“Sagro orrore and the Species. Counter-Reformation visual theory and Eucharistic spectacular ornament.”

Ruth S. Noyes, PhD

Chapter under review, Cultures of Baroque Spectacle, ed. Ralph Dekoninck et al. Leuven: GEMCA, forthcoming.

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“Sagro orrore and the Species. Counter-Reformation visual theory and Eucharistic

spectacular ornament.”

Ruth S. Noyes, PhD

Abstract: This article takes up the question of issues of the intended spectacular effects of

early Seicento Counter-Reformation Eucharistic festival devices and mechanisms as

instantiated in performative printed media. I attend to the confluence of text and image in

Louis Richeôme’s La peinture spirituelle (1611) as a case study, to plot early Baroque

optical theories and processes of transformation against Jesuit Eucharistic multimedia

festival culture. In La peinture Richeôme transformed the act of perceiving or seeing into

a metaphor for Transubstantiation. Of largely unacknowledged consequence is the fact

that his description of a Roman Jesuit Eucharistic festival theater demonstrated the

workings of visual perception and Transubstantiation. His passage inflected Kepler’s

recent notion of retinal perception yet refuted Keplerian theory’s rejection of the real

presence of the percept in the ocular species by recourse to a Jesuitic Counter-

Reformation paradigm of embodied Eucharistic doctrine, whereby Christs’s Real

Presence was manifest in the sacramental Species. Bodying forth Richeôme’s polemical

elision of ocular and Eucharistic species, the engraved title page culminated in a

rendering of the Jesuits’ Eucharistic performance.

Total characters, including spaces and notes: 39, 636

2

I firmly established by irrefutable experiments, that…from the Sun, and from the colors

illuminated by the Sun, species exactly alike are flowing…until for whatever reason, they

fall on an opaque medium, where they paint their source: and vision is produced, when

the opaque screen of the eye is painted this way…and it is confused when the pictures of

the different colors are confused, and distinct when they are not confused.

For there are certain passions of light, or of rays descending from the illuminating bodies,

qua light, not qua inhering in the transparent air, the modes of which are emission and

extension, and their contrary, reflection and refraction or condensation. Therefore,

nothing prohibits a certain action to be of the same light…illuminating and altering the

screens [of the eye] through which colors, that is to say light, are not only poured upon

but are also imprinted and the contraries are destroyed.

Johannes Kepler, Astronomiae Pars Optica, 1604.1

It is said that this image of the image, or as the philosophers say, the species and

resemblance of the image, flies through the air, and arrives at the eye…If the matrix

image or model does not transport itself at all…How then could this second image, or

species be transported [to the eye]?…The artisan, who makes this image in the air, and

figures it so artfully, so that there is no difference between it, and that from which its

impression was printed so suddenly…Does it [the species] pull its own impression, by

itself? This could not be said: As nothing makes itself by itself, otherwise it would have

been before it was…The object must be transported to the [visual] faculty, where it

impresses itself…Lastly, take note of the greatest marvel of all, that this enlarged image

is inside the pupil, not only according to its proper scale, but also with all of its parts

distinctly arranged, without blurring and without confusion…

Do you not recall when, during the days passed in Devotion of the 40 Hours, held every

year during Lent to counteract the Lenten folly [i.e., Carnival], you saw at the high altar

of our church two large monograms, of the name of JESUS, and of his glorious mother,

composed and radiant with many hundreds of brilliant lamps, and two or three thousand

lights, arranged on the altar and all about; and were not all of them shining and distinct in

their proper place within the pupil of your eye? Were you not able to perceive all of

them? Can you not still recall them, just as you can count now the variety of images in

these pictures?…And if we believe these things because we touch them, will it be

difficult for us to believe that the Savior’s body with all its volume, size, and distinct

members, might be in a small [Eucharistic] Host?…If he is all-powerful when it comes to

the nature of common vulgar things, will he not be so when it comes to the great

Sacrament and worthy Mystery of his body?

Louis Richeôme, La peinture spirituelle, 1611.2

1 Kepler, Ad Vitellionem paralipomena, quibus Astronomiae pars optica traditur…. Frankfurt: Claudium

Marnium & haeredes Ioannis Aubrii, 1604, 41-2. In Gal & Chen-Morris, Baroque Science. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2012, 20. 2 Richeome, La peinture spirituelle ou L'art d'admirer aimer et louer Dieu en toutes ses oeuures, et tirer de

toutes profit salutere .... Lyon: Pierre Rigaud, 1611, 143-47.

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In 1608, four years after Kepler published his theory of retinal imaging, Jesuit General

Claudio Aquaviva invited Louis Richeôme to Rome.3 The visit resulted in Richeôme's La

peinture spirituelle (1611), a tripartite manual printed in Lyon for Jesuit novices, whose

training Aquaviva standardized in 1608.4 Richeôme's octavo text was illustrated with

copperplate engravings by German-born Mattheus Greuter, come to Rome from

Strasberg via Lyon and Avignon.5 1608 also seems to have been a watershed moment for

the Jesuits’ Roman observance of the Eucharistic paraliturgical performance known as

the 40 Hours Devotion—so named for the period of Christ’s entombment and the

corresponding period the consecrated Eucharistic Species remained ritually displayed—

and referred to as the Quarantore or Quaresima, the latter owing to the Devotion’s lenten

celebration.6 By 1608 the Quarantore festival enjoyed perpetual celebration in the papal

city, and entailed ephemeral decorative programs, called teatri, macchine, or apparati in

3 Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981,

178-208. On Richeome see Bottereau, "Richeome." Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique. Ed.

Marcel Viller et al. 17 vols. Paris: Beauchesne, 1937-95, 13:659-63. A volume entitled Louis Richeome,

Discours sur les images de Louis Richeome, 1610, ed. Dekoninck & Fabre, is forthcoming. 4 On Richeôme and La peinture see Lestringant, "La promenade au jardin, ou La Peinture spirituelle du

Père Richeome." In Récits / tableaux, ed. Guillerm. Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1994, 81-102;

Fabre, “Lieu de mémoire et paysage spirituel: les jardins du noviciat de Sant’Andrea del Quirinale selon la

Peinture spirituelle de Louis Richeome.” In Les jardins, art et lieu de mémoire. Besançon: Éditions de

l’Imprimeur, 1995; Dekoninck, Ad Imaginem. Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature

spirituelle jésuite du XVIIe siècle. Geneva: Droz, 2005, 68-75, 78-81, 119-21; Behrmann, “’Le monde est

une peinture.’ Zu Louis Richeôme's Bildtheorie im Kontext globaler Mission.” In Le Monde est une

peinture: Jesuitische Identität und die Rolle der Bilder, ed. Oy-Marra & Remmert. Berlin: Akademie

Verlag, 2011, 15-43; Loach, “An Apprenticeship in Seeing: Richeome's La Peinture spirituelle”, in Ut

pictura meditatio. The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500-1700, ed. Dekoninck, Guiderdoni &

Melion. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012, 337-400. 5 ASV, Sec. Brevi Reg. 352 fols. 353r-356v. The Greuter family of engravers is currently the subject of the

New Hollstein German series, compiled by Jörg Diefenbacher and edited by Eckhard Leuschner, for

publication by Sound and Vision Publishers. See also Baglione, Le vite de’ Pittori scultori et architetti

(1642), ed. Pesci. Bologna: Forni, 1975, 398-400; Leuschner, “The Papal Printing Privilege,” Print

Quarterly 15, 4 (1998): 359-70; Rice, "Matthaeus Greuter and the Conclusion Industry in Seventeenth-

Century Rome," in Ein privilegiertes Medium und die Bildkulturen Europas, ed. Leuschner. Munich:

Hirmer, 2012, 221-38. 6 For the history of the Devotion see de Santi, L'Orazione delle quarant'ore e i tempi di calamita e di

guerra. Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1919; Imorde, Präsenz und Repräsentanz, oder, Die Kunst, den Leib

Christi auszustellen. Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 1997.

4

early modern sources.7 In 1608 the Roman Jesuit community erected a macchina for their

Carnival Quarantore celebration that appears the first in the city described in an

expressly-published ekphrastic text.8 Richeôme’s La peinture consisted of ekphrastic

passages that functioned as devotional, mnemonic exercises guiding readers on a virtual

tour through the Roman Novitiate complex at S. Andrea al Quirinale. Judi Loach has

argued that the book’s primary intended readership consisted of transalpine Jesuit

communities, and emphasized the work’s significance for Jesuit pedagogical reforms

instituted in and issued from the papal city.9

What follows takes up the question of issues of the intended spectacular effects of early

40 Hours devices and mechanisms as instantiated in performative printed media. I attend

to the confluence of text and image in La peinture as a case study, to plot early Baroque

optical theories and processes of transformation against Jesuit Eucharistic multimedia

festival culture. In La peinture Richeôme transformed the act of perceiving or seeing into

a metaphor for Transubstantiation.10 Of largely unacknowledged consequence is the fact

that his description of a Roman Jesuit 40 hours apparato, cited above, demonstrated the

workings of the processes of readers' visual perception, and of Christ's miraculous

transformation made visible and expounded by the selfsame Quaresima and its teatri,

7 Among numerous studies of 40 Hours decorative programs see Noehles, “Teatri per le Quarant'ore e altari

barocchi,” in Barocco romano e barocco italiano. Il teatro, l'effimero, l'allegoria, ed. Fagiolo & Madonna.

Rome: Gangemi, 1985, 88–99; Weil, “L'orazione delle Quarant'ore come guida allo sviluppo del linguaggio

barocco,” in Barocco romano e l'Europa, ed. Fagiolo & Madonna. Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello

Stato, 1992, 675-93; Imorde, “Visualizing the Eucharist: Theoretical Problems,” in Le monde est une

peinture, 109-25. 8 Alaleone, Relatione del solenne e sontuoso apparato…per l'Oratione delle Quarant'hore ne'tre giorni di

Carneuale, alla Chiesa del Giesù. Rome: Guglielmo Facciotti, 1608; de Santi, L’Orazione, 279-81. 9 Loach, “An Apprenticeship in ‘Spiritual Painting’.” 10 Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565-1610. Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 2003, 50.

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climaxing a lengthy section entitled “Merveilles de la veüe, et de la peincture.”11 His

passage inflected Kepler’s notion of retinal perception, likewise cited above, yet refuted

Keplerian theory’s rejection of the real presence of the percept in the ocular species by

recourse to a Jesuitic Counter-Reformation paradigm of embodied Eucharistic doctrine,

whereby Christs’s Real Presence was manifest in the sacramental Species. He thereby

reformed and gave material-physical form to the desired somatic effects of Jesuit

viewers’ lived devotional experience through momentary immersion in the environment

of the 40 Hours festival and its attendant media and devices. Bodying forth Richeôme’s

polemical elision of ocular and Eucharistic species, Greuter’s engraved title page

culminated in a rendering of the Jesuits’ Quaresima performance.12 (Fig. 1-3) The incised

graphic image eclipsed itself along a common hermeutical axis with the text it introduced

and adumbrated, inflecting Jesuitic paradigms of not only pre-Cartesian embodied visual

perception and memory formation, but also Eucharistic doctrine and ritual praxis, all

inscribed by the processes and products of imprinting.

Counter-Reformation defense of Transubstantiation reaffirmed the Real Presence in the

face of Protestant polemic, and seized upon the 40 hours Devotion to circumscribe and

promulgate Eucharistic reforms.13 The spiritual exercise appears to have begun in Milan

as early as 1527,14 and while varying historiographies tracing the festival’s introduction

to the papal city coexisted in early modern sources,15 during the Clementine and Pauline

Pontificates, the Quaresima enjoyed institutionalization and promulgation at an

11 Richeome, La peinture, 144-7. 12 On Jesuit title page designs and their functions see Dekoninck, “On the Threshold of a Spiritual Journey:

The Appealing Function of the Jesuit Frontispiece (Antwerp, 1593-1640),” in Le monde est une peinture,

71-84. 13 Wandel, “The Catholic Eucharist,” “The Tridentine Missal,” “The Mass in Rome,” in The Eucharist in

the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 208-51. 14 Imorde, Präsenz, 139-41. 15 de Santi, L’Orazione, 179-81.

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unprecedented level not only in Rome, but north of the Alps.16 In conjunction with the

first official pontifical celebration of the Quarantore, Clement VIII released his so-called

Graves et diuturnae, implying the 40 Hours’ special potency in the combat against

heresies in Northern Europe.17 In 1598 François de Sales, Cardinal de' Medici, and Duke

Charles Emmanuel were present for the celebration of the Quarantore in the church of St.

Augustine in the French city of Thonon, with an elaborate ornamental teatro.18 In the

southern Netherlands efforts were complemented by nascent Eucharistic iconographies,

such as the Host in a flower garland, which inflected spectacular Quaresima ornament

and thematized ocular communion.19 The Devotion’s appeal as a means to effect

Counter-Reformation sacramental reform is further born by the veritable explosion of

publications attending to the Quarantore from the years that followed Trent, over fifty

just Italian vernacular texts c. 1570-1695.20 These figures suggest a corresponding

number of ornamental apparati. Despite the fact that most securely dateable pictorial

documentation of ornamental programs date to the mid-seventeenth century, textual

evidence from the turn of the Seicento tells a different story, one in which a rich and

robust corpus of 40 hours macchine was already extant by 1600.21 In Rome, the churches

of S. Lorenzo in Damaso (affiliated with the Capuchin community) and the Gesù were

16 Instruttione per fare l'oratione continua delle quarant'hore…. Rome: Stampatori camerali, 1595;

Instruttione per fare l'oratione continua delle quarant'hore…. Rome: Stampatori camerali, 1606. 17 ASV, Segr. Stat. Avvisi 2, ff. 148r, 157v; de Santi, L’Orazione, 183-4. 18 de Santi, L’Orazione, 221-2, 290n1, 289, respectively. 19 Knipping, Iconography of the Counter Reformation in the Netherlands. Nieuwkoop: De Graff, 1974,

297-308; Merriam, “’The cake idol’: the Eucharist in a garland,” in Seventeenth-century Flemish Garland

Paintings. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011, 125-46. 20 Noyes, “A me toccano masticcare pillole amare. Rubens, the Oratorians and the crisis over the Beati

moderni in Rome circa 1600.” 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, PhD Dissertation, 2010, 1:355-

60. 21 In regards to the precociousness of figural 40 Hours ornament see ASV, Segr. Stato, Avvisi 9 (1623), ff.

58r-v; de Santi, L’Orazione, 288, 291.

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primary but not exclusive sites of extensively ornamented celebrations.22 In the latter, by

1600 a vault fresco Agostino Ciampelli (terminus post quem 1599) in the sacristy

recorded what was surely already a common iconography for such macchine, the

Sacrament surrounded by a refulgent angelic host.23 (Fig. 4) Ciampelli's fresco depicted

the ritual moment that followed the Eucharist’s procession around the church and return

to the high altar, shown with the requisite veil pulled back: this was when a priest knelt to

incense the altar, litanies were sung, and the forty hours of prayer began (step 21

according to Clement VIII’s prescritions).24 Quarantore visual-material manifestations

were also recorded, transmitted, and transmutated by means of printed images.25 With

increasing frequency in the Seicento, Quaresima spectacular engravings and etchings

featured the Host enframed by myriad incised rectilinear rays, which may have replicated

analogous vector motifs in the ornamental apparatus, or represented a visual shorthand

for multiple lights incorporated in teatri, their source hidden from beholders, a technique

known as lumi ciechi (“blind lights”).26 (Fig. 2, 3)

During the seventeenth century, 40 Hours ekphrastic publications emerged for the

express purpose of recounting the design and affect of such decorative programs.27

Richeôme’s 1611 account in La peinture constituted an early example, following another

published in 1608 (the year of Richeôme’s Roman sojourn) in Rome by Giovanni Battista

22 de Santi, L’Orazione, 285-6. 23 Bailey, Between Renaissance and Baroque, 221 and 255, though without mention that this depicts the

Quarantore. None of the studies cited above mention Ciampelli's painting. Noehles, "Teatri," 93, and Weil,

"L’orazione," 680-1, purport this iconography did not appear in Rome until the third decade of the

seventeenth century. 24 de Santi, L’Orazione, 196. 25 Tozzi, Incisioni Barocche Di Feste E Avvenimenti: Giorni D'allegrezza. Rome: Gangemi, 2002, 133-62. 26 "Il non men celebre che virtuoso Cavalier Bernino fu il primo, che a lumi ciechi e coperti ergesse questo

sacro teatro; indi a sua imitazione prosieguì poi Pietro di Cortona." A. de Santi, L’Orazione, p. 288. 27 Noyes, “A me toccano masticcare pillole amare,” 1:355-60.

8

Alaleone, a Relatione of that year’s Quarantore theater in the Gesù.28 The Relatione’s

ekphrasis of the Jesuit macchina obtained an ontological eclipse with the object it

purportedly described, realizing in words an overwhelming effect correlative to the

overpowering ocular-somatic effect upon the beholder achieved by the apparato’s

ornament. Effusive language catalogued innumerable decorative elements and culminated

in a dizzying inventory of countless burning lights ornamenting the theater: erected

before the high altar and separated from the nave by a balustrade, a two-part architectural

stage embraced the space of the tribune. Interspersed amongst this elaborate structure,

niches enframed statues of saints with relics (diverse statue de Santi con reliquie in ogni

nichio), accompanied by great quantities of candles, glass and silver lamps, and figures of

angels sculpted in high relief and bearing real burning torches (Angeli di rilievo, che [...]

gran quantità di accese fiaccole sostenevano). The ensemble soared into a trompe l'oeil

sky filled with burning lights for stars (oltre tanti altri lumi [...] a guisa di tante Stelle).

The macchina culminated in the Eucharist exalted at its center; its overall effect was the

semblance of heavenly paradise, rendered the more pleasurable by the Real Presence in

the Sacrament, and such was its design that, upon entering the Gesù, from a distance or

close up, beholders' eyes and souls became enraptured by the vision:

…such was the unity and impact [forza] of the well-designed Theater with

the aforementioned lights, that upon entering the Church, whether from a distance

or up close, the souls and eyes of all were caught up in that sacred horror [sacro

orrore], as they remained motionless for some time, and remained so

overwhelmed, with great devotion….29

The climactic passage suggested how myriad light contributed to the macchina’s

spectacular effect. Richeôme adduced a similar description of profuse Quarantore lights

28 Alaleone, Relatione. See also de Santi, L’Orazione, 279-81. 29 Imorde, Präzenz, 144-8.

9

in the above cited passage of La peinture, wherein their effect figured the wondrous

paradox intrinsic to the visual faculty, such that the eye of the beholder could clearly

discern and their memory recall the countless burning sources comprised by the

devotional macchina. Both accounts of these spectacular somatic experiences induced by

performative ornament resonated Kepler’s resolution of how what were thought to be

infinite rays from each point in the visual field were drawn into a coherent point-to-point

correspondence in the eye, such that the eye’s lens re-focused intromitted rays or “lines

[of light] infinite in number” on the retina, resulting in an image he called a “picture”

(picture). The picture resultant on a surface inside the eye in these accounts was in

accordance with pre-Cartesian notions of sensory perception, whereby senses received

information via imprint in the form of attenuated images of things, which traveled to the

imagination, and from there to the intellect, the heart, and blood itself.

Indeed, across confessional divides, early moderns understood complex and ostensibly

(to present-day minds) disparate phenomena ranging from diverse optical phenomena,

visual perception and memory formation and recollection, to natural procreation and

generation, as well as religious conversion and the miraculous, in terms of incising,

imprinting, and impressing.30 According to Aristotelian precepts, sense impressions

imprinted memories in the mind as in warm wax, and the processes in perceiving and

remembering stamped a sort of impression of the percept on a substance called spiritus or

pneuma, a vapor thought to be distilled from blood and contained in the arteries, veins,

30 Yates, The art of memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, 35-6; Small, Wax Tablets of the

Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity. London: Routledge, 1997;

Carruthers, The craft of thought: meditation, rhetoric, and the making of images, 400-1200. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998, 333-4 n46; Park, “Impressed Images: Reproducing Wonders,” in

Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Jones & Galison. New York: Routledge, 1998, 254-71; Carruthers,

The book of memory: a study of memory in medieval culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2008, 24-5.

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nerves, and the cerebral ventricles.31 With the advent of printing technology, the

imprint’s wide-ranging semiotic, legal, hermeneutical, theological, philosophical, and

scientific implications, inherited from the Middle Ages, were transferred by early

moderns to the phenomenon of printed images.32 Indeed, rather than losing efficacy,

agency or authority due to processes of mechanization,33 it has been convincingly argued

that early modern printed images accrued such potentials by virtue of their vast, evocative

inheritance.34

Counter-Reformation Catholics understood doctrines subsuming Incarnation and

Transubstantiation as partaking in economies of imprinting, metaphorical, mechanical

and material.35 Saints received miraculous stigmata on exterior and interior body parts by

means of divine imprinting.36 Contact relics such as the Turin Shroud and the Veil of

Veronica were “manufactured” when Christ’s body impressed and transferred its image

31 Schott, "Paracelsus and van Helmont on Imagination: Magnetism and Medicine before Mesmer," in

Paracelsan Moments: Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Europe, ed. Williams & Gunnoe

Jr. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2002, 135-47; Barker, “Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern

Medicine,” The Art Bulletin, 86, 4 (2004): 659-89. 32 Tyson & Wagonheim, eds. Print and culture in the Renaissance: essays on the advent of printing in

Europe. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986; Dekoninck, “Dum premis imprimis. L’imaginaire de

la gravure au XVIIe siècle,” in L’estampe, un art multiple à la portée de tous?, ed. Raux, Surlapierre, &

Tonneau-Ryckelynck. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2008, 261-76; Pon,

Printed Icon: Forli's Madonna of the Fire in Early Modern Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press,

2015, 39-82. 33 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations. London:

Fontana, 1973, 219-53. 34 Ivins, Prints and visual communication. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953, 3; Talbot, “Prints

and the Definitive Image,” in Print and culture in the Renaissance: essays on the advent of printing in

Europe, ed. Tyson & Wagonheim. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986, 189-205; MacGregor,

"The Authority of Prints," Art History 22, 3 (1999):289-420; Areford, “Multiplying the Sacred: The

Fifteenth-Century Woodcut as Reproduction, Surrogate, Simulation,” in The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century

Europe, ed. Parshall. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2009, 119-53; Flaten, "Reproducible Media in

the Early Fifteenth Century, Mostly Italian," Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 3, 1

(2012): 46-62. 35 Gertsman, “Multiple Impressions: Christ in the Wine Press and the Semiotics of the Printed Image,” Art

History 36, 2 (2013): 310-37. 36 Vidal, “Miracles, science, and testimony in post-Tridentine saint-making,” Science in Context 20, 3

(2007): 481-508; Davidson, “Miracles of Bodily Transformation, or How St. Francis Received the

Stigmata,” Critical Inquiry, 35, 3 (2009): 451-80; Chatterjee, The living icon in Byzantinium and Italy: the

vita image, eleventh to thirteenth centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 127-62.

11

onto a material support.37 Eucharistic Hosts were likewise manufactured in multiples by

imprinting.38 Catholic Eucharistic reforms—instantiated and proliferated by means of the

40 Hours ritual, its attendant macchine, and the impressed texts and images they

engendered—were at once fueled and complicated by the peculiar efficacy of printed

pictures for early modern viewers, who believes that these objects subsumed a more

indirect and maseductive way of insinuating meaning into the beholder. The repetition

sublimated in the mechanical reproduction of printed matter—textual and visual alike—

implied prints’ potential, to become internalized “transformations of consciousness.”39

Seemingly echoing Alaleone’s and Richeôme’s ekphrases of Quarantore spectacular

ornament one description of engraved lines suggested they were overpowering to visual

perception, and “even ravishes our senses, by a secret kind of charm, not to be expressed

in words.”40

Grasping the polyvalent hermeneutics of printing and prints can help us to understand

better the intersection of imprint, optics and sacramental doctrine in La peinture and its

engraved ornament, and Quaresima ornament and its intended embodied effects more

generally. Specifically, I wish to take up the issue of the innumerable lights and rays in

La peinture, the volume’s title page, written descriptions of Seicento apparati, and

engravings reproducing these sacramental teatri, which I have argued adumbrated

Keplerian notions of impressed species. Lest we suppose that splendorous rays

constituted a semiotically and confessionally neutral ornamental entity c. 1600, in light of

37 Kessler & Wolf, eds. The Holy face and the paradox of representation. Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1998. 38 Rubin, Corpus Christi: the eucharist in late medieval culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1991. 39 Ong, Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word. London: Methuen, 1982, 82. 40 Evelyn, Sculptura, or, the history and art of chalcography. . . London: J. Payne, 1755, 113. In Zorach,

‘"A Secret Kind of Charm Not to Be Expressed or Discerned": On Claude Mellan's Insinuating Lines,’

RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 55/56 (2009): 235-51, at 235.

12

Richeôme’s significant divergence from Kepler’s theory of retinal perception in the

matter of the species, I wish to consider how rays were implicated in contemporaneous

discourse surrounding the question of the truth of sense perception.41 Lights and rays

framing the Host in Quarantore theaters and in their resultant illustrations functioned as a

visually and ritually significant surround, performing an important directive by catching

the beholder’s attention and steering their gaze inward, enacting spectacular embodied

immersion and performing exegesis of the transfigured Species. Rays moreover

physically retraced, and were ontologically equal to, the path traveled by light and/or

visual species en route to being imprinted on the eye’s inner humour. For artist-engravers

like Greuter the ray represented the degree zero of their medium, a single incised

rectilinear line that demanded ultimate control and mastery of the technique and its

constituent instruments, the metal (usually copper) plate and burin.42

While Kepler held that there was no need for luminous rays to transport any form or

species, Catholic reception of Kepler’s theory of vision in the first decade of the

seventeenth century—of which Richeôme represented an early example—accepted the

model of imprinted retinal imaging, but restored the epistemological (and, I would add,

sacramental) primacy of species.43 Jesuits Franciscus Aguilonius and Christoph Scheiner

41 For a taxonomy of “splendor” see Elkins, ‘‘Marks, Traces, ‘Traits,’ Contours, ‘Orli,’ and ‘Splendores’:

Nonsemiotic Elements in Pictures,’’ Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 822–60. 42 Ivins, Prints: technique and expression. New York: Abrams, 1954. 43 Pantin, “Simulachrum, Species, Forma, Imago: What Was Transported by Light into the Camera

Obscura? Divergent Conceptions of Realism Revealed by Lexical Ambiguities at the Beginning of the

Seventeenth Century,” Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 245-69; Gal & Chen-Morris, “Baroque

Optics and the Disappearance of the Observer: From Kepler’s Optics to Descartes’ Doubt,” Journal of the

History of Ideas, 71, 2 (2010): 191-217, at 204-6; Dupré, “The Return of the Species. Jesuit Responses to

Kepler’s New Theory of Images,” in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. de Boer &

Göttler. Leiden: Brill, 2012, 473-87.

13

were two notable slightly later examples.44 In Opticorum Libri Sex (1613), Aguilonius

successively considered species as "objects of vision," as equivalent to "optical rays," and

as essential elements in the process of "cognition,” reinforcing the linkage between

Aristotelian philosophy of perception and geometry of luminous rays.45 Scheiner, in

Oculus, hoc est, fundamentum opticum (1619), contended vision was accomplished

through a single principal ray powerful enough to impress the organ of sensation.46 For

these operations, Scheiner sustained the preeminence of visual rays and primacy of the

mediation of the species, so that images retained something of the substance of things and

assured the genuineness of representations.47 Sven Dupré has maintained how this was

for reasons having “ultimately to do with the important role attributed to vision and

images in Jesuit spirituality,” because species and “the Aristotelian psychology of the

soul in which they were embedded, were crucial elements in the Jesuit theory of spiritual

exercises.”48

According to Dupré, Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, the Jesuits’ primary motivation to

foreground rays and species was their need to adhere to and preserve inherited

Aristotelian perspectiva tradition.49 Yet rays and species as legitimizers of natural

philosophy were especially precious to Catholic reform constituencies, as they

undergirded not merely Jesuit, but Counter-Reformation embattled theories of sacred

44 On Aguilonius see Ziggelaar, François De Aguilón, S.J. (1567-1617), Scientist and Architect. Rome:

Institutum Historicum S.I., 1983. On Scheiner see Daxecker, The Physicist and Astronomer Christoph

Scheiner: Biography, Letters, Works. Innsburck: Veröffentlichungen der Universität Innsbruck 246, 2004. 45 Aguilonius, Opticorum libri sex. Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1613, 114. In Pantin, “Simulachrum,

Species, Forma, Imago,” 258; Dupré, “The Return of the Species,” 483. 46 Scheiner, Oculus, hoc est, fundamentum opticum. Innsbruck: Danielum Agricolum, 1619, 38; Gal &

Chen-Morris, “Baroque Optics,” 205. 47 Pantin, “Simulachrum, Species, Forma, Imago,” 265-7. 48 Dupré, “The Return of the Species,” 473 & 475 respectively. 49 Gal & Chen-Morris, “Empiricism Without the Senses: How the Instrument Replaced the Eye,” in The

Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, ed. Wolfe

& Gal. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010, 121-48, at 137.

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images and spiritual visual perception. These theories entailed distinctively sacramental

and incarnational ramifications that Protestant constituencies were not under pressure to

preserve. According to the decrees of the Council of Trent, Images of Christ, the Virgin,

and "other saints," were to remain in churches to be honored and venerated, "because the

honor which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which those images represent."50

Post-Tridentine Catholic visuality and devotional functioned according to honor referred

to a prototype,51 and substantiating the replica-prototype relation became a particular

purview of images.52 The optical and natural philosophical veracity of rays and species

helped sustain the veracity of sacred images and devotional praxis based on such images.

And in a somewhat circular fashion, images participated in the illustration, experimental

testing, and experiential proof of these interconnected, interdependent veracities.

Greuter’s engravings for La peinture brought to the fore and given palpable form to the

confessional urgency inhering in these circumstances, and the mutual necessity of

depicting Counter-Reformation prerogatives with images that subsumed current optical

theory and orthodox doctrine. His title page not only gave form to “pre-existing ideas”

about the Counter-Reformation optical/Eucharistic species/Species paradigm, it was “a

vital part of its production, altering its course.”53 The German’s plates’ hair’s-breadth

linear register and palm-sized proportions necessitated an intensively immersive and

somatic visual inspection that generated its own kind of virtual space of spectacular

embodied experience. The title page composition culminated in a tiny vignette depicting

50 Tanner, ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols. London, 1990, 2:774–6. 51 For sacred image-prototype theory, see Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and

Theory of Response. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989; Belting, Likeness and presence: a history of

the image before the era of art, trans. Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 52 Hamburger, '"In gebeden vnd in bilden geschriben': Prints as Exemplars of Piety and the Culture of the

Copy in Fifteenth-Century Germany," in The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, 155-89. 53 Hills, “How to Look Like a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in Exploring Cultural History: Essays in

Honour of Peter Burke, ed. Calaresu, de Vivo, & Rubiés. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, 207–30, at 209.

15

the Jesuits’ observance of the Quarantore, and alluding to Richeôme’s allusive ekphrasis.

(Fig. 1-3) The minutely-inscribed engraved linear register, described by Walter Melion as

the “fine style,” verged on virtual imperceptibility, to obtain a physiognomic and

ontological elision with his ostensible subject, the trans-mutated Host.54 Greuter’s

adapted his handling from that developed at the turn of the seventeenth century in the

southern Netherlands by the Wierix brothers, who also produced numerous images for

the Roman Jesuit market.55 The Wierix, in turn, had developed the fine style from earlier

Netherlandish artist Cornelis Cort’s technique refined in the second half of the sixteenth

century in prints after exquisitely subtle miniatures executed by artists in the circle of

Michelangelo.56

Thus, Greuter’s manner recapitulated and rendered multi-directional the Rome-

transalpine axis traced by Quaresima Eucharistic reforms, Richeôme’s 1608-1611

trajectory, and the engraver’s own geo-confessional itinerary. His self-absconding vision,

a kind of pictorial distillation and shorthand for a ritual, communal Jesuit visionary

experience that would have taken place within the space delimited by a 40 Hours theater

of monumental scale, represented the interpretive point of entry to the not just the text

and Quaresima ornament described therein that followed, but their shared hermeneutic as

well.57 His visual effects operated as prompts, calling forth the meditative artifice that

dexterously pictured this vignette of the 40 hours, rendering the paradox of largeness in

smallness and macrocosm and microcosm that adumbrated contemporary theories of

54 Melion, “Prayerful Artifice: The Fine Style as Marian Devotion in Hieronymus Wierix’s Maria of ca.

1611,” in The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400-1700, ed.

Brusati, Enenkel & Melion. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 589-637. 55 Mauquoy-Hendrickx, Les estampes des Wierix conservées au Cabinet des Estampes de la Bibliothèque

Royale Albert Ier, 3 vols. Brussels: 1978–1983. 56 Calvillo, "Authoritative Copies and Divine Originals: Lucretian Metaphor, Painting on Stone, and the

Problem of Originality in Michelangelo’s Rome," Renaissance Quarterly 66, 2 (2013): 453-508. 57 Dekoninck, “On the Threshold,” 72.

16

ocular anatomy and human vision, and stood ultimately for the mystery of Christ’s

Incarnation and Eucharistic Transubstantiation evoked in Richeome’s own writing.58 His

minutely incised rays bodied forth the possibility of representing holiness.

I would go further still, and propose that for Counter-Reformation Catholics, rays and

species mediated direct access to the divine, to the extent that they were divine. The

linguistic assimilation of optical species and Eucharistic species assumed visibility by

means of light(s) and rays. According to venerable artistic convention, saintly figures like

St. Francis were represented receiving miraculous and printed signs on/in their physical

bodies by means of divine species transmitted along heavenly rays.59 David Areford has

maintained that prints of the Stigmatization materialized the “divine energy that transfers

Christ’s wounds to the saint’s body,” in accordance with the Greek root stigma meaning a

“brand impressed by iron.”60 Inherited philosophy from Medieval thinkers like

Bonaventure associated the perceived species with Christ, even claiming “Christ is

species:”

Since the perceived species is a similitude generated in the medium and then

impressed on the organ [of sense] itself, and through this impression it leads us to its

starting point, that is, to the object to be known, this process manifestly suggests that the

Eternal Light begets from itself a Likeness, a coequal, consubstantial, and coeternal

Splendor.61

Richeôme’s explication of ocular/Eucharistic (s)/Species echoed this:

Does it [the species] pull its own impression, by itself? This could not be said: As nothing

makes itself by itself, otherwise it would have been before it was… And if we believe

these things because we touch them [with our eyes], will it be difficult for us to believe

that the Savior’s body with all its volume, size, and distinct members, might be in a small

58 Echoing Melion, “Prayerful Artifice.” 59 Bennett, “Stigmata and Sense Memory: St Francis and the Affective Image,” Art History 24 (2001):1–16. 60 Areford, The Viewer and the Printed Image, 36-44. 61 In Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2011, 99.

17

[Eucharistic] Host?

It was for this reason that, aligning with Richeôme, Aguilonius couched his explication of

optical species in the context of Paul’s religious conversion, achieved by direct visual

communion with God.62 Because Christ was really present in the species that travelled to

the sense organ—as he was in the consecrated Species—“the species of an object leads

one not only to apprehend the object but, to some degree, Christ…so the impression of

divine species, or Christ, on the soul [or retina] leads the individual back to God.”63

Greuter further materialized the sacramental hermeneutics of optical rays and species in

his frontispiece for Scheiner’s Pantographice, seu ars delineandi (1631), wherein the

incised inky rays connecting perceived object—a bust (possibly a reliquary) of St.

Gavinus—to disembodied eye, not only guaranteed the genuineness of the saint’s

representation, and the legitimacy of both the image-prototype connection and the

Catholic votary’s devotional honor transferred via this connection, but suggested the real

presence of the saint inhering in his relics (if the bust was a reliquary), and the capacity of

prints to affirm and transmit this presence.64 (Fig. 5) These optical-sacramental

implications were born out by the small putto’s activity to the right: he could be seen

reproducing the contours of Christ’s face from the Veronica relic. Counter-Reformation

Quarantore ornament, then, participated vitally in issues surrounding the true nature of

rays and species, which carried especially high stakes—in cultic, devotional, sacramental,

as well as philosophical terms.

62 Anguilonius, Opticorum libri sex, 3; Gal & Chen-Morris, “Empiricism Without the Senses,” 133-4. 63 Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition, 102. 64 Scheiner, Pantographice, seu ars delineandi…. Rome: Lodovico Grignani, 1631. See Rennert, “Visuelle

Strategien zur Konturierung eines jesuitischen Wissensreiches,” in Le monde est une peinture, 85-108, at

104-7.

Fig. 1

Mattheus Greuter, engraved title page for Louis Richeôme, La peinture

spirituelle, ou, l'art d'admirer, aimer et louer Dieu en toutes ses oeuvres,

et tirer de toutes profit saluterre. Lyon: Rigaud, 1611.

Fig. 2

Mattheus Greuter, engraved title page for Louis Richeôme, La peinture

spirituelle, ou, l'art d'admirer, aimer et louer Dieu en toutes ses oeuvres,

et tirer de toutes profit saluterre. Lyon: Rigaud, 1611. Detail.

Fig. 3

Mattheus Greuter, engraved title page for Louis Richeôme, La peinture

spirituelle, ou, l'art d'admirer, aimer et louer Dieu en toutes ses oeuvres,

et tirer de toutes profit saluterre. Lyon: Rigaud, 1611. Detail.

Fig. 4

Agostino Ciampelli, Jesuit celebration of the 40 hours,

Rome, Gesu, after 1599.

Fig. 5

Mattheus Greuter, engraved frontispiece for Christoph Scheiner, Pantographice, seu ars

delineandi res quaslibet per parallelogrammum lineare seu cavum, mechanicum, mobile: libellis

duobus explicata, et demonstrationibus geometricis illustrate. Rome: Lodovico Grignani, 1631.