Porter le Christ : une affaire de famille en France au XVIIe siècle
(2026)
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- Abstract
- This study contends that the representations of Christ-bearing saints in seventeenth-century France operated as genuine ecclesiological agents. Through their non-verbal language, these works of art articulate a meditation upon the Church grounded in the auctoritas of the Fathers, the teaching of doctrine, the Incarnation of the Word, and the visibility proper to the sacramental order. In this way, they take their place within the post-Tridentine culture of controversy, standing alongside the ecclesiastics. Set within the distinctive political, spiritual, and cultural conditions that shaped the period between 1598 and 1715, these “sacred images” (Council of Trent, XXV) are here examined as constituting a locus in which Gallican France affirmed its identity as the Eldest Daughter of the Catholic Church – not only by setting forth its faith in response to Protestant theology, but also by thinking that faith through its most brilliant painters, engravers, sculptors, and writers. The Virgin Mary, Joseph, Simeon, and the Tridentine Christ-bearers – Hyacinth of Kraków, Frances of Rome, Cajetan of Thiene, Rose of Lima, and Felix of Cantalice – thus emerge as mediators of a “family affair”, disclosing what Bérulle termed a “State affair, the greatest of all, since it concerned God Himself”. The works that depict the act of christophoria invited the faithful to enter into the sacramental economy, wherein faith, righteousness, and prayer are united and the believer is ordered toward the edification of the Body of Christ.
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Citations
Le Druillenec, A. (2026). Porter le Christ : une affaire de famille en France au XVIIe siècle. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/274385