Confessional and Creedal Images around 1600 – Paths to Religious Division? South German Case Studies (Konfessions- und Bekenntnisbilder um 1600 – Wege in die Glaubensspaltung? Süddeutsche Fallstudien)
Author : Wolfgang Wüst
Abstract :
Around 1600, a new genre of large-format, precisely painted confessional and denominational images attracted the attention of church communities, particularly in Saxony and Franconia. As in Schweinfurt, they will be displayed in the church that played the most important role in the Reformation (St. John's Church), or, as in Windsheim, initially in a prominent and central location in the town hall. It is thanks to the life's work of the Nuremberg painter Andreas Herneisen (1538–1610) and, somewhat later, the copperplate engraver Johannes Dürr (c. 1600–1663), among others, that they quickly became widespread. The model originating in Nuremberg found its way in similar, sometimes identical form to neighboring Mögeldorf near Nuremberg, to Markt Kaserndorf near Kulmbach, to the residential seats of Ansbach, Coburg, Eisenach, Kulmbach, and Waldenburg (Hohenlohe district), to the imperial and trade fair cities of Leipzig, Nördlingen, Schweinfurt and Weißenburg, and to the university town of Helmstedt. The iconography depicting the presentation of the Confessio Augustana by the Protestant imperial estates in 1530, Bible quotations, and the central elements of Protestant Lutheran worship (baptism, the Lord's Supper, preaching, and hymns) has been sufficiently explained in research. However, the timing of the pictorial narrative, remembrance and argumentation remained unclear, a good two generations after the Reformation, with its clear confession against the papal church (“arch-heretics”) against Calvin and Zwingli. For the first time, therefore, an attempt is being made to use the new legal form of “good” police, which has also been established for several generations, as an explanatory model for why the early 17th century was so important for the explanation of theological or confessional-political processes that, in the tradition of the biblia pauperum, greater emphasis was once again placed on the image as a medium of revelation.
Keywords :
Confessions, Reformation images, Lutheran und Catholic parishes, bible, Nuremberg, Noerdlingen, Schweinfurt, Windsheim, Imperial cities, Ansbach, Eisenach, Saxony, Franconia, Andreas Herneisen.
