Christian ecclesiastical architecture has for long provided, whether in the use of transept or south portals to perform sacraments, chapels for pilgrimage, guilds and fraternities, or baptismal chapels and burial sites and tombstones, a myriad of spaces and abodes to manage and afford conduct, comportment and ritual. Halfway between a seat of sacred authority and the flesh-and-bone community, they are often assumed to meet the requirements of strictly choreographed procedure rather than the needs engendered within a flux of interaction and make-do cultural practice. Surprisingly, art history has tended to promote this very idea by tending to present the public interior of church as fixed and unalterable, much in the way of its exterior walls. It hastens to assume for instance that with the crystallization of post-Tridentine doctrine, the images and spaces of church had come under effective and centralized censorship and supervision. At least since Colin Baily’s famous study on the European and Atlantic ecclesiastical rococo (2014), one sees however an accumulation of evidence for a contrary thesis: in large swathes of the Catholic sphere that skirted Italian or French classicising models (Southern Germany, Spain, Portugal, the Americas) high-baroque decoration of the interior did in fact develop spaces that need to be considered anomalous when tested to the injunctions of contemporary liturgical manuals or architectural treatises.
How to explain these deviations introduces us to trickier terrain. One can see for instance a strategic use of chancel and high altar spaces, for which a new horizon of spectacular and imagistic technology, stemming from theatre and optic illusion and light-decoration entertainments, provide important models. Moreover, this heightened rapprochement between the ecclesiastical interior and the space of comfort, festivity and spectacle involved another parallel effect: it opened up to practices characterized by a novel attention to statuary, new inroads to church furniture or new investments in thresholds. They also interpellate the flux of visitors by the fostering images of domestic roles and identities (motherhood, trade and profession). In some instances one even finds affordances, before altars and pulpits, for sexual desire or local belonging. This paper runs through some material trimmings underscoring these makeshift and unauthorized “spaces of the everyday”, recurring in addition to documentation obtained from inaugural sermons and written accounts commenting of affordances and social eventfulness under the vaults of high-baroque temples.
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Tomas Macsotay is an Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is an art historian and a cultural historian who works on the history of sculpture, Enlightenment culture and community approaches to the cultural installation, winner of the 2009 Prix Marianne Roland Michel. His books include The Profession of Sculpture in the Paris Académie (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014), the edited collections The Hurt(ful) Body. Performing and Beholding Pain, 1600-1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), Rome, Travel and the Sculpture Capital (Ashgate/Routledge, 2016), Die bildhauerischen Aufnahmestücke europäischer Kunstakademien im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Böhlau, 2016). With the aid of an Alexander Von Humboldt award, Macsotay is currently preparing two book-length studies on the outline in late-Enlightenment Rome and on the reform of the Hispanic ecclesiastical interior in the eighteenth century. With publications in journals such as Oxford Art Journal, Sculpture Journal, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Word and Image Interactions, Mélanges de la Casa Vélazquez, Cultural History, Architectural Histories, Metaforms. He was the PI to the Spanish research project Prehistories of the Installation: from ecclesiastical baroque to modern interiors. PGC2018-098348-A-100 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE).
Christian ecclesiastical architecture historically accommodated diverse functions, from sacramental rites to communal gatherings, burial spaces to ritual conduct. Traditionally perceived as rigid, this perception has been reinforced by art history's portrayal of church interiors as unchangeable. Contrarily, recent studies challenge this notion, highlighting anomalous developments in baroque decoration across Catholic regions. The divergence from prescribed liturgical norms reveals strategic uses of space influenced by theatrical techniques and imagery. This shift toward comfort and spectacle introduced novel practices, including attention to statues, furniture, and social identities within church settings. These unorthodox yet prevalent "everyday spaces" invite examination through material evidence and accounts, shedding light on the vibrant social life within high-baroque ecclesiastical structures.