‘Better Papist than Calvinist’: Art and Identity in Later Lutheran Germany

Abstract

This article argues that Lutheran images moved from being adiaphora, matters of indifference to salvation, to being confessional markers under the pressure of Calvinist iconoclasm. This was particularly true in Brandenburg, where Lutheran traditionalism was reinforced by Johann Sigismund’s ‘Second Reformation’ and the iconoclasm that it engendered in 1615. It was also true, however, in Albertine Saxony, where there was a cultural backlash against Christian I’s attempts to purify the Lutheran church (1586–1591). Conflicts within Protestantism, the article suggests, played an important role in embedding images in Lutheran culture and therefore contributed towards the flourishing of ecclesiastical art that occurred in Lutheran Germany during the later seventeenth century. The final section of the article asks how far Lutheran image use differed from Catholic. Concerns about idolatry never entirely disappeared from Lutheran discussions of images, and patrons and pastors sometimes came dangerously close to a return to works righteousness in their commemorations of the donation and adornment of churches. Yet during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Lutheran church successfully assimilated even the theatricality and illusionism of baroque art into its devotional life.

I: Introduction

At the start of the Reformation, scripture and images appeared to be in conflict with one another. With sola scriptura as their rallying cry, many of the early evangelical reformers attacked religious art in a bid to eliminate superstition and idolatry. Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, who assumed the role of city preacher in Wittenberg during Martin Luther’s absence in 1521/22, was at least partially responsible for the Reformation’s first real outburst of iconoclasm.1 Luther’s own response, as we know, was a call to moderation, and a declaration that the power of the Word would overcome the power of the image. Yet his attitude towards images was not enthusiastic: ‘we are free to have them or not’, he preached in 1522, ‘but it would be much better if we did not have them at all. I am not partial to them.’2 Subsequent events—further iconoclasm in the Swiss Confederation in particular and the violence of the Peasants’ War—led the moderate and order-seeking Luther to a more thoroughgoing defence of images. But even while he affirmed their commemorative and didactic value, he reduced their spiritual significance. Images, like liturgical rituals, no longer mediated salvation. As symbols of religious identity they were, it seemed, set to be displaced by the Word and by the Bible.

The art of the early Reformation seems to confirm that images’ significance was, indeed, circumscribed by the advent of Protestantism. Woodcut prints and the paintings produced by Lucas Cranach and his pupils played an important part in spreading and consolidating the evangelical message but they did not provide access to the divine or stimulate worship, as cultic and devotional images had once done.3 The woodcuts were, as Bob Scribner put it, ‘cheap, crude and effective’ in their propagandistic intentions, while Cranach’s altarpieces deliberately eschewed late-medieval naturalism, rejecting any elaborate visual formulae that might incite improper worship or detract from their pedagogical function.4 In his discussion of Luther’s impact on art, Joseph Koerner writes that ‘didacticism required that the image became less rather than more: less visually seductive, less emotionally charged, less semantically rich.’5 The neutralizing of religious imagery should not be overstated: the impassioned visual rhetoric of many Lutheran woodcuts was certainly intended to provoke an emotional reaction in its viewers, and by the mid-sixteenth century Konfessionsbilder and elaborate painted cycles celebrated Lutheran confessional consciousness.6 Yet the immediate post-Reformation trend towards relatively simple images, adorned with frequent inscriptions and concerned more with clarity than illusion, is undeniable.

Figure 29.28 shows, however, that two hundred years after the Reformation a very different Lutheran aesthetic had emerged. This image shows the interior of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, built between 1726 and 1743. The church was commissioned by Dresden’s Lutheran city council, and was intended, as we shall see, as a statement of Protestant self-consciousness. Here theology and visual culture speak as one; scripture and images have been fully reconciled. From the pulpit beside the entrance to the choir area the pure Word of God was preached against a truly magnificent visual backdrop. With its imposing high altar, showing in sculpted relief the emotive scene of Christ in prayer on the Mount of Olives, its splendid organ and its cupola with paintings of the evangelists and virtues by Giovanni Battista Grone, the interior of the Frauenkirche embraces illusion, even illusion dependent on the techniques of the Italian baroque.7 The Frauenkirche rivalled contemporary Catholic churches in its beauty and splendour and was, in fact, compared by eighteenth-century observers to St Peter’s in Rome.8

This article forms part of a broader research project that will seek to explain how Lutherans moved from Luther’s own moderate endorsement of images to the flourishing of religious art that occurred during the era of the baroque. At first, Lutherans sought above all to come to terms with the survival of medieval forms, and to legitimate their church through commemorating its founder and early history. Inherited Catholic elements (Katholische Überlieferungen)—both visual and liturgical—were adapted, where possible, to fit with the new evangelical teaching and Luther portraits became big business.9 Gradually, however, a mature Lutheran liturgy and spirituality emerged, in which images played much more than just an ancillary role.10 The path to the integrated aesthetic perspective represented by the Dresden Frauenkirche was uneven. It was shaped by ambivalence within Lutheranism itself about the role of images and by the affective devotion promulgated by Johann Arndt and his followers.11 It also reflected the triumph of Lutheran Eucharistic teaching emphasizing the real presence of Christ. During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, encounters with Calvinism played an especially important role in deepening Lutherans’ attachment to images. These encounters provide a useful starting point for explaining how and why a confession that derived its significance from the promulgation of the Word came to value the visual so highly.

Historians have long recognized the role that religious ritual played in defining Lutheran identity. Ernst Walter Zeeden argued, on the basis of his study of church orders, that the Lutheran response to Calvinist attacks on practices such as the wearing of vestments, the consecration of the host and exorcism was a greater recourse to ceremonial. Liturgy and ritual became, for Lutherans, a way of demonstrating confessional allegiance.12 Bodo Nischan’s work confirmed that traditional practices—from the celebration of the Lord’s Supper to the preaching of pericopic sermons and the observance of feast days—were upheld with particular zeal in regions where Lutheranism was in competition with Calvinism.13 Images have only relatively recently begun to receive similar attention, despite a growing awareness among scholars of their value as historical sources.14 Siegfried Müller has explored the role that they played in the process of Lutheran confessionalization, drawing on evidence from Oldenburg in northern Germany, while Thomas Kaufmann has emphasized their importance in the theological polemic of the later sixteenth century.15 Drawing largely on evidence from Albertine Saxony, bastion of the Lutheran Reformation, and Brandenburg, a territory where Lutherans and Calvinists were forced into an often uncomfortable co-existence, this article will suggest that the threat of Calvinism played a key role in embedding not only rituals but also images in Lutheran ecclesiastical life.16 It will also assess the attempts of Lutheran pastors and their congregations to tread a ‘right middle road’ between Calvinist iconoclasm and Catholic idolatry, asking whether in their desire to distance themselves from evangelical ‘fanatics’, Lutherans sanctioned the development of a devotional culture that was dangerously close to that of the Catholics.17

II: Lutheran Uncertainty

The Lutheran attachment to images of course had its origin in the early years of the evangelical movement. Although Luther would initially have preferred to see religious images fall from favour, he quickly realized their value not only as teaching aids but also as marks of confessional identity: the survival of traditional images, and the installation of new ones, distinguished Lutheran churches from those of the so-called ‘enthusiasts’, proponents of more radical reform.18 By the mid-sixteenth century images were a widely accepted part of Lutheran ecclesiastical culture, though particular items continued to attract the ire of zealous reformers. A late-medieval altar, created by the Nuremberg artist Michael Wolgemut, for example, nearly succumbed to the attempts of the Lutheran pastor Johann Petrejus to displace it from its traditional home in the choir of Zwickau’s Marienkirche (Figure 29.29). The dispute that arose around this particular altar, recorded in Zwickau’s council minutes, allows us an unusual insight into lay Lutherans’ attitudes to images and provides a useful starting point for a consideration of the role of images during the later Reformation.19

Wolgemut’s altar had been installed in 1479 during the early years of Zwickau’s heyday as a city catering to the silver-mining industry in the Saxon Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains). It was clearly an object of civic pride, and survived the Reformation cleansing of the Marienkirche intact and in situ.20 It is a splendid image: its carved shrine shows the Virgin Mary and eight other female saints, and its painted wings show the Annunciation and scenes from the life of Christ. When the Marienkirche needed renovating in the mid-sixteenth century, Zwickau’s city council considered replacing this old altar, adorned as they said with ‘idols’, with one more suited to the Lutheran liturgy. The Marienkirche’s new pastor, Johann Petrejus, campaigned to have the altar replaced: he warned that putting it back in the newly-restored church could give the impression to foreigners and to religious opponents that the inhabitants of Zwickau had ‘voluntarily submitted once again to the papacy’ and would again ‘honour the saints’ and place their trust in them.21

Ultimately, however, the council decided that they could not afford to replace Wolgemut’s altar. Zwickau’s city council decided to reinstall it rather than leaving the choir area empty. They did not, however, return its elaborate carved frame, which was considered worm-eaten beyond repair. The church’s Lutheran congregation were not content: they demanded a full restoration of the altar, and instructed Petrejus to leave its wings open on four feast days each year, as before the Reformation. Seeing the strength of local feeling, the council justified the retention of the altar: although it could, they said, be considered idolatrous on account of its images, the teaching of God’s Word rendered it harmless. Petrejus continued, however, to offend his congregation by leaving the wings closed, and proposed commissioning the Cranach workshop to produce a replacement. Eventually Petrejus turned to the Saxon elector, August, for support. But the elector rejected his pleas: the altar was given a new frame with a figure of Christ accompanied by angels holding instruments of the Passion, and returned to its rightful place in the new choir of the church.22

This image cannot be considered didactic. While the wings showed scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ that were not incompatible with Lutheran teaching, the carved central shrine—the part the Marienkirche’s congregation were so keen to see on four feast-days each year—showed the Virgin and Child accompanied by various female saints. The frame, without which the church’s congregation considered the altarpiece incomplete, was largely decorative. In 1569 representatives of Zwickau’s citizenry gave their reasons for defending their altar: it was, they said, ‘for the adornment [tzihr] of the church and in honour of our dear forefathers’.23 The survival of this image, and the reasons given for its reinstallation, are indicative of a Lutheran visual aesthetic that favoured adornment over emptiness; it is particularly interesting that neither the council nor Petrejus ever proposed leaving the choir area empty.24 If the Wolgemut altarpiece was going to be removed, it would have to be replaced with something else. The exact nature of Lutheran visual culture was, however, still a matter of dispute. While the congregation, and ultimately the city council and elector, were willing to accommodate a reminder of the papist past, Petrejus was concerned to ensure that the church did not look as if it had once more submitted to Rome or returned to the practice of venerating saints.

III: Reformed Challenges

The changing religious climate of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries strengthened Lutherans’ attachment to images. In the mid-sixteenth century Johann Petrejus might have feared, not entirely without reason, that the reinstallation of Wolgemut’s Zwickau altarpiece would suggest that his church had succumbed once again to papal tyranny.25 But a few decades later such fears had been eclipsed by the much more immediate threat of Calvinist iconoclasm. From the 1560s onwards there were a number of princely conversions to the Reformed faith within the Holy Roman Empire. Frederick III of the Palatinate was the first to impose Calvinism on his subjects (1561), followed by the rulers of Anhalt (1596), Hesse-Kassel (1605) and Lippe-Detmold (1605). In 1613 a second imperial elector, Johann Sigismund of Brandenburg, converted to Calvinism, though the Reformed faith initially made little progress beyond Brandenburg’s ruling Hohenzollern dynasty and court.26 A number of other dukes, imperial counts and cities also introduced Calvinist reforms. Even Saxony, the heartland of the Lutheran Reformation, seemed in danger during two ‘crypto-Calvinist’ interludes: 1571–1574, when the Wittenberg theological faculty came under suspicion, and 1586–1591, when Elector Christian I began to introduce a ‘second’, Calvinist Reformation.27 Reformed principalities still occupied only a small proportion of the Empire’s territory, and Germany’s Lutherans, unlike its Calvinists, continued to enjoy relative security under the terms of the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555). Yet the advance of Calvinism, with its ‘sacramentarian’ attacks on traditional liturgy and images, was perceived as an immediate threat to the Lutheran faith.

Princely conversions were invariably accompanied by the ‘cleansing’ of religious life. In the Rhineland Palatinate, for example, the destruction of idols—altars and fonts, as well as images—was presided over in person by Frederick III.28 Calvinist reforms led, as Halle’s superintendent Johann Olearius observed in 1591, to the abolition of ‘the public ceremonies of the Mass’ that Lutherans had kept ‘so that the people above all learn from them what they need to know about Christ’. These included (in conservative Brandenburg and in Saxony at least) elaborate music, altars, candles, vestments, silver and gold liturgical vessels, communion wafers and genuflection.29 The abolition of the elevation of the consecrated host and the introduction of the fractio panis—breaking of bread—caused particular resentment. As well as the reform of communion, Calvinists abolished auricular confession and numerous feast-days, and deleted the exorcism rite from baptism.30 Lutherans watched in horror. For them, anything was preferable to such tyranny: Polycarp Leyser, court preacher in Dresden from 1594 to 1610, asserted that it was better to be ‘papist than Calvinist’. Calvinists were, Leyser wrote to Elector Christian II in 1602, ‘enemies of all ceremonies and good order, and real trouble makers’.31 Leyser’s little address to the Elector was printed eighteen years later in 1620 at the behest of Matthias Hoë von Hoënegg, court preacher to Christian’s successor, Johann Georg. At that moment the religious and political climate was particularly favourable to such polemic: in 1619 Frederick V of the Palatinate, leader of Germany’s Reformed party, had accepted the crown of Bohemia, and Johann Georg helped Emperor Ferdinand II in his suppression of the Bohemian revolt.32 But Leyser’s sentiments also found resonance outside Saxony. An eighteenth-century description of the origins of the Reformed confession in Brandenburg and Prussia lamented that thanks to the dissemination of such writings and to inflammatory preaching, the Calvinists were hated more than the papists and Turks: ‘lieber päbstisch, als calvinisch’ had, the author asserted, become a common proverb.33

As events in the Netherlands and in France had demonstrated, and as Germany’s princely Reformations confirmed, Calvinism and iconoclasm went hand-in-hand. For Calvinists, the removal of images was a key part of the reform of religious life. In 1624 Abraham Scultetus, the leading theologian of Germany’s Second Reformation, wrote that the Bible not only forbids the worship of images and prescribes their destruction, but also ‘holds it for a sure sign of conversion that we remove the idols from before our eyes’.34 Scultetus, court preacher to Frederick V of the Palatinate, was infamous among Germany’s Lutherans not only for his supposed role in persuading Frederick to accept the crown of Bohemia but also for stripping the images from the castle church (Schloßkirche) in Prague.35 Images and iconoclasm became a standard theme in polemical battles between Lutheran and Reformed theologians, and examples of this polemic, especially those generated by the Anhalt iconoclasm of 1596, have been analysed in detail by Thomas Kaufmann.36 Here we need only consider particular justifications of images that had emerged, or gained in prominence, since Luther’s time; justifications without which the rich visual culture of later Lutheranism would have been unthinkable.

At the heart of later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutheran defences of images was the assertion that they remained adiaphora—matters of indifference—provided that they were not worshipped. As Simon Gedicke, court chaplain in Brandenburg until 1614, when he was forced to seek refuge in Saxony because of his vociferous opposition to Johann Sigismund’s conversion, wrote in 1615, ‘when the worship of idols is cleared out of the human heart through the Word, then the idol is discarded, and the external image is no longer an idol or false god, but a free and neutral thing.’37 Such defences had their origins in Luther’s concern for the weak in faith, but adiaphora gained much greater prominence during the virulent conflicts that followed Charles V’s attempts to impose the Augsburg Interim in 1548.38 The so-called Leipzig Interim, Philipp Melanchthon’s response, proposed compromises with the Catholic party regarding traditional ceremonies and images in order to preserve the key teachings of the Lutheran Reformation while enabling Elector Moritz to navigate the realities of imperial politics. The Gnesio-Lutherans, led by Matthias Flacius Illyrius, feared that Melanchthon’s compromises would confuse the common people, obscuring the central evangelical principle of justification by faith alone. Adiaphora, they maintained, prevented a true public confession of faith once they were prescribed by the state.39 What emerged in 1577 in the Solid Declaration of the Book of Concord was an endorsement of the Gnesio-Lutheran position. Adiaphora were truly harmless only if they were truly free: we must not ‘tolerate the imposition of such ceremonies on us by adversaries in order to undermine the genuine worship of God and to introduce and confirm their idolatry by force’.40

The concept of Christian freedom that underpinned this understanding of adiaphora justified not only resistance to Catholic compulsion but also opposition to Calvinist iconoclasm. For Lutheran theologians, it was as wrong to compel images’ removal as it was to compel their worship. Once again, this conviction dated back to the early years of the Reformation—to Luther’s response to Karlstadt’s iconoclasm—but it was given extra urgency in the later sixteenth century by the Calvinists’ actions. In the polemical writings produced in response to the Calvinist reforms and iconoclasm in Anhalt, for example, Lutheran preachers and theologians emphasized images’ continued importance as symbols of Christian freedom. Abraham Lange, court preacher in Altenburg, wrote in his 1597 Christlicher / lutherischer Gegenbericht that images were ‘evidence of Christian freedom’. In Anhalt followers of Karlstadt had, by forcing the removal of images, created laws like the pope.41 Simon Gedicke and others saw in their defences of images’ status as adiaphora a line of continuity with the ‘Christian heroes’ of Magdeburg: just as Flacius and his supporters had resisted the imposition of Catholic rites following the Interim, Lutherans were now called on to defend the truth and to reject the ‘lies and calumnies’ of the Calvinists.42

In pastoral terms, images were still valued for their didactic and commemorative potential, provided that they showed Scriptural subjects. They were, it seems, from the point of view of Lutheran preachers, more than merely indifferent. Images are not, Gedicke wrote in 1615, really lay Bibles, that ‘make [the laity] believe, because this is done actually by the Word of God’. Rather, they are to be preserved because ‘1. The simple folk understand the Word better if it is not only preached to the ears but also painted for the eyes. 2. That also their memory will be helped and they will remember the spoken Word when they look at the painted stories’.43 Alongside these defences, images’ aesthetic value emerged as a prominent theme. Abraham Taurer, pastor in the village of Schwertzau in the diocese of Magdeburg, reminded his readers in 1597 that images were intended ‘for the adornment of the church’ as well as for commemoration. Taurer complained that the Calvinists’ churches ‘resembled a public beer hall rather than a temple of the Lord’.44 The concern to distinguish church from beer hall was perhaps not entirely misplaced: a 1555 Saxon visitation had noted that some peasants were misusing their church, which should be a place of worship, ‘as a guesthouse or a beer hall’, and that they ‘stored the beer for Whitsuntide there to keep it fresh’.45 The desire to delineate sacred from profane was intensified, in some cases at least, not only by the spread of Calvinism but also by the destruction and desecrations of the Thirty Years’ War. A sermon of 1653 preached to celebrate the consecration of a new altar in the church of St Afra in Meissen lamented that during the war soldiers in many places had ‘turned the site of the altar into a pigsty’.46

Concern for the weak in faith also remained an issue, though it was undoubtedly a less prominent one than it had been during the early years of the Reformation.47 It now focused on the potentially alienating effects of Calvinist iconoclasm. In his debate with Theodore Beza at the Colloquy of Montbéliard (1586) Jakob Andreae, chief theological advisor to the Duke of Württemberg and principal author of the Formula of Concord, criticized Calvinist iconoclasm. In Saxony, he said, many churches still contained painted and carved images and maintained ceremonies that were neither prescribed nor proscribed in Scripture. Despite this, the region’s inhabitants no longer clung to ‘the Papist Mass, and other papist horrors, superstitions and idolatry’.48 Iconoclasm in Württemberg had, he claimed, achieved less in men’s hearts than the measured method of proceeding of the Saxon church. Zwinglian and Calvinist tactics served merely to alienate the weak.49 Gedicke and Taurer agreed: iconoclasm would ‘annoy the simple folk without reason’ (Gedicke); images should be allowed to remain ‘so that the simple people will not be made angry and scared away from the true service of God [Gottesdienst]’ (Taurer).50 Finally, the belief that images had an affective role, that they could engage the hearts of the faithful, was of increasing significance. ‘What someone sees with his own eyes’, wrote Gedicke in his Calviniana Religio, ‘goes deep into his heart and moves him’.51 Of course, agency in this process was ascribed not to the image itself but to the Holy Spirit. A man’s heart would be stirred, argued Taurer, when he contemplated images of Christ or other Biblical stories ‘through the movement of the Holy Spirit’.52

The affective role ascribed to images gained particular currency against the backdrop of the movement for the renewal of piety (Frömmigkeitsbewegung) that began in the late sixteenth century with Johann Arndt. In 1596 Arndt, who was forced to leave his parish at Badeborn in Anhalt because of his opposition to the Calvinist innovations, wrote a brief tract on images, the Ikonographia. For Arndt, as for other Lutheran commentators, images were matters of Christian freedom and aids to teaching and commemoration.53 The Ikonographia also, however, looked for a new theology and practice of image devotion, emphasizing in particular the correspondence between outer (physical) and inner (spiritual) images: ‘what you see externally will be represented in your heart by the Holy Spirit’.54 An image’s role was much more than merely didactic; it carried religious feeling and truth. Nature teaches us, Arndt argued, that it is not possible to dislike an image of something that you hold dear in your heart. Only an enemy of Christ’s Passion, therefore, could object to images of the Crucifixion. While the direct impact of the Ikonographia was probably limited, the broader emphasis on inner spirituality and on mystical union with Christ promulgated by Arndt and his successors (and eventually taken up by the Pietist movement) undoubtedly had great appeal, and perhaps goes some way towards explaining the iconographic simplicity and emotionalism of much later Lutheran art, with altarpieces focusing on the isolated figure of the crucified Christ.55

III.1: Lay Responses

There is plenty of evidence that testifies to the role that Calvinist iconoclasm played in embedding images in Lutheran ecclesiastical culture at the level of theological polemic. It is harder, not surprisingly, to demonstrate images’ significance for ordinary parishioners. It lies beyond the bounds of the present study to explore the role that images played in Lutheran households and in private devotion, but a number of cases of public conflict over images do suggest that they, like certain liturgical ceremonies, served as a focal point for confessional identity.56 In the Upper Palatinate, in Danzig, in Anhalt, in Hesse, in Lippe and in Brandenburg, Calvinist attempts to cleanse Lutheran churches of remnants of the ‘papist’ past met with fierce resistance.57 In Anhalt, for example, a number of pastors resigned and parishioners boycotted the Calvinist communion and forcibly delayed the removal of images. A citizen of the small town of Jessnitz refused to help with the removal of the Lutheran altars, saying that he had sworn at his baptism not to destroy churches and altars, but to help build them. He feared, he added, that his hand would whither away if he turned it to the destruction of an altar; not a strictly orthodox position, by the standards of any evangelical confession!58 When Moritz of Hesse-Kassel introduced his Calvinist reforms—including the breaking of bread at communion, the Heidelberg Catechism and iconoclasm—in 1605–1608, he encountered opposition from Lutheran Upper Hesse in particular. On 5 August 1605 resistance in Marburg reached a high point when rumours circulated that the parish church was about to be stripped of images. Lutheran citizens boycotted the Calvinist service, and attacked the preacher who had preached on the problem of the Eucharist. They then took the keys of the church and locked it. Moritz threatened to use military force against them if necessary, and preached in the church himself. After this display of princely authority, a group of artisans were commissioned to destroy the contested images.59 In Schmalkalden, a Hessian exclave in Thuringia, there were revolts in 1608 triggered by the prospect of the introduction of the fractio panis and the removal of images.60

In cases of conflict between Lutheran subjects and Calvinist princes it was not just images and liturgy that were at stake. Resistance to religious reforms was often, of course, a focal point for protest against an increase in princely or central state authority. Yet the fact that popular resistance coalesced around the attempted reform of liturgy—in particular of communion and baptism—and iconoclasm suggests that for many Lutherans it was above all their day-to-day religious life that was at stake. Perhaps the most extreme case of the popular Lutheran defence of images occurred in Berlin in 1615. In March of that year Brandenburg’s Statthalter and regent Margrave Johann Georg, a keen adherent of the Calvinist faith, ordered that all images and liturgical paraphernalia were to be removed from Berlin’s richly-furnished cathedral.61 Elector Johann Sigismund had refused to undertake the cleansing of his own church, despite pressure from Abraham Scultetus, because of the reaction that he feared it would provoke from his Lutheran subjects. And indeed Johann Georg’s iconoclasm, compounded by the arrest on 3 April of a Lutheran deacon who had preached against the Calvinist iconoclasts, led to a riot: the houses of Calvinist preachers were plundered. According to one report the citizens and rabble cried ‘you destroyed our images and our crucifix; we want to attack you and your Calvinist Pfaffen [holy joes]’—and Johann Georg himself was forced to flee the city.62

Images clearly played a prominent role in the confessional conflicts of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But what, if anything, did the visual culture of later Lutheranism owe to these disputes? Can they help to explain why Lutheran patrons commissioned such elaborate images?63 An epitaph from 1616, produced in the immediate aftermath of Berlin’s Calvinist iconoclasm, suggests that both the preservation of medieval furnishings and the commissioning of new images could affirm confessional identity. In this epitaph Johann von Kötteritz, an electoral advisor, and his wife, Caritas Distelmeyer, kneel between Moses and John the Baptist, representatives of the Law and Gospel.64 In the background the interior of St Nikolai, Berlin's main parish church, is represented, richly adorned with images that provided a suitable setting for the key rites of the Lutheran liturgy (baptism, preaching, marriage and communion). A baptism enclosure with its font, dating from 1563, occupies the centre of the church; to the left is a confessional or a private pew. The celebration of communion is depicted at the medieval high altar in the choir. A triumphal cross rises above the rood screen, and the Kötteritz family chapel can be seen on the right.65 With the cleansing of Berlin's Cathedral (the electoral church) in 1615, the richly furnished parish church of St Nikolai became, it seems, a crucial site of Lutheran identity.66

Outside Berlin, patrons also responded in similar ways. Hans Friedrich von Stutterheim, for example, who died in 1616, commissioned a new altarpiece for the parish church in Drahnsdorf, near Golßen. In the predella (destroyed in 1945) was a bust-length image of the donor with an inscription in Latin and German that read: ‘O God protect the church and the altar from all danger so that the Word and sacrament remain to honour you until the end. Send away from it the Romanists, the Jesuits and Calvinists’. The central image in this altar was not, as we might expect from a Lutheran confessional piece, a Crucifixion or Last Supper, but an image from the late fifteenth century of the Queen of Heaven holding the Christ Child and a sceptre.67 Here, as with Wolgemut’s Zwickau altar (Figure 29.29), we see the Lutheran readiness to assimilate remnants of the Catholic past. But whereas Zwickau’s pastor, Johann Petrejus, had expressed grave concerns about the confessional confusion that might result from the reuse of a pre-Reformation ‘idol’, this Brandenburg patron confidently placed Mary alongside an inscription castigating all of the Lutherans’ religious opponents.

While Saxony’s Lutherans were never confronted with a full-scale Calvinist reform of religious life, the territory’s two ‘crypto-Calvinist’ interludes certainly informed attitudes to ecclesiastical art. A polemical image, produced in Leipzig in Saxony in around 1574, demonstrates very clearly the centrality of the altarpiece to Lutheran identity (Figure 29.30). The image opposes Calvinists on the left with Lutherans on the right. At the far left the Calvinists celebrate their communion secretly in a tent, with the devil as a guest. On the right, Lutherans gather around a splendid altarpiece to receive communion. The image is divided by a heavenly ladder, at the top of which a Calvinist plunders a chest containing divine secrets. Zwingli has also started to climb this ladder, but it collapses beneath him. This painting was almost certainly produced in connection with Saxony’s first crypto-Calvinist interlude in 1571–1574. Elector August suspected a plot against Lutheranism among his advisors and the Wittenberg theologians, and persecuted those accused of Calvinism, including the Leipzig publisher of a 1571 tract, Lucid Explanation of the Lord’s Supper.68

For the majority of Lutherans, the finer points of the controversies that arose over the Lord’s Supper and Christology during the later sixteenth century undoubtedly remained obscure. They could, however, perhaps have spotted the visible markers of these theological debates. The Leipzig polemical image contains, for example, a nice visualization of the theological dispute over the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature: Christ chained in heaven on the right-hand side of God’s throne. The image ridicules the ‘sacramentarian’ view advanced in Zwinglian and Calvinist writings that Christ’s human nature had ascended to sit at God’s right hand, and could not therefore be truly present in the Eucharist, as Luther had suggested.69 Ordinary Lutherans could also grasp the image issue, and there are indications of a heightened public awareness of the confessional significance of church art during both the 1570s and the late 1580s, when Elector Christian I attempted to ‘purify’ Saxony’s religious life. A visitation carried out in 1575, for example, in the parish of Grossenhain, north of Meissen, showed a concern for the church’s chattels that had been neglected during earlier inspections. These were carefully listed in an inventory, and the visitors also reprimanded the local mayor for having moved a crucifix in the parish churchyard into a corner.70 Elector Christian I’s reforming attempts were brought to an end by his death in 1591, before he had a chance to mount a systematic attack on images. Yet his Lutheran subjects were already getting worried. Hieronymus Engelberger, a zealous reformed pastor who became superintendent in Herzberg in 1589, aroused hostility in part because he was known to have stripped his previous church of images.71 Some Lutheran laymen responded by publicly reaffirming their commitment to images: in 1592, for example, Heinrich von Beust and his wife gave a splendid new altar to the parish church in Nieder-Planitz near Zwickau, which had an inscription referring to the crypto-Calvinist movement, an admonition to believe God’s words concerning Christ’s gift of his body and blood. An epitaph-altar from Seifersdorf near Dresden, erected in 1604, commemorates the steadfast loyalty of its donors, two brothers, ‘to the Unaltered Augsburg Confession’ (as opposed to Melanchthon’s Variata, signed by Calvin in 1540).72

III.2: Preaching

Such explicit inscriptions are unusual, but consecration sermons indicate that congregations would have had an awareness of the confessional significance of images and church furnishings even without them. Consecrations, though apparently at odds with the evangelical rejection of the notion of churches as sites made holy by priestly ceremonies and by the presence of relics, had a strong history within the Lutheran tradition.73 Luther himself had preached a sermon for the consecration of the chapel at Schloß Hartenfels in Torgau in 1544, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the taking-into-use of new churches, altars, pulpits and fonts was often accompanied by some kind of special service. As Vera Isaiasz’s study of these sermons indicates, consecration rituals derived their significance in part from confessional conflict: they were shaped by Lutherans’ desire to distinguish themselves from Catholic idolatry on the one hand and from Calvinist iconophobia on the other.74 Unlike Catholic ceremonies, they involved no exorcism and no installation of relics. Preaching was the central event, accompanied by prayer and music. But in response to Reformed challenges, sermons from the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries increasingly emphasized the sacrality of the church and its furnishings, and the importance of setting them aside from profane, worldly use.75 These sermons, like their Catholic equivalents, were often titled encaenia, the term used for the Jewish feast commemorating Solomon’s consecration of the Temple of Jerusalem (John 10.22).76

Consecration sermons provide a good indication of the significance attributed to newly-commissioned works, even if congregations did not always pay attention to their content (in 1620 one preacher found it necessary to remind his congregation that the pews in their newly built church were for listening diligently, not for sleeping).77 Preachers often took the opportunity to emphasize the confessional significance of the space or object that was being consecrated. Andreas Veringer’s 1609 consecration sermon for the Stadtkirche in Freudenstadt in Württemberg was a paradigm: ‘alongside the fact that we have a beautiful altar and font in our newly-built church’, he told his listeners, ‘we also want to show with these objects that we share no part or community with the Zwinglians and Calvinists, who smash up the altars and fonts’.78 Of all the items that adorned Lutheran churches, it was undoubtedly the altar and altarpiece that had greatest significance during the era of the Second Reformation, for in the altarpiece conflicts over the Lord’s Supper, Christology, rituals and images coalesced. Altars, retables and their consecration sermons all testify to the depth of Lutheran Eucharistic piety.79 As Helwig Garth reminded his congregation in his 1610 consecration sermon for the splendid new carved wooden altarpiece in the church of St Jakobi in Freiberg, ‘whatever affronts, shames and dishonours the altar, redounds to the sacred and most worthy Lord’s Supper’.80

Garth’s consecration was not, he stated, like the papist ones that used blessed water, chrism and the invocation of saints. But the presence of the altar and its retable distinguished this church from the churches of the iconoclasts, who used only wooden tables. It was fitting, he added, that the altar should be decorated,

because through it the honour of God, His Word and sacraments is sought and promoted. Furthermore, the altar is built and used for the distribution of communion, which pleases and consoles our hearts. Thus those with pious hearts feel the duty and responsibility to care for and adorn it using their temporal wealth and goods, so that it will remain clean and pure and distinguished from other common tables and edifices.81

Garth’s sermon also described the function of the altar within the ceremonial life of the Lutheran community, perhaps providing an insight into the populace’s attachment to such objects. It was used not only for the distribution of communion, but also for the collect and blessing, for weddings, for ordinations and for public penance. His sermon concluded with a prayer that asked God to protect the altar from Papists and Jesuits, Zwinglians and Calvinists and other fanatics and heretics, who would make it unclean and desecrate it through false teaching, idolatry and superstition, or even tear it down entirely.82

It was not only the altar, however, that reminded Lutheran congregations of their confessional identity. When the church in Oelsnitz in the Vogtland had a new font installed in 1638, the pastor told his congregation that it was to be consecrated neither with papist, idolatrous ceremonies nor ‘with Calvinist mockery’, for Calvinists ‘hardly have any respect for fonts and holy baptism’.83 In 1654 Gottfried Siegmund Peißker, pastor of Bischofswerda, consecrated the new altar in Stolpen and lamented that the Calvinists had made ‘pigs’ troughs’ out of fonts and altar stones.84 In 1663 Christianus Parneman consecrated the pulpit, altar, font and confessional of the church in Jessen. The pulpit, he said, was for the preaching of the pure Word; ‘pray with me so that God does not allow any papist, heretic or enthusiast [Schwärmer] … to enter this pulpit’.85 Parneman also affirmed the confessional significance of the altar for his congregation:

I say that with the erection of this altar they attest in front of the whole world … that they are of pure and sound evangelical teaching and religion. For if they were of the Calvinist teaching and religion, they would never have contributed so willingly to the construction of a new altar.86

While baptism could, of course, be performed without a font, the Calvinists ‘cannot tolerate fonts’. ‘In some places in the principality of Anhalt’, Parneman added, ‘where there were especially zealous disfigurations, [fonts] suffered and were torn down, and thrown at dogs and pigs in the street, as had already happened in the Palatinate and elsewhere’.87 Even the confessional could reinforce a sense of Lutheran identity, for Calvinists had, Parneman reminded his hearers, abolished private confession before a priest.88

Sermons that did not draw explicit attention to the confessional significance of individual items might still express gratitude for having avoided the destruction perpetrated by the Calvinists. Martin Mirius’ 1591 encaenia for the renovation of the Stiftskirche in Halberstadt celebrated the fact that the territory’s postulate bishop, Heinrich Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, had introduced a Reformation that was Lutheran not Calvinist, and that had therefore removed abuses and not church furnishings.89 Simon Gedicke preached a sermon in the cathedral at Meissen on the occasion of its restoration in 1616, in which he recounted the survival of the church and its furnishings through traumas of history, including the Peasants’ War and the Schmalkaldic War. In particular he referred to the survival of the church during the ‘Calvinist poison’ of 1590/91, when proponents of the Reformed faith had wished to attack the altar, organ, images and especially the crucifix. ‘God protect us’, he pleaded, ‘from their zeal and venom.’90

Even once the immediate threat of forced conversion to Calvinism had receded, thanks to the protection for territorial churches enshrined in the Peace of Osnabrück, the notion that church buildings and their furnishings proved loyalty to the Augsburg Confession persisted. In 1662 Elector August of Saxony donated an altar to the cathedral in Halle that was, according to its inscription, intended ‘as a witness of true love towards the evangelical truth’.91 August’s court preacher, Johannes Gottfried Olearius, reminded his listeners in his consecration sermon for the altar that August had given the magnificent work not only as a sign of his own faith, but also ‘to promote public worship through the pious and orderly use of the holy, revered Eucharist, and also to adorn this church and to awaken proper worship among listeners.’92 When, in 1663, August laid the foundation stone for a new chapel at the ducal residence in Weißenfels, he placed in a cavity in the centre of the stone inscriptions on vellum testifying to his heartfelt love for the evangelical truth, commemorative medals and the Formula of Concord in German, a fact that Olearius recalled when he preached as part of the elaborate ceremonies that accompanied the consecration of this chapel under August’s son, Johann Adolf I (1682).93 These ceremonies lasted for five days and included six sermons as well as the usual trappings of a baroque court spectacle: music, drama and fireworks.94 In the first sermon, Olearius praised God for preserving the confessional purity of the scions of the Saxon electors ‘regardless of the many religious changes in this recent evil and waste-filled time’, then went on to list the furnishings, adornment and accessories necessary for a ‘properly furnished house of God’.95 Loyalty to the Augsburg Confession and a richly adorned place of worship went hand-in-hand.

IV: ‘The right middle road’?

Sermons and inscriptions testify to Lutherans’ desire to avoid iconoclasm on the one hand and idolatry on the other. The presence of particular church furnishings—above all altars and elaborate altarpieces—did clearly distinguish Lutheran from Calvinist places of worship. But what marked out Lutheran from Catholic? Did Lutherans, in their determination to distance themselves from evangelical ‘fanatics’, in fact remain ‘half-papists’ and ‘idolaters’ as their Reformed opponents suggested?96 Lutheran preachers were optimistic about their congregations’ ability to resist the lure of the images that filled their churches. According to Abraham Lange, court preacher in Altenburg, Calvinists, like the Jesuits, believed that ‘paintings move the heart [Gemüth] more strongly than the preached Word’.97 Lutherans, by contrast, could enter even Catholic churches without endangering their souls. Fortified, as they were, by God’s Word, paintings and sculptures were, for them, ‘wood like any other wood and stone like any other stone’, as Wittenberg’s theological faculty observed in 1597.98 ‘I do not worship them’, stated the Lutheran protagonist in The True Calvinist Peasant Catechism of 1597, ‘and I know that no one is to be found among us who does.’99 Helwig Garth reiterated in his 1610 consecration sermon that ‘there is no person in all the evangelical Lutheran churches who is taken in and stained by superstition, idolatry and horrors of the papists.’100 Christian Gerbern confirmed in his eighteenth-century history of church ceremonies in Saxony that ‘no one among us removes their hat before such an image, let alone kneels or prays beside it.’101

Despite such confident assertions, evidence of continued idolatry among the Lutheran population comes as little surprise to those familiar with the records of Lutheran church visitations. Even the Wittenberg theological faculty, who had stated that Lutherans could enter Catholic churches, acknowledged that such visits were not to be recommended for the ‘weak’.102 And as late as 1665, the theologians of Leipzig University were asked by a Dresden pastor whether it was permitted, in the evangelical church, to clothe and adorn images on altars, or whether ‘such practices are not superstitious, against our religion, and therefore to be counselled against or entirely abolished?’103 Their response was that although the practice was, in itself, indifferent, it should be stopped for through it the common man was drawn too easily to Catholic thoughts.104 Such obvious recourse to traditional forms of devotion may, by the later seventeenth century, have become fairly rare. But the commissioning of new imagery presented another, more subtle problem. Calvinists accused Lutherans not only of idolatry but also of recourse to works righteousness, which contradicted the central Reformation principle of justification by faith alone. The donors of images believed, they argued, that they were earning salvation through their actions.105 And indeed, such thoughts seem not to have been far from the minds of at least some Lutheran patrons. The inscription on the covering of a font from a small town in Lower Saxony, dating from 1645, reads: ‘Do not forget this good deed, O highest God, we pray to you, bless in turn the body, the soul of this benefactor and give perpetual salvation.’106

Lutheran pastors and preachers, driven by the difficulty of financing the refurbishment of their parish churches in the absence of any salvific imperative for patronage, encouraged the hope or conviction that God would in some way reward each donor’s pious act. In his 1611 consecration sermon for the new altar in the Jakobikirche in Freiberg, Hedwig Garth thanked the elector and all those who had contributed to the renewal of the church and its furnishings, adding that ‘the Lord Jesus may generously reward and repay all of them both in this world and in the next with the resurrection of the righteous.’107 In 1638 Christophorus Dörfelius promised the congregation at Oelsnitz that because Augustus Findekeller, captain of the Saxon elector’s bodyguard (Leibregiment), had given the church a font, God would ‘amply reward his good deed with his divine blessing, cover him with blessings, and put a golden crown on his head.’108 A 1647 sermon to celebrate the consecration of an altar in Nordhausen includes a prayer at the end:

bless all those who helped to build and who gave to the altar panel that is placed here, also their children to the third and fourth generation, and reward them in eternity for the deeds that they have done in your honour. Arouse their piety further for the adornment of your house, so that they faithfully look after and preserve this, your house, and adorn it as well as possible.109

Abraham Werdermann’s sermon in 1653 promised the donors of the altar at St Afra in Meissen that ‘God will make you His own. God will generously reward you and your children.’110 And another sermon celebrating the rebuilding of the church at Liebenwerda in the same year confirmed that ‘God will always communicate his grace, help and blessing to those who helped out of piety, generosity or duty to build this church with contributions.’111 While they do not constitute a full recourse to works righteousness, such assurances do at least mitigate the evangelical message that works were merely the fruits of salvation, not its cause.

What we see here is not, as in so many sixteenth-century visitation records, ‘ignorant’ or ‘weak’ peasants failing to understand or to accept the difference between pre-Reformation and new, Protestant devotional practice. Here, as with Bob Scribner’s tales of miraculous images of Luther, it is Protestant pastors, the educated elite, who are using the visual to ‘promote piety, confessional solidarity and self-confidence’.112 The rich visual culture that emerged after the Thirty Years War in Saxony points to their success. Figure 29.31, for example, shows an altarpiece from the church of St Wolfgang in Schneeberg, located 20km southeast of Zwickau. The painting displayed at the centre of the altarpiece is a relic of Schneeberg’s early Reformation: a panel from Lucas Cranach’s Crucifixion altarpiece, painted in 1539, the year that Albertine Saxony introduced Lutheran reforms. It is a relic that local Lutherans clearly valued highly: it had been looted by imperial troops during the Thirty Years’ War, and was finally returned to Schneeberg with great ceremony in 1650 after a lengthy campaign mounted by the city council, local pastors, the consistory and Elector Johann Georg I.113 The baroque transformation (Barockisierung) of the church in which it stands began straight after the traumas of the Thirty Years War, with the creation of new burial chapels, epitaphs, an organ, galleries and confessionals. The culmination was the installation in 1712 of this splendid new altar.114 Just as Catholics reset their most treasured images in new frames (for example the ancient Marian icons in S. Maria Maggiore and S. Maria dei Miracoli in Rome) Schneeberg’s Lutherans gave their precious Cranach panel a new setting commensurate with its perceived importance. Angels present it to the viewer, Moses and Aaron frame it, and Corinthian columns and glorioles with symbols of the Trinity and Holy Ghost crown it.

In its eighteenth-century form, the Schneeberg altarpiece is not merely didactic or commemorative; it is theatrical and engaging, just like the art of the Catholic baroque. Indeed, the closest parallel for the spectacular architectural structure of the altar is the high altar of Salzburg Cathedral, completed in 1628, while the glorioles with rays of light and clouds that crown it derive ultimately from Roman models.115 The Lutheran desire to appropriate Catholic visual forms perhaps owed something to the emotionalism and affective piety promulgated by Arndt’s Frömmigkeitsbewegung and later by the Pietist movement, and found a parallel in the cross-confessional use of devotional texts.116 It certainly indicates a readiness to use images not just as pedagogical aids but also as instruments of spiritual awakening. It was also, of course, driven by fashion. In its quest to appear respectable and refined, the Dresden court actively looked to Italy for its artists and musicians, even before the conversion of its elector in 1697. Throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, under the rule of Johann Georg, high baroque art spread rapidly through electoral Saxony.117 Many of the artists working for Lutheran patrons looked to great baroque masters such as Gianlorenzo Bernini and Peter Paul Rubens for inspiration. Indeed, a 1690 altar from the Johanneskirche in Belgershain even directly copied Rubens’ ‘Descent from the Cross’, one of the great masterpieces of the Counter-Reformation produced for the altar of the Arquebusiers Guild in the transept of Antwerp Cathedral.118

One final example will demonstrate that this recourse to Catholic forms did not, however, constitute a weakening of Lutheran confessional identity: the Dresden Frauenkirche, completed in 1743 (Figure 29.28).119 In early eighteenth-century Saxony, Catholicism was a much more immediate threat than Calvinism because of conversion of the elector, Friedrich August ‘the Strong’, in 1697.120 The city’s Lutheran council responded by financing and organizing the construction of this magnificent church, designed to accommodate 3,500 worshippers. Despite its visual splendour, and despite the fact that the town council tried to finance its decoration by selling burial sites in the ‘sacred’ ground beneath it, this church can only be understood as an assertion of Protestant self-consciousness in the face of Elector Friedrich August’s Catholic court. In a ceremony that took place before an audience of thousands, the Augsburg Confession was laid into its foundation stone, and an inscription above the altar commemorates the role of ‘the senate and the people of Dresden’ in its creation.121 There can be no doubt about what this church is for. As the preacher Valentin Ernst Löscher emphasized in his consecration sermon (1734),

churches are not theatres, to which one goes to see vain representations and splendid processions [as happens with the Catholics] … but they are auditoria, where we come together to hear God’s Word and to celebrate the sacraments; they are teaching and hearing houses [Lehr- und Hör-Häuser].122

From its prominent pulpit to its confessionals and communion gallery, which enabled congregants to walk behind the altar after receiving the host on the north side to receive the wine on the south, the Frauenkirche provides a remarkable setting for Lutheran piety.123

V: Conclusion

From the early decades of the evangelical movement, Lutheran reformers valued images not only as teaching and commemorative aids, but also as signs of order and moderation. Lutheran attitudes to images were not, of course, homogenous: from Johann Petrejus in Zwickau, who feared images’ idolatrous connotations, to the Pietist leader Philipp Jakob Spener, who rejected visual splendour in favour of poor relief, ecclesiastical art had critics inside as well as outside the confession.124 Here, as in other matters, there was a diversity of opinion as to what constituted proper Lutheran practice. In a number of German territories, however, it is clear that the threat of Calvinist iconoclasm embedded images more deeply than ever in Lutheran religious culture, not only at the level of the theological elite, but also at the level of popular piety. Images, like liturgy, became an important confessional marker. The strength of Lutheran attachment to images—the extent to which they had become embedded in Lutheran confessional culture—was manifest in the flourishing of religious art after the era of the Thirty Years War. In Saxony in particular, with its rich, Italianate court culture, the Lutheran baroque blossomed. The elaborate altarpieces and other furnishings that adorned not only court chapels but also numerous parish churches should not be understood, despite their affinities with contemporary Catholic visual culture, as a blurring of the confessional boundary between Lutheran and Catholic. Rather, they expressed the true, evangelical church’s continued confidence in its ability to tread a proper path between iconophobia and idolatry.

Author notes