In contrast to Christ’s indifference to the taxation required for the temple, the pope was the instigator of the press for income to build St. Peter’s, so Cranach shows the facing image as his covetous use of indulgences to raise funds. Surrounded by his usual entourage of cardinals, bishops, friars, and monks, the pope sits high above the secular figures of the emperor in his arched crown and armor, facing inward from the lower left with another knight in armor beside him. Those Germanic figures are being dunned for money by a monk and a nun, who already hold a bag of coins, bestowed from the emperor by his armored associate; they are followed by a theologian in a doctor’s cap, or biretta. Meanwhile the outstretched right hand of the pope above holds an indulgence, solemnly certified with no fewer than three attached seals. It hovers over the head of the emperor and his adjacent knight, but it also gives off pestilence in the form of lightning bolts and hail, much as late medieval woodcuts of witches showed them brewing up storms descending from clouds as a punishment. Thus does Cranach show the papal indulgences as an evil scourge, by implication equating the pope with the evil malevolence associated with witches (and anticipating the final image of the Passional, where the pope descends into Hell).
Works Cited
- Brinkmann, Bodo. Witches’ Lust and the Fall of Man. The Strange Fantasies of Hans Baldung Grien. Frankfurt: Staedel Museum, 2007.
- Nuechterlein, Jeanne. Translating Nature into Art. Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011.
- Dykema, Roberta. Luther, Cranach, and the Passional Christi Und Antichristi. Saarbrücken: Lambert, 2017.
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Such imagery is associated with sudden storms caused by malevolent weather witches, as in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of a Witch Riding Backwards (ca. 1500 ; B. 67). See Brinkmann 2007, especially pp. 24-35, figs. 11, 15. For images of indulgences as documents bearing seals, see the similarly critical woodcut as a papal initiative by Hans Holbein the Younger, ca. 1524-26, The Sale of Indulgences in Nuechterlein 2011, pp. 34-35, fig. 18. This reading contradicts that of Dykema 2017, pp. 48-51. She sees the transaction going the other way, to the emperor from the clergy, and she uses the chosen texts to back her point. On the side of Jesus, Plate 7, besides the passage on the Tribute Money from Matthew is a passage from Romans 13: 6-7: “Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due . . . .” The next verse, however, suggests the importance of the community of the faithful: “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves one another has fulfilled the law.” (Romans 13:8) On the pope’s side, Plate 8, an excerpt from canon law proclaims the immunity of the Church: “We decide what jurisdiction secular officials possess over the clergy. . . . Thus the Pope by his mandates tears to pieces the mandates of God, by the work of his impious and antichristian decretals.” So in the German text the arrogation of papal authority over Gospel doctrine is expressly criticized, which accords with a reading of the visual imagery, where Cranach was expressly attacking indulgences rather than taxes of the church by secular authorities. So in this instance the artist and the author/editor may have provided different arguments through their different media. ↩