ABSTRACT
Of the many misconceptions about the Reformation that should be expelled from popular understanding of that period the most striking is that about the relationship between art and the Reformation. It is certainly mistaken to believe that the Reformation, in Germany at least, destroyed art. This is at best a poor half-truth. It is related to a second misconception, encapsulated in an oft-cited tag from Lawrence Stone, that the Reformation was a shift Trom an image culture to a word culture'. This kind of judgment rests on an over-estimation of the role of printing in the Reformation, as well as on a confusion about printing's impact on 'ways of seeing' in the sixteenth century. I do not intend to go into either of these two points at any length here. Carl Christensen has already shown convincingly the fallacy of the first view in several articles and in his Art and the Reformation in Germany (1979). The second belongs to a wider debate about printing and the Reformation which I have no time to discuss further here. I should like in this paper to concentrate on two themes: first, the nature of iconoclasm in the German Reformation, which has been the source of some of these misconceptions; second the functions of the image in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the age of Protestant confessionalism.
