Title Page, from Passion of Christ

A symbolically charged heraldic arrangement—including the spear, sponge, lash, and other instruments of Christ’s Passion—occupies the bulk of this oval design. Although the rest of the sheet contains significantly more text than the Sadeler and Gheeraerts signatures seen below the image in each subsequent print, it is similar in many ways to the grotesque imagery throughout the series. The blank background here makes one marked exception, as the other scenes play out before a unifying netting of black crosshatched lines.