An Illustrated Life of Christ Presented to the Chinese Emperor

A renewed attention to visual culture is one of the recent developments in the study of cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The subject of this book is the illustrated Life of Christ presented to the Chinese emperor in 1640 by the Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell S.J. (1592-1666). The origin of the work is a small parchment booklet with coloured miniature paintings based on a wide variety of prints by well-known European engravers