Marian Demotion: An Engraving of the Virgin and Child in Early Modern China and Problems of Cross-Cultural Translation

Images, the Jesuits believed, had a special power to communicate Christianity to potential converts, unhindered by the obstacles of language or cultural difference. This fantasy of images as, in the words of CounterReformation thinker Gabriele Paleotti, a “universal language” able to move the unlettered or those who did not speak one’s language to piety motivated the Jesuits’ extensive use of visual material in their missionary activities. A print in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, however, points to anxiety around, rather than confidence in, images used in missionary endeavors. It provides evidence of when Alessandro Valignano’s