Plan for the Gesù

Following three decades of diversified and mainly collaborative artistic activity, Vignola emerged in the 1550s as the leading architect in Rome after Michelangelo and was in papal service for over three decades. His masterpieces (notably the Villa Farnese at Caprarola and the church of Il Gesù in Rome) were produced as house architect to the wealthy and powerful Farnese family.

The commission for Il Gesù, Rome (1568-75), Vignola’s most ambitious and influential church, came from Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who underwrote the cost of its construction for the Society of Jesus. Farnese stipulated that the church must have a single vaulted nave with side chapels. Vignola’s response was in part conditioned by his project of Santa Maria in Traspontina, Rome (1566; not executed), and perhaps by Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi (1568), which he laid out. These are Latin-cross churches with a nave and two aisles, relatively shallow transepts and domed crossings. At Il Gesù the elimination of side aisles allowed for enlarged lateral chapels and a broader nave that turns the cupola into a highly visible culminating element. The innovative plan brought these ecclesiastically differentiated parts into unprecedented visual and spatial unity. Overall cohesion was enhanced by lining the interior with paired Composite pilasters without pedestals and a continuous belt-like entablature. Lowered entrance arches rendered the six nave chapels unobtrusive; above their flattened oval vaults are screened-off galleries.

Under Vignola’s direction, Il Gesù was constructed to the height of the main entablature; the barrel vault of the nave and the dome were built later, and higher than he had intended, by Giacomo della Porta.

In the following decades, Il Gesù profoundly influenced the Roman church designs of della Porta, Martino I Longhi and Carlo Maderno, while as the home church of the Jesuit Order it became a prototype for countless churches world-wide.

Vignola’s initial fa�ade project for Il Gesù, recorded in the foundation medal of 1568, features giant Corinthian pilasters topped by a high pedimented attic with obelisks. The emphatically horizontalizing design follows from his Santa Maria in Traspontina project and from the fa�ade he built at Santa Maria dell’Orto, Rome (1564-67). In these a single order of pilasters masks the entire width of the church and, with the central entrance accentuated by columns, the higher nave is covered as a subordinate element. Such a conception failed to please Cardinal Farnese, whose munificence the fa�ade was to celebrate, and in 1570 Vignola produced a more elaborate second design that acknowledged the authority of traditional Roman double-order aedicular schemes. In 1571 this design was rejected and Cardinal Farnese turned from his architect of 20 years to award the commission to a younger man, Giacomo della Porta.