Review: The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment, by Christopher M. S. Johns

Abstract

Christopher M. S. Johns. The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, 440 pp., 56 color and 104 b/w illus. $89.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271062082 Accounts of the gradual modernization of European culture over the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the process we call the Enlightenment—have traditionally focused on developments in northern European countries, especially France and England. Many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers in those countries were famously anticlerical, and the secularization of the modern Western world is generally assumed to be one outcome of their project. More recently, scholars have been questioning the emphasis given to northern countries as well as assumptions regarding attitudes toward religious thinkers and institutions throughout eighteenth-century Europe, but the papacy still tends to be seen as the antithesis of Enlightenment. With Christopher M. S. Johns's magisterial study The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment , that last antiquated notion can finally be put to rest. Johns brings to his subject a wealth of erudition and a lifetime of reflection on it, beginning with his first book, Papal Art and Cultural Politics: Rome in the Age of Clement XI (1993), in which he examines the titular pontiff's program of restoration for Rome's early Christian basilicas.1 In the current book he explores the many ways that the Catholic Church shared in Enlightenment assumptions and goals in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, as evidenced by the reforming impulses of the four popes who reigned during that time: Benedict XIII Orsini (r. 1724–30), Clement XII Corsini (r. 1730–40), Benedict XIV Lambertini (r. 1740–58), and Clement XIII Rezzonico (r. 1758–69). Examining a comprehensive selection and variety of papal and episcopal projects of different types and media, including art, architecture, furniture, decorative arts, prints, and ephemeral constructions, Johns defines the loaded phrase “visual culture” as “the nontextual production of things created for specific purposes in the expectation that they will be valued and preserved” (31). This broad and simple definition …