
Contending with the unfold of the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church, after the Council of Trent (1545–63), adopted a propagandist program during which art was to serve as a method of stimulating the public’s faith within the church. Whereas a naturalistic therapy rendered the non secular picture more accessible to the average churchgoer, dramatic and illusory results have been used to stimulate devotion and convey the splendour of the divine. The second tendency was the consolidation of absolute monarchies—Baroque palaces have been built on a monumental scale to show the facility of the centralized state, a phenomenon best displayed …







