CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE MANY LIVES OF IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA: FUTURE SAINT1
In 1609, Ignatius of Loyola was declared “blessed,” the preliminary step to canonization. To celebrate the event, the Jesuits that year published the Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae [The Life of Blessed Father Ignatius Loyola]. They republished it in 1622, the year Ignatius was canonized, adding to it another engraving depicting the ceremony (Figure 15.1). The road to Ignatius’s beatification and canonization had been long and difficult, but by 1609, one goal had been achieved and the other was within sight. The Jesuits hoped the Vita would inspire popular devotion to Ignatius and move forward the process of his canonization. The Vita was certainly not the first illustrated saint’s life—or, in this case, future saint’s life. In Rome in 1584, for instance, there appeared a life of Saint Francis of Paola illustrated with thirty-eight engravings by Ambrosius Brambilla.2 In 1603, there appeared in Antwerp a life of Saint Catherine of Siena engraved by Philips Galle,3 and around the same time a life of John the Baptist engraved by Jacques de Weert was published there that consisted in a title-page and twenty-one plates.4 In 1608, the year before the publication of the Vita, there appeared in Rome a life of Saint Francis of Assisi designed and engraved by Philippe Thomassin, which consisted in a title-page and fifty-one plates.5 The Vita Ignatii of 1609 with its eighty-one copper plate engravings—seventy-nine biograph- ical scenes, plus title-page and frontispiece—took its place in this young genre as its most elaborate exemplar. The Vita, whose production was encouraged by Claudio Acquaviva, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, was just one element in the Jesuits’
1 Originally published in Constructing a Saint through Images: The 1609 Illustrated Biography of Ignatius of Loyola (Philadelphia: St. Joseph’s UP, 2008), 1–36. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. I am grateful to David Collins, Simon Ditchfield, and Walter Melion for their sugges- tions and criticisms on early drafts of this introduction. 2 Vita et miracula Sancti Francisci de Paula (Rome: s.n., 1584). 3 D. Catharinae Senesis virginis ss.mae ord. Praedicatorum vita ac miracula selectiora for- mis aeneis expressa (Antwerp: Philips Galle, 1603). 4 Vita s. Ioannis Baptistae graphice descripta (Antwerp: Collaert, n.d.). 5 Vita et miracula seraphici patris s. Francisci de Assisio (Rome, 1608).
Figure 15.1. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Engraving 80, in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition. Used with permission of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Caption: By the customary rite and ceremony of the Catholic church, he is enrolled among the saints by the Supreme Pontiff Gregory XV, on the twelfth day of March in the year 1622.