ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of a church decoration made shortly after the Reformation in Denmark. A closer examination, among others by Louise Lillie, has revealed that the model for the overall programme, the majority of the text and a large part of the individual motifs derive from a Passional of 1531 by the Danish humanist and subsequent Reformer Christiern Pedersen. Christiern Pedersen was born around 1480 in the merchant town of Elsinore; he went to school in the cathedral town of Roskilde and matriculated 1496 at the North German university of Greifswald, where he graduated two years later as Baccalaureus of arts. The humanist influence on Christiern Pedersen is clearly seen in one of his schoolbooks, namely his Latin-Danish dictionary vocabularium ad usum dacorum. Christiern Pedersen polemicizes, contrary to Luther, against the iconoclasts: ‘there are, alas, many who say that one should not have paintings or pictures in their houses or other places’.
