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| Bernardo Strozzi Adoration of the Shepherds ca. 1615 oil on canvas Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Guido Reni Saint Sebastian ca. 1615 oil on canvas Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa |
"It might seem paradoxical that Benedetto Croce, a severe critic of the Baroque, would use emblematic language for a vivid evocation of the preacher, but, as Hilary Dansey Smith reminded us in a recent study, Croce exclaimed:
Who can recall the seventeenth century without seeing in his mind the figure of the preacher, dressed in black like a Jesuit, in white like a Dominican, or with the rough habit of the Capucin, gesticulating in a Baroque church before an elegantly dressed audience?
Croce's insistence on the regular clergy (there is no mention here of the parish priest), on gesticulation, and on Baroque ornamentation, all stress the paradigmatic role of the preacher in the post-Tridentine world.
Thorough examination of all the tendencies in sacred oratory is impossible in the context of the present work, but if we are to understand what motivated the average preacher we need to examine a few basic notions. Now what we notice most is the "gesticulating" Baroque preaching reliant on dramatic effect, and contemporaries were just as sensitive to grandiloquence as we: theoreticians long discussed the relative merits of of the "plain style" and the "grand style" in preaching. This was not merely a question of aesthetics, nor was it a simply choice between a "popular" and a "cultivated" style. Both styles were based, at least in part, on classical Latin and Greek didactic texts: some of the more striking expressions in the "grand style" were taken from Cicero, while the "plain style" preferred Seneca and the "Attic tradition," because the major Hellenistic texts used more sober forms than did the Roman texts.
It must be noted, however, that the dominant rhetoric (or rhetorics, since there were more than one) was based on an underlying conception of the life of the spirit that emphasized emotion more than intellect. That conception was already present in the Bible, and it was much in evidence during the Middle Ages. In substance, it reflected the predominance of Augustine's vision of humankind over that of Thomas Aquinas, and after the Reformation it persisted in a number of Christian confessions.
Thus it was not just the Church of Rome that emphasized emotion in preaching. Some Protestant authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries agreed with the greater part of Catholic writers on this point. . . . Even the Anglican "metaphysical" preachers active in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries started from the same Biblical tendency to link the soul with the heart more than with the mind, and their sermons reflected that orientation. John Donne exclaimed in one of his sermons, "Marke my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell."
– from The Preacher, a chapter by Manuel Morán and Jose Andrés-Gallego in Baroque Personae, edited by Rosario Vallari, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (University of Chicago Press, 1991)
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| Pier Francesco Mazzuchelli (Il Morazzone) Flagellation of Christ ca. 1615-20 oil on canvas Prado, Madrid |
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| Bartolomeo Cavarozzi Madonna and Child with Angels ca. 1620 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Scarsellino Virgin and Child with Saints Mary Magdalene, Peter, Clare, Francis, and an Abbess before 1620 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Orazio Gentileschi Portrait of a Young Woman as a Sibyl ca. 1620-26 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Orazio Gentileschi Madonna and Child in a Landscape ca. 1621-24 oil on canvas Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa |
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| Orazio Gentileschi Lot and his Daughters 1628 oil on canvas Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao |
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| attributed to Giovanni Francesco Romanelli Education of the Virgin 1630s oil on canvas Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
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| Francesco Cozza Madonna and Child 1630s oil on canvas Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
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| Bernardo Strozzi David with the Head of Goliath ca. 1631-41 oil on canvas Cincinnati Art Museum |
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| Guido Reni Penitent Magdalene ca. 1635 oil on canvas Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Bernardo Strozzi Annunciation ca. 1644 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest |
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| Bernardo Strozzi Sermon of Saint John the Baptist ca. 1644 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |