How Catholic Art Saved the Faith

How Catholic Art Saved the Faith: The Triumph of Beauty and Truth in Counter-Reformation Art by Elizabeth Lev, 295 pages

Every Catholic knows (or ought to know, but, times being what they are, likely doesn't) about the great saints who led the Catholic Reformation customarily, but misleadingly, called the Counter-Reformation: Charles Borromeo and Robert Bellarmine, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Thomas More and John Fisher, Philip Neri and Francis de Sales, Ignatius Loyola and Peter Canisius, and many others.  Along with this litany, however, there was a corresponding movement in the arts, which boldly reasserted the claims of the Catholic Church in the works of artists including Caravaggio and Bernini, Titian and Rubens, Guido Reni and Artemisia Gentileschi.  In How Catholic Art Saved the Faith, Elizabeth Lev demonstrates how the art of what she calls the Catholic Restoration incarnated doctrine and thus used beauty to convey truth.

Lev has an intimate familiarity with the great art of Rome, and this enables her to not only present the works themselves, but present them in their proper spatial and devotional as well as historical context.  This alone would make the book worthwhile, although her focus on Rome means that she omits a great deal of art produced elsewhere - notably in Spain - and her focus on the visual arts means that other arts are barely mentioned - St Philip's role in creating the oratorio, for instance.  Amusingly, where Catholic medievalists, mostly based in northern Europe, have tended to disparage the Baroque (and therefore the churches of Rome), Lev slights the Gothic.  The book is printed on high-quality paper with full-color illustrations liberally sprinkled throughout, but unfortunately some of these reproductions, taken from public domain sources, are disappointingly poor in quality.