PIETY AND PERSECUTION

Nuremberg’s many churches and chapels were replete with statues, paintings, tapestries, and precious objects, around which religious rituals and devotions were performed, some extending into civic space. Nuremberg itself became a pilgrimage destination on the feast celebrating the Imperial Relics, which included pieces of Christ’s cross, and the lance that pierced his side.

Dürer’s religious prints allowed direct emotional engagement in matters of faith. His many images of the Virgin, some located in familiar Nuremberg surrounds, were meant to stimulate devotional piety. So were the prints depicting Christ’s suffering and death, as especially found in The Small Passion and The Large Passion series, books that also included verses by Nuremberg monk and humanist, Benedict Chelidonius.

A focus on Christ’s suffering in these books, Dürer’s own writings, and many contemporary sermons, texts, and images, helped amplify false accusations, however, that the Jews were the killers of Christ. Such anti-Jewish beliefs stimulated blood libel accusations and the expulsion of Jews from many German cities and territories, including from Nuremberg in 1499.

The growing reforms and dissent related to the outbreak of the Reformation in the 1520s brought further challenges to Nuremberg; yet the city’s government and artists navigated religious change with comparatively little social upheaval.

Michael Wolgemut (artist)

Germany, 1434-1519

Wilhelm Pleydenwurff (artist)

Germany, c.1458-1494

Simon of Trent; Regiomontanus; Hans Böhm, the ‘Drummer of Niklashausen’

in Hartmann Schedel, Register des Buchs des Chroniken und Geschichten

(Nuremberg Chronicle; German edition)

(Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493), fols CCLIIII verso – CCLV recto

hand-coloured woodcuts

Rare Books collection, State Library Victoria.

RARESEF 093C933KB

In 1475, Jews in the Italian city of Trent (here wearing compulsory Jewish badges) were falsely accused of the child Simon’s murder: one of many ‘blood libel’ cases. Christ’s blood underpinned Christian devotion, and Simon’s Christ-like wounds are here enhanced with hand-applied red ink. Nuremberg astronomer Regiomontanus holds an astrolabe. Hans Böhm’s 1476 vision of the Virgin led him to throw ‘sinful’ objects into a bonfire and preach social and religious change; he was burned as a heretic.

Unknown artist

Crucifixion and Canon of the Mass

in Missale insignis ecclesie Trajectensis (Missal for the Diocese of Utrecht), 1497

hand-coloured woodcut

Rare Books collection, State Library Victoria.

RARESF 093 C974H

Missals provided the words for the Catholic Mass, that ritual where bread and wine became Christ’s body and blood. But missals were not simply scripts for priests; they were also ritual objects. At the moment in the rite shown here, as the bread was about to be transformed, priests would kiss a crucifixion image. This opening includes an ‘osculatory target’, a smaller cross at the base of the crucifixion, used so that repeated kissing would not damage the precious image.

Christoffel van Sichem II (wood-engraver)

Netherlands, c.1580-1658

after Albrecht Dürer (artist)

Germany, 1471-1528

Harrowing of hell. Christ in limbo c.1600-1648

woodcut and letterpress

Gift of Dr J. Orde Poynton 1959.

Prints and Drawings Collection, Archives and Special Collections.

University of Melbourne.

1959.2936.000.000

This copy of Dürer’s print from his Engraved Passion series by one of the most productive artists of early seventeenth-century Netherlands provides one example of Dürer’s ongoing and profound influence. Dürer’s innovative representation of Christ’s release of Old Testament figures from the section of Hell called Limbo is depicted from within Hell itself. The doors have been smashed, Adam, Eve, and Moses already freed, and Christ now releases John the Baptist, to the consternation of Hell’s monstrous devils.