Embodying the Catholic faith

Abstract

This essay probes the political and ideological status of such images in the officially Calvinist state after 1579. Focusing on the relationship between representations of the body of dead priests and the collective body of Catholic believers, Marquaille’s essay addresses one visual expression of the paradoxical situation whereby Catholics were reduced to minority status, not in numbers but through restrictions on public worship, including the public display of images. These prohibitions on the display of images notably extended to funerary rites, which were strictly regulated. This repressive context, according to Marquaille, gave rise to the posthumous clerical portrait as a new class of image with specific resonance for the emergent Dutch Catholic community. While Protestants shunned the representation of mortal remains, Dutch Catholics in particular came to embrace such depictions as an affirmative and distinctive feature of their newly proprietary visual culture.