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  • L'Imago primi saeculi (1640) e il signicato dell'immagine allegorica nella Compagnia di Gesú: Genesi e fortuna del libro
  • Walter S. Melion
Lydia Salviucci Insolera . L'Imago primi saeculi (1640) e il signicato dell'immagine allegorica nella Compagnia di Gesú: Genesi e fortuna del libro. Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae edita a Facultate Historiae Ecclesiasticae in Pontificia Universitate Gregoriana 66. Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2004. xvi + 346 pp. index. illus. bibl. $69.95. ISBN: 88–7652–993–4.

Composed by faculty and students at the Jesuit College of Antwerp to mark the centenary of the Jesuit order, the Imago primi saeculi remains the fore-most document of the anniversary jubilee sanctioned by Father General Muzio Vitelleschi and celebrated worldwide between 27 September 1639 and 31 July 1640. The lavishly illustrated book is a work of mixed genre, consisting of a prose history of the order, with chapters on its founding, propagation, missionary activity, tribulations, vindication, and the Flemish-Belgian Province (instituted in 1612), each of which is glossed by emblems made up of imprese, mottos, and epigrammatic poems expounding the order's distinctive sense of its guiding principles and vocation. Oratorical set pieces, poems, and epitaphs punctuate the text, giving evidence of the rhetorical and literary formation of the order's scholastics. Salviucci Insolera's excellent monograph on the genesis and fortuna critica of the Imago situates this magnificent yet little-studied book within the cultural ambit of the Jesuit College and the artistic community of Antwerp, focusing respectively on the place of emblems and allegorical images within the collegiate curriculum; on the composition of emblemata sacra by the most gifted student academicians training in classical letters and rhetoric; and on the designers, engravers, and publishers of Antwerp, among them Philippe Fruytiers, Abraham van Diepenbeck, Cornelis Galle, Michael Natalis, and Balthasar Moretus, who collaborated with the Jesuits in the production of the Imago and its Dutch edition, the Afbeeldinghe van d'eerste eeuwe, likewise issued in 1640.

Salviucci Insolera divides her monograph into five interlocking parts. Part 1 examines Jesuit attitudes to allegorical imagery, both literary and pictorial, as these were codified in the various redactions of the Ratio studiorum and specifically in the pedagogical institutes expressly approved by Vitelleschi for the Flemish-Belgian Province in 1625. Salviucci Insolera aligns these rules for the invention and application of symbolic images, with Jesuit treatises on emblematic usage composed by leading theoreticians such as Antonio Possevino, Louis Richeome, Maximilianus Sandaeus, Silvestro Pietrasanta, and Claude-François Menestrier. She devotes particular attention to those authors writing at the intersection of theology, rhetoric, and art theory, elegantly summarizing Sandaeus's complex distinction between the symbolic image of a thing perceptible by the senses and the symbolic translation of a word discernible by the intellect, and Pietrasanta's subtle definition of the impresa as symbolicum heroicum, that is, as a similitude, consti tuted by the relation between pictorial image and literary text, which he likens to the interdependent hands and quadrant of a clock face. However, Salviucci Insolera neither stops to consider theoretical differences — for example, Pietrasanta's and Alessandro Donati's divergent notions of the sources of symbolic meaning — nor [End Page 1370] explains precisely where within this spectrum of Jesuit image theory the Imago should be located.

Part 2 brilliantly characterizes the Imago as a species of the allegorical displays promulgated to celebrate the order's hundredth anniversary; according to Father General Vitelleschi, these displays were to serve as prompts urging all Jesuits — indeed, all beholders — to transform themselves into living images of the virtues bodied forth fleetingly for their spiritual benefit. In his letter officially endorsing the centenary, Vitelleschi adds a pregnant analogy that perhaps explains why so many imprese incorporate images of artisans: just as any abeyant art, through the provision of tools and workshop, will be restored to life, so the jubilee will occasion the renewal of vocation. Salviucci Insolera compares the Imago to other centennial publications, such as Joannes Bourghesius's De Jubileo Societatis Iesu, that distill the order's theology and spirituality; explains how the book's subsections, based on phases in the life of Christ, constitute an expression of the imitatio Christi; calls attention to...

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