Il Gesù

‘The church is to have a single nave, not a nave and aisles, and there are to be chapels on both sides.’

Cardinal Alessandro Farnese to Giacopo Barozzi da Vignola, 1568.

Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, Insignium Romae templorum prospectus exteriores interioresque a celebrioribus architectis inveni nunc tandem suis cum plantis ac mensuris a Io. Iacobo de Rubeis Romano suis typis in lucem editi ad aedem pacis cum privilegio summi pontificis. Anno. 1684. (Rome, 1684), plate 20 (exterior façade and perspective view of interior of the Gesù).

In this image we see the exterior façade and a perspective view of the interior of Il Gesù, designed by Giacopo Barozzi da Vignola (1507-1573). Vignola was not the first architect to work on the site of what was to become the mother-church of the Jesuits: as Lotz (1995) tells us, both Nanni di Baccio Bigio (c.1512-1568) and Michelangelo (1475-1564) had provided previous designs but nothing had come of them due to lack of finance. That situation changed in 1568 with the advent of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-1589) who agreed to fund the structure and who was a strong supporter of Vignola’s plans. Vignola’s nave owed much to the above instructions from Farnese, but could also be seen as an architectural answer to the Council of Trent: as Lotz (1995) reminds us, his broad nave expressed the ‘new ideal conception of the open, clarified space’ which had its spiritual counterpart in the reforms of the Church at Trent.

Despite the fact that Farnese championed Vignola’s plans, the façade of the building, visible here to the left of the image, was designed by Giacomo della Porta (c.1533-1602). Della Porta took over the building of the church on Vignola’s death in 1573 and it was he who was responsible for the vaulting of the nave. We can see that his façade bears two coats of arms: those of the Jesuit order itself (HIS) and the papal coat of arms. As Whitman’s (1970) comment suggests, the debate over the differing façades of Vignola and Della Porta is a vibrant one: ‘it is generally agreed that Vignola’s façade exhibits a finely developed classical equilibrium, whereas that by Della Porta displays a bolder if less subtle organization. In his tendency to submerge the parts into an organically fused whole dominated by a strong central climax, the latter architect created the first truly baroque façade.’

Il Gesù, as the mother church of the Jesuits and as an innovative design in its own right, was immensely influential as its design served as the basis for many Jesuit churches elsewhere – see, for example the Gesù Nuovo built at Naples in 1584 by Giuseppe Valeriano (1542-1596).

As Lotz (1995) points out, the plan of the Gesù owed much to the design of churches popularised by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1485-1546). The latter introduced to Rome the Florentine style of a flat-roofed, single-aisled church when he built the hospital church of S. Spirito in Sassia. It was a design which continued to grow in popularity after his death. Il Gesù is clearly an example of this type of structure. In this image we see that the walls of the four chapels on either side of the nave are aligned with the walls of the short transepts.

Sources

Hopkins, Andrew, Italian Architecture from Michelangelo to Borromini (London, 2002).

Lotz, Wolfgang, Architecture in Italy 1500-1600 revised by Deborah Howard (Yale University Press, 1995).

Whitman, Nathan T., ‘Roman Tradition and the Aedicular Façade’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 29, no. 2 (1970), 108-123.

Text: Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library.

Architecture at Edward Worth Library

Gesù, Rome

Il Gesù