134 - Vivaldi, Agostino. Meditations on the Gospels Read Throughout the Year at Mass, and the Principal Mysteries of the Life and Passion of Our Lord. Accompanied by the illustrations of Father Girolamo Natale, Ziletti 1599. , A Monument to 16th-Century Flemish Engraving Art

Vivaldi, Agostino. Meditations on the Gospels Read Throughout the Year at Mass, and the Principal Mysteries of the Life and Passion of Our Lord. Accompanied by the illustrations of Father Girolamo Natale, Ziletti 1599. , A Monument to 16th-Century Flemish Engraving Art A folio volume containing the *Meditations on the Gospels Read Throughout the Year at Mass, and the Principal Mysteries of the Life and Passion of Our Lord*, corresponding to the illustrations by Father Girolamo Natale by Agostino Vivaldi, printed in Rome by Luigi Zanetti in 1599, with an early chalcographic title page dated Antwerp 1606 and 153 plates outside the text, based on drawings by Bernardo Passari and Martin de Vos, engraved on copper by the Wierix brothers, Karel de Mallery, Adrien, and Johann Collaert. Geronimo Nadal was born in Palma de Mallorca in 1505 and, at the age of twenty-three, met Saint Ignatius of Loyola, following him on his mission. The complex preparation of the *Imagines* took several years: Nadal composed the explanatory texts for the images between 1575 and 1578, while the production of the chalcographic plates was not initiated until 1580 by the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Claudio Acquaviva, thanks in part to funding from Clement VIII, to whom the work is dedicated. The *Imagines* constitute one of the most important expressions of the figurative culture of the early Society of Jesus: conceived in close connection with the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, they were used as a tool for evangelization in the missions in the Far East. The extraordinary quality of the plates, entrusted to the most prominent Flemish engravers of the time, makes the work a masterpiece of late 16th-century Flemish copperplate engraving. The masterpiece of sixteenth-century Flemish copperplate engraving