German History-2012-Forum-574-91-1.pdf

German History Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 574–591 FORUM The Visual Turn in Early Modern German History and Historiography 1. In what ways are studies of visual culture enriching our knowledge or transforming our understanding of early modern society, culture and politics in Germany? Have theoretical moves or new or interdisciplinary © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghs076 Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 In recent years, following the linguistic and cultural turns, scholars have begun to speak of a visual turn in historical scholarship. This has been particularly pronounced in early modern historiography. Though the Renaissance has long been studied as a high point in the patronage of artists and the flowering of the arts, more recent scholarship has argued that visual materials have for too long been the subject only of aesthetic appreciation, rather than de-coded for what they were: sites of power and its contestation, of negotiations between governments, churches, civic rulers and communities. Among art historians, various movements challenging a (still widespread) connoisseur tradition have encouraged more political readings—beginning with the Warburg School, and including the work of individuals such as Michael Baxandall, Roy Strong, Martin Warnke and Horst Bredekamp. In the process, visual studies have been broadened to place more emphasis on popular media, such as woodcuts, engravings and artefacts. Meanwhile, beyond the discipline of art history—notably in History and Literature departments—scholars have become attentive to the materiality, performance and reception of what are now widely known as ‘visual texts’. Though some genres, such as medals or commemorative porcelain, remain neglected, research into images and their role in the political cultures and social histories of the day is thriving. Yet we are still grappling with methodological problems. How do images differ from words as communicative strategies (bearing in mind that many early modern visual texts often contain both)? How do we establish intentions and the respective roles of artist or patron? How do we assess how images were perceived? Was there a ‘period eye’? Did more popular pictorial media, such as ceramics or cheap lead and copper medals, permeate all levels of society? How did increasing literacy in early modern Germany affect the function of visual texts and objects? How far did visual texts and objects contribute to the constitution of a public sphere during the German Reformation and Counter-Reformation? And were there distinctive national patterns in regard to any of the above? To reflect on such questions, and their particular bearing on the history of early modern Germany, shortly before his untimely death the editors invited the distinguished scholar of Tudor and Stuart visual culture Kevin Sharpe (Queen Mary London) to convene a forum to reflect upon such questions and their particular bearing on the history of early modern Germany. He invited Jeffrey Chipps Smith (University of Texas), Barbara Uppenkamp (Kunsthochschule Kassel), Bridget Heal (University of St Andrews) and Larry Silver (University of Pennsylvania) to participate. Forum 575 approaches been the most fruitful new explorations or has empirical and archival scholarship more enhanced our understanding of early modern visual culture and history? Uppenkamp: As an art historian with a background in Philosophy and Comparative Linguistics, of course I prefer an interdisciplinary approach to the study of art and architecture, as a part of cultural studies informed by theories of symbolic communication. This encompasses empirical methods, comparative reading of historical sources, and archival research as a basis and as a method for verifying hypotheses. In my personal experience the Hamburg school of art history, rooted in the methods of Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky, remains the starting point for any methodology of this nature. Theoretical moves and new impulses for interdisciplinary approaches emanated Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 Smith: I am tempted to begin my answer to these questions with a simple ‘yes’. Studies of visual culture have expanded greatly in recent years, especially as scholars in disciplines beyond art history have recognized the potential of art, broadly defined, in helping us understand early modern Germany. Bob Scribner demonstrated how woodcuts, both polemical and didactic, shaped nascent confessional debates. Artists and audiences alike realized the capacity of the visual for influencing public opinions. Scribner adroitly anchored his examination of these prints in discussions of popular culture, in which the messages of the woodcuts had their counterparts in contemporary rituals, carnival and literature. Ulinka Rublack’s Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe considers clothing, as recorded in the visual arts, as a source for investigating issues of self-fashioning, consumerism, and social and even national kinship. In The Body of the Artisan, Pamela Smith demonstrated how masters such as the goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer combined their fundamental knowledge of natural materials with new experimental practices to stimulate the period’s scientific revolution. Fortunately, scholars today are ever more inclined to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries as they search for sources for and, perhaps, answers to their research questions. Like many art historians, I take the historian half of this label seriously. Art offers an invaluable tool, a historical document, for studying early modern German culture. It complements archival, textual and other forms of primary evidence. One must be cognizant of the inherent limits of any document and aware of the proper methods for analysing its content. I am encouraged by scholars’ increasing willingness to grapple with issues of visual culture. This was nicely demonstrated by the responses I received to the call for papers for a conference on the theme of ‘Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany’ for Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär, a meeting held at Duke University in late March 2012. I proposed six sub-topics: art, visual literacy and strategies of presentation; audience and the art of persuasion; the art of envisioning, which includes verbal and aural pictures and methods for stimulating the imagination; the ephemeral arts and theatricality; the built environment and spatial settings; and the history of the visual, which can encompass the rise of historical awareness, art collections, iconoclasm and new technologies. Seventy-six speakers from all the relevant disciplines embraced the challenge of thinking broadly about the early modern awareness of visuality, whether it is in the form of a painting, a verbal picture painted textually by Hans Sachs, or an image evoked in a sermon by Martin Luther. 576 Forum Heal: Students of the visual culture of early modern Germany can of course draw upon a rich tradition of detailed, meticulous late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship. The topographical descriptions given in multi-volume regional inventories, Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 in the 1990s especially from the departments of art history in Hamburg and Marburg. Both departments established interdisciplinary research groups for graduate students (Graduiertenkolleg): Hamburg’s was launched by Martin Warnke and focused on political iconography (Graduiertenkolleg Politische Ikonographie), and Marburg’s, led by Wolfgang Kemp, on art in context (Graduiertenkolleg Kunst im Kontext). Both research groups integrated interdisciplinary research from the fields of art and architectural history, media theory, philosophy, social sciences and history. The remit of these research groups was of course not limited to early modern German art, but some of the PhD dissertations that came out of these research groups shed new light on German art and architecture of the period c.1500–c.1650. In recent years, research on political iconography has moved from representations of single persons, princes or rulers, to representations of groups and corporations. This includes milieus at court or in the city, such as the high nobility or lower ranks of nobility; the mayors, the council and the burgers of a city, as well as religious communities and institutions. The investigation of courts and cities has also considered gendered audiences and gendered spaces, especially at court, and spaces that have been occupied by specific groups, such as religious groups or immigrants in the city. Let us consider three specific research projects as examples. The ‘Palatium’ project is a European group committed to research on networks of the European courts c.1400-c.1700. The ‘Residenzenkommission’ is a German commission that has been conducting research on courts and cities for twenty-five years, with a series of publications and colloquia. Their focus lies on historical research, but they have also engaged in interdisciplinary work, mostly with historians of architecture. The ‘Rudolstädter Arbeitskreis zur Residenzkultur’ is a group of historians and art historians who work on German courts on an interdisciplinary basis. Art historians who are attached to these projects look at works of art and architectural structures within the context of an historical and social process of communication. Another important contribution to this field of research has come from catalogues of works by individual artists or genres of production, such as tombs and epitaphs, which are based on archival research and the collecting of data and photographs. Until not so long ago the sixteenth century was a somewhat neglected field in German art history, except for the art of the early Reformation. As an exceptional dissertation of the 1970s, I would like to mention Hermann Hipp’s study of church buildings, which combines statistical and iconological methods. The result is a new perspective on the so-called ‘post-Gothic’ style mixed with Italianate Renaissance elements. Hipp suggested that it is a misunderstanding of the sources of sacred (‘church-like’) architectural forms to see them as a synthetic style directly connected with Gothic. Gothic elements are used almost exclusively for sacred architecture and carry religious meaning. The sacred ‘post-Gothic’ forms and the period style called Gothic exclude one another. This major step in the understanding of style in terms of a semantic system has been developed further in the volume Stil als Bedeutung in der nordalpinen Renaissance edited by Stephan Hoppe, Matthias Müller and Norbert Nußbaum. Forum 577 Silver: When historians first began to examine visual culture as part of early modern Germany, it was perhaps inevitable that they would—initially at least—turn to considerations of the Reformation. Thus their overviews tended to focus on the visual realization of new Lutheran themes, particularly in paintings—here, I am thinking of authors such as Christensen, Koerner, Heal and Noble—or the use of imagery in religious practices, as well as harsh caricature of Catholic excesses, particularly in prints. Bob Scribner’s signal contribution lay in consideration of art as an indispensable part of cultural practice and to include not just paintings, especially for princes, but also prints ‘for the sake of simple folk’. Visual culture can lead directly to the study of social behaviour and attitudes in the sixteenth century, the more so if patronage or audience can be determined. If any lesson can be derived from early modern religious divisions, underscored by the Peace of Augsburg (cuius regio eius religio), it is that religion and politics remain inextricable, especially at the will of princes. The English Reformation under Henry VIII and his heirs might be the prime case, but German examples abound—and they often come with artistic baggage. Lately under the banner of Lucas Cranach the Elder, scholars (particularly Andreas Tacke) have investigated the artist’s mystifying concurrent commissions, even for altarpieces, from both sides of the confessional divide—from both Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 for example the Kunstdenkmäler von Bayern or the Beschreibende Darstellung der älteren Bau- und Kunstdenkmäler des Königreichs Sachsen, are by no means comprehensive, but they provide a great starting point for any study of visual culture. There are also many detailed archival micro-histories in local history journals from the same period and later. The study of German visual culture rests on a firm empirical base, which has developed apace, especially with the increased accessibility of sources located in the former GDR. Of course, our understanding of early modern visual culture has also been invigorated by new approaches. Ever since Aby Warburg’s pioneering work in evading the ‘border police’ of disciplinary specialization, interdisciplinary scholarship has driven the field forward, as Jeffrey and Barbara point out. For those of us fortunate enough to have worked in Warburg’s library, incorporated into the University of London in 1944, the significance of the contribution made by the Hamburg School is beyond doubt. To give a more recent example, the study of early modern religious art has been advanced by a dialogue between theology and art history that goes well beyond the straightforward decoding of iconographical programmes. The research generated by the Kultbild project in Münster, under the leadership of Thomas Lentes, is exemplary here, while Joseph Koerner’s The Reformation of the Image provides a fascinating analysis of Lucas Cranach’s 1547 Wittenberg altar in the light of Luther’s own theology. The study of political culture and social history has also been enriched by a new attention to forms of visual communication such as gesture and dress, for example through Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s work and Ulinka Rublack’s Dressing Up. These works demonstrate the significance that contemporaries accorded to non-verbal expressions of religious and political identity. Historians have also devoted considerable attention to the use of both secular and ecclesiastical space, with German literature inspired in part by earlier sociological studies. I find Renate Dürr’s detailed study of church space in Hildesheim especially useful here in highlighting the importance of the physical environment in which political and social interactions occurred. 578 Forum 2. Belatedly, the work of Jürgen Habermas has been greatly influencing Anglophone scholarship. In particular, historians of early modern England have identified a public sphere in a period earlier than Habermas posited. Recently some have seen prints, cartoons and other popular visual artefacts (playing cards, or porcelain, for example) as important sites of the representation, consumption and contestation of authority. How far have such developments impacted on the scholarly field you know best? Has a revised model of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) been reimported to German scholarship and what role have visuals been given in it? Uppenkamp: Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communication and the public sphere has certainly played a role in the development of political iconography, which has been considering different categories of public and different modes of visual argumentation for about twenty years. This is true in respect of both of the impact of the artworks themselves and of responses to them—for example the destructiveness of iconoclasm Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 Luther and Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, a Hohenzollern and prince-bishop. Certainly Cranach’s religious paintings often featured his Saxon ducal patron, Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous, most notably in the great Weimar Altarpiece, at once a pictorial doxology and a dynastic tribute through donor portraits. More expressly, Cranach’s political links on behalf of his Saxon ducal patrons extended to political portraits for neighbouring electoral Brandenburg and the Hohenzollern. And moving beyond a narrow focus on the Reformation, additional studies of regional rulers, such as Ottheinrich of the Palatinate, consider the rich interplay between visual representations amidst the blend of religion and politics. But some rulers, particularly the Habsburgs, realized how much visual art could serve as a form of political promotion (and assertion of piety), as well as providing for a lasting memorial. Nowhere was such pictorial ambition more employed than for Maximilian I, though his descendants, such as Margaret of Austria, Charles V and Rudolf II have begun to receive scholarly attention, albeit often in the form of exhibitions. Clausewitz famously declared that war was the continuation of politics by other means, and early modern Germany was marked by powerful, apparently endless strings of battles between and among rival European dynasties (and nemeses, led by the Ottoman Turks) as well as among alliances of cities, especially in Germany or Switzerland. Such conflict generated a considerable body of imagery, and not only within the context of the Reformation. The early modern German military introduced standing armies of infantry (Landsknechten) and innovations in both gunpowder artillery and siege warfare, which appeared in commemorative luxury tapestries as well as in the more familiar prints and paintings. These examples suffice to show how the importance of close analysis and interdisciplinary investigation of visual imagery can lead to both social and cultural insights about German politics. Art history (by its very name an interdisciplinary field) has deep roots in the social practice of patronage and in ideological commitments of politics and/or religion, although its principal commitments largely remain in the cultural sphere. But art history rarely gives itself over to grand theorizing in the service of models, even historical models of modernization, imagined communities, or identity at any level. Forum 579 Heal: It is surely impossible for a historian of the German Reformation to maintain that there was no public sphere before the eighteenth century. Recent interest in the history of communications has confirmed this: thanks largely to the advent of printing, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of course witnessed what has been described as a media revolution (Medienrevolution). There can be no doubt that the Reformation generated, as Andrew Pettegree has put it, a ‘culture of persuasion’. But the exact impact of Reformation propaganda, especially visual propaganda, will perhaps always remain a matter of debate. In his seminal study of Lutheran woodcut propaganda, even Bob Scribner, who did so much to open up the field of early modern visual culture to historians, acknowledged the impossibility of establishing a concrete link between images and the actions and beliefs of the evangelical movement’s early supporters. Recent analyses of space and its use have also provided valuable insights into the nature of early modern Öffentlichkeit. Some, for example Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff in their 2004 study, draw explicitly on Habermas and his notion of a pre-modern representative and institutional public sphere. From church to tavern, built environments not only witnessed but also shaped social representation, public communication and conflict. Recently attention has also been given to the domestic environment, and to the role that images and material culture played in both shaping and proclaiming individual and family identity. The research here is difficult: domestic inventories rarely describe objects in sufficient detail to satisfy (as I know from experience, having waded through lots of them), and it is usually impossible to trace the provenance of items of furniture and so on that survive in museums. Yet work that takes the confessionalization paradigm as its starting point and investigates images and objects as part of a process of regulation and social discipline is bringing some new insights. Siegfried Müller’s 2002 article in Zeitschrift für historische Forschung on the confessionalization of domestic imagery in Oldenburg was exemplary, and Oliver Mey’s monumental (forgive the pun) study of epitaphs, Memoria und Bekenntnis is also of great use. Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 or the remodelling of religious artworks and their investment with new meaning during the Reformation. Theories of different forms of effect which go beyond the simple author–reader/sender–receiver model also have their roots in communication theory. With his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas undoubtedly had an influence on political iconography, in which artworks are seen as products of negotiation between different interests operating in public. The ground for this was laid by Aby Warburg, however, who saw artworks as ‘products of argumentation’ (Auseinandersetzungserzeugnisse). Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Wittkower and Fritz Saxl saw artworks as embedded in a communication process which was constitutive of wider historical and social change. This form of contextualization, which was based on the Frankfurt School and the Hamburg School of Art, was taken up again after the Second World War by critical art historians such as Martin Warnke, Klaus Herding, Jutta Held and Wolfgang Kemp. Martin Warnke speaks of art objects as products of balance (Ausgleichsprodukte), which stresses the actual object and its function within a certain context. This notion differs slightly from Aby Warburg’s notion of images in a wider sense as products of controversy or argumentation, which stresses the process of communication. Both give an active role to artworks in a process of cultural, social and political exchange. 580 Forum Silver: Visual art inevitably involves an exchange, so it is a public act, like a speech act. Certainly the degree of public discourse and/or contestation varies according to the proposed audience, the openness of access, and the medium involved. Obviously, Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 Smith: In my view, Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and The Theory of Communicative Action have had little direct impact on art historical scholarship about early modern Germany. Yet specialists have certainly long grappled with the intersection of art and audience. Who were the intended and unintended consumers of various types of art and artifacts? Even the term ‘simple folk’, which Scribner borrowed from Martin Luther’s reference to the large illiterate segment of his society for whom a visual image speaks more effectively than a written word, is problematic. How far and how effectively did any form of art reach? In 1520 over 120,000 lead and silver pilgrim’s tokens were sold to the faithful visiting the chapel of the Beautiful Virgin in Regensburg. An unrecorded but certainly substantial number of woodcuts by Albrecht Altdorfer, among others, were available for purchase there as well. How an individual subsequently used these devotional objects can only be broadly conjectured. Even the audience for a single print is hard to quantify. How do we count the consumers of a broadsheet posted in a quasi-public setting or one held up and read aloud to an assembled crowd? With the advent of printing, more people owned or encountered images than ever before; however, audiences were often stratified depending on the quality, theme and form of a print. Issues of audience are inherently tied to media. For much of the twentieth century, scholars of German art focused mainly, though never exclusively, on painting, drawing, high quality prints, and, to a lesser degree, sculpture. Not surprisingly, because of patronage the noble and elite urban classes are more prominent. It is far easier and often more rewarding to address the commissioning and functioning of art by Emperors Maximilian I or Rudolf II than to investigate how a lower class individual might worship using available images in his or her local parish church. We place too few expectations on what might be termed the secondary users of works of art. In Donatio et Memoria, Corine Schleif offered a series of case studies of patrician patronage in Nuremberg’s St Lorenz church. She astutely investigated projects, such as Adam Kraft’s towering sacrament house (1493), seeking to illuminate the donor’s personal, familial and, as in this instance, communal aspirations. Since this stone Eucharistic tabernacle served the entire congregation, lessons can be drawn about the role of art for public benefit. Censorship provides another way of thinking about art and the public sphere. Fear of the broad dissemination of controversial images and ideas led to princely and civic suppression of books, prints, and certain public pageants, especially during the opening decades of the Protestant Reformation. The need to control implies real concern about the power of art and texts to influence different segments of society. Christiane Andersson has authored several essays (1997–1998 and a current book project) on the rise of polemical and typically anti-Catholic woodcuts during the second quarter of the sixteenth century, as well as on civic efforts, notably in Nuremberg, to ‘control the uncontrollable’, as she puts it. Prints and broadsheets were cheap to publish in large quantities, easy to disseminate, and almost impossible to suppress completely in spite of confiscations, fines and occasional imprisonments. Forum 581 a mural on a city hall has a much more diverse public than a luxury manuscript or tapestry confined to a exclusive royal collection. Prints appeal to a wider, more unpredictable set of recipients, but they often carry their own verbal message and often strive for an explicitness, whether caricatural or affirming of authority. Certainly the printing press, including the production of printed images, initiated a public sphere of discourse, but art historians and cultural historians have long known about the Gutenberg galaxy without requiring the theorizing of a Habermas. Thus, while the formulations of Habermas are common currency today, there seems little point in grounding cultural or art historical analysis in his terms. The best work by visually oriented historians such as Bob Scribner explores both cultural critique and popular endorsement in the public sphere of leading figures of religion or politics—Luther and his opponents, for example, or the German dukes who became advocates of confessional change. Silver: The claims of Koerner regarding the Reformation image have been narrowly construed, akin to the ideal constructs of theoretically minded German historians of a century ago, with prior definitions driving analysis. In contrast, Bridget Heal offers a nuanced and varied consideration of Mary imagery among both Protestants and Catholics and over a longer period from 1500 to the Peace of Westphalia. Jeffrey Chipps Smith has provided the confessional counterpoint in the form of Jesuit imagery, whether as architecture, print imagery or church decorations, amidst wider studies of Jesuit art, led by anthologies edited by John O’Malley and Gauvin Bailey. What used to be dismissed merely as Counter-Reformation propaganda is now also being taken more seriously. Even art related to apparently aniconic Calvinism no longer is relegated to the same stepchild status as before, as indicated in work by Mochizuki, an effective anthology edited by Finney, and work on the complexity of didactic prints by Veldman. Clear distinctions need to be drawn in terms of audience, medium, region and period of production in assessing religious works of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The very status of the image has been studied by historians through the phenomenon of iconoclasm. Artists in the Renaissance could also be caught up in tensions between ruler and ruled, which in Northern Europe in particular could erupt in acts of iconoclasm. Seen only a couple of generations ago as the result of some sort of individual or collective pathology, iconoclasm can now be seen in many instances as a ‘revolutionary tactic’, by which those demanding reform tested the strength of the Catholic cult in a given area. Lee Wandel has gone so far as to argue that by examining such ‘acts’, we can reconstruct the motives of those who had long been denied more stable forms of communication such as images or texts. Indeed, much more scholarship has addressed the varied effects of an altered conception of the religious image in the wake of Luther and the wider Protestant critiques, starting with the crude opposition of icons with an age of art. Most recently, provocative considerations of the power of Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 3. For long it was argued that the Reformation brought about a confessional divide in the use of, and in attitudes to, visual texts in Europe. More recently, scholars have complicated this binary picture and discerned a reformation of the arts in Protestant states and churches. How far did religious and confessional factors shape the production, display and perception of visual texts in your field of study? 582 Forum imagery, particularly religious imagery, have considered basic questions of reference and variously addressed the challenge of idolatry/iconoclasm and the use of devotional images in the early modern period, as in, for example, the works gathered by Cole and Zorach. Complexity between Catholic and Protestant uses of a shared scripture emerges in the examination of Netherlandish Bible prints by Clifton and Melion, which in turn builds upon the wide-ranging considerations of ‘the consequences for art’ after Luther in a seminal 1983 exhibition by Werner Hoffmann. Even Perlove and Silver’s monograph about a single—if celebrated—artist, Rembrandt, reveals complex visual interpretation and blurring of confessional rhetoric in prints as well as paintings. Thus, art history studies now regard confessional issues and even more fundamental issues of religious imagery as fluid categories, continually renegotiated in German (and Dutch) art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Smith: Although there is little doubt that the Reformation and the Catholic Reformation created a confessional divide in terms of the visual arts, scholars recognize that the reactions were far more varied and nuanced than was traditionally thought. It is common to juxtapose a Catholic church filled with altarpieces, statues and other visual adornments with a Calvinist church devoid of all decorations beyond Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 Heal: Lutheranism has long been recognized as an exception to the general rule of Protestant iconophobia. Even Calvinism, it has recently been pointed out, was in many ways a ‘material religion’ (see, for example, Mia Mochizuki’s 2008 study of the St Bavo church in Haarlem). Yet still lurking beneath the gradual accumulation of scholarly work on Protestantism and art is the assumption that images were peripheral to Reformation piety, that they moved from being central during the late middle ages to being almost superfluous under Luther. Hans Belting’s notion that the Reformation destroyed the iconic power of images is certainly due for revision. Part of the problem here is one of chronology: research has tended to focus on early printed propaganda and on the works produced by the Cranach school, that is to say, on images that were largely didactic and commemorative. The visual culture of seventeenth-century Lutheranism remains relatively neglected. The term ‘baroque’ is still synonymous with Catholicism, at least for art historians if not for historians of court culture. If it is applied to Lutheranism it is to literature and to music, not to the images of the period. Questions of display and perception will always remain difficult, but again broadening the chronological basis of the study of Protestant art will help: reconstructing the history of the post-Reformation treatment of images (beyond iconoclasm), for example, and examining textual sources such as funeral sermons and travel literature. To give just one concrete example, the altarpiece in the church of St Wolfgang in Schneeberg in Saxony is well-known to art historians because it was painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1539. But I don’t think we can really understand the significance of this image unless we acknowledge its later history. It was looted by imperial troops during the Thirty Years’ War, then returned to Schneeberg in 1650 with great ceremony after a lengthy campaign by the town council, pastors, consistory and elector. Finally, in 1712, it was dismantled and reset in an amazing Italianate baroque altarpiece. Here the reception and display of a paradigmatic Reformation image showed remarkable parallels to contemporary Catholic practice. Forum 583 Uppenkamp: The Reformation led to a new way of engaging with images. Artists such as Lucas Cranach, working in close association with the reformers, developed Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 a simple cross and perhaps a pulpit. Numerous historians and art historians have complicated this overly simple distinction. Jeremy Bangs challenged the assumption that the Netherlandish iconoclasm of 1566 and 1567 was as thorough as is often claimed by those cataloguing what works of art survived in churches that subsequently became Calvinist. In 2008, Mia Mochizuki argued that in the case of St Bavo’s church in Haarlem, iconoclasm was a catalyst as it forced the community to ask what sorts of decoration, if any, were appropriate in their newly cleansed church. Large panels, such as the Last Supper (c.1581) that replaced the former high altarpiece, offered inscribed biblical texts in lieu of pictures. Bildersturm: Wahnsinn oder Gotteswille?, the catalogue of an exhibition at the Bernisches Historisches Museum (2000), is one of several recent excellent studies of iconoclasm and the debates over images. In Germany the situation is even more complex, as cities and regions could and did change confessional affiliation quite suddenly. Berlin and Brandenburg were the focus of the exhibition Cranach und die Kunst der Renaissance unter den Hohenzollern: Kirche, Hof und Stadtkultur (2009). Elke Anna Werner, Maria Deiters and the other contributors examined the region’s religious culture under the Brandenburg electors when it shifted from Catholicism via Lutheranism to Calvinism. Riots between these Protestant sects over issues including the right to have church art resulted in both Calvinism and Lutheranism being permitted in 1615. Discussions about Lutheran and Catholic art still tend to be segregated. Many scholars have focused on the formative role that Lucas Cranach the Elder and his circle played in the development of polemical anti-Catholic images and then in the devising of new evangelical themes, such as Law and Gospel. Carl C. Christensen’s Art and the Reformation in Germany provided an excellent introduction to the origins of Reformation iconoclasm, Martin Luther’s theology of images, and to the formulation of appropriate subjects for display within Protestant churches. Lee Palmer Wandel used detailed case studies of iconoclasm in Zurich, Strasbourg and Basel in the 1520s to understand the agency or motivations of ordinary people who often at great personal risk destroyed long familiar and beloved objects in their local churches. Joseph Leo Koerner’s The Reformation of the Image centred on the Stadtkirche in Wittenberg where twenty-five years after experiencing one of the first incidents of Protestant iconoclasm the congregation welcomed Lucas Cranach the Elder’s new high altarpiece. Koerner argued that painted scenes are unsuitable for idolatry since these illustrate Luther’s word-based, non-iconic theology. In Tugend versus Gnade, Margit Kern considered complex didactic painted cycles, such as the ceiling of the Marienkirche in Pirna (1544–46), and public fountains stressing moral virtues. From Celle to Freudenstadt, palace chapels and parish churches received large-scale high altars, pulpits stressing the word of God and frequently the portrait of Martin Luther, extensive series of Old and New Testament scenes, attractive baptismal fonts, and expensive tombs and epitaphs. Most discussions of Catholic art, especially after 1580, focus on a single artist, building, patron or town. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has broadly surveyed artistic developments with their geographical and historical contexts. In Sensuous Worship, I explored Jesuit art and architecture in Germany. 584 Forum 4. Traditional scholars often object that visual texts present insurmountable problems of interpretation regarding the intentions of artists, commissioners and patrons, the meaning and performance of texts in the polity and public sphere, and the reception and consumption of images. Are these problems greater than those historians face in dealing with written texts, and how do you suggest we endeavour to resolve them? Heal: Images are ambiguous. Their meaning is hard to circumscribe. This is why sixteenth-century Lutheran reformers peppered them with Biblical citations and explanatory inscriptions. But as cultural histories of reading have emphasized, texts are Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 a Protestant iconography aimed at depicting Protestantism’s own specific doctrines. Another development that can be observed is the ways in which image and text interacted. Images were to be freed of their cult value but to retain a pedagogical function. Images became a means of propaganda in the religious disputes. The media revolution represented in bookprinting and woodcuts led to a new politics of images. Protestants and orthodox believers used the new media of printed books and flyers to express and disseminate their messages. Recently, rather than talking about ‘The Reformation’ as a uniform movement, scholars have foregrounded the variety of ways in which churches and territories were reformed. In this way a pluralist picture of the various actors and their aims, and of the diverse ways of engaging with works of art—between Lutherans and Calvinists, for example—has emerged. More and more studies are also engaging with the age of confessionalization, i.e. the processes by which Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist confessions were formed. Recently a whole string of dissertations, exhibition catalogues and conference volumes has focused on the Reformation and the age of confessionalization, sometimes using classical methods but sometimes, however, taking interdisciplinary approaches too. The historian Marcus Sandl and the archaeologists Carola Jäggi und Jörg Staecker have approached the history of the Reformation using methods derived from media studies. In her numerous publications Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger considers symbolic communication practices in the Holy Roman Empire. Recent art historical dissertations on Reformation- and confessionalization-related themes include those by Freya Strecker on Catholic and Protestant altars in Augsburg, and by Margit Kern on representations of the virtues in Protestant towns. Freya Strecker’s comparative analysis of altarpieces in the era of confessionalization—after all the most important group of images of both confessions—discusses the relationship between idolatry and iconoclasm. Kern demonstrates an increase of ethical programmes in Protestant public space, despite the fact that Luther disapproved of the virtues to which scholastics in the vein of classical philosophers appealed. Both scrutinize a group of artworks within their social, political and religious context as part of a process of state formation and social disciplining. The volume edited by Wegmann and Wiemböck is a collection of contributions on the question of confessionalization from various disciplines, such as art history, history and theology. It links an interdisciplinary approach with recently issued questions of space as a category in historical and art historical discourse. The contributions are not limited to Germany but also cover Italy, Switzerland, France, Holland, Poland and Bohemia. Forum 585 Uppenkamp: I would hesitate to speak of visual texts but rather use the term visual argumentation. Working on political subjects in general contexts, I would like to stress that visual and discursive argumentation should be subjected to a balanced reading. I think that there have sometimes been misunderstandings about Erwin Panofsky’s and even about Warburg’s ways of connecting images and texts and relating them to each other, so that one might not look at the image closely enough, or think that an image cannot be true if it tells a different story from a text, or vice versa. Images, be they paintings or prints or drawings, and sculpted objects and architecture too, are not just testimonies of their own time: not just illustrations of history or adiaphora of political history. We should also beware of taking them as authentic documents of political or historical fact. They have their own ways of making an impact. They constitute the aesthetic and symbolic dimension of politics, secular as well as theological. There are always intentions behind them, and yet we need to differentiate between intended and unintended effects. With regard to methodology, I think that the comparative methods of linguistics, the structural synchronic and diachronic analysis of grammar and the models of how Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 also subject to appropriation and reinterpretation. The problems of using images are therefore not necessarily greater than the problems of using texts, but historians generally have much less training and experience in dealing with them. One key task, therefore, is to integrate images more fully into undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. History students need an understanding of key art historical terms and methodologies (‘iconography’, for example) and an awareness of the history of the discipline, as well as practical training in finding and using images. They also need the ability to recognize visual conventions and topoi in the same way they would recognize their textual equivalents, and to understand visual symbolism and allegory. A scholar of visual culture needs to understand the production of images (patronage, workshop practice and so on), to be able to decode their content and to recreate the social and political context within which they were produced and viewed. There is just about enough secondary literature now to make this possible at an undergraduate level: Peter Burke’s Eyewitnessing is a good place to start. There is undoubtedly still a tendency among historians if not to use images as mere illustrations, then at least to regard them as secondary to texts. Michael Baxandall’s concept of the ‘period eye’—the detailed reconstruction of the context in which images were viewed and understood—and David Freedberg’s provocative study of response provide stimulating introductions to the potential value of visual sources. We must remember that images were much more than mere reflections of texts, and that they— like words—had the power to affect feelings, thoughts and behaviour. In relation to Reformation art, the concept of Intermedialität (intermediality), is, I think, a useful one. We should not simply look for textual sources that explain images; we should recognize that texts, images and music interacted and that in terms of both content and style there was considerable cross-fertilization between these different media. A good example here would be Johann Anselm Steiger’s recent volume, Golgatha in den Konfessionen und Medien der Frühen Neuzeit that brings together musicologists, art historians and theologians to analyse changes in depictions and descriptions of Christ’s Passion from the late middle ages to the nineteenth century. 586 Forum Silver: At the risk of turf-protection, art historians insist that images are not mere illustrations of some pre-existing textual or doctrinal point. It should be evident that some powerful traditions exist for the presentation of religious figures and narratives, which cannot always be grounded in verbal references, though the effort to find such links should always be made across the fence of visual ‘texts’ and verbal texts. Conventions loom large, all the more in the public sphere, where such items as medals and coins participate in both tradition and emblematic personalization. Emblems themselves pose a wonderful conjunction—as well as a conundrum—of the visual with the verbal in the early modern period, and their interplay with pictures, including the apparently naturalistic depictions of Dutch genre paintings, has posed fruitful, if challenging interpretative puzzles. Even apparently objective documents, maps, have opened up as important visual sources of political and ideological claims. So reading the visual requires the same analytical and critical resources as close study of more conventional historical documents. But the problems of interpreting them are no greater, as long as one is mindful of the conventions and traditions within which each individual representation operates. Art historians are trained in their craft just like literary historians, religious historians and political historians. Caution is always a prudent attitude in crossing disciplinary boundaries, but for culturally oriented historians at least, many Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 communication works (thinking for instance of Roman Jakobson and the beginnings of semiotics) have decisively inspired cultural and social sciences. We know that we can ‘read’ a work of art on many different levels—if I may use the word ‘read’ as a kind of understanding, which includes the different intentions that have prompted a work of art but also the perspective of different audiences. It also includes a reflection of one’s own point of view. In this sense, we have an ongoing process of interaction with the work but also with people in the past. Recently Horst Bredekamp has juxtaposed speech act theory with a theory of image acts. This represents the image as an agens, the effects of which unfold in a manner which do not necessarily have to correspond to the intended impact of the patron or the artist. The concept of the imagines agentes itself hails from mnemonics and connotes drastic images to which ideas that are to be remembered can be attached. It refers to a usage of images that has its roots in the rhetoric of antiquity (Cicero, De oratore). Recently research into ornaments and into style in particular (beyond the art-historical definitions of stylistic epochs) has benefited from insights made with the methods of linguistics and literary studies. And yet drawing all too close parallels between text and image can bring with it the danger of seeing images simply as illustrations of texts, which would undoubtedly be misleading. I think that it is very interesting to look at texts and images or buildings in parallel with the method of early modern rhetoric and early modern art theory. This can be very revealing. If we consider, for instance, a building in conjunction with an inaugural sermon preached in that building, or an epitaph and a funeral sermon for the same person, we may discover that the text and the work of art have something in common. It is not that the text explains the work of art, or that the artwork is an illustration of the text. It is about the way an argument is built according to the principles of early modern rhetoric. We are dealing with complex systems of argumentation, mixing topoi, allegories, metaphors and quotes from classical authors and from the Bible. Forum 587 of the same issues and supporting evidence will at least overlap with the visual objects under examination. 5. The Renaissance has traditionally been described as a period of revolution in the visual arts and in the nature of the relationship between artists and princes. Was the early modern period of special significance for changing how art related to power? Was there something unique about Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 Smith: Visual texts offer tantalizing glimpses of a period’s cultural dialogue. Certainly scholars must be aware that we can never understand fully the intentions of the artist, the patron and initial audiences. Similarly, one must be circumspect when making grand pronouncements about art since only a small percentage of works have survived over the intervening centuries. Wars, iconoclasm, changes of taste and the passing of time have ravaged the visual arts. Yet the same can be said for archival documents and texts. One essentially has two options. We can either decide that we’ll never know the truth about an object and so restrict our study to connoisseurship and stylistic developments. Or, alternatively, we can investigate it using other methodological or theoretical approaches. We may recognize that we can never fully reconstruct the original context, but this does not mean we should not try to tie it, as closely as is possible, to its historical setting or to the evidence that related objects or texts provide. Or phrased differently, we shall never hear the whole choir but we can learn from the few remaining ‘voices’. Every generation comes up with interesting new questions and ideas to test against the surviving corpus of art. In The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany and in various earlier texts on Italian Renaissance art, Michael Baxandall pursued what he termed the ‘period eye’. He constructed a social history of pictorial style by considering, among other things, how the contemporary vocabulary used in music, drama, calligraphic texts, and even physiognomic studies might be applied to a statue’s poses or drapery design. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann revived older debates about the geography of art (Kunstgeographie) and the fundamental characteristics that define (or fail to define) art along geographic, national, regional, or even civic lines. For instance, is it historically valid to speak of German Renaissance art or of Bavarian art? Christopher Wood considered the early modern conceptions (and misconceptions) of history and historical time in Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art. For individuals, such as Emperor Maximilian I, the past could fluidly include equal belief in Roman emperors and the physical relics of the heroes of the Nibelungenlied. Yet humanist interest in antiquity and the middle ages, coupled with the rise of print culture, gradually changed uncritical attitudes about German history while also stimulating the emergence of archaeology as a discipline. Peter Parshall creatively explored early modern ideas of and claims for truthfulness. Specifically he considered the growing authority accorded the visual arts, from prints to portraits, to verify or to authenticate the natural world. A very different but no less rewarding approach can be found in Corine Schleif and Volker Schier’s Katerina’s Windows. A throve of extant letters written by or to Katerina Lemmel, a wealthy Nuremberg patrician who became a Birgittine nun after the death of her husband, afford glimpses into her two worlds. This is micro-history at its best as Schleif and Schier sensitively unpack many of the subjects or concerns raised by the letters. 588 Forum attitudes to the visual arts in the early modern period? How does study of visual culture complicate our periodization? Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 Silver:Both the forms and the media of the Renaissance and early modern period greatly facilitated expressions of power on the part of princes. As I have discussed for the case of Emperor Maximilian I, the printing press in particular allowed wide distribution of replicated images of princely achievements and authority, whether in the form of inexpensive broadsides, massive murals, or illustrations of claims, as books and as fine art prints. The revival of antique forms, such as medals, also allowed for replicable image distribution, encompassing both a princely portrait on the obverse and frequently either claims to territory in the form of heraldic arms or symbolic declarations in the form of imprese or allegories. Celebration in general of military strength and of particular victories on the battlefield could take many forms, most expensively in the form of tapestry narrative cycles, such as the Battle of Pavia or the Conquest of Tunis, woven for Emperor Charles V. But here, too, printed celebrations of glorious victories, whether the Siege of Vienna of 1529 or the Battle of Lepanto, occasioned visual imagery, in paintings as well as tapestries. This topic has been well limned by J.R. Hale in his survey of Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance. Critical among the driving forces of the early modern state are the institution and the increasing size of standing armies, and this topic held particular significance for rulers of the era. But more generally the Renaissance era also brought the enhanced institution of the court artist, a topic that is receiving renewed attention in the midst of revived interest in the history of European courts more generally (that bibliography surely is familiar to this readership). One consequence of the convergence of princes with painters (and to a lesser extent sculptors) is the formulation of a new pictorial form, the full-length standing or seated court portrait. One of its variants, with a classical pedigree, was the sculpted bust; another revived antique formula, particularly favoured after the mid-sixteenth century, was the equestrian portrait. Fons et origo of this development is the Venetian painter Titian, a favourite of the Habsburgs. But innovations at one court quickly stimulated responses in rival courts, as one can see in the nearly contemporaneous fashion for portrait miniatures at the Tudor and Valois courts of the sixteenth century. One major development of the early modern period is the professionalization of other arts besides painting, particularly architecture; building programmes meshed readily with the ambitions of princes. Not only palaces, as evident at Versailles and its countless imitations, but also other royal structures, such as dynastic tombs, began to proliferate, such as the tomb of Henry VII at Westminster (by an Italian, Torrigiano) or the tombs at St Denis, Dijon and Brou. In Ottoman Constantinople, palatial complexes met the needs of sultans and their viziers, ranging from the Topkapi Palace to the mosque and tomb complexes, highlighted by the buildings of the architect Sinan for Suleyman the Magnificent in the mid-sixteenth century. Princely interest in the arts also stimulated a competitive race for prized artworks in burgeoning collections, principally paintings for the developing art chambers (Kunstkammer). But princes also delighted in rare exotica from nature, often retrieved from transoceanic royal ventures, then refashioned by human artifice for mounted display in ‘chambers of marvels’ (Wunderkammer). The proliferation of current scholarship Forum 589 Heal: The early modern period did not witness the beginning of the propagandistic use of art, nor, of course, its end. There were, however, very significant developments, in particular thanks to the development of printing. Larry Silver’s study of Emperor Maximilian I (1459–519) demonstrates this: Maximilian’s campaign of self-promotion made brilliant use of this new technology. Maximilian’s case is especially instructive however, because it reminds us that visual splendour did not necessarily correlate to political authority. Indeed for Maximilian the careful manipulation of his image was in some ways a compensation for his political difficulties. The recent interest in art and power, in political culture, must not be allowed to obscure the realities of early modern rule. Recent work has also paid more attention to the relationship between art and power outside the court. The lords of Germany’s numerous castles (Schlösser) and manor houses (Herrenhäuser), for example, often pursued their own visual agendas rather than simply creating miniature copies of royal residences. Images visualized and perpetuated power relations in towns, in churches and in domestic environments as well, for example through the decoration of town halls, through the rulers’ galleries (Herrschaftsemporen) that were added to so many German churches or through prints that satirized women’s wiles. In terms of periodization, interdisciplinarity brings considerable challenges. While ‘Renaissance’, ‘baroque’, ‘rococo’ and ‘neoclassical’ are all necessary tools to describe the visual culture of the period, they cannot be mapped neatly onto the events and processes described by historians: the Reformation and Catholic- or Counter-Reformation, the seventeenth-century crisis, the rise of absolutism, the Enlightenment. Theodore Rabb’s The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe was an early attempt to do this, and should continue to serve as a salutary warning to historians. Uppenkamp: Our notion of the Renaissance has been shaped by Vasari’s concept of progress in the arts. In nineteenth-century historicism this led to the periodization of Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 on collecting, including a Journal of the History of Collections, and the recent survey of the phenomenon by Arthur MacGregor, reveal the importance of this topic for scholars of art history and political history alike. Noteworthy landmarks include the overview of Wonders and the Order of Nature by Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park. Additionally, the attention in late twentieth-century viewing to performance and spectacle as art forms is echoed in contemporary scholarship about the early modern period, where such phenomena as Triumphal Entries, funeral ceremonies and other public spectacles has formed a fruitful topic for seeing the public presentation of authority. Roy Strong helped pioneer this important topic with his Splendour at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theatre of Power, and in general his studies of the role of art in early modern courts, particularly in England, remains foundational. This powerful alliance between visual (and built) creations and the emerging courts and national or imperial dynasties obviously could be expanded almost indefinitely. Certainly, early modern scholarship has underscored the powerful role of the aesthetic in what Clifford Geertz called the ‘theatre state’ (nowhere better exemplified than by the formative model of the fifteenth-century Burgundian dukes of Huizinga and Cartellieri). This interpretative model continues to inform interpretations and to spark new research by historians and art historians alike. 590 Forum Smith: In the Power of Images David Freedberg posed this question differently. Do images have an inherent or potential power? If one accepts this premise, especially for the early modern period, then one can explore how artists and patrons alike exploited the ability of art to communicate. Roy Strong’s highly influential Splendour at Court demonstrated the role of the arts, including the visual arts, to construct and to convey meaning to diverse audiences. Others have shown that a display of tapestries or even just cabinets with shelves holding expensive silver vessels can impart a host of powerful messages depending on the context. Social status, wealth, magnificence, virtue, authority and kinship are just a few of the coded messages. The challenge was to find the artistic medium appropriate for the desired task or ritual. In Marketing Maximilian, Larry Silver recounted how Maximilian I brilliantly recognized and exploited the potential of prints to articulate imperial and highly personal iconographies to multiple audiences across and beyond the Holy Roman Empire. Harriet Rudolph’s Das Reich als Ereignis examined imperial triumphal entries, investitures and other rituals between 1555 and 1618. She considered not only the role of art in staging these ephemeral occasions but also in creating permanent event records. The advent of the print complicates many assumptions about this period. The ‘intimate connections between artists and princes’ certainly flourished, especially with the rise of court artists, such as Lucas Cranach or Friedrich Sustris. The catalogue Apelles am Fürstenhof (Veste Coburg, 2010) examined the activities of court artists and evolving Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 the classical, medieval, Renaissance and modern period, with their respective fine tunings of early and late medieval; Renaissance and Mannerism; baroque, rococo and classicism and so on. Marina Belozerskaya has rightly questioned this model in her study on Burgundian art. We need to question the definition of German Renaissance art in a similar way. At any rate, the historical consciousness of the period was not founded on a sense of periodization in which the Renaissance displaced the medieval era, but rather on the subjective sense of a continuously present Holy Roman Empire—a view which transcended the confessional divide. The idea of history in early modern Germany was based upon the theory of the four monarchies according to Daniel book 2 and 7. The succession of the four monarchies was identified by early modern German scholars as the succession of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires. They imagined the Roman Empire as the present, which had been transferred by the Translatio Imperii to Charles the Great in 800 and would continue as the Holy Empire until the second coming of Christ. This idea of a continuation of the Roman Empire through the middle ages does not conform with the Vasarian concept of a recovery of antiquity in the Renaissance. The study of Renaissance art in Germany is therefore a difficult field. For a long time, Renaissance art and architecture have been identified with Italianate forms. However, in German architecture, for instance, we are confronted with a confusing mixture of Italianate Renaissance forms fully integrated with Gothic forms such as window tracery. The established art historical periodizations rooted in Vasari’s concept cannot sufficiently explain this phenomenon. We need to look at the Renaissance as a multi-faceted, European phenomenon, and as far as the German Renaissance is concerned, we need to keep the particular contemporary understanding of history in mind. Forum 591 Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at UB Kassel on May 8, 2013 attitudes about the status of artists. Prints, however, reached ever wider and more diverse audiences. Defining these audiences can prove challenging. Clearly Dürer’s ambitious Melencolia I (1514) engraving and a contemporary Nuremberg playing card would seem to appeal to different consumers; however, that is not necessarily the case, especially when masters such as Erhard Schön, Hans Schäufelein and Peter Flötner designed luxury decks in the 1530s. Keith Moxey and Alison Stewart have smartly studied the popular woodcuts produced mainly in Augsburg and Nuremberg during the first half of the sixteenth century. Both struggle, however, to provide solid evidence about the intended audiences or how these prints were displayed. Perhaps it was the ubiquity of prints, coupled with the emergence of efficient systems of making, marketing and disseminating them, that make their study so rewarding if often frustrating. The production of prints mixing image and text increased exponentially during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Even trying to determine whether a broadsheet is a work of art or a visual solution for conveying news and information is problematic.