 So I think we'll start. I'm neither the speaker nor the introducer, but I'm the introducer of the introducer. I'm Linda Wilkes-Simon. I'm the director of the museum and the organizer of the exhibition that you're all here to celebrate tonight, our opening event. And I just, I can't imagine a more fitting way to launch what we hope is going to be a really glorious three and a half months by having with us a speaker who is, he is identified with the subject. There are very few people in any discipline where their name is sort of the same as the subject. And our speaker tonight, as you'll hear from my colleague, Michelle, really is that scholar. And I am not an expert in the JZU and I just want to say the little bit I know I really learned from reading his extraordinary scholarship. So I just want to invite you all to join us for our reception afterward in Bellarmine Hall where the exhibition is from 6 to 8. I'm going to turn the podium over to my colleague Dr. Michelle DeMarzo, our Curative Education. But before I do, I've had lots of occasions to thank many people in the past few days. And I hope I'm going to embarrass her. I would like to give a call out to our colleague at the museum, Lauren Williams, who I hope she's in the room somewhere. Lauren is our peerless behind the scenes, get it all done without ever asking how or why we're just doing it. And without Lauren behind the scenes, or she is even now, none of anything that you're going to enjoy tonight or for the time of the exhibition would happen. And so I'm really, I hope she's somewhere, maybe we could bring her in here. Okay, so I would really be grateful if everybody could just give Lauren Williams a hand because she is, and here she is. Thank you, Lauren. Thank you. So, Michelle, thank you all and welcome. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Michelle DeMarzo, the Curator of Education and Academic Engagement here at the Fairfield University Art Museum. And I am delighted to introduce Galvan Bailey, Professor and Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queens University at Kingston, Ontario. As Linda just explained, one of the foremost experts on the art of the Jesuits and of Baroque Rome. Professor Bailey is the author of numerous books, two of whose titles suggest the wealth of Ariadition that he brings to the subject of tonight's lecture, The Construction and Embellishment of the Church of the Jesuit in Rome. The first is the 2003 Between Renaissance and Baroque Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565 to 1610, which you can purchase a signed copy of after the lecture should you wish. And the second is the Jesuits and the Arts, 1540 to 1773, co-edited with John O'Malley in 2005, which offered the first ever comprehensive survey of the Jesuits' artistic enterprises across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. His more recent book projects include The Palace of Saint-Soussi in Milo-Hady, published in 2017, and Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire, State, Church, and Society, 1604 to 1830, forthcoming this year. In addition to Queens University, Professor Bailey has taught at King's College at the University of Aberdeen, Boston College, and Clark University, along with guest professorships as far ranging as the Central Institute for Kunstgeschichte in Munich and Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. Professor Bailey has also held a number of prestigious fellowships, including those with the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa Itati and the British Academy. He is a corresponding member of the Institute of France, as well as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. I could certainly go on at great length, but instead, I simply invite you all to give a warm welcome to Professor Bailey. Thank you for that very kind and very generous introduction. Before I start, I'd like to thank some people myself. I'd especially like to thank Linda Wolk-Simon and Michelle DiMarzo for the introduction to come here, the invitation, and for all the work they've done. It's been incredible working with them. Also for the invitation, Fairfield University Art Museum, it's a real pleasure to be here at what is turning out to be a very spectacular exhibition and quite a unique opportunity. I would also like to thank, perhaps above all, my wife, Pita, for putting her foot down and driving me here in a snowstorm when our little airport shut down at home. So that was very much the last-minute thing. Whether we consider it to be the last work of the Renaissance or the first work of the Baroque, the Church of the J. Zoo in Rome with its cliff-like facade and signature twin volutes was arguably the most influential building of its era. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to call it one of the most influential in the history of the world. The largest church in Rome at the time, except for the unfinished St. Peter's Basilica, and the first major new church in the city since 1527 when the sack of Rome brought Rome and the Catholic Church to its knees, the J. Zoo was the epicenter of the religious and political life of the city. Even its physical situation was prime real estate directly behind the papal palace of San Marco, now the Palazzo Venezia, close to the Capitoline Hill and on a bend in the preeminent processional route known as the Via Papalis. In a similar way, the J. Zoo has dominated contemporary Renaissance and Baroque art history, where it has earned a guaranteed mention in even the most basic art history surveys and taken a permanent place in the canon. A privileged honor aided by the fact that historians of Renaissance and Baroque art have both fought over ownership of a church they consider to be their own turf. Generations of students of architectural history, including the ones standing before you this evening, have written undergraduate essays on why the façade design of the church's main architect Giacomo Barazzi da Vignola on the left with its stepped wall planes and sloping struts was rejected for that of Michelangelo's pupil Giacomo della Porta on the right, flatter with the vertical emphasis created by linked pairs of palasters on both stories and, of course, its scrolling volumes. From the very beginning, few have been indifferent to this cavernous and greatly decorated building, holding it up either as the embodiment of Catholic triumph or of corrupt worldly sensuality. One is not surprised, perhaps, by Protestant critics, such as Gray Bridges, 5th Lord Chandus, who marveled in 1620 at how the gloriousness of its altars and infinite number of images were used to catch men's affections and ravish their understanding. And he was writing at a time when the nave and apps were bare and only part of the crossing and side chapels had been decorated. One of these was the Colourful Angels Chapel by Federico Zuccaro, shown here, finished about 20 years earlier. But plenty of Catholics were also suspicious of the visual richness of the church's decorations. After Queen Christina of Sweden, a former Protestant monarch, now resident in Rome, kind of as a papal queen, expressed her enthusiasm for Biciccio's opulent ceiling frescoes following a sneak preview in 1679. An anonymous critic made snide remarks about her lapse in taste. Indeed, the pseudo-queens' penchant for worldly extravagance, or what we might call bling, made her an easy target. In fact, the most damning reaction to the Jésus was by a Catholic, the 19th century French critic and historian Iblit Ten, whose taste, like that of his contemporary John Ruskin, tended toward the austere and the Gothic. Incensed after a visit in 1865, he sniffed, this church is like a magnificent banqueting hall, adorned with all its silverware, all its crystals, its dam-ass cloth, its curtains trimmed with lace. In the Jesuits' ingenious and delicate hands, religion has become worldly. She desires to please. She dresses up her temple like a salon. The little rotundas on both sides of the large nave are charming marble cabinets, cool and half-lit like the boudoirs or baths of a beautiful lady. He continues, pretty white marble angels frolic on the entablatures, showing off their elegant legs. In short, this church has all the bonbons of a devout confisserie. But if the Jesuits made bonbons, he said, it was with genius. The proof is that they have reconquered half of Europe in this way, and not just Europe. The Jezu was also the first church building with a truly global diffusion. Its facade, ground plan, decorations, generation, imitations across North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia within decades of its completion. Although the Jesuits did not promote a specific style as many have claimed in the past, certain elements of the facade and interior of the Jezu were recreated by Jesuits and others around the world as a way of claiming allegiance to Rome, to the Catholic reform, and to the papacy. I just want to show you four examples limiting ourselves to facades. The Jezu's sister church in India, the Bomb Jezus in Goa, was begun just 19 years after the Roman church was completed and contains the body of Francis Xavier, the other of the first two Jesuit saints. Its facade plays a spirited two-tone variation on the Jezus palasters and entablatures with fan volutes instead of scrolls. On the south coast of China, the Church of Our Lady in Macau, better known as St. Paul's today, begun in 1601, was also more than a faint echo of the mother church, despite an overlay of richly carved Chinese-style Marian imagery, lotus blossoms, and temple lions. Here the volutes contain a skeleton, a devil, and the earliest Chinese characters ever carved in a Christian church. In Beijing itself, a short walk from the Forbidden City, in the Portuguese-Jesuits church called the Nantang or Southern Hall, the Jezu's wide flat facade and volutes are book-ended by Iberian-style towers and fronted by a Chinese temple courtyard, complete with temple lions. The building you see here was rebuilt in 1703 to 33 by the Italian Jesuit Fernando Buonaventura Moggi. Some missionaries could only afford a Jezu in miniature. In the sparsely populated hamlet of Kaz Pilots and Western Martinique, a small group of underpaid Jesuits detested by plantation owners for their program of evangelizing African slaves, created a tiny simulacrum of their mother church in the little church of Notre Dame de l'Assumption et Saint Joseph. And lest we think that the Jezu facade was better received in Angola or Peru than in Rome itself, we need only walk a few blocks away to see the impact of Delaporte's facade on the mother churches of rival orders and the titular churches of powerful cardinals. For instance, let's take a 10-minute stroll down what is now Corso Vittorio Manuel, which takes us to Fausto Ruggese's facade for the church of Santa Maria in Valicella on the left completed in 1605, the headquarters of the Oratorian Order, perhaps the Jesuits greatest competitors in the ministry to the city of Rome. Or we might embark on a slightly longer journey northeast up the Quirinal Hill near the Baths of Diocletian to see Carlo Moderna's facade of Santa Susanna on the right completed in 1603 for Cardinal Girolamo Rusticucci. Both churches are variations on the Jezu design with their cliff-like facades, their tripartite divisions, and their scrolling volumes. Going back up the Corso, this time within view of the Jezu, we might pause before San Andrea de la Valle, the mother church of the Theotene Order, founded like the Jesuits in the 16th century. Built on a 1623 design by Carlo Moderna and elaborated in the 1650s and 60s by Carlo Rinaldi into something more boldly three-dimensional, it nevertheless remains indebted to the Jezu, even if the volute has been playfully transformed into a combination of an angel and what looks like a stock of Christmas panatoni. The latter is in fact the device or stemma of the church's Cardinal patron, Alessandro Peretti Montalto. Indeed, owing to a large part to the Jezu's popularity, Rome quickly became a city of volutes from the stade, as on the left at Santa Susanna, to the erotic, as with Martino Longhi, the younger sinuous figural volute on the right, a Sant'i Vincenzo Anastasio near the Trevi Fountain, designed in 1646. The Jezus did not invent the volute. That honor goes to Leon Battista Alberti at Santa Maria Novella in Florence in 1456. And there are earlier ones in Rome as well. But henceforth, although they did not always use them, the Society of Jesus claimed the volute as a sign of Jezu identity, both locally and globally, like a corporate logo. No less influential was Vignola's ingenious ground plan and interior elevation. The Jezus placed great emphasis on preaching and the Eucharist, and the church was therefore designed to accommodate large crowds and give them an unbroken view of the pulpit, which was placed midway down the nave on the left-hand side, and of the high altar. This scheme differed from a traditional basillical plan in which columns or piers divided a narrower nave from side aisles, blocking people's views if they were not standing in the nave. Vignola compensates for aisles with six nave chapels placed discreetly to the sides and lined up in amphilods with narrow communicating passageways to allow circulation between them. The church is a Latin cross, a forum with early Christian precedents and most famously promoted by Alberti again at San Andrea in Mantua, 1472-90. But here almost entirely inscribed within a rectangle, with the semi-circular apps. At the four corners of the crossing are smaller chambers, the two flanking the chancel, housing the chapels of the Madonna della Strada on the left, a miraculous image which resided in the original wayside chapel that sat on the site when it was first given to the Jesuits, and on the right-hand side, that of St. Francis of Assisi, an early hero of the society in the days before they had their own saints. The spacious crossing possesses an extraordinary majesty as the width of the nave equals that of the transepts and apps. One other significant novelty is the absence of quarry stalls in the apps as the society did not keep the canonical hours as a community. The Jesuits' plan, like the façade, became one of the main prototypes for Jesuit and non-Jesuit churches around the world. In fact, in some places, such as Spanish, South America, or French Canada, it was known as the Jesuit plan already in the 17th century. Here are just two examples of its diffusion. Etienne Martellange's project for the Church of St. Louis in Paris of 1627 on the left, and on the right, the Church of St. Peter and Paul and Krakow from 1596. The first maintaining the passageways between the side chapels but shortening the apps, the second preserving the elongated apps but keeping the chapels separate. The Jesuit Church of St. Pablo in Lima, built on the site of the earliest Jesuit foundation in South America from 1568, was based directly on a drawing of the plan of the Roman Jesuit brought by the Neapolitan Italian superior Niccolò Mastrilli in 1623, although it was adjusted to have five chapels beside rather than three and had a narrower nave to give it better protection against earthquakes. But Ciccio's exuberant ceiling frescoes and stuccoes also enjoyed a long afterlife and wide distribution at times combined with features taken from Andrea Pozzo's 1690s nave ceiling fresco at the Jesuits Other Church at San Ignatio in Rome. The Jezus ceiling type is particularly prominent here in this vertiginous zig-zags and vortex-like cloudbursts by Franz Josef Spiegler in his titanic nave ceiling fresco called the Cult of the Holy Virgin Mary spread by our Holy Order across the whole globe of 1751 in the Benedictine Abbey of Svifalten in Swabia, one of the largest nave frescoes in Europe. The Jezu was not only the Jesuits' most significant building. It was also the chief ecclesiastical commission of Alessandro Farnese, the grandson of Pope Paul III, one of the richest and most powerful men in Rome and the city's leading patron of the arts. A cardinal from the age of 14, Alessandro indulged in the widest spectrum of arts patronage from the frescoes cycles in his palatial villa at Caparola and Roman titular church to San Lorenzo in Damaso to some of the Renaissance's most important works of decorative arts, the famed Farnese hours by Giulio Clovio and the gilded silver casket known as the Casetta Farnese. Since Alessandro's grandfather was the pope who officially approved the society in 1540, an event depicted in an early 17th century painting now in the vestibule of the Jezu sacristy, the Farnese family were proprietary about the Jesuits, a relationship which proved both fruitful and problematic for the new order. On the one hand, it encouraged Alessandro to turn the Jezu into the most important church of its time. On the other hand, it put most of the crucial architectural decisions into his own hands from the size of the church to the facade decoration so that in the words of Clara Robertson, if we are to speak of a style for the Jezu in Rome, it is surely a Farnese style rather than the Jesuit one. There was considerable strife between the Jesuits and their patron during the planning and building of the church. And most scholars now agree that the Jezu which we see today was far more ostentatious than the Jesuits with their preference for flat wooden roofs and plain facades would have liked at the time. This medal, stamped by Farnese in 1575 demonstrates Alessandro's pride in what he considered to be his church. It depicted the completed Jezu on the occasion of the papal Jubilee of that year even though the church was not actually finished until 1577 and remained unconsecrated until 1584. Even the plot of land where the Jezu was built was associated with the Farnese. Immediately after the approval of the new order Paul III gave Ignatius a small chapel called Santa Maria della Strada as the Jesuit's first church. This 1642 map much later shows the Jezu on the site of that former chapel. Aside from being close to Paul's palace it was also a short walk from the family palace the Palazzo Farnese and was thus in the Farnese's own neighborhood. But it was also in an ideal kind of neighborhood for Jesuit purposes as it was very diverse allowing Jesuits to minister to poor and rich alike as well as to the Jews who lived nearby in what is now called the Roman ghetto. The church became Ignatius' final resting place after his death in 1556. But Santa Maria della Strada quickly proved too small for this growing order. As early as 1550 Ignatius had hired the architect Nani di Baccio Bidio to draw up a plan for a new church. A three-isle structure whose basilical plan may reflect an interest in early Christian churches. No trace of this design survives. Another project illustrated here possibly by Jesuit brother architect Giovanni Tristano and possibly from the 1560s demonstrates an early preference for a wide nave for listening to sermons, shallow side chapels, and a semi-circular apps. However, the Society of Jesus did not have enough money to begin either project. It was at this point that Cardinal Farnese stepped in. This double portrait, the pendant for the one we have just seen shows Alessandro on the left across from his nephew Oduardo who would succeed him as patron of the Jezu. Alessandro offered to pay for the church in 1561, but thanks to some delays in purchasing part of the land for the new church, construction did not start until 1568, the same year that they were also able to buy an adjacent house for their casa profesa from the Altieri family. During the negotiations which followed, Alessandro made it clear who was the boss. Nani's and Tristano's plans were abandoned, and Tristano, whom the Jesuits hoped would oversee the project, ended up being little more than an executor of the Farnese one. It was Alessandro who brought in Vignola, a family architect who had designed the villa at Caparola. Although Vignola first played with the idea of an oval church, he eventually settled on the existing Latin cross plan, perhaps a compromise with Tristano's design in the Jesuit desire for a wide open nave. And the church was built and decorated with the assistance of the Jesuit architectural supervisors Giuseppe Valeriano until 1590 and Giovanni di Rossi from 1590 to 1999. Famously, the Jesuits objected to Vignola's barrel vaults since they were afraid that it would create echoes and be unsuitable for preaching. But Alessandro insisted that, in fact, the opposite was the case and that it was better for acoustics and because he was paying for it, that's what they have today. Alessandro also decided to reorient the church west to east so that its façade faced the square, giving it a much more imposing and dramatic appearance, especially when bathed in the afternoon sun. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the Cardinal was unhappy with Vignola's façade design and hired Della Porta in 1571 to finish the church. In the end, Alessandro spent four times as much as he had intended on this project. Perhaps wary of his uncle's profligacy, Oduardo was less enthusiastic about the project he inherited upon Alessandro's death in 1589, which is why the nave and apps vaults remained undecorated until 1574, more than 60 years after the completion of the decorative program of the side chapels. In this painting by Andrea Sacki, showing the celebrations held at the J. Zoo in 1640 to commemorate the centenary of the order, the nave and apps vaults are plain, with frescoes only in the drum and the pendentives of the dome. These had been executed in the 1580s by Giovanni Vivecchi and Andrea Liglio. Although Cardinal Oduardo reneged on his efforts to complete the decorations, which at one point included a grand scheme to cover the whole apps with mosaics, he did finance a tomb for Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, of which Gian Lorenzo Bernini's bust in this exhibition is the only survivor. I will return to the sculpture very shortly. The J. Zoo's first iconographic cycle, dating mostly from the 1580s and 90s, occupied the six nave side chapels, the two chapels flanking the apps, the pendentives and drum of the dome, the sacristy, and a chapel in the crypt. It was executed by artists who were celebrated in their day but are no longer household names, people such as Niccolò Circegnani, Girolamo Muziano, or the first potso to contribute to the church Giovanni Battista. Unlike the building itself and interior of the nave and crossing, all of which fell firmly under Farnese patronage, the side chapels were commissioned by older aristocratic families who were less inclined to make stylistic or iconographic demands on the Jesuits. Many of these patrons had already supported the society before and numerous of them were women. The original cycle has not survived in its entirety. The dedications of several chapels have changed and the paintings have been switched, especially altarpieces of which only two remain in the original location. The nave chapels received their original dedications in the 1580s, beginning at the west portal. They included the chapel of St. Peter's and Paul, or the apostles, which is now Francesco Borgia, on the left, and St. Andrew or the martyrs on the right. The middle pair were the chapel of the Nativity, which is now the Holy Family, and the Passion Chapel on the other side, and at the crossing the chapels of the Holy Trinity and that of the angels. The chapel to the left of the apps on the left here inherited its dedication to the Madonna della Strada from the original church on the site, and its pendant on the right side, now the chapel of the Sacred Heart, was originally the one dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi. Although extraordinarily complex and bursting with color, indeed the effective power of color was a major concern of the early Jesuits, this series of paintings by over 45 artists is less triumphant than Gowli's and Potso's work, and was also quite experimental. The early Jesuits were still investigating ways in which art could serve their ministries, and the artists they hired and the styles and subjects they promoted revealed a variety of approaches. Some of them already tested out in the churches and residences of their five other institutions in the city. The Jesuit paintings were also closely related to printed books, especially Geronimo Nadal's Evangelicae Historiae Imagines, printed in Antwerp in 1593, a major series of illustrated meditations on the Gospels with links to pictures and meditations to the text of the liturgical cycle of the year, and which was the basis for Gasparicelio's two lateral frescoes in the Passion Chapel in 1597, one of which is shown here. Although they are not well-known today, these paintings enjoyed wider influence at the time, such as Celio's dramatic, violent, windswept apotheosis of the instruments of the Passion from 1597, also in the Passion Chapel, which inspired Carabino Alberti's fresco of the glory of the cross at the nearby church of Santa Maria Sopraminarva, painted between 1605 and 11. Similarly, Giuseppe Valeriano's panel of the Assumption of the Virgin in the Chapel de Madonna de la Strada, executed between 1586 and 1888, may have inspired the Virgin's placement and pose in Anible Caracci's Assumption in the Cirassi Chapel Centrum de del Popolo from 1601, where it accompanied Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter and Crucifixion and Conversion of St. Paul, both from 1601. In fact, Caravaggio unsuccessfully sought a commission for one of the Gesù side chapel paintings in 1602, an altarpiece of the resurrection for the right transept, where the altarpiece of St. Francis Xavier stands today. The job went instead to his bitter Roman rival, Giovanni Ballione, and a bozzetto or oil sketch of Ballione's altarpiece, is all that survives today as seen on the left. Caravaggio was so incensed at the Jesuit's choice that he and his companions wrote scurrilous and scatological verses, making fun of Ballione's painting and accusing him of copying Caravaggio's signature style, especially his deep chiaroscuro called Tenebrism, as seen on the right in Caravaggio's Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1599 to 1600, from the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi de Franciese. The painting, in fact, which Ballione was most likely imitating in his work for the Gesù. One of the few lines of Ballione's that's appropriate for a general audience calls Ballione a disgraced painting. I won't go any further with that. Ballione brought a libel case against Caravaggio in 1603, which not only led to a lifelong hatred between the artists, but also left us with the single largest collection of archival documents about Caravaggio, something which has been crucial for art historians hoping to learn about Caravaggio's tastes, friends, enemies, and attitudes. I will segue into my discussion of the later generations, later decorations of the Gesù by suggesting that there are more links between them and the decoration of the early side chapels than is generally recognized. Individual motifs such as Caelio's Apotheosis likely inspired John Lorenzo Bernini's project for the Puto Carrying the Cross from 1672 to 75 one of four surviving studies he made as guides for Giovanni Battista Gaoli's Gesù Dome Frasco. Both make dramatic use of foresortening to give the sensation that the cross is being lifted out of our space into the heavens as angels cling to the massive cross and cloudbursts part above. On a more generic level, all six of the knave side chapels are crowned with apotheosis scenes and many and other miraculous visions of this sort in which the vaults seem to open up into the sky to reveal angels, saints, golden light, and clouds. Many of them featuring a multitude of small-scale figures like those in Gaoli's ceiling. These side chapel decorations also shared with Gaoli's frescoes a taste for robust color, not only in the frescoes and altarpieces but also in their splendid and multi-hued marble and gilded revetments. Gianluenzo Bernini was critical in making the renovations of the 1670s and 80s happen in successfully gaining the job for his disciple Gaoli and in the early phases for guiding the young painter with advice and sketches like the one we have just seen. But the only work Bernini himself executed for the Gesù is much earlier from a period when the young sculptor was still living at the Villa Borghese working for the Cardinal Nefu Scipione Borghese immortalized in Bernini's animated 1632 portrait on the right and producing such masterpieces there as his Apollo and Daphne and his David. His subject for the Gesù was Cardinal Bellarmine, the Hammer of Heretics who became the rector of the Jesuit Collegio Romano and a theologian specializing in antiprotestant rhetoric. A hero to Catholic reformers and still celebrated for his contributions to higher education Bellarmine was unsurprisingly hated and lampooned by Protestants. This jug of a sort made in the Rhineland and later England and found off the east coast of Barbados is known as a Bellarmine jug because it is a character of the portly Cardinal with his signature goatee and heavy brow a mocking counterpart to Bernini's portrait. When Bellarmine died in 1621 his body was brought secretly to the Casa Profesa where during the embalming ceremony devotees scrambled up to the table to dip handkerchiefs into his blood as relics. His tomb, designed by della Porta and commissioned by Eduardo Farnese was begun in 1623 and it was positioned on the left side of the apps as can be seen in this detail from Sacchi's painting where it remained until 1841. Bernini may have felt a personal connection with Bellarmine and it's possible that he attended the reburial in 1622 and even saw the corpse. At any rate, this sculpture was Bernini's first major Jesuit commission decades before his work on the novitiate church of San Andreas Quirinale began in 1658. It is a magnificent work even though he had not yet perfected his technique in making his sculptures seem to speak. He gives the cardinal an extraordinary sense of character the carefully observed facial features and folds of his skin representing a man of considerable elegance and an intellectual vigor tipping his head slightly forward into one side in a gesture of prayer and humility. I also love the five o'clock shadow on the side there which is excellently done in his wonderful technique of texture. Bernini's next moment with the Jezu came about because of one man the church's most important patron since Alessandro Farnese and one of the most artistically savvy high level Jesuits in the history of the society. This man was John Paola Oliva Superior General of the Society of Jesus between 1661 and 81 and the main protagonist in the competition or sorry in the completion of the nave crossing and transept decorations of the Jezu and the equally lavish ornamentation by Andrea Pozzo of the New Desert Church of San Gnazio three blocks away due north and attached to the Collegio Romano although he did not live to see their completion. Here is Andrea Pozzo's gargantuan illusionistic ceiling painting at San Gnazio begun ten years after Oliva's death celebrating both the order's founder and the global enterprise of the Society of Jesus. As Franco-Mormondo has noted Oliva wavered between the Jesuit party line that their building should be humble and simply adorned and an enthusiasm for opulence and what he called magnificence especially in churches. Oliva became acquainted with Bernini during the latter's work at San Andrea which he completed during Oliva's tenure in 1670 and the two men quickly became something of a mutual admiration society personal friends but also men who recognized each other's strengths In Oliva's case his celebrated preaching style which had even impressed Louis XIV not an easy task for a non-Frenchman. Bernini's contribution to Oliva's master plan for the Jezoo was that of an ideas person and consultant rather than an artist indeed he did not contribute directly to any part of the decorations except for that bust sculpture. After considering other artists to spearhead the Jezoo campaign Oliva chose the young Gowli with much intervention from Bernini and Gowli signed the contract in 1672 working at the head of a small army of workshop assistants, stucatori, guilders and carpenters. The cupola and pendentives were the first to be unveiled in time for the jubilee year of 1675 followed by the nave vault in 1679 the apse in 1680-83 and the left transept in 1685. Gowli's dome fresco the vision of paradise is deeply indebted to the heavenly dome frescoes of the Renaissance painter Antonio Correggio in Parma notably his assumption of the virgin in Parma Cathedral 1522-30 shown on the right which Gowli studied first hand at Bernini's urging. Both have the spiraling upward motion created by the clouds and tiny figures who play a secondary role in the interplay between darkness and light and the expressive use of color. Like Farnese 100 years earlier Oliva wanted this work done in time for the jubilee actually stipulating this in his contract with the painter. Gowli also painted over Devechi's pendentives which had each depicted a single church father but instead of one figure per pendentive Gowli gives us four each this time representing Old Testament prophets Old Testament judges the evangelists shown here and the fathers of the church. In the place of Devechi's staid poses he gives us lively interactive figures who twist and turn with the energy of the later nudes, symbols and prophets in Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling. But the nave project is his masterpiece an illusionistic combination of fresco, stucco, gilding and architectural elements which reproduced on the grandest scale ever Bernini's invention known as the bell composto or beautiful hole. In a composto the media literally break through their traditional frames and barriers and combine to create a single artistic moment a representation of visionary experience meant to overwhelm the viewer. In this painting entitled Adoration of the Holy Name 1676-79 Gowli boldly crosses media boundaries the frescoed sections of the nave vault bleed into the gilt decoration of the ceiling and cast painted shadows onto the coffering Although painted onto flat plaster these sections of fresco seem to extend the viewer's space enhancing the fresco's three-dimensional character The focus is a brilliant sunburst surrounding the Christogram which would have recalled in people's minds all over Rome the way Bernini had framed the dove of the Holy Spirit at the Cathedral of Petri the window and sculpture group at the end of the apps at St. Peter's Basilica which was completed in 1666 A multitude of small figures surrounds this illuminated area arranged in loosely connected light and dark zones that either ascend into heaven on the rays of the sun and there are the elect or tumble down as if into the church and we've seen this here and we all know who they are the Vices Christopher John suspects that many more of these figures represent individual people than had earlier been acknowledged in the scholarship these include St. Teresa of Avila and Filippo Nari the two who shared the 1622 canonization date with Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier they also included the Milanese reformer Carlo Borromeo and the most beloved saint of the new world, St. Rose of Lima who in fact was a frequent visitor to the Jesuit church in Lima in her last years Incidentally, St. Rose of Lima was the subject of the greatest sculpture group ever carved by Bernini's other disciple Maltese sculptor Melchiori Gaffa from 1665 which now resides at the church of Santo Domingo in the Peruvian capital at the window level Antonio Raji's stucco figures at the Jezu represent the geographic regions ministered to the Jesuits from China to Paraguay they reach upward toward the light the theme of Baciccio's fresco is stated in the caption held by the angels at the entrance of the church at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth Philippians 2, 10 to 11 echoing the three different levels suggested by the illusionism of Baciccio's ceiling the Christogram or the initials IHS standing for Jezus hominum salvatore or Jesus savior of humanity was at once a representation of the glory of Christ and of the glory of the Jesuits and it echoes the one place prominently over the door in Delaporta's façade seen on the right this quintessential Jesuit corporate logo like the volume was not a Jesuit invention but had earlier been associated with the great preacher Saint Bernardino of Siena who lived from 1380 to 1444 it appears again triumphantly surrounded by gilded bronze sun rays against the background of lapis blue underneath the apse fresco of the adoration of the lamb the final icing on the cake at the Jezus if we are to extend Ipulitz 10's metaphor of the church as Confiserie was a sumptuous tomb of Saint Ignatius in the left transept and built in 1694 to 1999 located directly across from the altar of Saint Francis Xavier in the right transept as early as 1671 Oliva was hoping to move the body of the saint from this transept to a crypt below the high altar at the end of the apse and to replace him with the body of Saint Francis Borgia because he felt that a location in the apse was more appropriate for the society's founder his idea was to create a suite of altarpieces dedicated to Ignatius Francis Borgia and Francis Xavier and he had hoped that the Farnese would underwrite it but as was so often the case with funds they were not forthcoming and he turned to a new patron Cardinal Gianfrancisco Negroni who happened to be a fellow Genoese a little company lismo there the altar of Saint Francis Xavier was first completed by Carlo Marati in 1679 and had to make due with the saint's right arm since the rest of the body laying the church of Borgia Zuchangoa which we have just seen Andrea Pozzo who had already produced a series of illusionistic frescoes in the Ignatian corridor at the Casa Profesa between 1682 and 1888 was chosen to design the tomb of Saint Ignatius a reliquary writ large the tomb plus altarpiece uses materials associated with jewelry such as silver and lapis lazuli which was never used on such a scale before it is composed of an etiquule of green serpentine known as Verde Antico supported by four columns of travertine marble veneered with gilding and lapis lazuli and the side walls overlaid with colored marble and marble relief over the side doors French sculptor Pierre Lagro executed the original silver statue of the saint and a marble group showing faith trampling heresy shown here on the right on the left fellow Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Eldon carved religion trampling paganism above them are two bas by other sculptors representing the confirmation of the Society of Jesus by Pope Paul III and the canonization of Ignatius by Pope Gregory XV below the niche and above the corners of the church are episodes of the life of Ignatius with an emphasis on his visions and his miracles underneath the altar rests a casket containing the saint's remains at the beginning there had been an argument over whether a painting or sculpture was more suitable for this altarpiece as the main representation of the saint but in the end they came up with rather charming compromise a silver sculpture which could be hidden by a painting that was lowered in front of it by polis and here you see it open on the left and closed on the right and usually when you go into the jazoo it's closed unfortunately the original silver sculpture was melted down in the late 18th century what we see today when it is revealed is an 1804 reconstruction with the head hands and legs made of stucco attached to the original Chausable incidentally the placement of the altars dedicated to Ignatius on the left and Francis on the right would quickly become ubiquitous in Jesuit churches throughout Europe and also overseas in fact in San Pablo and Peru there is already an altar dedicated to Ignatius on the left of the chancel in 1614 so 85 years before Paz's altarpiece was unveiled likely because the saint was actually there in 2018 we celebrate the 450th anniversary of the beginning of the church of the jazoo in Rome in 1568 in the half century since James Ackerman called it one of the most significant and influential architectural statements of the Renaissance the jazoo's reputation as one of the most important churches in the world has only increased few buildings in Baroque Rome are more widely known and visited and no guidebook leaves it out even those catering to millennial backpackers such as the 2017 rough guide which extols what it calls the glitzy tomb of the orders founder and the nave ceilings tangle of writhing bodies and stucco angels stuck like limpets before recommending a nearby club called Charrivarie where you could meet some real life glammed up Romans in its day the jazoo's design whether it's facade ground plan elevation of decorations was copied or at least approximated literally around the world from Paris to Panchimalco El Salvador where this tiny 17th century Paris church nestled in a volcanic valley reaches across the Atlantic to connect with the monument its builders associated with the golden age of Catholic reform and legitimacy of the Roman church just like the cherubs who peek down from above its famed volutes but are rarely noticed from the street the church of the jazoo continues to surprise and delight us today with its rich plethora of paintings stucco's marbles and other treasures some of which we are most fortunate to be able to see this evening in this remarkable exhibition dedicated to the legacy of this great church and the artists who contributed to it thank you very much