ABSTRACT
Courtly poetry knew only beautiful people and beauty was a mark of their inherent nobility; accordingly, the ugly represented the opposite pole to the sincere and true soul. In fact, by the third and fourth decades of the sixteenth century, through the twin impulses of the Reformation mistrust of the image and the increasing interest in and adoption of Italian Renaissance forms, the emotion-laden, affective image had died out. The process of its gradual demise can be witnessed in a later rendition of the Mocking of Christ by the same artist, Jorg Breu, dateable to the early 1520s. Both outward beauty and ugliness have become irrelevant to a process of purely intellectual cognition that seeks to recognize the idea behind the image. Beauty, as in the mystical religious tradition, remained an inward, moral quality, to be grasped by the inner eye; the outward, bodily appearance was but its signifier.
