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This article sees the light as the result of a research accomplished at the Xaverian Historic Archives, in Bogotá. The investigation allowed the author to have direct access to the documentary files gathered from different national and international archives, on the goods and chattels which made up the decoration of the church owned by the Society of Jesus in Santa Fe de Bogotá. The actual enclosure, in its decoration, has been modified over the years, having been adapted to the taste of the epoch and to the historic circumstances by which it has been marked, like the fact that it was converted into pro-Cathedral, after the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Kingdom of Spain, in the latter part of the 18th century. Thus, the claim of this article is to try to unveil the first level of the theological-spiritual and didactic reading of the original decorative ensemble of the temple that belonged and still belongs, to the Society of Jesus. Therefore, we will realize a reflection on how the image, the art, that was used always by the Catholic Church to transmit the faith, is a fundamental tool to express a theological content which could be understood by the persons who contemplated it; and we will propose the possible keys of reading, obviously, from the point of view of the Ignatian spirituality, so as to explain from it, the message that the Jesuits were sending to the Bogotanian people, or to any other faithful, who would enter into the sacred place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces to the iconography of Thesenblätter - posters advertising the theses of academic disputations, characteristic feature of an academic disputation in Catholic universities since the 16th until the 17th century - as a proper and important genre of Catholic European visual culture of the Baroque and Rococo. Next it introduces the Thesenblatt "Die Weltmission der Gesellschaft Jesu" (The World Mission of the Society of Jesus) engraved in 1664 by Bartholomäus Kilian to a design by Johann Christoph Storer. The article shows the wide and at the same time varied use of the religio cordis as imagetic language in this German Thesenblatt and points out how it characterizes the Jesuit world mission in particular and the Jesuit theology in general. The pictorial language of the religion of the heart establishes the idea of continuity between Jesuit theology, the Mass of Gregory, great mystics of medieval times and the Catholic reform and sets up an interface with the Renaissance world, to reinforce and promote the triple way of medieval mysticism as an ideal and orthodox spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]