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Claude Mellan’s 1683 engraving of the Resurrection contains a legend that invites us to seek out the ideological motivations of the image. The phrase per se resurgens is not a citation of a biblical passage, but a synthetic allusion to a debate about the resurrection of the Messiah that had already arisen in the first few centuries AD and which, in the time of Mellan, had become topical within the context of the discussions of the trinity that so agitated the theologians of the Christian confessions. This study reconstructs the theological question underlying one of the masterpieces of seventeenth-century graphic art.