California Italian Studies

This essay examines the rise of the devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the eighteenth century and the debates that this devotion stirred within Catholicism concerning its iconographical representations. While images of the fleshy, anatomical heart of Jesus were perceived by the Jansenists as obscene and an ultimate Disrobing of Christ, the devotion, progressively sanitized in its representations, brought Christ to the center of Catholic devotional life again, and helped to move the much-criticized cult of the saints to the margins. While examining how the ultimate defining image of Christianity was so fiercely opposed and debated, I explore the thorny issue of the role of images in Catholicism.