The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe

As a social phenomenon and a commonplace of internet culture, virality provides a critical vocabulary for addressing questions raised by the global mobility and reproduction of early modern artworks.This book uses the concept of virality to study artworks’ role in the uneven processes of early modern globalization. Drawing from archival research in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Stephanie Porras traces the trajectories of two interrelated objects made in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century: Gerónimo Nadal’s Evangelicae historiae imagines, an illustrated devotional text published and promoted by the Society of Jesus, and a singular composition by Maerten de Vos, St.Michael the Archangel. Both were reproduced and adapted across the early modern world in the seventeenth century.Porras examines how and why these objects traveled and were adopted as models by Spanish and Latin American painters, Chinese printmakers, Mughal miniaturists, and Filipino ivory carvers.Reassessing the creative