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Andrea Pozzo's masterpiece: the Glory of St. Ignatius in Rome
The Glory of St. Ignatius, a masterpiece by Andrea Pozzo in the church of St. Ignatius of Loyola in Rome, is not only one of the most spectacular Baroque frescoes: it is an authentic poetic manifesto, as well as a work capable of expressing the worldview of the Jesuit order.
By Federico Giannini, Ilaria Baratta | 14/11/2024 19:22
The saint is above a cloud, borne in flight by a swarm of angels, moving over a sky that illusionistically breaks through the vault of the church of St. Ignatius of Loyola, in the heart of Rome: in front of him Jesus with the cross, in the corners the personifications of the continents, all around angels and saints witnessing the divine vision. We are talking about the Glory of St. Ignatius, the masterpiece that Andrea Pozzo (Trent, 1642 - Vienna, 1709) painted on the very ceiling of the church of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a work considered one of the manifestos of the great Baroque fresco. In the church dedicated to the founder of the Jesuit movement, Pozzo, who was himself a Jesuit (he had joined the Society of Jesus in 1664, at the age of twenty-two), painted an enormous optical illusion, a triumph of his research into the effects to which theapplication of rigorous perspective employed, however, not to give order to the world, but to offer the faithful spectacular visions, infinite skies within buildings, immense decorations that exceeded openings beyond sensible reality.
It was 1681 when Andrea Pozzo was called to Rome by Gian Paolo Oliva, at that time father general of the Jesuits: he had been pointed out to Oliva by another great artist of the time, Carlo Maratta, and was summoned to the Urbe to complete the frescoes in the Corridor of the Casa Professa, left unfinished by Jacques Courtois, known as Borgognone. Given the success he found in Jesuit circles, Pozzo was also hired for that great undertaking, the most challenging task of his career: decorating the church of his founding father. Only four years had passed since his arrival in Rome: in 1685, Pozzo began the decoration of the apse basin, with stories from the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola(The Vision of St. Ignatius at the retort that can be admired on the central wall, St. Ignatius Healing the Plague Victims in the apse basin, and the Defense of Pamplona on the vault). It was in these frescoes that Andrea Pozzo offered his patrons the first taste of those illusionistic effects that made him known everywhere and made him one of the most outstanding Baroque artists: in fact, in 1685 he painted an incredible mock dome (painted on canvas in the space that should have opened onto the real dome, which was never built, partly for economic reasons, partly for reasons of statics: it should have become the second largest in Rome after that of St. Peter's) which raised the level of the already astonishing results that, in Rome, Pozzo had achieved in the frescoes of the Casa Professa where, with all the tricks that his experience and technique could suggest, he had succeeded in transforming a flat, short corridor into a vaulted gallery imitating those of the great palaces of the time. Again thanks to optical illusions capable of simulating curvatures on flat surfaces. With the mock dome, Pozzo had given concrete proof of the single-point perspective that he would theorize in his treatise De Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, published in Rome in 1693, just as the painter was awaiting the execution of the frescoes of St. Ignatius. According to the Trentino artist, this was the most correct way to apply perspective: the single point of view. Essentially for three reasons, in his opinion: because it was the mode that had always been used by the great masters, because "perspective being a mere fiction of the true, the painter is not obliged to make it seem true on all sides" (and therefore the "true" must give itself from a single point of view), and because the work cannot be realistic if the painter tries to paint it in such a way that it can be observed from several points of view.
These are the ideas behind the Glory of St. Ignatius(or Triumph of St. Ignatius), an immense fresco executed beginning in 1691 on a vault 36 meters long and 16 meters wide, dimensions that make it one of the largest frescoed vaults in the world. Looking at Andrea Pozzo's masterpiece, one has the perception that the ceiling of the church of St. Ignatius no longer exists: in its place is an open building, offering the faithful a view of the sky on which the sacred epiphany unfolds. The dimensions of the real church doubling and opening to show another temple, an ethereal temple, made of air, blue and clouds, instead of stones and columns. For the illusion to work, it is necessary to stand in the center of the nave: that is where Andrea Pozzo had envisioned the observer (and to make the task easier for him, at the exact spot he installed a bronze disk, later replaced with a new yellow marble disk, which can be easily seen in the band of white marble in the center of the nave), it is in that area that the perspective lines of his complex scientific calculation converge; it is from there that one admires the miracle and has a realistic perception of the fake dome. If the visitor to the church of St. Ignatius tries to move, this effect is lost, the sensation is that of a confused architecture, of a directionless sky, of an unreal dome: this sense of bewilderment was also the result of calculation, it was intentional, since it alludes to the loss of orientation should one abandon the path of faith. Behind this powerful depiction there is a solid architectural basis: Andrea Pozzo, as we have seen, was a theorist of perspective and trained as an architect. This can be appreciated from the exactness of the quadratures, that is, the foreshortened painted architectures that house the main scene, the one that takes place in the breakthrough space of the ceiling.
What, specifically, did Andrea Pozzo paint on the vault of St. Ignatius? He himself provides a brief description, in a 1694 letter, and also clarifies where his inspiration came from. In particular, to tickle the artist's fancy came a verse from the Gospel of Luke ("I came to bring fire to the earth, and what do I want but for it to burn?"), from which sprang the image of light coming from Christ and of fire illuminating many elements of the vault (indeed, all along the perimeter of the decoration one can see clipei with images of flames, glowing stones, burning pyres, burning tizzioni, flame-shaped swords, braziers, candles, and everything to do with fire). "Bouncing from side to side in the immense fresco is the now secret now explicit exaltation of the power of fire," wrote Marcello Fagiolo. "Fire arises as libertarian dissolution from structures in architecture or as enfranchisement from bodily heaviness in painting and sculpture. It is above all the reflection of a higher form, and thus reveals itself as an aspiration of the spirit. But in the vault of St. Ignatius, fire loses its connotation of elegance, loses its tension to heaven because the transition is now reverse: from heaven to earth. It is fire that heats but also fire that burns. Aspiration thus becomes drama, and the presence of fire is no longer merely metaphor but substantiates the very life of the images. The Christ with the sword that the Gospel sometimes speaks of prevails over the merciful Christ."
The light is in fact a symbol of the Holy Spirit who, through Christ, floods St. Ignatius with Christian wisdom, while the fire is a symbol of the word of the Gospel that the saint is to spread, but it also alludes to the saint's very name(ignis means "fire" in Latin). "The first light I had to form this idea," Andrea Pozzo would have recounted, "came to me from those sacred words: Ignem veni mittere in terra et quid volo nisi ut accendatur, adapted to Saint Ignatius by serving his children and inciting them with those famous voices: Ite et inflammate omnia ("Go and inflame everything"). But since all fire and all celestial light must come from the Father of lights, in the middle of the vault I painted an image of Jesus who communicates a ray of light to the heart of Ignatius which is then transmitted by it to the innermost breasts of the four parts of the world which I figured with its hieroglyphics in the four shutters of the vault. These invested with so much light stand in the act of rejecting [...] the deformed monsters either of idolatry, or of heresy, or of other vices."
The verse from Luke's Gospel also appears in the two large shields held up by angels at the beginning and end of the vault. Ignatius of Loyola, wearing Jesuit garb, is depicted in the middle of the vault, kneeling before Christ (who occupies the geometric center of the entire composition). Jesus holds up the cross and bathes St. Ignatius with the light that comes, however, from the dove of the Holy Spirit (just above Jesus), depicted next to God the Father. From St. Ignatius, the light spreads out forming a kind of X to reach the four corners of the vault where allegories of the four then known continents are depicted, each symbolized by a different animal: Europe (the horse), America (a large feline, a puma probably, with a naked woman dressed in a feathered headdress and a parrot next to her: this was the native imagery at the time), Africa (a crocodile ridden by a dark-skinned woman holding an elephant tusk) and Asia (a camel on top of which we note a woman in a turban). The depiction of the continents alludes to the light of the Holy Spirit and the word of the gospel reaching every corner of the globe. Below the continents, we see figures of sinewy women and men succumbing and seeming almost to shelter themselves: these are the allegories of the vices and heresies alluded to by Andrea Pozzo in his own commentary. In the clouds above the continents, on the other hand, we see figures alluding to the peoples of the respective geographical areas, but also figures of saints kneeling above the clouds: these are the missionaries of the Jesuit order sent to do evangelization work in the world. Above the allegory of Europe, the figures of Stanislaus Kostka, Francesco Borgia and Luigi Gonzaga are particularly recognizable, while on the cloud in front of them, recognizable because of his staff, appears St. Francis Xavier, depicted from the side ofAsia because that is where his work of evangelization was accomplished (he died in 1552 on the island of Sangchuan, along the Chinese coast, following a brief illness). It will be noticed that the figures of the continents occupy the quadratures, are arranged around the architectural elements, under the columns, above the cornices decorated with gilded friezes: this is a precise choice, since the faux architectures are an element of connection also symbolic between the real space of the church, the one in which the faithful are, and the divine space represented in the illusionistic breakthrough, in the sky in which the sacred episode takes place. The continents are part of the tangible world, that same world of which the faithful is a part, and consequently find space within those same elements that continue the real space, simulating an architecture that continues upward.
Continuing in the reading of the fresco, one will notice that one of the beams of light departing from the center of the vault invests the angel at the lower end, the one holding the mirror with the trigram IHS surmounted by the cross, one of the symbols of the Jesuits: it is symbolic of the strength of their preaching in the world, a strength that is infused by the very name of Jesus. Still below, above the shield with the first part of Luke's verse, several angels hold a brazier (and one of them distributes a torch to a missionary): the allusion is to the divine love that motivates the Jesuits' missions.
To fine-tune his undertaking, Andrea Pozzo surely resorted to various figurative sources that could inspire his work in some way. In Rome, Pozzo could easily see the great vault of the Palazzo Barberini with the Triumph of Divine Providence that Pietro da Cortona had painted some sixty years earlier, effectively signing the first great manifesto of the Baroque fresco. Of no secondary importance must have been the neo-Correggesque frescoes of Giovanni Lanfranco, which Pozzo could admire in the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle where the Parmesan had frescoed the Glory of Paradise in the dome, or in the basilica of San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini where, also in the 1720s, Lanfranco painted another fresco steeped in Correggesque poetics, the Resurrection. And also impressive was a further fresco, the Council of the Gods painted on the vault of the loggia of the Villa Borghese Pinciana. Instead, the light appears dense with suggestions that must have come to Pozzo from Venetian painting, particularly that of Veronese.
No less impact must have come from certain of his contemporaries. A few years before the Glory of St. Ignatius was painted is another of the masterpieces of Roman Baroque fresco painting, the vault of the gallery of Palazzo Colonna, decorated by Giovanni Coli and Filippo Gherardi, and just between the 1770s and 1880s, another great exponent of theBaroque fresco painter, the Genoese Giovanni Battista Gaulli, better known as Baciccio, was involved in another Jesuit undertaking, the decoration of the vault of the mother church of theorder, the Church of the Gesù in Rome, located a short distance from the Church of St. Ignatius, a work that, elaborating on Bernini's legacy, fused all the arts, architecture, painting and sculpture, to offer the faithful a spectacle the likes of which had never been seen before, a grand depiction, a painted scene that broke through both the ceiling space and the frame space, with the figures for the first time illusionistically invading the architectural space of the church. Gaulli and Pozzo are the two great Baroque fresco artists of the late seventeenth century, yet they are very different artists: "pyrotechnic," to use an adjective of art historian Alessandro Zuccari, the Genoese, and calculated instead, the Trentino. "If Giovanni Battista Gaulli is the expression of a theatrical baroque machine that has no limits," Zuccari explained, "Andrea Pozzo becomes an interpreter of another sign: for him the perspective breakthrough and the sense of infinity start from an architectural basis, he is a theorist of perspective and painted architecture, and the vault of St. Ignatius is the expression of this more posed, but universalistic dimension."
Pozzo'suniversalism is expressed above all in the symbolic bearing of his fresco, a bearing that, moreover, reflects the ideas of his patrons, the ideas of the movement of which Pozzo himself was a member. Light, like the architecture of which we have already mentioned, also plays a double role in this sense, technical and symbolic. Technical, because the terse and uniform light that Andrea Pozzo wanted to give to his scene comes from a single point (which coincides with the central vanishing point of the perspective), and thus allows the scene to be credible even in terms of its lighting, distributed with supreme balance. Symbolic, because this uniform light alludes to the divine light that spreads harmoniously everywhere, and is able to reach the faithful everywhere.
And if anyone had tried to hold Andrea Pozzo, or his patrons, to account for the illusion the artist was able to create, perhaps the answer would not have been exactly straightforward. Pozzo and the Jesuits would have said that, inside the church of St. Ignatius, there is no illusion, but there is, if anything, the truth of a message of faith, which radiates from the "virtual" space, so to speak, of the vault of St. Ignatius, but ends up overflowing into the real world that welcomes what the paintings suggest. This is the idea behind the iconographic program of the vault. The Jesuit order, first with Gaulli and then with Pozzo, had sought to express itself not only through the written word, but also through the medium of visual art.
What one witnesses inside the church of St. Ignatius is not only a work of art: it is a new worldview, as well as a new artistic vision. The art of the Renaissance had also produced masterpieces of pictorial illusionism, breakthroughs of vaults and walls, but if the Renaissance breakthroughs based their measure on the centrality of the human being, in the Baroque it is the divine that once again becomes the measure of art, the measure of reality, the measure of life. In Baroque art there is a sense of the infinite that is instead completely absent in Renaissance art: it is, if you will, also a reflection of scientific discoveries, of the awareness of the infinity of the universe. This interest in the infinite could not fail to be reflected in art: there is therefore, Nicola Spinosa has written, "a continuous alternation, contraposition and concatenation of negations and affirmations of real or concretely definable spaces, through an extraordinary technique of transforming matter into energy and energy into space in continuous expansion, to the visual configuration of which the same finite, real elements of the environment in which one moves contribute unitedly." Frescoes such as those of Gaulli and Pozzo were intended to remind the faithful that that infinity, which could provoke a sense of strong disorientation since human beings were beginning to come to terms with their limitedness, their insignificance compared to theorder of which he realized he was part, remained infused with the reassuring presence of divinity, of a light to which to cling, a light that men and women of the seventeenth century believed capable of radiating everywhere.
