Abstract
Recent historical studies have focused on the vital role that Catholic saints played after the Council of Trent, investigating how these holy figures were utilized to alleviate all manner of problems besetting the Post-Tridentine Church, emerging European nation states, and individual Catholics. My dissertation, however, approaches this issue from an art historical perspective, considering how images of St. Francis Xavier, the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary, exercised considerable agency in an early modern world rife with global crisis. Specifically, I investigate Xaverian prints and paintings created in border zones of early modern Catholicism or in territories of the Iberian empires, particularly Antwerp, Goa, and Naples. In these places, the image of Francis Xavier was consciously utilized to ameliorate crisis situations resulting from the tensions characteristic of cross-cultural interaction, the Jesuits’ evangelization efforts, colonialism, and religious schism. The fundamental contention of my dissertation is that early modern images of saints do not simply reflect the historical circumstances in which they were made. Instead, institutions such as the Society of Jesus, the Portuguese or Spanish empire, and the Catholic Church enlisted the image of Xavier to quell crises globally and propagate an image of the political and spiritual triumph of Latin Christendom.