Two years after the foundation of the Society of Jesus in 1540, the first Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier disembarked at the Portuguese colony of Goa on the eastern seaboard of India. In rapid sequence, overseas missions were established on every known continent, including Japan (1549), China (1561), Mughal India (1580), and Paraguay (1609). Gauvin Bailey’s ambitious study covers the artistic production of these four outer-circle Jesuit enterprises, highlighting their affinities and regional differences over more than two centuries until the Jesuits were expelled, in 1759 from Portuguese territories and 1767 from the Spanish empire. This dense volume, based on broad visual and documentary data, fills a vacuum in the otherwise rich literature on Jesuit history. What emerges from Bailey’s art historical analysis is the astonishing power of images as worldwide carriers of the evangelistic message and, more importantly, as the lynchpin in the official Jesuit program of accommodation to indigenous cultural traditions. Bailey contends that the key to Jesuit success lay in their tolerance and flexibility toward their potential converts or what he calls a “global partnership” between Jesuit and indigenous peoples. Artwork is used as a major index to measure this partnering. In one of the more useful sections...