Bridget Heal

Introduction: Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe

This introduction situates the essays of this special issue within current scholarship on art and religious reform in early modern Europe. The first section considers iconoclasm and the settlements reached in its aftermath, and emphasizes the richness and diversity of the Protestant and Catholic visual cultures that evolved alongside movements for religious reform. The second section considers the individual essays, and draws out common themes: the relationship between image and word; artists’ and patrons’ responses to new understandings of Christian history and soteriology; images’ role in the construction of confessional boundaries, but also their ability to transgress those boundaries. The introduction highlights the plurality of methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, which reminds us that although attention to the social and political contexts in which images were produced and received is an essential part of both historical and art-historical analysis, the power of art can never be fully captured through words.

Lutheran Baroque: The Afterlife of a Reformation Altarpiece

This essay focuses on the dramatic seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Schneeberg Altarpiece (1539). The altarpiece was looted by imperial troops during the Thirty Years’ War, recovered by Schneeberg’s congregation and reinstalled in 1650. In 1709, however, it was dismantled during the baroque refurbishment of the church. Parts were then reset in an elaborate frame. The altarpiece’s history testifies, the essay argues, to images’ importance in Lutheran confessional culture. Moreover, its eighteenth-century setting, which deployed the visual idioms of the Italian baroque challenges the still-powerful paradigm of a Protestant aesthetic of plainness. The central Crucifixion panel of Cranach’s altarpiece was now presented as a relic, held aloft by angels. This transformation was driven in part by changes in taste, but also by a changing devotional context, in particular by a renewal of highly affective Passion piety within Lutheranism.

Art and piety in Lutheran Germany and beyond

Protestantism was, without doubt, a religion of the Word. During the early modern period, Lutheran religious life was built around the spoken and printed word: around the sermon; around the use of catechisms, prayer books and hymnals; and around Luther’s own translation of the Bible. The Wittenberg Reformation matured alongside the printing press, and vernacular print production – from polemical pamphlets to Bibles, catechisms and spiritual literature – was crucial to its history. The word had, as Thomas Kaufmann has recently argued, a “culture-shaping significance” for Lutheranism everywhere. Books not only disseminated Luther’s message but also became the most “profound symbol of Lutheran confessionalism.”1 This powerful paradigm of a wordand book-oriented Protestant piety and identity has, for too long, co-existed with a narrative that recounts the rejection of visual piety and marginalization of religious art. Reformation historians have recognized that Lutherans made extensive use of visual propaganda, and that the Wittenberg workshop of Lucas Cranach and his son produced numerous images in the service of Luther and his supporters. But Lutheran art is still characterised as primarily polemical and pedagogical, as unnecessary and incidental to true, word-based Protestant piety and to Lutheran confessional identity. In this brief essay I shall focus on one particular genre of Lutheran religious image: Bible illustration. The Bible – in particular in the reformer’s own 1545 translation – lay at the very heart of Lutheran culture. In Jonathan Sheehan’s words, “the Reformation made the Protestant Bible the engine of political, religious, and imaginative life, an engine defended and

„Zum Andenken und zur Ehre Gottes“: Kunst und Frömmigkeit im frühneuzeitlichen Luthertum

ABSTRACT This article explores the motivations behind Lutheran patronage of ecclesiastical art. Drawing on a number of case studies from amongst the lesser nobility in Albertine Saxony during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it asks why Lutherans gave images - pulpits, altars and epitaphs - to churches in the absence of any salvific imperative for doing good works. It argues that although individual and family commemoration had always been and remained an important motivator, we should not understand Protestant visual culture as purely commemorative. Lutheran patrons were prompted by their desire for dynastic representation, but also by a sense of duty to their local church and by their desire to express confessional loyalty. Yet other examples, such as a memorial church in the village of Prießnitz near Leipzig decorated in 1616 by Hans von Einsiedel as a memorial to his dead wife, show that after the Reformation, as before, religious and secular objectives sat side-by-side. Such monuments are in no sense secularized - their most obvious parallel was perhaps the Lutheran funeral sermon, which aimed to console, to promulgate confessional norms and to strengthen communal ties as well as to commemorate. The article closes with a consideration of other possible motivations, presenting sources that demonstrate the continued importance of pleasing God through such donations.