The Baroque imagination has its roots in Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises (1547) which
defined for the Counter-Reformation era the parameters in which Catholic believers must
confront the Enemy and the temporal corruption he embodies in order to enter a state of grace
and obtain salvation. Through complex interactions of different imaginative functions Loyola's
text is able to superpose a variety of simultaneous narrative levels. In order to reformulate
the «greater narrative» (the Magisterium) of the Roman faith beyond what is revealed in
Scripture the Spiritual Exercises require their exercitant to become an active participant in
this narrative through constant visual contact with «orders of corruption» that is spaces in
which virtue can be confronted with physical decay and sin. Through these spaces
Counter-Reformation Rome (La Roma Ignaziana) would redefine the economy of salvation and
diffuse the visual dynamics of the Spiritual Exercises throughout the Catholic world. In their
writings Spanish Golden Age authors Miguel de Cervantes and Baltasar Gracián use the rising
modernity of the novel to transform Loyola's notion of «orders of corruption» by adapting it to
the secular world. Their encoded criticism of Loyolan imagination contributed to the
epistemological crisis that marks the Baroque age but also prepared the way for the crucial
debates that would take place during the Enlightenment (such as the deconstruction of the
Catholic «greater narrative» reflected in Loyola). This book concludes with a discussion of the
eventual negation of Loyolan imagination in the novels of the Marquis de Sade which undermine
the Roman faith by parodying the Baroque forms of spiritual visual experience and negate the
Loyolan projection into «orders of corruption».
