SusannaBerger: The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025; pp. 336.

Berger's new volume explores the so-called Deformation, the name she bestows upon an expansive visual phenomenon that came to prominence in seventeenth-century Rome and enjoyed popularity over the course of the century. Berger defines “deformations” as deliberately strange, sometimes even apparently incomprehensible objects, structures or images that altered accepted forms, often doing so in the service of devotional ends. Berger connects her case studies to the vibrant visual and scientific culture of the Catholic Reformation, demonstrating that deformations were often conceived by their patrons along carefully considered theological lines as a way of guiding the discerning viewer on a journey from obscurity to clarity, with the ultimate goal of transcendence. Much of the visual material examined in the book would have once been characterised using the broad and much contested term “Baroque.” Yoking the artistic production of the period with the aims of the Catholic Church, detractors of the Baroque characterised it in negative terms as a movement that sought to manipulate spectators by appealing to the senses through dazzling feats of artistic virtuosity. The images of the period could have been deliberately created to mislead, entrance and confound and this was frequently in the service of religion, which is indeed one of the central arguments of Berger's book. However, if the cliché of art in the wake of the Reformations is that the Catholic Church newly emphasised the importance of clarity, so as not to mislead the illiterate laity, Berger illustrates how visual deceptions were simultaneously envisioned positively as a rhetorical tool that could remind the spectator of the limits of their earthly understanding and how, in Saint Paul's words, we “see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Deformations may have presented aesthetic novelties — indeed the book commences with Francesco Borromini's billowing façade of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane that was described as “ugly and deformed” by Giovanni Baglione around 1664–1667 — but, as Berger explains, “a deformation could be original and bold, but not unorthodox in its key points or motivations” (p. 13). In common with other publications in art history and adjacent disciplines, the book thus illuminates the tolerance for contradiction in a period once associated with Counter-Reformation rigidity. The introductory chapter introduces us to the phenomenon of deformations and their emergence in the Settecento, a century that saw the proliferation of treatises concerned with perspectival and optical illusions. This leads neatly on to Chapter 1 and the decoration of Cardinal Bernardino Spada's family palace in the 1650s' in Rome, with an emphasis on the famous Baroque illusionism of the exterior colonnade or “prospettiva” designed by Borromini and the Augustinian Fra Giovanni Maria da Bitonto. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 explore the Jesuit and Minim Orders' engagement with visual deformations as part of their broader interest in the spiritual potential of visual experience. Much of the Jesuit material is well known, from Andrea del Pozzo's trompe l'oeil paintings in Sant'Ignazio in Rome to botanical treatises that invest the passionflower with the symbolism of Christ's wounds. Of particular note is Chapter 2, with its examination of the fascinating anamorphic frescoes of Saints John the Evangelist and Francis of Paola in the Minim Convent of Santa Trinità dei Monti in Rome, painted by the cultivated French Minims Emanuel Maignan and Jean-François Niceron. Berger shows how the paintings would have been viewed by the friars from different vantage points as they moved through space, connecting these and other examples to a Minim deployment of anamorphoses as a considered mode of devotional communication due to a belief in its potential for divine revelation. Berger points out that the Trinità dei Monti decoration is little known in English language publications, but it could have been made clearer in the body text that after the restoration of the convent decoration in 2005, Agostino de Rosa published extensively on both Niceron and Maignan, as well as anamorphic images in Baroque Rome and the “deformazione delle immagini” more broadly. This is one of a few moments where one feels the lack of a comprehensive literature review in such a scholarly volume. Chapter 5 examines the 1678 architectural treatise of the Spanish polymath Cardinal Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, best known for his moral theology of probablism. Rather than endorsing deformations, Caramuel's Architectura civil recta y obliqua advised on how to avoid them, showing an eccentric interest in how architectural forms could be manipulated to correct visual distortions that occur naturally. Continuing the emphasis on elite men of the Church and their well-educated spectators, the final chapter focuses on the French Minim Charles Plumier who authored a treatise on the noble art of ivory turning in 1701. An art beloved by aristocrats, these mesmerising, costly and intricate objects entranced European Courts and were favoured as diplomatic gifts and, in Berger's view, due to their complexity, they present the apotheosis of contemporary ideas concerning deformations (although they were not labelled as such by contemporaries, as the author points out). Made and enjoyed by Catholics and Protestants alike, often without any religious iconography, it is unclear whether the theological significance ascribed by Plumier to turned objects would have been appreciated by the spectator. The beauty of these works may have indeed led “observer and owner to feel closer to God” (p. 239), but the same could be said of much artistic production in this period meaning that the focus of the final chapter, although fascinating, is somewhat disjointed from the rest of the study. As a general, unifying theme, deformation allows for a rich terrain of works in diverse mediums to be examined. One of the pleasures of this book is how unexpected links are woven through the chapters via a chain of protagonists, many of whom knew one another. Berger's book illustrates how deformations were the fruit of a profoundly learned creative climate and the ways in which the artworks surveyed were invested with layers of meaning are often skilfully revealed. The key achievement of the volume lies in its interdisciplinary sweep which incorporates insights from fields including optics, the natural sciences and philosophy to explain the genesis and meaning of works of art that confound our visual expectations. Deeply intellectual, it is a book that will best appeal to advanced students and scholars of art history and those interested in the cultural climate of seventeenth-century Italy. Finally, the full-page pullouts and a sheet of card that when folded allows the reader to resolve the anamorphic depiction of Saint Francis of Paola renders this an elegantly produced volume. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.