Introduction by Bobbi Dykema

Introduction

Bobbi Dykema, PhD

Whether or not Martin Luther actually nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Schloβkirche in 1517, his theology of justification broke the mold of the medieval Catholic penitential system, in which cracks and fissures had been developing for some time.¹ For Luther, devotional praxis needed always to direct the worshipper toward the experience of Christ and an encounter with God;² thus, his formulation vastly simplified the medieval religious complexities of the cult of the saints, monastic orders, rituals and sacramentals.³ For a church whose devotional practices, piety, and in some ways theology itself had been overwhelmingly image-based, this new devotion to the Word necessitated a sea change in visual culture. Fortunately for Luther, a powerful imagemaker devoted to his cause was able to bridge the gap, one who combined medieval conventions of devotional imagery with polemical images of the Pope to create a visual theology that complemented Luther’s verbal theology.That artist was Lucas Cranach the Elder, and his pivotal work of Reformation propaganda was a pamphlet entitled Passional Christi und Antichristi.

Passional Christi und Antichristi

Passional Christi und Antichristi was published in May 1521 by Johann Rhau Grünenberg of Wittenberg, in five German editions followed by one in Latin. It is a 19cm quarto booklet of 28 pages, with woodcuts on each page by Lucas Cranach the Elder. It consists of thirteen images of Christ paired with texts quoted from scripture; across the gutter on each facing page is a contrasting image of the Pope paired with quotations from canon law. This strategic combination of text and image was designed to appeal to a wide spectrum of literacy.

Cranach’s innovative contribution to early Lutheran polemics employed several strands of tradition in German artmaking in terms of both technique and subject matter. The use of print technology to create visual images predates the invention of the printing press and movable type. Block printing on paper (as opposed to cloth) began in Europe in the early fourteenth century, and was used for single-sheet images, playing cards, and, somewhat later, block-books in which both text and image were carved directly onto the printing block.⁴ Across Europe, single-sheet devotional images were created for sale at pilgrimage sites and other religious venues,⁵ but it was in Germany that the printed image in both woodcut and engraving especially flourished. Thousands upon thousands of single-sheet, pamphlet and book images were created, primarily for devotional works such as Passions of Christ, Lives of the Virgin, and so forth. Collection of such prints began relatively early as well, including collecting by artists, as designs were freely imitated. Many common religious images developed a standard compositional arrangement and pictorial language, and most of Lucas Cranach’s images of Christ for Passional Christi und Antichristi utilize these elements, entering into conversation with and continuing the German devotional print tradition.

While there is broad agreement that Cranach executed the drawings himself, it is likely that other members of his workshop completed the cutting of the blocks; his son Hans has been credited as the block-cutter.⁶ For the most part, the text for the pages of Passional relating to the life of Christ was drawn directly from scripture—the Vulgate in the Latin edition, and a German translation of the Vulgate in the German editions, most likely the Mentel Bible, which was printed in 1466 in Strassburg. With a few important exceptions, the texts accompanying the images relating to the Pope were taken from papal decretals in canon law. A number of these also include biblical quotations, and most have editorial comments as well.

However, Cranach was not, directly, the author of the woodcuts seen in digitized form here. Not only was the original Grünenberg edition in Wittenberg reprinted numerous times, bootleg editions were prepared in both Erfurt and Strassburg, painstakingly copying the original Cranach woodcuts line for line and the original text word for word. The Pitts Library edition digitized here is from an extant copy of the Erfurt edition of Passional. In an era before the rise of copyright protection and image reproduction permissions, the creation of such faithful replicas is a further testimony to the popularity and importance of Passional.

While Philipp Melanchthon has been credited as the chief author-editor of the document, and a letter from Martin Luther indicates the assistance of the canon lawyer Johann Schwerdtfeger,⁷ the identity of the person or persons responsible for the selection and ordering of the text is not secure. Luther himself did not have a hand in its creation, but he was aware of and approved of the pamphlet prior to its publication—a letter to Georg Spalatin of April 14, 1521, refers to antithetical figures of Christ and the Pope by Lucas Cranach, and Passional was printed in May.⁸

In several instances in Passional , the selected texts accompanying a particular image are not a direct description of that scene, but rather text and image must be read and interpreted together, as they form an organic whole greater than the sum of its parts, in which meaning is derived from the interplay between the two.

Passional Christi und Antichristi is a complex work whose meaning can be read and interpreted on a number of levels, but its main thrust is a visual and verbal contrast between Christ and his Vicar, the Pope, which serves to present the case that the papacy has arrogated to itself so many inappropriate powers and privileges that it can be identified with the figure of Antichrist. The pamphlet seeks actively to efface the image of the Pope in the mind of its reader-viewer, and to lead him or her toward a doubled vision which sees both the pretense to spiritual leadership and the diabolical reality beneath it. Cranach’s woodcut series for Passional reflects a pivotal moment in Lutheran image-making. Its rhetorical structure allows the reader-viewer, of whatever level of literacy, to engage with the images and texts, and answer for himself or herself the implicit question posed between the figure of Christ and that of the pope: “Choose this day whom you will serve.”⁹

While polemical images of the Pope existed prior to Cranach and the Reformation, they are not common. Here, Cranach needed to visually innovate, working in tandem with the authors of the text of Passional and drawing from the teachings and writings of Luther. To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation was published in August 1520, and On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church in October 1520; the first attacked the papacy’s pretense to both spiritual and temporal power, especially its arrogation of authority over the emperor, and the assertion that only the Pope could convene councils. On the Babylonian Captivity attacks the seven sacraments, each of which is described by Luther as having no basis in scripture. Both of these writings, as well as the 95 Theses, castigate the papacy for leading Christendom astray in these matters, and it is in these documents that Luther begins to refer to the papacy as Antichrist. An additional work on which Passional relies is Nicholas of Dresden’s 1412 The Old Color and the New, which shares with Passional both its antithetical structure and a significant amount of specific content.

Luther was by no means the first to suggest that the Pope was Antichrist. The English reformer John Wyclif had made that identification in 1383, during the Avignon papacy, in his De Christo et suo Adversario Antichristo, and Joachim of Fiore had done so even earlier in the 14th century.¹⁰ Although there is scant evidence to suggest that Luther or other German reformers were familiar with the writings of Wyclif,¹¹ both Wyclif and the anonymous author-editors of Passional Christi und Antichristi go about making their case for the identity of the Pope as Antichrist in very similar ways. In De Christo et suo Adversario Antichristo, Wyclif demonstrates the anti-Christian character of the Pope through a series of twelve antitheses. In Christ is the spirit of truth, whereas the Pope has wreathed himself in lies. Christ lived an earthly life of poverty, whereas the Pope’s life is characterized by splendor and magnificence. Christ is humble; the Pope is proud. Christ had contempt for worldly power and was obedient to the emperor; the Pope embraces worldly power and asserts his superiority over the emperor; and so on.¹²

Even as Wyclif was writing, a church reform movement was stirring on the Continent in Bohemia. With the revival of national identity and emergence of the Czech language under Charles IV (1333-1378), and especially his establishment of the university at Prague in 1348, religious leaders began calling for a return to the apostolic simplicity of the early church. Particular issues included the morals of the clergy and access to the Bible in the Czech vernacular.¹³ An early preacher in the Czech movement, Matthew of Janov, preached and wrote on the theme of Antichrist’s takeover of the Church, as evidenced by the schism in the papacy.¹⁴ Their writings, especially Matthew’s Tractatus de Antichristo (1388/1392),¹⁵ evidence a distinctly Joachimist flavor,¹⁶ and Matthew specifically identifies the antipope John XXIII as Antichrist.¹⁷

Jan Hus, whose name was lent to the entire Bohemian reform movement, emerged as a leader of the movement shortly after the turn of the fifteenth century, preaching in the vernacular and supporting efforts to offer Eucharist to the laity in both kinds, wine as well as bread. His De Ecclesia of 1413 quotes Wyclif extensively, and although Hus was not as extreme in his apocalyptic language as his older contemporaries in the Bohemian movement, he did assert that if the Pope were morally opposed to Christ, greedy, proud, or in the business of selling benefices, he was indeed Antichrist.¹⁸

Alongside the reformist-minded preachers in Prague was a group of displaced Germans known as the “Dresden School.” After Bishop Rudolph of Meissen forbade the teaching of the Bible in secondary schools, the group departed for friendlier territory in Bohemia.¹⁹ Among these was Nicholas of Dresden, whose work The Old Color and the New (1412) bears far too many similarities to Passional Christi und Antichristi to have not been an influence on the latter pamphlet. Although no illustrated versions of The Old Color and the New are still extant, evidence suggests that such versions were created and circulated, and included antitheses such as Christ carrying his cross and the Pope on horseback;²⁰ a number of the the same quotations from both scripture and papal decretals are to be found in both Nicholas’ work and Passional.

Luther was aware of the work of Wyclif, and had read Hus,²¹ and he knew also that his own writings, particularly On the Babylonian Captivity, would be labeled “Wycliffite” by his opponents.²² While the discrete groups of reformers in England, Bohemia and Saxony had similar goals, the Lutheran propagandists had a distinct advantage over the Bohemians: the invention of the printing press, which gave them the ability to disseminate their ideas quickly to much larger numbers of people.

Propaganda

As the Lutheran Reformation unfolded, cheaply printed pamphlets (Flugschriften)and broadsheets, in tandem with evangelical preaching, were the engine that drove the movement.²³ In cities across Germany, the diffusion of evangelical ideas was accomplished by preachers who considered themselves in solidarity with Luther proclaiming the Word of God to the people;²⁴ many of these additionally published their sermons in printed form. Hundreds of such sermons, treatises, pamphlets and tracts, which served as a tangible record whose impact endured beyond that of oral forms of communication, were printed and sold. For many of the single-page broadsheets, the primary mode of communication was the image. However, few of the Lutheran pamphlets were illustrated;²⁵ Passional Christi und Antichristi is one notable exception. While the majority of these were written by trained theologians and disgruntled clerics, a significant minority of such works were penned by literate members of various estates of the laity. Passional Christi und Antichristi, with its unique combination of text and image, was a hybrid of authorship, with the images the product of a layman and the text a product of theologically-trained authorship, that of canon lawyer Johann Schwerdtfeger, as well as, quite possibly, that of Philipp Melanchthon.

Printers, particularly in the south of the German-speaking lands, ran some risk in publishing these tracts. Many of the pamphlets have no publication information, as they were published anonymously in an attempt to protect the printer’s identity.²⁶ In Saxony, Luther, Melanchthon, Cranach, the printer Grünenberg, and other printers and pamphleteers, were under the protection of the Elector, Frederick the Wise, and so greater freedom of writing and publishing may have been exercised there than elsewhere.

The most prolific of the pamphlet writers in the vernacular was Luther himself, whose early pastoral and devotional works made him “Germany’s first best-selling vernacular author.”²⁷ The earliest portraits of Luther were woodcuts made for the title pages of his sermons and devotional tracts, and Luther soon became something of a celebrity on the basis of these writings and images. Between Luther, the lay authors, and dozens if not hundreds of other theological writers, the number of printed pamphlets available in German experienced a forty-fold increase from 1517 to 1524;²⁸ single-sheet works whose main mode of communication was the woodcut image also experienced a marked increase. Interestingly, in terms of images, the most clever visual rhetoric in the propaganda battle with Rome came on the side of the reformers; the images in the Catholic propaganda produced in response to the Lutheran onslaught were mostly rather derivative. Works such as Passional Christi und Antichristi and the broadsheets established a visual vocabulary of Reformation polemic that was inventively rehearsed by later artists, continually reminding the viewing public of the dire danger posed to true Christianity by the papal pretenders to spiritual leadership.

Personalities

Passional Christi und Antichristi appeared on the world stage in 1521, just four years after the 95 Theses, launching a volley of polemical writings that circulated throughout Europe. Combining the primarily visual medium of printed broadsheets with the primarily textual medium of persuasive pamphlets, Passional Christi und Antichristi was designed to appeal to a wide range of literacy skills among the lay populace. The instigators whose discourse shaped Passional included the theologian and former monk, Martin Luther; the biblical scholar and humanist, Philipp Melanchthon; the artist and entrepreneur, Lucas Cranach; and a sympathetic jurist named Johann Schwerdtfeger.

Lucas Cranach the Elder was born in the town of Kronach in Franconia, and presumably trained by his father, an obscure artist who signed his work Hans Maler (Hans the Painter). Cranach’s Wanderjahr brought him to the University of Vienna in a circle of humanists surrounding Conrad Celtis,²⁹ and shortly thereafter, in 1505, was called to serve as court painter in Wittenberg to the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise. The young artist’s work was especially influenced by that of his older Nuremberg contemporary Albrecht Dürer, who had initially been approached regarding the court painter position for Frederick, but who had turned the prince’s offer down. The two artists do not seem to have met; Cranach knew Dürer’s work primarily through prints.

Taking his surname from the place of his birth, Cranach in Wittenberg eventually became a self-made man, with a workshop that employed more than a dozen craftsmen; the output of which was likened to an art factory. Additionally, Cranach had interests in publishing and winemaking, as well as a bookshop, a pharmacy,³⁰ and other industry, and was thrice elected burgomaster of Wittenberg. At its height, Cranach’s workshop employed both of the artist’s sons, ten journeymen, and additional craftsmen and assistants; as many as seventeen artists have been identified with the Cranach workshop.

Although Cranach is credited with inventing the chiaroscuro woodcut, recent research has asserted that his first efforts in this regard were backdated so as to appear to have been created before those of his Augsburg contemporary Hans Burgkmair.³¹ Cranach designed a large number of woodcut series of the Passion and other religious subjects, with innovative and hyper-realistic treatment of the torture of Christ, the two thieves, and the early Christian martyrs. He contributed eight pages to Maximilian’s great prayer book,³² and also made what might be considered the first Reformation artwork, a single-leaf broadsheet entitled the Coach of Heaven and Hell, in 1519.³³

Cranach, upper Germany’s most prodigious painter, was both a sympathizer and a friend of the region’s most influential theologian, preacher, and biblical interpreter: Martin Luther.³⁴ While in the current popular imagination it is Luther’s 95 Theses that made him the hero of the Reformation, most of Luther’s lay contemporaries became acquainted with Luther’s thought in the published version of his Sermon on Indulgences and Grace. Here, Luther taught that is was better for Christians to suffer the punishment for their sins than to enter into error by purchasing indulgences.³⁵

Looking around him, Luther saw a church that had drifted far astray from this basic teaching. In nearby Jüterbog, the Dominican Johannes Tetzel was preaching the cult of indulgences, immortalized in the words of a satirical pamphlet: “So bald der Gulden im Becken klingt, im nuh die Seel in Himmel springt.”³⁶ Luther saw a Church where salvation was for sale and the head of the ecclesial edifice seemed more interested in luxury, money and temporal power than in the stewardship of souls. This situation could only mean one thing: that the end of the world was near and the souls of the faithful were in grave and mortal danger.

On October 31, 1517, Luther addressed a letter to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, enclosing his 95 Theses with their challenge to the Roman Church’s cult of indulgences.³⁷ Although it is not clear whether Luther actually posted the theses on the door of the Schloβkirche,³⁸ his invitation to the supra-national scholarly community to a disputation on the doctrine of indulgences³⁹ was indeed construed as an attack on the papacy by at least some of his respondents.⁴⁰ At the same time, Luther began disseminating his ideas to the general public with the publication of his Sermon on Indulgences and Grace in pamphlet form, also in 1517. Mark U. Edwards Jr. has discussed the “multiplier effect” of evangelical preaching circulating in both oral and literary forms;⁴¹ indeed, preaching as well as publishing was key to the diffusion of evangelical ideas.⁴²

Following the publication of Passional,Cranach continued to create work in a Lutheran vein; one of his next sets of woodcuts after Passional was created to adorn the work that kept Luther occupied during the latter’s exile in the Wartburg: a series of illustrations for Luther’s vernacular translation of the New Testament, the Septembertestament released in September 1522. Cranach also created the woodcuts for Luther’s complete illustrated vernacular Bible, which appeared in 1534, with 123 woodcuts. In 1529, Cranach began creating his visual schema of Lutheran theology, the Allegory of Law and Gospel paintings and prints, of which there are a number of extant versions; by the mid-1530s, Cranach was also producing specifically Lutheran altarpieces.

Although his authorship is not firmly established, Philipp Melanchthon, professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg, is credited in several sources, including Scribner, as the author of Passional Christi und Antichristi.⁴³ Luther refers to Melanchthon as a co-compiler of an “illustrated Passional” in a letter to Melancththon of 1521;⁴⁴ the 1885 facsimile edition by Gustav Kawerau, and many more recent scholarly sources, simply refer to Melanchthon as the author of Passional.⁴⁵

The influence of Melanchthon on evangelical thought can hardly be overstated. In particular, Melanchthon elaborated a detail of the Lutheran two-kingdoms theology especially pertinent to Passional, equating ecclesiastical traditions and ordinances with civil law and not spiritual governance.⁴⁶ Melanchthon represented the Lutheran movement at Speyer in 1526 and 1529, and was responsible for both penning and presenting the Augsburg Confession at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530.⁴⁷ Indeed, Melanchthon was largely responsible for formulating the doctrine of law and gospel that became foundational not only to Lutheran doctrine,⁴⁸ but also to Lutheran image-making, in the form of Cranach’s Allegory of Law and Gospel panels, which the artist began making in 1529.

Melanchthon as a rhetorician was as concerned with the construction of texts as with their content; his methods of textual analysis for reading were designed to eventually reveal the secrets of effective composition.⁴⁹ He applied this method to the analysis of the construction of various books of the Bible, and recommended its study to preachers in order to create effective sermons.⁵⁰

Passional Christi und Antichristi, designed to persuade its reader-viewer regarding the depth of corruption of the papacy, may be seen to be constructed using just such rhetorical methods. In many respects, the text selected to accompany an image in the Passional series was not simply a description of the action or event depicted, but rather a theological comment on the nature of Christ’s divinity and humanity that interacts with the image to produce a complex interplay of meaning, such as the texts from Luke 9 and 2 Corinthians 8 on the poverty of Christ which accompany an image of the Nativity. Jesus was seen by the reformers as a member of the triune Godhead who, out of his tremendous grace and love for humankind, descended from heaven and consented to a humble existence as a human being, whose redemptive meaning for humanity is revealed in his obedient servanthood and sacrifice on the cross. The images and texts of Passional achieve their power primarily through a tension between their reverence for the grace and humility of Jesus Christ, and their contempt for the papacy which seems to have fallen away utterly from Christ’s example.

With regard to Passional, a letter from Luther to Melanchthon dated May 26, 1521, seems to indicate Luther’s approval of the polemical pamphlet. The letter specifically refers to the work of a second authorial hand, that of canon lawyer Johann Schwerdtfeger, whom Luther mentions as having assisted with the elements of canon law used in Passional to condemn the pope as Antichrist.⁵¹ Schwerdtfeger hailed from Meissen and was on the law faculty of the university at Wittenberg; other than that, little is known about him. Nearly half the text of Passional Christi und Antichristi relies heavily on a thorough knowledge of canon law, with quotations from papal decretals carefully selected and edited in such a way that the pronouncements of the papacy are used against it to persuade the reader that Antichrist was none other than the Pope himself.

As Joseph Leo Koerner has argued, “To vilify something it is necessary to exhibit it,”⁵² and in this sense a creative work such as the woodcuts for Cranach’s Passional become themselves a form of iconoclasm, where the subject of vilification (the Pope) is exhibited in an antithetical relationship to the very Christ whose Church he is supposedly the vicar of. By appropriating the image of the Pope and placing it in this antithetical and negating context, Cranach achieves an iconoclasm of the Pope’s image, an effacement that reveals the true villainy of Antichrist behind the visage of the Vicar of Christ. The Pope’s authority is undermined and the scandal is laid bare.

This digitized edition allows the reader to access a variety of information about Passional Christi und Antichristi while looking at an actual copy of the Erfurt version in digitized form. English translations have been provided for the text, as well as commentary on the images by art historian Larry Silver. Martin Lohrmann has contributed analysis of the biblical and theological components of Passional. And the specific copy in the possession of the Pitts Theological Library includes handwritten marginalia, which is deciphered and discussed here by Ulrich Bubenheimer.

It is to be hoped that this edition will further illuminate the understanding of anti-papist polemical literature in the early years of the Lutheran Reformation, and its influence on the relationships of the laity to the evangelical movement. Such literature by its very volume played a vastly important role in the spread of evangelical ideas both positive, in the form of teaching about the faith, and negative, in the form of polemical works such as Passional.