Images Re-Vues (Nov 2020)
Une théologie de l’image mariale
Abstract
This paper examines the meaning of the event related by a chronicler named Antonio Ortiz through two short narratives (relaciones) printed in 1600 in Madrid: the arriving at the English Jesuit college of Valladolid, in presence of the queen Margaret of Austria, of a wooden statue of the Virgin ‘outraged’ by the iconoclast attack of the English when the sack of the town of Cadiz in 1596. The college itself has been founded in 1589 in the heart of Castile under the royal patronage of Philip ii. At the moment of the translation of the statue of the Virgin to Valladolid, his son and successor Philip iii was reigning since he had died in 1598. This arriving and its narrative form make this solemnly staged event an act of founding or refounding the jesuit college dedicated to instruct who would were bound to be future martyrs in heretic England. In this paper the image is not examined under its metaphorical form but under its singular material aspect (it was stabbed with a knife), which is at stake in all the theological discourse in the Catholic World after the Council of Trent. It is the object of the foundation but also the object founded, as it is renamed on this occasion. It founds a political and religious regime of catholic reformation and, with its safe haven, it is placed at the center of the universal Catholicity.
