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By Root 1027 0

order, originally set up to promote the faith in the East and the New World, was also to be strengthened. There would be new schools to train ‘guerrilla’ priests. The Jesuit general, Loyola, a retired Basque army officer who had been turned down by the Franciscans, started deploying his troops. Between 1544 and 1565, to combat the Protestant influence in Germany, Loyola was to build colleges in Cologne, Vienna, Ingolstadt, Munich, Trier, Mainz, Braunsberg and Dillingen. For Protestant England there would be overseas schools in St Omer, Liège, Rome and Douai. Scotland would have one in Madrid. The Irish would go to Rome, Poitiers, Seville and Lisbon. There was a Jesuit college in virtually every French town of note.

Teaching would be standardised and regimented. The curriculum would consist of classics, maths, cosmology and geography, rhetoric, good manners and Holy Scripture. The aim would be to spread and strengthen the faith among the more influential members of society.

For the peasants the Council had other plans which were to change the face of worship. It was time to make the Church and her activities more attractive. In order to counter the libertarian promises of the Protestants, the Catholic Church should come to represent Heaven on Earth. The appeal to the senses would awake vague and soulful desires in the breast of the worshipper. A manual of iconography was produced by Cesare Ripa that ran to many editions and had profound influence all over Europe. The aim was to bring in the faithful, make them participate in the Sacrament, and excite their desire for festive occasion.

An English edition of Ripa’s iconography, which set the rules for Catholic artists all over Europe. Every possible character trait, vice and virtue was included so as to leave no artistic latitude at a time when orthodoxy was paramount.

Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa, erected between 1644 and 1647.

The new style appealed to the ordinary passions. An increased emphasis on the lives of the saints, aimed at bringing religion closer to everyday life, meant that the inhabitants of heaven were soon to be seen in any church. The decor and the general design was aimed at taking the eye up into extravagant gyrations of colour and embellishment in the painted dome, which represented heaven.

Lights, clouds, drapes and holy figures, all in dazzling materials and colours, turned the church into a theatre. The aim was to achieve a rhetorical, revelatory explosion of truth. Gone was the cool, sober use of art to teach Bible stories. The eurhythmia and proportion of the Renaissance gave way to a chaos of forms and colours. The effect was above all to be theatrical. Indeed, in the Cornaro Chapel in S. Maria Vittoria in Rome, where the figure of Saint Teresa swoons at the vision of heaven, her draperies falling sensuously round her body, the Cornaro family are placed behind balconies of marble, like people in a theatre box, watching the event.

The first complete example of the new type of art, which we now call baroque, was not ready until 1578. Fittingly enough, the first fully fledged example of baroque architecture was the Jesuit church of Gesu, in Rome.

Meanwhile, the Council entirely missed the point of an event that had taken place two years before it convened, and which would prove to be a force for change greater than anything Martin Luther could have dreamed of. This event came about in response to an order from the Church itself. For some time there had been urgent and serious need for a reform of the calendar. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the Julian calendar was about eleven days wrong; this much could be seen, even by the most ignorant believer, from the behaviour of the moon. The problem was a theological one. Missing a saint’s day lessened a worshipper’s chances of salvation. The major festival of Easter gave particular trouble. It was difficult to calculate since it involved using the Hebrew calendar as well as the Julian in order to calculate the phase of the moon on which the date of Easter depended. Unfortunately