[Religion and the Visual] Visual, Verbal, Mental, and Living Images in Early Modern Catholicism

Abstract

The episode in the history of the visual communication of the sacred that this paper explores is the image-making activity of a major and highly influential figure of the early modern Catholic reform, St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), and one of his most important interpreters, Adrien Gambart (1600-68). Francis de Sales was the early seventeenth-century French-speaking Savoyard bishop of Geneva compelled to reside in exile in Annecy because his see city was Calvinism’s citadel. One of the best educated and most learned men of his day, Francis studied humanities and philosophy at the Jesuit Collège de Clermont in Paris, while also attending classes at the Sorbonne; subsequently, he attended the University of Padua, where he studied law to please his father, receiving the doctorate in utroque jure (i.e., canon and civil law), and studying theology