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9780271062082

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This groundbreaking book defines in depth and breadth the parameters of the Catholic Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Papal Rome, revealing the extent of the Church's engagement with the secular Enlightenment through Papal initiatives for religious and more secular reforms that had a direct impact on the visual arts, the sciences, and many facets of culture. A remarkable range and variety of such projects are studied in a broader cultural context, including fascinating subjects such as the Pope's coffee house in the Palazzo del Quirinale, the founding of the Capitoline Museum, the restoration of the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum, and the cult of the saints, to name but a few. In this lucidly written and richly researched book, Christopher Johns recreates a complex historical fabric through the interweaving of art and culture during a period when Rome was the epicenter of the Grand Tour and Enlightenment Europe. This magisterial study should find a prominent and permanent place on the shelf of every student and scholar of eighteenth-century European visual culture. --Dorothy Johnson, University of Iowa

This is a wonderful, odd, challenging book. Wonderful because it is learned, informative, and engaging. Odd because it brings together ideas, events, and institutions that often are thought of as disparate and even antithetical. Challenging because by means of patient argument and accumulation of evidence, Christopher Johns disturbs many long-held assumptions about his subjects. . . . Johns opens our minds and eyes to creative acts, ideas, and works that have long been overshadowed by theories and events that seemed to have little or no positive relation to the religion of the time. This is not only a good book to look at, but a very good book to read. --Robert Kiely, Eighteenth-Century Life

This magisterial study reveals the artistic vibrancy and intellectual ferment at the heart of the Catholic Enlightenment. It upends old notions of the Church as a passive spectator of cultural change and reveals the myriad and dynamic ways in which the Roman hierarchy engaged the new ideas, new sensibilities, and new institutions that transformed Europe during the eighteenth century. --Jeffrey Collins, Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture

This magnificently illustrated book, which also explores notions of Italian Jansenism, makes us aware that eighteenth-century popes recognized the advantages of engaging with certain aspects of Enlightenment thinking and explains why utility was such a prominent topic of the Enlightenment era, not only in hagiography, but also in urbanization and architecture. . . . It should interest not only every student and scholar of eighteenth-century visual culture, but historians of the Church as well. </p> Dries Vanysacker, <em>Renaissance Quarterly</em></p>

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Christopher M. S. Johns is the Norman and Roselea Goldberg Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt University.

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