ABSTRACT
Illustrated broadsheets were the first modern mass media: a central tool of political and religious propaganda that even people who were illiterate could understand. This chapter discusses a polemical broadsheet, dates from the early 1620s, the beginning phase of the Thirty Years’ War, when confessional polemic had reached its climax. The broadsheet combines three different motifs which were familiar to contemporary viewers into a caricature that equally derides the Martin Luther family and the Protestant refugees in Bohemia. First, the broadsheet utilizes the well-known Luther portraits by Lucas Cranach the Elder as a motif, which is, however, exaggerated into a caricature. Second, the broadsheet employs the popular biblical motif of the holy family on the flight to Egypt. As early as 1520, this motif may be found in a woodcut by Hans Weiditz, and it is also present in the picture of gluttony that is part of the famous cycle of the seven deadly sins by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.
