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Abstract
These two distinct but complimentary papers analyse canvases by El Greco (1541–1614) and Daniel Seghers (1590–1661) that depict in different ways religious subject matter. Neither painter was born in Spain, and both received their artistic training outside it, but their religious works were collected and copied avidly in Castile, and became known and influential throughout the Catholic Monarchy and beyond. The aim of the papers is to explore the religious contexts of contemporary interpretation and reception, and in doing so to assess the mutually constitutive interplay of the visual imaginary and cultural matter(s) in the paintings concerned.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Peter Cherry, María Cruz Carlos Varona and Éamonn Ó Carragáin, whose practical assistance helped me to prepare this article. It is dedicated respectfully to David Davies.
2 The three versions are discussed in El Griego de Toledo: pintor de lo visible y lo invisible, ed. Fernando Marías (Madrid: El Viso, 2014), 198, 204.
3 Rudolph Wittkower, ‘El Greco’s Language of Gesture’, Arts News, 56 (1957), 45–54, reprinted in his Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 148–58.
4 J. M. Huskinson, Concordia Apostolorum: Christian Propaganda at Rome in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries: A Study in Early Christian Iconography and Iconology (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1982).
5 See the examples in Picturing the Bible: the Earliest Christian Art, ed. Jeffrey Spier (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2007), 246–49, and Umberto M. Fasola, Traces on Stone: Peter and Paul in Rome (Roma: Vision, 1980), 75, 81.
6 Huskinson, Concordia Apostolorum, 114–23.
7 Johannes Molanus, De picturis et imaginibus sacris (Louvain: Apud Hieronymum Wellaeum, 1570), Book 3, Chapter 24, reproduced in Traité des Saintes Images, ed. & trad. François Boespflug, Olivier Christin & Benoît Tassel, 2 vols (Paris: Cerf, 1996), I, 398, and II, 304; and in Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura, ed., intro. & notas de Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas (Madrid: Cátedra, 2009), 667.
8 See Felipe Pereda, ‘Ribera’s Peter and Paul: One, Maybe Two, Notes on Blindness’, in Senses of Sight: Towards a Multisensorial Approach of the Image: Essays in Honor of Victor I. Stoichita, ed. Henri de Riedmatten, Nicolas Galley, Jean-François Corpataux & Valentin Nussbaum (Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2015), 227–44. I am grateful to Professor Pereda for allowing me to read his article before it appeared in print.
9 The Barcelona painting is reproduced in El Griego de Toledo, ed. Marías, 202.
10 See María Cruz Carlos Varona & Jose Manuel Matilla, ‘El Greco y las estampas de Diego de Astor’, in Simposio Internacional El Greco 2014, ed. Ana Moreno & Leticia de Cos (Madrid: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2014), 171–90.
11 The version in St Petersburg and the Madrid painting of St Paul alone are reproduced in El Griego de Toledo, ed. Marías, 203, 200. On the St Petersburg canvas, see Ludmilla Kagane, ‘Las ideas del humanismo cristiano en el San Pedro y San Pablo del Greco del Museo del Ermitage’, in El Greco of Crete, ed. Nicos Hadjinicolaou (Irakion: Municipality of Irakion, 1995), 287–94. I am grateful to Dr Hilary Macartney for the following comment on the Madrid canvas: ‘The St Paul, c.1580–1586, Madrid: Private Collection, gives the clearest version of the architectural arrangement similar to that in the background of the later Stockholm and St Petersburg paintings. In this wider architectural view, there is the panelled door on the left, one of the leaves of which is open, then two sides of a niche which opens on the other side, and on the right the wall of the room in which St Paul stands. Between St Paul and the niche and the door there is, in this version, also the balustrade of a staircase’.
12 Ephesians 2:12–14. Quotations from Scripture are from the Douay-Rheims version (1582–1610), slightly modernized in places: The Holy Bible, Translated from the Latin Vulgate (London: Washbourne, 1899).
13 On El Greco and the image of the Temple, see David Davies, ‘El Greco and the Spiritual Reform Movements in Spain’, in El Greco—Italy and Spain, ed. Jonathan Brown & J. Manuel Pita Andrade (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1984), 57–75 (pp. 63–65, 70).
14 Alfonso Salmerón, In epistolam ad Ephesios disputationes, in his Commentarii in evangelicam historiam, 16 vols (Köln: Apud Antonium Hierat et Ioannem Gymnicum, 1604), XV, 605. On the biblical exegesis of Salmerón, see Klaus Reinhardt, Bibelkommentare spanischer autoren (1500–1700), 2 vols (Madrid: CSIC, 1990–99), II, 276–80.
15 Cornelius a Lapide, Commentarius in epistolam ad Ephesios, in Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram, 21 vols (Paris: Vivès, 1868–76), XVIII, 605.
16 a Lapide, Commentarius in epistolam ad Ephesios, XVIII, 607.
17 Salmerón, In epistolam ad Ephesios disputationes, XV, 207. The hymn and the English version by J. M. Neale are reproduced in The Hymns of the Breviary and Missal, ed. Matthew Britt, O.S.B. (New York: Benziger, 1936), 348–49.
18 See Conor O’Brien, ‘Exegesis As Argument: The Use of Ephesians 2,14 in Cummian’s De controversia Paschali’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 67 (2014), 73–81. In his sermon on Psalm 94, St Augustine affirmed: ‘The cornerstone is Christ. He can be the corner only because he has tied two walls together in himself; they come from different directions, but in the corner they are not opposed to each other. The circumcised come from one direction, the uncircumcised from another, but in Christ the two peoples are at peace, because he has become the cornerstone, he of whom it was written, The stone rejected by the builders has become the headstone of the corner (Psalm 117:22)’ (Saint Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 73–98, trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B. [New York: New City Press, 2002], 416–17).
19 a Lapide, Commentarius in epistolam ad Ephesios, XVIII, 608.
20 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner 2 vols (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990), II, 663. On El Greco and the Council of Trent, see David Davies, ‘The Relationship of El Greco’s Altarpieces to the Mass of the Roman Rite’, in The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, ed. Peter Humfrey & Martin Kemp (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1990), 212–42 (p. 218), and David Davies, ‘El Greco’s Religious Art: The Illumination and Quickening of the Spirit’, in El Greco. Exhibition Catalogue, ed. David Davies (London: National Gallery, 2003), 45–71 (pp. 59–66). The Greek translation of the Council’s decrees that El Greco owned was probably one published in Rome in 1583 (see La biblioteca del Greco, ed. Javier Docampo & José Riello [Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2014], 214–15).
21 See his commentary on Galatians 2:14, in Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram, XVIII, 529–30.
22 Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram, XVIII, 528: ‘Dextras dederunt [ … ], id est, dextras sociales in societatis symbolum, quia in fide et dogmate utrique eramus concordes et associati’.
23 Alciato: Emblemas, ed. & comentario de Santiago Sebastián (Madrid: Akal, 1993), 74 (Emblem XXXIX).
24 Their handshake, understood thus, is an example of the ‘rhetorical’ and ‘symbolic’ types of gesture distinguished by Wittkower, ‘El Greco’s Language of Gesture’, 148–49.
25 Alonso de Cartagena, Defensorium unitatis christianae (Tratado en favor de los judíos conversos), ed., prólogo & notas de Manuel Alonso, S.J. (Madrid: CSIC, 1943), 190. On Cartagena’s Pauline theology, see Bruce Rosenstock, New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Castile (London: Dept of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary Univ. of London, 2002), 22–42; and Stefania Pastore, Una herejía española: conversos, alumbrados e Inquisición (1449–1559), trad. Clara Álvarez Alonso (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010), 43–50.
26 See David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking (London: Head of Zeus, 2013).
27 Hernando de Talavera, Católica Impugnación, ed. & notas de Francisco Martín Hernández, estudio preliminar de Francisco Márquez (Barcelona: Juan Flors, 1961), 129–30. See also Pastore, Una herejía española, 74–83.
28 Erasmo, El Enquiridion o Manual del caballero cristiano, ed. Dámaso Alonso, prólogo de Marcel Bataillon (Madrid: CSIC, 1971), 306 (the additions by the translator are in italics). The influence of Erasmus on writings in Spain on society and government has been examined by R. W Truman in Spanish Treatises on Government, Society and Religion in the Time of Philip II: The ‘De regimine principum’ and Associated Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 1999), and R. W. Truman, ‘Ideological Discourses in Spanish Treatises on Government of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, in Discourses of Power: Ideology and Politics in Neo-Latin Literature, ed. Karl Enenkel, Marc Laureys & Christopher Pieper (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2012), 177–207. On Erasmianism in El Greco’s Toledo, see Davies, ‘El Greco and the Spiritual Reform Movements in Spain’, 58–60, 62–63, and Davies, ‘El Greco’s Religious Art’, 66–68.
29 Albert A. Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre: controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII, trans. Mauro Armiño (Madrid: Taurus, 1985), 132, 137, 146, 166.
30 Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, 173, 178, 190–91.
31 Richard G. Mann, El Greco and His Patrons: Three Major Projects (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1986), 4–6. El Greco’s converso contacts and friends are discussed in Davies, ‘El Greco and the Spiritual Reform Movements in Spain’, 62–63.
32 Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, 221.
33 Juan Hernández Franco, Sangre limpia, sangre española: el debate sobre los estatutos de limpieza (siglos XV–XVII) (Madrid: Cátedra, 2011), 158.
34 On the contrasting situations of the conversos and the moriscos, see Ricardo García Cárcel, ‘La memoria histórica sobre la expulsion de los moriscos’, eHumanista/Conversos, 2 (2014), 120–32 (pp. 124, 127).
35 Pedro de Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, fols 9v–10r, quoted in Grace Magnier, Pedro de Valencia and the Catholic Apologists of the Expulsion of the Moriscos: Visions of Christianity and Kingship (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 269. In her detailed commentary on Valencia’s thought, Magnier draws attention to parallels and continuities with the earlier writings of Cartagena and Talavera. On the treatise and its context, see also El discurso sobre la expulsión de los moriscos, ed. Rafael Carrasco, in Pedro de Valencia, Escritos políticos, ed. Rafael González Cañal & Hipólito B. Riesco Álvarez (León: Univ. de León, 1999), 13–139 (Vol. IV, pt 2 of Pedro de Valencia, Obras completas, dir. & coord. Gaspar Morocho Gayo), and Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ‘Pedro de Valencia y el tratado de los moriscos de España’, in Seminario internacional Valle de Ricote. 400 aniversario del primer bando de expulsion de los moriscos, 1609–2009, ed. María Cruz Gómez Molina & José Miguel Adab González (Abarán: Consorcio Turístico Mancomunidad Valle de Ricote, 2010), 85–92.
36 Sermón predicado por el Patriarca Ribera el 27 de septiembre de 1609, in Francisco Márquez Villanueva, El problema morisco (desde otras laderas) (Madrid: Libertarias, 1991), 295–318 (pp. 299–302).
37 Pedro Aznar Cardona, Expvlsion ivstificada de los moriscos españoles (Huesca: Pedro Cabarte, 1612), fol. 62v, quoted in Magnier, Pedro de Valencia and the Catholic Apologists of the Expulsion of the Moriscos, 397, n. 9.
38 Trevor J. Dadson, Tolerance and Coexistence in Early Modern Spain: Old Christians and Moriscos in the Campo de Calatrava (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2014).
39 See Rafael Benítez Sánchez-Blanco, ‘The Religious Debate in Spain’, in The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain: A Mediterranean Diaspora, ed. Mercedes García-Arenal Rodríguez & Gerard A. Wiegers, trans. Consuela López-Morillas & Martin Beagles (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 102–31 (p. 102), and Stefania Pastore, ‘Rome and the Expulsion’, in the same work, 132–55 (p. 153).
40 Quoted in Benítez Sánchez-Blanco, ‘The Religious Debate in Spain’, 116, n. 55. See also Márquez Villanueva, El problema morisco (desde otras laderas), 127, 234–35. El Greco’s portrait of Cardinal Niño de Guevara (c.1600–1604) is reproduced and discussed in El Griego de Toledo, ed. Marías, 166–67.
41 Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ‘El nunc dimittis del Patriarca Ribera’, in El problema morisco (desde otras laderas), 196–293. A different view of Ribera is advanced in Benjamin Ehlers, Between Christians and Moriscos: Juan de Ribera and Religious Reform in Valencia, 1568–1614 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 2006), 143 and 210, n. 100. See also Rosa María Alabrús Iglesias, ‘San Juan de Ribera y la legitimación de la expulsión de los moriscos’, in El Patriarca Ribera y su tiempo: religión, cultura y política en la Edad Moderna, ed. Emilio Callado Estela (València: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 2012), 547–54.
42 On Cervantes and the expulsion, see Anthony Close, A Companion to ‘Don Quixote’ (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008), 188–89, and B. W. Ife, ‘The Historical and Social Context’, in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002), 11–31 (pp. 23, 28). On Calderón’s view of the matter, see Don W. Cruickshank, Don Pedro Calderón (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2009), 38–39, 143–45, and Alexander A. Parker, The Mind and Art of Calderón: Essays on the Comedias, ed. Deborah Kong (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1988), 315–20. Literary responses to the event are considered by Antonio Feros, ‘Rhetorics of the Expulsion’, in The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, ed. García-Arenal Rodríguez & Wiegers, 60–101. He concludes that for many Golden-Age writers, ‘it was a deed that [ … ] showed no heroism, and was doubtful from the human, religious and legal standpoints, in spite of all justifications of it by the authorities’ (100).
43 The possibility of a connection between the painting and the expulsion was suggested in 2005 by Grace Magnier in her article, ‘Pedro de Valencia, Ignacio de las Casas, and el problema morisco’, in Antes y después del ‘Quijote’, ed. Robert Archer et al. (Valencia: Biblioteca Valenciana, 2005), 201–11 (p. 206). On the expulsion itself and its consequences, see Roger Boase, ‘The Muslim Expulsion from Spain’, History Today, 52:4 (2002), 21–27. I am grateful to Dr Boase for supplying me with a revised and extended version of his article.
44 Carlos Varona & Matilla, ‘El Greco y las estampas de Diego de Astor’, 203, 207. On the popular demand for religious images and El Greco’s response, see Richard L. Kagan, ‘La Toledo del Greco, una vez más’, in El Griego de Toledo, ed. Marías, 47–65, and Richard L. Kagan, ‘‘Toledo Urbs Sacra: la demanda de arte en el Toledo del Greco’, in Simposio Internacional El Greco 2014, ed. Moreno & Cos, 192–203.
45 See Thomas Dekens’ 1661 Jesuit necrology, printed in Alexandre Pinchart, ‘Daniel Seghers’, Messager des Sciences Historiques, ou Archives des Arts et de la Bibliographie de Belgique (1868), 341–46. See also Marie-Louise Hairs, The Flemish Flower Painters in the XVIIth Century, trans. Eva Grzelak (Brussels: Lefebvre & Gillet, 1985), 117–24.
46 Federico Borromeo, Sacred Painting: Museum, ed. & trans. Kenneth S. Rothwell, intro. & notes by Pamela M. Jones (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard U. P., 2010), xxiii.
47 Gertrude Wilmers dates the first cartouche image by Seghers, one with an image by Schut, to between 1627–1631. See Gertrude Wilmers, Cornelis Schut (1597–1655): A Flemish Painter of the High Baroque (Antwerpen: Brepols, 1996), 53. This is a decade earlier than Hairs who dates the earliest examples of Seghers’ garlanded cartouches to 1638 and 1641 (The Flemish Flower Painters, 173). For Seghers' popularization of the garland-around-a-cartouche, see Hairs, The Flemish Flower Painters 26, 30 and Susan Merriam, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings: Still Life, Vision, and the Devotional Image (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 107.
48 See Hairs, The Flemish Flower Painters, 176.
49 On Flemish garlands and Marian images, see David Freedberg, ‘The Origins and Rise of the Flemish Madonnas in Flower Garlands: Decoration and Devotion’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 32 (1981), 115–50. Also Merriam, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings, 112–13, 150.
50 See the tabulation in Walter Couvreur, ‘Daniël Seghers’ inventaris van door hem geschilderde bloemstukken’, Gentse bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis en de oudheidkunde, 20 (1967), 87–158 (p. 140).
51 See Merriam, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings, 117–20.
52 See Merriam, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings, 55.
53 See Hairs, The Flemish Flower Painters, 121, 146. For this canvas, see Seghers’ entry in Couvreur, ‘Daniël Seghers’ inventaris’, No. 92 (p. 104).
54 For Chiflet’s contemporary account of the visit, see Auguste Castan, ‘Contribution à la biographie du portraitiste A. de Vries’, Bulletins de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 7, 3ème série (1884), 199–202 (pp. 201–02). Of the two works presented to the Cardenal-Infante on that occasion, one is listed by Seghers in his inventory, where he also notes that it is now in Spain: Couvreur, ‘Daniël Seghers’ inventaris’, No. 119 (p. 110). For the possible identification of the image of the Virgin presented, see Hairs, The Flemish Flower Painters, 125–29 and Wilmers, Cornelis Schut, 172 and 298, n. 68.
55 See Hairs, The Flemish Flower Painters, 121.
56 See Couvreur, ‘Daniël Seghers’ inventaris’, Nos 159 (p. 116) and 188 (p. 119).
57 See Francisco de los Santos, Descripción breve del monasterio de S. Lorenzo el Real del Escorial, única maravilla del mundo (Madrid: Joseph Fernández de Buendía, 1667), 71v–72r, 77. See also Bonaventura Bassegoda, El Escorial como museo: la decoración pictórica mueble en el monasterio de El Escorial desde Diego Velázquez hasta Frédéric Quilliet (1809) (Bellaterra [Barcelona]/Girona/Lleida: Memoria Artium, 2002), 161–62, 170, 175–76.
58 See Couvreur, ‘Daniël Seghers’ inventaris’, Nos 201–02 (p. 120).
59 See Couvreur, ‘Daniël Seghers’ inventaris’, No. 33 (p. 96); No. 79 (p. 102); Nos 90, 92, 93 (p. 104); Nos. 111 and 189 (pp. 108, 119); No. 192 (p. 119); No. 205 (p. 121); Nos 186, 209–11 (pp. 119, 122). In his necrology, Dekens comments that ‘pictas ab eo tabulas, rex catholicus, tresque imperatores, archiducesque aliquot, et summi alii principes ac Belgii gubernatores sibi oblatas lubenter accepterunt et gratum amicum prolixe testati’ (Pinchart, ‘Daniel Seghers’, 343).
60 See also Couvreur’s general overview: ‘Daniël Seghers’ inventaris’, 145.
61 Castan, ‘Contribution à la biographie du portraitiste A. de Vries’, 201–02.
62 On the difference in facture between distinct elements of garland paintings, see Merriam, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings, 47, 67, 70 and, specifically re Seghers, 111, 116–17.
63 Even in the latter case, ‘fictive’ is itself a problematic term, because such an image is obviously both an actual painting and is meant to function as an illusionistic painting within the whole.
64 One reason for the second interpretation being the more likely is that, as Wilmers notes, the flowers here ‘dwarf the human forms’ (Cornelis Schut, 167; and also 54). Merriam mentions the features that make the figures undeniably present (Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings, 109). On the size relationship between flowers and figures in Seghers, see Nina Ayala Mallory, La pintura flamenca del siglo XVII (Madrid: Alianza, 1995), 296.
65 See Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago/London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008), 32.
66 See Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting 1600–1720 (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 1995), 10; Goldgar, Tulipmania, 39.
67 See Goldgar, Tulipmania, 40, 115, 170, 286.
68 Goldgar, Tulipmania, 86; see also 88, 89, 117.
69 See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, foreword & trans. by Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 2003), 12.
70 Deleuze, The Fold, trans. Conley, 4.
71 These colours can also symbolize Christ’s virginity and martyrdom. See Jennifer O’Reilly, ‘ “Candidus et rubicundus”: An Image of Martyrdom in the “Lives” of Thomas Becket’, Analecta Bollandiana, 99 (1981), 303–14 (pp. 304–05). My thanks to Terry O’Reilly for this reference.
72 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Pied Beauty’, in The Major Works, ed., with intro. & notes, by Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2009), 132–33.
73 Hopkins, Major Works, ed. Phillips, 175.
74 If intertwined red/white are read as symbolizing the hypostatic union of Christ’s humanity and divinity, then from a Christian perspective this would obviously be a categoric exception to such unfolding.
75 See Matthew 13:24–30. My thanks to Eric Southworth for drawing my attention to this example of pre- and post-parousia intertwining.
76 Merriam, Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings, 107.
77 On Calvinist Holland making more explicit use of vanitas connotations in still lives than Catholic Flanders, see Hans Vlieghe, Flemish Art and Architecture 1585–1700 (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 1998), 9. On the Reformation leading to an emphasis on vanitas, see the general comments in Alain Tapié, Le Sens caché des fleurs: symbolique & botanique dans la peinture du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Adam Biro, 2000), 85.
78 On flowers being dead, see Harry Berger, Caterpillage: Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting (New York: Fordham U. P., 2001), 68, 87.
79 For the correct identification of the subject matter, previously held to depict Teresa of Ávila, see Y. Morel-Deckers, ‘Catalogus van de ‘Bloemenguirlandes omheen een middentafereel’ bewaard in het Koninklijk Museum te Antwerpen’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kuntsten Antwerpen (1978), 157–203 (p. 172).
80 See Couvreur, ‘Daniël Seghers’ inventaris’, Nos 117, 152, 170, 176, 177, 178, 186, 203, 221, 224, 232, 235.
81 For this exhortation, see Constituciones de la Compañía de Jesús, ed., intro. & notas para su lectura por S. Arzubialde, J. Corella & J. M. García-Lomas (Bilbao: Mensajero/Santander: Sal Terrae, 1993), No. 288, p.150 and Ignacio de Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales, in Obras completas de San Ignacio de Loyola, transcripción, intro. & notas de Ignacio Iparraguirre & Cándido de Dalmases, 2a ed. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1963), No. 235, p. 244. O'Malley sees this final section of the Ejercicios as an expansion of the exhortation in the Constituciones to ‘buscar en todas cosas a Dios nuestro Señor’, and Ignatius as thus moving from a traditional position of contemptus mundi. See John W. O’Malley, Saints or Devils Incarnate? Studies in Jesuit History (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2013), 49, 125, 127.
82 For flowers and this Ignatian principle, see Tapié, Le Sens caché des fleurs, 24; and for Seghers specifically, see Kevin F. Burke, ‘Daniel Seghers (1590–1661)’, in The Ignatian Tradition: Sprituality in History, ed. Kevin F. Burke & Eileen Burke-Sullivan (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2009), 100–03 (p. 102). See also Ralph Dekoninck's nuanced essay, ‘ “Chercher et trouver Dieu en toutes choses”: méditation et contemplation florale jésuite’, in Flore au paradis: Emblématique et vie religieuse aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, ed. Paulette Choné & Bénédicte Gaulard (Glasgow: Glasgow Emblem Studies, 2004), 97–110.
83 Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales, No. 23, p. 203.
84 See, for example, Burke, ‘Daniel Seghers (1590–1661)’, 100, 102. Compare Merriam’s equivocation here (Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings, 5, 14, 116–17). Merriam’s caution is grounded in her well-made point that, unlike the Ejercicios, Seghers’ garlands rarely focus on the life of Christ (117).
85 On mediocritas and the Early Modern Jesuit ethos, see, for example, Ignatius’ comments in Obras completas, ed. Iparraguirre & Dalmases, 762, 854, 911.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.