Blending Christological Images: José Cayetano Padilla’s The Sacred Heart of Jesus as the Good Shepherd

A hallmark of the Sacred Heart devotion is its visual nature, as “images played a primary role in formulating and propagating the devotion throughout its existence” (Seydl, The Sacred Heart 43). The catalyst for launching the cult of the Sacred Heart as a global Catholic devotion was a series of revelations made by the Lord, from December 1673 to June 1675, to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647–1690), a young nun at the Paray-le-Monial monastery of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary. Among Jesus’s instructions to Margaret Mary was that the image of His Heart be publicly exposed: “Since He is the source of all blessings, He will shower them on every place where an image of this Sacred Heart shall be honored, because His love urges Him to dispense the inexhaustible treasures of His sanctifying and salutary graces to all souls of good will” (Alacoque 203; cf. 47, 50, and 230). Graphic representations of Jesus’s Heart became ubiquitous, so much so that by the eve of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), “the Sacred Heart had become the virtually defining symbol of Roman Catholicism” (Wright, Sacred Heart 4).

Margaret Mary herself designed and supervised the first way the Sacred Heart was pictured, which was as an emblematic image, as she saw it in a vision.

I saw this divine Heart as on a throne of flames, more brilliant than the sun and transparent as crystal. It had Its adorable wound [made by the soldier’s spear (John 19:34)] and was encircled with a crown of thorns, which signified the pricks our sins caused Him. It was surmounted by a cross which signified that, from the first moment of His Incarnation, that is, from the time this Sacred Heart was formed, the cross was planted in It …

(Alacoque 229)¹

Moreover, the Heart was inscribed with the word CARITAS. It was this image that Margaret Mary placed on a little altar to serve as a focal point for her novices’ prayer and reparation for the first celebration of the Sacred Heart in June 1685 (Figure 1). Although elements such as little hearts intertwined in the crown of thorns—a coded symbol of communal engagement in the devotion (see Morgan, The Sacred Heart 11)—were subsequently added to the core image, the Sacred Heart was still visualized only in this emblematic fashion during Margaret Mary’s lifetime. However, after papal approbation of the feast of the Sacred Heart in 1765, its iconography shifted “away from a purely emblematic symbol to a tangible carnal organ” (Seydl, “Contesting the Sacred Heart” 216), largely in response to the devotion’s critics who objected to Margaret Mary’s separation of the heart from the body of Jesus.

Figure 1.

The First Celebration by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and Her Novices of the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, c. 1860. Oil on canvas. Visitation Monastery, Paray-le-Monial.

Courtesy Musée de la Visitation, Moulins.

Figure 2.

Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787), The Sacred Heart of Jesus, 1757. Oil on copper. Il Gesù, Rome.

Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

This new image was a kind of “engagement” with the Sacred Heart, and its prototype was Pompeo Batoni’s The Sacred Heart of Jesus of 1767 (Figure 2), commissioned by the Jesuit priest Domenico Maria Saverio Calvi (1714–1788) for the church of the Gesù in Rome: the half-length figure of Jesus, locking eyes with the beholder, offering to the viewer His Heart, “now a pulsating, naturalistic organ, with the valves, ventricles, musculature and dripping blood rendered with unnerving accuracy.”² But criticism of the separation of the heart from the body persisted, and consequently a third form of Sacred Heart iconography developed in the nineteenth century (Figure 3):

Figure 3.

Nathaniel Currier (American, 1813–1888) and James M. Ives (American, 1824–1895), The Sacred Heart of Jesus: Sacr...