ABSTRACT
Baroque art and architecture could be one of those easily digested manifestations of Italian culture to which travellers might turn in relief from the more perplexing manifestations of Southern politics—if only to dismiss it. Its cultural history as a response by the Roman Church to the liturgical and spiritual threat of the Reformation is normally enough to condemn the form fairly straightforwardly in the eyes of Protestant Northerners. In the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, monarchical power, a wealthy papacy, and influential religious orders (such as the Theatines and Capuchins, but particularly the Jesuits) combined to produce multiple forms of expression that were designed to be awe-inspiring. This did not sit easily with neoclassical taste. The fact that churches, palaces, sculptures, and paintings appealed explicitly to the spiritual and emotional capacities of the citizenry with dazzling displays of artistic dexterity that served to confirm the spectacular, all-embracing power of the Church, did little to recommend it to a pared-down Protestant sensibility. This being so, it might seem odd that British observers of these visual feasts, particularly in the Italian South, rarely commented on their spiritual dimensions, or on the history or politics of Roman Catholicism that gave rise to them. Nobody, as it were, mentioned the Spanish Inquisition.
