The Church of the Gesu

The high point of the exhibition is this early original work by Bernini – a portrait bust of St Robert Bellarmine.

The Holy Name: Art of the Gesu: Bernini and his Age. (At Fairfield University Art Museum)

Taking refuge from the overblown, paganistic megashows of Gotham City, we turn to a smaller, more focused but more artistically significant exhibition that illustrates a time when the “Catholic Imagination” did indeed set the standard for European taste. The 16th century church of the Gesu (the main church of the Jesuit order) was one of a number of great Roman churches of the late renaissance that created the model for church construction all over Europe. Much later, in the second half of the 17th century, the original sober appearance of this structure was transformed by a late Baroque decoration of unsurpassed splendor. The main contributor here was the painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli, a pupil of the dominant master of the Roman baroque, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Gaulli’s ecstatic works, which seem to open up the ceiling of the church to the heavens, likewise helped to stimulate similar ceiling paintings all over Europe – but especially in Germany and Austria. For the central Roman church of the Jesuits was bound to have extraordinary influence all over Europe and even beyond.

This exhibition includes valuable original works by Bernini, Gaulli and many others. Paintings, altar cards, statues and vestments are on display. The narrative of the building and decoration of the Gesu is filled out by engravings and original documents. Yes, we encounter in this exhibition the energy and creativity of the counter-reforamntion – which received its complement and completion in the splendid decorative art of the late baroque. We are not informed, however, why the Church and specificailly the Jesuit order has for fifty years now rejected such “triumphalistic” tendencies and themes – except, of course, for exhibitions hoping to attract visitors by visions of past glories.

(Above) Lavishly decorated altar cards created for the Gesu. The artist was a German working in Italy.

(Above and below) Models for the paintings of the apse of the Gesu by Gaulli. Inspired by such examples, this type of “perspectivist” painting reached its fullest flowering north of the Alps in Germany and the rest of Central Europe.

(Below) The model of Gaulli’s vast painting in the nave of the Gesu “The Triumph of the Name of Jesus.”

You will have to move fast if you want to catch this exhibition, for it is only open for one more week – Tuesday through Saturday, May 19, 11 to 4 PM. For further information see HERE.