Images, faith and power · 01 / 03
Why Would Anyone Fear an Image?
From shattered faces to surviving altarpieces: how the Reformation redistributed the power of images
Look first, then read
What must an image be capable of doing for someone to decide that it has to be destroyed?
Pause and find the details that support your interpretation.
Begin reading01First, Follow the Actions
In Hogenberg’s print, distinguish climbing, pulling, striking, and watching. Which activities has the composition made easiest to see?
02Next, Follow the Guidance
Trace the tree, gestures, and scriptural texts in Law and Grace. What requires a comparison between left and right? How much freedom does its visual route leave to the viewer?
03Finally, Examine Position
Study seating, central axis, and open aisles in The Council of Trent. Who occupies the center or margins? How does the picture give a large institution a visibly ordered form?
Imagine entering a church where a statue’s finely carved drapery survives but its face has been smashed. This looks less like gradual aging than a deliberate interruption of its ability to meet the viewer’s gaze. Today we may see damaged art. Contemporaries might instead have seen an error in belief that required removal, or a shared memory under attack.
The original English lectures place these conflicting judgments at the center of the sixteenth-century Reformations. An image could be understood as helping people approach God or accused of standing in the way. Dividing the participants into lovers and haters of art would explain little. A more productive starting point is to ask what the image had been doing, and who claimed the authority to decide whether it could remain.
A timeline of events
- 1517
Luther Issues the Ninety-Five Theses
Indulgences and associated abuses become the focus of public debate. This is a conventional starting point, not the origin of every demand for reform.
- 1521
The Diet of Worms
Luther refuses to retract his writings, drawing religious controversy further into ecclesiastical and imperial politics.
- 1545–1563
The Council of Trent
The council meets in phases on doctrine and discipline, rather than as one uninterrupted eighteen-year session.
- 1563
The Decree on Sacred Images
The final session affirms the religious uses of images while requiring abuses to be removed and oversight strengthened.
- 1566
Iconoclasm in the Netherlands
Churches in Antwerp and elsewhere suffer destruction; experiences differ among cities and individual churches.
What Were Images Doing in Churches?
In museums today, we often concentrate on the artist, date, and technique. Before the Reformation, sacred images and altarpieces formed part of prayer, Mass, festivals, and commemoration of the dead. People might light candles or kneel before them, or use them to recall biblical narratives. A work occupied more than wall space: it organized bodies, sightlines, and emotions.
It also connected with less visible institutions. Who funded an altar? Which family, guild, or religious order gained remembrance through it? Who explained its stories? Reformers questioning a religious practice confronted not only pigment and wood but networks of authority, donations, and community relationships. Much of an image’s power came from that whole structure. Calling it “just decoration” makes the problem too small. Removal could change not only a room’s appearance but how a group was commemorated and where it stood in public life.
A Dispute Becomes a Question of Religious Authority
In 1517, Martin Luther issued the Ninety-Five Theses, criticizing the preaching of indulgences and associated abuses. This is a familiar starting date, not the moment when every underlying problem suddenly began. At the Diet of Worms in 1521, he refused to retract his writings, making the dispute’s implications for emperor, princes, and Church still clearer. Theology did not remain confined to a study.
Images entered wider questions: whom should believers trust, how should salvation be understood, and which practices had scriptural foundations? Print carried arguments, satire, and reformers’ portraits beyond local settings. Some people questioned sacred images in churches while using pictures on paper to persuade wider audiences. Particular uses were challenged; looking itself did not end. Yet mass reproduction did not guarantee a uniform interpretation. Who displayed a print, the accompanying explanation, and the occasion could turn the same sheet into instruction, mockery, or provocation.
Looking at an Image of Image-Breaking
Hogenberg’s etching of the 1566 iconoclasm in Antwerp’s Church of Our Lady transforms a lofty church into a setting for simultaneous actions. Some climb ladders, pull down statues, or strike objects, while others watch. Following their gestures reveals targeted destruction. The building’s height and the original placement of sacred images also determined how the attack could proceed.
The print selects and arranges its account. It is not a photograph of the event or a record of every participant’s motives. It demonstrates that iconoclasm also produces new images: news of destruction is drawn, copied, and circulated. As images within the church fell, stories of their overthrow acquired another public power outside it. Two questions should remain separate: what destruction does the print show, and how does it ask viewers to judge that destruction? One concerns the event, the other its narration.
How Much Can a Shattered Face Tell Us?
A relief of Saint Anne, the Virgin, and the Christ Child preserved in Utrecht Cathedral offers another kind of evidence. Clothes and background survive while most faces are missing. Such selective damage suggests that identity and recognizability may have been particular targets. Inferring meaning from traces, however, is not the same as knowing what each person wielding a hammer thought. Surviving portions matter as much as missing ones: they allow the extent of destruction to be compared without automatically filling every historical gap.
Dates also need careful separation. Damage to this group’s faces relates to events in 1580, though whether it occurred during the March conflict or subsequent changes to the church remains uncertain. It should not simply be assigned to the iconoclastic wave of 1566. Local politics, church administration, and the timing of actions differed. “Reformation iconoclasm” was not one event occurring on the same day across Europe.
Why Did Opponents of Idolatry Still Need Painters?
Reformers did not agree on the limits of imagery. Luther accepted pictures as aids to teaching, while some Reformed areas excluded sacred images from worship more strictly. Even within one city, removal might proceed by decree, negotiation, or collective action. Equating “Protestant” with “without images” misses the portraits, prints, and religious paintings that continued after reform.
The Gotha version of Cranach’s Law and Grace of 1529, also called Law and Gospel or Damnation and Redemption, explains faith visually. A central tree divides bare branches from green foliage. On the left, Death and the Devil pursue a naked figure; on the right, another figure looks toward Christ under John the Baptist’s guidance. Contrast leads viewers through sin and salvation, while biblical text below constrains the reading. Imagery receives a new task rather than leaving religious life. This is a particular Christian theological formulation, not a description of Judaism or a division that dismisses the entire Old Testament as the bad side. Its oppositions guide Christian understanding of the relationship between law and gospel.
Does “Counter-Reformation” Mean Only Opposition?
“Counter-Reformation” is the familiar name for the Catholic side. It emphasizes responses to Protestant challenges, but can make every development seem a reactive counterattack. “Catholic Reformation” directs attention to internal demands and earlier efforts to improve clerical discipline, education, spiritual practice, and abuses. The terms illuminate different aspects. Choosing one shapes which people and actions enter the narrative. Alongside conflict with Protestants, we should examine how religious orders, bishops, and believers understood and changed their own lives.
Meeting in successive phases from 1545 to 1563, the Council of Trent was a major turning point, not a switch that changed the style of every church simultaneously. It clarified doctrine and promoted disciplinary reform. Particular cities, orders, and patrons still had to interpret and implement its decisions. Institutions could set boundaries without determining the appearance of every painting.
Retaining Images Also Meant Regulating Them
The decree on sacred images in the council’s final session in 1563 affirmed that images of Christ, the Virgin, and saints should be retained and appropriately venerated. It distinguished respect directed toward the represented person from worship of the material itself: wood and pigment did not possess inherent divinity. Images could help people remember articles of faith, follow exemplary lives, and cultivate devotion.
Affirmation came with limits. The decree called for the removal of false doctrine, superstition, and improper representations, and required a bishop’s approval for unusual new images. These were rules about use and oversight, not a uniform prescription for light, color, or composition. In The Council of Trent reproduced here, orderly seating makes authority visible as spatial order. Yet the painting depicts a session in July 1563, not the December session that issued the images decree. Reading a regulation and studying an image of a council are different tasks that must be checked against one another.
Can One Religious Conflict Explain All Baroque Art?
Religious institutions certainly invested in works intended to instruct, move, and unite audiences. Baroque developments also involved courtly competition, urban construction, collecting, artists’ experiments, materials, and workshop techniques. A powerful, sumptuous, or theatrical object cannot be explained wholly through the Counter-Reformation, nor can an entire period be treated as one propaganda campaign. Similar visual methods served different commissions. Determining what a work did requires its particular place, viewers, and uses, rather than a judgment based only on how overwhelming it appears.
Beyond Europe, Jesuit networks played an important part in circulating images and knowledge, alongside commercial routes and colonial expansion. Local makers, materials, and viewing habits transformed works rather than reproducing Europe unchanged. Yet exchange also accompanied missionary activity, control of land, and unequal power. Recognizing local creativity does not require idealizing this history as harmonious cultural fusion.
Have We Stopped Fearing Images?
People today still debate the removal of public statues, museum displays of contentious works, and platforms’ treatment of inflammatory pictures. Such comparisons help formulate questions; they do not imply that present disputes have the same causes as sixteenth-century religious conflict. The recurring questions concern recognition and exclusion: who gains acknowledgment when an image occupies public space, who feels shut out, and who can decide whether it stays?
Shattered faces and retained altarpieces bring objects and institutions into view together. The same thing can become a devotional object, a prohibited item, historical evidence, and a collectible without necessarily changing its substance. Artistic value is established, rejected, and rewritten through these relationships. Understanding fear of images begins an inquiry into their social life. Value here is not only price. Some people treasure sacredness, some craftsmanship, and others testimony to trauma or identity. These values can coexist or conflict.
A short glossary
Key terms
- Reformation
- A series of sixteenth-century movements that changed Western Christian doctrine, institutions, and practice. Regional paths and Protestant traditions differed.
- Iconoclasm
- The removal or damage of images for religious or political reasons, whether through collective action or institutional measures.
- Idolatry
- In these disputes, the mistaken treatment of a created thing or its image as an object of divine worship. Opposing groups differed over what constituted an idol.
- Indulgence
- An ecclesiastical grant relating to remission of temporal punishment after forgiveness of sin. Its preaching, sale, and fundraising practices became central issues of reform.
- Catholic Reformation
- Renewal of discipline, education, spirituality, and institutions within Catholicism. It overlaps with the Counter-Reformation’s response to Protestantism without having an identical scope.
- Council of Trent
- The Catholic council that met in phases between 1545 and 1563, clarifying doctrine and promoting reform. Its decree on sacred images was adopted in 1563.
- Function of an Image
- What a work is actually used to do in a particular setting, such as aiding devotion, teaching, commemorating, persuading, or displaying authority.
- Baroque
- A common designation for aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art and design. Its varied forms cannot be equated with one confession or a single official style.
Your turn to reflect
When an altarpiece moves from a church into a museum, which relationships disappear, and which new ones become possible?
Consider another perspective
Consider access, permitted behavior, and interpretive authority separately. Religious functions may diminish while historical, aesthetic, or collecting values grow. The object’s earlier sacred significance need not vanish completely.
Take this question into your next encounter with art
Fear of images often concerns whom they make credible, which order they make seem legitimate, and what actions they encourage.
Sources and further reading
These guides draw on the Reformation and art presentations, slide lists and reading materials of Marie-Louise Lillywhite, Clare Ford-Wille and Susan Bracken, alongside collection research. Art Value Lab has developed the looking questions and comparisons for this edition.
Dates, attributions and historical accounts have been checked against the sources below; image sources are identified in individual captions.
- Rijksmuseum | Hogenberg: Iconoclasm in Antwerp in 1566
- Domkerk / Verhaal van Utrecht | Damage to the Faces of Cathedral Images
- Cranach Digital Archive | Damnation and Redemption, Gotha, 1529
- Luther2017 | Bild & Bibel: Images and the Bible in the Reformation
- Hanover College | Council of Trent, Session 25: English Translation of the Decree on Sacred Images
- City of Worms｜The 1521 Diet of Worms
- Victoria and Albert Museum｜The Baroque style
- UNESCO｜Jesuit Missions of the Guaranis
Read further
The following titles are selected from the course’s further-reading lists.
- John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern EraHarvard University Press, 2000
Develops the chapter’s question of naming: can Catholic reform be understood only as a response to Protestantism?
- Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter ReformationMacmillan, 1999
Places religious reform within a longer history of institutional, social, and devotional change.
- Margaret Aston, Broken Idols of the English ReformationCambridge University Press, 2015
English cases extend the question of how removing images changed everyday religious life.