On Christmas in 1521, a former priest in peasants’ clothing delivered such an incendiary homily that, one cold and clear night shortly after, the churches of that red-roofed, gothic town would be stripped of their sacred statues. With hammer, chisel, and mallet, zealous reformers in Wittenberg, Germany set out in the city where the Reformation had started only five years before, now deigning to destroy what they perceived as popish idols. Bricks hurled through stained-glass windows and white paint splashed upon walls; over-tipped statues of saints and shrines scattered in naves. Not even Wittenberg Cathedral, to whose front door Martin Luther had nailed his “Ninety-five Theses” in 1517, would be spared the iconoclastic fury. Luther had absconded shortly before, his life endangered after his excommunication, but Andreas Karlstadt, that fiery preacher who now ministered in his place, hewed to an even more radical vision. “Images bring death to those who worship or venerate them,” he wrote in a pamphlet that justified this night of broken statues. “Our temples might be rightly called murderers’ caves, because in them our spirit is stricken and slain.”
Karlstadt was at war against art itself, but his mentor, who was currently translating the Bible into German while in hiding in Wartburg Castle, disagreed. For Luther, it was crucial to exorcize the worship of images from the heart; whether they were on an altar or not was incidental. As such, Karlstadt “does not preach faith,” Luther thundered in a 1525 sermon. “Unfortunately, only now do I see that.” When Luther returned from exile to helm the Reformation, indeed, he greeted the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (the title differentiating him from his less talented son), warmly. Cranach, in turn, would develop a distinctly Protestant imagery that replaced sacredness with utility, functioning essentially as propaganda minister for the reformer.
Printed in 1523, with text from Luther and his lieutenants, Cranach’s unequivocally titled woodcut broadsheet “The Papal Ass” was a prime example of the painter’s propagandistic duties. In it, the Catholic Church is a chimerical nightmare composed of the bare-breasted body of a woman with a donkey’s head and reptilian arms and legs, one foot cloven and the other clawed. Behind this freakish creature is a clear view of Rome’s Tiber River, Castel Sant’Angelo and the Papal Prison visible along its banks. It was scandalous and obscene, offensive and blasphemous — and effective.
If a theological treatise spoke to the mind, “The Papal Ass” communicated in a different register. Contrary to his talent — Cranach was among the most accomplished artists of portraits, altars, and sumptuous classical scenes in the Northern Renaissance — there is nothing particularly skilled in this crude cartoon. But in this instance, skill and technique were 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), wherein Luther denounces the “papacy by explicating the parts 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 spread the Reformation throughout Europe, fracturing Christendom. Art would undergo an ideological shift from being interpreted through the domain of religion into the realm of politics. Cranach’s work would prove that the woodblock print could be as powerful as Gutenberg’s press.
Unlike Karlstadt, Luther cannily understood the power of pictures, even if his understanding of art itself wasn’t sacralized. For centuries, Catholic worshipers had learned the finer points of scripture, ritual, and faith while standing before the Bible for illiterates: mosaics and frescoes, icons and statues. There was a potent lesson in the ability of imagery to sway a mind 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 first time in Western history to channel a ‘mass’ movement to affect change,” while Philip M. Taylor claims in Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era (1995) that the Reformation was the “first movement of any kind, religious or secular, to use the new presses for overt propaganda.”
Indeed, even if in the beginning there was the Word, it would not be by that medium alone that Luther would conquer, for despite the iconoclasm of more radical Protestants, it was imagery like that in “The Papal Ass” that would act upon the mind and heart of worshipers in the way that a crucifix or a relic once had. Luther was many things — a brilliant pugilist, an earthy interlocutor, a profane thinker, and a quick-witted theologian — but an artist he was not. For that, the early successes of Lutheranism owe much to the visual rhetoric of Cranach, who began his career as a Catholic craftsman producing sacred images and ended it as a Protestant artist manufacturing Reformation agitprop. Art, as we know it today, is in many ways a category only made possible by the Reformation: The severing of the sacred from the representative opened up the very possibility of creating works for their own sake. What aided Luther in the deployment of affective imagery — of propaganda that worked — was the skill, talent, and genius of a painter like Cranach.
Cranach’s 1529 portrait of Luther, original held by St. Anne’s Church in Augsburg, is an encapsulation of the new Protestant aesthetics. Luther is depicted in the somber black gown and flat cap of a scholar, the muted hue of his modest dress an undifferentiated field of darkness. The former monk’s visage appears above that plane, offset by an uncanny green background. The reformer’s face isn’t rendered charitably; though keen-eyed, he is jowly and double-chinned; a slight stubble brushes him with a dissolute appearance. This is not a painting of an angel, a saint, or a pope — this is a portrait that asks us to behold a fallen man, which is precisely Cranach’s (and Luther’s) point. The work is no icon, but rather an artifact of a faith that maintains a priesthood of all believers, no matter how scruffy or fat they may be. A 1526 portrait of the same subject held in a private collection, arguably a draft of the later version, is even more unsparing in its unflattering verisimilitude.
Medieval and Renaissance Catholicism, with their nativities and crucifixions, pietas and last suppers, hagiographies and martyrdoms, produced the most potent artistic language in the Western world, so that the forging of an entirely new religious visual vocabulary wasn’t a small task. After stripping the altars and white-washing cathedral walls, Protestantism had a deep void to fill. Artists like Cranach stepped in — appropriating the very traditions Protestantism was ostensibly in rebellion against. The altarpiece that Cranach made for the parish of the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Weimar demonstrates the ambivalent position of a Protestant artist: At the center of the composition is the crucified Christ, his side wound spraying out water and blood — the same sort of imagery that more radical Protestants were smashing and burning in cathedrals across Europe. At the lower left is another image of Christ in red robe, straddling a monstrous demon in the traditional pose of St. Michael casting Satan from Heaven, here configured as the hero who harrowed Hell. Beneath the cross is a lamb, a standard symbol for the sacrificial Messiah. If this didn’t seem Catholic enough, just look to the right — there is Christ again, but now he is 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.
Even more remarkable is Cranach’s “Allegory of Law and Grace,” (c. 1529) now held by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. Drawing from Medieval allegory while presenting a doctrine foreign to that same Medieval theology, Cranach illustrates the most potent through-line in the conflict between Catholics and Protestants: What needs to be done to merit individual salvation? On the left of the diptych, the artist illustrates what Lutherans see as the prophet of the law, of good works and moral behavior. Here, a presumably stalwart and upstanding man is nonetheless hounded by a duo of demons, one grey-faced and bestial, the other a skeleton, that pushes him toward a gleaming, lurid-red, devil-infested Hell. In the upper left corner of this painting’s half, Adam and Eve stand with Eden’s tree, an intimation of that which condemned humanity in the first place. Diagonally across from them stand a gathering of bearded, distinctly rabbinic-appearing men, one of whom clutches the stone tablets of the Decalogue. This conflation of Catholicism and Judaism, concurrent with Luther’s own growing antisemitism, presents both religions as stiff-necked, obstinate, and legalistic.
By contrast, the right half of the diptych presents Cranach’s allegory of love, which is to say, of faith. Another crucifixion centers the painting, while at its base, John the Baptist explains the finer points of salvation to the same man who on the other side of the composition is damned. “Hence it comes that faith alone makes righteous,” wrote Luther in his Commentary on Romans (undated). For Catholic theologians just beginning to mount the Counter-Reformation, this aspect of Luther’s teaching was among the most heretical. They feared that a cleaving between virtue and faith would encourage the second at the expense of the first, that people would abandon morality while believing themselves sanctified.
Having learned something about persuasive mass media from Cranach, anti-Protestant polemicists began to print their own propaganda. If the Catholic Church was depicted as a monstrous ass by Cranach, then printmaker Hans Brosamer would imagine the father 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 murderer, among other things, his identity as riven as the schism he instigated within the Church. According to the accompanying text, Luther was a madman who “preaches what the mob wants to hear.”
Five centuries later, the autos-da-fé having cooled, the difference between the strange images in “The Papal Ass” and “The Seven-Headed Luther” both seem uncanny, eccentric, odd. From the distance of half a millennia, with such sectarian details now obscure for most people, either side only appears so much as if each other. Worth considering, however, is how much we also see ourselves in the past, through a mirror darkly. For if Cranach demonstrated anything, it’s that the sacred utility of images can be repurposed: Whether in prayer or propaganda, art or advertising, the picture still casts an enchanting light.
