This book presents Cranach's Reformation painting to a broader audience and explains the pictorial strategies Cranach devised to clarify and interpret Lutheran thought. For specialists in Reformation history, this study offers an interpretation of Cranach's art as an agent of religious change. For historians and students of Renaissance art, this study explores the defining work of a major sixteenth-century artist.

The collection reveals how scholars of the 1970s through the 1990s argued the importance of previously unconsidered questions about the shape of medieval familial experience, and how their mutual information and criticism has refined and added to this investigation in the intervening period.

A revealing new account of the life and work of this early modern German printmaker. This captivating biography brings Lucas Cranach the Elder into the spotlight for the twenty-first century. The illuminating narrative unveils an artist whose vision transcended personal brilliance, seeking rather to elevate his nascent nation. Perhaps Cranach’s most remarkable achievement lay in forging a robust Lutheran community around his work. Using prints, the prevailing medium of mass communication, he developed an intricate symbolism that resonated with the populace in early modern Germany. On the other hand, Cranach also produced many paintings of female nudes, which this book returns to their central place in the artist’s life as symbols of Germany’s rich cultural connections with ancient Greece and Rome.

John Dillenberger has written the first comprehensive account of the relation between the visual arts and theological currents in Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century. With an astute knowledge of the theology of the period and a keen interest in the lives and work of prominent artists, Dillenberger makes incisive connections that illuminate the cultural movements of the time. Images and Relics considers both popular and professional art within distinct religious contexts. It examines the works of Matthias Grunewald, Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Michelangelo, Hans Holbein the Younger, Hans Baldung Grien, and Albrecht Altdorfer, and demonstrates how these artists expressed and transformed the reigning theological ideas of their day. The book also addresses the range of iconoclastic movements from the 1520s to the 1570s, particularly in northern Europe. Finally, Dillenberger reflects on the ambiguity of the history of this period and its continuing impact on modern-day life.

Through an examination of material and institutional circumstances, through the study of work shop practices and of technical and aesthetic experimentation, this book seeks to give an account of the ways in which Renaissance prints were realized, distributed, acquired, and handled by their public.

This compelling book retells and revises the story of the German Renaissance and Reformation through the lives of two controversial men of the sixteenth century: the Saxon court painter Lucas Cranach (the Serpent) and the Wittenberg monk-turned-reformer Martin Luther (the Lamb). Contemporaries and friends (each was godfather to the other's children), Cranach and Luther were very different Germans, yet their collaborative successes merged art and religion into a revolutionary force that became the Protestant Reformation. Steven Ozment, an internationally recognized historian of the Reformation era, reprises the lives and works of Cranach (1472-1553) and Luther (1483-1546) in this generously illustrated book. He contends that Cranach's new art and Luther's oratory released a barrage of criticism upon the Vatican, the force of which secured a new freedom of faith and pluralism of religion in the Western world. Between Luther's pulpit praise of the sex drive within the divine estate of marriage and Cranach's parade of strong, lithe women, a new romantic, familial consciousness was born. The "Cranach woman" and the "Lutheran household"--both products of the merged Renaissance and Reformation worlds--evoked a new organization of society and foretold a new direction for Germany.

Devils, ghosts, poltergeists, werewolves, and witches are all covered in this book about the "dark side" of supernatural beliefs in early modern Europe, tapping period literature, folklore, art, and scholarly writings in its investigation. The dark side of early modern European culture could be deemed equal in historical significance to Christianity based on the hundreds of books that were printed about the topic between 1400 and 1700. Famous writers and artists like William Shakespeare and Albrecht Dürer depicted the dark side in their work, and some of the first printed books in Europe were about witches. The pervasive representation of these monsters and apparitions in period literature, folklore, and art clearly reflects their power to inspire fear and superstition, but also demonstrates how integral they were to early modern European culture. This unique book addresses topics of the supernatural within the context of the early modern period in Europe, covering "mythical" entities such as devils, witches, ghosts, poltergeists, and werewolves in detail and examining how they fit in with the emerging new scientific method of the time. This unique combination of cultural studies for the period is ideal for undergraduate students and general readers.

Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation—a reformed drama—and a producer of Protestant habits of thought—a reforming drama. According to Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society. Drawing on the insights of symbolic anthropologists, Diehl explores the relationship between the suppression of late medieval religious cultures, with their rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James. Questioning long-held assumptions that the reformed religion was inherently antitheatrical, she shows how the reformers invented new forms of theater, even as they condemned a Roman Catholic theatricality they associated with magic, sensuality, and duplicity. Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.

With his 95 Theses, Martin Luther advanced the radical notion that all Christians could enjoy a direct, personal relationship with God—shattering years of Catholic tradition and obviating the need for intermediaries like priests and saints between the individual believer and God. The text of the Bible, the Word of God itself, Luther argued, revealed the only true path to salvation—not priestly ritual and saintly iconography. But if words—not iconic images—showed the way to salvation, why didn't religious imagery during the Reformation disappear along with indulgences? The answer, according to Joseph Leo Koerner, lies in the paradoxical nature of Protestant religious imagery itself, which is at once both iconic and iconoclastic. Koerner masterfully demonstrates this point not only with a multitude of Lutheran images, many never before published, but also with a close reading of a single pivotal work—Lucas Cranach the Elder's altarpiece for the City Church in Wittenberg (Luther's parish). As Koerner shows, Cranach, breaking all the conventions of traditional Catholic iconography, created an entirely new aesthetic for the new Protestant ethos. In the Crucifixion scene of the altarpiece, for instance, Christ is alone and stripped of all his usual attendants—no Virgin Mary, no John the Baptist, no Mary Magdalene—with nothing separating him from Luther (preaching the Word) and his parishioners. And while the Holy Spirit is nowhere to be seen—representation of the divine being impossible—it is nonetheless dramatically present as the force animating Christ's drapery. According to Koerner, it is this "iconoclash" that animates the best Reformation art. Insightful and breathtakingly original, The Reformation of the Image compellingly shows how visual art became indispensable to a religious movement built on words.