In this PhD thesis I offer an examination of the work of Jesuit Andrea Pozzo
(1642-1709), an artist known primarily for his works of perspectival fresco painting.
Pozzo's development, his career and his multifaceted practice––which included
painting, scenography, architecture, and a two-volume treatise on perspective––
together serve as a prime case study for understanding the relationship of the
religious art and architecture of the seventeenth century to the period's culture of
ritual and performance. Pozzo's work, I argue, is religious theatre, and the key to
reading both his ephemeral scenographies and the permanent works of painting and
architecture lies in religious performance. Each of the works, I contend, functions as
a work of religious theatre: architectural space, images, narrative, illusion and light
are used to communicate messages, to engage the senses and the intellect, to activate
the memory and the imagination, and to directly involve the spectator both internally
and externally as a performer.
In my first two chapters I present an analysis of the environment in which Pozzo
emerged, beginning with the religious, intellectual and visual culture of the Jesuits,
before turning to the religious theatre of Northern Italy. Here I concentrate on the
Counter-Reform culture of religious spectacle, before arriving at Pozzo’s first
recorded scenographies. In addition to their ritual function, I demonstrate how these
works establish many of the recurring visual themes and techniques we see across
Pozzo's work. In the third chapter I study Pozzo's earliest surviving major painting
commission: the church of San Francesco Saverio at Mondovì. I present the church
as a teatro sacro—a permanent ritual scenography of architecture and painting which
evokes the elaborate ritual processions of the time.
My fourth chapter focuses on the ephemeral scenographic works of Pozzo’s
Roman period. Pozzo’s innovations in scenography and perspectival illusionism in
Rome quickly establish his reputation and lead to the major commissions in the
church of Sant'Ignazio, which I discuss with several major Roman works in my final
chapter. The examination of the Roman projects returns us to the central theme of
my thesis: art and architecture as theatre; both a setting for religious ritual and a
means of persuasion through intellectual and spiritual engagement of the observer in
a ritual performance.
In order to pursue this line of argument I have consulted a wide array of sources
and secondary literature across a number of fields. Important primary sources
studied include Pozzo's two-volume treatise, Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum
(1693,1700), Jesuit documents and archived correspondence, eighteenth-century
biographies of Pozzo, prints and commemorative publications of festivals, works of
classical authors, and theological writings of major figures in the seventeenth
century. This project embraces a wide range of topics including painting,
perspective, architecture, illusion, theatre and scenography, ritual and spectacle,
theology, philosophy, early modern science, Counter-Reform religious culture, and
Jesuit history
