Spaightwood Galleries

Before the Reformation, the subjects most likely to be depicted in religious art included Adam and Eve's fall in the Garden of Eden as modeled by Masaccio, Michelangelo, and Raphael among others. With the Reformation, the meaning of the fall became crucial: how far down did Adam and Eve fall and by what means could they be raised back up again. (Other subjects generated by this event included the fate of Adam and Eve's posterity, including Cain and Abel; the decline of life into sinfulness that led to the flood, with Noah as God's chosen agent to save those who were to be saved; Lot, the one just man permitted to leave Sodom before its destruction; chosen to destroy God's enemies but through his own weakness, forced to destroy himself as well when he pulled the temple of Dagon down upon the Philistines gathered there; Judith, whose faith allows her to save her people from Holofernes and the Assyrians; Susanna, whose innocence proves no defense against the false witness of the elders who try to coerce her into granting them sexual favors, but who is saved when God calls up a child to foil the elders (who stony hearts are rewarded by being crushed by stones for bearing false witness). Of course, the New Testament was of even more relevance to artists of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation: popular subjects included events from the life of Jesus, images of the Virgin Mary, devotional images of saints commissioned for altar pieces, and devotional works for side chapels in churches or in the homes of the wealthy. With the explosive growth in the production of prints at the beginning of the 16th century, opportunities to create images abounded and the audience for them multiplied: now even those much lower down on the financial tree could own their own art and with the Reformation, doctrinal issues seem to have become central for many commissioning and publishing prints. Prints could depict individuals who were either positive or negative examples and prints could depict biblical histories by showing cycles devoted to significant biblical events like creation, temptation, fall, the life of fallen man, heroes and heroines of the Old and New Testaments, and subjects from the life of Christ, usually focusing on his miracles or his sufferings, and images showing the acts and sufferings of the faithful. In the North, the center of artistic activity in the early part of the century was focused in Nuremberg, where Albrecht Durer and the artists he influenced (such as Hans Sebald Beham, Heinrich Aldegrever, Georg Pencz, Daniel, Hieronymous, and Lambert Hopfer, and others) worked and in the Netherlands, where Lucas van Leyden's works were a starting point for those who came after, like Hendrik Goltzius and Jan Saenredam. As Netherlandish artists started traveling to Italy and returning with a whole new set of ideas about how prints ought to look and work, Mannerism based upon Italian models (especially Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian) but drawing as well upon the works of Durer and Lucas became the dominant style and the lands that would become Belgium and Holland became the center of the print world. During the mid to late 16th century and the first part of the 17th century, artists and print publishers located in Antwerp (like Cornelis Cort, Jan Sadeler, Phillip Galle, the Wierix brothers, the Collaert brothers) or, after the fall of Antwerp to the Spanish, in other Dutch cities (including artists like Hendrick Goltzius or Rembrandt) produced large bodies of work published in books, in portfolios, and as single sheets for large publishers like Hieronymous Cock, the Plantin-Moretus publishing dynasty, or the great engraver-publishers like Jan Sadeler, Philips Galle, Hendrik Goltzius, and others. Within this large body of images, we have chosen to present several groups as identified above and several overviews. The two sets of prints depicting the heroines of the Old Testament and of the New by Adrien and Hans Collaert and by Carel de Mallery after drawings by Maerten de Vos (see links above) provide an easy introduction to the question of the role of individuals in 16th- and early 17th-century art; the links to specific individuals like Adam and Eve, Noah, Lot and his daughters, Samson and Delilah, Jephthah and his daughter, Judith, Susanna, the Virgin and Jesus, and Mary Magdalene among many others provide extended glimpses of some different kinds of presentations of these key figures suggesting that Renaissance artists and viewers may have been both more complex and more sophisticated in their presentations than they have recently been given credit.

Select Bibliography: W. Th. Kloek et al, Northern Netherlandish Art 1525-1580: Art Before the Iconoclasm (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1986); H. Diane Russell, Eva / Ave: Women in Renaissance and Baroque Prints (Washington DC: The National Gallery of Art, 1990); Ellen Schultz, ed. Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg 13000-1550 (NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986).