ies of the body. For example, in Teresa of Avila's mystical visions sensory experience and mystical contemplation were combined.
The great zeal of the Jesuits, and others, in the renewal of Catholic faith inspired a new outpouring of art. In painting, Mannerist spatial complexity and artificiality of concepts replaced Renaissance order and decorum. Michelangelo's Last Judgment mural demonstrates the new interest in extreme states of emotion depicted through the contortions of the human body. Mannerist intensity was exemplified by El Greco's striking distortions of form, experiments in space and the use of dissonant color. A painting such as El Greco's The Agony in the Garden shows his complete re-working of the idea of pictorial space. Caravaggio and his follower Artemisia Gentileschi painted dark canvases with heroic biblical figures displayed in sharply focused light, like people lit on a stage.
Theatricality also marked the work of Gianlorenzo Bernini, whose dramatic, intense fountains and multimedia works such as The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa rejected the simple unpainted marble of classicizing Renaissance sculpture and employed painted plaster, jewels, glass, gilded bronze, colored marble and other elements to construct large dramatic sculptural works in which they tried to give spiritual and intangible experience tangible form. All these works were at the service of the Church and were intended to convey to viewers the majesty and power of the Church as well as the glories of spiritual experience that could be theirs if they remained faithful. In architecture, the opening up of space (perhaps reflecting the age's interest in exploration) is best exemplified by the enormous illusionistic painted ceilings that seemed to open the churches to the actual experience of heaven.
The music of the Baroque period escaped the Church's old requirement that hearing the religious text must be the most important consideration. ...