Abstract
ABSTRACTRight from its foundation in 1540, the Society of Jesus recognised the value and role of visual description (ekphrasis) in the persuasive rhetoric of Jesuit missionary accounts. Over a century later, when Jesuit missions were to be found on all the inhabited continents of the world then known to Europeans, descriptions of the new-found lands were being read for the entertainment as well as the edification of their Old World audiences. The first official history of the Society's missions in the vernacular, the volumes authored by Daniello Bartoli (1608–1685), played an important role in communicating a sense of the distinctiveness of the order's global mission. Referred to by Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) as the ‘Dante of baroque prose’, Bartoli developed a particularly variegated and intensely visual idiom to meet the challenge of describing parts of the world which the majority of his readers, including himself, would never visit.
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