Under the sign of the cross in the kingdom of Kongo

This dissertation brings together African and European historical documents and art objects to examine the correlated role of artistic form and religious thought in the cross-cultural encounter between Catholicism and Kongo worldview in early modern Central Africa. Focusing on the period of Italian Capuchin activity in the Kongo along the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this study analyses how the heterogeneous European and African systems of beliefs and visual syntaxes shaped each other and the entire visual and ritual environment of the powerful kingdom of Kongo. The Capuchins arrived in Central Africa in the mid-seventeenth century, sent by the Pope at the demand of the Kongo crown. There, they deployed primarily visual catechization methods to "infuse devotion into the people" which they exposed in richly illustrated manuscripts for the edification of future missionaries. (Chapter 1) The friars found in the Kongo a highly organized polity which kings had strategically adopted Christianity at the turn of the sixteenth century as a tool to reinforce their legitimacy. The rulers had at the outset located the new faith in continuity with local religious and political practices through a strategic reformulation of the kingdom's fundamental mythological narrative and visual syntax. (Chapter 2) Working in what they perceived as a Christian land, the Capuchins inscribed their apostolate within the pre-existing social and political, and to some extent religious, structures of the region. To develop the Church in the already converted kingdom, they used European devotional objects, theatrical staging of rituals, and linguistic translation to operate a point to point replacement of the persisting idolatrous practices by devotions directed to the true God. (Chapter 3) The methods and objects used by the Capuchins in their apostolate had a profound impact on the development of Christianity and Christian art forms in the region, where Franciscan imagery and devotions took on a prominent role. (Chapter 4) Eventually, Kongo art of Christian form bore witness in its iconography and style to the creation of a new and consistent system of beliefs and artistic expressions that stood at the crossroads between Central African and Italian Baroque visual syntax and religious discourses. (Chapter 5)