the reception of christian devotional art || torture and teaching: the reception of lucas cranach...

Torture and Teaching: The Reception of Lucas Cranach the Elder's Martyrdom of the TwelveApostles in the Protestant EraAuthor(s): Mitchell B. MerbackSource: Art Journal, Vol. 57, No. 1, The Reception of Christian Devotional Art (Spring, 1998),pp. 14-23Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777988 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 05:42

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.189 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 05:42:18 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/777988?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Torture and Teaching The Reception of Lucas Cranach the Elder's Martyrdom of the Twelve Apostles in the Protestant Era

14

Mitchell B. Merback

A child is like a wild tree standing alone in afield.... To

gather sweet fruit from a tree, you must first trim off all the wild branches and then insert into the cuttings buds of a sweeter kind. Treat the young in the same way. Their nature is wild, they are children of wrath, conceived and born in sin; their instincts and drives are unfailingly wicked. Into this rude stock you must implant a better nature. Suppress their rebellious impulses. Use the knife of God's word to cut

off the branches of their contumacious will. Raise them in the fear of God. And when their wild nature comes up again-as weeds always will-and the Old Adam stirs in them again, kill it and bury it deep in the ground, lest the

newly grown good nature once more revert to its wild state.

-Christoph Vischer, 15781

mong the projects carried out by the famed German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder for his patron, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, is a set of twelve

woodcuts depicting the martyrdoms of the Twelve Apostles (figs. 1-3). In scene after scene the missionaries of Christ are mocked, tortured, and hideously executed:2 they are beaten with clubs and fists, crucified, impaled, sawn in

half, flayed, and beheaded. Even from today's perspective of a culture glutted with images of violence, and even in the monochrome of woodblock printing, Cranach's images pack a visceral punch unmatched in the blood-spattered history of European religious art.

I have elsewhere interpreted these images as the

product of Cranach's unique "penal imagination," noting the transpositions of certain features of the artist's judicial milieu into the fabric of the individual images.3 Here, however, I focus not on the original production of Cranach's

prints, but rather on their successful republication by a Protestant printer twenty-five years later.

While there is nothing extraordinary about such a renovation of older "Catholic" imagery for Protestant

purposes-especially when the man behind the images was the ducal Hofmaler and Wittenberg patrician Cranach-this particular instance of a cross-sectarian

reception is highly instructive in several ways. The woodcuts served as illustrations to successive editions of Das

Symbolum der Heiligen Aposteln (The Apostles' Creed), with commentary by Luther, so we know that they were intended for specific educational uses. And judging from the number of times the blocks were republished in the Reformation era,4 they must have been a resounding suc- cess. Harnessed to the Creed and Luther's catechetical

gloss, Cranach's martyrdom imagery was reactivated to

uphold the cause of Lutheran religious indoctrination in a critical, later phase of the Reformation (roughly the 1530s and 1540s). During this time Lutheran reformers grew increasingly bitter over the persistence of religious ignorance within Protestant territories and anxious about the

spread of heterodoxies among their evangelical rivals. Cranach's images of the apostles, viewed in relation to the text of the Creed in these books, served as positive models of and for Lutheran education. They can be seen as defenders of "true doctrine" who, with the very concrete- ness of their physical pain, authorize the claims of the

text(s) to be the proper object(s) of indoctrination. Cranach's series appears to have been planned to

accompany the Apostles' Creed from the start, making it the first documented instance in which martyrdom imagery-as opposed to the conventional standing portrait-was used in

conjunction with the. Creed, though the original premises of this coupling of image and text are still uncertain.5 How- ever, if my interpretation of the Protestant uses of the

images is right, these premises will be more easily grasped.

SPRING 1998



Der.1* tidcI* S. PE TRVS.

San 3ott 'cn ) 3atn ?im gleO aOa

tel r

b2ts iff/jd ?verfage bem b6fen 0cigj/ 41ke 2Lbg6ttetcy / al4r enbetry rnb mioglanbem.

JCb FIAt man trawe n auff einetn lncCf4~n - auff lten /2( tuncbh t ,auff mib relbI/,no1c aurf mein gewalt/ unf /ge/t frt~nit / obbcv was ic baben mag.

3Cb f•esg mein trawen aufff •ine• Crcatmn /

fie lnb ins im mel otW c uff au1Een. 3Ca1 erv rugea n6t •se mein 4tr.w/alUin auff

benm lolfen un irticndicen enign 50ott/ ber 6io mel vnb Etrbett gefdcbafen bat / anb allein tbev alle iCreatu if. tribberumb ctttege icb> mid) nit fut: allc bose1ei bea inffdls/ rnub feincc GSe5lf4afft/ben mein ott r ber fic allUe i

3Cb gleube nic)te befte wen'iger a4I1 4ott/ ob i4f von allen trenf4con edl4f•/obber vere foltgt bt~be.

3~CLb glclb nicbts be•fe

Rteniger/ob ib artm/ ntnwerenbig/vntgett/veradt bin/obb~t all4s

binges mangel. 3C) gleube nidts bee wj1eniger/ob icb ein

61tinbr bin/Dc nn bicfcr mein ilaube/t fol nb opf tu

15

FIG. 1 Lucas Cranach the Elder. Martyrdom of St. Peter, c. 1512. Woodcut, 63/8 x 5 inches (16.3 x 12.6 cm). From Das Symbolum der Heiligen Aposteln (Wittenberg: Georg Rhau, 1548), fol. di verso. Landesbibliothek Coburg.

Across the divide of 1517 the reception of Cranach's pre- Reformation imagery therefore points two ways. That his

violent imagery suited Protestant needs so well suggests not

only the urgency of those needs in the late 1530s and

1540s, but also the potential meaning the images already held in 1512. Though I will concentrate on the Reformation

reception of the images, it seems to me that the meaning of

Cranach's series, like that of any influential work of art, must be sought in the "historical coherence" that emerges,

according to Hans Robert Jauss, in a historical process

relating production and reception, author and audience, back and forth, one against the other. "The work lives to the

extent that it has influence," writes the Marxist literary critic Karel Kosik, "the work is a work and lives as a work

for the reason that it demands an interpretation and 'works'

[influences, wirkt] in many meanings."' This process of reception and influence ramifies in

many directions, not only art historical ones. The fact that

the earliest Protestant editions of Das Symbolum with

Cranach's woodcuts were designed for the religious instruction of children casts the brutality of the imagery in

a new light. In both the theory and practice of Lutheran

education, catechism was essentially Kinderlehre and

required discipline (Zucht), something children were

thought to be lacking by nature. As reformers grew

increasingly despondent over the historical exhaustion of

their movement and its social consequences, they turned

their full attention to molding the subjectivities of the next

generation. Thus to see catechism as its practitioners did, as a technique as well as a text, means that we must give some account of its disciplinary dimensions and map its

implementation across the three interlocking spheres of

school, home, and civic life that the child inhabited.

Finally, I will try, in a limited space, to show how the

woodcuts themselves anticipate the disciplinary dimension

of Protestant education-in effect, announcing from within

the visual narrative itself, their participation in a kind of

penal didacticism that aimed at disciplining the young with the "lessons of the scaffold." Both Cranach's production and his Protestant reception therefore locate us at a

unique social intersection, where pedagogy, punishment, and image making overlap. In their new roles Cranach's

woodcuts worked to mold the young subject of catechism

into a model Christian, one who displayed the proper rev-

erence for authority (Obrigkeit) and the desired combina-

tion of inner faith and "outward discipline" (eusserliche

ART JOURNAL



16

FIG. 2 Lucas Cranach the Elder. Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, c. 1512. Woodcut, 63/8 x 5 inches (16.3 x 12.6 cm).

Zucht). The images became, in this regard, an arresting example of what Marx characterized as a "production [that] produces not only an object for the individual, but also an individual for the object."'

The Martyrdom series was brought back to life by the Wittenberg publisher Georg Rhau. A prominent citizen and supporter of Luther, Rhau published music and several important evangelical tracts and letters, including Luther's Large and Small Catechisms (1529) and the Augs- burg Confession (1530). After 1537, Rhau planned to pub- lish an evangelical counterpart to the most popular of the

medieval prayerbooks. Taking an older collection of

prayers called the Hortulus animae (Garden of the Soul), he revised them to accord with Protestant doctrine. He

paired the new Hortulus with the Apostles' Creed, supple- mented it with catechetical explanations of the Creed

penned by Luther fifteen years earlier, and illustrated it with Cranach's woodcuts, which are described in the title as "fine and pleasing illustrations." Rhau made it clear for whom the collection was intended when he dedicated the new edition to his five daughters from "a pious father and minister of the home."8

SPRING 1998



FIG. 3 Lucas Cranach the Elder. Martyrdom of St. James the Lesser,

c. 1512. Woodcut, 63/8 x 5 inches (16.3 x 12.6 cm).

17

How did the woodcuts, produced before the Reforma- tion, acquire a specifically evangelical meaning in Rhau's new configuration of text and image? What recommended their special use in a book designed for the young? And what attitudes toward children and their religious education underlie this particular combination of text and image?

As is well known, Luther and his colleagues endeav- ored to use education to transform German society into a true Christian polity, a "priesthood" of believers, based on an intimate knowledge of Scripture. To achieve this they launched an ambitious program of mass indoctrination for

both children and adults, requiring the concerted effort of the new church and local governments.9 Persuaded that no

theology can take root without the commitment of all to

popular schooling, Luther in a series of tracts vehemently exhorted the leaders and parents of Protestant Germany to reform, reorganize, and maintain a new system of Lutheran schools. To the urban magistrates in 1524 he asked, "for what purpose do we old folks exist, other than to care for, instruct and bring up the young." In another letter he admonished the same group for spending more money fighting the Turks than on schooling. And Luther let par-

ART JOURNAL



18

FIG. 4 Albrecht DOrer. The Four Apostles, 1526. Oil on two limewood panels, each 84%/8 x 30 inches (215 x 76.2 cm). Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

ents know there was treachery in skirting this commitment: "if you keep your intelligent son from school you are serv-

ing the devil."'1 After the reports of the Saxon Visitations of 1527-29,

which revealed an alarming level of religious ignorance in the parishes, Luther devoted himself to developing new forms of evangelical literature for religious instruction- what he called, simply, his "catechism." The Latin word catechisare means "to teach by word of mouth" and points to the traditional centrality of oral recitation in both teach-

ing and learning. Medieval catechisms-along with their

counterparts, confessors' manuals-were built upon the triad of the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the

Decalogue (typically in that order)." Though these books contained everything the Christian should know in a con- densed form, they were, from the Protestant point of view, lacking in order and clarity.12 Luther undertook to revise the order of the three parts and in the Large Catechism of 1529 introduced a new interpretation of the triad by putting the Decalogue (code) first, then the basic articles of faith (creed), and lastly the Lord's Prayer (cult).

Henceforth, in the hands of Lutheran reformers catechism became much more than a vehicle for instruction. It became, in short, a powerful instrument of psychological conditioning and the primary focus of pedagogical practice. Study of the catechism had to become habitual if its truths were to take root in the personality and reshape its

impulses. Drawing upon a commonly used trope of memory

work, Luther writes: "God's word must be in us like such a seal or brand mark, burned in, not touching the heart

lightly, as foam on water or spittle on the tongue which we want to spit out."13 Catechism practice was thus under- stood as a way of impressing (einbilden) the Word of God on the hearts of people so that the Holy Spirit could do its work there.14 The labors of the teacher had to be devoted to

exposing the pupil to the branding iron of the Word. This was done through lecturing, drilling, recitation, and memorization (music and images were also used as aids). In other words, catechism as text had to be wedded to catechism as technique to serve the cause of indoctrination.

There was both a positive and negative imperative in this theory. With the techniques of einbilden pedagogues pursued not only the positive goal of impressing the basic articles of the faith into the hearts and minds of individu- als; they also, in a crucial sense, sought to inoculate them

against their opposite-"false teachings." This was especially important toward the end of the 1530s, when the

original dynamism of the movement had waned and ortho-

doxy seemed beset on all fronts. These were the years of Luther's fiercest doctrinal battles with both the Catholic church and those evangelical radicals whom Luther called "the false brethren."'5 These controversies drove Luther- ans back upon their own orthodoxy, compelling reformers to begin placing more emphasis on standardization and

uniformity (Gleichfirmigkeit) of instruction.

This, then, shows us something of the pedagogical milieu into which Cranach's woodcuts were adopted. To understand what makes them appropriate to this new milieu, consider how they work in conjunction with the text of Das Symbolum in the Rhau edition of 1548. The

sequence begins, as all apostle sequences must, with Peter, who is shown by Cranach-in line with both textual and iconographic tradition-being crucified upside down

(fig. 1). On the right the first article of the creed is announced (and associated directly with the name of its

apostolic author),16 then rendered in ornate letters: Ich

gleub an Gott den Vater Allmechtigen / Schepffer Himels und der Erden (I believe in God the Almighty Father, Cre- ator of Heaven and Earth), followed by Luther's explica- tion: "That is, I reject the evil spirit, all blasphemy, all magic and false beliefs. I place my trust in no creatures, be they in Heaven or on earth, also neither upon myself nor upon my own power, ingenuity, property, piety or whatever [else] I may have.""' Each of the twelve articles is format- ted in this way throughout the book.

How are the three elements, two textual and one pictorial, designed to interact? The Creed, because of its ancient authorship, was seen as being invested with the presence of the Holy Spirit; it was, therefore, the primary object of einbilden, to be etched upon the heart through drilling, recitation, and memorization. Luther's catecheti-

SPRING 1998



cal text, though contemporary, partakes of the Creed's aura, extends and amplifies the primary object, and thus becomes the secondary object of einbilden. It is significant that the words of all of Luther's catechetical writings in general were likewise seen to represent "true doctrine." Contemporaries wholly endorsed the idea that they, like the ancient articles of the Creed, were infused with the Holy Spirit. Cranach's

images, by contrast, lack this metaphysical status; they neither "speak" doctrine in any didactic sense nor "illustrate" the words in any explanatory one. Rather, they serve as what I want to call the symbolic index of the objects' truth value:

they guarantee the claims of the text(s) to be the proper object of einbilden. And they do this in specific ways that conform to the distinctive ideological role reserved for the apostles in Protestant thought and iconography.

In the struggle against the papacy, sectarians, and radicals, the Protestant "cult" of the apostles was deployed to break the stranglehold that the cults of the saints and

Virgin had long held over medieval piety. The twelve were

configured as collective witnesses to the truth of Luther's cause and, therefore, prophetic figures who warn against the dangers of false doctrine. In a famous instance of such a deployment, Albrecht Dtirer, in response to Nuremberg's decision to "give leave to the Pope" in 1525, converted his

planned Sacra Conversazione altarpiece to a diptych portrait of the Four Apostles (even though one figure is, strictly speaking, an evangelist only) (fig. 4). He had these panels inscribed with German passages condemning the "false

prophets," the "damnable heresies," and the "spirit that is not of God." Thus at a time when radicals interpreted Luther's teachings to justify everything from iconoclasm, communism, and polygamy to the redistribution of wealth, conservative German artists used the figures of the apostles to defend Lutheran orthodoxy and to assail its enemies.18

Cranach's apostles play their defensive role mili-

tantly. As martyrs (in Greek mndrtys means "witness"), they bear a direct, existential "witness" to the truths whose words they were thought (by Catholics) to have authored. Beaten, tortured, mutilated, and executed, the apostles appear to defend their common creed article by article, limb by limb. Sacrificial pain, both glorious and abject, is made the visible and concrete testimony of the Word's truthfulness; the apostles authorize the Word with the indisputable materiality of their torments. In the process they also annihilate the Word's antithesis, the false teachings of papists and radical sectarians. The Protestant struggle is projected into the past, where the first disciples of Christ also become the first Lutheran martyrs at the hands of a nefarious pagan host.

The significance of such a backward projection to the era of the primitive church-when the galvanizing force of the catechism, and the Creed in particular, as a "symbol of faith" was based on its ritualized, oral recitation-could

frr )rmaubt fir brr rru rwr tfritf b intldf fbm dat

Int'r wtilt dl d i- nt aub irtrbru rimt t babr utab giuaiM oun im tun aui~mn •u fig wrmn rut btar er bumatur.rda

t HiMn ftouwra imjwunkftumwn wry fm bf hrba4iOtAOoi rjmrn ulitn grrn uft m Munim illinifbrttrjuORa4?tltI itia ua ndubna fIwuuifltahutw gituatrittj 5 .

FIG. 5 Ambrosius Holbein. Signboard for the Schoolmaster Oswald Myconius, 1516. Tempera on pine panel, 217/8 x 253/4 inches (55.5 x 65.5 cm). Oeffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel.

not have been lost on reformers. Pedagogues stressed the

importance of oral recitation as a way of ensuring that the individual was impressed with true doctrine. And now we see that, in the uses to which the book was put, a relation-

ship is established between the oral performance of the Creed by the child and the heroic defense of the Creed by the apostles, who also seem to recite the Creed in their death throes (roughly half of Cranach's twelve apostles appear to be speaking through their torments). Thus the

apostles, who appear in their roles as both the authors of the Creed and its militant defenders, become the very model of the pedagogical process of affirming truth and

annihilating falsehood, the very model of einbilden. As martyrs, the apostles also stood as a model of

discipline, of steadfastness under duress. And the goal of

einbilden, as any schoolchild knew, was one that required discipline. Schoolmasters demanded it and, when it was not forthcoming, extracted it with the birch rod. Whereas medieval schoolmen, according to Phillipe Aries, hardly ever concerned themselves with the conduct or moral character of their students outside the classroom, in the century leading up to the Reformation a new attitude developed.'9 It was no longer enough simply to communicate knowl-

edge; now pedagogues were responsible for shaping the whole individual. A signboard made for the Basel schoolmaster Oswald Myconius by Ambrosius Holbein in 1516

portrays the teacher casually birching a student during a recitation (fig. 5). On one hand, the teachers' actions con- cretize what Mary Carruthers has called a "recurring pre- occupation" with the uses of physical violence as a "mneumotechnical principle" among medieval schoolmen.20 On the other, this kind of treatment developed a

penal function as well, eventually becoming known,

19

ART JOURNAL



20

FIG. 6 Artist unknown. Figura reorum plectendorum (Execution in a Crowded Square). Woodcut from Jean Milles de Souvigny's Praxis Crimins (Paris: Colinaeus, 1541).

euphemistically, as the "scholastic punishment."21 From the fifteenth century onward, for all ages and classes of students, intellectual training would be permanently harnessed to the

body; instruction would incorporate surveillance, informing, and humiliating beatings to make education a total approach to shaping behavior, attitude, piety, and intellect.22

The attitudes of many sixteenth-century pedagogues, it seems, were likewise hardened in the battle against youthful depravity. Our records from later in the century are filled with condemnations of the brutality dished out by schoolmasters and calls for moderation. The Nordhausen

Schulordnungen of 1583, for example, told teachers to refrain from "acting tyrannically, striking boys until they are bloody, kicking them, lifting them from the floor by their hair or ears, beating them about the face with a cane or a book."23 Such warnings would hardly have been nec-

essary if the "techniques" described were never practiced. Although most pedagogues advised moderation, many warned against the danger of too little discipline. Further- more, they hoped to extend the discipline of the school into the home, where it was the parents' responsibility to train their children properly.

Seen against this backdrop of intensive institutional- ized discipline, Cranach's apostles emerge as the exem-

plars of a disciplined commitment to einbilden. What the schoolchild could only hope to "set as a seal upon [his] heart" through constant practice, memorization, and the

urgings, threats, and beatings of the schoolmaster, the

apostle has already had inscribed upon his flesh through the work of the executioner. Martyrdom, as the perfect confession of faith, here becomes a bodily metaphor for einbilden. It marks and conveys the perfect internalization of doctrine conceived as a "symbol of faith." Cranach's

apostolic authors and martyrs who triumph through violent death address the young auditor-viewer across a shared

experience of fortifying physical pain to uphold a divine and beautiful truth; to this the child should aspire. At the same time, however, the apostles stand apart from the

experience of the young person as remote and awesome

beings, much as the comic-book superheroes of today- several of whom suffer horrible deaths to be reborn into

dazzling bodies-model a certain kind of virtue as they fight for truth and right.

How did the theory and practice of discipline in the new Lutheran schools relate to and interact with the theory and practice of discipline in society at large-that is, in the legal order existing outside the schools? To ask the

question this way is to inquire into a structural relation between disciplinary spheres that were juridically separate but otherwise connected. Certainly there existed parallels between the disciplinary regime rooted in the home and school and the one rooted in the functionings of the judi- ciary and state. But perhaps it is too easy to say that these are "two halves" of a total disciplinary apparatus, or that both reflect the authoritarian character of the sixteenth-

century state (although I think both propositions are basi-

cally true). In the history of punishment the sixteenth

century holds a special and, one could say, notorious place. Cranach's generation lived through a more rapid absorption of Roman law into European jurisprudence than in previous centuries and saw the criminal justice system expand to

encompass a wider variety of punishable offenses-mostly those against property-and harsher penalties. The brutal and spectacular public punishments often ascribed to the Middle Ages en bloc actually reached their bloody zenith toward the middle of the century (execution rates for most European cities began to decline after 1600).24 Punish- ment functioned in large part as deterrent theater, a ritual of retribution staged by authorities, usually with the active cooperation of the community, whose interest in securing a good, Christian death (bene moriendi) for the penitent con- vict was paramount.

The structural relationship between disciplinary spheres of course becomes much more complicated when punishment is looked at in terms of what Foucault called a

SPRING 1998



"political tactic" in a total field of power relations, embed-

ded in and enacted through a legal-social ritual dense with

religious meanings.25 Here, however, attention to one

straightforward question will have to suffice: Was there a

concrete point of contact between the two spheres that was

of relevance to the Protestant reception and function of

Cranach's woodcuts? Such a point can be found at the site of punishment

itself, where children were often brought to executions and

given sharp moral lessons, sometimes accompanied by

whippings to drive the point home and impress it in mem-

ory. Most written evidence for this practice comes from the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-for example, the

travel accounts of the French Dominican Father Labat.

Witnessing a hanging at Civitavecchia, near Rome, Labat

left a morbid account of the ensuing display of the corpse, which the executioner mutilated and stripped of its pants to enhance the deterrent effect. After this, Labat reports that fathers arrived with their children "to observe the

corpse and drew the moral of the situation in ways that

suited the age of the child; they then gave them sound

slaps so that the child would not forget what he had seen

and heard."26

Although such rare textual evidence comes from the

Roman Catholic south, the visual evidence for these practices in the north is more abundant and can be found in

chronicle illustrations and woodcuts made for printed legal codes. To take one example, a woodcut from Jean Milles de

Souvigny's Praxis Crimins, which shows a small boy in the

immediate foreground of a crowded square where a decap- itation and hanging are being carried out: Clutching his hat

and pushing people aside to escape the crowd, his brow

creased, he appears ready to vomit (fig. 6). Of all the spectators, it is a preadolescent boy in whom the "message of

the scaffold" has produced the greatest outward display of

fear and trembling. Similar scenes can be found as barely noticeable genre motifs within the densely peopled spaces of northern religious art, particularly Passion iconography. At the base of the cross in a painting of the Crucifixion,

signed and dated 1538 by Cranach, is a figure of a man in

artisan's dress, clutching a young boy by the wrist and

directing his attention to the crucified Savior with a

pointed finger (fig. 7). These images, along with the documentary evidence,

suggest the expanded contours of a disciplinary sphere for

children that was mapped across the social spaces of

home, school, and civic and religious life. Psychologically, the spectacle of judicial suffering must have been a powerful tool of conditioning, more so for young children-

specifically preadolescents-since they were still, in the

eyes of pedagogues, innocent and docile enough for the

deterrent message to root itself firmly in their hearts. My inference is that both teachers and lawyers deemed it a

FIG. 7 Lucas Cranach the Elder. Crucifixion, 1538. Oil on panel, 475/% x 321/2 inches (121.1 x 82.6 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1947.62.

parental duty to put into practice the deterrent theories of

the early modern state; parents were to regard their dear

children, the heirs to the moral-political order, as potential criminals, as threats to that order.27

Would it be fair to say, then, that the deterrent image of the scaffold "indoctrinated" in much the same way as

the articles of the faith, by being "burned" into the heart of

the young person, to remain there, like a brand mark, as

Luther might say? Certainly they were informed by the

same attitude toward discipline, served the same kinds of

authoritarian social interests, and grew out of the same

forms of administrative organization. Perhaps the message of the scaffold was not terribly different from the message of the catechism. It may be useful to think of the discipli-

nary practices associated with public punishments as

counterparts to the injunctions against anti-Christian and

antisocial behavior (really, one and the same) forced upon schoolchildren in their catechetical lessons on the Deca-

logue. Like the medieval summas for confessors, the regular

drilling in the Decalogue by Lutheran catechetists forced

the impressionable child into a form of ritualized self-exam-

ination which was, a priori, a form of self-recrimination.

ART JOURNAL

21



22

FIG. 8 Lucas Cranach the Elder. Ecce Homo, from The Passion of Christ, 1509. Woodcut, 97/8 x 63/4 inches (25 x 17.2 cm).

Pastors such as Caspar Aquila, superintendent of Saalfeld in Saxony during the 1530s, projected pathological images of knavery, sinfulness, and degeneracy upon the young people in his charge:

QUESTION: Tell me, what have you learned from the Ten Commandments? ANSWER [by the child]: I have learned from them that we lead a damnable sinful life and that God cannot find a

single good thing in us. For the Ten Commandments are the book of our vices ... in which we see clearly ... what we are

before God without his grace, namely, idol worshippers, miscreants, blasphemers and violators of God's holy name, cursed robbers of his sacred temple and despisers of his eter- nal word .... rebellious abusers of our fathers, murderers of our children, envious dogs, cutthroats, whoremongers, adul- terers, thieves, rogues, deceivers and dissemblers, liars, tale- bearers and false witnesses, misers and insolent braggarts. In short, we are wild, insatiable, unbridled beasts whom God must keep locked in the cage of his commandments so that our evil nature may be confused and prevented from ruining us and all around us.28

This chilling passage stretches the limits of our credulity in how far pedagogues were willing to go in using guilt and fear in the repression of the natural drives and impulses of childhood. Aquila's catechism, though extreme, is struc- tured by a set of perceptions and theories about children, a kind of "anthropology of childhood" that he shared with moderate reformers and pedagogues like the superintendent Christoph Vischer (in the epigraph above). Their words echo a debate that exercised the minds of Lutheran

pedagogues and theologians-namely, the extent to which children were implicated in the rebelliousness of "the Old Adam." Since their behavior was the product of Original Sin, pedagogues faced an uphill struggle against a "natural" corruption that had to be destroyed if true Christian

piety were ever to be etched on their hearts, and if external

discipline (eusserliche Zucht) were ever to be achieved. It is possible, and useful, to locate Cranach's mar-

tyrdom imagery of about 1512 in the same ideological space as the Lutheran anthropology of childhood. But instead of seeing a one-way flow of social ideas and pre- scriptions issuing from the intellectual elite at Wittenberg University to civic authorities and parents, we can see ideas moving both ways. On the important subject of

youthful disobedience, for example, Luther once even cited his friend Cranach to the effect that "this is a perilous time" and "there is widespread disobedience and ingrati- tude, so that a magistrate is very much occupied with cases

involving the relation of parents and children."29

Equally direct testimony to the common currency of such ideas are Cranach's woodcuts themselves. Children

appear in four of the twelve designs and in two, the Martyr- dom of St. Bartholomew (fig. 2) and the Martyrdom of St. James the Lesser (fig. 3), they participate in the saint's passion in some provocative ways. In the first, a small boy appears in the lower right corner, flanked by two armored

knights and confronted by an angry dog. In several

respects he anticipates the figure Cranach would later use in the Chicago Crucifixion (fig. 7). But instead of passively accepting the spectacle before him, the boy makes a hand

gesture (resembling horns) by forming a closed V with the index and middle fingers, an indecent gesture-the exact

meaning is unclear-often used by Cranach and other artists to identify the enemies of Christ.30

The V gesture appears conspicuously in the crowd of jeering Jews in Cranach's woodcut of the Ecce Homo (fig. 8), part of a Passion series made for Frederick the Wise in 1509. Here we see two children among the spectators, both led by a large, robed figure with his back turned away from the viewer. While one boy seems immersed in the crowd, the other pulls away; and while the first boy looks up, agitated, toward Christ, as if taking part in the crowd's condemnations, the other's face seems to express fear. Elsewhere in the Passion series a child-tormentor skitters along the Via

SPRING 1998



Dolorosa, mocking the fallen Christ by pulling his lips wide apart, another obscene gesture. And in the Martyr- dom of St. James the Lesser (fig. 3) Cranach portrays a pair of children who, instead of being directed by an authority figure, stand alone at the forefront of the hostile throng inside the temple. Both figures appear to be making a hand

gesture known as the mano fica, or "fig," the medieval

equivalent of our raised middle finger. Numerous further instances of children present as

penal spectators in secular imagery, and as witnesses and tormentors in Passion iconography, could be cited here.31 But the quick glance I have provided here should suffice to show that the pessimistic views of children expressed in the Lutheran anthropology of childhood and put into practice at the actual site of public punishment were already present in Cranach's work (and in the work of his contem-

poraries) before the Reformation. This is what made them so well suited to their new context as Protestant Kinder- lehre. Children appear in Cranach's series as both witnesses and participants in the saint's passion. Perhaps they have been brought to the execution for its deterrent effect or to be taught a moral lesson, as their real-life coun-

terparts would have been; but they subvert these expecta- tions and instead use the occasions to revile the saints in their final agonies. In thus rejecting the "lessons of the scaffold" they mirror the rebellious adult's rejection of the

"message of the cross." Because children are naturally untamed and wicked, the deterrent and disciplinary effect of the spectacle is lost on them.

Finally, by reviling the apostles as they defend the articles of faith, Cranach's child tormentors repudiate the

very knowledge that Lutherans believed would lead them to the cure for their spiritual infirmity. In its stead they pro- duce an evil kind of anti-knowledge, which issues from the

unregulated body in the form of obscene gestures. The children in Cranach's series stand as negative models of einbilden and thus as antitypes against which the school-

child, using the book of instruction, could measure his own

progress toward Christian subjectivity and citizenship.

Notes 1. Christliche Auslegung und Erklerung der Haustafel ... (Leipzig, 1578),

quoted in Gerald Strauss, Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 96-97.

2. For the whole series, see Walter L. Strauss, ed., The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 11 (New York: Abaris, 1978), nos. 37-48. I use the term torture loosely here,

equating it generally with corporal punishment. It must be kept in mind, however, that historically torture denotes not a penal sanction, but rather a specific set of

practices for producing physical pain as a form of coercion, usually associated with judicial or military interrogations. For a historical introduction, see Edward

Peters, Torture (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985). 3. See Mitchell B. Merback, "Lucas Cranach the Elder's Martyrdom of the

Twelve Apostles: Punishment, Penal Themes, and Spectacle in His Early Graphic Art," Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1995, chs. 2, 4, 5, 6.

4. For all known incarnations of the series, see ibid., 485-94. 5. Ibid., 47-60. 6. Karel Kosik, Die Dialektik des Konkreten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967),

138-39; quoted and discussed in Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 15.

7. Karl Marx, from his introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Politi- cal Economy, in Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary, ed. Maynard Solomon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 65.

8. Quoted in Johannes Ficker, "Hortulus animae," in Buch und Bucheinband:

Festschriftfiur Hans Loubier (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1923) (my translation). 9. I take the gist of my arguments here from Strauss, Luther's House of Learn-

ing. For criticisms of Strauss's approach, see Lewis Spitz, "Further Lines of

Inquiry for the Study of 'Reformation and Pedagogy,"' in Charles Trinkhaus and Heiko A. Oberman, eds., The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance

Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 294-306. 10. For the quoted passages, see James Bowen, A History of Western Educa-

tion, vol. 2 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975), 363, 369. 11. On the evangelical transformations of the medieval catechism, see Dennis

Janz, introduction to Three Reformation Catechisms: Catholic, Anabaptist, Lutheran, ed. Janz (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1982).

12. Strauss, Luther's House of Learning, 157. 13. From a sermon on Luke 2:17ff. (December 1533), quoted and discussed in

ibid., 152-53. 14. In modern German einbilden means "to imagine, think, or believe," but

sixteenth-century reformers used the word to denote an act of impressing, etching, or imprinting lastingly (the Word of God) upon the mind.

15. See the two books by Mark U. Edwards, Luther and the False Brethren

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); and Luther's Last Battles: Politics and

Polemics, 1531-1546 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 16. The legend of apostolic authorship of the Creed was accepted and ratio-

nalized by most medieval authors but rejected by Luther, making the attribution of individual authorship for each article in Rhau's layout problematic; for solutions to this problem, see Merback, "Lucas Cranach," 411-16.

17. The entire text of the 1548 edition (now in the Coburg Landesbibliothek) is transcribed and translated in ibid., Appendix C.

18. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Diirer (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1955), 233-34. 19. Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life,

trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 252. 20. See Wolfgang Schild, "Schule und Schulstrafen," in Ch. Hinckeldey, Jus-

tiz in Alter Zeit (Rothenburg: Mittelalterliches Kriminalmuseum, 1989), 479-90. 21. Mary Carruthers, "Remembering with Attitude, Remembering the Book,"

in Dolores Warwick Frese and Katharine O'Brien O'Keeffe, eds., The Book and the

Body (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 3ff. 22. On discipline in the history of childhood, see essays by Lloyd deMause

and Mary Martin McLaughlin in The History of Childhood, ed. deMause (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), esp. 39-50, 130-38.

23. Quoted in Gerald Strauss, "Reformation and Pedagogy: Educational

Thought and Practice in the Lutheran Reformation," in Pursuit of Holiness, 286. 24. For the best recent work on the history of capital punishment in the late

Middle Ages and early modern period, see Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Jus- tice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993). For Ger-

many, see Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in

Germany, 1600-1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41ff. for declining rates after 1600.

25. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 23.

26. Quoted in Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence, Martyrdom (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 40.

27. For other evidence, see Albert G. Hess, "Pictorial Representations as Sources for Historical Criminology," Criminal Justice History 2 (1981): 63-84.

28. Caspar Aquila, Des kleinen Catechismi Erklerung... (1538): quoted in Strauss, Luther's House of Learning, 209.

29. Martin Luther, Table-Talk, ed. and trans. T. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967), 267 (entry from February 17, 1538 [no. 3751]).

30. See Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art

of the Late Middle Ages, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 200. 31. See ibid., 201-202 and 206-207; also Amy Neff, "Wicked Children on

Calvary and the Baldness of St. Francis," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Insti- tutes in Florenz 34, no. 3 (1990): 215-44. Neff's typological reading would have been overdrawn for most medieval viewers.

MITCHELL B. MERBACK teaches at DePauw University. His

forthcoming book is The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Crucifixion and Capital Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1998).

ART JOURNAL

23



the reception of christian devotional art || torture and teaching: the reception of lucas cranach...

Documents