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Around the middle of the seventeenth century, a lingering controversy between different branches of the Franciscan order on the original dress of St Francis, erupted. The prominent Capuchin friar Carolus of Brussels (or Arenberg) engaged in this dispute through writing and collecting visual documentation on early Franciscan works of art from around Europe. When in 1658 all further publications about the history of Franciscan dress were banned by the Holy See, Carolus’ monolithic five-volume book on these and other subjects, the Clypeus Seraphicum, had to remain unpublished. Instead, Carolus reverted to displaying visual evidence to prove his point. Around 1660 he commissioned a series of paintings of Franciscan saints in landscapes from the Flemish artist Gillis Backereel, to display on the walls of his newly built Capuchin church in Brussels. Their life-size saintly figures were copies after thirteenth and fourteenth century works, and each was provided with a description stating the date of its prototype, the artist and the location of the original. Carolus thus used his church as a vast showcase for his censored opinion. He also published the underlying visual documentation in a print series entitled Icones antiquae.

Dr. Eelco Nagelsmit is an historian of art and architecture and lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Culture, History, and Antiquity at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and currently NIKI scholar-in-residence. Eelco’s project explores the seventeenth-century use of citation of older works of art as “historical evidence” in the context of religious polemics, aiming to elucidate how these works meant and for whom. Should this be situated in the context of the emergence of empiricism and historical criticism in antiquarian practices, or did it remain firmly embedded in a tradition of legitimizing miracles, visions, etc. as evidentia? How was plausibility and self-evidence produced and constructed through evidentiary images, and how was such “proof” exhibited and scrutinized, verified and authorized, or even counterfeited and falsified?