Word Made Image

During the formative decades of the Reformation, Lucas Cranach filled sacred places with evangelical art distinctively grounded in biblicism. He and his workshop (including Lucas Cranach the Younger) were innovators in all the key areas of art production: the publication of the new Bibles, the invention of biblical imagery for the new theology (motifs including Law and Gospel, Christ blessing the children, Christ and the adulteress, and Crucifixion with the centurion), the reformation of the retable altar (including the first and most influential Protestant altarpieces), and the portrayal of the electors of Saxony as guardians of the new church and the promotion of Luther and Melanchthon as biblical authorities. From the perspective of traditional Christian art, their images often owed as much to a spirit of renovation as to the zeal of revolution. In opposition to iconoclastic Protestants, Cranach consistently demonstrates the vitality of visual biblical art as an evangelizing medium and as a theological discourse.

In the Beginning Was the Image

Renaissance artists represented the Bible as the preeminent monument of classical culture well before humanist scholars began their revolutionary efforts to recover the ancient forms of biblical texts. Once Renaissance humanism and the Reformation turned decisively to biblical philology (and began overturning the authority of the Vulgate Bible and medieval theology), artists supported their creation of innovative conceptualizations of the Bible. Remarkably, the three most influential artists of the Northern Renaissance—Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger—made profound contributions to all the major Renaissance and Reformation Bibles in Germany and Switzerland and to the biblical humanist movement generally. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the history of biblical humanism, including the emergence of new authoritative Bibles beginning with Erasmus’s first edition of the New Testament in the original Greek.

Dürer’s Reformation

This chapter offers an interpretation of Albrecht Dürer’s energetic promotion of the Reformation during the first decade of the movement. As evidenced from personal documents and artwork, his firm adherence to humanism shaped his perception and support of the Reformation. Unquestionably, Dürer advanced the ideals of biblical humanism as the foundation of the new movement in his portraits of Melanchthon, Erasmus, and biblical saints. He also captured the core principles of Luther’s Bible, including the status of good works in a theology of solafideism, in his innovative Last Supper (1523). His Four Holy Men (1526) is a powerful endorsement of Lutheran reform that reveals the political crises arising from Protestant activism. In this important work, Dürer acknowledges that the sudden diversity of Protestantism has fomented political chaos; nonetheless, he defends biblicism, specifically by portraying the preservation of biblicism (and a biblically based orthodoxy) as the right and responsibility of governmental authority.

Epilogue

The epilogue traces the impact of the early Protestant Bibles on the explosion of an exceedingly popular new genre: the Bible emblem book, especially those by Bernard Salomon, Virgil Solis, Jost Amman, Tobias Stimmer, and Matthäus Merian. As was the case with Dürer, Cranach, and Holbein, the new Protestant Bible designs were reused and imitated in diverse theological contexts, thereby illustrating the dynamic cultural transfer across language and confessional borders. Solis’s woodcut illustrations, for example, appeared in German, Dutch, Latin, and English Bibles by both Protestant and Catholic translators. Remarkably, Protestant designs informed not only Catholic but also Jewish biblical art (the Amsterdam Haggadah of 1695). Though any concept of textual unity faded with the Reformation, the Bible image emerged as a significant visual source for common cultural knowledge and experience.

The Artist as Biblical Humanist

Albrecht Dürer played a significant role in the emergence of the Renaissance Bible, promoting a new perception of its authority at a pivotal moment in the history of Christianity: the beginning of the age of print, followed by the onset of the Protestant Reformation. For artists across Europe, the breakthrough that suddenly raised the woodcut to the status of high art was Dürer’s 1498 publication of illustrated editions of the Book of Revelation, usually called the Apocalypse. During the decade 1494–1504, he developed a methodology for imitating classical art that represented the Bible as part of classical antiquity (Fall of Humanity, 1504). In these efforts, he worked to validate and advance the philological and historical methodologies of biblical humanism, the innovative academic discipline that revolutionized European Christianity and politics. The chapter analyzes Dürer’s Apocalypse, his representations of St. Jerome (author of the Vulgate translation), and his classicizing adaptations of the biblical Passion.

The Artist as Reformer

Lucas Cranach the Elder, a close friend of Martin Luther, not only produced the definitive visual record of the history of the Reformation but also became a major leader in the movement to transform Christianity. From 1518 onward, he designed art to advance the Reformation of the church across Germany and Europe. The Bible stood at the center of his media campaign. Cranach and his workshop designed the first Protestant Bible (1522) as well as subsequent imprints of Luther’s translations. He also developed innovative biblical propaganda (most importantly in the anti-papal Passion of Christ and Antichrist). Frequently in his immense oeuvre (including works designed for both Protestant and Catholic contexts) Cranach anchors the new biblicism in a humanist ideal of the authority of philology. A major accomplishment was his development of the portrait type of the professor of the Bible (preeminently Luther and Philipp Melanchthon) as an icon of the authority of humanist biblical philology for the Reformation.

Holbein and the Art of the Heterogeneous Bible

The new diversity of Bible versions and ensuing sociopolitical upheavals presented challenges with which publishers and artists, such as Hans Holbein, had to contend. Initially receiving commissions from printers in Basel (Johannes Froben, etc.), Holbein designed art for numerous German Bibles, a French humanist translation, the first complete Bible in English (Coverdale Bible, 1535), and a host of Catholic-oriented Bible texts, including the Vulgate and Erasmus’s Bible editions. He also created the first emblem Bible, the Icons of the Old Testament, one of the most influential Bibles of the Renaissance. Holbein focused on the Bible as image and history, not as text or theology, an approach that enabled him to accommodate the heterogeneity of humanist and Reformation Bibles. With few exceptions, Holbein’s designs could be reused in Bibles with different theological agendas, an artistic efficiency that contributed to the stability of the Bible image across a wide humanist and multi-confessional spectrum.