A hypothetical reader familiar with the history of twentieth-century Europe but unfamiliar with the art produced in that period would be baffled by the leading survey texts of our day. The three major totalitarian regimes of the century—Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Stalinist Soviet Communism—brought down upon humanity the most severe cataclysm in recorded history. Even the aftermath lasted through the end of the century. Yet our imaginary reader would find little evidence for that in textbooks on art and architectural history. Except for Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third Internationall (1919–20) and an occasional reference to the Degenerate Art Exhibition mounted by the Nazis in 1937, or perhaps an anti-Nazi poster from the early 1930s by John Heartfield, one might imagine these autocratic systems had never existed. Or suppose that their art production was negligible. Even more specialized texts barely nod to totalitarian art. The most widely used book on the history of Western architecture, (Hyman, Isabelle and Marvin Trachtenberg, Architecture: From Prehistory to Postmodernity, New York: Abrams, 2002) does not include a single work sponsored by one of these governments. So toxic is the context in which they produced their designs that Albert Speer and Tatlin are mentioned only in passing relation to Étienne-Louis Boullée and Frank Gehry. Even a modernist like Giuseppe Terragni has been erased. This fact is still more puzzling because all three regimes placed enormous emphasis on art and, particularly, architecture—and one of them was led by a self-styled artist.

No doubt the teleology of modernism has befogged our view art twentieth-century art, but Evonne Levy argues that art historians peremptorily dismiss totalitarian art because we judge it to be mere propaganda and therefore not worthy of consideration. Asserting that there is no such thing as “mere propaganda,” her provocative and insightful book on the problem of art and propaganda focuses on the Jesuit Baroque in order to examine in detail the historical origins of this vast blind spot in our discipline. In the process, she illuminates much about the persuasive purpose of Early Modern Italian art and demonstrates the value of the visual culture of the past for interpreting more recent developments, including, by inference, the neo-totalitarian techniques adopted by many political parties in Western democracies in the post-1945 era. Few art history books realize so compellingly as this one R.G. Collingwood’s admonition in The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946) that the most worthy task of the historian is to assess the past not only in its own terms but also for its utility in understanding the present. As Levy puts it, she aims to demonstrate “propaganda’s usefulness to art history” (13). The by-product of this analysis is a critique of much art-historical writing, especially of the Early Modern period, which she sees as fetishizing the material object, its formal qualities, and its iconography to the exclusion of its ideological content and intended impact on the viewer. In this assessment, art history is an idolatrous practice: “Our eyes are filled with the glow of the Golden Calf. We are the discipline that has performed the longest dance around it” (71). Levy argues that we need to engage the art of propaganda as art. This important book is conceived as a stern corrective to our idolatrous practice.

The reader may be surprised by the frontispiece image of Speer’s Reichschancellery as well as by the juxtaposition of his model for the Great Hall (to be built as the centerpiece of Hitler’s new Berlin) with St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. But Levy sees the ideological toxicity of Nazi art as a parallel to our inability to treat the propagandistic nature of Catholic Baroque art more directly and profitably. She holds that Italian Baroque scholarship today too often sanitizes the political nature of art and architecture produced by the various institutions of the Counter-Reformation. Only if we accept its bid for ideological hegemony, she argues, can we grasp the true character of the Catholic Baroque. “Does Bernini’s Cathedra Petri . . . rise above propaganda because it qualifies as great art? (7), she asks rhetorically.

Levy is an expert in seventeenth-century Roman art and architecture and has published a significant body of work primarily on Jesuit art and its manifestations both in and outside of Rome. In some of these publications she has explored theoretical issues, such as the problematic originality of the image of a saint (Stanislas Kostka) in an age of mass reproduction (Representations LVIII (1997): 88–114), that have stretched her intellectual purview beyond the traditional historical boundaries of Italian Baroque art. Such is the case here, where she takes on an enormous historiographical problem touching on the nature of art-historical inquiry in general.

By examining the problematic operations of propaganda as a vital but almost unspoken agent in art-historical scholarship, she engages a theme of the broadest concern even as she focuses on Jesuit-sponsored art of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for her examples. This is a risk-taking enterprise such as rarely occurs in the field of Early Modern Italian studies. In the scope of its intellectual effort and originality of insight, Levy’s study may suggest to some readers the mind-expanding impact of Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), an exploration of Dutch pictorial culture that—for all the book’s shortcomings and obscurities—stimulated a useful debate in the Northern Baroque field precisely because of its bold thesis and interdisciplinary ambition. Like that earlier work, Levy’s book aims to provoke a discussion well beyond the normal reaches of Early Modern scholarship on the history of art.

The inquiry begins with a historiographical analysis of one of the oldest debates in academic art history: Is there such a thing as a “Jesuit style”? Levy uses as her prime exemplars of Jesuit art two of Andrea Pozzo’s media extravaganzas: the vast ceiling painting (1691–94) in the nave of the Church of St. Ignatius and the Chapel of St. Ignatius (1695–99) in Il Gesù, the mother church of the Society of Jesus. Herein lies one of the great strengths of the book. Levy joins to her theoretical and historiographical exposition a thorough knowledge of the primary sources and physical form of the monuments she uses to prove her points. She has done her time in the archives and has a good grasp of the material properties of the objects she studies. (She was fortunate to have been researching in Rome on the Ignatius Chapel just at the time it was being thoroughly restored.) Occasionally her application of theory to the case at hand may be a bit difficult to follow—as with her application of Louis Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatuses” essay and its discussion of “interpellated” subjects, for example—but the seriousness of the effort is impressive and on the mark more frequently than not. And she successfully engages theoretical issues without recourse to the cant that sometimes taints such discussions.

One of the surprises emerging from the hard-nosed scrutiny of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussion of Jesuit art is the discovery that just after the First World War the scales tipped radically against a reasonable analysis of the Jesuit contribution to the visual culture of the Baroque. Werner Weisbach’s Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1921) appeared at this time and not only posited Jesuit art as paradigmatic of the Baroque but also tagged it as propagandistic. This, however, was not the term as it was used in the seventeenth century to refer to the positive dissemination of doctrine—the Collegio di Propaganda Fide was founded in 1622—but the “black” propaganda that rose to public consciousness after the war, especially in Germany, as a component of the war-time government-sponsored misinformation campaign purveyed though modern mass media.

Levy resurrects the idea that Jesuit art is corporate art, a notion once jettisoned in favor of the individual artistic genius such as Pozzo. At the same time, however, she rejects the notion of a “Jesuit Style,” at least in the sense of style as aesthetic form. She replaces that with a consistent institutional intentionality aimed at appropriate viewer response and enhancement of the organization’s public reputation. In this regard she sees the Chapel of St. Ignatius as a consummate work of propaganda in the proper sense of the term. The Jesuitness of a work produced under Jesuit patronage is in the process and not in the form of the resulting object (107). In the case of Pozzo’s chapel, Levy points to the public display of the model and the recorded observations of the visitors who came to see and comment on the project. She believes these written remarks may have had some effect on the fully realized work; but whether this was the case or not, the effort to engage public opinion at that level reveals intent on the part of the corporate Jesuit sponsors and points the way for a more fruitful understanding of Jesuitness in art.

The chapter on the “message” or ideological content of Jesuit art comprises the core of Levy’s contention that interpretations of Jesuit art and of much institutional art produced in Early Modern Italy miss the point by failing to grasp its intention to sway the viewer in the direction of a positive response to institutional goals. Like José Antonio Maravall (La Cultura del barroco, Esplugues de Llobregat: Ariel, 1975), Levy holds that much of the art of this period is freighted with persuasive purpose. To omit discussion of audience response is therefore fatally to undervalue the ideological import of the imagery. Here she cites Siegfried Kracauer’s essay on ornament in Nazi film (Das Ornament der Masse, Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963), particularly the obsession with the repetition of forms, which he explicitly identified with propaganda that aims to overwhelm the viewer’s senses and thereby transfer ideology at a visceral rather than intellectual level. Kracauer explicitly alludes to Versailles and Baroque Italy in this regard. The superfluity of ornament, material splendor, and sensory overload seen in some Italian Baroque art and exemplified by the Chapel of St. Ignatius has long been criticized as a crude ploy to move the viewer emotionally. Levy packs this section of the book with her major historical examples of Jesuit art, including not only her analyses of Pozzo’s ceiling painting and chapel but also the imagery of the Corridor of St. Ignatius in the Casa Professa (ca. 1682–86) and a pertinent study of the print images of the saint himself as they evolved over time in response to the needs of the Society.

Levy devotes the last chapter to the diffusion of Jesuit architecture and its images. She observes that the Jesuits thought artistic forms inherently conveyed the belief system of its creators (203), but they did not advocate a uniform style in architecture. Even the requirement that all provincial houses submit designs to Rome applied only to groundplans, not to elevations. Levy does, however, bring forward the print trade as the medium that made possible the diffusion of some design types. To make this point, she traces the dissemination of the imagery of the Chapel of St. Ignatius in Central and Eastern Europe and as far afield as Goa. Here she argues persuasively that the borrowing evinced in the works implies ideological intent. “There is no such thing as a mere aesthetic use of a model,” as she puts it (231). While not promoting a specific visual style, the Jesuits nevertheless maintained an unswervingly didactic program in art and architecture.

“Subject formation” (meaning impact on the intended audience) and its relation to propaganda as embodied in Jesuit art are at the heart of Levy’s argument. There is little question that art historians have undervalued viewer response as an area of investigation in Early Modern Italian art and architecture. The range of confessional options available to men and women of the period was a new and disorienting phenomenon—and worrisome to power elites. On this battleground of ideologies we should not be surprised at the deployment of new instruments of mass persuasion. Too often our negative attitude toward propaganda has obscured our vision of the manipulative mechanisms of much Early Modern imagery, especially that produced under institutional sponsorship in Catholic lands. We can therefore be grateful for a book that directs our attention to this reality and simultaneously prods us to new thinking about the function of meaning in visual culture.