“Before Our Lord like a blank canvas before a painter”: The Cult of the Cor Iesu and Its Flemish Emblematic Origins

When Pompeo Batoni, mindful of the mystic visions of Marguerite Marie Alacoque, painted his renowned Sacred Heart of Jesus (1765–1767), he like her was engaging with a meditative visual theme that the Society of Jesus had already codified by the 1640s. This essay examines several key Jesuit and Jesuit-inspired Flemish emblem books, asking how and to what ends they visualize the mimetic-affective relationship between the Lord’s heart and the votary’s. These books present the Sacred Heart and the spiritual exercises attached to it as the highest form of image-based prayer directed at uniting the exercitant with Christ. Jesuit emblematists treat spiritual conformation as a pictorial process, and concomitantly they construe exercitants as skilled artisans whose expert manipulation of various materials secures the Lord’s likeness in their hearts.