Light Against the Howl: Baroque Exorcisms from Nave to New World

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Baroque art, born from the shock of reform and the counter-shock of the Counter-Reformation, made spiritual combat look palpable. Across altars, chapels, canvases, and prints, artists translated exorcism into a language of light and shadow, muscle and breath, sound and smoke.

The Miracles of St Ignatius of Loyola; St Ignatius standing at left in front of an altar, his right hand lifted in a gesture of blessing; on his right are nine other Jesuits, St Francis Xavier first; in foreground behind a balustrade is a crowd of people cured of demonic possession or saved by the miracles performed by the Saint; a demonic figure half-human half-dragon under the dome in right background; five angels with palm and crown in left one; the scene takes place in a church similar to St Peter at Rome; third state; after Peter Paul Rubens. Print made by: Marinus van der Goes, 1633-1639

Caravaggism’s cutting beams do more than model bodies; they discriminate spirits. In Caravaggio’s circle and followers, light often “chooses” the saint while shadow engulfs the afflicted, establishing a pictorial metaphysics where illumination equals election. Smarthistory’s treatments of Caravaggio’s lighting and of post-Tridentine clarity frame this as Counter-Reformation pedagogy; legible drama guiding viewers toward right belief (and away from “confusion” condemned by Trent). When transferred to demonic scenes, the same grammar pins vice in occluded corners and throws grace into relief at the very moment of deliverance. (Smarthistory, “Light, form and drama”; “Caravaggio”).

Peter Paul Rubens, Miracle of St. Ignatius of Loyola, 1616-1617

The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier is a large altarpiece painted by Peter Paul Rubens in 1617 or 1618. It was originally commissioned by the Jesuits in Antwerp for their church, now known as the St. Charles Borromeo Church. It is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The painting depicts the miracles worked by St. Francis Xavier during his mission to Asia and includes a large variety of figures from Asia and Africa, as well as the destruction of a Hindu idol in the background. Rubens also painted a companion piece, The Miracles of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Rubens adapts that lesson on an epic scale. In The Miracles of St. Ignatius of Loyola and The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier, raking luminosity isolates the exorcists and their gestures while demoniacs churn at the picture’s darker lower registers. The Vienna panels’ museum entries and an early modern reproductive print after Rubens (British Museum) confirm the program; cured demoniacs mass before the altar while a hybrid demon skulks near an architectural edge, literally “relegated” to shadow. (Kunsthistorisches Museum entries; British Museum R,4.25).

Triumph of the Name of Jesus is a 17th-century fresco painting by Giovanni Battista Gaulli.[1] The fresco occupies the nave of the Church of the Gesù in Rome, with both fresco painting and stucco molding.

At Il Gesù, Gaulli’s Triumph of the Name of Jesus fuses paint with architecture to produce a somatic theatre; gilded light radiates from the IHS monogram while foreshortened figures float beyond the frame; the “damned,” in contrast, are cast into shadowed margins; an iconographic staging of expulsion built into the nave’s ceiling. The effect is didactic and disciplinary; illumination as inclusion, shadow as exclusion. (Harris and Zucker, Il Gesù, Rome).

Triumph of St. Ignatius of Loyola, ceiling fresco by Andrea Pozzo, church Sant'Ignazio, Rome. 1685.

Pozzo retools that dramaturgy at Sant’Ignazio. His Glorification of Saint Ignatius is both a miracle of quadratura and a missionary manifesto: continents personified, heaven opened, and Jesuit triumph rendered through optical persuasion that dissolves vaults and stabilizes belief. Pozzo’s Saint Ignatius Chapel at Il Gesù further choreographs approach, light, and material splendor (bronze, lapis, crystal) to dramatize sanctity as a force displacing evil. (Harris and Zucker, Glorification of Saint Ignatius; Pozzo, St. Ignatius Chapel).

Rubens’s altarpieces, originally for the Jesuit church in Antwerp, crowd demoniacs, the sick, and the credulous into a unified public before an authoritative altar. The Vienna entries document their scale (over five meters high), provenance (the Jesuit high altar), and function; a contemporary engraving after Rubens makes explicit the program; a hybrid, half-draconian demon skulks beneath the dome while Ignatius and Jesuit confrères marshal sacramental authority. These pictures are not just healing; they are governance in oil, staging the Society’s curative power as a civic spectacle and a global claim. (Kunsthistorisches Museum; British Museum).

Saint Benedict exorcising a demon Simone Cantarini After Ludovico Carracci ca. 1637–39

Baroque figuration makes possession legible: torsion, splayed hands, arched backs, and eyes averted from the light. In Rubens’s altarpieces, demoniacs’ convulsions compete with the architectonic order of the altar; the body’s revolt signifies a household seized by an alien tenant. Print culture pushes this to close-up extremes; Simone Cantarini’s Saint Benedict Exorcising a Demon (after Ludovico Carracci) isolates contact, gesture of command versus crumpling frame of the afflicted, epitomizing a Baroque physiognomy of invasion. (Kunsthistorisches Museum; The Met).

The Temptation of St. Anthony, Jacques Callot. Publisher: Israël Henriet 1635

Jesuit imagery often avoids grand devils at center stage, pushing them to margins while relying on recognizable cues (smoke, claws, bestial grafting) to signal the spirit’s departure. Jacques Callot’s widely disseminated Temptation of St. Anthony codifies a popular demonography (hybrids, swarms, serrated silhouettes) whose motifs feed Catholic print and pulpit. Even when not depicting exorcism proper, such demon “types” provide a visual lexicon that viewers could import into devotional reading of altar scenes. (The Met; Cleveland Museum of Art).

Francisco Goya, St. Francis Borgia Helping a Dying Impenitent, 1788. A painting by Goya, of Father General, Saint Francis Borgia, SJ performing last rites.

Giotto, Legend of St Francis, Exorcism of the Demons at Arezzo

Early modern exorcism dossiers frequently report the disgorging of alien matter (pins, nails, stones) construed as material tokens of diabolic tenancy. Historians (Levack; Sluhovsky; Almond) stress how such objects authenticated the rite for publics hungry for proof. In images, artists often substitute less literal signs (black smoke, bat-things) yet the sensational rhetoric of objects-in-the-mouth haunted viewers and commentators alike, surplus evidence of the unseen. (Levack; Almond).

Baroque artists visualize sound as ray, breath, or banner. Jesuit ceilings render the Name (IHS) as radiant speech; Pozzo’s vault literalizes voice as world-conquering light. Beyond painting, Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher’s Phonurgia Nova diagrammed sound as propagating lines; conceptual scaffolding for a culture that pictured logos as force. Exorcism scenes capitalize on this convention; the blessing that “pushes” the demon out rides a painted beam. (Harris and Zucker; Kircher, Phonurgia nova record).

The St. Benedict Medal. 📸: Gabriel Lopes dos Anjos

Ignatius and Xavier function as Jesuit brand-saints (teachers, founders, global missionaries) whose miracles authorize the Order in paint and stone (Vienna altarpieces; Pozzo’s chapels). Benedict represents monastic anti-demon expertise, crystallized in the Saint Benedict Medal whose inscriptions (Vade retro satana …) have an explicit exorcistic lineage. Philip Neri, celebrated in Roman cycles, often appears as a pastoral “therapist” saint, healer of spirits and bodies. (Kunsthistorisches Museum; OSB - Medal of St. Benedict; Smarthistory on Pozzo’s Ignatius chapel; Uffizi cataloging of Neri cycles).

Relation de la sortie du demon Balam du corps de la Mere Prieure des Vrselines de Loudun. Et ses espouuentables mouuements&contorsions en l'exorcisme. Avec l'extraict du procez verbal des exorcismes qui se font à Loudun, etc. Author: a Demon BALAM. Publisher: R. Fremont, 1635. Original from The British Library.

The Loudun possessions (1630s) saturated Europe with printed images of exorcism as courtroom. Gallica preserves broadsides and pamphlets narrating the Ursulines’ writhings, signatures of possessing spirits, and public exorcisms in the presence of princes; gendered theaters where female bodies became canvases of both sanctity and scandal. These sheets, Relation de la sortie du démon Balam… and other “véritables relations”, circulated as visual-textual proofs of possession and expulsion. (BnF Gallica records).

Baroque compositions frequently move demonic presence to the architectural periphery: cornices, pendentives, or far domes. The British Museum’s engraving after Rubens explicitly notes a “half-human half-dragon” demon under the church’s dome, a threat contained by liturgical focus. Gaulli’s Il Gesù ceiling presses the damned to the shadowy edge, where frame and vault meet; liminal zones where sin clings until grace drives it out. (British Museum; Harris and Zucker, Il Gesù, Rome).

Painters “perfume” pictures with censer-bearing angels and smoke that turns gold near the altar (incense) or black near the demoniac (sulfur). Recent museological work on smell (Prado’s Essence of a Painting) and studies on religion and the senses detail how early modern viewers expected sacra to be smelled as well as seen; exorcistic scenes lean on that synesthetic literacy. (Museo del Prado; Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion).

The Roman Ritual, also known as the Ritual is one of the official liturgical books of the Roman Rite of the Latin Church of the Catholic Church. It contains all of the services that a priest or deacon may perform; and are not contained in the Missale Romanum, Pontificale Romanum, or Caeremoniale Episcoporum, but for convenience does include some rituals that one of these books contains. Title XI of the 1925 Roman Ritual which contains the rites of exorcism.

Exorcism depended on things; reliquaries pressed to the body, aspergilla flinging holy water, rosaries gripped as tactical devices. The Rituale Romanum (1614) codified the rite; Jesuit images frame its efficacy through emblems, most famously the IHS, the Society’s monogram whose rays in Gaulli’s ceiling “burn” demons at the edges. The Benedictine medal simultaneously condenses text, cross, and command into a widely recognized anti-demonic sigillum. (New Advent, “Rituale Romanum”; Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, “IHS Monogram”; OSB).

Jacques Callot, (Nancy 1592 - 1635 Nancy) After Andrea Boscoli, Italian (Florence, Italy c. 1560 - c. 1607 Rome, Italy). Exorcism print.

Printed and painted exorcisms fold into the larger choreography of Catholic cities: the crowd, the balcony, the aisle as stage. Harvard’s Exorcism print (after Andrea Boscoli) shows the rite as a public performance. In Goa today, the recurring solemn exposition of St. Francis Xavier’s relics still transforms streets into catechetical processional space; a living Jesuit “set” where demons are named and expelled by movement and chant. (Harvard Art Museums; Vatican News).

Medicalized skepticism shadows Baroque exorcism. Physicians and polemicists recorded bite-marks, scratches, and livid rashes as signs of possession; or imposture. Historians of possession document how such marks toggled between the devil’s signature and natural disorder; visual culture registers this ambiguity by showing skins that alternately bruise under attack and glow under blessing. (Almond; National Library of Medicine).

In Counter-Reformation optics, light is more than metaphor; it is efficacy. Caravaggist beams select their saints; Jesuit vaults pour radiance from the monogram; Rubens backlights gestures of command. In each case, light acts, not just depicts; an artistic corollary to sacramental theology where words and matter effect what they signify. (Smarthistory, “Caravaggio”; Harris and Zucker, Il Gesù, Rome).

Rubens’s program and its reproductive prints reward close looking. The British Museum’s engraving highlights a tucked-away hybrid demon under a dome; elsewhere, artists insert bat-sprites, smoke-tails, or serpent-tongues at thresholds of windows and cornices. These micro-narratives literalize the sermonizing cliché, “the devil lurks in the details”, and invite viewers to “spot” the expelled spirit they hear about at the pulpit. (British Museum; Callot’s demon swarms).

André Reinoso, St. Francis Xavier and the Crab Miracle at Seram Island, c.1619

André Reinoso, Francis Xavier Preaching in Goa, 1619 -22.

André Reinoso, Miracle of St. Francisco Xavier, 1619

Sequential programs make theological argument. The São Roque cycle by André Reinoso (c. 1619) strings episodes from Francis Xavier’s life into a visual dossier of catechesis, cures, and conversions; read serially, such cycles offer “before/after” logic for grace, implying that affliction, possession included, is a prologue to sanctified order. (Museu de São Roque entries; Museum With No Frontiers dossier).

Main Altar dedicated to San Francisco Javier, Tepotzotlán, MX; Detail from Main Retablo showing San Francisco Javier , Tepotzotlán, MX; Detail from Retablo of San José, Tepotzotlán, MX.

Jesuit globalization exported a recognizable iconographic kit (monogrammed light, miracle-clusters, missionary saints) to new publics. Lisbon’s São Roque preserves the earliest large cycle of Xavier’s life; Goa’s Museum of Christian Art and the periodic public exposition of Xavier’s relics anchor a long visual tradition; in New Spain, lavish Jesuit retablos at Tepotzotlán staged parallel spectacles of doctrine and deliverance. The result is a global Baroque where exorcism reads fluently across continents. (Museu de São Roque; Google Arts & Culture - MOCA Goa; INAH Tepotzotlán; Vatican News).

Baroque exorcism imagery is a complex technology of presence. Light, gesture, smoke, pageantry, and print build a consensus reality in which saints specialize, tools work, and devils make their exits at the frame’s edge. Jesuit stagecraft synthesized theology with optics; Rubens orchestrated crowds into assent; printmakers condensed the ritual to emblems and signs. Viewed together, these verified works demonstrate how early modern Catholicism made the invisible efficaciously visible; and how that visibility traveled along imperial routes, teaching audiences to see sanctity and recognize, in every shadowy corner, the unclean spirit in flight. (Harris and Zucker; Kunsthistorisches Museum; British Museum; The Met; Museu de São Roque).

References:

Almond, Philip C. Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts and their Cultural Contexts. Cambridge UP, 2004.

British Museum. “The Miracles of St Ignatius of Loyola (after Rubens), R,4.25.” Collection Online.

Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits. IHS Monogram.

Cleveland Museum of Art. The Temptation of Saint Anthony (second version), Jacques Callot.

Harvard Art Museums. Exorcism (After Andrea Boscoli; engraved by Jacques Callot). Object S3.55.3.

Harris, Beth, and Steven Zucker. Il Gesù, Rome. Smarthistory, 2021.

Andrea Pozzo, Glorification of Saint Ignatius. Smarthistory.

Pozzo, St. Ignatius Chapel, Il Gesù, Rome. Smarthistory.

INAH (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia). Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán. Institutional pages.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The Miracles of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Object GG 517.

The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier. Object GG 519.

The Miracles of St. Ignatius of Loyola, modello.

The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier, modello.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. Simone Cantarini, Saint Benedict Exorcising a Demon (etching). Acc. 53.600.2168.

Simone Cantarini, Saint Benedict Exorcising a Demon (state/variant). Acc. 61.647.4.

Jacques Callot, The Temptation of St. Anthony (1635).

Museu de São Roque (Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa). Pregação de São Francisco Xavier em Goa / Preaching of St. Francis Xavier in Goa. Collection PIN.96.

Museum With No Frontiers. St. Francis Xavier Preaching in Goa (André Reinoso). Discover Baroque Art database.

National Library of Medicine. From Superstition to Science: Visual Representations of Skin Disease. Exhibition site.

New Advent (Catholic Encyclopedia). Rituale Romanum.

OSB (Order of Saint Benedict). The Medal of Saint Benedict. Official site.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Incense.

Prado Museum. The Essence of a Painting: An Olfactory Exhibition. Exhibition materials.

Smarthistory. Light, Form and Drama in Baroque Art.

Caravaggio. Overview essay.

Vatican News. Pilgrims Flock to Goa for the 18th Exposition of St. Francis Xavier’s Sacred Relics. 22 Nov. 2024.

Valencia Cathedral Museum. Goya, San Francisco de Borja y el moribundo impenitente. Institutional page.