ABSTRACT
This essay examines the relationship between printed illustrations in Protestant texts and religious imagery in seventeenth-century domestic decoration.1 It is now widely acknowledged that images in print served as a source of design and iconography for the decorative arts of early modern Britain. Tessa Watt’s Cheap Print and Popular Piety published in 1991 included a discussion of the role of cheaper printed wares as a source for imagery in relatively humble domestic decoration.2 A few years later Anthony Wells-Cole’s comprehensive monograph dedicated to the subject established that Continental prints were employed extensively as sources of inspiration across the visual arts of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.3 It is not generally recognised, however, that a significant amount of the iconography depicted in domestic decoration from the first half of the seventeenth century is copied from the illustrated title-pages of Protestant books, including the best-selling guides to ‘godly’ behaviour offering advice on approved religious practices and habits of thought. To judge from surviving examples, this type of imagery was found mainly in houses belonging to the gentry and the so-called ‘middling sort’.4 The discussion that follows explores the implications of such a direct connection between printed imagery from Protestant conduct literature and religious imagery in interior decoration, and speculates about the meaning and purpose of this iconography once transferred from the printed page to the context of the domestic interior. I suggest that the ‘reproduced’ imagery functions in three ways: as a permanent reminder of godly instruction provided by these texts, to regulate behaviour, and to prompt pious meditation.
