Introduction
Texte intégral
1The design of this volume has deeply branching roots. Its inception goes as far back as Fall 1998, when Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Walter S. Melion first met in the Faculty Club of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Their conversation, and the mutual encouragement they offered then and in its aftermath, led both Fabre and Melion to continue their respective projects on the visual culture of the early Society of Jesus. Shortly afterwards, Fabre met Ralph Dekoninck at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, where he was pursuing doctoral research on Flemish engraving and the many implications of this art for the Jesuits in the 16th and 17th centuries. The third taproot was the development by Dekoninck and Melion of many collective undertakings, in the 2000s, focusing on the history of spirituality and the history of images in early modern Europe. These friendships and shared endeavors have now converged in the reference work before you, which examines ‘Nadal’s images’, in particular the drawings preparatory to the engravings ultimately published as the Evangelicae historiae imagines and incorporated into the Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia. This book is the happy result of a research program on the history of the Society of Jesus coordinated by P.-A. Fabre at the École Française de Rome within the framework of the four-year contract 2013-2017.1
2Beyond these circumstances, worth recalling for the light they shed on the concrete life of scientific work, our collaborative work on this volume also entailed mobilizing many other specialists of the Catholic image in Europe and beyond,2 including experts on the Southern Netherlands and Rome. This was a necessary condition for further illuminating the ‘shadowy recesses’ of Nadal’s planetary venture, the worldwide reach of the Imagines as a monument of the Catholic Reformation, which only a globalized approach to the diffusion of these ‘images’ could recount. It was just as important to examine the very difficult gestation of the Imagines, the perplexing difficulties the young Society of Jesus had to overcome as they considered the relation between images and worship, asking how images should function in devotional and spiritual life. Within the Society, Jerónimo Nadal and Francisco de Borja competed for control; and there were strong tensions amongst the different centers of cultural authority that exerted control over on Jesuits and Catholics, the most important of which were Rome, capital of the Papacy, and the Catholic Netherlands where the Spanish Habsburg monarchy held sway (tensions that would later surface around the Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis Jesu). Equally crucial were the extraordinarily diverse forms of adaptation the Imagines underwent, both within and outside Europe.
3Our introduction, before presenting the contributions gathered in this volume, attempts to explain how and why the collected images studied here, precisely because of the complex cultural landscape in which they were produced, can be construed as a paradigm of the Tridentine image, in respect of their genesis, edition, and posterity.
4Before entering into these three phases, two basic questions arise: what were the Evangelicae historiae imagines, as they are now generally known, and what were the Adnotationes et meditationes of which they form a crucial part? Their author was Jerónimo Nadal, who died in 1580, almost fifteen years before the first edition of the Imagines. Nadal was also the author of the vast set of Adnotationes et meditationes that accompanied these engravings in the first joint edition of 1595; in addition, he commissioned, or was the ‘reviser’, as he himself wrote in the 1570s, of part of the series of preparatory drawings for the final engravings; and finally, from the early 1560s, he was one of several key protagonists involved in the task of assembling the illustrations for a set of meditative spiritual exercises, an assignment supposedly given him by Ignatius of Loyola himself on the eve of his death, according to a legend without documentary foundation (entirely based on Diego Jiménez remarks in the dedication to Clement VIII)3. Yet this legend is obviously worthy of serious consideration, on the one hand because Nadal was, between 1545 and the death of the founder of the Society of Jesus in 1556, one of the most eminent members of the Society’s government, and on the other hand because this commission, if it was indeed conferred by the founder, made it possible for Jesuits to embrace the material image as a kind of ‘seasoning’ (to use a formulation by Francisco de Borja), in some way a natural part of spiritual meditation, though the problem of the place of the image in spiritual life remained a major question throughout the second half of the 16th century, parallel to that of the diffusion of the Spiritual Exercises as a text. At issue were the articulation of the relation between image and imagination and the articulation of the relation between the written word and the image in its various forms. We shall see presently how Nadal’s Imagines attempted to incorporate this Jesuit ‘semiotic square’ into their own dynamic operations.4
5But it is important to make clear from the outset that, contrary to the foundational myth of the mission entrusted to Nadal by Ignatius, the Imagines was not intended merely to illustrate the Spiritual Exercises, even if the series of images almost certainly sometimes used in their place. The 153 sequential plates constitute an evangelical précis, augmented by a partial life of Mary, that concludes with the dual coronation of Jesus and Mary. These plates, executed by some of the famous Antwerp engravers of their day (the Wierix brothers, Adrian Collaert, etc.), resulted from extensive study and research. At the top of every plate appear a title, one or more evangelical references, and two numbers, one corresponding to the order of the evangelical narrative, the other to that of the liturgical year; a legend consisting of captions, below the image, refers to various letters inscribed within the image (from two to ten).
6Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes was written to accompany the Evangelicae historiae imagines, chronicling key events from the life of Christ that correlate to the Gospels read on the dominicae dies and feriae of the Church calendar. This is to say that the Adnotationes et meditationes, in the form in which it was finally published, encompasses two books: a volume comprising various genres of text (titles, captions, pericopes, annotations, and meditations) that comment on the liturgical Gospels by responding to a sequence of engraved images – the Imagines – a book within a book, precisely keyed to these very texts. The play or, better, entanglements of text-book and picture-book, of image and text, are grounded in Nadal’s distinctive usage of a crucial meditative device, the composition of place (compositio loci), sanctioned by Ignatius of Loyola, reformulated by Francisco de Borja and then adapted by Nadal who utilized it as the chief instrument whereby the meditans, the exercitant soul, refashions itself in the image of the Gospel personae – Jesus and Mary, above all, but also the apostles and disciples et alii – it visualizes as fully embodied and spatially situated.5 The process of meditative self-fashioning takes place in and through the encounter of the pictorial image with the imaginative image that the imago, in conjunction with Nadal’s ekphrastic texts, inspires the reader-viewer to visualize in mind, heart, and spirit. Every chapter mobilizes a textual movement from titles to captions, captions to pericopes, pericopes to annotations, and annotations to meditation, that operates in tandem with a recursive movement swinging back and forth between image and texts, texts and image; the diachronic flow through the texts and the recursive flow between image and texts activate and are activated by the votary’s ability to generate internal images. The image-making faculty, set in motion by the individual imagines and setting them in motion, engenders the meditative flow that enables him finally, by means of a process both systematic and mysterious, to convert himself into a living image of Christ.
7The process just outlined implicates images of various kinds, both material ones and spiritual ones. The nature of the relation amongst the various registers of image harnessed for the purposes of meditative reformatio was a matter of great concern to Nadal, as P.-A. Fabre shows, infra. Nadal’s correspondence about his magnum opus in progress, first with Borja then with Borja’s successor as General, Everard Mercurian, reveals the degree of attention lavished not only on his image-based texts but also on the pictorial images that anchor them. In a letter of 17 March 1577 addressed to Mercurian, for example, Nadal states about himself and his editorial assistant Johannes Zonhovius: “We continue to occupy ourselves, my companion and I, with the revision of the images and of the annotations and meditations”.6 Indeed Mercurian, as Fabre further points out, construed Nadal’s project as continuous with an earlier similarly image-based project of Borja, left unpublished until the early twentieth century, the Meditaciones para todas las domenicas y ferias del año. The point is that the concatenated status and effect of various kinds and degrees of imago – internal or external, rhetorically or pictorially produced, on the page or in the heart – and their mutual relation was very much on the mind of Nadal and his fellow Jesuits throughout the 1560s and 1570s, when what eventually became the Evangelicae historiae imagines and the Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia were conceived, composed, and revised with a view to publication either in Rome or, as ultimately came to pass, in Antwerp.
The genesis of the Evangelicae historiae imagines7
8Let us continue discussing the origins of this first systematic biblical iconography of the Society of Jesus, a program complementary to the frescoes in the Roman churches of San Vitale and San Stefano Rotondo, painted between 1570 and 15808 (and, like the engravings of the Imagines, symptomatic of ‘anti-Mannerism’).9 According to what can be reconstructed today, at the end of the 1550s, two different proposals followed one another for the Jesuit production of a book of illustrated meditations. For his Meditaciones para todas las domenicas y ferias del año, already mentioned, Borja proposed to integrate the meditative exercises into the liturgical cycle, and he fundamentally recomposed the structure of contemplative devotion as codified its Ignatian expression: he attached the preamble of the composition of place to the application of the senses for the conception of a scene, and thus – responding to requests from within the Society (the ‘cahier de doléances’ linked to the preparation of a Directory for the Exercises testifies to this) – he resolved the major difficulty of the composition of place – its solitary position, at the head of the contemplative exercise where it was separated from the figures, from the action, etc., which was experienced as the main difficulty of the composition of place. Its difficulty (but also its generative potential), since ‘solitude’ made the composition of place not merely a difficult challenge but also a near impossibility: the problem that inevitably arose was how, in devout memories richly arrayed with mental images as vivid as paintings, to distinguish between the place of an evangelical scene and the figures that inhabit it? The vexing issue is one of presence, the presence revealed in and through performance of the Exercises, when the person who performs ‘compose[s], before God, the place of himself’, a place which God alone has the power to see. Against this background, we can see why Borja, ostensibly without ‘difficulty,’ proposed that one’s meditations be accompanied or ‘seasoned’ by images, as noted above. Alas, we know nothing certain about the nature of these illustrations, since the editorial project abruptly halted in the early 1560s, a doubly pivotal period: it was then that Borja, the former Duke of Gandía, preacher and writer,10 assumed his role in the Roman government of the Society, as successor to Diego Lainez in 1565, thereupon abandoning many of his previous activities (he died as Superior General for life in 1572); around the same time, in 1563, the Council of Trent closed by publishing the decree on saints, relics and images, which constituted a new requirement for the great religious organizations that emerged from and energized the movement of Catholic reform.
9At the same time, a second proposal for an illustrated meditative treatise, parallel to Borja’s, was taken up by Jerónimo Nadal. With respect to these circumstances, the following hypothesis can be formulated (Fabre’s essay, below, offers a detailed examination of it:11 on the one hand Nadal’s project insists on fidelity to Ignatian sources, a fidelity to which many of his writings likewise testify and which intensified in the wake of his political marginalization, starting in the late 1550s; on the other hand Nadal’s project, which aimed to inscribe the Society in Tridentine posterity, consisted in producing a meditation of place in the image, that is to say, in articulating the principle of the ‘composition of place’ by way of the material image. Lizzie Boubli attempts, in her contribution, to reconstitute this very complex history, which continues to raise numerous unanswered questions.
10Apropos Nadal’s project, this introduction can do nothing more than supply one empirical proof. A series of preparatory drawings illustrative of the Gospels, attributed to Livio Agresti,12 was made in Rome, probably in the early 1560s (it is equally likely that Jerónimo Nadal ‘revised’ these drawings tirelessly during his retreat in Hall, Tyrol). In this volume, Margherita Breccia carefully analyzes this set of drawings, which qualifies as the first major artistic project of the new Society of Jesus. Some of these drawings bear the traces of a large number of so-called ‘repentances’ that point to the long-suffering draftsman or draftsmen’s efforts to comply with what seems to have been a major requirement: to set the scenes in places credibly constructed to accommodate them, not without recalling the traditional format of the multi-panel polyptych, but transposed into the very compressed format of a part-folio.13 For example, the Annunciation drawing (fig. 0.1) is stitched full of flaps with alternative drawings (so many, in fact, that one wonders the underlying drawing was designed to be provisional). If we put this sketch and the final engraving side by side, ignoring for the moment the two intermediate series of drawings made at some later date (respectively attributed to Gian Battista Fiammeri, following Wadell, and to Bernardino Passeri, whose set came very late in the process), we can see that the image has grown to take over the full page, and that architecture has become so imposing that more than simply determinative of the internal space of representation, it establishes the very condition of possibility of that space (pl. 1/CVII). It demarcates this space, defines its borders, and in so doing articulates what one might call the place of the image, that is, the ‘surface’ on which the pictorial image is represented and its title and captions are arranged. A decisive transformation, whereby the spectator finds himself carried (especially by the letter D, at the top right of the engraving) beyond the dramatic action, to a zone of circulation between the image and the legend; he shuttles between the letter and its associated meaningful caption, or between the caption and the pertinent subsection of the image. In either case, the image is seen, then reviewed; it is intro-jected then projected; it is re-produced by the viewer; to put it in a nutshell, it is imagined.
Fig. 0.1. Livio Agresti (attributed to), Annunciation, Biblioteca Nazionale, Rome.

11This is the ‘genius’ of the Imagines: it codified a process that can almost be said to operate regardless of the subject, through which a transformation of the imagination is accomplished; this process came to dominate the devotional culture of the early Jesuits, anchoring that culture to the world of the image. It is certainly this ‘genius’ that first captivated the coordinators of this volume, and continued to fascinate them.
12This process was to prove decisive, its operative consequences crucial, and it was largely modeled on the prodigious plasticity of the Imagines. We will return to this point in the third part of the Introduction. For now, we want simply to note that Borja’s and Nadal’s differing conceptions of the meditative image continued to develop afterwards as a rivalry between Flanders and Rome: as a matter of fact, a revised Roman edition of the Flemish engravings was the first version of the image to reach China, under the signature of another Jesuit, Agostino Vivaldi.14
The production of the collection
13If we assume that the aim of Borja’s project, and then of Nadal’s, was from the start to produce an illustrated work, then the production of the Imagines allows us vividly to discern the many obstacles the Society had to overcome, the many pitfalls it was compelled to overstep, as its devotional usages came increasingly to be conveyed not only person to person, but also by means of the printed word (and the printed image) during the first saeculum of the Society of Jesus.
14Beyond the rivalries of influence in the editorial field that we have just mentioned, beyond the multiplicity of possible modalities of articulation between the text (the Adnotationes et meditationes) and the engravings (a relation of text and engravings initially placed under the authority of Jerónimo Nadal, but bore fruit in its final form only after his death), beyond all this, there is, at the very heart of the Imagines, a kind of active concealment of the relationship between image and imagination, and thus of the conditions for the legitimacy of pictorial illustration from the point of view of Ignatian meditation. And this occurs not only as regards the engraved plate, but also, as we have just seen in the case of the Annunciation, at the expansive scale of the whole sequence of 153 plates.
15As we noted when first describing the series, it jointly invites both an evangelical and a liturgical reading. Several chapters in the volume examine this point at much greater length.15 Thus each engraving is duplicated: it is not only narrative but also commemorative, part of the cycle of iteration. It instructs and recalls, thus combining or, better, condensing the two requirements of the image according to the Tridentine decree. One of the engravings of the Imagines furnishes the theory of this practice: it is the one-hundred-second engraving, Sanctissimi sacramenti, et sacrificii institutio (pl. 102/LXXVIII). The process of inscribing, in the form of a medallion, a pictorial image onto another image, as if that other representational image were its background – which it thereby reveals to be a planar image, i.e., a support for a visual projection – this process is, throughout the series, one of the ways in which constituent images, having once been introduced, were repeated, re-represented; often first seen in the distance of an earlier plate, an image then recurs in a later one, where it can be more closely studied, reviewed, and preserved in memory until, in its final unfolding on the whole plane of the engraving, it recurs yet again as a medallion (there are a few notable exceptions to which we will return). In engraving no. 102, the image and the medallion it supports are reproduced almost identically: with the essential difference that the medallion represents the Last Supper in the instant immediately preceding the institution of the Eucharistic sacrament, whereas the central representation illustrates the institution itself. But the accompanying caption – in the right-hand column at the bottom of the engraving – neither describes the Eucharistic event not transcribes the words of institution. Everything happens, therefore, as if this statement were being produced in the joint articulation of the two images, as if it is the medallion itself which, like the host held out by Jesus to his apostles, is being given to be consumed; in this articulation, the image itself is offered for consumption to the person who, looking at it, finds himself in its real presence, yet outside its representational modality, its representation of the instant immediately preceding the Eucharistic celebration. Or again, this articulation enunciates the image by bringing the spoken word into relation to the written word, and thus progressively activating the terms of what we have called the ‘semiotic square’ of the word, imagination, writing, and image – a square that could well be the strategic place of the Imagines as a paradigm of the Tridentine image.
16However, the image remains in the last instance deposited on the surface of the engraving. This fact required to be acknowledged in a period when Catholic dogma strove both to ensure the legitimacy of the Eucharist and to reinforce the worship of images without confusing representation and presence, the virtual and the actual. If it is indeed true that the stratification of the two images produces one as the support of the other, as its ‘place’, and that it is in this location that the image speaks, that it formulates as a statement what the caption leaves silent, it is equally true that the medallion – in which everything is presented for our consumption – remains before us as we look at the subject it [re]portrays, and that, as soon as we have seen it, we see it again; and as soon as it has passed into our gaze, as soon as it has been injected into it, it is, so to speak, ejected from it, as the image in the image. The visual and temporal stratification of the representation of the Eucharistic celebration on the plane of the image – on the place of the image as the support of the representation – thereby discovers another place, the place of the embodied viewer: this place is not defined by what supposedly fills it – the sacramental body of Christ consumed – but by what passes through it, by what passes through the gaze to return to the plane of the image, by what is seen and seen again between the place of the body and the place of the image.
17Now the work of memory, condensed to the extreme in this Eucharistic ‘review,’ reopens the way to the imagination, the fourth term of the semiotic square of the Imagines, because an extraordinary enigma lies at the heart of the series: certain scenes – including those of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist16 – are recalled in a secondary scene when they were never represented elsewhere in the foreground; others are anticipated in a secondary scene, and never actually portrayed. In both cases – a kind of double crisis of the liturgical iteration of the narrative event – the imagination works to produce these missing foregrounds and projects them onto the surface of the engraving that becomes a screen of sorts for the projection of these interior images. Here again – but as so often in the decipherment of this mysterious ‘monument’ – we are left to wonder about the conception of these ‘voids’. But one thing is certain: the posterity of the Imagines hated these curious absences, as shown, for example, by this surprising sheet (fig. 0.2), the trace of an unrealized project to rewrite the Imagines, dating from the first decades of the 17th century in Madrid, which we discuss below17: the letters are generally inscribed in imitation of the lettering of the Imagines, but in the case of the ‘Bautismo de San Juan’, nothing else is portrayed – the page is otherwise blank. And with good reason, since there was no text to correlate to the image. The representation of the Baptism was presumably planned to fill in for this textual lacuna. Conversely, Chiara Franceschini, in her chapter, below, focuses on the case of images which have no textual justification in the Gospels, images which are seen without the benefit of a prior or accompanying text.
Fig. 0.2. La Anunciacion, Madrid, private collection.

The posterity of the collection: the construction of the model
18This third part of this investigation can only be an archipelago in an ocean of writings, images, monuments, literally and figuratively: there were early reformulations or parallel formulations of the Antwerp series, first in Italy, later in Spain, where several copies are preserved that bear the marks of an artist and/or devotee; there were reappropriations, as in the adaptation of the Flemish engravings to the Chinese aesthetics of landscape representation; there were poetic transcriptions and monumental projections in spiritual retreat houses, in Mexico or Peru.18
19P.-A. Fabre examines several Spanish reappropriations, focusing in particular on a quite enigmatic document, completely unknown – a Spanish translation of the Nadalian captions with the letters inscribed on an empty page. For what function? A devout exercise for training the faculties of memory and imagination, on the model of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises? The first stage of what was to have been a Spanish publication? This aniconic document accentuates the problematic spiritual status of the image, as exemplified by the Imagines, in early Jesuit culture.
20In truth, the extensive posterity of the Imagines highlights several major virtues of the images that played so decisive a part in the history of modern evangelization. This vector, which tracks the afterlife of these images as evangelical instruments, could be said to be tri-directional in the sense that the image is directed toward the a person, the viewer-exercitant, who conceives it as a three-way mirror allowing him to see through the depicted actions to himself, to the place where those actions are located, as testimony and proof of their existence in a locale that can notionally be visited, and to those other persons who as the recipients of the images are called upon to become agents of the Gospel, responding constructively to it.
21It only remains to add here that these visual constructions of the gospel narratives, comprising scenes that reflect like a treble mirror, and their narrative correlates in the adjoining captions, contributed to the production of a certain style, the topic of Ralph Dekoninck’s chapter. This style, even though it was the final result of a series of transformational operations that spanned convulsive years in the history of Catholic imagery,19 becomes – as a function of these operations’ evangelical effects (and we are here at the heart of what we call the multidirectional vector of the image) – a possible model for other images, as if we were dealing here with a series of ‘prototypes’, to use the vocabulary of the Council of Trent; as if these images were part of the extraordinary ontological transmutation by which, in all the great Catholic treatises on the image, from Johannes Molanus to Francisco Pacheco, Gabriele Paleotti to Louis Richeome, actual images were potentially generative of further images, images that the posterity of the Council were obliged to produce.
22Now this style becomes a model, even if the reasons for the ordonnance of the engravings of the Imagines were often misunderstood, as shown, for example, by the Annunciation which opens Bartolomeo Ricci’s Vita Christi, published in Rome by the main printer of the Jesuits in 1607: one finds in the upper right-hand corner of the engraving the letter D, which designated in the model of the Imagines ‘the room where Mary is’ (fig. 0.3), but there is no longer any mention of this letter on the right-hand page: the thread that connected the caption to the image by means of this letter placed at the point of articulation between the space of the representation and the surface of the page, has been lost. But the letter remains on the plate, the remnant of a problem to which neither Ricci nor his (anonymous) engraver has the key.
Fig. 0.3. Annunciation, in Bartolomeo Ricci, Vita Christi, Rome, 1605.

23Another manifestation of this drift away from Nadal takes us to the borderlands of the Habsburg empire, the viceroyalty of Peru, where several plates of the Imagines were reproduced with a visual literalness that seems to extend to the smallest detail of the Flemish image, and cleaves closely to its instructive and memorial effects (fig. 0.4, pl. 121/XCIIII). Thus, the genesis and posterity of the Evangelicae historiae imagines are joined in a profoundly complex relationship, made up by turns of oblivion and memory. But isn’t this true, too, of the history of institutions, which conceal their foundations only to find that they resurface, insisting that the inhabitants of the edifice built upon them remember what they wanted to bury? And should this not, a fortiori, apply equally to the Imagines, contemporary as the book is with the history of the Society as an institution, with its foundational system of representation, and with the key documents that codified the Jesuit vocation: the Constitutions, model of its functioning, the Ratio studiorum, model for its educational institutions, and the Directory of the Spiritual Exercises, model for the practice of spiritual direction. Not only is the Imagines contemporary with all of these models, but one could hypothesize that it represents them by sealing the marriage of spiritual writing and its visual environment, a marriage that proved extraordinarily difficult to achieve, as the archaeology or excavation of the foundations of the Imagines that we attempt in this volume will show. But events of the following decades indicate that this marriage remained definitively unstable, and that the history of illustrated Jesuit books in the first half of the 17th century exemplifies both the authority of the text and the resistance of the image to that textual authority. The imaginative faculty is exercised as a response to that which writing cues but also to that which it leaves unsaid; images echo in and through words, words echo in and through images.
Fig. 0.4. The Flagellation of Christ, Fondation Barbosa-Stern, Lima.

Presentation of the contributions to this volume
24The essays contained in this volume explore the form, function, and meaning of this magnum opus of Jesuit image culture, which was also one of the most elaborate and widely disseminated books of the later 16th century. The essays also summarize the state of the question on the book’s preparation, production, and dissemination. Several of the essays are dedicated to the long and tortuous gestation of the Imagines. In what follows, the main contributions of these essays (with the exception of those of P.-A. Fabre mentioned above) are summarized.
25Upon publication, the Adnotationes and the Imagines could be acquired separately or together, and combined copies of the two books differ in the way the constituent parts are collated: the Imagines can appear as an integral series at the start or the close of the Adnotationes et meditationes proper, in which case the series unfolds in chronological order, starting with year one of the vita Christi, when the mystery of the Incarnation commences, and ending with the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, when Jesus and Mary are reunited in eternal glory; or alternatively, the images can be interpolated into the annotations and meditations, chapter by chapter, whence they appear in liturgical rather than historical order. Whatever the method of collation, the images and texts are for the most part tightly coordinated: as Agnès Guiderdoni observes in her chapter, the format of the book is often designated as ‘proto-emblematic’, in the sense that the images can be seen to read the texts no less than the texts can be read as extended glosses on the images and, to paraphrase Ralph Dekoninck’s formulation, the ruling principle of decorum that guided the design and execution of the engravings ensured that the elegantia and pulchritudo of the imagines, rather than exceeding the descriptive richness and narrative vigor of the texts, would fittingly complement them. Guiderdoni further argues that the use of the term ‘proto-emblematic’ stems from the fact that the moment when the Imagines was conceived and published corresponds to the moment when the field of biblical illustration was reconfigured in a variety of new forms, not all of which are so easily definable in terms of genre. In particular, there was an intense circulation of images and motifs amongst books illustrated with engravings or series of engraved plates, to such an extent that it is sometimes difficult to see clearly in which direction this circulation moves, and even more difficult to categorize the works that resulted. An intense and wide-ranging process of recycling and bricolage took place. Guiderdoni situates Nadal’s volume within this dynamic ensemble of moving parts, and, in so doing, reflects on the book’s emblematic qualities.
26In his contribution, Ralph Dekoninck attempts to account for the way in which the Evangelicae historiae imagines was able to meet or, more precisely, to programme the expectations of the larger public for whom it were intended. He therefore focuses his attention on formal and compositional aspects that contributed to the forging of a kind of graphic koinè designed to be disseminated widely and to permeate, deeply and durably, the visual and artistic cultures of the Spanish Empire. He also considers how the choices made in terms of visual rhetoric respond to the post-Tridentine ideals of a reform of the arts and images, a reform that aimed to strike the right balance between sober beauty or moderate style and sensitive truth.
27Walter S. Melion reflects on the relation between book’s texts and images at a late stage of its production. The two manuscripts of the Adnotationes et meditationes preserved at the Pontifical Gregorian University, as he explains, contain numerous indications that Nadal (who died in 1580) and his successors charged with seeing the book into publication (amongst whom Jacobus Jiménez played a supervisory role) paid close attention to the interaction between the texts and the images. In one of the manuscripts, X’s were placed in the margins to mark every passage that pertains specifically to an imago. In the other manuscript, supplementary remarks on the images, likewise written in the margins, comment of what they show or omit to show, and justify these omissions; they also invite the reader-viewer imaginatively to amplify the pictorial imago, even while insisting that the rule of decorum be observed. The supplements to both manuscripts, which hereafter migrated into the double columns of the published text, give crucial evidence of the criteria applied to revising the texts in light of the images. In one specific case, imago 14 of chapter XXVII, which depicts angels ministering to Christ after his temptation in the wilderness, the cancellation of a long apocryphal passage from annotation A describing how Mary prepared a meal for Jesus, appears to have led, after the fact, to the excision of the respective scene from the two earliest surviving sets of preliminary drawings.
28The pains taken to correlate Nadal’s texts and the imagines went hand in hand with his own efforts, apparent throughout the annotations and meditations, to ensure that the amplifying images which he assists the meditans to visualize remain complementary to the book’s pictures and texts, never breaking free from their discursive web. Conversely, changes made to the three sets of drawn modelli brought them ever closer to Nadal’s compositiones loci, as described in the adnotationes and expounded affectively in the meditationes. As Melion argues in a second chapter, the process of aligning the texts and images operated in conformity with dual criteria that licensed two types of scriptural image. The two categories of images that Nadal consistently ratifies can be deduced from his remarks and also from the internal evidence of the imagines themselves: these are either evidentiary images that represent places, persons, and events whose existence Scripture confirms, or inferential images that originate from legitimate surmise, pious conjecture, or authoritative tradition. In applying these criteria to the pictorial and ekphrastic images comprised by the Adnotationes et meditationes and Evangelicae historiae imagines, Nadal implicitly adjures the votary to apply them himself whenever he manufactures conjectural images as appurtenances to Nadal’s. Moreover, whereas there are moments when Nadal explicitly endorses the possibility of imaginative elaboration, he elsewhere demarcates the threshold beyond which visual surmise must fail and imagination be curbed. Chiara Franceschini, focusing initially on the book’s Preface, which justifies the inclusion of several events from the life of Christ not recorded in the Gospels, asks why these particular subjects and, in addition, why novel pictorial iconographies – such as that to be seen in imago 1 of chapter CVII, the Annunciation, where the Creation of Adam and the Crucifixion are combined with the mystery of the Incarnation – were allowed.
29Nadal’s evident interest in the status of the imago leads one to inquire why his consideration of this topic, extensive as it is, remained so deeply embedded, so implicitly ingrained: his views must be teased out from the fabric of the annotations and meditations, but there is nothing like a prolegomenon, several pages long, that patently discusses the manner and meaning of the sacred image. Wietse de Boer, in his chapter on theological attacks on and defenses of the Thomist understanding of images, waged at mid-century before final ratification of the Tridentine reform decree of 2 December 1563 on images, relics, and the cult of saints, supplies the theoretical context wherein Nadal, even while presuming upon the Church’s official sanction of image-use (both liturgical and meditative), might choose not to embark on a formal disquisition, even briefly. It might be argued that Trent was mainly concerned with iconic images that produce an illusion of sacred presence, not with the sort of narrative itineraries annotated and meditated by Nadal, but in fact many of his texts, both annotative and meditative, encourage the votary to focus in on the image of Jesus implanted within the larger imago, to dilate upon it, so that it becomes intensely present to consciousness. So, the distinction between icon and narrative merely begs the question of why Nadal chose to dispense with a straightforward theoria imaginis. More likely, as de Boer’s chapter allows us to infer, his understanding of the image, like that of his fellow Jesuits, as witness the image theory of the Society’s second Father General, Diego Laínez, diverged in some respects from the consensus reached by high-placed Dominican theologians such as Matthieu Ory, Ambrogio Catarino Politi, and Feliciano Ninguarda; their defense of image-use attempts to account for the equivalent relation between image and prototype, by way of the Aristotelian doctrine of the two motus animi (distinct yet identical) that mediate the viewer’s relation to the object of vision, and the scholastic doctrine of the identity between obiectum quo (the means whereby vision occurs) and obiectum quod (the object of vision) in the act of perception. Underlying all their treatises is the ‘insistence on a strong ontological likeness between the image and its model’. Even for Catarino, who does not directly advance this claim, the image and that which the image portrays, though their ontologies may differ, are experienced as if they were the same. For Laínez by contrast, and presumably also for Nadal, cognition of the image qua image, though it leads to, even intensifies cognition of the represented, would appear to have been seen as discrete (though closely related) processes. Indeed, Nadal viewed the transition from process to process as quite laborious: this is what meditative work is all about, and such work is strenuous. Neither Laínez nor Nadal dwells on the ontology of the image, let alone on the equivalent ontologies of image and subject, and reluctance to address this particular issue may perhaps explain why the Adnotationes et meditationes incorporates no expansive statement on the quiddity of the imago. Also implicit, though readily evident, is another point of image doctrine, this time shared with Dominican theorists such as Ory – the assumption of the continuity, if not identity, between the external pictorial image and the internal spiritual image that that material image helps to bring into view.
30Two contributions, already mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, look back at the genesis of Imagines. Lizzie Boubli’s essay attempts, for the first time since Maj-Britt Wadell’s pioneering monograph, but with a great deal of new information, to reconstruct step by step the emergence of the collection of engravings, its successive designers, its dead ends, its revivals. The second, by Margherita Breccia, offers an extremely precise analysis, never before carried out, of the set of drawings now kept in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, considered to be the first designs of the future Imagines and long attributed to Livio Agresti. In fact, Margherita Breccia brings to light several probable hands and further deepens the mystery of what motivated this project, dating from the very first period of the Catholic ‘Counter-Reformation’, of tracing on paper, in all the narrative scope and richness of circumstance, the story of the birth and itineraries of the ‘son of God’ from Bethlehem and Nazareth to Jerusalem.
31The rest of the volume considers the extremely rich posterity of ‘Nadal’s book’. Steffen Zierholz argues that Bartolomeo Ricci’s three meditative treatises – the Instruttione di meditare, the Vita D.N. Iesu Christi, and the Considerationi sopra tutta la vita di N.S. Giesu Christo – constitute a virtual schola affectus (‘school of affect’) founded on the premise, shared by Nadal and Ricci, that the Christian votary, if he is to advance on the road to spiritual perfection, must convert speculatio, i.e., image-based prayer, into a source of practical virtue. This is how one becomes a truly moral Christian subject. Ricci conceived of the labor of conversion as projective, in that the ‘individual inserts himself into the imagined scene’, and also as transformative, in that by mobilizing the three faculties of memory, intellect, and will, the votary seizes upon the Aristotelian species of the image; having entered the viewer’s soul, this species can potentially merge with it, so that the exercitant soul, through its prayerful exertions, becomes a living likeness of the image within.
32If the material organization of the Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia and Evangelicae historiae imagines was complex, its reception, as it turns out, was equally multi-faceted. This is subject of the articles by Jean Michel Massing, Junhyoung Michael Shin, Sylvie Morishita, and Isabelle Saint-Martin. Giving full credence to Jesuit missionaries such as Matteo Ricci, who stated in a letter written from China on 12 May 1605 that the book “is of even greater use than the Bible in the sense that […] we can also place right in front of their eyes thing which, with words alone, we would not be able to make clear”, Massing’s magisterial and wide-ranging study traces the uses to which the Imagines was put in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and India during the 17th and 18th centuries. J. Michael Shin, focusing on the phenomenology of the book’s reception in late Ming- and Qing-dynasty China, in particular on the form and function of selected images from two Chinese adaptations, the Tianzhu Jiangsheng Chuxiang Jingjie (‘Illustrated Life of the Heavenly Lord’) and the Tianzhu Jiangsheng Yanxing Jilüe (‘Essential Record of the Life of the Heavenly Lord’), elucidates how they were adapted to Chinese mnemonic norms, to local conceptions of bureaucratic hierarchy and patronage, to the trinitarian Buddhist doctrines of Trikāya, of Diipamkara, Śākyamuni, and Maitreya, and to the analogy between the Virgin Mary and the Yinlu Bodhisattva.
33S. Morishita identifies the discreet traces of the Imagines in Japan, starting with a request for gospel images, dated as early as 1587, and extending to the subsequent reception of the Evangelicae historiae imagines. The Jesuits who initiated the Japan mission ca. 1549, like their compatriots elsewhere, relied on images for their apostolic ministry, but the proliferation of Christian images was massively curtailed upon the expulsion of the Society in the mid-17th century. One of the distant echoes of Nadal’s book that Morishita examines is a series of twelve engravings whose compositions are comparable to plates from the Imagines. These analogies testify to the importance of Flemish engravings, as filtered through Parisian engraving. The iconographic fortuna critica of the Imagines can be traced into the 19th century, as Isabelle Saint-Martin’s chapter demonstrates. The book’s images continued to pervade French Catholic visual culture. They were purportedly rediscovered and celebrated by the French art press in the 1860s, and they played a part in the change of taste and pedagogy precipitated by the moving image. The Imagines also reemerged, either explicitly or implicitly, as an enduring source of inspiration for vast mural compositions.
34The issue of reception raises collateral questions about the circumstances of production and circulation, which Natale Vacalebre, Karen Bowen, and Dirk Imhof address in their respective chapters. The documents perused by Vacalebre, especially Diego Jiménez’s summary account of book shipments, appended to a report on the debts incurred by the College of Tivoli in connection with the Adnotationes et meditationes and Evangelicae historiae imagines, reveal how profound was the Society’s commitment to publishing Nadal’s magnum opus for the express use of its members. It was the Order’s houses and colleges that received most of the earliest consignments, amounting to well over a thousand copies. Jan Melander, rector of the College of Antwerp, oversaw the bulk of these shipments. Another precious document, the Raguaglio de debiti fattisi nell’op[e]ra d’imagini, et annotationi del Padre Natale, discloses how the final stages of production were financed, with major contributions coming from the College of Sezze, the Maronite College, the Roman monastery of Santa Marta, and individuals such as Father Antonio de Mendoza and the merchants Duarte Ximénes and Agostino Braghieri. The Society transferred the debt burden (6,325 gold scudos plus interest) to the Jesuit College of Tivoli, thinking (wrongly) that sales of the book plus the College’s annual revenues would be sufficient to remunerate the investors. K.L. Bowen and D. Imhof call attention to the fact that the Antwerp Jesuits, gradually succumbing to financial pressure, started selling copies of the Adnotationes et meditationes and the Imagines to the independent publisher Jan Moretus I, commencing in 1595. The sales to Moretus I, head of the Plantin publishing house, continued to grow between 1598 and 1605, with prices for the Adnotationes and Imagines combined ranging from 18 to 30 florins, depending on the quality of the images. That the house’s financial records describe copies as ‘cum figuris melioribus’ and ‘de los mejores stampadas’, indicates how criteria attuned to the interests of collectors rather than to the evangelical priorities of the Society had begun to prevail. This trend, as Bowen and Imhof attest, escalated under Jan’s successor Jan Moretus II, who published a new edition of the Adnotationes et meditationes in 1607, illustrating it with copies of the Imagines purchased from Carolus Scribanus, S.J., rector of the Jesuit College of Antwerp. By December 1605, Moretus II had become co-owner (with Theodoor Galle) of the 153 plates engraved for the Imagines. The Moretuses’ marketing strategies, which targeted booksellers, merchants, clergy, amongst others, inevitably altered patterns of reception, changing how the Adnotationes and Imagines were appreciated and understood.
35This final point allows us to circle back to the raison d’être of our volume, the chapters of which have been assembled with a view to considering from multiple vantage points – that of Nadal, of Fathers General Borja and Mercurian, of Jesuit scholastics and the Order’s other reader-viewers, of clergy in the wake of Trent, of lay reader-viewers, of converts worldwide, et alii – how the Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia and the Evangelicae historiae imagines were parsed, received, and interpeted from its inception onward.
Notes de bas de page
1 Our warmest thanks go to the management of the École Française de Rome, Michel Gras, then Catherine Virlouvet and now Brigitte Marin, as well as to Jean-François Chauvard, François Dumasy and Fabrice Jesné who closely followed our project. The present volume represents the last part of a triptych opened with The Society of Jesus from the Ancient Regime to the Contemporary Era, published in the Historical Library of the Society of Jesus with the cooperation of the Pontificia Universita Gregoriana and the EFR, and Pour une histoire de la théologie dans la Compagnie de Jésus, published in the Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, both in 2020, the former under the direction of P.-A. Fabre, Patrick Goujon and Martín Morales, the latter by P.-A. Fabre and Jean-Pascal Gay.
2 For several years we benefited from the cooperation of Juan Carlos Estenssoro, a well-known specialist in the history of American evangelization, who took charge of researching the posterity of the Imagines in the ‘West Indies’ and whom we considered a co-director of this project. He was then compelled by other obligations to withdraw. We deeply regret his departure.
3 Dixerat aliquando, Beatissime Pater, Hieronymo Natali, uni ex suis alumnis, Parens nostrae Societatis Ignatius, operaepretium facturum eum, qui ad perpetuam atque paratam Religiosis eiusdem Societatis Scholaribus meditandi, orandique materiam ac segetem, Evangelia Quadragesima tota, Dominicisque per annum diebus inter sacrificandum recitari consueta, methodo quam brevissima certos ad locos, seu capita meditantium utilitati accommodata redigeret: neque id solum, sed etiam appositis imaginibus & Adnotationibus illustraret. fol. 2r.
4 Imagines is used here to signify the syntagm ‘Images-of-Nadal,’ on the model of Alain Cantillon's ‘Pensées-de-Pascal’ (A. Cantillon, Le pari-de-Pascal, Paris, 2013, p. 16-18).
5 See the chapter by P.-A. Fabre, Nadal, Borja et Mercurian (1562-1577), in this volume.
6 Translated from the French, in ibid.
7 Inwhat follows, we take a brief look at all facets of the thematic survey conducted by the ‘college’ of researchers brought together for this project, specifically during two round tables organized in Rome in 2016 and 2017. This overview will assist readers to familiarize themselves with an extremely complex dossier, the multiple aspects of which the essays in this volume examine in far greater depth.
8 See on this point, G.A. Bailey’s well-documented synthesis Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565-1610, Toronto, 2003.
9 See R. Dekoninck, A Graphic Koiné for a New Religious Value. The Visual Translatability of the Evangelicae Historiae Imagines, in Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, 64, 2014, p. 235-258.
10 Borja is also the author of a remarkable treatise on the art of preaching which, like his Meditaciones, was not published until the early twentieth century (Tratado breve sobre el modo de predicar el Evangelio, Madrid, 1908).
11 See P.-A. Fabre, Nadal, Borja et Mercurian (1562-1577), infra.
12 Based on an identification made by Maj-Britt Wadell, also a major pioneer in the study of the Imagines, in Evangelicae Historiae Imagines: Entstehungsgeschichte und Vorlagen, Göteborg, 1985 (Gothenburg studies in art and architecture, 3). For a codicological perspective, see the analysis of the entire series by Margherita Brescia (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Roma), in this volume.
13 See on the relevance of the polyptych, P.-A. Fabre, Résistance du polyptique : le retable et l’« esprit du Concile » (XVIe-XVIIe siècles), in R. Dekoninck and B. d’Hainaut-Zveny, Machinae spirituales. Les retables baroques dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et en Europe. Contributions à une histoire formelle du sentiment religieux au XVIIe siècle, Brussels, 2015 (Scientia Artis, 10).
14 Agostino Vivaldi, Meditationi sopra li Evangelii che tutto l'anno si leggono nella messa, & principali misterii della vita, & Passione di Nostro Signore, Rome, Luigi Zanetti, 1599.
15 See P.-A. Fabre, Temps du récit et ordre liturgique dans les Evangelicae historiae imagines (1593-1595), in this volume.
16 Much more could be said about this single, singular reminiscence of the Baptist, the last prophet of the world before the coming of the Messiah, the man who came before and yet was privileged to see him. See, for example, in this volume, P.-A. Fabre, Les ‘manuscrits de Madrid’.
17 See ibid.
18 Unfortunately, Juan Carlos Estenssoro could not complete the transcription and commentary of an admirable Limenian poem, linked to the academic activities of Parnaso Atlantico; it is to be hoped that this edition will eventually see the light of day. He, along with Fabre, was also working on the wall decorations of the Casa de Ejercicios, which sheltered many members of Peruvian high society in the mid-18th century, decorations whose Nadalian sources they hope one day to investigate.
19 In this context, the term ‘imaging’ might even be applied, in the medical sense of auscultation, to European Catholicism as a social body, in the second half of the 16th century.
Auteurs
-
Ralph Dekoninck
Université catholique de Louvain - ralph.dekoninck@uclouvain.be
-
Pierre-Antoine Fabre
École des hautes études en sciences sociales - pafabre@ehess.fr
-
Walter S. Melion
Emory University of Atlanta - walter.melion@emory.edu
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Le Thermalisme en Toscane à la fin du Moyen Âge
Les bains siennois de la fin du XIIIe siècle au début du XVIe siècle
Didier Boisseuil
2002
Rome et la Révolution française
La théologie politique et la politique du Saint-Siège devant la Révolution française (1789-1799)
Gérard Pelletier
2004
Sainte-Marie-Majeure
Une basilique de Rome dans l’histoire de la ville et de son église (Ve-XIIIe siècle)
Victor Saxer
2001
Offices et papauté (XIVe-XVIIe siècle)
Charges, hommes, destins
Armand Jamme et Olivier Poncet (dir.)
2005
La politique au naturel
Comportement des hommes politiques et représentations publiques en France et en Italie du XIXe au XXIe siècle
Fabrice D’Almeida
2007
La Réforme en France et en Italie
Contacts, comparaisons et contrastes
Philip Benedict, Silvana Seidel Menchi et Alain Tallon (dir.)
2007
Pratiques sociales et politiques judiciaires dans les villes de l’Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge
Jacques Chiffoleau, Claude Gauvard et Andrea Zorzi (dir.)
2007
Souverain et pontife
Recherches prosopographiques sur la Curie Romaine à l’âge de la Restauration (1814-1846)
Philippe Bountry
2002