Baroque art in the Czech lands as a medium of propaganda for religious orders

In the period after the Battle of White Mountain, the tasks of promoting the Catholic faith in the Czech lands, the administration of parishes, and the education of the faithful were given to various church institutions with different spiritual and cultural traditions and social and political strategies. These institutions were drawn into competition and rivalry not just by social, political, and economic as well as religious interests. The meaning expressed by a work of art was not always exclusively religious, as through various distinctive symbols and carefully selected themes it also communicated ideological and propagandistic messages and increased the visibility of the church institution by which it had been commissioned. In the 16th and 17th centuries the Order of the Society of Jesus particularly developed sophisticated, effective, and powerful forms of representation and self-presentation. In this article the author seeks to clarify how some instruments of Jesuit propaganda influenced older Church orders such as the Benedictines and how those orders then adopted them for their own interests