If ever you are in Rome, go to the church of the Gesù. Go in. Look up. See that the ceiling seems to have opened up to reveal the heavens, with the name of Jesus appearing in a blaze of light. The name is written in the form of the ‘sacred monogram’, that is, the three letters I H S, with a cross standing on the horizontal bar of the letter H. In the light that radiates from the Holy Name are throngs of cherubs, too many to count, linking to heaven the groups of people who are being borne aloft upon the clouds. Beneath the clouds, in a shadowy area, other people are shielding their eyes and tumbling down, limply, chaotically, away from the light.
There could be no more appropriate subject than this for the ceiling over the nave of the Gesù, the mother-church of the Society of Jesus. It was the Father General of the Society, Gian Paolo Oliva, who on 21st August 1672, made a contract for the painting with a young artist from Genoa, Giovanni Battista (John Baptist) Gaulli who had begun to make a reputation for himself as a painter in Rome. The nickname ‘Baciccio’ or ‘Baciccia’ was usually given at that time in Genoa to anyone called ‘Battista’, and that is the name by which the painter of the Gesù ceiling is usually known today.In the contract, Baciccio agreed to paint not just the ceiling of the nave, but, in fact, all the principal ceilings in the church. He was to make the designs for these paintings, but submit them to Fr. Oliva for approval before carrying out the work. So we can be sure that it was in consultation with the General that he painted the Adoration of the Name of Jesus on the ceiling of the nave, as well as the Adoration of the Lamb of God in the half-dome over the main altar, and, in the dome over the centre of the transept, the ‘Paradise’, with the Holy Spirit at the very top, God the Father, Jesus and Our Lady.
The theme of the Adoration of the Name of Jesus is based on the words of St. Paul, in his Letter to the Philippians, when he writes of Jesus that ‘God raised him high and gave him the name which is above all other names, so that all beings in the heavens, on the earth and in the underworld, should bend the knee at the name of Jesus and that every tongue should acclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’ In fact, a few of those words are written on a long ribbon-like scroll which seems to float above the end of the ceiling just over the main entrance door of the church. ‘Jesus ... all ... genuflect ... the earth ...’. The words enter our consciousness like snatches of sound carried on the wind. Thinking of them as we look up at Baciccio’s ceiling, we can see that those figures falling away, downwards, are intended to represent what St. Paul is calling the ‘underworld’, the place of darkness, where those people live who have turned their eyes away from the light which radiates from the name of Jesus. The people on the clouds, looking up at the light, are those who adore the Holy Name, and the cherubs represent all the angels and saints who are in heaven.
In this ceiling, Baciccia has given us more than a painting. He has included sculpture as well, and has blended the two to create an astonishing piece of illusionism. He has created the illusion that the ceiling itself, which is gilded and decorated with rosettes and other ornaments, has, in its centre, an opening framed by a richly decorated rim supported by four carved angels. He has painted the cherubs as being high above the opening, in heaven, but the people carried on the clouds are floating between us and heaven, partially in our space, as we stand in the church, but being drawn upwards into the heavenly space beyond the rim. He has even painted shadows on the gilded part of the ceiling, as if cast by the clouds as they float across the rim. The nearer the figures are to the earthly space represented by the church itself, the more material substance they seem to have, until finally, on either side of each window, they are no longer two-dimensional, painted figures, but three-dimensional, fully modelled in stucco/plaster, in more than life-size.
On 31st December 1679, this great work was unveiled. A contemporary diarist relates that crowds of people came to see it, and that such was the praise it received that the church was kept open to the crowds for a whole week and that on 8th January, the Queen of Sweden, a noted art-lover then living in Rome, came for a second time to see and admire it.
For the artist, too, this was a moment of triumph, the peak of his career. Perhaps he took a moment then to look back and think of how, as a youngster of about fourteen, he had lost both his parents and all his sisters and brothers to the plague in Genoa, and how he had boarded the ship of the Genoese ambassador who was about to sail down the coast to Rome, and begged to be allowed to accompany him. He must surely have remembered that the ambassador proved to be a good friend, and found work for him in a picture-dealer’s shop. He certainly remembered how he had been introduced to the great sculptor Gian-Lorenzo Bernini who seemed to know everybody of importance in Rome, because it was Bernini who recommended him to Fr. Oliva just when the Jesuits were looking for an artist to paint the ceiling of the Gesù.