The Long Sixteenth Century
Many ages have believed themselves poised on the verge of apocalyptic change. But the long sixteenth century, starting with the ominous round date of the half-millennium in 1500, surely witnessed more than its share of unsettling disturbances, including fundamental ruptures to received wisdom and to prior assurances of both human and cosmic order.1
Certainly, change in this early modern period dominated ideas in every category of inherited understanding. The perception that the heavens held seven planets, whose orderly, spherical orbits encircled the earth, was irrevocably broken by new concepts and observations. First, assimilation of the alternate, heliocentric model of Copernicus displaced the centrality of the earth; then, in the early seventeenth century, new telescopic observations by Galileo led to his discovery of “generations and corruptions” in the heavens. No wonder the Church of Rome condemned Galileo as a heretic. He had utterly shattered the crystalline, geocentric cosmos of their inherited Christian teaching.
Yet no other established order came under fire more than that very Catholic Church itself. Threats, both spiritual and military, suddenly loomed ominously against a formerly united European Christendom. Farther afield but looming against the horizon, a powerful Muslim empire of the Ottoman Turks advanced into the continent, and in 1529 even laid siege, nearly conquering Vienna, the linchpin of power of the Holy Roman Empire and of its nominal political head, the Habsburg Emperor. Within that German Nation of that Holy Roman Empire a more local disturbance to the heart of Europe also was posed, first by Martin Luther after 1517, then followed in turn by powerful ripple effects of numerous sects and schisms, loosely lumped together today under the general label of Protestantism.
Though a first major split of authority had already occurred in Christianity between Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the mid- eleventh century, the Great Schism of 1054, in retrospect that separation looks more like an amicable divorce between partners, resolved with a division of territory along linguistic and cultural lines, which separated West from East but still within an enduring wider European Christendom. Safely within their regions and balanced leaderships, those sectarian divisions rarely conflicted. By contrast, the sixteenth century was traumatic, torn by internal religious conflict—not only about doctrine and theology but also about what should comprise religion within the region of any ruler. Despite a major truce, inscribed in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which recognized distinct regions of Catholics and Lutherans in the Empire (cuius regio, eius religio—in his region, his own religion), internecine wars of religion still raged continuously. Those conflicts often commingled with local political struggles for power, within divided, smaller German provinces, but also across broader regions, including the Netherlands and France. These wars climaxed in the next century in the disastrous, nearly universal Thirty Years War (1618–1648), a watershed trauma that effectively ended the long sixteenth century with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.
Warfare thus came to dominate sixteenth-century life in Europe, and both its scale and weapon technology intensified across the long sixteenth century in what has been called a “military revolution.”2 This era quickly developed the political strategy of having a greatly enlarged national standing army, which in turn raised the stakes (and the costs) of an increasingly centralized dynastic rule. Rival crowns, consequently, exacerbated pre-existing major power rivalries, particularly between the Habsburgs, ruler of both the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, against their nemeses, the Valois kings of France. Bolstering these enlarged armies, innovative tactics of military drill combined with deadly new battlefield arms: cannons as well as muskets, both lethally powered by gunpowder. Soon after cannons had helped the Ottoman Turks subdue the massive walls of Constantinople in 1453, their rapid spread across Europe prompted further military responses, countermeasures in the form of designs for cities’ fortified walls, whose bastions and ramparts strove to resist (but also to require) the common tactic of prolonged sieges.
Early modern views of the world itself also changed suddenly. The unsettling voyages of Columbus ushered in Europe’s discovery of what they called a “New World,” inhabited by humans unlike any known earlier.3 Moreover, increasing contact with Asia as well as coastal exploration through Vasco da Gama prompted both new trade and attempts at naval domination across the Indian Ocean. In consequence, Europe experienced entirely new, more global repertoires of costumes and customs; these, in turn, were increasingly communicated in printed books through both word and image.4 By the end of the sixteenth century, published atlases of maps as well as costume books visualized the wider world for increasingly curious Europeans. Curiosity itself—stigmatized during the Middle Ages—became a new driving force that led to collections of items from abroad and an emerging concept of the “exotic,” including stuffed animals and shells, assembled by elites into “cabinets of curiosity” (Wunderkammer).
As many sudden observations reinforced anxieties about change, even doom, so apocalyptic expectations intensified around the turn of the half-millennium of 1500. Many contemporaries, including Luther himself, regarded the threat of the Turks and Islam as a divine punishment, a scourge sent to chasten corrupted Christendom. Local anomalies, especially in the 1490s, were interpreted as disturbing omens, warnings from heaven about imminent disruptions in the social and religious fabric. Such events—misbirths of animals or monstrous humans, and cosmic sightings, such as meteorites or comets; plus wider scourges, such as new epidemics (highlighted by the new plague of syphilis)—seemed to fulfill doomsday prophecies in the Book of Revelation, to display divine displeasure with the sinful state of humankind.5
To many observers Satan’s own imminence and powerful influence seemed increasingly immediate and potent. Prior medieval concepts of witchcraft as a satanic pact swiftly gained widespread traction in published treatises and in disturbing images across the long sixteenth century (and even beyond). This period marked the institutionalized definition and inaugurated the heyday of persecution of witches. The power of witches to effect black magic (maleficia) thus came under increasingly fearful scrutiny whenever unexplained misfortunes occurred.
Thus, the long sixteenth century generated a “darker vision” (Robert Kinsman)6 about the period that is more usually praised as the Renaissance, the celebration of human learning, ability, and achievement. Its larger shocks, generated by the changes and conflicts outlined above, led to major social and spiritual shifts that would emerge in a new philosophical literature of skepticism and satires of human folly alongside the confident assertions of the “dignity of man.” Despite their own accomplished erudition, Erasmus, Thomas More, Rabelais, Ben Jonson, and Cervantes—and especially Montaigne’s Essays—reshaped any confidence in human rationality, established custom, and traditional values. Along with skepticism as a recovered new philosophy (albeit revived from Antiquity), melancholy emerged as the new, widespread, fashionable intellectual malady, exhaustively analyzed in turn by Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), speaking as “Democritus Junior,” the philosopher who laughs at the follies of the world.
Such a sea change of outlook inevitably also emerged in visual culture, particularly in the increasingly widespread new medium of prints, whose diverse subject matter and larger audience offered an opportune forum for precisely these social and religious issues. Examination of that sixteenth-century visual culture will be the task of the following chapters.
An initial introduction (Chapter 1) presents two major case studies of the breakdown of seemingly stable social and intellectual structures: first, of court culture and of learning in Hans Holbein’s painting, The French Ambassadors (1533; London, National Gallery); then of allegory and rationality in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Melencolia I. Chapter 2 also sets the foundations of such early sixteenth-century visual dilemmas by focusing on a new pictorial emphasis—on human sinfulness and demonic temptation, followed by eternal physical punishment—in the imagery of Jheronimus Bosch (d. 1516). Bosch can also be seen as an initial formulator of the new artistic category of genre painting, imagery about overindulgences, sin, and folly in everyday life by ordinary, anonymous actors.
That consciousness about humanity’s sinfulness and profound feeling of the need for divine grace underlay the new theology by Martin Luther and other new spiritual shapers of the Protestant Reformation. Chapter 3 sketches the variety of visual imagery, largely in prints, that was stimulated by Lutheranism and how it drew vivid contrasts with traditional Catholic visual culture, while also seeking its own positive representations, drawn from their shared Bible. A darker side of belief founded on the continuing theology of demons, shared by both Catholics and Protestants, prompted suspicions and new charges of witchcraft as a malevolent, magical form of Satanism (Chapter 4).
The rupture of a unified Church under the Reformation combined with political rivalries to generate a century full of warfare (Chapter 5), conducted with those new forms of destruction: technologies (gunpowder vs. fortifications); plus massive increases of military scale and drill discipline. Many images of warfare offered positive encouragement to campaigns, while others underscored the risk of death along with the new scourge of venereal disease.
Even though a former, united Catholic Christendom became newly torn with internal conflict under the Reformation, European Christianity also suffered grievous external threat from Ottoman Islam (Chapter 6), a powerful, expanding, neighbor empire, particularly under the long leadership of Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520–66).7 Both in the Mediterranean and along the banks of the Danube, occupying Hungary and besieging Vienna, Ottoman forces prompted Christian European alliances, led by the papacy and by the Holy Roman Empire.
New observations of exotic, non-European regions, beginning with the Turks, were recorded in prints and paintings but also assembled from imported objects—both natural and artificial—into “cabinets of curiosity.” Chapter 7 examines such novelties and discoveries from more distant regions of Asia and Africa as well as from “New World” peoples and biota.
Representations of sin and folly, begun with Bosch around the turn of the sixteenth century, quickly became a major component of art-making, especially in the urban open market for prints and paintings (Chapter 8).8 The Fool, originally a real figure in either court life or civic festivity, came to embody those misbehaviors in genre paintings and prints, presenting negative examples and posing moral choices for viewers, such as the visual dilemmas posed throughout and revisited briefly in the Conclusions. Additionally, individual character types—whether spoiled aristocrats or boorish peasants—acted out their own indulgences as antipodes to the urban middle-class consumers who formed the basic viewership for those images. Finally, representation of proverbs, both biblical and vernacular, exemplified homespun wisdom, sometimes in comically literal fashion, especially in the imagery of Pieter Bruegel (Chapter 9), who challenged the attentive viewer’s eye after midcentury.
Beneath the sixteenth century’s visual culture lies a pervasive challenge to vision itself. Thus, while many images offer powerfully persuasive illusion or fascinating figures, behind those same images perception itself remains subject to “vanities of the eye.” (Stuart Clark)9 Whether visual novelties or parodies or breakdowns of straightforward representation (Hans Holbein’s anamorphosis and Albrecht Dürer’s inconsistent allegory or Pieter Bruegel’s proverbs enacted literally), pictorial understanding loses clarity and straightforward reliability along with moral ambiguity. Visions of demons or witches may be perceived as literal, but they remain illusions, false or deceptive perceptions. Thus artistry across the sixteenth century—a time of such profound and utter changes and an era of emerging skepticism—undermines established understanding through sight itself (Conclusions). Challenging vision itself through innovative imagery became hallmarks of the disturbing long sixteenth century.