| Abstract [eng] |
The Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563, hastened the internal reform of Catholic Church as a response to Protestant movements in Europe. One of the topics discussed and decreed in the Council was the outline of proper sacral art. This unanimous position of the Roman Church inspired Catholic authors of XVI–XVII centuries to discuss the problematics of religious images and to approach the issue structurally. Among such sacred art critics were Giovanni Andrea Gilio, St Carlo Borromeo, Gabriele Paleotti, Antonio Possevino SJ, who studied the religious images in the context of Post-Tridentine Church. Nevertheless, the approach of these authors regarded art as a functional part of faith in opposition to Federico Borromeo, who in 1624 published his treaty De pictura sacra and a year later Musaeum. In these tractates the author postulated hypothetic and aesthetic inferences in order to define the proper religious images of the Post-Tridentine Church. Federico Borromeo succeeded to express a concise and systematic approach to what can now be called the baroque art through the definition of decorum, which can be perceived as the main criterion for every artwork. Due to decorum images become representations of the divine and holy. That is why Borromeo in De picture sacra and Musaeum by criticising Mannerist painters due to their seek of excess individuality (maniera) defined the collusion of moral values of Mannerist works and Post-Tridentine religious images. |
