PARIS.- The great reform movement that shook the Church in the sixteenth century comprised a profound reflection on the nature of sacred images, fiercely attacked by the Protestants.

With some 85 works (prints and drawings, paintings, objets d’art, sculptures), “Making Sacred Images” aims to explore the complex issues at the heart of the religious art created by the greatest seventeenth-century painters, sculptors, and architects, such as Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Pietro da Cortona in Rome, and Simon Vouet, Eustache Le Sueur, Philippe de Champaigne, or the Le Nain brothers in Paris.

Following the upheaval of the religious crisis and the stabilization of the Catholic and Protestant positions, the Church of Rome undertook its own reform. This is most impressively illustrated by the Council of Trent (1545–1563) which reaffirmed, for instance, the possibility, legitimacy, and usefulness of sacred images, profoundly and brutally attacked by the Protestants.

This was the backdrop against which artists and their clients reflected on how to make new images that would be acceptable: how could such images be created and what was the artist’s role in the process? It was admitted that Christ or the Virgin Mary could be represented as they were incarnate, but how could they be given features when their faces were unknown? Could artists invent such images and give them validity in the eyes of believers?

The religious crisis of the sixteenth century saw a revival of the campaign against images. From the 1520s onward, this led to the reappearance of a virulent iconoclasm which found its fullest expression in France and the Netherlands in the 1560s. The Catholic Church was quick to act in defense of images, particularly at the twenty-fifth and final session of the Council of Trent in December 1563.

After a brief period of reaction, Italian religious art was restructured in the 1580s according to the principles of devout purity and truth. This sparked an unexpected revival resulting in a movement of incomparable richness. Our presentation, resonating with the exhibition “Poussin and God,” aims to illustrate two related but rival visions: that of Rome, where the love of images was given triumphant expression, and that of Paris, where the peaceful coexistence of Catholics and Protestants after the Edict of Nantes gave rise to a more restrained, less theatrical but equally rich form of artistic expression.

Central to the exhibition is the significance of the Christian love of images. In Christianity, God took on the face and body of a man, thereby lending himself to the image: this is the Church’s age-old argument to justify the presence and veneration of sacred images. And at a deeper level, the Christian God has, in himself, the nature of an Image.

The exhibition is presented in four thematic sections that explore the principal issues raised by the making of sacred images in the seventeenth century. It begins with one of the main Catholic arguments for the legitimate existence of images: if Jesus left imprints of his face and body for men to see, then God approves of images. The following sections introduce two different, complementary realities: triumphant papal Rome in the period around the great Jubilee (Holy) years of 1600, 1625, and 1650; and Paris, the mirror of a country scarred by the divisions of the religious wars, where the Church was seeking independence from the papacy. The exhibition concludes with a section on the Eucharist and the Blessed Sacrament, which acquired greater importance in the seventeenth century and is explored here in its dimension as a sign and ultimate image.

Images
“Not Made by Hands” The tradition of “acheiropoieta”—images “not made by hands” and said to have been imprinted by the body or face of Christ—was one of the main practical justifications for Christian iconophilism (love of images).

In the series of Holy Faces, the most famous was the Mandylion, the cloth on which Jesus was said to have imprinted his face in response to a letter from King Abgar of Edessa, begging Christ to heal him and requesting a portrait. This image was moved from Edessa to Constantinople, and lost after the Fourth Crusade. There was also a series of Shrouds, the most famous being the Shroud of Lirey, which was taken to Chambéry, then to Turin in 1578. At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these images sparked a new fervor, attracting pilgrims and inspiring numerous copies.

The Glory of Images. Rome, 1580–1660
From 1580 until the eighteenth century, building projects were constantly under way in Rome. The first period in this extraordinary transformation—until 1610, around the Jubilee Year of 1600–is traditionally associated with the Counter Reformation. Like architecture, religious images aimed to conform to the spirit of the Council of Trent: to search for truth, rather than beauty.

The art of this transitional period, characterized by a rejection of contour and color, was one of didactic narration and spatial clarity with simplified or deliberately archaic forms, which soon progressed toward greater naturalism. At the turn of the new century, the rigorous search for truth with regard to religious history and nature gave rise to two related but rival forms of artistic expression, represented by Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio: nature seen as essential and universal, or as ever-dependent on the contingency of singular bodies.

The Council of Trent’s decree on images gave no indication that the work of this first generation—soon enriched by the return of strength, color, and sensitivity—would result, around 1630, in an even more triumphant form of art that revived the power and enchantment of the image and was dedicated to the perpetual glorification of a manifest God.

Nonetheless, this art maintained the contradiction inherent in the image, which simultaneously reveals and veils the truth of the Inaccessible. This is magnificently illustrated by the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, with Bernini’s sculpture of the Transverberation (ecstasy) of Teresa of Ávila: all is visible, yet absorbed in the abstraction of gold and marble, vanishing into the secret encounter between the uncreated light of God and eyes that no longer see.

The French School, Paris, 1627–1660
In the religious, political, intellectual, artistic, and literary fields, the relationship between France and Italy was a blend of profound affinity, proclaimed independence, and fundamental rivalry.

In ecclesiastical and spiritual matters particularly, France was “Gallican,” i.e. opposed to the “ultramontane” influence (which defended the spiritual and jurisdictional primacy of the Pope over the political authority). The country was also deeply divided after half a century of civil war, and French Catholicism had now to accommodate the sensitivities of the Protestant minority. Consequently, the prodigious flowering of mysticism and literature that followed the pacification of the kingdom by the Edict of Nantes was accompanied by a relatively discreet expression of the love of images.

Those who showed the clearest support for the culture of the image were the reformed Carmelites and the Jesuits—for whom Simon Vouet produced the large altarpiece of the Presentation in the Temple for the high altar of the Paris church of St. Louis. However, the iconophilism of the French School also took many other forms.

Catholicism continued to be characterized by the love of images— unchallenged even by the Jansenists—but in the work of artists such as La Hyre, Le Sueur, or Philippe de Champaigne, it was expressed with distance, discretion, immobility, restraint, and silence before the infinite greatness of God.

The Holy Sacrament
For Catholics, the Eucharist represents the ultimate sacrament of thanksgiving and a memorial of the Passion, but also the constant actualization of Christ’s sacrifice and his real presence in the sacred species.

The worship of the Holy Sacrament is a feature of the Catholic Reformation and its iconography. Previous depictions of the Last Supper, focusing on the moment when Jesus announced his betrayal by Judas, were replaced by the Eucharistic Supper, at which Christ as priest consecrates the bread and wine and gives communion to the apostles.

The Church refuted the idea upheld by Byzantine iconoclasts and taken up by Reformation thinkers—that the consecrated host was the only true image of Christ—on the grounds that, as it was Christ’s body, it could not properly be called an image. Nonetheless, the Eucharist concerns the question of the image: despite being Christ’s body, it presents something other than the appearance of his sacrificed and broken body, given to be eaten—a sight which, as St. Thomas Aquinas had observed, would have been truly unbearable.

The host, therefore, is not only Christ’s body, but his body with a different, paradoxical image. “Tridentine” (from the Council of Trent) liturgies and devotions, which worship the divine presence in the Eucharist, exhibit and glorify it like an image, exalted by the sun monstrance.

The Peasant Meal, attributed to Louis Le Nain, is one of the most mysterious testimonies to the importance of the Blessed Sacrament in seventeenth-century society. This painting is now associated with the activity of Gaston de Renty, an eminent member of the Company of the Blessed Sacrament, who organized Eucharistic suppers at his home for the benefit of the poor, in whom the Church also sees the hidden image of Jesus Christ.