There seems to be something paradoxical, even self-contradictory, in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit. The 15th century had seen a great flowering of the visual arts all over Europe, and in Luther's Germany a generation of giants - Dürer, Grünewald, Cranach, Altdorfer, to speak only of the painters - provided an astonishing flow of emotionally charged ultra-Catholic art, devotional or liturgical images for veneration or meditation in church and home.

LRB 19 August 2004 | PDF Download