Illustrious Jesuits: The Martyrological Portrait Series circa 1600

Before the Jesuits officially received their first saints, they capitalized on the power of the portrait series to promote their martyrs. The growing ranks of Jesuit martyrs, thought to number over a hundred in the early seventeenth century, allowed the order to participate in contemporary trends of serial portraiture as a means of legitimization. This article focuses on one crucial object in this history, a 1608 print depicting one hundred and two Jesuit martyrs in a repetitive and chronological format, published by Matthäus Greuter and Paul Maupin in Rome. An analysis of Greuter’s print demonstrates how the Jesuits coopted conventions of the portrait series to associate their martyrs with notions of Christian exemplarity and apostolic succession ingrained in the genre. The making of Jesuit identity cannot be disentangled from the discourse of portraiture, a category that includes the reiterative series as well as the naturalistic likeness.