Neither for Trent nor Against

Hendrick Goltzius adapted his teacher Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert’s method of scriptural exegesis most fully in an extensive series of biblical allegories invented and engraved between 1578 and 1580 for the Antwerp-based print publisher Philips Galle. Goltzius, who had been studying with Coornhert since 1574, followed his master from Cleves to Haarlem in 1577, where soon thereafter he produced the seven Allegories on the Life of Christ and ten Allegories of the Christian Creed, along with closely related prints such as the Winnowing of Evils, the Allegory of the Mercy of God, the Education of Boys, the Allegory of False Judgment, and Christ and the Cross (Figures 9.1–9.12). ¹ He was thus very closely associated with Coornhert when he devised these prints that derive in form, function, and argument from Coornhert’s system of scriptural loci communes (“commonplaces”). ² Coornhert, who began compiling these biblical commonplaces in the mid-1550s, continued assiduously to broaden their scope until his death in 1590. So extensive were they that Cornelis Boomgaert, editor of his Wercken, published posthumously in 1630, describes them as follows:

In such a kind has this author described and dissected with the utmost method and brevity a very great number of key words and names taken from Holy Scripture, the majority concerning Virtues and Vices, Passions or Motions of the Heart—Hope, Fear, Joy, Sorrow, Judgment, Will, Desire, Knowledge, Intelligence, Instruction, [as well as] Teacher, Nature, Inclination, Habit, Life, Death, Strife, Peace, Cross, Suffering, Repose, Labor, Rule, Obedience, Birth, Growth, Child, Son, Man, Flesh, Soul, Angel, Devil, Salvation, Damnation, etc.—the which, being so vast a work, we have [for the most part] left to another occasion, rather than overburdening the present publication. ³