A Cabinet of Religious Curiosities

In 1723, the first volumes of the seven-part book series, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-1737), were published in Amsterdam by the exiled Huguenot Jean Frederic Bernard. Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 engravings by the famous exiled Parisian engraver Bernard Picart, the Cérémonies provided a revolutionary insight into all the world’s religions by comparing ceremonies, customs, and rituals on an equal footing. Earlier research has already shown that Picart’s body of illustrations must be considered as a « source of, and target for, social agency », to put it in a Gellian way. Accordingly, Picart’s printed illustrations can be considered as tools to elicit emotions and demand the viewer’s active intervention by means of emotionally laden visual strategies. In this article, I intend to deepen our understanding of the way(s) in which Picart’s representations of religious ceremonies from all over the world worked as a profound force for change by looking into the various ways in which Picart tended to achieve his goal. In addition to earlier scholarly work that highlighted Picart’s use of the comparative method (Hunt et al. 2010), the « con‑visualization » of images (Von Wyss-Giacosa 2019), and the « dis‑orientation of the self » (Tarantino 2021), I argue that his artistic strategy is also highly indebted to the use of theatricality as a visual rhetorical and performative device to spread knowledge.