The Unified Church Interior in Baroque Italy: S. Maria Maggiore in Bergamo

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy, altarpieces were essentially hybrid entities; most often they were privately commissioned works of art, but they stood in the public spaces of churches. During the early part of this period such giving over of public space to the expression of private interests did not seem to create significant problems, and in fact the system had such advantages for both parties that it remained in place through the end of the seventeenth century. The selling of rights to the spaces associated with altars was one of the principal ways for the Church to encourage the decoration of its structures and to raise money for new construction. Simultaneously, it enabled private patrons to establish monuments to themselves that not only glorified their families but also helped to ensure their salvation. During the Counter-Reformation period, however, the private component of these altarpieces' function began to come into conflict with increased clerical control, stemming from the r equirement that religious art play a broad public role, both as the Bible of the illiterate and as a stimulus to piety. The sacra conversazione type, showing the Virgin and Child surrounded by saints, was an altarpiece staple throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. This was effective insofar as it catalogued the holy figures referred to during masses endowed for these altars, but it did little either to instruct the viewer or to provide models for emulation; it did not show the saints' actions, nor did it explicate the mysteries of the faith. With the selection of saints determined by the particular proclivities of the individual family responsible for commissioning the altarpiece, the sacra conversazione type can perhaps be thought of as a pictorial embodiment of the increasing privatization of the mass in the centuries preceding the Reformation. [1] Although such privatization was not cited explicitly as a problem by any known contemporary source, the mid-sixteenth century saw the emergen ce of a widespread desire to create programs coordinating all the altarpieces in a given church around a single concept or narrative, suggesting that the consignment of church space to private interests was indeed considered worrisome. Adding momentum to this movement was its link to a problem of much longer standing, that of the aesthetic unity of the church space. [2] In addition to determining the subjects of altarpieces they underwrote, private patrons also selected their forms to distinguish themselves from their neighbors, to stand apart. The result was an aesthetic and thematic hodgepodge that demanded correction.

In the late sixteenth century a number of famous churches were either renovated or newly built with thematically and sometimes aesthetically unified programs of altarpiece decoration. At S. Croce and S. Maria Novella in Florence, for instance, Duke Cosimo promoted comprehensive renovations resulting in altar decorations that collectively made up cycles of Christ's Passion. [3] At the same time, aesthetic unity was achieved in each of these two examples through the adoption of monumental frames similar in design. Likewise, a thematically and aesthetically coherent cycle of altarpieces was created for the new Venetian church of Il Redentore. [4] At two new churches in Rome, Il Gesu and S. Maria in Vallicella, altarpieces were arranged programmatically to express the ideals of the Jesuits and the Oratorians respectively. [5] Aesthetic unity does not seem to have been the goal in these two Roman churches; patrons still selected their own artists. In all these examples, however, the interests of private patrons, who had usually made their chapels into distinct representational environments, both iconographically and aesthetically, were at least partially subordinated to the impulse to create thematically unified environments. Thematic and aesthetic unity thus could be separated, with the former assuming in these cases greater relative importance than the latter.

Widely separated geographically, these examples must surely be representative of a commonly held ideal, yet they are in no way typical. The programs of these churches were carried to completion only because conditions proved uniquely appropriate in each case. In Florence, private chapel holders paid for the renovations, but the exercise of Cosimo's absolute political power rendered their own particular interests insignificant. Without this coercion, many of the private. sponsors of the renovations doubtless would have withdrawn their support. In the Roman examples the churches were new, and the Jesuits and Oratorians brought to bear sufficient influence to make adherence to their programs a condition of chapel patronage. Patrons agreed to compromise in order to gain the rights to an altar in one of these prestigious new churches. Still, both orders obviously felt that the choice of artist could be left up to the patrons; aesthetic unity was not as important as thematic coherence in these cases. Finally, the Venetian project, sponsored directly by the government, did not require the participation of private patrons, with all their demands for recognition within the space of the church. This made it possible to create an altarpiece program both aesthetically and thematically unified. In these examples then, private patrons were either excluded entirely or controlled by a powerful governing body. When that body was all-powerful, both aesthetic and thematic unity could be achieved. When compromises had to be made, only thematic unity could be ensured.