“A Most Severe Judgment to All Peoples”: On the Circulation of Philippe Thomassin’s Last Judgement (1606) in the Early Modern Iberian World

Ianick Takaes de Oliveira

In 1606, the French engraver Philippe Thomassin—by then a seasoned member of Rome’s printmaking community—published a monumental, eight-plate print of the end times. His Last Judgment is a didactic, borderline-diagrammatic exposition of what is to be expected on doomsday while also concealing a Franciscan iconographical program fusing alchemy, Biblical eschatology, Joachimite prophecy, and missionary zeal.
Thomassin’s Last Judgment was successful across land and sea. From the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, it was used as a source for murals and canvases throughout Europe, Asia, and the Iberian Americas. Thus, as missionaries, merchants, soldiers, and explorers crisscrossed the globe in an effort to expand the Christian ecumene, Thomassin’s print helped to fulfill the evangelical injunction in its header that “a most severe judgment is brought upon all peoples.” Produced at a time when the Iberian powers and the Church were engaged in an international struggle against Protestants and the Ottomans, while also investing energy and resources in the conversion of indigenous peoples, Thomassin’s print was an important visual tool in the spiritual and colonial conflicts of the time. My research has three main goals: first, to assess the visual policies underlying the conception and production of Thomassin’s Last Judgment; second, to investigate the intercontinental circulation of this print across Europe and the Iberian world; finally, through a close analysis of the Last Judgments painted after Thomassin’s, to discuss the transatlantic exchange of apocalyptic ideas and its overall impact on the eschatological conceptions of the early modern European world.