Early Modern Printed Images Assembled in the Iconographic Collection of Father Charles Cahier, s.j.

From the origin of printed images rose the practice of their physical handling. Early modern woodcuts, engravings and etchings were frequently cut out, pasted and assembled by their subsequent owners for devotional, aesthetic or epistemic purposes. Regarding this last point, the plasticity of printed images made them apt aids for a documentary role. A methodological shift has taken place in recent decades in the study of print, from seeing the printed image as an apparently passive tool of dissemination and visual delectation, toward considering its role as a generative, active agent that was responsible for driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production. The objective of this paper is to address the question of the construction of historical knowledge through old images via a little-studied Jesuit print collection. The iconographic collection of Father Charles Cahier, s.j. (1807-1882), held in Lyon constitutes a singular graphic set, assembled and mounted by plates. Early modern Italian, French and Flemish prints and drawings were collected for the purpose of documentation and analysis in Christian art history. My aim is to assess the impact of these images and their montage on the historical imagination.