The seeds of this regeneration were planted in 1542, when Paul III. empowered Caraffa to establish the Inquisition in Rome. At the same time Paul III. sanctioned the Company of Jesus. Caraffa himself became Pope in 1555. His whole policy was inspired by a determination to re-establish the political dominion of the papacy. Caraffa’s successor Pius IV., made an immense step forward when he obtained the sanction of the General Council of the Church to the principle of papal absolutism. A more militant policy was at once possible. Added to this, Pius IV. suggested a return to the older and more subtle forms of political intrigue which the Papacy had used with such effect during the middle ages. The change ushered in an age of emotions. Note the religious origin of the numberless wars which convulsed Western Europe at this time. Is it surprising that the circumstances which brought this great change about added a passion, an imaginative glow, to the art of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries? For several reasons, the religious enthusiasm which revivified Italian painting and sculpture proved a poor substitute for the civic enthusiasm of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which it replaced. The point we are making now is that for good or ill, the Catholic Reaction added a vitality to art in general, and to sculpture in particular, which had been absent for half a century. The effects of the Catholic Reaction began to be felt upon Italian art about 1580 A.D. Painting quickly offered its aid in spreading the new ideals. Some time, however, elapsed before a sculptor of sufficient genius arose to express the regenerated enthusiasm for Catholicism by means of the chisel and the marble block. Giovanni Bernini (1598-1680), who was born in the full tide of the Catholic Reaction, made sculpture once more a living, social force. The influence he exercised over his age is comparable with that exercised by Michael Angelo. Bernini was a favourite of Maffeo Barberini (Pope Urban VIII.) and played a great part in the reconstruction of St. Peter’s. He had a large school and with the aid of his assistants produced numberless works. He brought an art which had become alienated from every-day life back to the people. Bernini’s services to sculpture may be likened to those of Giotto to the sister art. What Giotto did for painting by allying his art with the ideals of the Seer of Assisi, and the Franciscans in the thirteenth century, Bernini did for sculpture by cementing an alliance with the ideals of Ignatius of Loyola and the Order of Jesus. In both cases it is impossible to separate the artist from the general body of thought and emotion which it was his life’s work to express. Let us look more closely into the ideals which arose with the returning political power of the Church of Rome, and which were destined to find expression in the marbles and bronzes of Bernini.