The Canonization of St Francis Xavier in Spanish Habsburg Lands: A Poetry Challenge in Madrid, Sacristy Paintings by André Reinoso in Lisbon and an Altarpiece by Pieter Pawel Rubens in Antwerp

Abstract

This article examines Jesuit representation of the exploits of Francis Xavier, ‘the Apostle of the East’, in celebration of his canonization in 1622 and in the Jesuit campaign to have him canonized prior to that. Pageants in Madrid, Lisbon and Antwerp are examined, along with prior pictorial depictions of Francis’ miracles and activities, taking into account the gulf between the political realities of proselytization in the Portuguese territories of influence in the East and the hagiography of 1622. The work of Rubens, the Portuguese painter André Reinoso and three Spanish Golden Age poet/playwrights are analyzed, exploring variance in the application of a universal Jesuit aesthetic founded on the melding of the Classical and the Catholic in response to the local conditions for which each ephemeral event and work of art were produced.

In the early seventeenth century, the port city of Lisbon lay at the heart of Jesuit interaction with the Portuguese overseas territories. Cosmopolitan Antwerp, the most important European port in the Spanish Habsburg empire, played an equally crucial role in the movement of goods and people from east to west and vice-versa. Landlocked Madrid, despite its status as the capital of the conjoined (1580–1640) Iberian empires, sat further from the realities of trade with and proselytization of the East.

Of the many examples of Jesuit propaganda produced in these constituent parts of the Habsburg realms in Europe in the years leading up to the canonization of Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola in 1622, two outstanding instances remain in situ, or almost so. The first, still in its original location, is the Portuguese painter André Reinoso’s series on the life and miracles of St Francis painted in 1619 for the sacristy of the Jesuit residence of São Roque in Lisbon which now forms part of the museum of the same name. The second consists of Pieter Pawel Rubens’ two altarpiece paintings for the new Jesuit church of Our Lady in Antwerp, made in 1617–1618. The church is now a parish church dedicated to St Carlo Borromeo who, as bishop of Milan, had been most welcoming to the Jesuits when they established a house in his diocese in 1563 (Ardissino 2021, p. 62). While most of the decoration of the Antwerp church, in large part designed or painted by Rubens, is intact and has been extensively restored, his renditions of the lives and miracles of the two Jesuit saints are no longer present. However, as the altarpiece for which they were painted is unchanged and the paintings available to view in the Kunsthistörischesmuseum in Vienna, it is not difficult to appreciate their impact at the time of the inauguration of the church.

In the absence of a major, in situ pictorial statement on the two Jesuit founders from the Madrid Jesuits in the years prior to 1622, the documented poetry competition organized by the Colegio Imperial, the primary Jesuit house in Spain, as part of their festivities in the capital in 1622 will be taken into consideration as evidence of their agenda in relation to the public projection of St Francis and his deeds in the Spanish capital.

The Madrid Jesuit event marked the canonization of several Spanish saints by the Jesuit-educated Pope Gregory XV (Alessandro Ludovisi). In his very short reign, from 1621 to 1623, he canonized four Spanish saints: the two Jesuits, the Carmelite Teresa of Ávila, and Isidore (1070–1130), a farm laborer from the outskirts of newly-reconquered Madrid with a reputation for posthumous miracles. He also beatified another sixteenth-century Hispanic figure, the Franciscan Peter of Alcántara (1499–1562, canonized in 1669). The ceremony took place on 12 March 1622 in St Peter’s basilica in Rome. Given the political importance to the Habsburg monarchy of having, finally, a recognized saint as patron of the imperial capital, it should be no surprise that the ephemeral structure or theatre erected in the basilica for the ceremony accorded prominence to the medieval San Isidro Labrador over the three Counter-Reformation heavyweights (Jones 2022, pp. 230–32).

This recognition of Spanish saints also mattered in Flanders, but for a different reason. The Archduchess and Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia (1566–1633), joint governor of the Spanish Netherlands, wrote in January 1621 to Pope Paul V (Camillo Borghese, d. 28 January 1621) to welcome his decision to canonize the four Spanish saints in the same ceremony. She had personally campaigned for the elevation to sanctity of Ignacio de Loyola and Teresa de Ávila. In her letter, she thanked him for ‘God’s kindness for Spain […] in a time so full of storms and troubles, in a time when heretics are so pernicious’ (Dekonnick and Delfosse 2022, p. 254). In April 1621, the Twelve Years’ Truce would end and hostilities between the Protestant Dutch United Provinces (Dutch Republic) and Flanders resume.

The year 1622 was a high point in the recognition of Spanish sixteenth-century conventual, devotional, educational and missionary achievement. Francisco de Jasso y Azpilcueta, known subsequently as Francisco de Javier after his place of birth, died at the age of 46 in 1552, Íñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola in 1556 at the age of 64 and Teresa de Sánchez de Cepeda Dávila y Ahumada in 1582 at the age of 67, while the beatified mystic Pedro de Alcántara died in 1562 in his early sixties. In hindsight, the singular omission seems to be St John of the Cross, Teresa’s reform-minded collaborator. Less vigorously promoted by the Carmelites and more theologically controversial than Teresa, the now-renowned poet and mystic, Juan de Yepes y Álvarez (1542–1591) was not beatified until 1675, then canonized in 1726. For all the others, magnificent celebrations were orchestrated throughout the peninsula, in the Spanish-ruled territories in Flanders and Italy and in those ruled by Spain and Portugal overseas.

The vast majority of these celebrations were organized by the Jesuits. In that year, there were over 15,000 Jesuits worldwide, with over 700 establishments including residences, professed houses, seminaries, colleges and missions in the various overseas territories. The confessors of the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Spain and the King of France were also Jesuits (Châtellier 2002, p. 220). While frequently celebrating Teresa, Isidro or sometimes the Italian Filippo Neri (1515–1595), the founder of the Oratorians who was canonized on the same day as the Spaniards, the Jesuit pageants mainly showcased the lives and piety of Ignacio de Loyola and Francisco de Javier. Within each series of events, a greater number of festival exhibits was routinely devoted to the achievements in Europe of Loyola as founder of the Society of Jesus. However, Francisco’s spectacular career as an evangelizer and explorer in India, Japan and the islands and nations of the South China seas was far from neglected. He embodied the quintessence of Jesuit endeavor beyond the known Christian world.

Unlike the other preaching and evangelizing orders operating in the new and established colonies in the Americas and the East, the Jesuits were not conventual and not subject to the restriction on non-Spanish clergy entering the Spanish-American territories or being ordained there. As Gauvin Alexander Bailey observes, when the Jesuit overseas structures matured, this led to a community of Jesuit priests hailing from most of the Catholic Western European nations, with the odd Eastern European brother or priest, and members also from the nations of South Asia where the Portuguese traded and established settlements and fortresses. He adds that the Jesuits on these missions were far from philosophically homogenous, containing ‘both humanists and reactionaries, geniuses and men of mediocre abilities, bigots and human rights activists’ while the mission cultures in which they operated were just as multifarious:

[…] divided among merchants and nobles, shamans and warriors, literati and peasants, women and men. Socially, the dynamics of cultural convergence varied widely according to nationality, religion, and class, and their effects ranged from overt conflict and resistance to accommodation, acculturation and syncretism—often all at once.

(Bailey 1999, p. 5)

1. The Apostle of the East

Francisco de Jasso, born into the Navarrese lordship of Javier, near Pamplona in northern Spain, was nominated in 1540 by João III of Portugal as Papal Nuncio to the Portuguese Indies, the Estado da Índia. This was the same year in which Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese) recognized the Jesuit Order (27 September). Francisco and two companions, the Italian priest Paolo de Camerino, also known as Micer Paolo, and the Portuguese novice, Francisco Mansilha, were duly dispatched on the fleet of Martim Afonso de Sousa, appointed viceroy of the Portuguese Indies from 1542 to 1545. They left Lisbon on 7 April 1541 and came into Goa on 6 May 1542.

Sousa opted to overwinter in Mozambique from August 1541 to February 1542 to enable passengers and crew to recover from scurvy and other debilitating illnesses (Mkenda 2017, p. 428). Camerino and Mansilha remained in Mozambique for a full year tending to the sick, on the orders of Afonso de Sousa while Francisco continued on, because Sousa himself was unwell and he wanted Francisco by his side (Schurhammer 1977, p. 103). Francisco was later persuaded by Sousa not to remain with the isolated minority Christian community on the island of Socotra in the Arabian Sea because he would be in danger of kidnap and enslavement if left there on his own (Schurhammer 1977, p. 130). As far as the Portuguese Crown was concerned, the imperative governing the injection of the Jesuits into Goan society, albeit by then in the lone personage of Francisco, was the requirement to address the lax moral and civic behavior of some elements of the Portuguese community in the viceregal capital (Županov 2005, pp. 48–49). Up to that point, the only significant religious presence there was the Franciscans who had established themselves in the city in 1518 (Schurhammer 1977, pp. 161–63). To be effective, it was imperative that Francisco should train up assistants in Goa, irrespective of ethnicity, while awaiting the arrival of his companions from Mozambique. By early 1543, Francisco was in a position to write a long and detailed letter to João III on the state of the Church in India. Amongst many concerns, he listed the requirement to institute the Inquisition to combat Judaism in India, the abandoned Catholics in Socotra, the need to permit vicars in outlying fortresses and settlements to give the sacrament of confirmation and the conversions in Goa and further south (Schurhammer 1977, p. 386).

When Francisco left to preach in the villages of Cape Comorin (Kanniyakumari), known as the Pearl Fishers’ or Coromandel coast, on the tip of the Indian sub-continent, in September 1542, he left indoctrination and organizational instructions for Camerino and Mansilha to be put into operation on their arrival from Mozambique. Meanwhile, he set off to continue the evangelization of Tamils and Paravars, learning their language as he went along (Monteiro 1998, pp. 101–3). He would spend two years there and converted many thousands. Yet, while proselytization in India in Francisco’s time was successful, often wildly so, it is worth remembering that the penetration of the ministers of the Church into new, non-Christian territories was always considered to be an arm of the political and economic agenda of the Portuguese crown. Under the motto Forte-Feitoria-Frade (fortress, factory/trading post, friar), mass conversion was often a means of acquiring the loyalty of a strategically important community and the clergy were knowing though not always willing participants in these maneuvers (de Sousa 2008, p. 415). Thus, in 1536–37, in the very area in which Francisco concentrated his efforts from 1542–1544, at least 30,000 and up to 80,000 Paravar people, oppressed and enslaved by their Muslim rulers, converted to Christianity to avail of Portuguese military support and more secure social status (de Sousa 2008, p. 416). The advantages for the Portuguese were greater control of the coast south of Goa and access to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) but their hold on these territories was weak. By 1543, Francisco was obliged to report the vulnerability of this newly Catholic community in his letter to the Portuguese king.

2. Proselytization in Japan

Francisco’s eyes lay on a greater prize however: Japan, as yet uncontacted by Christian missionaries. On 24 June 1549 he set sail from Cochin (Kochi) for Japan, coming into port at Kagoxima on the island of Kyūshū on August 15th in the company of the Spaniards Father Cosme de Torre and Brother Juan Fernández, and the converted Japanese samurai and former convict, Yajirō, baptized as Paulo de Santa Fé, who would serve as translator. There were two other Japanese converts or Kirishitans with him on the voyage, along with Domingos Dias, a servant of mixed race allocated to him by Dom Pedro da Silva da Gama, Portuguese governor or captain of Malacca from 1548 to 1552 and the fifth son of the explorer Vasco da Gama (c. 1460–1524). Da Silva afforded him sufficient gifts and treasure to build a church and pay elaborate court to the shōguns in Japan (Monteiro 1998, pp. 109–12, 154; Schurhammer 1982, pp. 9–10, 52; Kentarō 2003, pp. 5–6).

Even before his arrival in Japan, Francisco had acquired the utmost respect for and appreciation of the advanced nature of Japanese society. Indeed, he toyed with plans to establish links between what he considered to be Japanese universities and those in western Europe, including the Sorbonne. However, his conviction that his was the only true faith led to misunderstandings and lapses in conduct that were not well received. In addition, the upper echelons of Japanese society proved ultimately impenetrable to him, despite da Silva’s munificence and the elaborate silken attire he had to hand for the purpose of audiences at court (Schurhammer 1982, pp. 94–96). From Japan, he turned his sights on China, believing Christianity could be introduced more effectively into Japan via China because of the strong influence of Chinese culture on elite Japanese society through the centuries (Monteiro 1998, p. 119). Nevertheless, severe difficulties regarding entry into China, which was closed to foreigners excepting embassies of the very highest nobility and magnificence, and a lack of willingness on the part of the Portuguese political establishment in the Estado da Índia to support fully this latest venture, rendered that ambition fruitless. He died on Shangchuang island, ten miles off the Chinese mainland and two hundred or so south-west of modern Hong Kong, on 3 December 1552, attended by a Chinese convert known as António de Santa Fé who had been educated in the Jesuit college in Goa (Schurhammer 1982, pp. 561, 640–43). He had been waiting to be picked up by a Chinese merchant who had agreed to take him into China through the port of Canton (Guangzhou).

Despite Francisco’s early death and his misjudgment on access to China, two years afterwards there are estimated to have been about 3000 baptized Christians in Japan. Many of these conversions took place in Yamaguchi, on the southern end of Honshu island, encouraged by the daimyō, Ōuchi Yoshitaka (1507–1551), who was very much taken by the conventionally opulent European gifts of cut-glass objects, wine and textiles and even more so by the new technology, such as spectacles, two clocks and a pair of telescopes, that Francisco presented him with in December 1550 (Schurhammer 1982, pp. 215–20; Higashibaba 2001, p. 2). In September 1551, Francisco was summoned by the young yakata (commandant) of Bungo, on Kyūshū island, Ōtomo Sōrin (Yoshishige) (1530–1587). He was given permission by him to proselytize and allocated a residence in Okinohama from which to conduct his mission (Schurhammer 1982, pp. 237–58). For Ōtomo Sōrin, who formally converted to Christianity in 1578, the association seems to have been beneficial and he died in power of natural causes. Ōuchi Yoshitaka was less fortunate, as he was ousted and forced to commit seppuku, ritual suicide in the month of Francisco’s departure for Bungo (Kentarō 2003, p. 7).

While respect for Japanese elite culture was promoted by Francisco, no such recognition was accorded by him and his acolytes to the belief systems of the Japanese. There were misunderstandings as a result of the Jesuits’ poor translation or comprehension of Japanese, of which more later. Francisco and Juan Fernández, whose grasp of Japanese was more assured, are reported by the Portuguese Jesuit historian of Japan, Luís Fróis (1532–1597), befouling the philosophy and practices of Buddhism and Shintoism on the streets of Yamaguchi in November and December 1550 (Higashibaba 2001, p. 3; Schurhammer 1982, p. 154). Fróis recounts that there was no crossroads in that well-populated city that had not at some point witnessed the preaching of Francisco and Juan Fernández (Schurhammer 1982, p. 152, fn. 24). Nor did Francisco shy away from challenging the elite in their own palaces. On the day of his first audience with Ōuchi Yoshitaka, who had caused a scandal when repudiating his wife for his concubine in 1549, Fernández expounded the same claims before the daimyō, accusing the Japanese of idolatry, sodomy and the propagation of abortion (Schurhammer 1982, pp. 160–62). Yet Francisco himself reports the appointment and his own evangelizing activities in the most serene manner: ‘Having passed many days in this activity of preaching, both in houses and on the streets, the duke of Yamaguchi summoned us, being in the same city’ (Fróis in Schurhammer 1982, p. 158, fn. 42).1 Fernández, on the other hand, appears to have feared that Francisco desired martyrdom for himself, since he insisted on responding to any criticism from or contempt shown by members of the Japanese elite in kind, with a trembling Fernández as the vehicle for these ripostes (Schurhammer 1982, pp. 156–57).

3. Jesuit Celebrations in Iberia and Flanders

By Francisco’s death, the Jesuits had succeeded in establishing colleges for the education of boys and novices in the Portuguese-ruled trading ports of Goa, Bassein and Cochin on the west coast of India, in Malacca and on the island of Ternate in the Malukus. While they maintained the exclusive right to evangelize Japan and China until the end of the century, it was primarily the miracles and the mass conversions Francisco performed while in Portuguese-ruled territories that were celebrated in the lead-up to and celebration of his canonization in Iberia (Monteiro 1998, pp. 128, 133–59). Jesuits throughout the world had received an instruction from their General, Muzio Ventilleschi (1563–1645), to mount events to celebrate the dual canonization and there were magnificent events in all the major capitals of the Spanish realms (Dekonnick and Delfosse 2022, pp. 255, 258).

The Jesuit professed house of São Roque in Lisbon published a lengthy account of the festivities organized in the cities and some of the most important towns of Portugal: Lisbon, Coimbra, Evora, Braga, Braganza, Vila Viçosa, Oporto and Portalegre, the Jesuit residence at Sanfins do Douro, Funchal on Madeira and the Ilha Terceira in the Azores to mark the canonization of Francisco and Ignacio de Loyola in 1622 and the beatification of the Italian Jesuit, Luigi Gonzaga (1568–1591) in 1605 (Anon 1623). Six Jesuit colleges were established in Portugal in the latter half of the sixteenth century, in Lisbon (1553), Evora (1559) and Coimbra (University College of Jesus 1542 and College of the Arts 1555) in the south, and Oporto (1557), Braga (1589) and Bragança (1561) in the north (Jofre et al. 2023). There were also colleges in Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel in the Azores (1568) and in Funchal, Madeira (1599). The earliest of these, apart from the two university colleges at Coimbra, and the first building owned by the Jesuits outright was the College of São Antão in Lisbon, sited in the existing convent of St Anthony in 1553 and later transferred to a new building which was then confiscated by the Crown in 1759 when the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal. The former college now houses a major Lisbon hospital (Jofre et al. 2023; Monteiro 1998, p. 85).

It is perhaps the ownership of the College of St Anthony that enables the Jesuit chronicler in 1623 to claim foundational primacy for Portugal on the Iberian peninsula, given that the Jesuit university colleges in Spain, in Gandía (1548) and Alcalá de Henares (1545) were set up shortly after the College of Jesus in Coimbra:

And because the Province of Portugal was the first that the Company had, & [was] admired so much by the glorious Patriarch Saint Ignatius Loyola, & loved because of the great religious observance which in it [the province] was ever resplendent, & the Kingdom of Portugal with the Oriental lands of her conquest were the principal theatre of the marvels achieved by the glorious St Francis true sun of the Orient, who with the rare holiness of his life, & light of his doctrine illuminated the darkness of those heathen peoples.

(Anon 1623, Prologo)2

Spanish Jesuit institutions, both colleges and professed houses, would eventually become far more numerous and the very size of the Jesuit organization in Spain meant that it would have been impossible to produce a single volume account of the festivities organized for the Jesuit canonizations in 1622. The Duchy of Milan, under Spanish rule since the abdication of Charles V in 1556, witnessed an extravagant celebration for the dual canonizations from 17 to 26 April 1622 held in its capital city (Ardissino 2021). In the Spanish Netherlands, despite strong Habsburg support from Madrid for the canonization of the two Jesuits and Teresa of Ávila, the festivities were viewed as exclusively the preserve of the Society of Jesus, ‘not a Spanish triumph but a Jesuit jubilation’ with no elements addressed to the majesty of the Habsburg monarchy (Dekonnick and Delfosse 2022, p. 256). Later in the century, much of the Jesuit pageantry conceived across the Spanish lands in northern Europe would appear to the religious purists attracted to Jansenism to border on desecration. They objected to the appropriation of Classical motifs and figures in celebration of Christian evangelization and piety encouraged by the Jesuits (Dekonnick and Delfosse 2022, pp. 266–67, fn. 26). However, in 1622 this was the reigning aesthetic and in most of the Jesuit pageants and their associated texts and images, the actual achievements of Francisco, even his reputed miracles and thousands of conversions, became largely submerged in elaborate comparisons with Classical figures.

4. The Colegio Imperial Celebration in Madrid

While the Colegio Imperial in Madrid did not have a pictorial statement on a par with those produced in Lisbon and Antwerp to their name, they did, in 1622, commission the architect Pedro Sánchez (1569–1633) to build a magnificent new church to a design similar to that of the Jesuit (Gesù) church in Rome. On its consecration in 1651, it was dedicated to San Francisco. Two centuries later, from 1885 until 1993, this monumental edifice was the pro-cathedral of Madrid, dedicated by then to San Isidro. However, it suffered catastrophic damage in a fire in 1936 and many of its paintings were destroyed beyond repair. In Madrid on 22 June 1622, the Jesuits mounted their spectacular pageant showing the peoples of the four continents on which they had a presence, though this was more reflective of their position as a global force in the early seventeenth century than the achievements of Francisco or Ignacio de Loyola (Hsia 2022, pp. 219–21). In lieu of a visual artifact from Madrid, the Jesuit marriage of the Classical and the religious can be seen in the extant poetry from the Justa Literaria Publica (public, literary joust) incorporated into their festivities.

In the great cities of early seventeenth-century Spain, poets and painters congregated together at the same social events and had similar concerns relating to the status of their art and themselves as practitioners. They were often profoundly interested in and influenced by ‘the discipline cultivated by the other.’ (Portús Pérez 1999, p. 57). In all these celebratory pageants, paintings, statues, emblems and verse were interdependent in that images were almost always accompanied by written explanatory texts. It was habitual for poets who were paid to provide texts to accompany images for the ephemeral structures to take part in the poetry competitions as well. Therefore, it can be taken that the poetry submitted for the Justa Literaria was composed with the visual environment of the Jesuit celebrations in mind and these extant texts may go some way to providing an impression of how the Colegio Imperial envisioned the triumph of the two saints in 1622.

In his account of the festivities, Fernando de Monforte y Herrera, a gentleman of the Madrid court (cavallero residente en esta corte), provides details of the competition (de Monforte y Herrera 1622, f.1r; Hsia 2022, pp. 212–21). It would be ‘devoted to the conquerors of the World, illustrious poles of the Heavens, Triumphant over the World, the holiest, the strongest, the greatest’ (de Monforte y Herrera 1622, f. 5r).3 The highly visual framing was the role of San Ignacio and San Francisco in sustaining the world, as its two poles: ‘holding between them the globe of the Earth, they served as fixed points’ (de Monforte y Herrera 1622, f. 5v; Hsia 2022, pp. 213–14).4 The competition is presented as lying in the gift of Apollo, who, unsure of his own poetic abilities, invites los excelentes ingenios de la Mãtua Filipica (the excellent wits of the Philippian reign [the young king Felipe IV, mãtua/manteo, his imperial mantle]) to complete the task of lauding the Jesuit saints, even if this puts his own lyric pre-eminence amongst the Muses at risk—con riesgo de perder el principado de las musas (de Monforte y Herrera 1622, ff. 6 r-v). In Monforte’s account, the achievements of the two Jesuit saints constitute a worthy subject for such divine Orpheus figures, who will be able to take advantage of the opportunity to demonstrate the valor of their wit and ingenuity.5

The competition is overseen by the noted playwright, Lope de Vega (1562–1635), who also orchestrated the city of Madrid’s majestic celebrations for the canonization of San Isidro and the associated poetry justa (Mata Induráin 2004, p. 23). The rules for submission, by June 8th, and the individual prizes are enumerated, including one for the worst poem, thirty ducats wrapped up in an old rag, perhaps a humorous touch typical of Lope (de Monforte y Herrera 1622, ff. 11v–12v). The competition was divided into two thematic sections, the first and best focused, relating the exploits of San Ignacio and San Francisco to the twelve astrological houses, the second invoking the major planets so as to represent Santa Teresa, San Isidro, all four Spanish saints, the King and Spain. Five of the astrology signs are dedicated exclusively to consideration of Francisco’s life: Virgo is devoted to his virginity, Sagittarius his strength, Capricorn his prophetic gifts, Aquarius his great voyages and Pisces his miracles.

The poetry competition stipulations can be taken as the template the Colegio Imperial wished to impose for the projection of the achievements and personae of the two Jesuit founders. Many of the contributors were Jesuits themselves who thoroughly understood the complexity of their own order’s propagandistic and artistic agenda, but there were also submissions from lay poets, some famous to this day, very many more unremembered. The extent to which the entrants attempted to gloss the exploits of Francisco in a wealth of Classical allusion indicates how valiantly they accepted the challenge posed by the justa; though, to the eye of posterity, most of the poems seem to bear little knowledge on Francisco’s life of preaching and peregrination. For comparison, Luís de Camões (1524–1580), in his monumental poetic account of the Portuguese expansion to the East, The Lusiads (1572) devotes verses 92–142 of his tenth and final canto to describing in considerable detail all the existing Portuguese overseas territories, trading posts and locations providing opportunities for future exploration and proselytization (de Camões 1987, pp. 341–52).

The willingness of the entrants to rise to the aesthetic conditions of the justa may be explained in some degree by the precariousness of the economic circumstances of some of them, as the prizes on offer, three in each category, are not negligible in value. For Virgo, the best poem in Spanish in six décimas describing how Francisco resisted lascivious temptation while asleep would be awarded a salt seller, pepper canister and sugar bowl worth thirty ducats (de Monforte y Herrera 1622, f. 8r). Under Sagittarius, the theme is Francisco’s service in a hospital for the mortally ill in Venice, for which the writer of the best Latin epigram in six distichs (rhyming couplets) would be awarded two silver salvers worth twenty ducats (de Monforte y Herrera 1622, f. 9r). The next topic takes place under Capricorn and shows Francisco in the Estado da Índia, marking his reputed prophecy of three events during his time in the South Seas. These, rather vaguely outlined in the instructions, were: the Portuguese naval victory against the Achinese in October 1647, 375 miles north of Malacca; his declaration a year earlier in Amboina, on the South Moluccan island of Ambon, of the death of a Portuguese merchant João de Araújo (Arauxo) while he was preaching on the North Moluccan island of Ternate almost 400 miles away and when no news had yet come of his friend and supporter’s death; and the demise of the soldier and seafarer Diogo Gil, (‘Don Gil, General de Portugal’) on Ternate, announced while Francisco was in Amboina, though this may be a mangled version of the story of Araújo’s death with Francisco’s location and that of Gil interchanged (de Monforte y Herrera 1622, f. 9r-v; Schurhammer 1980, pp. 154–55, 192, 236–37, fn. 149). The best six couplets in Spanish in arte mayor or menor (indicating longer and shorter line lengths, respectively) would be rewarded with a silver vase worth twenty ducats. The last two themes relating to Francisco are laid out in much sketchier terms. Under Aquarius, his navigational exploits are not described in any detail; priority is given rather to his propensity for being sighted on two different ships in different places at the same time (de Monforte y Herrera 1622, f. 9v). The best eight octavas in Spanish on this subject would obtain for their author fifteen yards (varas) of Italian black grosgrain silk, worth thirty ducats. Finally, under Pisces, contributions in twelve quintillas on the twenty-five different people Francisco was believed to have brought back from the dead were invited, for a first prize of a silver ewer worth twenty ducats (de Monforte y Herrera 1622, f. 10r).

Apart from the three events mentioned in the Capricorn stipulation, there is very little factual matter in this set of instructions. Furthermore, the three events listed under Capricorn are very imbalanced in terms of political significance, in that one refers to a major naval battle which Francisco himself promoted fiercely and the other two relate to the deaths of not very important individuals and are suspiciously similar. This might imply that either the chronicler Monforte’s and possibly also the Madrid Jesuits’ grasp of the facts of Francisco’s political existence was less than solid or, more likely, that the political realities of the Portuguese territories in the East were not viewed as paramount within the celebrations in the Habsburg metropolis. Certainly, almost all the extant Spanish poems from this period eulogizing Francisco, including those submitted for the Madrid justa, seem to employ a wealth of Classical allusion to compensate for the absence of factual information when accounting for his exploits in the Indies (Mata Induráin 2004, pp. 23–113; Hsia 2022, p. 222).

Amongst the octavas depicting Francisco’s sea voyages, the playwright Rodrigo de Herrera (1578–1641) submitted an entry which deploys three rather florid introductory stanzas before the fourth begins to address Francisco’s career in the East. Here, the poem seems to conflate Arabia with the Indies:

• Where the Indus proffers Sabaean aromas, [Saba in ancient Arabia]
• being the burning cradle of the fourth planet, [Cancer]
• the Apostle of Christ overcomes and dominates
• the vile affections of the Indian peoples;
(Mata Induráin 2004, pp. 32–33)6

Stanzas five, six and seven then describe Francisco departing from an unnamed port with a sizeable fleet which soon finds itself engulfed by a storm. Some of the sailors see themselves as valiant giants, like Atlas attempting to hold up the heavens in the face of the storm, while others appeal to Francisco for aid. Mountains of foam rise in the sea, blown by Notus, the south wind, and the waves then sink deep into the ocean, drawn down by Neptune. Whereupon, the miracle of Francisco appearing at once on two different ships to rescue sailors and calm the storm becomes apparent.

Francisco’s twentieth-century biographer, the Jesuit Georg Schurhammer, offers an account of a storm experienced by Francisco and his companions in the winter of 1548 on their way from Malacca to Goa which is not unlike Herrera’s poetic version:

The tempest raged for three days and nights, and at each instant the frail craft seemed about to go down. The driving waves swept thundering over the deck. The yards and masts creaked and broke. The ship was tossed helplessly from one side to the other. At one time it seemed to be buried between black foaming waves reaching like mountains into the sky. At another time it was tossed upwards, but only to sink again.

(Schurhammer 1980, p. 283)

On this occasion there is no mention of Francisco bilocating but rather an account of how he withdrew to his cabin and devoted himself to quiet prayer as the storm raged. This is evidenced in a letter he wrote a month later:

When the storm was raging at its worst, I recommended myself to God our Lord and I first chose as my intercessors on earth all of the blessed Society of Jesus with all their friends; and with so much favor and help I surrendered myself entirely to the faithful pious prayers of the bride of Jesus Christ, our holy Mother the Church […]

(Schurhammer 1980, pp. 283–84)

Herrera concludes his seventh stanza, having described the miracle of bilocation, with this rhetorical question: ‘but what can/A valiant faith, a firm hope not achieve?’7 While Francisco’s actual response to storms appears to have been far more prosaic, the sentiment is nevertheless fitting. Stanza eight records the dissemination of the news of the miracle throughout India and he is compared to St Anthony of Padua (born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon in 1195), reputed to be able to appear in two different churches at once. The poet states that like Anthony, Francisco will be acclaimed ‘miraculous/the glory and honor of the Lusitan kingdom’.8 The reference to St Anthony is the only citation of a Christian figure in the poem, yet this invocation of the Portuguese saint and the mention of the Lusitan kingdom at least serve to place the life and miracles of Francisco within the correct Portuguese imperial context.

Another poet and playwright, Francisco López de Zárate (1580–1658) submitted eight octavas presenting a more general account of Francisco’s sea voyages. The first five stanzas posit, in a blend of Classical allusion and some Christian reference, Francisco’s navigational competence, at a time when Portuguese ships were often poorly maintained and equipped and frequently overloaded (Monteiro 1998, p. 120). In an ingenious twist, López de Zárate has Neptune no less hail Francisco’s magnificence in his fourth octava:

• Whoever depends on him, invokes the entire Heavens;
• because he is, like another Alcides [Hercules], the firmament
• of the Firmament; and since he relies on Him [Christ]
• anything he proposes He grants.9
(Mata Induráin 2004, p. 35)

In the sixth octava, he turns his attention to the nations and peoples Francisco visited. He mentions China in the opening line, even though Francisco never set foot on the Chinese mainland. He states that Japan paid great tribute to Francisco, a somewhat questionable statement. He cites the ‘cyclops of the Antarctic hidden/in the fierce Carib, a rational beast’ as having had to bow down to Francisco’s ministry (Mata Induráin 2004, p. 36).10 The word caribe/carib in this context is used to describe those peoples who did not belong to any of the major Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism or indeed Buddhism and were regarded as barbarians as well as pagans or gentiles. The deployment of the adjective ‘antarctic’ is less clear since Francisco went nowhere near either pole; however, it may be taken to indicate territories south of Equator in this period. In his final stanza, he compares Francisco both to the pelican in that he sacrificed his own physical wellbeing to nurture his converts and the phoenix in that in death he rose to new life in sainthood. These two analogies enable the exclamation that brings the octava almost to its close: ‘Oh saint, for a thousand saints [saintly acts] portentous!’11

Perhaps the call for twelve quintillas on Francisco’s much vaunted powers of bringing the dead back to life elicits the most generalized responses and none more so than that of the arch playwright, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), who would then have been a very young man. In this poem, far less ornate than most of the others in the justa and devoid of direct Classical allusion, the poet seems to be treading a very delicate path between Francisco’s role as the performer of these miracles and that of God as the holder of power over life and death. He opens with reflections on the resplendent new light/in the East/nuevo sol resplandeciente/en Oriente, in reference to Francisco’s ability to intercede with the Divine on behalf of the twenty-five languishing in death. In quintillas seven and eight, he creates a distinction between piety and faith:

•  There piety can be seen
• guiding with certain steps;
• but here, faith is at work,
• for twenty-five of the dead
• the trumpet of Heaven it was.
•  
•  It sounds, and ceding to its voice
• Death heeds its empire,
• and the offended soul returns;
• whoever saw Death be obedient?
• Whoever saw Death bring life?12
(Mata Induráin 2004, p. 50)

As the poem moves towards its conclusion, it seems quintillas ten and eleven are jointly addressing the resurrected Christ and Francisco as channeler of his divine power, quite correctly not attributing the resuscitation of the dead to Francisco’s piety and faith alone. However, the expression is not entirely unequivocal and the relationship between los dos/the two and victorioso/victorious in the singular in quintilla eleven is somewhat confusing:

•  Strong and divine victor,
• who would not be astonished
• if he hails your glories,
• since before God made Man
• Death was able to show defiance?
•  
•  And in defiance you both
• have emerged victorious;
• who could dare to take you on,
• since you have taken on,
• she [Death] who takes on God?13
(Mata Induráin 2004, pp. 50–51)

The victor could therefore be Francisco himself, quasi-divine in his ability to raise the dead but the expression is sufficiently ambiguous to entail a broader interpretation.

The young Calderón may well be an outlier in this justa with his eschewal of Classical allusion and relatively direct engagement with the theological aspects of Francisco’s miracles. Like the others though, his poem is similarly light on factual fabric. The only information is that these twenty-five dead were brought back to life in the East. For all the entrants, the aim seems to have been to demonstrate learning, wit and rhythmical dexterity rather than to deliver a history lesson. Had context been a matter of priority for the Colegio Imperial, they would no doubt have found ways of providing relevant background for the competing poets. They set an agenda knowing that the entries would produce that blend of Classical learning, or at least the semblance of it, with some basic awareness of the trajectory of Francisco’s achievements and respect for the tenets of Catholicism which most closely adhered to their aesthetic at this point in the early seventeenth century.

In Portugal, however, the political and geographical facts of Francisco’s mission on behalf of João III were of supreme importance. They are celebrated most clearly by the Jesuits in a sequence of 20 paintings commissioned for the sacristy of their residence of São Roque in Lisbon three years before the canonization.

5. The Sacristy Paintings in the Residência de São Roque in Lisbon

The events shown in the paintings are based on the account of the Jesuit historian João de Lucena (1549–1600) of the life of Francisco and the activities of the Jesuits in the Estado da Índia, and those of his confrères Luís Fróis and Alessandro Valignano on his work in Japan. André Reinoso (c.1590-after 1641), with the help of an unnamed collaborator, possibly Simão Rodrigues (1560–1629), painted a series of scenes in 1619 reflecting what were considered to be the most salient events and wonders of Francisco’s life (Serrão 1993, pp. 27, 90). In chronological order, paintings 4–8, 14 and 20 depict events in India and Sri Lanka; 9–13 show incidents in Malacca and the Moluccas; 15–17 portray Francisco’s activities in Japan and 18–19 represent his efforts to enter China. Hung at eye level in the sacristy of the church of São Roque and still there today, the paintings offered the clergy a detailed panorama of the achievements of Francisco with well-informed visual documentation of the peoples of Portuguese India, if not of the other territories shown. So successful was this sequence of images that it was used as a prototype for similar series installed in other Portuguese Jesuit settings: the Colégio do Espíritu Santo in Évora, the Sé Nova in Coimbra, the Colégio de São João Evangelista do Funchal on Madeira and, tellingly, the Igreja do Bom Jesus de Velha Goa (Serrão 1993, pp. 50–52). Reinoso’s images are far from monumental in size, the larger paintings of the series measuring about 100 cm × 160 cm. They were created to decorate the four walls of the sacristy designed by the royal architect Baltazar Álvares (1560–1630) within a carved wooden frieze with frames and pillars of jacaranda and rosewood. Their commissioning and display constituted a significant part of the Jesuit campaign to secure canonization for Francisco (Serrão 1993, pp. 21–23). The series of twenty paintings contains four miracles associated with Francisco: raising a Sri Lankan tribal leader from the dead (No. 7), turning sea water into drinking water on the voyage from Cochin to Malacca (No. 9), the apparition of the Christ Child to save the ship in which he was sailing to the Moluccas (No. 12) and the recovery of his lost pectoral cross in the arms of a crab on the island of Seram (No. 13). All the other events are factual. A sequence on the life and miracles of San Ignacio, created at the same time, has been lost (Serrão 1993, p. 26).

Reinoso was never appointed royal painter, probably because his family were converts from Judaism going back a couple of generations, and little is known of his life (Serrão 1993, p. 31). He was, however, the most technically innovative of the painters available in Lisbon at the time, an important matter since this demonstrates the Jesuits’ policy, wherever they operated, of engaging with the new and using their influence to champion the most up-to-date trends and approaches in communicating their message. In the absence of existing templates for some of these images in the form of engravings, it is certain that Reinoso and his collaborator were carefully guided by the Jesuits in Lisbon and their intimate knowledge of the future saint’s life and the cultures he encountered (Serrão 1993, p. 27). Many of the priests who passed through the residence at São Roque would have seen service in the Estado da Índia and even as far afield as Japan. Francisco, though Spanish born, was their apostle of the Indies and there would be little tolerance of vagueness in this series of images.

What Vítor Serrão describes as the ‘exotic character of these compositions, full of sumptuous ethnographic detail (Indian and Japanese costume faithfully reproduced, functional objects in the background, arms, examples of colonial fauna and flora, interior settings from the period, ships, etc.’ brings the documentary nature of this sequence home (Serrão 1993, p. 31). The most widely cited example is painting No. 5, which shows Francisco preaching in Goa in 1542 (Figure 1).

In the mid-sixteenth century, the Catholic diocese of Goa was the largest in the world, stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to China (Schurhammer 1977, p. 145). At its center, the city of Goa, capital of the Estado da Índia was the most magnificent European metropolis of the East, its trading wealth causing it to be dubbed Goa Dourado do Oriente (Golden Goa of the Orient) or the Rome of the Orient (Serrão 1993, p. 66). In Francisco’s time, there were about 3000–4000 Portuguese men in Goa, all striving for status and wealth. They lived within a highly stratified and rather fragile civil structure that placed Portuguese fidalgos or nobles (many with a tenuous claim on that status) at the top. Below this layer were settled lower-class Portuguese men (casados) who over the years intermarried with local or mixed-race (mestiça) women, an option not open to the nobility. The Portuguese male population was completed by two significant but more transient groups, the military and clergy. In total, the Portuguese made up under 10% of the inhabitants of the Portuguese-ruled cities and settlements in India (Disney 2009, p. 147). In Goa, there were Hindu merchants, considered pagans, Muslim merchants, considered infidels, Italians, Armenians and other traders as well as the various indigenous ethnic and religious communities who lived outside the Portuguese area of the city. The Portuguese elite and merchant classes were served by a large population of enslaved or indentured people, both Indian and African (Županov 2005, pp. 49–51).

Upon his arrival in the viceregal capital in May 1542, Francisco reports that he based himself at the Portuguese hospital and went regularly to the nearby chapel of Our Lady to instruct children in Christian doctrine. On these occasions, up to 300 children attended, more than the chapel could easily accommodate (Schurhammer 1977, pp. 271–72). This is most likely the crowded scene depicted here, with the image of the Immaculate Conception held up by an assistant on Francisco’s right indicating the dedicatee of the chapel. Reinoso presents a congregation of adults and children, Portuguese and locals, clergy and congregants. At the extreme left, under a sunshade held by an invisible local servant are two bare-headed Portuguese fidalgos on horseback. On the extreme right, two others are standing behind Francisco. There is a group of more simply dressed Portuguese or European men in the center, of lower social status, possibly casados, behind the locals. The adults standing and sitting in front of the Europeans are shown in various styles of Indian dress, some paler-skinned men in turbans, beards and long gowns, a couple of dark-skinned men in head-dresses and skirts with silver necklaces and bright red rosaries on their bare torsos. A woman in the center, with both breasts exposed through the folds of her simple white sari, holds a swaddled infant. She is most likely a wet nurse from a lower caste or an enslaved woman. Her prominence in the center of the image is meant to underscore the extreme youth of the small children seated on the ground before Francisco, a group to which she appears to belong. There are three finely dressed local women sitting with the children. They appear to be wearing red and white patterned saris with fringed white jackets on top. They could be higher class servants or the wives of some of the casados and perhaps also the mothers of some of the children. A second Jesuit, probably an assistant in Francisco’s time, holds a rod over the little children, all apparently boys with short hair though this is not specified in the reports of these catechism lessons. Some of these boys are Portuguese, others local, each in typical dress, some pale-skinned with blond hair, some dark-complexioned. The rod implies the need to exert discipline over little boys and may be a reference to their future attendance at the Jesuit college in Goa. Francisco too holds a rod, indicating his pedagogical role. The whole presents an image of multi-ethnic harmony amongst the Catholic community, convert and European, as the charismatic Francisco, his head pre-emptively surrounded by a halo, exhorts them to direct their attention heavenwards.

Another instance of Francisco’s teaching is depicted later in the sequence (No. 16), with the aid of a collaborator (Figure 2). This is the scene believed to show an audience at the court of Ōuchi Yoshitaka, daimyō of Yamaguchi in March 1551. While not as elegantly composed as the scene in the chapel of Our Lady in Goa, owing to the involvement of the collaborator, and somewhat smaller, it might be taken to represent the pinnacle of Francisco’s political penetration of Japanese society.

After his initial embassy in December 1550, Yoshitaka had given Francisco an abandoned monastery from which to conduct his activities and for a brief period the monastery was thronged with curious visitors eager to listen to the Jesuit preacher’s views on a wide variety of scientific matters:

nobles, bonzes [Buddhist priests] of all sects, bikunis [Buddhist nuns], yamabushis (‘magicians’), merchants and others. The house as a consequence frequently lacked space to accommodate them all. Endless questions were asked, and the conferences, which were usually held twice a day, ended with disputations which lasted a long time.

(Schurhammer 1982, p. 221)

Such was the fame of these gatherings that Francisco was accorded a second audience with Yoshitaka in June 1551. On this occasion, he brought with him an illuminated Bible and an illustrated copy of Walafried Strabo’s ninth-century commentary on the Bible, the Glossa Ordinaria. The meeting with Yoshitaka was successful on the day, with the listening bonzes apparently accepting that Francisco’s Christian God who did not have physical substance was no different from the Dainichi venerated by the Zen (Shingon) priests present. However, it soon became evident that there was a misunderstanding involved. As Francisco’s language skills and those of Juan Fernández were far from proficient, this was inevitable. The lack of clarity in Christian indoctrination was a problem that would persist for some time after Francisco left Japan (Higashibaba 2001, pp. 4–11; Kentarō 2003, p. 6; Schurhammer 1982, pp. 106–9). In the days after this second audience, Francisco realized that the Dainichi was in fact not a deity at all but the primal energy of life or chi (Schurhammer 1982, pp. 223–26). He therefore instructed his preachers to condemn the veneration of Dainichi and thus began the fracturing of his relationship with the bonzes in Yamaguchi, from which he was saved by the summons to Bungo in September 1551.

While this painting may represent that second audience with Yoshitaka, it does seem unlikely that the daimyō would not be seated on a throne or dais so that the nature of the gathering would be obvious to a European audience. He should also be dressed more elaborately than any of the others present to indicate his status. It would therefore appear more plausible that this painting depicts one of Francisco’s conferences at the monastery, in which the main disputants are seated in the round, with many others looking on from a gallery. The architecture is far more suggestive of a European conventual interior than a Japanese palatial environment, with its high stone arches and pillars. This may be the artists’ attempt to render the Japanese monastery lent to Francisco by the daimyō. The seated figures are all on the same level, and all appear to be shaven-headed bonzes in kimonos with narrow sashes excepting Francisco who is in his ordinary black cassock, not the formal robes in which he attended audiences. The Japanese costume is as authentic as the costumes in Goa were, demonstrating once again the resources available to the clergy in São Roque (Serrão 1993, p. 88). While all the seated men make conversational gestures with their hands, Francisco raises his right hand with the index finger pointing upwards, such that his hand is higher than any of the heads of the seated bonze. His head is encircled by a slim golden ring to indicate his sanctity and the dove of the Holy Spirit hovers above him, signaling the heavenly inspiration behind his discourse. All the other men present, either massed on the balcony or behind the seated men, are ostensibly Japanese, with the two standing in the right foreground probably being samurai as the topknot on the nearest man, shown in profile, is visible and they appear to have swords at their waists. One of the two samurai seems to be pointing directly at the Holy Spirit. There is no evidence of the Buddhist nuns reported to attend Francisco’s gatherings, though the small figure on the left of the group on the balcony may conceivably be female.

As with the rendition of Francisco teaching the catechism in Goa, the painting does not represent a miracle and the Japanese figures present are, as far as is reasonable for a Portuguese painter who probably had no acquaintance with people from Japan, depicted accurately. The likelihood of Reinoso having seen representations of people from India or individuals from India was much greater and therefore the men and women shown in the Goa painting are more convincingly Indian, at least for the European audience of the period. If anything, this sequence, visible at eye-level in the sacristy of the professed house of São Roque and full of authentic detail and authenticated events, speaks more directly to the ongoing, practical and often dangerous missionary work of the Portuguese Jesuits in the East than any extolling of supernatural happenings in Francisco’s life. Such would not be the case further north in Antwerp.

6. Propaganda and Celebrations in Antwerp

In that prosperous and key port city, the Jesuits commissioned two monumental paintings (535 cm × 395 cm from Pieter Pawel Rubens (1577–1640), one depicting the miracles of San Ignacio, the other those of San Francisco (Figure 3), for their new church dedicated to Our Lady (the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk) which was completed between 1615 and 1621 (Vlieghe 1973, pp. 28–29). Rubens produced his two large altarpiece paintings in 1617–18 making them part of the Jesuits’ ‘twin fathers’ canonization campaign (Boeckl 1996, p. 982). The paintings were to be displayed on the altarpiece of the new church though the two eminent Jesuits had not yet been canonized. More pertinently, the paintings were to be on view even though it was far from approved practice to show topics other than episodes from the Bible or the life of Christ in the centerpiece over the high altar (Prohasa 2004, p. 216). Such displays would only be formally prohibited in 1634. The paintings were to be hung on a system of pulleys behind the main altar, two of a set of four to be alternated throughout the liturgical year. The other two paintings, rather more sober, were ‘The Raising of the Cross’ by Cornelis Schut (1597–1655), made between 1624 and 1626, and ‘The Saints Worshipping the Queen of Heaven’ by Gerard Seghers (1591–1651) produced in 1639–1640. The two Rubens paintings were purchased for the Viennese Royal Collection in 1776, after the dissolution of the Jesuit Order. Today, there are still four altarpiece paintings, among which are the Schut and Seghers figures, and they are changed on Ash Wednesday, Easter Monday and the Feast of the Assumption in what is now the Church of St Charles Borromeo.

Rubens was a good friend of the Rector of the Jesuit Seminary in Antwerp, François d’Aiguillon (1567–1617), who had been appointed in 1613 (Prohasa 2004, pp. 215–16). This association, added to his prestige as the most pictorially ambitious and Italianate painter in Antwerp, led to his being employed to oversee the decoration of much of their splendid new church. While imbued with his knowledge of the Italian sixteenth-century mythological painting, ‘The Miracles of St Francis’ also betrays the intervention of his Jesuit employers who acted to calm the exuberance of his composition in order to communicate more effectively the didactic and devotional message of the painting. This dialogue is evident in the changes made from the modello to the finished painting, mainly his ‘lowering the density of figures’, making ‘the composition easier for the faithful to comprehend when viewing the picture from a distance’ (Prohasa 2004, p. 218). This does not imply, however, that the identities of the figures in the painting are or were easy to decipher, even for the scholars of today.

The Jesuits provided Rubens with the benefit of their knowledge of Francisco’s life and achievements so that he was not reliant on Horatio Tursellinius’ biography, De vita Franciscii Xaverii, published in Antwerp in 1596. Christine Boeckl argues that the information in this work would have been overtaken by new material given the intensity of scrutiny of Francisco’s life in the years leading up to his canonization (Boeckl 1996, p. 983, fn. 5). Nevertheless, a majority of the events shown in Rubens’ painting can be located in Tursellinius and these are: an Indian child brought back to life after drowning in a well, priests (in Korean costumes which Rubens owned) representing the bonze who debated with Francisco, a naked male figure with a samurai topknot resuscitated during his funeral, a man possessed by demons, a crippled man and the destruction of a local idol by divine intervention, related in Tursellinius as an act undertaken by the people themselves (Vlieghe 1973, p. 27; Boeckl 1996, pp. 983–84). Boeckl further argues that there is another figure representing the restoration of sight to a blind merchant and a reclining male figure depicting Francisco’s ending of an outbreak of plague in Japan, both instances traceable to witness statements gathered for the canonization process but not in Tursellinius (Boeckl 1996, p. 985).

The end product is a grandiose and dynamic representation of an imperious Francisco in elaborate flowing black robes on the top right of the painting, surrounded by a variety of the miracles required for canonization (Prohasa 2004, pp. 217–18). Above Francisco, a flurry of seraphim surrounds the female figure of Fides Catholica who is seated, in a green robe and golden mantle, on a globe holding a golden chalice. He stands, arms outstretched in exhortation, on a plinth opposite a temple building which is largely Classical in structure, with columns, a balcony, stairs and niches for bearded male idols. These seem European in facial features; that is, with square jaws, round eyes and prominent cheekbones, but wear head-dresses with four curling animal horns that appear vaguely Indian. Without the benefit of modern interpretation, the people gathered before Francisco and his black-robed assistant appear to be: various men dressed as unspecified mythological figures from Classical Antiquity, others representing Eastern ethnicities and garbed in suitably Oriental attire but with generally European facial features; a group of naked-torsoed men with samurai topknots (on the balcony); a bearded European soldier in full gold-chased sixteenth-century armor; behind him, at least one lightly bearded and darker-skinned man with features that seem more European than East Asian in a golden Korean durumagi or formal gown and high headdress; a dark-skinned man in a high turban behind the Korean figure; and several women, all of whom are European-featured, the younger ones with golden hair and rosy cheeks on pale skin (Prohasa 2004, p. 215). The scene is full of movement, color, emotion and dynamism but it keeps very much to an Italianate mythological style and, the odd instance of costume, skin-tone or statuary apart, shows none of the specific awareness of Francisco’s environment that runs through the Reinoso series. Made to sit at the end of the long and exquisite nave of the new church in Antwerp, it served its appropriate purpose, calling on the faithful to hail the majesty of Francisco’s miracles and sainthood within an ornate architectural setting.

Unlike Lisbon or Madrid, Antwerp was neither a royal seat nor an imperial one but from 1498–1499 to 1548, it had been the site of the Royal Portuguese Factory, receiving ships from the Estado da Índia (Subrahmanyam 2012, p. 92). After 1548, trade with the Indies was devolved to private entities. Antwerp in the early seventeenth century was a city of guilds and painter’s workshops, fervently Catholic and, as in all cities where the Jesuits were present, imbued with a devotional culture that spread from the colleges into the wider community, including those of lower social status who were never exposed to Jesuit formal education (Châtellier 2002, pp. 220–21). Though in 1622 it was a Catholic city, such had not always been the case. Fewer than four decades before this, in 1585, the city capitulated after a year-long siege to the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Alessandro Farnese, on terms which involved an agreement that its substantial number of Protestant citizens, many skilled and more well-to-do, would settle their affairs and leave the city within four years. A year before, the Twelve Years Truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic, as the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia intimated in her letter to the Pope, had ended and Antwerp was once more affected by war if not encroached upon by it. In 1587, under Farnese, the Jesuits had begun to send chaplains to serve with the Army of Flanders and would continue to do so (Hsia 2022, p. 225). Thus, the political backdrop to the 1622 celebrations in Antwerp was one of renewed wariness of a religious enemy that was not the heathen idolatry of the Americas, Africa or Asia, nor the residual Judaism or Islam of the Iberian Peninsula, but the heresy of Protestantism.

In the formal festival celebrations mounted by the Jesuits in Antwerp on 24 July 1622, Francisco’s catechetical exploits in the East constituted the lesser narrative, subordinated, as in Madrid and elsewhere, to those of the founder of the Society, San Ignacio. Yet, little expense seems to have been spared on their depiction in this port city with such a strong and enduring connection to the Indies. The procession was led by members of the twenty-six corporations, followed by the six guilds of men entitled to bear arms. Then came the sumptuously decorated floats and carriages. The ‘Triumph of St Francis Xavier’ was drawn by men and boys dressed as converts from the nations and islands of the East and followed by a series of converted kings and potentates with their lavish retinues. Especial excitement was generated by the ship of the Emperor of China and its attendant fleet (Châtellier 2002, p. 223). To modern eyes, this adds a rather melancholy note, as Francisco died never having set foot in China. At the time, it was no doubt received as glowing evidence of a successful Jesuit endeavor since the Society’s presence on the Chinese mainland would be definitively established by the Italians Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and Michele Ruggieri (1542–1607) in the early 1580s from their Portuguese base on the island of Macao.

7. Afterword

Much later, in another Protestant city in which the Jesuits and Catholicism had rediscovered their voice, Francisco’s death on the island of Shangchuang, within sight of the Chinese coast (Figure 4), would be rendered for the new Jesuit church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in London. The Gothic Revival church was begun in 1844 and opened, partly finished, in 1849 (Gilley 2016, pp. 15–17). The painting of Francisco’s death was made when the St Francis Xavier chapel was created in the 1880s (Hall 2016, pp. 64–65). Francisco is shown reclining in one of the beach shacks built by the Portuguese seafarers docked at Shangchuang. He is accompanied by a kneeling Chinese convert in typical dress and a sitting Indian man in a turban, in a very lyrical painting by Charles Alphonse Goldie (1835–1906). To the uninitiated, these two figures may simply represent the mass of Muslim and Buddhist converts Francisco made throughout the East. To those more conversant with Francisco’s biography, they are likely to be the Goanese servant Christovão and the Chinese convert, António de Santa Fé whom Francisco took with him on his departure from Goa for China in 1552 (Schurhammer 1982, pp. 561, 640–43). Of the two, António would go on to live a virtuous life of service to the Jesuits in India and China while Christovão descended rapidly into dissolution and was killed in Malacca not long after Francisco’s death (Schurhammer 1982, p. 642).

The painting is made for the late Romantic Victorian era with its taste for poignancy, just as the Madrid poetry justa in 1622 responded to an outstanding generation of intellectual and classically influenced poets, André Reinoso was commissioned to document the realities of Francisco’s mission for early seventeenth-century missionary Jesuits and Rubens to reinforce the Catholicism of Spanish-ruled, baroque Antwerp with its new Jesuit church and residence. These different acts of commemoration reflect Jesuit willingness to enable the best of artistic endeavor in the local culture and harness it for the furtherance of their catechetic purposes. They also demonstrate the ways in which the biography of Francisco de Javier was appropriated and packaged for the requirements of three major Habsburg capitals, two actual and one cultural, at the time of the canonization of the two Jesuit founding fathers.

In view of this, perhaps the last word should be given to Lope de Vega, as great a poet as playwright, and the concluding lines of the thirteen humorous redondillas he produced for the city of Madrid festivities in honor of Francisco under his picaresque pseudonym of Maestro Burguillos. These were not entered for the certamen (competition) of which he was secretary:

•    All is madness and change,
• he does well who serves God;
•  
•   who is a Lord worth serving,
• whose men are always content,
• who understands their thoughts
• and who cannot die.
(Mata Induráin 2004, p. 30)14