Giovanni Battista Gaulli, called Baciccio (1639–1709), Frescoes of the Nave Vault and Dome, 1672–1685, Fresco and stucco, Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù (Church of the Gesù), Rome.
For nearly a century after its consecration in 1584, the nave vault of the Gesù remained bare plaster, an oddly austere cavity in the mother church of the most ambitious religious order in Catholic Europe. The Theatines at Sant’Andrea della Valle and the Oratorians at the Chiesa Nuova had decorated their interiors lavishly by the middle of the seventeenth century, yet the Jesuits, for reasons of funding and institutional inertia, had not. The election in 1661 of the Genoese Gian Paolo Oliva (1600–1681) as Superior General of the Society of Jesus changed this. Oliva was a man of considerable cultural ambition, and he opened a competition for the ceiling’s decoration that attracted several important artists, among them Carlo Maratta (1625–1713), Ciro Ferri (1634–1689), and Giacinto Brandi (1621–1691). A strong internal candidate also existed: Jacques Courtois (1621–1676), a French battle painter who had entered the Jesuit order and whom Oliva, understandably, wished to favour. Yet the commission ultimately went to none of these. Instead, on the advice of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), Oliva awarded the contract to Giovanni Battista Gaulli, a Genoese painter barely past his early twenties and, by the standards of his competitors, a relative unknown.
The choice was, by any measure, a gamble. Gaulli had arrived in Rome around 1657, orphaned by the plague that devastated Genoa, and had been introduced to Bernini by the Genoese art dealer Pellegrino Peri. By 1662 he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca, and the following year received his first public altarpiece commission at San Rocco. His early Roman work drew on the warm palette and loose handling of Genoese painters such as Bernardo Strozzi and Valerio Castello, an inheritance that set him apart from the cooler classicism prevailing in Roman studios during the 1660s. A decisive shift came in 1669, when Gaulli visited Parma and studied Correggio’s dome frescoes in the cathedral, particularly the Assunzione della Vergine [Assumption of the Virgin], painted over a century earlier. Correggio’s radical use of the illusion of figures viewed steeply from below and his willingness to dissolve the architectural surface into apparent open sky left a lasting mark, pushing Gaulli toward a more painterly and spatially ambitious manner than anything he had previously attempted (Wittkower, 1999).
The formal contract for the Gesù was signed on 21 August 1672. Its terms stipulated that the dome was to be completed within two years, with the remainder finished within ten. Gaulli’s programme encompassed the entire nave vault, the dome and its pendentives, the lantern, the window recesses, and the transept ceilings. Ranuccio II Farnese, Duke of Parma, whose uncle Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had originally endowed the construction of the church, remained involved as patron, linking the project to one of the most powerful dynastic networks in papal Rome.
The main vault fresco, the Trionfo del Santissimo Nome di Gesù [Triumph of the Name of Jesus], was unveiled on Christmas Eve 1679. Its subject, drawn from St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, presents a dramatic vision of divine revelation: figures ascend in a vortex of light toward the radiant IHS monogram (the Christogram of the Jesuits), while the damned, their bodies distorted into bestial forms, fall into shadow. The inscription from Philippians appears on a painted ribbon just outside the architectural frame, grounding the celestial spectacle in scriptural text. The dome fresco, completed in 1685, continues the same theological theme within a circular, centripetal design.
What makes the ceiling exceptional, and what distinguishes it from earlier Roman precedents such as Pietro da Cortona’s Allegory of Divine Providence at the Palazzo Barberini (1633–1639), is the calculated collapse of boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture. The stucco figures were executed by Antonio Raggi (1624–1686), Bernini’s most accomplished pupil in that medium, whose angels and allegorical figures appear to float free of the vault surface, their gilded forms continuous with Gaulli’s painted figures in a way that makes it difficult, from the nave floor, to determine where plaster ends and paint begins. Rudolf Wittkower described Raggi’s stuccoes as ‘a perfect sculptural parallel to Gaulli’s intense response to Bernini’s fervent, spiritualised late manner’ (Wittkower, 1999, p. 348). The painted damned fall outward beyond the frame of the fresco itself, casting painted shadows onto the gilded stucco mouldings below, a trompe l’oeil device of great audacity that extends the illusion into the physical architecture of the church.
The question of how much of this design was Gaulli’s own, and how much was Bernini’s, remains unresolved. The biographer Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, writing in the following century but drawing on accounts given by Gaulli’s son, claimed that whenever Gaulli faced the challenge of complex multi-figure compositions (quadri storiati), Bernini himself drew up the plans. Robert Enggass, in his foundational monograph, treated this claim with caution, noting its reliance on second-hand testimony composed some sixty years after the artist’s death (Enggass, 1964). What seems clear is that Bernini, by then in his seventies, played more than a merely advisory role. The principle of the bel composto, the unified fusion of painting, sculpture, and architecture into a single experiential whole, had been central to Bernini’s practice since the Cornaro Chapel at Santa Maria della Vittoria (1647–1652), and the Gesù ceiling represents its fullest extension into the medium of ceiling fresco (Lavin, 1980). Contemporary critics were alive to this debt: Gaulli was called ‘un Bernini in pittura’, a Bernini in paint.
The programme was, at every level, an instrument of Jesuit purpose. Oliva, a gifted preacher, likely shaped the theological content closely, and the emphasis on the Holy Name aligned the decoration with the church’s formal dedication, the Santissimo Nome di Gesù. The single-nave plan of the Gesù, designed by Giacomo da Vignola (1507–1573) and completed by Giacomo della Porta (c. 1532–1602), had been conceived with preaching in mind: a wide, unobstructed space in which the voice of the preacher could carry clearly to a large congregation (Blunt, 2026). Gaulli’s ceiling extended this logic into the visual field, enveloping the assembled faithful in a single overwhelming image of salvation and damnation, with the Jesuit Christogram at the centre. The acoustic function of the nave and the visual function of the vault were, in this sense, designed to work together, producing an environment in which word and image reinforced each other.
The influence of Gaulli’s scheme was immediate and far-reaching. Within Rome, it set the terms for the next great Jesuit ceiling: Andrea Pozzo’s fresco at Sant’Ignazio di Loyola (1691–1694), which pushed the illusionistic framework even further toward pure quadratura, the simulation of fictive architecture across the entire vault surface. Pozzo, himself a Jesuit, published the principles behind such work in his two-volume Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum [Perspective for Painters and Architects] (1693–1700), a treatise that was translated into numerous languages, including Chinese, and circulated through Jesuit networks across the globe. Through Pozzo’s treatise and through the order’s centralised approach to artistic patronage, the decorative model established at the Gesù was replicated, adapted, and imitated in Jesuit churches from the Austrian Habsburg lands to the Philippines, from Paraguay to the churches of Goa in India and Macau in China. The single-nave plan, the illusionistic ceiling, the integration of stucco and fresco, the deployment of light as both pictorial and spiritual instrument: these became, collectively, what has been called the ‘Jesuit style’, a phrase imprecise but not without substance, describing a recognisable approach to sacred space that persisted well into the eighteenth century (Levy, 2004; Bailey, 1999).
The Gesù ceiling was not simply copied; it was codified. Pozzo’s treatise reduced the intuitive spatial intelligence of Gaulli and Bernini’s collaboration to a system of geometric rules that could be taught, learned, and applied by painters of modest talent working thousands of miles from Rome. The result was a remarkable standardisation of sacred interior decoration across an institution that operated on four continents. Whether this process enriched or flattened the original achievement is a question the scholarship has not fully resolved. What is certain is that few seventeenth-century artistic projects had a comparable structural reach, carried forward by the machinery of a religious order whose global infrastructure had no parallel in the early modern world.
References
Bailey, G. A. (1999) Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Blunt, A. (2026) A Guide to Baroque Rome: The Churches. Edited by M. Erwee. 3rd edn. London: Pallas Athene.
Enggass, R. (1964) The Painting of Baciccio: Giovanni Battista Gaulli, 1639–1709. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press
Haskell, F. (1980) Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque. Revised edn. New Haven: Yale University Press
Lavin, I. (1980) Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts. New York: Oxford University Press
Levy, E. (2004) Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque. Berkeley: University of California Press
Petrucci, F. (2009) Baciccio: Giovan Battista Gaulli, 1639–1709. Rome: Ugo Bozzi Editore
Waterhouse, E. K. (1962) Italian Baroque Painting. 2nd edn. London: Phaidon
Wittkower, R. (1999) Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750. Revised by J. Connors and J. Montagu. 6th edn. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press