 Good evening everyone. You'll have to pardon our extreme promptness, but our wonderful speaker this evening, Yvonne Levy, will be jumping in a cab directly after her lecture to get to LaGuardia to get out before snowpob lifts. So we hope you'll pardon us. My name is Michelle DeMarzo. I'm the curator of education and academic engagement here at the Fairfield University Art Museum, and it's my great pleasure to introduce to you this evening Yvonne Levy, who is professor of art history at the University of Toronto. Introducing her very briefly, she has written extensively on Jesuit art and architecture worldwide, including her first book, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque, as well as the art and biographical legacy of John Lorenzo Bernini, including co-edited volumes, Bernini's biographies, critical essays, and material Bernini. She's also a specialist in the historiography of art, and in 2015 co-edited a new translation of Heinrich Wolfland's classic work, Principles of Art History, and she's currently at work on a volume on its global reception. And without further ado, I invite you to welcome Professor Yvonne Levy. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you, Linda. Thank you, everyone, for the wonderful organization of this exhibition. I hope you are all enjoying the treat of having a Bernini, which has only once been taken out of its niche. And it's quite amazing that all of these things have landed here in Connecticut. I am spending the year in Rome this year, and I wistfully looked at the empty niche where the Bellarmine was just last week at the JCU. Well, I know, I know where it is, at least. And I just want to apologize in advance that I won't be able to take questions afterwards. I am truly pained by this. I love answering the questions. I love talking to students. But I just need to get to the airport. I'm really sorry. I'm sorry for also the dinner that I'm going to miss with people who came up from New York for it as well. So the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, the so-called Mother Church of the Jesuit Order, has a very special status. As the Church of the Administrative Center of the Order, from which the General and his assistants organized a global enterprise of spirituality, teaching, and missionary work. The place to which letters arrived from Jesuit missions all over the world. The Church represented the Jesuit Center. It was also the first church that Jesuits really built and decorated ex nihilo, and it had to express what they, as a new religious order, were all about in the 16th century. The brick and mortar building you see here conveyed through its very large scale and its stripped-down classical style, the new faith put by the church hierarchy in this small group of men and their modern approach to the faith. The interior, though, was the place of eloquence, where the Jesuits articulated their spiritual ideas with immediate tools at their disposal in the late 16th century. So it's worth asking, and this is what I'll do in this lecture, how the 16th century church interior came together. How did the Jesuits express something about themselves in the myriad elements that comprised a church interior, the many altar pieces and decorations inside chapels, and the so-called public spaces of the church, the nave, transeps, and apps. We also have to contend with the fact that unlike the exterior of the church, which has hardly changed since it was built, church interiors are very dynamic. What we see today is hardly what a 16th century viewer saw. The Jesuit order itself changed over time, and as I will show, they updated their interiors, adapting them for new messages the Jesuits wished to convey about the society through the 17th century, which is the scope of my lecture today. Putting together a church interior involved figuring out what your church was going to say, arranging the furniture accordingly, and commissioning pictures to create those messages. I imagine the Jesuits gathered around a plan of the church, figuring out what goes where. Their challenge was to create arrangements in visual form of messages that were already conveyed in the many different types of texts that they read, performed, or composed themselves, that is to say masses, litanies, prayers, meditations, the spiritual exercises, sermons, commentaries, theological tracts as well. They also kept in mind images that they had already seen in other churches, including their own. They began at the Jesuit with the basic organizing scheme, around the life of Christ. Five of the original chapel dedications were assigned to Christ's life and death, though they're not organized chronologically or progressively, in fact, quite the opposite. The imitation of Christ's life was important to the early Jesuits, but as it was also at the center of Western Catholicism in general, these chapel dedications don't look particularly Jesuit. But at least one of these did. And that is, sorry, it's jumping ahead from me. The High Altar dedicated to God, the name of Christ, and to the Virgin, which was decorated with the scene of the circumcision. A highly identifiable Jesuit choice for the most important altar in the church, and this is the original altar piece. For it was at the time of the circumcision that Christ received his name. And it was the name of Christ that St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit Order, chose for the Society of Jesus, and which has ever since been represented ubiquitously by the Jesuits in the form of a monogram of the first letters of Jesus's name, IHS. And as you will expect, the monogram appeared above the scene of the circumcision in the 16th century, Jesu, as we see in this painting that recorded the original appearance of the altar. It was the name of Jesus of Christ, even more than his life, that was at the center of the Jesuit Order, because Ignatius made it the Society's purpose to spread the name all over the world before the end of time, to participate in the eschatological mission of all Christians. This broader mission of the Jesuits was alluded to within the circumcision painting with the presence of Simeon as the Sandat figure for the day after the Christ was named at the circumcision. Simeon expressed a prophecy in a cantile. That Christ is to be a light to illuminate the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people. Simeon compared the child who would illuminate the Gentiles to a light that is made visible in the world. And this helps to explain the unusual background of the circumcision by Muziano, that is a landscape with the sun barely rising over the horizon and starting to spread the light, that is to say Christ over the world. For the next century within the Jesuit self, this global mission would just be alluded to in the high altar piece of the church. And in the IHS, the monogram of the name of Jesus surrounded appropriately by rays of light, an abstract and abbreviated motif that encapsulated the Jesuit's understanding of how they fit into sacred history. Jesus was given his name to be spread through the world and Ignatius gave the society the name of Jesus to continue what Simeon had prophesied. The small monogram of Jesus that could be found all over the church were small but numerous allusions to this mission. And these are some of the places in the church of the 16th century that you would find it. The church of the name of Jesus was off to a Christocentric start at the end of the 16th century. But there were other factors to take into account when placing the first pieces of furniture on the 11 altars in the church. The Jesuits were mindful that their large church was built on the site of a previous church on an oratory. They inherited a dedication to the Apostles St. Andrew from an oratory on their building site. So they commissioned an altar piece showing Andrew's martyrdom. But they brought in the message of the rest of the chapel decorations to martyrs of the church. Although most martyrs that were represented in this chapel were from early Christian times. The subject of martyrdom would have struck viewers as very contemporary and also particularly Jesuit. Edmund Campion was martyred in England in 1581 and five more Jesuits were martyred in India in 1583. The Jesuits had already painted several martyrdom cycles like this one in other churches that they controlled in the city of Rome. Big splashy frescoes with lots of blood and gore before they chose this single chapel in the Jesu in which to focus on the theme of martyrdom. Martyrdom was on the Jesuits minds in the late 16th century. In fact, right around the time the chapel was decorated, the Jesuit Francesco Benci who taught at the Jesuit Roman college right down the street from the Jesu published this epic poem about the Jesuits martyred in India. Benci connected Ignatius, the name of Jesus and the mission of these men to that very image of light we saw in the circumcision when he wrote, but you my companions upon whom sweet Jesus's name and a new piety and a burning love has been fastened by Father Ignatius's example. This assists you when you have followed the holy standards to bring the light of divine law through unknown lands born across far oceans, whether distant America, or the foreign shores of China detain you, wherever sees and far from land send you fearing for your life. End quote. The five Jesuits martyred in India about which Benci was writing in his epic poem could not be represented in the chapel because they were not yet badified and wouldn't be for centuries. The Jesuits might have been getting ahead of themselves when they represented the five martyrs of India with other Jesuit hopeful saints with the martyrs palm in this relief that adorned the tomb of Saint Ignatius from 1629. The recasting of that relief which you see in the exhibition downstairs has eliminated the martyrs palm probably because canonization was not in sight. Let's go back to the chapel of the martyrs. The audience for this chapel would have been aware of just how contemporary martyrdom was. Benci for instance, has one of the future martyrs exclaim about the recently martyred Edmund Campion. Oh, new example of ancient virtue. The contemporary Jesuit martyrs can't be represented in the jesu chapel. This chapel does not tell a story about Jesuits, but it would have encouraged viewers to understand contemporary Jesuits that they were hearing about into a longer history of the church. And these associations were achieved because the message was being conveyed simultaneously in a number of media, neo Latin poetry, paintings in other churches and no doubt sermons as well. It was also non negotiable that the chapel of the Madonna della Strada to the left of the High Altar would acknowledge the church previously another church previously on the site and the 15th century cult image that had been extracted from it. Again, the Jesuits worked with this cult image of the Santa Maria de la Strada, combining it with another theme in the chapel expressed in the paintings, namely their dedication to the cause of the immaculate conception, the belief that the Virgin herself was immaculate when she gave birth to Christ. So this chapel dedication carried forward a debt to another church that had been on the site and also expressed one of the Jesuits great theological causes. The chapel of the angels, third chapel on the right, put on a display by contrast of a new Jesuit devotional theme. Organized around the archangels, the chapel's decorations which were executed around 1594 by Federico Zuccotti include relatively novel representations of hell and purgatory on the side walls with angels participating and a controversial altarpiece representing seven archangels, not all of whom had been agreed upon by the church. They're very avant-garde. Various authors have pointed out Jesuit connections to angels including the meditation on the guardian angel in Ignatius's spiritual exercises and the Jesuit theologian and Cardinal Robert Bellarmine's promotion of the cult of the angels. The chapel presents less of an experience of angelic intervention, although this was also possible, then a kind of encyclopedic argument about angels, a dense compilation of ideas piling up argument upon argument for the angels efficacy and bringing us to God. Like the chapel of the Madonna of the Strada which I just spoke about, this chapel has the earmarks of a theological argument the Jesuits were busy making out in the world. In this chapel they were showing off their theological chops. The dedication of the chapel to the right of the High Altar to St. Francis of Assisi is very unusual for Jesuit church since Francis was the founder of another religious order and I threw this in for the medievalists in the audience. So Dan demands some explanation. Some scholars believe that the subject was chosen by Ignatius himself out of his own personal devotion to St. Francis or by the general Francis Borgia in recognition of Francis's importance to Ignatius. This must be right in some way but the Jesuits must also have thought that showing the figure on whom Ignatius modeled himself would have helped in the ongoing effort to prove their work founder worthy of canonization. The fact was that at the time the Jesuits were decorating their mother church Ignatius like the recently martyred Jesuits from India could not be represented in a chapel near an altar because he was not yet canonized. So the idea here too is that the image of Francis could through association bring Ignatius into the room. Most of the paintings in this chapel suggest likenesses between Ignatius and Francis. So for instance St. Francis once appeared in a fiery chariot giving him the reputation of a saint who was fiery and illuminated. This is pride precisely the quality the Jesuits seized upon for Ignatius on the right in whose name they found a kind of false etymology of fire in the word Ignis similar to Ignatius in Yigo. By omitting the horses and chariot in the scene represented in the chapel on the left that often accompanied the scene Francis was made more like Ignatius. The appearance of St. Francis before the Sultan would have brought to mind Ignatius' ardent but ultimately foiled attempts to reach the Holy Land. But more importantly it would have brought to mind the dedication of both the Franciscan and Jesuit orders to missionary work and especially Francis Xavier Ignatius' companions extraordinary missionary work in Asia. The image presumed to have been on the altar of the stigmatization has no precise Ignatian parallel for Francis was practically unique in this form of imitation of Christ. Yet images of Ignatius hinted at a similar though more conventional relationship to the crucified Christ. The most common image of St. Ignatius that was circulating at this very time the late 16th century was Ignatius in prayer before a crucifix. Almost every image in the chapel of St. Francis of Assisi has a parallel in Ignatius' life except the episode of Francis talking to the animals. And it was precisely at this moment that engraving showing Ignatius' life were just being cautiously prepared for circulation when they could be circulated after the Beatification in 1609. So here is an example where there is no Jesuit story in the chapel but the Jesuits themselves would have recognized their founder in the figure of Francis everywhere. The constraints around the representation of Jesuits in their churches were finally lifted in 1622 when Ignatius and Xavier were canonized. As saints these two figures could now have altars dedicated to them. It was time to move the furniture around. As saints Ignatius and Xavier now had the privilege to have altars dedicated to them so the relics of Ignatius were moved into the prestigious left transept and Xavier was moved into the slightly less important right transept. The Christological core of the church decorations were thereby obscured right. So you see the chapels of the crucifixion and resurrection are now gone. Instead the Jesuits were entering a phase in which their mother church starts to tell the society's history overtly. We don't have a record of what the Ignatius and Xavier chapels looked like in 1622 when the relics and Xavier were moved into them but we know enough of what was in them that I can say with confidence that they didn't manage to make a big splash. A few new paintings of their new subjects were commissioned. These are now in the Vatican and lots of silver accrued on the altars on the feast days of the saints. The decorations were long recognized as provisional and unsatisfactory. And so the church would remain in a provisional state for 50 years. Giacomo de la Porta's magnificent barrel vault and the semitone of the apps remained white and unadorned just as we see in this very large painting showing the church all dressed up for the first centenary of the Society of Jesus celebrated in 1639. On major occasions it was customary to I'm sorry it was customary for the walls of churches to be covered in the luxurious textile medium rendering the church practically unrecognizable. Tapestries, damasks and silks hung over it obscured the pilasters and other architecturally distinctive elements of the church and it did not seem to matter that the scenes were of quite unrelated profane subjects. The point was to make the familiar splendid for the occasion and rather unfamiliar on the occasion. Pope Urban VIII accompanied by nine cardinals, princes and Romanobals was received by the Jesuit General Viteleschi as we see in this painting. The artist to organize the display of tapestries under Asaki included himself in the painting on which he also collaborated to record the occasion. The Pope was recorded as having admired the magnificent apparatus which was no surprise since the textiles came from his family's collection. And once the party was over the Jesuit returned to its whitewash cell for another 30 years while the Jesuits worked behind the scenes to raise funds and sought the cooperation of the heirs of the founders, the Farnese family to carry forward the decoration as the church. When John Polo Oliva you see in this wonderful engraving in the exhibition became general of the society in 1664 he wasted no time in organizing the complete redecoration of the public spaces of the church. He was hell bent on an up-to-date and coordinated interior. He wanted altars of the same design in the apps and transept. Decorations that made you take the large space of the church in together at a glance as a unified whole. I'm sure he was talking to Bernini and he commissioned plans from one of Bernini's assistants Carlo Fontana to try to engage the Farnese family who built the church to begin with and continue to control the apps. A plan such as this one would have showed the Farnese an idea for new coordinated altars in the transepts. And notice that the proposed altar ridiculous is below the pink cornice that I've drawn in there so that the great line one could follow all the way around the church would give it a sense of continuity. Fontana left the apps which the Farnese controlled unadorned in this drawing empty to show them just how embarrassing it would be if they didn't join in the project. But the Duke of Parma and Piacenza Renuccio II was not in the mood to spend money on a church in Rome to keep promises of relatives long dead even ones who had enriched the family. So Oliva had to settle for a less expensive but no less transformative project to decorate the vaults everything above the cornice. Paintings were a lot less expensive than architecture. By the early 1670s the painting of the vaults was no doubt an effort to keep up with the Joneses. Around 1600 the state of decoration of the three big new mother churches of the counter-reformation orders in Rome which were all in the same long block in the city were all more or less in the same situation with big white but unadorned barrel balls. The Theotene order which was closest to the Jezu threw down the gauntlet first with paintings by the painters Domenichino and Lomfranco in the 1620s in their acts and dome. But the ante was really raised for the Jesuits when the mother church of the oratory and congregation the Chiesanova also down the street had its upper zones painted by Pietro da Cortona. The project completed after 20 years of scaffolding in 1665 just after Oliva became general. Cortona transformed a white wash vault into a golden heavenly space with complex stucco shapes in the open fields around his frescoes and white stucco figures frolicking around the window frames above the cornice. The Jesuits painter Baciccio clearly was working from Cortona's scheme in the Chiesanova when he created a gilded set of ribs springing from one side of the cornice to the other and an enormous frame with rounded ends and a frescoed field contained by it. But Baciccio's angels are so much more dynamic and the frame cannot contain the figures on the sides kneeling in adoration of the name of Jesus nor can it contain the figures of vices that are cast away on the bottom there from the heavenly host. These groups of figures are painted in thick stucco spilling over the frames and the artist has used a dark paint actually painted over the gilding to create shadows to create the impression that these are three-dimensional figures that are actually hovering physically in the church and casting real shadows onto the vault. It's an illusion. It's a creative use of media of an intermediality that enabled an illusionistic feat that makes their presence seem really physical and so the Jesuits surpassed its neighbors. The subject of the name fresco is not the adoration of Christ who does not appear but the adoration of the name of Jesus which appears in a sunburst. Finally that prophecy of Simeon forecasted in the circumcision and that grand monogram which greeted visitors to the church and to the exhibition on its exterior in a fantastic relief sculpture received a magnificent elaboration as a subject of the interior decorations. The name fresco is based on a passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians which exhorts that in the name of Jesus every knee shall bend in heaven on earth and under the earth. This passage had been chosen at the time of Ignatius's canonization and became part of his mass for the universal church building a story around the the name chosen for the society by its founder. Ignatius chose the name for the society after he experienced a vision of the Trinity at Lestorta as he entered the city of Rome for the first time. Christ's words to him I will be propitious to you on that occasion when he had this vision were taken as a sign for the founding of the society that the popes would be sympathetic to the founding of the society and the popes soon approved the group's constitution. The vision at Lestorta is an important scene for the Jesuits because it shows the founding of the society as divinely sanctioned. It's represented in the exhibition with this beautiful painting by the Bolognese artist Domenico but maybe the painting was a bit subtle. This engraving by contrast makes explicit that the outcome of Ignatius's vision was the founding of the society of Jesus and the choice for it of the name of Jesus which you see inscribed on a cloud. The ceiling fresco the adoration of the name of Jesus expresses the convergence of the name and the core mission of the Jesuit society and that passage from Philippians on which the ceiling was based was given new prestige and liturgical presence precisely at the moment that Baciccio was painting the vault because the official mass of Ignatius as a mass of the universal church was released just as he was making this fresco and the letter from the Philippians passage is part of the mass. Now one of the most novel and dramatic changes Baciccio introduced to Cortona's design was to populate the window frames above the cornice running high above the name of the church with standing stucco figures. Now here the artistic ideas of Bernini have come into play again for the immediate precedent for such a display of standing figures perched above a cornice was probably the colonnade of St. Peter's which was gradually being populated with marble figures of saints from across the globe at this time. Bernini admired the Jesus cornice we know that and he recommended that the Jesuits maintain it unbroken. The statues helped to emphasize the continuity and to shape our experience of the space as a coherent one. The statues themselves which have until recently been pretty overlooked represent rulers and leaders of Catholic realms, papal and imperial power and then representatives of the territories of Asia and the Middle East, Africa and the Americas. They effectively demonstrate the effects of Jesuit evangelization whereby Christ's name had by the 1670s been brought to all parts of the world Africa, Asia and the Americas. In an engraving dated to 1649 that I saw last month hanging in the Jesuit Archive in Rome we see this idea in Nuce. Baciccio also painted the cupola and pendentives carrying the message of the name of Jesus across the large space of the dome in the inscription but I want to take a closer look at the culminating frasco in the semi-dome of the apps because it has a special significance in the ongoing effort to shape the Jesuits' messaging of their own history and there are two fantastic paintings which were sketches for this work downstairs in the exhibition and we were looking at them carefully earlier today and they're quite different so they really recommend close looking and study. Now the subject the adoration of the lamb has always published sorry puzzled art historians. It's a very old-fashioned theme for an apps we see it in medieval mosaics and it's an entirely justifiable scene above the circumcision because it projects to the end of time to the day of judgment when the work of spreading the name of Jesus by religious like the Jesuits will have been accomplished. Indeed the apocalyptic lamb already appeared in a side chapel dating to the 1590s where the sacrifices of the church's martyrs were seen populating the heavens before the end of time but the apocalyptic lamb isn't a particularly Jesuit subject and the Jesuits were by the 1670s debating whether their decorations and their church could be more explicit about their history. Initially General Oliva was set on another subject the Old Testament story of Joshua stopping the son in the battle over the Amorites over whom Joshua was able to prevail because he was with the Lord's help the son was stopped prolonging the day to win the battle. This subject too was puzzling until scholars realized the many connections that Joshua had to Jesuit themes. As Joshua's name was the transliteration in Greek of the name Jesus he was the Old Testament forerunner for Christ in his name. Joshua is also linked to the Eucharist often surrounded by a burst of sun and he was an Old Testament type for Christ who also reversed night and day at his death. I want to suggest another reason Oliva was so set on this theme and it has to do with Roberto Bellarmine the Jesuit cardinal whose tomb was since the 1620s in the apse of the church. Now around 1670 when Oliva was making his plans for the redecoration of the church anyone up on their politics of science would have immediately recognized the scene of Joshua stopping the son as provocative. It was precisely the Joshua passage in the Old Testament that was at the center of the Catholic Church's debate with Galileo over heliocentrism. If the Copernican system was correct the son alone could not have stopped as the Bible claimed. Galileo argued that the Old Testament story upholds heliocentrism while disputing that the Bible can be read literally in matters of science. The apse painted with the Joshua scene might have read as a massive billboard advertising the Jesuits traditionalist position towards the new science. Now Bellarmine played a part in Galileo's trial and this may have been part of Oliva's motivation for having the fresco in the apse. For it was Bellarmine who advised Galileo to take a moderate position on this matter. What is more precisely at the moment that the jesu frescoes were being painted Bellarmine's canonization proceedings had opened because it was 50 years after his death and the Jesuits were busy mounting their case for his canonization and did I mention that his tomb was in the apse right below the semitone where Oliva wanted to paint Joshua stopping the sun? I asked myself if Oliva thought that Bellarmine's role in this case was proof of Bellarmine's prudence. One of the virtues of Bellarmine the Jesuits were planning on extolling in their case for his canonization. This is a very unresolved proposal but I wanted to put it out there because in my view the Jesuits decided not to represent the scene not because the battle painter Oliva thought would represent it had died but because their scientists had in effect accepted the new science and were quietly teaching it down the road at the Jesuit College it might have been embarrassing. Now the Jesuits also proposed a third subject for the apse so sorry here's my slide this is where Bellarmine's tomb is and you see it in relation to the fresco with the with the bust in it yeah now the Jesuits also proposed a third subject for the apse in a document that has not been discussed much in it and unnamed in this document an anonymous Jesuit argued that the adoration of the lamb which they eventually settled on as we know was not specific enough to the Jesuits it's a subject that could appear in the church of any other order as an alternative he suggested an invented scene based on an often illustrated passage in the book of revelations and i show you here a tenth century manuscript illumination still trying to seduce the medievalists here in which christ promises to the angel of philadelphia his name given anew you can see the attraction of the passage to the Jesuits a passage that focuses on the giving of christ's name for the jesu our author proposed the following invented scene so sort of riff on this passage from revelations he said this is a quote from the document christ should be shown in the act of giving his name his new name to the angel of philadelphia who appears alone with his candlestick and designates the first ten fathers of the society of jesus with ten lamps and around them the 24 elders adoring christ and praising him for such a great feat and for the sukur sent to the holy church by this in this order and quote our author backed up his idea his proposal for a really invented kind of scene with an authoritative interpretation of the passage the scriptural passage by the medieval commentator yohima fiori who understood revelations three seven ten as prophesying the coming of a new religious order which would be given the name of jesus and which would help to usher men into the third age these men according to yohima fiori would live life halfway between the active and contemplative life engaged in earthly affairs and not wholly withdrawn in contemplative life as the scholar marjorie reeves has commented as a piece of real prophecy there could hardly be a better delineation of the society of jesus and the role it can see for itself so our anonymous jesuit in this document shared the belief of many that the company to which ignatius gave the name of jesus was the fulfillment of that prophecy prophecy as interpreted by yohima fiori the plan for the aspresco would have made visible to all that the jesuits like the franciscans and dominicans who had laid claimed yohing's prophecy before the jesuits viewed their enterprise as part of god's plan to unite the universal church now our author clearly did not convince his fellow jesuits although i asked myself looking at the the uh... paintings downstairs whether there might be elements of this plan in that representation that haven't yet been discerned so the yohakumite interpretation of the coming of the jesuit order never took on visual form although this text from revelations was much discussed in printed sources and sermons by the jesuits it is implicit nonetheless in the choice of the adoration of the lamb for the fresco in the apps as the culmination of the fresco in the name it sets out the eschatological goal of the society in print if not explicitly in its in its visual imagery believes to be its role in history what these three different subjects for the apps of the jesu joshua the old testament type for the name of jesus the bishop of philadelphia giving the name anew and the apocalyptic lamb show is a deeper investment in a specifically jesuit iconography around the name of christ than is usually apparent to the eye so with all of the vaults in the public spaces of the church being frescoed they remained the question of the altars in the three main chapels oliva's idea oliva's idea that all three altars should be of the same design and not interrupt the beautiful uninterrupted cornice was immediately dashed a rogue cleric from genoa who agreed to redecorate the right transit which you see here insisted on hiring his own architect and painter not a team player and he certainly spent more money in the chapel than had been spent before with its marble columns and a painting of the death of frances aviar by the painter carlo marati and he spared no expense in the painted and gilded vaults which are quite nice but they didn't follow bachichos scheme and oliva was upset that the architect obscured and broke the cornice with the stucco figure representing the soul of frances aviar ascending to heaven here in a drawing in the exhibition a gilt bronze angel carrying the venerated relic of zavier's arm the arm with which he baptized so many in india which as linda pointed out is now on tour in canada was a nice conceit but overall the jesuits were very dissatisfied with the result of this chapel and they considered the chapel practically a waste of money quoting their words so when in 1695 the jesuits turned to renovate the left transept chapel dedicated to euthanasias with its all important relics of their founder and adorned with this painting since 1622 they had to contend with some past decisions first they received the rights of cessation and rights to the chapel from the civilly family that originally built the chapel of the crucifixion so they were free to do as they pleased and they left a memento of that former patronage tucked into the corner of that chapel the civilly coat of arms and a and a very carefully put together inscription the chapel was paid for by the society itself in this unusual form of patronage what was represented in the lamps that had figures representing the different provinces of the order meandering across and protecting the tomb lamps just think of it the jesuits spreading the name of jesus symbolized by light the chapel was not bare but chico had already frescoed the vault and the urn dated back to the 1630s was to be re-accommodated though not the painting and then there was the question of coordinating with the right transept chapel because they were so unhappy with its design they decided that the design would be conceived independently the architect of the project the jesuit and repulso covered part of the cornice if for no other reason that ignatius was a more important saint than variance's saviour and his chapel should simply not appear smaller there are many things to say about this chapel and i've written a book about it but i want to just emphasize that jesuit's principal goal and how they thought they sought to achieve it saint ignatius as important as he was to the jesuits was alas not a popular saint and even the chapel that is his tomb with his relics had not attracted a cult following the new chapel was an opportunity to enhance the cult or at least the appearance of one so they promoted his miracles oh is important for the cult with a splendid band of gilt bronze representations of them but most of all they created a spectacle around the revelation of a spectacular silver statue of the saint now the statue that you see today is not the original one the solid silver parts of which were melted down in the early 19th century during the french occupation of rome and replaced with silvered stucco so it's quite quite different but it's it gives the sense of the early the late 17th century one the jesuits made the unusual choice for this work of silver because the statue because of its preciousness the preciousness of silver and the association of silver with relics it's a material often used for reliquaries the material itself therefore signaled the presence of the relics below the altar and silver is also inherently luminous as a material it's the one of the brightest materials and thus it reinforced that very saintly quality of illumination that made ignatius appear to others as a man of god they even cut a small window which you see the outside of on the street here a view from the street on the left they cut the small window behind the statue's head which is absolutely invisible from below but which would throw some light on the statue and make it appear glow to glow that is when maybe the sun came out of the clouds and you were in the church and all of a sudden this sort of light appeared on the statue's head the silver statue made sense on its own as a kind of ignatius in gloria when you look up to the ceiling ignatius is received in the heavens but it was also part of an implied narrative of ignatius's vision at lastorta which we've already seen was an important subject for the Jesuits above the statue is the trinity and between the trinity and ignatius is a beautiful lapis lazuli escutcheon upon which an angel has just finished writing the name of jesus in the form of the ihs monogram and when i was a graduate student writing my dissertation on this chapel i was very lucky that the chapel was restored and if i hadn't if it hadn't been restored i wouldn't have been able to climb up on the scaffolding and see a wire hang which was attaching a pen to the hand of the angel so it was only then that i realized that this angel was supposed to have been writing the ihs monogram and that implies a temporality of a scene something that's just happened that causes the ihs monogram to be written what's happened is that he's had the vision at lastorta of the trinity with all of the emphasis in the church of the giving of the name of jesus and ignatius's choice for the society of the name this narrative simply could not be lacking the entire church celebrates the society's name so does the new chapel of ignatius where monograms multiplied and this narrative attributes the choice of the name to ignatius and shows that it was heavenly ordained the jesuits went one step farther in staging this narrative as a miraculous and glorious event andred potso also made a painting that until very recently on most days of the year covered the statue the painting represents ignatius handing the banner of victory to christ with figures representing the four parts of the earth below him here's a closer view it's an allegorical representation of the jesuit mission a kind of condensation of all of those figures of the world dispersed in the nave and it shows ignatius as the leader in the jesuit mission to spread the name of christ to the all corners of the earth on feast days the painting was lowered by hidden police to reveal the statue and ignatius's vision that resulted in the choice of the name of jesus now since the chapel of ignatius was unveiled in 1699 the jesuit has undergone many changes and this shows you how many altar pieces have been changed the places where there are three different objects connected to an altar means that the altar has changed three times the ones closest to the altars are the ones that are still in place so only four of the 11 altars retained their original altar pieces today as they accommodated new saints and new devotional objects paintings have been removed and tombs moved around and added and the entire nave was clad in the 19th century with yellow marbles the church feels very different today than it would have around 1600 or 1700 church interiors are dynamic there was however one restoration around 10 years ago that really brought the church back to its baroque ideas the sliding altar which had over the years fallen into disrepair andrea posseau's canvas had been entirely forgotten it was sort of down below in its in its lowered state but you can now visit the church every day at 5 30 p.m. you'll see the baroque mechanism restored and they're on the website for the exhibition they have a video around 928 on the video you'll see the painting start coming down it takes about a minute now this media spectacle attracts the devout and the tourist delight and i don't see this as a perversion of the original intentions of the Jesuits rather together with the recent placement of a very powerful mirror in the nave from which you can study Baciccio's frescoes very very well without straining your neck the Jesuits are in step today with the immediate awareness that served them so well throughout the history of the church's decoration and which aided them expressing through their decorations what the society of Jesus was all about thank you