Thaumaturgic visions: Andrea Pozzo’s St Ignatius Corridor

Abstract

Abstract Andrea Pozzo’s larger, more famous frescoes have tended to supercede his small, 1682 corridor outside St Ignatius Loyola’s private apartments in Rome. And yet, the site is more than just a prelude or footnote to his other, grander works in Mondovi, Rome and Vienna. The corridor stands out because it exploits radical disjunctions between perception and belief, subject and frame, and vision and hallucination. The anamorphic elements of the trompe l’œil architecture destabilize and threaten to overwhelm the quadri riportati that track a narrative regarding Ignatius’s life and miracles. Pozzo’s own publications are largely unhelpful for understanding anything more than the frescoes’ technical and geometrical rules. In fact, there is no text that can be used to understand the corridor’s “program.” But the corridor’s frescoes visually and phenomenologically suggest a Jesuit response to Counter-Reformation ideas about truth, sight and miraculous visions articulated through the visual contrasts and juxtapositions of its enclosed representational system. The site is thus a case study for the difficulties Jesuits faced both in distinguishing between different categories of visual phenomena and in policing different responses to them.