Reviews 441..455

This book considers Jesuit architecture through the lens of ‘propaganda’ and vice versa. Fascinated by apparent connections between Nazi propaganda and Jesuit architecture, Levy asks whether we might usefully think of early modern Jesuit architecture in terms of propaganda. Conversely, she suggests that National Socialist architecture was indebted to the Baroque: ‘That Speer and Hitler self-consciously modelled the domed Great Hall . . . on a Roman building like St Peter’s . . . suggests that the historiography of the Catholic Baroque made it ripe for appropriation by a totalitarian regime’ (p. 2). In short, Nazi architecture and Jesuit architecture smack of demagoguery and mass manipulation and Levy sees ‘propaganda’ as the most appropriate mode in which to address these similarities. The real ambition of the book is greater than this, however. In the teeth of Hitler’s legacy that makes it ‘virtually impossible’ for propaganda to function as ‘a productive category of analysis’ (p. 2), Levy nevertheless wants to lift ‘propaganda’ into a ‘productive category’ for art historical analysis. The book fails in its avowed aims, but it should be welcomed as a courageous attempt to rethink old paradigms of Baroque architecture. In addition, it provides particularly stimulating historiographical discussion, and some useful work on Andrea Pozzo’s vault frescoes of S. Ignazio and on the Chapel of St Ignatius in the Gesù in Rome. I shall start with the book’s accomplishments, before discussing its principal failings. Levy’s historiography is most exciting: the first chapter, on the historiography of the terms ‘Jesuit style’ (and its larger shadow, ‘baroque’), is particularly rich, and the second, on the term ‘propaganda’ (as opposed to ‘rhetoric’), is helpful. While Levy’s claims that, if effectively historically contextualised, the notion of a Jesuit style was ‘quite right’ and ‘extraordinarily fertile’ (p. 40) remain respectively banal and curiously vague, her argument that the (international) Society of Jesus was the focus of particularly intense suspicion during the nineteenth century is sharply focused. In the mid-nineteenth century a politicised discourse on architecture and a hostile political debate over the survival of the Jesuits converged in the concept of Jesuit style. Levy’s role is, therefore, part sleuth: ‘Although no one would claim today that a Jesuit Style existed, this term and its historiography still occupy a central if hidden place in our understanding of the Catholic Baroque’ (p. 15). Thus, born with its times, and useful to art history ‘the Jesuit style provides a piquant example of the art historical repressed’ (p. 41). It is fascinating to learn that the term ‘Jesuitenstil’ (first used in 1842) was first fully defined by the young Jacob Burckhardt (in his entry for Brockhaus’s Allgemeine deutsche Real-Enzyklopedie of 1845). He argued that ‘the great pomp of their church style with its inner poverty brought all of church architecture of the time down with it, following the lead of the Jesuits, sacrificing everything, even the highest goods, to achieve raw effects’ (quoted p. 30). Here aesthetic style is a particular manner of thinking (or deceiving). The critique (like Croce’s later critique of Baroque) suggests that spiritual insincerity inevitably undermines Jesuit work from within. Levy’s take on this emphasises ambition, rather than moral corruption: ‘it is not surprising that in the search for stylistic coordinates, institutions like the Society of Jesus, which possessed what were perceived as clear goals, could anchor stylistic designations’ (p. 30). Levy identifies three major themes in anti-Jesuitism: the Jesuit ‘Ur-Author’ (the Society as author of its productions), ‘Jesuit architectural imperialism’ (Roman-style Jesuit architecture as a means to world domination) and the ‘conquest of minds and spirits through visual intoxication’ (‘excessive’ decoration as a strategy for mass manipulation). Levy rightly underscores the significance of the coincidence of Quatremère’s assessment of the Baroque as a principle of degeneration and Quinet’s of Jesuitism as decline in religion: ‘visual intoxication’ rapidly equated with material splendour and ‘decorative excess’ (a classic topos of decline since Vitruvius). The ‘nineteenth-century idea’ that material splendour could conquer souls, Levy argues, drew on the western tradition of mistrust of the senses, guided by a nineteenth-century (political) fear of Jesuit hegemony, which fed the notion that the Jesuits had a hold on the Baroque epoch. While Levy is quick to historicise much of Reviews