The Protestant Reformation came at a time in which people in positions of political power were looking to leverage control over Catholic Europe by way of the Church. The reformation was a total political, religious and cultural upheaval with the mission to make the Bible and not tradition the center of political and religious power. In trying to wage a war and win back those “lost” to the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church’s campaign was designed to go against the idea that it was not the end-all, be-all of Christianity and its practices. To do this, the Church appeal to human emotion and feelings in what would be considered an unconventional way today: architecture.
The Baroque style of architecture was borne of the Church’s counter-Reformation movement. Art, even today, is viewed through an emotional lens and has the capacity to evoke strong feelings in the viewer. The idea of Baroque-style architecture is exaggerated lines and particular lighting so as to increase drama, intensity and leave an audience in awe. A notable example of this type of architecture is Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s Basilica, a Renaissance church located in Rome, Italy. From its inception, one of the world’s largest churches was meant to be the literal center of the Christian world in Rome. For the Counter-Reformation, however, the Pope commissioned Carlos Moderno to expand the church into the form of the Latin cross to accommodate the large congregations of worshipers in a show of grandeur that would demonstrate the triumph and achievement of the Church over the effects of the Reformation.
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"Reformation And Its Peculiarities".
Architecture was not the only way in which the Church looked to appeal to human emotion. While the new interior of St. Peter’s sparked new developments, such as the piazza and the baldechino, music and paintings were also used to appeal to the hidden theatre in the population. The call to the visual senses came by way of architecture and paintings; for the aural sensations, music. The dramatics of paintings was reaffirmed by Catholic figures of the Counter-Reformation who cemented the importance and visibility of figures such as the Virgin Mary. Baroque-style art was about dramatics and intensity, which was done through the manipulation of light and dark space. The “master of light and dark,” Caravaggio of northern Italy, revolutionized painting. The sharp contrast and subtle transition between light and dark in his paintings set the tone for the dramatic element of light as a symbol of revelation and conversion while dark being a symbol of the depths from which the figures in the painting rise. For example, The Calling of Saint Matthew, like many of his works, is about the transformative power of faith. Through the use of tenebrism—the slight graduation between light and dark—the hand of Christ and face rise up from the dark in a move that creates life and brings salvation to Matthew himself.
Finally, Baroque music, in line with Counter-Reformation ideals, was meant to be the antithesis of secular music while creating a call to the aural senses as well as the need and desire to be closer to God. Music developed in Venice as the marriage of music and the drama conveyed in architecture. The dramatics of musical harmony through orchestration, dynamics and tonality were mean to be heavenly in nature and cause listeners, as the Council of Trent put it, to contemplate “the joys of the blessed.” Like tenebrism, loudness and softness were emphasized and varied in force and intensity. Baroque music was orchestrated to appeal to the soul. After this development came the innovations of the opera, the sonata, and the concerto, imitating speech and the use of supporting instruments, respectively.
