Commemorating the Reformation after 500 Years: Just a Misunderstanding?

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Adventist Theological Society

Giselle Hasel

Art as Artillery: The Visual Battle Between the Reformers and the Counter-Reformation

There is a time for everything, the Bible says.

And there is a time prophetically for everything.

And Luther was at a crucial time and a season for every activity under heaven, a time to be silent and a time to speak.

You will see how bold and how courageous these men were because they were against the institution and they had the power to kill.

Now we might have the courage, but we have this thing called human rights we hide under.

So I'll go ahead and read it because I feel a little, I hate reading things but I'm being recorded so I better better say everything right.

So just 4 years after 1417 when the 95 thesis had been completed, a powerful publication which combined words and images were going to fall upon the established church like a bomb.

The publication was completed in May 1521 and its title was Paschal Christi und Antichristi.

The odds were stacked against Kranach the Elder, the artist, and authors Melanchthon, and they also consulted with Schwetzfeger.

They knew that Luther's book had been burned in Frankfurt and his excommunication had been official a short 5 months earlier in January.

The Authors also knew that Tetzel still demanded for Luther to be burned at the stake and to make matters worse, they did not know if Luther was alive since no 1 knew of his whereabouts since March.

Despite all these uncertainties and pressures, these brave souls approached this extremely controversial publication with boldness, courage, and conviction.

The time in which the Paschal Christi und Antichristi was being made would have been controversial on both sides.

On the reformer's side, there was an iconoclastic riot in Wittenberg, which escalated by the end of that same year.

Karlstadt and Zwilling were especially instrumental in bringing into question the usage of works of religious art and called for its destruction.

And on the Catholic side, their booklet was most decisively an assault on the Church and on the Pope.

Throughout history, images have been made to disseminate information.

The Catholic Church understood the power of art as early as the 6th century, during the reign of Pope Gregory the Great.

Art served as the venue for meditation, indoctrination, and above all, legitimation of power.

By the early 16th century, the accessibility to prints gave more power to the common layman, who especially used art as their strongest weapon against the Catholic Church.

Of course, this is the 95 Thesis, which got published.

Germany was at the forefront of this battle, especially in making prints, because the printing press had been invented in mines just 65 years prior to Luther's protest.

And printing what they called Fluchschrift, my German is horrible, but It's basically flukes is like fly, schrift is writings.

So now they could print and these things would fly.

And this is how the thesis then was also published.

Reformation ideologies use of art can be seen in a single printed pop-up pamphlet that dates to around 1500s.

This is an image that actually testifies of a popular dissatisfaction with the Pope since the Hussite movement in Bohemia.

On its front, it shows Pope Alexander VI as a stately pontiff with the inscription above stating Alexander VI Pontifex Maximus, which we all know is a title by a Roman emperor.

Then you would flap it, and look what you would see, a hideous image revealing the Pope as the devil, and then the inscription saying, I am the Pope.

People were dissatisfied with the corruption in the church, but didn't know how to articulate it theologically.

The common person did not have access to Scripture and thus the tools to properly engage.

It is no wonder that when Luther wrote his 95 thesis in Wittenberg, he became their hero.

Just 2 years later in 1520, Cranach the Elder created a portrait of Luther that gave the people an image of their hero, which was widely distributed.

Below the image, Cranach wrote in Latin that the paper and the artist would soon be forgotten, but not the image of Luther.

1 year later, in 1521, another print of Luther was released, circa January.

This was during the time when Luther would have been tried at Worms and subsequently kidnapped.

The print was made by Hans Baldung, who made Luther look like a saint with a halo and the Holy Spirit descending upon him like a dove.

The image was banned, hunted down, burned, and their owners were accused of idolatry by papal authorities.

A few prints survive, but often they have been mutilated.

As an example, here we see a defacement of Luther, including a mocking mustache making him look like the devil, and a black ink on his eye that actually cancels his heavenward gaze.

Anyhow, German artists like Albrecht Dürer and Kranach the Elder mastered the new technique of printmaking and became successful.

Ironically, Kranach, the 1 on the right here, the elder, sharpened his skills making a catalog of Friedrich the Wise's extensive relic collection, something he would later despise.

Both artists Albrecht and Cranach sided with the Reformation, but Cranach the elder had especially become close friends with Luther.

The publication Passionale Christi Unto Antichristi followed the tradition of religious art, And the booklet had 2 purposes.

It was actually a medieval prayer book, and the other purpose, of course, was an anti-papal propaganda.

And this kind of prayer, if we have time, we'll see how much we make it, you'll see how there's a positive side which is Jesus and on the other side there's the negative side which is the beast and they go back and forth like that which actually is congruent with Luther's theology of the 2 kingdoms, the kingdom of God and then the kingdom of earth.

And this is actually happens in in the Bible.

If you think of the Lord's Prayer, for instance, give us our daily bread as well as lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.

It is characteristic of the Christian life to be positioned in a place somewhere between the now and the not yet, between evil and redemption, temptation and deliverance.

The reader viewer using Paschana as a sort of prayer book is invited to meditate on the life of Christ and warned against the corruption of the papacy, moving between a meditative form of prayer and a negative form of petitionary prayer for delivery from the papal antichrist.

So the booklet was produced in the wake of an increase in sales of indulgences, so that it would be specifically contrast Christ's spiritual kingdom against papal ambitions for temporal kingdom.

It highlighted true discipleship and Christ's model of self-emptying.

Due to time constraints I'm only going to focus on a few illustrations on the booklet so if you you want to leave it or look at it in the the PowerPoint that's fine.

The first pair of images set the stage for the antithesis, sorry, drawing attention to the contrast between the perfect spiritual rule of Jesus Christ and the corrupt rule of the Pope on earth.

The image depicts Christ as he retreats to the wilderness as a group of followers attempt to crown him.

Beneath this illustration there are only Bible verses from John 18 or Luke 22 that says, my kingdom is not of this world, and the greatest amongst you should be like the smallest or the lowest.

On the other side, they only used papal decretals.

Very few times did they put their own words.

They were actually just taking what the popes had said about themselves.

So here we see a decreto on the Council of Vienna on the papal side that claimed papal power was superior to secular authorities.

Notice on the image how the Pope has a stronger army behind him than the Kings.

The second illustration, crown act develops further the contrast between heavenly and earthly kingdoms.

In these pages, we see the crown of thorns being placed on Jesus' head, which he accepts.

And we know that the Bible talks about, in the text below, about him receiving a purple cloak as a gesture of cynical mockery.

And look at the animals and how Kronach depicts the animals in these illustrations.

The dog in the foreground actually stands to represent the kind of people that are putting the crown of thorns on Jesus' head.

On the opposite side, of course, the Pope is accepting the triple tiara in all of its glory and he is enhanced with the whole ceremony.

You see there's people playing trumpets on the window outside.

But the text underneath refers to that purple cloak.

And it says from, again, Papal Decretals, it says, the Emperor Constantine has given us the Imperial crown, the purple cloak, the scarlet tunic, and other imperial regalia like this and the scepter.

The message of kenosis, which is self-emptying, is 1 of the main purposes of this book.

So here we have this kenosis happening as Jesus lowers himself to wash his disciples feet like a slave in the Roman Empire, like a servant.

Another verse in this underneath the image of Jesus bowing is basically talking about Luke 22, when the disciples are arguing amongst themselves who's going to be the greatest, because they thought Jesus was gonna be a temporal king.

And so this contrasting again the kingdom of heaven.

On the other side, the disciples are supposed to understand this inversion of material values from spiritual ones And Jesus taught them as he demonstrated by washing his their feet the image image shows them looking at each other in Dismay on the opposite image the Pope is seated High on his baldachin that is the little cloth thing over his head, receiving kings and princes who stooped down to kiss his feet.

And much like a Roman emperor, he has his hands raised and accepting this homage to himself.

Notice how the Pope is always placed spatially above Christ in the compositions of these 2 images.

The Pope is higher throughout the booklet.

There is an implied line also in the heads of the disciples going down towards Jesus's head, while the archbishops on the other side are looking up towards their Pope, and there is no dismay on their side.

There's expressions of pride and maybe an attempt to gain that position themselves.

I have included this 1, and I don't know which page it is on the booklet, but this is interesting to me because of what Mrs.

White talks about in the great controversy.

There was images like this in Jan Hus' time, and she talks about this in the great controversy.

So I think the closest thing we can get to it is this image right here because the reformers actually looked at what had been done during Hus's period and copied that, so that they are 1 in the same movement.

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Art as Artillery: The Visual Battle Between the Reformers and the Counter-Reformation

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