If you have visited an Italian church built or refurnished between the end of the sixteenth century and the seventeenth, you have already seen the effects of a document signed in Trento on 4 December 1563. Probably nobody told you.
The Council of Trent is one of those things everyone knows they ought to understand and almost nobody can explain in terms of art history. The usual formula: after Trent, art became more controlled, more didactic, more severe. Half true, and put that way it does not help you look at a painting.
This article tries the opposite: start from the text the Council actually produced on images, which is far shorter than you would expect, and work forward to what concretely changed on the canvas.
What the Council was, in eighteen years and three phases
The Council of Trent opened in the cathedral of San Vigilio on 13 December 1545 and closed, in the same cathedral, on 4 December 1563. Eighteen years, with long interruptions, in three distinct phases.
It was convened to answer the Protestant Reformation, and that has to be kept in mind because it explains everything else: almost every decision taken at Trent is a reply to an objection, not an initiative. On images the objection was very heavy, because part of the Reformation held the cult of images to be idolatry, and in several European cities statues and paintings had been smashed.
The sessions of the first and second phases were held in the cathedral choir; from 13 April 1562 the congregations of the third phase moved to Santa Maria Maggiore, into a semicircular wooden tribune erected for the purpose in the nave. On 5 December 1563, two hundred and seventeen council fathers signed the acts at the high altar of the cathedral.
The decree on images: at the end, in the last session
Here is the first fact that surprises anyone expecting a grand aesthetic programme. The text on sacred images arrives in session XXV, on 3 and 4 December 1563, that is in the very last hours of a council lasting eighteen years, inside a decree entitled De invocatione, veneratione et reliquiis sanctorum, et sacris imaginibus.
It is not a treatise on art. It is a decree whose main subject is the cult of the saints and of relics, with images inside it as one chapter. The Council states that the use of sacred images is legitimate, against those who had denied it, and orders bishops to instruct the faithful in their proper use.
What it actually says, and what it does not
Why did such a short text have such a large effect on European painting? Because it does not prescribe a style: it prescribes a responsibility, and places it on the bishops. The decree establishes what may be represented, that veneration goes to the original and not to the image, that anything false, indecent or provoking unseemly curiosity is to be avoided, and that oversight belongs to the diocesan ordinary.
It is worth being clear about what is not in the text:
- there is no condemnation of nudity as such;
- there is no indication of style, composition or colour;
- there is no list of forbidden subjects;
- there is no reference to any particular artist.
The decree is generic by design. And it is precisely that generality, combined with the order to have bishops keep watch, that generated what came next: not the application of a rule, but a flowering of manuals written by bishops who had to decide case by case.
Who turned it into real rules
The Council gave the mandate, not the instructions. The instructions were written by three men, in three different places, over the following twenty years.
Johannes Molanus (1533-1585), a theologian at Louvain, published the De picturis et imaginibus sacris in 1570: the earliest and the harshest, it reviews the images then in circulation and declares which are admissible and which are not, with particular ferocity towards apocryphal subjects.
Charles Borromeo, cardinal archbishop of Milan, completed the Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae in 1577: it deals not only with pictures but with buildings, altars and furnishings, and it became the central document by which the decrees of Trent reached the architecture of Catholic churches.
Gabriele Paleotti, archbishop of Bologna, published the Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane in 1582, the most intelligent of the three and the closest to an aesthetics: Paleotti reasons about the effectiveness of the image, how it reaches those who cannot read, what makes it persuasive.
The point is this: when people talk about the rules of the Counter-Reformation, they are almost always quoting these three books, not the Council. The Council opened the door; the manuals furnished the room.
The Braghettone, the case everybody knows
There is an episode always told about this, and it is useful because it shows how oversight worked in practice.
In the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo had painted hundreds of naked bodies. After his death, in February 1564, that is two months after the Council closed, the Church ordered the nudities covered, and the job went to Daniele da Volterra, who earned the nickname il Braghettone, the breeches-maker.
Two qualifications usually get dropped. First: the campaign against the Judgment had begun long before the decree, practically from the day it was unveiled, and the decree gave it formal cover rather than generating it. Second: the drapery was not all added then, the retouching accumulated over the following centuries, and twentieth-century restorers had to decide case by case which to remove.
Read also: Curiosities about the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo
What actually changes in the pictures
Set an altarpiece of 1540 beside one of 1600 and the differences show, in four kinds.
Legibility. The subject has to be recognisable without explanation. The crowded, ambiguous compositions of late Mannerism disappear, the figures are fewer, the central gesture becomes clear.
Decorum. It is not nudity that goes, it is gratuitous nudity: Catholic painting of the seventeenth century still shows bodies, plenty of them, but inside subjects that justify them, such as martyrs, penitents and bodies taken down from the cross.
Orthodoxy of detail. Many details that had circulated for centuries, taken from apocryphal gospels or from popular devotion, are removed because they have no basis in Scripture. This is the front on which Molanus is most aggressive.
Engagement. This is Paleotti’s legacy, and the part usually forgotten: the image must move the viewer, not merely instruct. Hence the dramatic realism that characterises the seventeenth century, with light that selects, close-up planes and the dirty feet of pilgrims.
Careful: the formula that the Counter-Reformation reined art in describes the facts badly. The century following the Council is that of the Roman Baroque, one of the most spectacular and sensuous moments in the whole of European art. The rules did not put painting out: they gave it a job.
Who built a career on it
What does an artist produce when the Church asks for images that are clear, orthodox and moving? Exactly the generation that dominated European art around 1600, and the names say it better than any theory.
Annibale Carracci and the Bolognese workshop worked under Paleotti’s eye, in the city where the Discorso was written: their reform of painting, bringing back order and naturalness after Mannerism, was born in that climate.
Caravaggio is the most instructive case, because he shows the rules could be applied scandalously: his figures are legible, his subjects orthodox, the emotion is at maximum, and more than one of his altarpieces was refused all the same, because the realism of the bodies looked indecorous. The conflict was not about the programme, it was about how far you could push it.
Peter Paul Rubens, a Catholic in the newly reconquered Netherlands, built the whole machinery of the Counter-Reformation altarpiece, in which the engagement of the faithful is calculated like a stage effect.
Read also: El Greco, life and works and Michelangelo Buonarroti, the life and works of an incredible artist
Where you see all this, in Trento
The curious thing is that Trento has very little Counter-Reformation art. The city that gave the phenomenon its name hosted it and did not produce it: its two conciliar churches are a Romanesque building and a Renaissance one, and the two great artistic projects in the city, the Magno Palazzo and the frescoed façades of the centre, are thirty years earlier and both entirely secular.
So what you visit in Trento is not the style: it is the places where the decision was taken. The cathedral choir where the first two phases sat, the high altar where the acts were signed, the Baroque chapel of the Crucifix built a century later to house the crucifix before which the decrees had been promulgated, and the nave of Santa Maria Maggiore where the wooden tribune stood.
Details checked on 6 September 2026 on the official sites of the cathedral of San Vigilio and the municipality of Trento. The cathedral opens every day 6.30-12.00 and 14.30-20.00 with free entry. Santa Maria Maggiore opens Tuesday to Sunday 9.00-18.00, also free, and closes on Mondays. The visual record of the conciliar sessions is at the Museo Diocesano Tridentino in Piazza Duomo, which costs 7 euros full price and 5 reduced and closes on Tuesdays.
Read also: Trento Cathedral and Santa Maria Maggiore, the two Council churches
How to use it when you look at a painting
If you kept one thing from this article, keep this: the Council did not tell artists how to paint, it told bishops to supervise. Everything we call Counter-Reformation art follows from that transfer of responsibility, filtered through three manuals and hundreds of local patrons who read them differently.
It is useful in front of a seventeenth-century altarpiece: instead of asking whether it obeys the rules, ask who commissioned it, in which diocese, and what it had to achieve with the people looking at it. That question almost always gives better answers.
Photographs: the conciliar session is a painting in the public domain; the Paleotti portrait is by Nicola Quirico and the Madonna of the Pilgrims by Peter1936F, both CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.
Read also: What to see in Trento in two days
