ABSTRACT
When Richard Verstegan reached Antwerp early in 1587, he found a city in which Catholicism was being re-established and the visible effects of two waves of iconoclasm were in the process of repair. The first violent assault by the Protestants, in August 1566, had been followed by a more deliberate systematic and orderly removal of images from the churches by the Calvinist town council in 1581.1 The images of martyrdom in reconstructed altarpieces and church ornaments, and in the new works which had been commissioned to replace those destroyed, were different from their predecessors: torture and instruments of torture were now graphically depicted in pictures teeming with detail. It was within this broken religious landscape and in explicit representation of martyrdom, which was to have such a strong influence on his next work, that Verstegan established himself.
