Immersive Special Effects and the Baroque: The Ceiling of the Gesù.

Unless otherwise specified all photos were taken on the evening of 27 June 2024

Outside the Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù, the mother church of the Jesuit Order, traffic lurches uncertainly; inside the glorious ceiling is one of the great spectacles of Baroque Rome. The juxtaposition of grubby pavements and seventeenth century grandeur is exactly why I adore Rome so much, and one can usually view it in the company of a handful of seminarians and nuns who only add to the dizzying timelessness of it all. Rome, after all, really doesn’t have to be seem from amid a relentless throng.

Me, traffic, and the Gesù under a stormy sky. February 2023

Recently I rewatched Kenneth Clark’s 1969 BBC series Civilisation, a period piece if ever there was one. In the episode which deals with the Roman Baroque, called “Grandeur and Obedience”, he ends by detailing personal misgivings inevitably coloured by a deeply ingrained Anglican snobbery towards the extravagances of excitable Catholic foreigners. You can take the boy out of Winchester, but you can’t take Winchester out of the boy. Clark speaks of “illusion and exploitation”, which step beyond the boundaries he deemed acceptable in art.

Il Gesù, interior

His criticisms maintain that the “affluent Baroque in its escape from the earlier severities of the fight against Protestantism ended by escaping from reality into a world of illusion […] becoming more and more sensational”. The corollary to all of this “sensation”, he says, is “imaginative energy fizzing away, up into the clouds which will soon evaporate”.

The clouds he mentions include the ceiling of the Gesù, a church built during the reign of Paul III Farnese. The Farnese are among the families Clark—himself the scion of a Scottish textile fortune—dismisses in the same episode as “rapacious parvenues”. Given that the Castrum Farneti, their first feudal stronghold in Northern Lazio, is first documented in 984 the parvenu bit is perhaps a little strong.