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| Domenico Zampieri (Bologna) St Ignatius Loyola's Vision of Christ & God the Father at La Storta ca. 1622 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
"At the beginning of the modern era, in Ignatius's century, one fact seems to begin to modify the exercise of the imagination: a reordering of the hierarchy of the five senses. In the Middle Ages, historians tell us, the most refined sense, the perceptive sense par excellence, the one that established the richest contact with the world, was hearing: sight came in only third place, after touch. Then we have a reversal: the eye becomes the prime organ of perception (Baroque, art of the thing seen, attests to it). This change is of great religious importance. The primacy of hearing, still very prevalent in the sixteenth century, was theologically guaranteed: the Church bases its authority on the word, faith is hearing: auditum verbi Dei, id est fidem; the ear, the ear alone, Luther said, is the Christian organ. Thus a risk of a contradiction arises between the new perception, led by sight, and the ancient faith based on hearing. Ignatius sets out, as a matter of fact, to resolve it: he attempts to situate the image (or interior "sight") in orthodoxy, as a new unit of the language he is constructing."
– from Sade / Fourier / Loyola by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976)
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| Simon Vouet (France) Virginia da Vezzo, the artist's wife, as the Magdalene ca. 1627 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Daniele Crespi (Milan) Mocking of Christ ca. 1624-25 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Hendrick ter Brugghen (Netherlands) Boy playing a recorder 1621 canvas Staatliche Museen, Kassel |
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| Hendrick ter Brugghen (Netherlands) Annunciation 1624-25 canvas private collection |
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| Hendrick van Balen (Flanders) Holy Trinity 1620s oil on panel Sint Jacobskerk, Antwerp |
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| Hendrick van Balen (Flanders) Minerva and the Nine Muses 1620s oil on panel private collection |
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| Gerrit van Honthorst (Netherlands) Concert on a balcony 1624 canvas Louvre |
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| Gerrit van Honthorst (Netherlands) Granida and Daifilo 1625 oil on canvas Centraal Museum, Utrecht |
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| Alessandro Turchi (Verona) St Agnes protected by an Angel ca. 1620 oil on marble Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Domenichino (Bologna) Erminia among the Shepherds ca. 1622-25 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Frans Francken the Younger (Flanders) Crucifixion of St Andrew ca. 1620 oil on copper Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Clara Peeters (Flanders) Still-life with cheese, artichoke, cherries ca. 1625 oil on panel Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
"Perturbations and passions which trouble the phantasy, though they dwell between the confines of sense and reason, yet they rather follow sense than reason, because they are drowned in corporeal organs of sense. They are commonly reduced into two inclinations, irascible and concupiscible. The Thomists subdivide them into eleven, six in the coveting, and five in the invading. Aristotle reduceth all to pleasure and pain, Plato to love and hatred, Vives to good and bad. If evil, we absolutely hate it; if present, it is sorrow, if to come, fear. These four passions Bernard compares to the wheels of a chariot, by which we are carried in this world. All other passions are subordinate unto these four, or six, as some will: love, joy, desire, hatred, sorrow, fear; the rest, as anger, envy, emulation, pride, jealousy, anxiety, mercy, shame, discontent, despair, ambition, avarice, etc., are reducible unto the first; and if they be immoderate, they consume the spirits, and melancholy is especially caused by them."
– from The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton
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| Hendrick Pot (Netherlands) Portraits of Jacob van de Merckt & his wife Petronilla Witson 1628 oil on panel private collection |