seventeenth century. Small wonder that Catholic churches and courts shared a taste for visual spectacle at a time when high church officials were themselves high aristocrats. When we recognize the absolutist religious politics inherent in the new Counter-Reformation visual piety, we can develop a deeper understanding of the way visual piety served the Catholic church. All of the new stress on visual culture was meant to strengthen church values as defined by the Catholic hierarchy dominating church patronage If the hierarchical and absolutist politics of Counter-Reformation religious culture and visual spectacle remind us that Catholic church culture shared a lot with court culture in the seventeenth century, they also point to the larger spread of absolutist politics and ideologies in an early age of imperial nation states and global or imperial Catholicism. 6. The Problematic Body in Counter Reformation Art In contrast to medieval Christian values which generally saw the body as a false, mutable, sinful realm opposed to reason and spirit, Renaissance humanist culture looked back to classical antiquity to redefine the body as divinely beautiful, perfectly engineered, and a noble image of a larger cosmic order (as seen in Leonardos famous drawing, Vitruvian Man). The spread of nudity in Italian art after 1480 was at first confined to classical subjects. From the time of Michelangelo, nudity spread to every possible subject, including a wide variety of Christian themes with strikingly erotic results in paintings and even more in the smaller world of prints. Given the many erotic subjects in the Bible, one can speak of a widespread taste for Biblical erotica in Christian art after 1520. Indeed, sacred subjects were the perfect pretext for legitimizing erotic images. This trend accelerated greatly with Michelangelo and his later Mannerist followers such as Bronzino. By the 1530s, the naked body had triumphed over all subjects in Western art and had even become the primary form for Renaissance ornament in all media and in a wide array of decorative arts. With these excesses in mind, the Counter-Reformation outlawed lascivious or gratuitous nudity in church art, especially the depiction of genitals, buttocks, and breasts. Despite this crack-down, the naked body survived in religious art with the most problematic areas decorously covered. The most acceptable body was the suffering body of the martyrs, saints and Christ, and the torments of the damned. Since the late Middle Ages, the suffering body had been allowed in Christian art in part because it imaged a traditional monastic hostility toward the body. The suffering or punished body offered up an exemplary, penitential piety in line with Biblical passages asking readers to follow Christ in crucifying the sinful, fleshy world. At the same time, late medieval writers and artists, both sacred and secular, inscribed more positive values on the body which Renaissance humanists took much further by drawing on classical traditions. For Baroque artists, the suffering, saintly body allowed a new opportunity for reintroducing a striking sensuality in seventeenth-century Catholic art. Catholic artists also bent the rules by representing decorously clothed religious bodies in a sensual manner. Even a completely clothed body could be highly sexual, as Bernini showed in the Ecstasy of St. Teresa and the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni on Her Deathbed.

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Baroque painters also made color, lighting, and undulating compositional form more sensual as if compensating for the new crackdown on nudity. Or perhaps they were just fulfilling the later Counter-Reformation desire for an art of maximal decorum, on the one hand, and maximal physical and emotional presence, on the other. 7. Rhetorical Piety: Emotion, Ecstasy, and Mystical Marriage Catholic Emotion in an Age of Sentiment Emotion was hardly new to Catholic piety and art in the Counter-Reformation. Since the later Middle Ages, European Christianity had turned toward a more affective piety as the rise of the city tipped the cultural balance from the ruling intellectual world of male monastic theology written in Latin to the more emotionally rich world of lay piety communicated in the vernacular and in the visual vernacular of naturalistic images. No one understood the popular appeal of emotionally rich images better than the new preaching orders like the Franciscans and Dominicans who redirected monastic piety away from esoteric theology to a practical world of vernacular preaching and pastoral care in the city. Affective piety was also taken up eagerly by the traditional monastic orders including the Cistercians and Carthusians at a time when pilgrimage piety eroded the barriers between monastery and lay world. Interestingly, most of the most popular affective themes in Catholic Baroque art - including the Pieta, the Lamentation, the Descent from the Cross, the Madonna and Child, the Eucharistic miracle, the Sacred Heart, and mystical marriage - were either introduced or first popularized in European art in the fourteenth century. Others, like the Holy Family, emerged to prominence first in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, well before the Counter-Reformation. In a century (17th) when philosophers separated reason and faith much more clearly and gave each its due, emotion took on even greater value as the core of religious faith among Catholics and to a somewhat lesser extent, Protestants. As the great French Catholic philosopher, Pascal put it, "We come to know truth not only by reason, but still more through our hearts". 8 As rhetoric took on greater importance in a new age of Catholic preaching and evangelical outreach, so did the world of feeling which rhetoric traditionally worked to arouse. As rhetorical culture, Counter-Reformation Catholicism used the full spectrum of media printed and spoken words, images, miracles, ceremonies, musical performance, theater (often held in churches), festivals, processions, and grand architecture to stimulate intense emotions, visceral responses, and Ignatian devotion. It is significant that the newest preaching and evangelical order of the mid-sixteenth century the Jesuits (founded in 1540) placed the same high value on the world of emotional feeling, this despite their equal commitment to rational study, Catholic education, and modern science. The striking value placed on emotion is clear in the very founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and it was taken much further by the mid-seventeenth century with popular devotional writers like St. Francis of Sales. Although known for his Stoic demeanor in public life, St. Ignatius of Loyola wept copiously in his private devotions. His Spiritual Diary is largely a record book of devotional tears which arrive every few lines and which allow him insights into the sacred far deeper than anything possible through book learning.

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I experienced very great devotion, and many most intense tears, not only during prayer, but while I vested Later, before, during, and after mass, greatly increased devotion and a great abundance of tears. . . . This feeling of vision [of God the Father] grew; I wept most copiously, the tears streaming down my face, and felt great trust in the Father, as if the exile I had been under was being lifted. . . . While I made this offering and oblation, once more the tears were of such a kind and so copious, the sobs so violent and the spiritual gifts so great that after I made it, I felt no desire to rise but on the contrary longed to continue in that state which I was experiencing so intensely. . . . When I went to mass, I was not without tears, before it; many tears, coming very peacefully, during mass. I had very many intuitions about the Blessed Trinity my understanding being enlightened with them to such an extent that it seemed to me that with hard study I would not have known so much. . . . I knew that what I had then understood feeling and seeing I could not have learned in a whole life of study. . . . Later when I prepared the altar, some impulses to weep: I kept repeating, I am not worthy to invoke the blessed name of the Holy Trinity. This thought, and the repetition of the phrase caused greater interior devotion my soul opened more to tears and sobs. I was being helped by a warm grace which later battled like fire with water against some thoughts. . . . While preparing the altar and vesting, the name of Jesus was shown me: I felt great love, confirmation, and an increased resolve to follow Him. I wept and sobbed. Throughout mass, very great devotion and many tears so that quite often I lost the power of speech. . . . I felt an increase of devotion, tears, and sobs, and the hope of obtaining the grace. 9 Underscoring the gap between feeling and reason, Ignatius repeatedly comments on how the intensity of his crying silenced all powers of speech. In the later sections of the diary, he often describes tears as a spiritual visitation as he progresses to a higher form of crying. Those tears that came today seemed completely different from all others in the past: they came so slowly, seemed so from within, and were so gentle, without clamor or great impulses, I thought they came from deep inside though I cannot explain it. 10 So significant were tears as an outward sign of inner devotion that the final 240 entries in Ignatius diary list nothing more than the day and the presence (or rarely, the absence) of tears. 11 In one poem, the Dutch Jesuit, Stalpart described penitential tears as the soap-suds of the soul and saw Christys tears as flowing pearls inviting sinners to open our eyes to weep / fountains of water / over the manifold evil. 12 Already found in classical literature and Scripture (Jeremiah 9:1), the fountain of tears became a favorite metaphor in later sixteenth and seventeenthcentury Catholic writing. In one of the emblems from Herman Hugos emblem book, Pia Desideria (1623), a penitent woman sits and weeps streams of water beside a fountain where a female statue weeps even more copious tears. 13 Although weeping was widely accepted among male theologians and encouraged in vernacular devotional literature addressed to all Catholics, emotion remained gendered as a feminine trait. This it was the penitential tears of Mary Magdalen, not male saints like Ignatius or penitents like King David, Peter, 14 Jerome, and Francis, which inspired the greatest flights of poetic fancy in seventeenth-century Catholic verse. In the poems of Marino, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, Lope de Vega, and dozens of others less famous writers, the Magdalens tears were transformed into

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baptismal floods and cleansing waters analogous to drops of Christs blood, a bath prepared for Christ, pools in which she floated, rivers which she created and in which she fished with the rod of Divine Love, and above all, beautiful pearls contrasted to the vanity of her discarded jewels. By describing these watery pearls in the most luscious poetic language, Catholic writers heightened the feminine beauty they ostensibly rebuked and made the lovely penitent all the more alluring as an object of sanctified desire. Mystical Marriage, Nuptial Piety, and the Catholic Worshipper as Bride From the twelfth century on, female and male spiritual writing made sexual experiences and food into primary metaphors for the loving, human experience of Christ, increasingly seen as a mystical Bridegroom married to the individual human soul. This nuptial piety drew on a new interpretation of the Old Testament Song of Songs, an erotic love poem about an unnamed husband and wife rich with traditional amorous imagery of fertile gardens, feasts, fountains, breasts like sweet wine, and so on. In the early Christian period when chastity was extolled as the highest spiritual state, the Song of Songs was interpreted in a strictly metaphoric sense of spiritual or mystical marriage to a more impersonal bride, the Church. A highly erotic poem was used, ironically, to support a medieval monastic piety extolling chastity and virginity. As late as 1195, an important theologian later elected pope (Innocent III), expressed the typical, early medieval monastic view of marriage in his treatise, On the Misery of the Human Condition. "Everyone knows that intercourse, even between married persons, is never performed without the itch of the flesh, the heat of passion, and the stench of lust. Whence the seed conceived is fouled, smirched, corrupted, and the soul infused into it inherits the guilt of sin, the stain of evil-doing, that primeval taint." 15 By 1200, most monastic writers viewed marriage in positive terms as a holy sacrament, blessed by God who supposedly married Adam and Eve, by Christ, who worked miracles at weddings, and by Biblical authors, especially Paul. Nonetheless, medieval theologians (who were mostly clerics sworn to celibacy) saw marriage as contaminated by sexual intercourse and ranked it lower than celibacy. In medieval monastic spirituality, the one, truly sanctified nuptial union was mystical and eucharistic - the "marriage" with the mystical body of the Bridegroom, Christ, achieved during communion. In striking contrast to this medieval ascetic spirituality, late medieval writers from the twelfth century, male and female, developed a different metaphoric understanding of the Song of Songs. Its voluptuous language was increasingly used to describe the loving, carnal experience of late medieval worship and the individual souls physical-emotional union with the nuptial Christ through Eucharistic communion, private meditation focusing on Christs humanity, and final resurrection. The many references to grapes and wine in the Song of Songs encouraged Eucharistic interpretations, just as the enclosed garden with its fountain was compared to the Virgin Mary. Whereas earlier medieval commentary identified the Bride as the Church (Ecclesia) in line with the more impersonal, corporate piety of the period, later medieval writers interpreted Christs bride in more, individual terms as the Virgin Mary (with whom Christ united in the flesh) or the individual human soul. The soul as bride was particularly popular in devotional literature written

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by or for nuns. 16 In short, the poem was reinterpreted in ways which moved away from strict chastity and an institutional bride toward human individuality and worldly experience, bodily and emotional. While the souls marriage with Christ remained mystical, the world of the body came to dominate the metaphoric language, fundamentally altering its meaning. Even as writers contrasted the false love of worldly desires to the Brides mystical love for the Bridegroom, the use of increasingly erotic language to describe this mystical union displayed a new openness to bodily experiences which dramatically reinterpreted traditional notions of the spiritual. In keeping with this trend, late medieval writers transformed Christs whole life into an expression of nuptial love with a focus on his Incarnation and Passion, moments when Christ was most intensely united with the flesh of humanity. The wound in the side of the crucified Christ was reinterpreted as an amorous wounding of the sacred heart offering portals through which the faithful could creep inside Christs nuptial body and unite with the loving heart of the mystical bridegroom. The fourteenth-century devotional writer, Ludolph of Saxony (d. 1378), described it thus. For the Heart of Christ was for our sakes wounded with the wound of love, so that we may by reciprocal love enter through the door of His Side to His Heart, and there unite all our love with His Divine Love, so that glowing like iron in fire, it may be reduced to one love. St. Augustine had entered through this wound as through a door of love, when He said, Longinus opened for me the Side of Christ with a spear, I have entered in, and there I safely rest. The nails and spear cry out to me that I am truly reconciled with Christ, if I have loved Him. In order to conform himself to this point, let a man call to mind what exceeding love Christ showed to us in the opening of His Side, by which he gave us an open entrance to His Heart. Let him then hasten to enter into the Heart of Christ, let him then hasten to enter into the Heart of Christ, let him gather up all of his own love and unite it to the Divine love . . . 17 In her autobiography dictated around 1436, the English burgher, Margery Kempe imagined nuptial union with the Christ who spoke to her in the following manner. "For it is appropriate for the wife to be on homely terms with her husband. Be he ever so great a lord and she ever so poor a woman when he weds her, yet they must lie together and rest together in joy and peace. Just so must it be between you and me . . . "Therefore I must be intimate with you, and lie in your bed with you. Daughter, you greatly desire to see me, and you may boldly, when you are in bed, take me to you as your wedded husband, as your dear darling, and as your sweet son, for I want to be loved as a son should be loved by the mother, and I want you to love me, daughter, as a good wife ought to love her husband. Therefore you can boldly take me in the arms of your soul and kiss my mouth, my head, my feet as sweetly as you want. ..." 18 Later medieval theologians and popular devotional writers also used the extensive nuptial language found in the Apocalyptic narrative of Revelations to interpret salvation in conjugal terms as the moment of complete and perfect union with mystical bridegroom. Salvation became commonly imaged as a wedding and paradise became the nuptial chamber of the soul. In

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seventeenth-century art and devotional literature, the nuptial interpretation of paradise led to the eroticizing of death with dying saints displaying a nuptial bliss captured in the title of one popular handbook: The Sweet Thoughts of Death and Eternity (1632). With the rise of nuptial piety, a long line of women in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance began experiencing mystical union with the Bridegroom, usually just after taking communion when the Body of Christ fused with their flesh. (Here mystical writers drew on the extensive mingling of food and erotic metaphor in the Song of Songs.) Among the most famous Brides of Christ, we can mention St. Elizabeth of Hungary (d. 1231), St. Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (d. 1533) and St. Teresa of Avila (d. 1582). Although nuptial piety usually worked along traditional gender lines with masculine bridegrooms and feminine brides, all men were brides of Christ as well. In the later Middle Ages, Christian men were increasingly measured against more feminine standards of godliness which placed new value on love, compassion, forgiveness, mildness, sweetness, and nurturing. We can see this feminized, bridal male in the androgynous images of John, Christs most beloved disciple who was traditionally shown in the Last Supper sleeping against Christs side. Although noted in Scripture, this sleep was reinterpreted in the late middle ages as the ecstatic sleep of Christs bride, lying beside His nuptial heart and drinking the wine-milk from his breast.
19

To a large extent, the new nuptial piety needs to be set against the wider feminizing of late medieval piety as traditional feminine qualities were increasingly extolled for all Christians and the cult of the Virgin gave a loving, tender, female face to Christian devotion. This feminizing of the sacred also gave rise to metaphors of Christ the Mother, whose breasts offered the milk of love and forgiveness or the wine of redeeming blood. In part, this metaphor drew on the medieval idea that breast milk was formed from blood. But it also drew on passages from the Song of Songs referring to the breasts of the Bridegroom. Some late medieval saints like St. Catherine of Siena even experienced visions when Christ appeared and suckled them from his bleeding chest. In this passage, Christ speaks to Catherine. I today shall give you a drink that transcends in perfection any that human nature can provide. ..." With that, he tenderly placed his right hand on her neck, and drew her toward the wound in his side. "Drink, daughter, from my side," he said, "and by that draught your soul shall become enraptured with such delight that your very body, which for my sake you have denied, shall be inundated with its overflowing good-ness." Drawn close ... to the outlet of the Fountain of Life, she fastened her lips upon that sacred wound, and still more eagerly the mouth of her soul, and there she slaked her thirst. 20 The use of maternal imagery for God is particularly striking in the writings of the English mystic, Julian of Norwich, especially her Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393). The mother may give her child suck of her milk, but our precious Mother, Jesus, He may feed us with Himself, and doeth it, full courteously and full tenderly, with the Blessed Sacrament that is precious food of my life; and with all the sweet Sacraments He sustaineth us full mercifully and graciously. . . . The Mother may lay the child tenderly

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to her breast, but our tender Mother, Jesus, He may homely lead us into His blessed breast, by His sweet open side, and shew therein part of the Godhead and the joys of Heaven, with spiritual sureness of endless bliss. . . . To the property of Motherhood belongeth natural love, wisdom, and knowing . . . 21 The Artistic Contribution to Catholic Feeling Although emotional language was a staple of Christian writing and art since 1300, it was the new artistic manner of the Baroque which allowed intense, inward psychological drama to take on a powerful, theatrical, outward form in painting, sculpture, prints, tapestries, and other figural representations. At a time when much Catholic piety was governed by an aggressive, missionary outreach at home and abroad, the new artistic handling of the expressive body invented by Baroque artists all over Europe (including Protestant lands) offered Catholic culture a kind of emotional channel. Once opened, it poured forth a steady stream of emotionally charged Catholic images for the next two hundred years. One of the most revealing examples of the new emotional imagery is the appearance of numerous Catholic emblem books devoted entirely to the metaphor of the heart. These emblems encompassed both the human heart and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a late medieval theme greatly expanded after 1600. The first of these was Hermann Hugos Pia Desideria (1623), soon to be followed by Benedictus van Haeftens Schola Cordis (School of the Heart, 1629) and Henry Hawkins, The Devout Hart (1634). With their wide ranging themes, these emblem books translated the full range of human experience into the more universal language of the heart. The fact the Protestant emblem writers jumped onto the bandwagon, even translating some of these Catholic books into Protestant texts while retaining the images, reminds us that the shift toward feeling visible in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century spirituality transcended sectarian divisions. Although Catholic spirituality encouraged a more theatrical, outward, and emotionally extravagant culture, there were no shortage of Protestant writers and artists like Rembrandt who broke new ground in the dramatic, complex, and subtle expression of human feeling. While Catholic art preferred a highly dramatic, outward language of emotion which risked devaluing ecstasy by using it so frequently, seventeenth-century Protestant and secular culture (Vermeer) also patronized the new culture of delicate sensibility. The best explanation for this European-wide trend lies more in economic and social developments, above all, in the rise of a prosperous, literate middle class eager to patronize a more accessible cultural arena of vernacular texts and images brought to new life through a familiar and powerful world of emotion. Every major social group had their own reason for investing in the new culture of feeling. Church officials on both sides of the sectarian split were eager to rally followers, convert heretics, and reach out to the new world. Absolutist monarchs were eager to use rhetorical culture to consolidate their authority and reach wider audiences. And the middle class was eager to translate everything down into a new vernacular of ordinary yet intensely felt human experience. The Affective World of the Bodily Senses and the Image Counter-Reformation religious art sought maximal emotional impact through visceral detail and rhetorically dramatic figures and compositions. Though nudes were largely eliminated from religious art as "indecorous" and "lascivious," Counter-Reformation art was intensely carnal and

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physical. At times, this "in your face" physicality was extremely sensual, even sexual, without showing any genital nudity or sexual activity. St Ignatius's handbook of Jesuit devotional instruction for priests, the Spiritual Exercises (1530), became a major, highly influential statement of this new Counter-Reformation piety. Here, the five senses became the core of a radically empirical devotional method serving a psychological piety of intense emotional involvement. The relatively new artistic subject of religious ecstasy nicely combined the authenticity of an intensely emotional, dramatic, "personal" faith with a proper Catholic submission to a larger, authoritative deity and to Catholic institutional values. In short, one can speak of an institutional politics of ecstasy. The highest state of spiritual union with God also displayed a proper submission as the soul surrendered to an overpowering Catholic spirituality. By reserving ecstasy for saints, extreme religious emotion was carefully circumscribed by official doctrines. And by gendering ecstasy largely as female, Catholic culture worked to reinforce patriarchal values in and outside the church even as official church piety eagerly embraced a more feminine rhetoric of emotion. 8. Martyrdom, Torment, and Violence as Exemplary Image, Affective Piety, and Mobilizing Device At periodic intervals in the second and third centuries after Christ, the Roman state sentenced many Christians to gruesome deaths in the Roman arena. Designed as a public theater of imperial law and justice, these deaths also provided early Christians with an arena of Christian fortitude, faith, and triumph over paganism. Martyrdom became a staple in early Christian art and literature. Though martyrdom largely disappeared after Constantine legitimized Christianity in 313 AD, the vivid examples of the early Christian martyrs continued as an occasional theme in medieval culture and a basic element in the lives of the apostles and early saints. With the humanizing of the sacred in the late middle ages, the theme of violent suffering, death, and martyrdom returned as an important element in Christian art and literature, especially after 1300. The onset of the Reformation (1518) unleashed waves of religious violence, persecution, and warfare across Northern Europe for two centuries. When the Protestant reign of Henry VIII of England gave way to the Catholic monarch, Mary I (1553-58), some 280 leading English Protestant church officials, theologians, and ordinary believers were martyred in five short years. The restoration of a Protestant queen (Elizabeth) led to a wave of religious violence against Catholics. The Catholic mass was outlawed as high treason punishable by death. Torture and public dismemberment a symbolic punishment reserved for those with divided loyalties was common. The fare of Father John Cornelius was typical. Arrested, tortured, and quartered, his body parts were posted on the four city gates of Dorchester as a public lesson. Although Queen Elizabeths government imprisoned thousands of Catholics and executed numerous priests and sixty-one lay persons, a steady stream of Jesuit priests sailed to England to hold secret masses and seek a glorious martyrdom. After the new king, James I, uncovered a Catholic plot to blow up Parliament in 1605, he ordered an even bloodier crackdown on Catholics. Religious violence was also common elsewhere in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1585, Dutch Calvinists massacred hundreds of monks in Gorcum. The worst outbreak came on St. Bartholomews Day in 1572 when French Catholics massacred of thousands of

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Protestants. As Catholic missionaries spread out all over the newly explored world, many faced violence from hostile heathen regimes. Thousands of Catholics, many of them Japanese, were tortured and killed by Japanese authorities between 1596 and 1640 when all European were expelled (not to return until 1859). The widespread outbreak of religious violence gave Protestants and Catholics a golden opportunity to sanctify their own victims as heroic martyrs and to demonize the enemy as cruel, tyrannical, and godless. Though Protestants did not believe in saints, they also represented victims of Catholic violence as martyrs. In 1563, the English Protestant, John Foxe, published an extensive, illustrated martyrology packed with bloody accounts of the torture and execution of Protestants. The Catholic church responded with similar books such as Richard Verstegens Theater of the Cruelties of the Heretics of Our Day (Antwerp, 1587, 1592, 1604) which elevated modern martyrs to the lofty status of the early Christians. In the 1580s, the Roman church of S. Stefano Rotondo was covered in a large fresco cycle offering graphic depictions of the early Christian martyrs. A heavily illustrated book was published in Rome at the same time, with the crucified Christ represnted as King of the Martyrs (Cavallieris Triumph of the Militant Church, 1585). Both sides mobilized followers, increased sectarian unity and obedience, and taught Christian doctrine by using the rhetoric of violence. In this they adhered to the ancient principle that visceral imagery and emotion were far more powerful tools than dry theology. The more brutal the violence inflicted, the more demonized the opposing side and the more innocent, heroic, and Christ-like the victims. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, Counter-Reformation Catholicism made the martyr into the exemplary Christian (though few new martyrs were canonized). In Rome, the colleges for German and English Jesuits even trained young men to return to their Protestant lands and seek out martyrdom as a glorious, triumphant death offering certain salvation. 22 The desire for martyrdom at the hands of heretics or heathen became a common fantasy in seventeenth-century Catholicism. As girls, both Saint Teresa of Avila and St. Roma of Lima fantasized about martyrdom. St. Rosa desired to run off to the provinces of the savages in order that the idolaters would torture her to death for the love of Christ. 23 Though many Catholic missionaries embraced martyrdom willingly, there is no reason to take these fantasies literally. Since most Catholic writers had no intention of dying for the faith, literary desires for martyrdom make more sense as parallels to Catholic paintings of early Christian martyrdom. Both offered a powerful formula for expressing intense devotion in Counter-Reformation terms tied to missionary zeal, Christ-like self-sacrifice, and bodily piety. It should be noted that bloody images of martyrdom were hardly new. Late medieval and early Renaissance art offered hundreds of examples, especially in Northern Europe at a time when violent Passion piety reached its zenith. On the other hand, all of that imagery predated the Reformation. With the shattering of Christian unity in 1518, the violent rhetoric of martyrdom was used for the first time by Christians against other Christians. Although the worst religious violence in Europe took place in the mid-seventeenth-century during the thirty Years War, the most bloody, large-scale images of martyrdom were produced in the late sixteenth-century by

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artists deemed minor today. Since Christianity has long outgrown its focus on martyrdom, these works have lost the prominence they once enjoyed. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, a number of important artists like Caravaggio, Poussin, and Reni competed to raise the level of graphic violence, exploiting its mesmerizing visual quality. Continuing traditions dating back to the late middle ages, some artists also eroticized scenes of violence against female martyrs, exploiting the pornographic appeal of violence for many viewers. At the same time, large public works like altarpieces were constrained by traditional notions of decorum. In the private world of the small engraving, Catholic artists were freer to develop higher levels of graphic violence in scenes of naked female martyrs cut in half with saws as seen in Biverus Sanctuarium Crucis (Sanctuary of the Cross, Antwerp, 1634). Around 1600, Philips Galle engraved a Martyrdom of St. Agatha designed by Stradanus showing Jews using red-hot pincers to tear off the breasts of the halfnaked saint tied to a column. The inscription below recommends this example of female piety to the artists daughter, a nun in the convent of St. Agatha in Florence. After 1625, Catholic artists moderated the rhetoric of violence in large church paintings at a time when graphic naturalism of the Caravaggesque sort yielded to a more idealized, classicizing aesthetic. In Italy, France, and Flanders, Catholic artists developed a more heroic image of martyrdom whereby saints floated serenely over the surrounding brutality. By selectively deploying a more lowly, Caravaggesque naturalism for persecutors, Catholic artists elaborated contrasts both aesthetic and religious - between serenity and brutality, beauty and ugliness, ennobling humanity and barbarism, sanctity and heresy (or heathenism). No depiction of a Catholic martyr was complete without the smiling or ecstatic gaze upward toward heavenly triumph where angels held crowns and palms of victory. Here Catholic audiences enjoyed a visually gripping, emotionally wrenching, and theologically sound arena of exemplary Catholic piety and its triumph over adversity, heresy, and non-Christian infidels (ancient Romans, modern Turks, Japanese, etc.). 9. Sacramental Piety / Eucharistic Piety / Penitential Piety The Counter-Reformation placed a new emphasis on church rituals, sacraments, doctrines, civic and church processions, and feast days, especially Corpus Christi. Increasingly prominent in church culture since the twelfth century, sacramental piety took on much greater importance with the Counter-Reformation in response to a radical Protestant critique (summarized below). Like many trends in Catholic spirituality, sacramental piety was embraced whole-heartedly at the top and bottom of the Catholic community. Because it allowed the church to function as an intermediary for Gods saving grace and as the primary channel for salvation, sacramental piety strengthened ecclesiastical authority. As the most powerful ritual of priestly authority, it was especially dear to the hearts of popes and other high officials such as Julius II and Leo X who commissioned Eucharistic frescoes from Raphael in the early sixteenth century (Disputa, Mass at Bolsena). Sacramental piety was also eagerly embraced from below by ordinary Christians for at least two reasons. First, the sacraments provided a ritual theater in which worshippers could participate more directly. At a time when the whole service was conducted in a language most worshippers

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could not understand (Latin), the sacraments translated religious values and experience into the emotionally powerful vernacular of empirical experience. Enshrined in lavishly decorated churches and accompanied by incense, music, theatrical processions and ceremonies, the sacraments used all five senses to reach human worshippers on many levels. Second, the sacraments required human participation and encouraged worshippers to direct their own lives and seek out their own salvation within the framework of the church. As such, the sacraments contributed to a larger Catholic spirituality giving individual Christians a relative free will and dignity. Nowhere is the popular appeal of sacramental piety more clear than in the rise of sacramental confraternities, above all, those dedicated to Corpus Christi and Penance Widely popular from the late thirteenth-century on, confraternities were Christian civic clubs formed by nobles and wealthy burghers and devoted to a particular charity, Christian virtue, or popular religious figure such as the Madonna, Corpus Christi (the Eucharist), the Passion, Penance, and charity work (hospitals, orphanages, and poor relief). By the early fifteenth century, the largest cities of Europe had numerous Corpus Christi and penitential confraternities. Fifteenth-century Florence had one hundred such groups enrolling most of the citys male citizens. As lay religious clubs, confraternities redefined piety in terms which were combined civic values and "good works" with the more traditional sacramental values of the church. While church services were conducted in Latin and the worshipper limited to passive spectatorship, confraternities allowed ordinary Christians to participate actively in religious life, delivering sermons to fellow members in the vernacular, discussing Scripture and theological matters, writing and performing religious plays, singing Psalms and hymns, praying collectively, and performing penitential rites together. 24 Although some confraternities drew their members from the wealthiest strata and served as exclusive social clubs imbued a pious civic spirit, most confraternities were open to a variety of social strata and offered an appealing social cohesion transcending differences of class and wealth. As urban populations expanded and village community gave way to more anonymous urban neighborhoods, the confraternity offered a therapeutic experience of a Christian utopia, a unified, harmonious, Christian brotherhood imitating the perfect community of paradise (frequently imaged in urban terms as the Heavenly Jerusalem). Here wealthy citizens could experience a Christian community beyond class and economic division. They could bond in rituals affirming a traditional Catholic spirituality of holy poverty, self-denial, and penitential discipline (rooted in medieval monasticism but still important in seventeenth-century Catholic lay piety and devotional literature). While all confraternities allowed citizens to assemble publicly to perform good works and parade in the many civic processions on feast days, penitential confraternities also allowed members to assemble privately to perform penitential rituals including prayer, fasting and self-flagellation. Burghers, whose wealth lay outside the divinely ordained natural order and whose social status was problematic, were particularly drawn to penitential piety. But so were many nobles. Protestant Anti-Sacramentalism as Prelude to Counter-Reformation Response The impact of the Reformation (1518-) is crucial to understand seventeenth-century Catholic sacramental piety. In general, Protestants dispensed with four or five of the seven sacraments and reinterpreted those which were retained to eliminate any claims to special powers on the part of

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church officials. Protestants rejected most of the seven sacraments for at least three reasons. First, the sacraments were seen as an outward set of ceremonies or images like the false images decorating Catholic churches and supposedly encouraging idolatry. In general, Protestants rejected material piety expressed in empirical images and ceremonies in favor of a new spirituality focused on the translated Bible and on preaching. In short, Protestants emphasized the Word and devalued all visual forms including the sacraments. Second, Protestants saw the sacraments as a license for church officials to claim miraculous powers in the name of God. In general, Protestants denied that any human being could work miracles or claim a higher sanctity. The most important of these miracles was the priestly transformation of bread and wine into Christs body and blood. Although the Protestants retained Communion as a sacrament, they stripped it of anything miraculous. For the same reason, Protestants denied that priests had the miraculous power to channel divine forgiveness in the sacrament of Penance. Third, Protestants rejected the idea that Christians could bargain with God for salvation through acts of contrition or godly living. In Protestant piety, human beings could do nothing to improve their chances for salvation. Whereas Catholic piety saw humans as free, active participants in their own salvation, Protestants saw humans as undeserving, wretched sinners. By arguing that salvation was never deserved and could not be earned, Protestants transformed it into a greater mystery. The weakness of sinful mankind thus worked in Protestant culture to strengthen the remoteness and incomprehensibility of the Protestant God, the mystery of his redeeming love, and the faith (not reason) needed to bridge the chasm between earth and heaven. By redefining the human relationship to God, Protestants stripped the sacraments of most of their consoling, encouraging, uplifting meaning. And by banishing the miraculous from those sacraments which were retained, Protestant spirituality secularized the sacraments (and church worship more generally) by relocating them to a more mundane world of ordinary physical actions and materials. Counter-Reformation Eucharistic Piety As with other core rituals and beliefs, the Counter-Reformation church responded to the Protestant attack by promoting sacramental piety and especially the cult of the Eucharist much more aggressively. For the first time, Catholic Baroque artists were commissioned to make cycles of large paintings on the Seven Sacraments (Poussin). As a material object miraculously transformed into an agency of grace and salvation by the power of the intermediating church, the Eucharist had already become an important focal point of Catholic piety since the mid-fourteenth century. To rebut the Protestant critique, the CounterReformation church circulated Eucharistic themes into every imaginable religious subject and, equally importantly, gave them a new militancy and triumphal rhetoric. Catholic artists produced numerous images of a victorious Eucharist, wielded by miracle-working saints (Rubens), held aloft by a resurrected Christ (Rubens) or by the Church Militant now riding a Roman triumphal chariot which crushes heretics (Titian, Rubens) or by a procession of church officials in Rubens Defenders of the Eucharist (Sarasota). The Eucharist also appeared by itself as the primary or sole subject in the Worship of the Eucharist (Titian, Rubens, Jordaens) and were the subject of a

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sacramental play staged in the church of the Gesu in 1650. De Heem even made the glowing wafer into a Catholic still-life, thereby creating a kind of private altar. Simple, clear, instantly recognizable, miraculous, redeeming, triumphant, outwardly visual, unifying and all embracing in its circular form, the Eucharist became the most powerful Catholic image of all after 1600. Indeed, it became the new logo of the Catholic church. 10A. The Institutional Politics of Mary in the Counter-Reformation Mary embodied the Catholic Church for many reasons. Since the twelfth century, she was the temple of Christ's body. She was Christ's mystical bride. She was the more human intercessor, whose maternal love and mercy offered a more reassuring channel for prayers and whose ties to Christ gave her a special influence. She personified the church as a nurturing, merciful institution which gathered the faithful into one community just as she sheltered supplicants under her robes in late medieval and renaissance art. As the only other person beside Christ to rise bodily into heaven soon after her death, she was the Queen of Heaven, figuring both the Church Triumphant and the salvational hopes for all believers. (This helps explain the predominant Marian imagery on late medieval and renaissance tombs.) Finally, she was associated with certain Catholic devotional practices such as the prayer of the rosary. All of these traditional aspects of her identity took on new importance after 1560 with the spread of Counter-Reformation church culture. Other aspects of Mary took on a new importance which reveals much about the CounterReformation as a Catholic ideology. These included the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception and the larger theme of her immaculacy and purity. Also important were the triumphal themes of Mary, above all, the Apocalpytic Madonna, the Madonna in Glory, the Coronation of the Virgin, and the Madonna Enthroned with Saints. In the first of these, a celestial Mary trampling a serpent allegorized the eternal triumph of the Catholic church over all its enemies and throughout the world. 10B. Immaculacy, Triumph, and the Nexus of Perfection and Power Mary was known for her perfect physical beauty since the twelfth century when poets sang praises of ideal female beauty in both secular courtly love lyrics and in sacred lyrics extolling the new cult of the Virgin. This tradition of Marian praise drew extensively on the Old Testament Song of Songs with its extensive descriptions of the perfect physical beauty of the bride, interpreted after the twelfth century as the Virgin, the Church, or the human soul. Canticles 4:7 even described the bride's spotless immaculacy. "Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee". This passage became very important in the later development of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception which extended Christ's immaculate conception to the conception of his mother, Mary. If the doctrine of Immaculate Conception exemplified the new cult of the Virgin, it also heightened the purity of the Catholic church since Mary was universally interpreted as a figure for the Mother Church. No wonder church officials and ambitious religious orders promoted the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception from the fifteenth century onward. If late medieval artists like the Master of the Wilton Triptych, the Master of the Paradise Garden, and Stephan Lochner pulled out all stops to make the Virgin beautiful, refined, and courtly, so

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did Early Renaissance artists such as Lippi, Botticelli, Bellini, Van Eyck, and Fouquet. This continued into the High Renaissance and Mannerist periods as seen with Raphael's Madonnas), Michelangelo's Pieta, Titian's Madonnas and Parmigianino's Madonna of the Long Neck. Each new generation strove to make Mary more beautiful, more visibly immaculate, in its own aesthetic terms. With its emphasis on a visible, carnal piety and an accessible, emotional deity, Counter Reformation church culture fueled a new wave of texts and images extolling Mary's great physical beauty as an immaculate bride. Baroque examples include Murillo's Immaculate Madonna and the many Madonnas by Rubens and Van Dyck, among others. When Caravaggio painted an altarpiece of the Death of the Virgin depicting her as an ordinary woman, his painting was rejected by church officials as indecorous. As the Church (Ecclesia), Mary united carnally with God in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. As noted earlier, eucharistic piety had gradually become the focus of Catholic devotion in the later middle ages and Renaissance and assumed a new centrality after the Counter-Reformation. Salvation was possible only through the institutional piety and practices of Mary-Ecclesia, that is, through the sacraments, rituals, dogmas, and grace defined and offered exclusively by the Mother Church. In an age when Protestants denied the cult of the Virgin and redefined Mary as an ordinary mother rather than a powerful intercessor, such religious conflict only intensified the Counter-Reformation cult of Mary and her identification with the "true," Catholic faith. By the 1570s, the new religious polarization transformed Mary into an increasingly triumphant and militant figure. She became an important weapon in representing and legitimizing the legitimacy of the Catholic faith and the authority of Catholic monarchs. With these religious conflicts in mind, we can see how a seemingly innocent discourse on spiritual perfection in body and soul also carried an ideological edge in serving Catholic culture and the political objections of Catholic states. The pure, immaculate Madonna also represented the divinely ordained purity of the church, its representatives, its ecclesiastical, cultural, social, political, and economic agendas around the world, and its secular allies. No wonder the Immaculate Madonna, the Ascension of the Virgin, the Madonna of the Apocalypse, and the Madonna in Glory with Saints emerged as major subjects of Counter-Reformation church art, popular devotional literature and prints, religious festivals and processions. Marian piety was also appropriated by Catholic monarchs, emperors, and high nobles out of sincere Catholic belief and to consolidate their own hierarchical values and power. It was also part of a longstanding tradition of divine providence where Christ, Mary, and the saints intervened in decisive battles to assure Christian victory for one ruler or another. The official cult of the Virgin originated in Christian military victories over infidels attacking Constantinople in the 7th and 8th centuries. It continued in the later medieval crusading literature including such as the Battle of El Sotillo in 1248 where Mary helped Spanish knights decimate an army of Moors. In the 1630s, this battle took on renewed significance within Spanish imperial ideology and was hailed in books and in a major altarpiece by Zurbaran, now in the Metropolitan Museum. 25 The militarized Madonna of early Byzantine piety, later medieval crusading literature, and late medieval republics like Siena continued through the Renaissance and beyond, fueled by the increasing threat of the Ottoman Turks and the growing centralization of church and state. By the

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fifteenth century, the Madonna was a convenient image for a variety of Christian victories and was thanked in altarpieces commissioned to celebrate Mantuan victory over the French (Mantegnas Madonna of Victory) and Venetian victories over the Turks (Bellinis Barbarigo Altar and Titians Pesaro Altar). The triumphant Virgin also appeared regularly in literary accounts of Catholic victories against foes throughout the world including Moslem enemies in the Mediterranean, Aztecs in the Spanish New World, 26 Protestants in Northern Europe, and Jews at home. As part of a successful military campaign in the late 1560s to crush a spreading Protestantism and political rebellion in the Netherlands, King Philip II of Spain replaced a statue on the Antwerp town hall proclaiming an imaginary Dutch republican liberty with a statue of the Apocalyptic Madonna, crowned as the Queen of Heaven and trampling on the serpent of heresy and evil. In 1612, Jesuit Catholic laymen in Ingolstadt (in modern Austria) founded a new confraternity of Mary of Victory to commemorate the 1571 defeat of the Muslim Turks at Lepanto and, more importantly, to rally Catholics against Protestants in Germany and Eastern Europe. During the Thirty Years War (1618-48) when most of Europe was convulsed in horrendous religious violence, images of the Madonna were closely tied to Catholic military victory and became a standard under which Catholic armies marched. One image of the Nativity was credited with securing a major Catholic victory in Bohemia in 1622 and was transferred by Pope Gregory XV to the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. 27 Although Catholic art produced numerous variations on the triumphant Mary including Mary in Glory, Mary Enthroned, Mary as the Aracoeli (altar of heaven), the Ascension of Mary, the Immaculate Conception, and the Coronation of Mary, the theme of Mary as the Apocalyptic Woman, clothed in the sun, crowned with twelve stars, standing on the moon, and trampling on the serpent in final victory at the end of time, emerged as a new favorite in Catholic culture. Conflated with images of the Immaculate Conception where Mary also floats in celestial glory, the Apocalyptic Woman emerged from an earlier history of popular piety and devotional prints (1450-1570) to become a major subject of large-scale paintings and sculpture, religious and civic, especially after 1600. With it came new interest in another Apocalyptic subject, St. Michael Vanquishing the Dragon, or its close cousin, St. Michael Expelling Lucifer and the Rebel Angels from Heaven. Images of the Apocalyptic Woman and St. Michael were favorites among Catholic rulers such as the Duke of Bavaria. In 1638, he moved a large statue of the Apocalyptic Woman, made in the 1590s for a German Jesuit church, and placed it on a column in the Marienplatz (St. Marys Square) in Munich to commemorate the defeat of an occupying Swedish Protestant army. Rubens painted large altarpieces of both subjects for Jesuit churches in Germany. Once we understand how Counter-Reformation piety transformed Mary into a powerful, triumphal figure personifying the Roman Catholic church, it is easier to comprehend why church figures rejected Caravaggios altarpiece, the Death of the Virgin. By depicting the Madonna in overly human terms as an elderly, dead woman and by eliminating the grand ecclesiastical rhetoric of celestial ascension, Caravaggio pushed his lowly naturalism too far for an official church image. (The painting worked better in a secular context and was quickly snapped up by a leading court collector. )

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Needless to say, not every image of Mary had politically charged locations or such explicit institutional meaning as images of ecclesiastical triumph. Not all images of Mary were altarpieces or statues in civic arenas. Many were more intimate, tender images of maternal love which avoided heavenly ascensions, solar backdrops, crowns, thrones, ecclesiastical courts of saints, and trampled serpents. And even the most official images of Mary employed a sweet, emotional, human tenderness, love, mercy, and physical beauty all the more compelling in a Baroque aesthetic age of subtle and rich emotional expression. Despite these differences, it is a mistake to separate these more intimate, human qualities from institutional agendas and ideologies, whether dealing with official church imagery or more intimate domestic works. Mercy was inseparable from the divine power to bestow it from above on those deemed worthy of its reception. Physical beauty expressed a superior divinity which invited obedience as much as it inspired spiritual love. Purity suggested Mary's authoritative, even commanding perfection, her perfect authority beyond question or critique. Tenderness did not preclude ecclesiastical power and grandeur. Even the most non-institutional images were deeply imbued with an official Roman Catholic piety which used the cult of the Virgin, closely identified with Ecclesia, to teach and strengthen institutional values. Since the cult of Mary was largely defined by male church officials in an institution which excluded women from all positions of high power (especially sacramental, doctrinal, and rhetorical power) while presenting itself to the faithful in the tender, human guise of a loving "feminine," maternal humanity, one has to remain skeptical of even the most beautiful and sweetly tender Marian images produced by seventeenth-century Catholic culture. The same Roman Catholic church which regularly celebrated images of Mary enthroned and attended by lesser male intellectuals and saints - the Madonna in Glory - also denied real women any chance to ascend, Mary-like, into thrones or seats of high institutional authority. Women could personify the church, attain sainthood within it, and run low level monastic institutions such as convents but they could not serve in any high church offices or decide larger institutional matters. Nor could they ever handle the body of Christ as priests. They could only receive. The tender mercy and innocent maternal love of Mary in Catholic seventeenth-century art also masked the violent, institutional persecution of Protestants, Jews, and witches through the Inquisition. Maternal tenderness, sweetness, benevolence, mercy, and mildness, along with submission and obedience, provided the perfect face for an increasingly militant church. (Of course, Protestants were just as good at persecuting their enemies and they managed to do it without images of Mary.) Methodological Issues in Historicizing Marian Culture From my perspective, the primary risk in this discussion lies not in the easy, shallow exercise of bashing Mary but in falling prey to a reductive attack on all Marian culture. To attack all images of Mary is to remove Mary from the changing dynamic of history and to endow her with a static, inherently repressive institutional meaning. Most criticism of traditional Marian culture emerges directly or indirectly from a modern feminist critique of Catholic culture. While some of this feminist critique remains hostile to all Catholic spirituality, some of it lies at the core of an ongoing Catholic, feminist reform effort and its attempts to create a less patriarchal, less

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authoritarian Catholicism. At a time when many Western Catholics are pushing for female ordination and the possibility for a real institutional voice for women at the highest levels of the Catholic church, the figure of Mary offers potential for mobilizing a less patriarchal Catholicism where Mary could finally speak with a more female voice. To historicize a Counter-Reformation Mary in a way which makes her less appealing is, perhaps, an inevitable element in any course on the history of art taught within a late-twentieth-century consciousness. We no longer extol female humility, chastity, obedience, and motherhood as divine virtues, gloriously exemplified in the perfection of the mother of God. On the other hand, the critical historicizing of seventeenth-century art need not reduce our experience of such art to purely historical terms. A critical sense of the institutional politics of Marian imagery and its intersection with seventeenth-century secular political, social, and sexual values should not blind us to appreciating the transfiguring beauty of Baroque depictions of Mary, of the glorious church music written to celebrate her virtues and triumphs, and the architectural qualities of the churches built in her honor. We might even find within traditional Marian culture many positive human and spiritual qualities, which, released from the historical burden of their original institutional settings, circumstances, audiences and meaning, could speak to the modern psyche in a new way. Indeed, this is largely what happens when modern viewers respond deeply to art from the past because we are generally oblivious to the original meaning of that art. If it makes no sense in an art history course to look at art outside history in some timeless, autonomous, aesthetic realm produced by modern culture, there is no need to make academic historical consciousness into the only legitimate response to all works of art. In the end, reducing art to pure aesthetics is not much worse than reducing art to pure history. 11. The Counter-Reformation and the Politics of the Saints While single saints were a common artistic subject in the middle ages, they became even more important in the Counter-Reformation. Saints were institutionally defined, Catholic authorities strategically appointed by church officials after lengthy deliberations. Imbedded both ideologically and symbolically within a chain of Catholic command running from God down through the pope and lesser church officials, saints worked as figures of church authority translating institutional values and dogmas down into a less intimidating human scale without losing hierarchical and institutional values. The cult of saints also allowed the church to broaden its appeal with figures from all walks of life in the very period (1575-1700) when noble status was essential for any appointment to high church office. In terms of gender, the cult of saints allowed the male-administered church to "feminize" the church with female "officials" while allowing male officials to work behind the scenes defining and publicizing those virtues and roles proper to women. It was male church officials, after all, who decided which women would become saints, how they would be represented artistically, and what would be said in their official biographies. At the same time, the example of important modern female saints like Teresa of Avila helped transform church piety in significant ways. Thus, images of saints were a cultural arena in which high

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ecclesiastical values were both affirmed and transformed. Outside church culture, saints could even be invested with other values and used to critique aspects of church culture. In general, Baroque church art usually showed saints imbedded in larger hierarchical compositions or forces stretching down from above (heaven, Mary, a pope). Saints affirmed liturgical doctrines, defeated heretics (Protestants) or infidels, converted pagans through preaching and the working of miracles. They also submitted to God in a variety of ways as seen in their initial calling (for example, Caravaggio's St. Matthew), in their miraculous visions of Mary, the Eucharist, etc.), and in their increasingly prominent religious ecstasies. Counter-Reformation triumphalism fused with the cult of saints with the example of military saints, especially St. George, the medieval Christian crusader reborn as the classicized hero of Rubens and other Baroque artists. His victory over the dragon at Alexandria was already assimilated to Christian victory over the Turk in Italian art after 1490 and he continued to image the destruction of infidels and heretics in seventeenth-century Catholic lands. The cult of George also drew on elaborate royal patronage, in England since the fourteenth century and in France since the mid-fifteenth century. With the emergence of the nation state after 1500, George became an important image of national unity and strength in tandem with classical heroes like Hercules. The other major military saint promoted widely during the Counter-Reformation was the archangel Michael. As with St. George, royal patronage was also important, especially in France after the mid-fifteenth century when Louis VI founded the Order of St. George. St. Michael appeared most commonly in Counter-Reformation art either trampling on Satan in final Apocalyptic victory, as in Renis painting, or casting the rebel angels down into hell. The latter subject served Catholic purposes in Frans Floris high altar for the Antwerp Cathedral of Our Lady (c. 1555) as a conspicuous bulwark against Dutch Calvinism, in Marie de Medicis cycle of self-glorifying paintings by Rubens where she ascends into heaven alongside Michael casting down the rebels, and in a painting designed by Le Brun but never finished for the ceiling of Louis XIVs chapel at Versailles after that monarch expelled all Protestants from France. Michael also emerged as a national protector saint in Catholic Germany, especially Bavaria, as Jeffrey Chipps Smith has recently shown. 28 12. Counter-Reformation History and the Myth of Early Christianity While Renaissance popes since Sixtus IV in the 1480s already looked back to the early Christian church as a period of imperial Catholic triumph and "Roman" Catholic power, this historical thinking was taken much further after the Counter-Reformation. Catholic reformers constructed a mythical period of an exemplary early Christianity where the church was supposedly pure (in contrast to fifteenth and early sixteenth-century corruption and Protestant heresy), and where all Christians were supposedly united harmoniously under one faith, one good shepherd, one pope, and one church. By representing the early Christian period as an unspoiled, original, historical moment, an ecclesiastical Golden Age when the Roman church brought harmony, peace, unity, and order to the universe, Counter-Reformation writers developed a religious absolutism analogous to the imperial political ideology of the new imperial nation states: Catholic Spain and France and Protestant England. Like Counter-Reformation writers, these emerging nation states built their

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great, international empires guided by dreams of one glorious empire uniting the world under one godlike ruler, one sun-king or sun-queen. To sum up, the Counter-Reformation myth of an exemplary early Christianity served the internal Catholic reform of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries while fueling a new, absolutist Catholic church culture defining godliness in increasingly rigid, hierarchical terms. The Historical Importance of Constantine As described by Eusebius, the early Christian historian and court writer to the Roman emperor, Constantine, it was that emperor who first legitimized Christianity under Roman law and transformed it into a powerful, imperial, state religion guiding his victories on the battlefield. Already in late antiquity, then, Christianity had fused with a Roman imperial culture. For Counter-Reformation writers, patrons, and artists fashioning an early Christian historical ideology, the example of Constantine was irresistible. A Roman, triumphant, imperial, early Christianity founded by Constantine offered the perfect expression and historical example for a modern, Counter-Reformation Roman church power and ambition. In contrast to the recent corruption of the Roman church, the supposedly pure Christianity of the early, Constantinian church gave Counter-Reformation church officials an imagery of church purity and power. Needless to say, the theme of Constantine resonated with particular force in Rome itself and in papal commissions such as Bernini's Vision of Constantine sculpted for St. Peters. (Raphael's pupil, Giulio Romano, had already painted a whole room of frescoes in the Vatican celebrating the life and victories of Constantine.) In so far as the early Christian church was constructed as both unified and victorious over all internal and external enemies, the myth of an early imperial, Constantinian Christianity was used to attack the threat of Protestantism in Northern Europe and to silence Catholic critics of official church abuses and papal corruption. 13. Penitential Self-Examination and the Creation of a Catholic Self Counter-Reformation Catholic piety extended its influence beyond the communal spaces of the sacramental church into the interior spaces of the individual psyche seven days a week. This took place through the new discipline of a regular, penitential self-examination which could be carried out at home or anywhere else and which encouraged individuals to internalize and individualize the new, institutional moral surveillance of the church. This penitential self-examination, deputized as it were to an internal ecclesiastical conscience, was linked directly to the church through the deeply personal sacramental rites of confession and penance which, in turn, were prerequisites to communion. It is not too much to speak of a new Catholic sense of self tied to a system of penance and self-scrutiny conceived in the mid-sixteenth century and popularized in 17th century religious practice and culture. Indeed, Peter Brooks has recently described this penitential self-scrutiny as a major impetus for the development of the modern, individualized sense of self. 29 As with other aspects of Counter-Reformation piety, the new self-examination and self-discipline was elaborated in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola as early as the 1540s. 30 Here, at the very beginning of the book, is the key passage. Particular Examination of Conscience to be Made Every Day

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This Exercise is performed at three different times, and there are two examinations to be made. The first time: As soon as he arises in the morning the exercitant should resolve to guard himself carefully against the particular sin or defect which he wishes to correct or amend. The second time: After the noon meal he should ask God our Lord for what he desires, namely, the grace to remember how many times he has fallen into the particular sin or defect, and to correct himself in the future. Following this he should make the first examination demanding an account of his soul regarding that particular matter which he proposed for himself and which he desires to correct and amend. He should review each hour of the time elapsed from the moment of rising to the moment of this examination, and he should make note on the first line of the following diagram, a mark for each time he has fallen into the particular sin or defect. He should then renew his resolution to improve himself until the time of the second examination that he will make. The third time: After the evening meal he will make a second examination, reviewing each hour from the first examination to this second one. And on to the second line of the same diagram he will again make a mark for each time that he has fallen into the particular sin or defect. Sunday _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ Monday _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ Tuesday _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ Wednesday _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ Thursday _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________

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Friday _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ Saturday _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ FOUR ADDITIONAL DIRECTIONS The following will help to remove more quickly the particular sin or defect. 1. Each time that one falls into the particular sin or defect, he should place his hand on his breast, repenting that he has fallen. This can be done even in the presence of many people without their noticing it. 2. Since the first line of the diagram represents the first examination, and the second line, the second examination, at night the exercitant should observe whether there is an improvement from the first line to the second, that is, from the first examination to the second. 3. He should compare the second day with the first, that is to say, the two examinations of the preceding day. And see if there is a daily improvement. 4. He should also compare one week with another and see if there is a greater improvement during the present week than in the past week. Though not available to a wider Catholic public in the 17th century, the Spiritual Exercises helped popularize 17th-century Catholic practices of regular penitential self-examination. In using diagrams to chart the souls progress in rooting out its own sins, Ignatius gives us a good example of the new visuality of Counter-Reformation spirituality. The new Catholic self-reflection helps explain the many images of solitary penitent figures in Catholic Baroque art. The most common example was Mary Magdalen in line with traditional gender values. To heighten the new self-reflection of Counter-Reformation piety, the Magdalen begins appearing in the seventeenth century with a mirror rather than her traditional ointment jar. Male penitents also proliferated in Catholic Baroque art, above all, St Jerome in the desert, St. Francis in the wilderness, and the prodigal son. (The Penitent Peter was rarely shown because Catholic values focused on a more positive images of Peter as the first pope. The penitent David was also generally ignored because court and church culture generally used Biblical monarchs to affirm secular and spiritual authority. Thus David was usually shown as a glorious ruler, builder,

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conqueror, and musician.) Jerome and Francis were popular as penitents in part because neither did anything seriously wrong like deny Christ (Peter) or commit murder and adultery (David). Despite consorting with harlots, the prodigal son emerged as a newly popular penitent in seventeenth-century Catholic art in part because his squandering of wealth appealed to nobles and rich burghers but also because his story was richly infused with family values and patriarchal ideals. Self-Reflection as a Seventeenth-Century Mode Beyond Catholic Penitence The new self-examination and self-reflection seen in seventeenth-century Catholic culture cannot be explained simply in Catholic terms. It also appeared with a different configuration and meaning in contemporary Protestant culture as well. One example is Rembrandts late religious art. Indeed, self-awareness was a feature in seventeenth-century culture as a whole, sacred and profane. Self-consciousness appeared in a wide range of seventeenth-century secular images from solitary philosophers by Ribera and Rembrandt (or Shakespeares Hamlet) to solitary pastoral landscapes and gardens, even if these subjects often displayed vestiges of penitential retreat. Other popular images of reflective inwardness had nothing penitential such as the absorbed letter writers and musicians depicted in Dutch genre painting. Indeed, one can speak of self-reflection as a primary theme in all of Vermeers secular art and in the late works of Rembrandt, regardless of subject matter.

Tasso, Creation of the World in Seven Days, trans Joseph Tusiani, Binghampton, 1982, pp. 32-33.

St. Ignatius, letter on obedience written in 1548, in St. Ignatius of Loyola, Personal Writings, Penguin Classics, 1996, p. 200, with a longer letter on (blind) obedience in 1553 on pp. 251-260 where he used examples in nature, history, Scripture, and modern church practice to buttress his case.
3

Quoted in Judith Hook, Religion in the Age of the Baroque, in Geoffrey Barraclough, ed., The Christian World, London and New York: Thames and Hudson & Harry N. Abrams, 1981, p. 229.
4

This paraphrases Hook, op. cit., p. 230. For the French text and others like it, see Inemie Gerards-Nelissen, "Otto van Veen's 'Emblemata Horatiana'", Simiolus, V, 1-2, 1971, pp. 20-63, esp. pp. 24-25. For similar ideas already in Savonorola, see Ronald Steinberg, Fra Girolamo Savonorola, Florentine Art, and Renaissance Historiography, Athens, Ohio, 1977, pp. 47-48. from article by Jack Spaulding? (UCSD) in Storia dell'Arte, ca. 1984.

In his Spiritual Diary, St. Ignatius describes a vision of the Trinity which parallels the visual artistic imagery developed much later in Pozzos fresco of the same saint soaring under the Trinity in the church of S. Ignazio. I entered the chapel and while praying felt, or to put it more exactly, I saw, not by natural power, the Blessed Trinity and also Jesus who was representing me, or placing me before the Trinity or acting as mediator close to the Blessed Trinity., that I might communicate in that intellectual vision. On feeling and seeing in this way I was covered in tears and love, but with Jesus as the object; and toward the Blessed Trinity, a respect of submission more like a reverential love than anything else.
8
9

Judith Hook, op. cit., p. 227. See St. Ignatius of Loyola, Personal Writings, Penguin Classics, 1996, p. 87

St. Ignatius of Loyola, Personal Writings, op. cit., pp 73-109 with my quotations taken from pp. 74-85. While celebrating mass, the devotion was so great and the tears so numerous that as it proceeded, I began to wonder if with more masses I should not become blind in one eye (p. 91). Most of these tears come during an examination of his conscience, the celebrating of mass or in contemplating the mystery of the Holy Trinity (pp. 80-85, 87-96), a subject dear to the heart of Ignatius which he saw reflected everyday in every trio of persons, animals, or things (p. 83).
10

Ibid, p. 107.

11

See the summary of the modern editor in ibid, p. 109, with pp. 105-109 offering offer two months of daily notations indicating little but the presence of tears or no tears.
12

John Knipping, Iconography of the Counter-Reformation, vol. 2, p. 314. Illustrated in Knipping, op. cit., II, p. 315.

13

14

Peter was the only male figure whose tears attracted significant poetic interest. See Tansillos Lagrime di Pietro (1539) cited in Knipping, II, 314.
15
16

Though some scholars have tied the feminine Christ to female writers, Caroline Bynum cites numerous texts on Christ the mother from male writers as early as the twelfth century. See Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 140-142.
17

Ludolph of Saxony, Life of Christ, op. cit., p. 375

18

The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. By B. A. Windeatt, Penguin Books, 1985, ch. 36, pp. 126-127. In real life, Margery swore off conjugal lovemaking as sinful. While mystical marriage was more complicated than a spiritually acceptable, sublimated version of sexual experience, it is hard to deny this as an element.

19

Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 123, cites Aelred of Rievaulxs De Institutione, ch. 40, on Johns sleep against the breast of Christ. See The Works of Aelred of Rievaulx 1, Treatises and Pastoral Prayer, Spencer, 1971, pp. 86-87. Who is that, I ask, who is reclining on his breast and bends back his head to lay it in his bosom? Happy is he, whoever he may be. 0, I see: his name is John. O John, tell us what sweetness, what grace and tenderness, what light and devotion you are imbibing from that fountain. There indeed are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, the fountain of mercy, the abode of loving kindness, the honeycomb of eternal sweetness. This is the special privilege of virginity: you were chosen to be a virgin by the Lord and therefore loved more than the rest. In his Sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux writes, John the Evangelist, the disciple Jesus loved. For his soul was pleasing to the Lord, entirely worthy both of the name and the dowry of a bride, worthy of the Bridegrooms embraces, worthy, that is, of leaning back on Jesus breast. See Sermon 8.7, Cistercian Press edition, vol. I, p. 50.
20

From the account of her spiritual confessor. See Raymond of Capua, the Life of St. Catherine of Siena, cited in Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Berkeley, 1987, p. 172
21

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ed. Grace Warrack, London, 1945, ch. 60, pp. 150-151, cited in Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1968, p. 190.
22

John Knipping, Iconography of the Counter-Reformation, vol. 1, p. 129. R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540-1770, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 144.

23

24

My summary of confraternities is based on Mira Levins Corpus Christi; Dale Kent, Cosimo de Medici and the Florentine Renaissance, New Haven, 2000, pp. 54-49, and Ronald Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence, 1982.
25

Jeannine Baticle, Zurbaran, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987, pp. 192-194. The author of the catalogue entry ignores the history of the military Virgin and makes no comment on its political significance in absolutist Spain. It isnt even clear if the battle was known in earlier Spanish literature or whether the Virgins intervention is an invention of seventeenth century sources. I assume it was not invented but further research is needed.
26

Cortez, Letters, and Bernal Diaz, Conquest of New Spain, routinely attributed Spanish victory to the intervention of Gods, Mary, and the saints. And when Cortez symbolically proclaimed Spanish triumph over the Aztecs, he destroyed the idols at the Great Temple at Tenochtitlan, set up an image of the Holy Mother, and had mass performed. See Beatriz Pastor Bodmer, The Armature of Conquest, Stanford, 1992, pp. 79, 85.
27

See Konrad Renger, Peter Paul Rubens: Altre fr Bayern, Munich, 1990. Sensuous Worship. Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany, Princeton, 2002, 57-76 See Peter Brook, new book on penance and the rise of the modern self, published, 2000 Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, First Week; this section begins on page 2 of the book.

28

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