Ladawan:Faithorne frontispiece.jpg

English: Frontispiece, 1657, William Faithorne, V&A Museum no. E.949-1960

Techniques - Engraving, ink on paper

Artist/designer - William Faithorne, Richard Royston born 1599 - died 1686 (publisher)

Place - London, England

Dimensions - Height 27.6 cm (excluding mount) Width 19.4 cm (excluding mount)

Object Type - This print is an engraving. The image is made by cutting lines into the surface of a flat piece of metal, inking the plate and then transferring the ink held in the lines onto a sheet of paper.

People - This is the title-page to The Great Exemplar - The Life and Death of the Holy Jesus. The author, Jeremy Taylor, was an Anglican bishop. He was distinguished as a preacher and as the author of some of the most noted religious works in English. Taylor was chaplain to Charles I and later to the Royalist army. At one time, owing to his friendship with the Roman Catholic theologian Christopher Davenport, he was suspected of Roman Catholic tendencies, of which he cleared his name in a sermon at Oxford in 1638. After the Civil War he lived quietly in Wales writing devotional books. His period of greatest literary production was between 1646 and 1660.

Subject depicted -

The images on this frontispiece show the Virgin and Child, Purgatory, the Instruments of the Passion, and the four Evangelists. The use of such Roman Catholic imagery was only permissible between the covers of a book. The Greek text at the foot of the page translates as 'Thou wilt honour God perfectly if thou behave thyself so that thy soul may become His Image' (from In Aureum Carmen by Hierocles, quoting from the Pythagoreans).