Jan David launches his catechetical emblem book Veridicus Christianus (True Christian; Antwerp: Jan Moretus, 1601) with five chapters on the nature of human sin, chief amongst which is the sin of idolatry (Fig. 7.1). Following chapter 5, he appends a complementary series of ten chapters on heresy, the most heinous form of idolatry, and on the chief means of combatting its pernicious effects – namely, anti-heretical image-making. Heresy must needs be challenged by recourse to images, argues David, and to shore up this point he traces the lineage of anti-heretical image-makers back to Moses, who was taught by God to construe leprosy as a typus haereseos (image of heresy), and then to Christ, who renewed the Mosaic image by substituting for it the more vivid parabolic image of a ravening wolf in sheep's clothing. My chapter examines David's bipartite notion of the heretical image, its body and soul, as a prelude to exploring the fundamental opposition he adduces between heretical and anti-heretical image-making. I begin by perusing David's conviction that heresy itself operates or, better, propagates through images. His account of the heretical image can be seen to arise from the parallel he draws between heresy and idolatry. Thereafter, the paper shifts focus to the topic of orthodox image-making. What sorts of defensive image must the good Christian devise to make incontrovertibly evident the heretic's modus operandi, which involves razing the edifice of faith and then building a counter-edifice from these spolia? And how do such images, more particularly David's emblems on heresy, purport to contravene heresy's pernicious effects?

The Veridicus Christianus consists of one hundred emblems, each subsuming four components: a titulus (title or motto), inscribed above the pictura (pictorial image); the pictura proper, overlaid with Roman capitals that correspond to loci textuales in the adjacent prose commentary; epigrammatic couplets written in Latin, Dutch, and French scripts, the first line in the form of an interrogatio (question), the second, of a responsio (response); and the prose commentary that embeds the pictura and constitutes the bulk of the chapter. The chapters centre on the picturae, closely responding to them, as well as amplifying and explicating their imagery. Designed and engraved by Theodoor Galle, with the assistance of his brother Cornelis, the plates vary in kind: some appear performatively to illustrate a moral precept or point of doctrine conveyed by the narrative mottos and epigrams;