Today, he said, people pass the statue, at the front of St. Michael’s Church, without a second thought. It was different in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. “The novelty of it in that point in time, indeed the novelty of this whole church, was quite startling,” said Smith, the Kay Fortson Chair in European Art at The University of Texas at Austin. Images of good besting evil and showing the path to heaven were repeated inside the church and in churches throughout Germany, particularly churches built with the guidance of the Society of Jesus, the Catholic order known as the Jesuits. Smith wrote about the Jesuits and their use of art in counteracting the Reformation in Germany in “Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany.” The book, with 188 illustrations and photos, won the 2004 Hamilton Book Award from the University Co-operative Society. It also won the Bainton Book Prize for 2003 from the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference and the Vasari Book Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Smith had written a book about German sculpture in the later Renaissance and had intended to write about sculpture from 1580-1648. But the St. Michael statue and the Jesuits stepped into his view. Martin Luther touched off the Reformation in 1517 and by 1560 or so the Catholic Church feared it might disappear in German-speaking countries, Smith said. “The Jesuits were sent there partly on a mission to re-establish the foundation of Catholicism,” he said. The “art” of worship
The Jesuits, founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1540, worked several fronts. They established or helped build 30 churches after a long drought in church construction. They established schools affiliated with the churches and provided free education. They became art patrons, either commissioning statues, paintings, woodcarvings and gold-smithed creations or persuading wealthy people to commission works of art. And they rolled out a bit of spectacle upon occasion, Smith said. The consecration of St. Michael’s in 1597 was a two-day pageant that featured a five-act, eight-hour play with more than 900 actors. In the play, St. Michael and Lucifer battle amid theatrical thunder and lightning before St. Michael vanquishes Lucifer. “You go to a UT football game and we have all these rituals and all these people wearing orange and things like that because that gets everyone’s attention,” Smith said. “To a degree, in their own way, the Jesuits were doing very much the same thing to get people thinking about the positive side of Catholicism.” Art everywhereThe placement of art in the churches was quite deliberate. “It was intended to be before you at all times when you were in the church,” he said. “They’d put stucco decorations on the ceiling. They have statues and paintings all along the wall. They’d have altars that were 40 feet tall.”
The schools the Jesuits established gave them another base of operations. They opened their schools to a broad range of students, which included the highest nobles, dukes and princes of the church. And as Texas alumni bleed orange, Smith said, the Jesuits’ students maintained an affinity for their schools and the Jesuits. “Their Jesuit education stayed with them,” he said. “You see this expanding network.” Smith’s grounding in art began when he lived with his parents in Europe where his father set up chemical laboratories for Esso (now Exxon). “I spent my high school years living mostly in Brussels and my parents liked to take day trips to Bruges and places like that and I was fascinated by the art,” he said. He started at Duke University as an international economics major, but switched to art history.
God in all thingsThe Jesuits were able to employ the creativity of art to give new life to the church in German-speaking lands. “In many cities which were wavering between Protestantism and Catholicism, the Jesuits were able to reestablish vibrant Catholic communities,” Smith said. “This contributed to the hardening of confessional identities, which contributed ultimately to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) that engulfed much of Central Europe. The effects of these events can still be seen in the political landscape of modern Germany.” Smith’s book ends this way: “One is reminded of Ignatius’s dictum to find God in all things. Fortunately, the Society recognized early on that art was indeed something to be cultivated and adeptly used ad majorem Dei gloriam (for the greater glory of God).” Related SitesProfessor Jeffrey Smith
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They also made the art more specific and less abstract. A series of engravings shows the Christ child seeing a heart covered with thorns. He breaks the thorns off and sweeps them away. Then he paints the story of his life on the interior of the heart.
“I was interested in how art was really a reflection of the creativity of different periods,” he said.