The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are customarily, and I think rightly, said to have contributed to the realistic quality of Baroque religious art... A particularly striking feature - and one that surely fired the imagination of artists - is what Ignatius calls 'compostion, seeing the place, the aim of which is 'to see with the eye of the imagination the corporeal place where the object one wishes to contemplate is found'. The 'secularization of the transcendental' (to use Friedlaender's term) was not long in manifesting itself in Spain, where painters and sculptors seized upon realism as a means of bringing the beholder into a state of mystical communion with the divine.
-- John Rupert Martin,
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