In 1606, French engraver Philippe Thomassin, a prominent figure in Rome’s printmaking scene, created an eight-plate Last Judgment. Thomassin’s engraving was successful across land and sea. From the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, it was used as a source for murals and canvases throughout southern Europe, western and eastern Asia, and in the Iberian Americas. Produced at a time in which the Iberian powers and the Church were engaged in an international struggle against Protestants and the Ottomans as well as set on the conversion of indigenous peoples, Thomassin’s print served as a visual tool in the spiritual and colonial conflicts of the time. My research examines: (1) the visual strategies behind Thomassin’s print in Counter-Reformation Rome; (2) its intercontinental dissemination and hybridization in non-European contexts; and (3) its impact on transatlantic apocalyptic imagery and early modern eschatology.

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