32 - Visualising Violence in Reformation Europe

Summary

Depictions of violence were ubiquitous in sixteenth-century Europe and drew freely on biblical and classical sources, as well as stories of Christian martyrdom. The new media of print and printmaking dramatically increased the number of such images, while pamphlets and broadsheets ensured their widespread circulation and deployment in the service of propaganda and the reporting of sensational crimes and disasters. The outbreak of polemic and conflict associated with the Reformation also provided new markets for the visualising of violence. The fascination with soldiers and war was driven by developments in arms technology and the desire of princely patrons to emulate the valour of the ancients. Whereas battle scenes in the first half of the century were largely conventional, the outbreak of confessional wars in the second brought images of gruesome violence, wholesale destruction and massacre, in which cities and the countryside were laid waste. While the use of violence for confessional propaganda never disappeared, the cruelty, desolation and terrible miseries endured by populations at the hands of ravaging soldiers during the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years War gradually became the object of fierce critique by artists in the early seventeenth century, drawing parallels with Spanish savagery in the Americas.