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This article discusses an altarpiece by Luca Giordano painted for the church of San Francesco Saverio (now San Ferdinando) in Naples in 1685. Described in contemporary sources as “St. Francis Xavier baptizing the people of Japan,” the painting reveals little about Japan or Jesuit missionary efforts in Asia; instead, the painting discloses much about how Jesuits approached their mission in Naples. Here, Jesuit missionaries found a heterogeneous environment, filled with a variety of different types of potential converts, including unruly nobles, superstitious peasants, fallen women, and a large number of Muslim slaves. Giordano’s altarpiece uses the figures of St. Francis Xavier and St. Francisco de Borja to exemplify two models for the conversions that Neapolitan Jesuits hoped to bring about—the baptism of non-Christians and the religious reform of those who had been born Christian. This article will demonstrate that Giordano’s altarpiece thematized the transformation of heterodoxy into orthodoxy, while also contributing to a Jesuit discourse that characterized Naples as being another “Indies,” an environment mired in religious heterodoxy and thus attractive to ambitious Jesuits who longed for the mission fields of far off lands.

Converting “the Indies” of Naples in Luca Giordano’s St. Francis Xavier Baptizing Indians Altarpiece