The recent surge in scholarly interest in the Jesuits and the visual arts continues with Andrew Horn's Andrea Pozzo and the Religious Theatre of the Seventeenth Century. Recent scholarship on the Jesuits has sought to reexamine the Jesuit cultural mission, contextualize the Jesuits among their contemporaries, and synthesize a wider view of global Jesuit activities. Saint Joseph's University Press has led the way, with over a half dozen volumes in their Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts Series dedicated to Jesuits. Horn sheds new light on Baroque master and Jesuit brother Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709) through a meticulous study of his art, analysis of new primary documents, and expert synthesis of the large body of scholarly literature on Pozzo. The final product expands our understanding and appreciation of Pozzo's artistic career and seventeenth-century religious theater, from the artist's tentative Jesuit beginning and works in Northern Italy to his spectacular successes in Rome.

Across five chapters, Horn writes about Pozzo and the Jesuits, his work in Northern Italy, and, finally, his work in Rome. This is not a complete study of Pozzo's entire career but, instead, an analysis of the permanent and ephemeral work he completed for the Jesuits. Horn notes that while Pozzo was a versatile artist who excelled in oil painting as well as architecture, this book focuses on Pozzo's scenography and illusionistic fresco painting. Proceeding chronologically and geographically, from Pozzo's formation in Northern Italy to the culmination of his career in Rome, Horn explains the art historical and cultural context in which the artist worked. Horn rightly notes that the Jesuits were extremely influential in Italian culture of the seventeenth century, centering this observation on the Jesuit use of ritual and performance (so essential to the Catholic Church at the time) in the art and architecture they sponsored.

The first chapter looks at Pozzo's education and training. Covering a good deal of ground about Jesuit spiritual and intellectual theory, Horn explains the order's significance in relation to rhetoric and performance in the visual arts. This philosophical education was an important element of Pozzo's artistic training. Once formed, Pozzo put his training into practice, as is discussed in chapter 2, which mostly centers on the artist's career in Milan. Horn explores the impact of the local environment on Pozzo's work, from the presence of Carlo Borromeo to the influence of the Spanish crown. The scenographic practices and theatrical culture of the region enhance our appreciation of Pozzo's first major public works: scenographic apparati for religious occasions.

Chapter 3 analyzes Pozzo's earliest surviving large-scale church decorations, at the Church of San Francesco in Mondovì, explaining that the sequence of the interior decorations creates a venue for a spiritual journey. After these successes in the north, Pozzo made his way to Rome, and his work there is the subject of the final two chapters. In chapter 4, Horn locates Pozzo within the larger context of Rome's religious theater and the Jesuits’ contribution to it through a study of Pozzo's Quarantore (a devotional exercise of forty continuous hours of prayer) in the main Jesuit church, Il Gesù. In particularly valuable paragraphs, Horn identifies and discusses the northern influences that show up in Pozzo's work in Rome. In some ways, the final chapter is the most fascinating, as it deals with Pozzo's best-known works in the churches of Il Gesù and Sant’ Ignazio. Horn presents these spaces as “theaters of transformation” (299), in which Pozzo created theatrical spaces through the use of the illusionistic architecture and other scenographic devices that transform visitors into performers, leading them to be active participants, rather than passive observers, in a journey of intellectual and spiritual discovery.

Horn's work is ambitious, presenting nuanced studies of a specific set of works while simultaneously commenting on larger issues in early modern studies. In this, Horn is eminently successful. Discussing Baroque art as “theatrical” is commonplace and superficial: all too often commentators say it, but they never explain what it means, why it's true, or why it matters. Not so with Horn. This book explains how in Pozzo's work, theatricality, concepts of scenography, the construction of co-extensive space, and compelled viewer participation were distilled into their most potent forms to create art and architecture that overwhelm the viewer's senses and deliver Jesuit messages. Andrea Pozzo stood at the culmination of this artistic strategy. Through four hundred pages and hundreds of images, Andrew Horn has made an important contribution to the study of Baroque art, the Jesuits, and early modern Italy.