by Jon Lackman | 13 October 2006 | Architecture
In a recent issue of the Oxford Art Journal, Helen Hills reviews Evonne Levy’s Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque: “Fascinated by apparent connections between Nazi propaganda and Jesuit architecture, Levy asks whether we might usefully think of early modern Jesuit architecture in terms of propaganda. Conversely, she suggests that National Socialist architecture was indebted to the Baroque: ‘That Speer and Hitler self-consciously modelled the domed Great Hall … on a Roman building like St Peter’s … suggests that the historiography of the Catholic Baroque made it ripe for appropriation by a totalitarian regime’ … The real ambition of the book is greater than this, however. In the teeth of Hitler’s legacy that makes it ‘virtually impossible’ for propaganda to function as ‘a productive category of analysis’, Levy nevertheless wants to lift ‘propaganda’ into a ‘productive category’ for art historical analysis. The book fails in its avowed aims, but it should be welcomed as a courageous attempt to rethink old paradigms of Baroque architecture.”
