ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the two prints commissioned by Naples officials in which the contaminated/contaminating body is given remarkable visibility. With the deployment of print within devotional practices of healing, the bodily idea of the image became entangled with the contaminating aspects of the new technology of print itself. Nicholas Perrey introduced a number of key changes to the planned image, starting with the inclusion of newer saints, ones with particular currency in devotional healing prints. Brought into visibility within the spaces of everyday life, the body's transition between life and death becomes particularly uncertain. In effect, the expected role of the sacred sphere as protector of the city seems to have diminished, and now can only be evoked as the vision of one of those whose struggle against the plague is acknowledged by the broadside. In Perrey's print, St Francis Xavier takes centre stage as the front line in the crucial confrontation between the sacred and contaminated.
