Early Modern Visual Representations of St. Francis Xavier and World Art History

In this paper, I will present a summary of my research on works of art depicting St. Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary and first Post-Tridentine saint to have a worldwide cult. This study considers images that were made both in Europe and on Jesuit missions in Portuguese India, East Asia, and Latin America in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries and is the first to examine the visual representation of Xavier in the context of cross-cultural tensions, imperialism, and religious difference in an increasingly global early modern world. My research has shown that Xaverian images had an especially potent ability to shape worldviews, advance imperial ideologies, and engender conversion in the border zones of Roman Catholicism and the territories of Iberian empires. Here, I engage with important theoretical issues facing the study of early modern global art, including a reconsideration of center-periphery theory where I articulate how newly formed imagined communities, such as the transnational cult of a missionary saint, could affect the production and circulation of visual culture between metropole and colony, as well as between Rome and mission.