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When Pompeo Batoni, mindful of the mystic visions of Marguerite Marie Alacoque, painted his renowned Sacred Heart of Jesus (1765-1767), he like her was engaging with a meditative visual theme that the Society of Jesus had already codified by the 1640s. This essay examines several key Jesuit and Jesuit-inspired Flemish emblem books, asking how and to what ends they visualize the mimetic-affective relationship between the Lord's heart and the votary's. These books present the Sacred Heart and the spiritual exercises attached to it as the highest form of image-based prayer directed at uniting the exercitant with Christ. Jesuit emblematists treat spiritual conformation as a pictorial process, and concomitantly they construe exercitants as skilled artisans whose expert manipulation of various materials secures the Lord's likeness in their hearts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]