How Lucas Cranach the Elder Went From Making Icons to Agitprop

On Christmas in 1521, a former priest in peasants’ clothes delivered such an incendiary homily that, one chilly and clear evening shortly after, the church buildings of that red-roofed, gothic city can be stripped of their sacred statues. With hammer, chisel, and mallet, zealous reformers in Wittenberg, Germany set out within the metropolis the place the Reformation had began solely 5 years earlier than, now deigning to destroy what they perceived as popish idols. Bricks hurled via stained-glass home windows and white paint splashed upon partitions; over-tipped statues of saints and shrines scattered in naves. Not even Wittenberg Cathedral, to whose entrance door Martin Luther had nailed his “Ninety-five Theses” in 1517, can be spared the iconoclastic fury. Luther had absconded shortly earlier than, his life endangered after his excommunication, however Andreas Karlstadt, that fiery preacher who now ministered in his place, hewed to an much more radical imaginative and prescient. “Photos convey dying to those that worship or venerate them,” he wrote in a pamphlet that justified this evening of damaged statues. “Our temples could be rightly referred to as murderers’ caves, as a result of in them our spirit is stricken and slain.” 

Karlstadt was at struggle towards artwork itself, however his mentor, who was at present translating the Bible into German whereas in hiding in Wartburg Fortress, disagreed. For Luther, it was essential to exorcize the worship of pictures from the center; whether or not they have been on an altar or not was incidental. As such, Karlstadt “doesn’t preach religion,” Luther thundered in a 1525 sermon. “Sadly, solely now do I see that.” When Luther returned from exile to helm the Reformation, certainly, he greeted the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (the title differentiating him from his much less gifted son), warmly. Cranach, in flip, would develop a distinctly Protestant imagery that changed sacredness with utility, functioning basically as propaganda minister for the reformer.

Printed in 1523, with textual content from Luther and his lieutenants, Cranach’s unequivocally titled woodcut broadsheet “The Papal Ass” was a major instance of the painter’s propagandistic duties. In it, the Catholic Church is a chimerical nightmare composed of the bare-breasted physique of a girl with a donkey’s head and reptilian legs and arms, one foot cloven and the opposite clawed. Behind this freakish creature is a transparent view of Rome’s Tiber River, Castel Sant’Angelo and the Papal Jail seen alongside its banks. It was scandalous and obscene, offensive and blasphemous — and efficient.

If a theological treatise spoke to the thoughts, “The Papal Ass” communicated in a special register. Opposite to his expertise — Cranach was among the many most achieved artists of portraits, altars, and luxurious classical scenes within the Northern Renaissance — there’s nothing significantly expert on this crude cartoon. However on this occasion, ability and method have been secondary to Cranach’s (and Luther’s) intentions. “The tone of the work is caustic,” writes Lawrence Buck in The Roman Monster: An Icon of the Papal Antichrist in Reformation Polemics (2014), whereby Luther denounces the “papacy by explicating the elements of a portentous monstrosity as symbols of papal corruption and error.” From Cranach’s workshop and the printing presses of Wittenberg, this novel German invention of propaganda would unfold the Reformation all through Europe, fracturing Christendom. Artwork would endure an ideological shift from being interpreted via the area of faith into the realm of politics. Cranach’s work would show that the woodblock print could possibly be as highly effective as Gutenberg’s press.

In contrast to Karlstadt, Luther cannily understood the facility of images, even when his understanding of artwork itself wasn’t sacralized. For hundreds of years, Catholic worshipers had discovered the finer factors of scripture, ritual, and religion whereas standing earlier than the Bible for illiterates: mosaics and frescoes, icons and statues. There was a potent lesson within the potential of images to sway a thoughts and convert a soul. As Mark U. Edwards Jr. argues in Printing, Propaganda and Martin Luther (2004), the “medium of printing was used for the primary time in Western historical past to channel a ‘mass’ motion to have an effect on change,” whereas Philip M. Taylor claims in Munitions of the Thoughts: A Historical past of Propaganda from the Historic World to the Current Period (1995) that the Reformation was the “first motion of any sort, non secular or secular, to make use of the brand new presses for overt propaganda.”

Certainly, even when to start with there was the Phrase, it could not be by that medium alone that Luther would conquer, for regardless of the iconoclasm of extra radical Protestants, it was imagery like that in “The Papal Ass” that may act upon the thoughts and coronary heart of worshipers in the way in which {that a} crucifix or a relic as soon as had. Luther was many issues — a superb pugilist, an earthy interlocutor, a profane thinker, and a quick-witted theologian — however an artist he was not. For that, the early successes of Lutheranism owe a lot to the visible rhetoric of Cranach, who started his profession as a Catholic craftsman producing sacred pictures and ended it as a Protestant artist manufacturing Reformation agitprop. Artwork, as we all know it right this moment, is in some ways a class solely made potential by the Reformation: The severing of the sacred from the consultant opened up the very risk of making works for their very own sake. What aided Luther within the deployment of affective imagery — of propaganda that labored — was the ability, expertise, and genius of a painter like Cranach.  

Cranach’s 1529 portrait of Luther, unique held by St. Anne’s Church in Augsburg, is an encapsulation of the brand new Protestant aesthetics. Luther is depicted within the somber black robe and flat cap of a scholar, the muted hue of his modest gown an undifferentiated subject of darkness. The previous monk’s visage seems above that aircraft, offset by an uncanny inexperienced background. The reformer’s face isn’t rendered charitably; although keen-eyed, he’s jowly and double-chinned; a slight stubble brushes him with a dissolute look. This isn’t a portray of an angel, a saint, or a pope — it is a portrait that asks us to behold a fallen man, which is exactly Cranach’s (and Luther’s) level. The work is not any icon, however relatively an artifact of a religion that maintains a priesthood of all believers, irrespective of how scruffy or fats they could be. A 1526 portrait of the identical topic held in a personal assortment, arguably a draft of the later model, is much more unsparing in its unflattering verisimilitude.

Medieval and Renaissance Catholicism, with their nativities and crucifixions, pietas and final suppers, hagiographies and martyrdoms, produced probably the most potent inventive language within the Western world, in order that the forging of a wholly new non secular visible vocabulary wasn’t a small job. After stripping the altars and white-washing cathedral partitions, Protestantism had a deep void to fill. Artists like Cranach stepped in — appropriating the very traditions Protestantism was ostensibly in riot towards. The altarpiece that Cranach made for the parish of the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Weimar demonstrates the ambivalent place of a Protestant artist: On the middle of the composition is the crucified Christ, his aspect wound spraying out water and blood — the identical type of imagery that extra radical Protestants have been smashing and burning in cathedrals throughout Europe. On the decrease left is one other picture of Christ in pink gown, straddling a monstrous demon within the conventional pose of St. Michael casting Devil from Heaven, right here configured because the hero who harrowed Hell. Beneath the cross is a lamb, a normal image for the sacrificial Messiah. If this didn’t appear Catholic sufficient, simply look to the best — there’s Christ once more, however now he’s joined by Cranach in prayerful supplication and Luther holding open a Bible, the spray of blood from God’s wound seeming to anoint the reformer himself. 

Much more exceptional is Cranach’s “Allegory of Legislation and Grace,” (c. 1529) now held by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. Drawing from Medieval allegory whereas presenting a doctrine international to that very same Medieval theology, Cranach illustrates probably the most potent through-line within the battle between Catholics and Protestants: What must be performed to benefit particular person salvation? On the left of the diptych, the artist illustrates what Lutherans see because the prophet of the legislation, of fine works and ethical conduct. Right here, a presumably stalwart and upstanding man is nonetheless hounded by a duo of demons, one grey-faced and bestial, the opposite a skeleton, that pushes him towards a gleaming, lurid-red, devil-infested Hell. Within the higher left nook of this portray’s half, Adam and Eve stand with Eden’s tree, an intimation of that which condemned humanity within the first place. Diagonally throughout from them stand a gathering of bearded, distinctly rabbinic-appearing males, certainly one of whom clutches the stone tablets of the Decalogue. This conflation of Catholicism and Judaism, concurrent with Luther’s personal rising antisemitism, presents each religions as stiff-necked, obstinate, and legalistic. 

Against this, the best half of the diptych presents Cranach’s allegory of affection, which is to say, of religion. One other crucifixion facilities the portray, whereas at its base, John the Baptist explains the finer factors of salvation to the identical man who on the opposite aspect of the composition is damned. “Therefore it comes that religion alone makes righteous,” wrote Luther in his Commentary on Romans (undated). For Catholic theologians simply starting to mount the Counter-Reformation, this side of Luther’s instructing was among the many most heretical. They feared {that a} cleaving between advantage and religion would encourage the second on the expense of the primary, that folks would abandon morality whereas believing themselves sanctified. 

Having discovered one thing about persuasive mass media from Cranach, anti-Protestant polemicists started to print their very own propaganda. If the Catholic Church was depicted as a monstrous ass by Cranach, then printmaker Hans Brosamer would think about the daddy of the Reformation as an apocalyptic beast in “The Seven-Headed Luther” (1529), conflating him with the Dragon from Revelation. To Brosamer, Luther was a heretic, a zealot, and a assassin, amongst different issues, his identification as riven because the schism he instigated throughout the Church. In accordance with the accompanying textual content, Luther was a madman who “preaches what the mob desires to listen to.”

5 centuries later, the autos-da-fé having cooled, the distinction between the unusual pictures in “The Papal Ass” and “The Seven-Headed Luther” each appear uncanny, eccentric, odd. From the gap of half a millennia, with such sectarian particulars now obscure for most individuals, both aspect solely seems a lot as if one another. Price contemplating, nevertheless, is how a lot we additionally see ourselves up to now, via a mirror darkly. For if Cranach demonstrated something, it’s that the sacred utility of pictures could be repurposed: Whether or not in prayer or propaganda, artwork or promoting, the image nonetheless casts a fascinating gentle.