SOURCE: Mullett, Michael A. “The Catholic Reformation and the Arts.” In The Catholic Reformation, pp. 196-214. London: Routledge, 1999.

In the following essay, Mullett examines how the Catholic Reformation influenced baroque art, including architecture, poetry, drama, and music.

In this final chapter we shall consider the relationship between the Catholic renewal of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the arts used as media for purposes of doctrinal instruction and the raising of religious consciousness. We shall review the art forms of architecture, painting, literature, theatre and music—looking very selectively at a few representative architects, painters, authors and musicians, and we shall consider the question of the baroque as, so to speak, the ‘house style’ of the Catholic Reformation.

The concept of the baroque, deriving in the first instance from architecture, has been extended to cover all the arts, and even lifestyle or the wider zeitgeist of seventeenth-century Europe...