Athanasius Kircher published his Arca Noë in 1675 and continued a long tradition of Christian exegesis featuring the Ark as the Church. The Ark also remains the framework of a form of zoology, from which he tried to extract mythical legacies by subtracting in particular the serpent or the dove from their symbolic liabilities or assets. Kircher endeavoured to construct an equivalence between the Ark, the Church and the Empire and mobilised this figure as an invocation of Spain on the scale of a world that already belonged to the past. The treatise is dedicated to the young Charles II, whose portrait appears in a frontispiece rich in multiple readings, in the wake of the great printed and illustrated works produced by the Society of Jesus throughout the 17th century.