The second volume, Ecclesiae Anglicanae trophæa, consists of an engraved title page and 35 engraved plates of the English College in Rome, which depict exclusively English martyrs. The third and final work in this sammelband consists of a single page of letterpress and five additional plates; the recto of the letterpress leaf bears the title and a preface to the reader, the verso an Admonitio ad lectorem.

Between 1581 and 1583, Circignani completed cycles of martyr paintings for three Roman colleges under the jurisdiction of the Jesuits. He undertook the first two projects for the churches of the German-Hungarian College at Rome, S. Apollinaire and S. Stefano Rotondo, at the behest of Pope Gregory XIII, a great patron of the Jesuits. These first two cycles depicted the grisly deaths of early Christian martyrs, such as those who were persecuted under Nero.

Modeled after Niccolò Circignani’s (now lost) frescoes in the Roman Catholic English College in Rome, Cavalieri’s virtuosic and provocative plate books constitute exemplary specimens of Counter-Reformation visual propaganda from the late sixteenth century. Their images of Christian and Roman Catholic suffering along a continuum, stretching back to the primitive Church and forward to the contemporary confessional theater of Europe, offer powerful early modern arguments for confessional authority, continuity, and commitment. Calibrated both to inspire young students at the English College destined for the English Mission by the courage of their immediate predecessors, these images served the concomitant purpose of hardening the resolve of persecuted Catholics in England and living in exile abroad. This rich register of images presents a host of complex visual resources for the exploration of confessional violence and, ironically, the magnificence of the human form even in the face of unimaginable brutality.

Following the excommunication of Protestant Queen Elizabeth by Pius V in 1570 and the arrival of the first Jesuit missionaries in England a decade later, the Elizabethan regime undertook a coercive policy to root out Catholic dissenters through heavy fines, social alienation, religious deprivations, and even public executions such as those depicted here. In this context, these Circignani-Calvalieri plate books offered up a powerful rejoinder to John Foxe’s contemporary martyrological Acts and Monuments, which illustrated similarly brutal scenes of Protestants suffering at the hands of Elizabeth’s elder sister, Catholic Queen Mary I. The violent coercions of imprisonment, torture, and even execution suffered by these Marian Protestants were portrayed throughout multiple editions of Foxe’s vast volumes in massive galleries of (albeit less expressive) woodcuts, which were also treated as natural extensions of the sufferings of the early Christian martyrs. While all of these images attempted to “speak for themselves,” it is notable that the brief, informative captions in the Catholic version of this visual-polemical traditional of Reformation and Counter-Reformation apology appear exclusively in Latin rather than the English vernacular. In contrast to Foxe, they were presented to a much broader, polyglot, and cosmopolitan—if also perhaps learned and ecclesiastical—audience spanning the whole of continental Europe.