Mirroring images and visual translations: Ivories of the Good Shepherd from Portuguese India and their relation to Persian Crosses (16th-17th centuries)

Recent studies have demonstrated that the Jesuit accommodationist method took its first steps in Malabar, in the context of the missions among Saint Thomas Christians. However, the Latinization of these groups was part of a broader missionary strategy across Western Asia to bring local Churches under Catholic authority. The present study exposes the transregional links of this policy between India and Persia by focusing on the iconographic genesis of the "Indo-Portuguese Good Shepherd". The article innovatively explains that this original iconography emerged from the translation of Indo-Syriac motifs into Latin comparable terms. Special attention is given here to the so-called Persian Crosses: a specific class of granite bas-reliefs from Southern India. Through the combined analysis of Jesuit and Augustinian sources from Persia and India, the study demonstrates that the original composition of these ivories was based on the search for mirroring images between the Roman Catholic and local Christian traditions.