Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) is often called as the painter of the Reformation. As one who was a trusted friend of Martin Luther (1483-1546) and did numerous portraits of this Protestant reformer, Cranach certainly qualifies to that title. After a brief sojourn in Vienna, Cranach came to Wittenberg in 1505, appointed as the court painter by Frederick III of Saxony (1463-1525). Also known as Frederick the Wise, Frederick III founded University of Wittenberg in 1502, where Luther taught, promoted arts and sciences, and provided protection for Luther when Pope Leo X excommunicated him in 1521.

It is not just the sheer number of portraits of Luther, however, that qualifies Cranach to the title of the painter of the Reformation. While Cranach did paintings of religious themes like other painters of his day, what is striking about his portraits is the skillfulness with which he was able to portray the individuality of his subjects, which is quite remarkable in the days when no cameras were available. Thus, Cranach’s portraits of Luther ranges from an early portrait of Luther as a struggling Augustinian monk to a later portrait of him as a stern theologian, from a portrait of Luther as a contented lay person on the occasion of his marriage to Katharina von Bora to the portrait of him on his deathbed. Cranach’s portrayal of Hans Luther, Martin Luther’s father, was even more remarkable in capturing the coarseness of his character, which Kenneth Clark characterizes as “this Troll King, who seems to have grown out of the earth.”¹ He did come up out of the earth, so to speak, for Hans Luther was a miner before he became a businessman of a sort as the owner of several mines later in his life.

There is another sense in which Cranach can be called the painter of the Reformation, or the individual in the age of the Reformation. Cranach was active in civic affairs of Wittenberg and even served as its mayor. Later in his life, Cranach became a businessman and, in that new role, printed Luther’s German translation of the New Testament among other ventures. Converting his studio into a workshop that produced large quantities of paintings, engravings and prints with the help of Cranach the Younger (1515-1586) and other assistants, Cranach spent most of his time in managing his workshop. Cranach, by making works of art available to ordinary citizens, not just to powerful emperors and princes and rich patrons, converted artistic creation into a profitable business enterprise and became the wealthiest citizen of Wittenberg.

Cranach’s transformation from an artist into an entrepreneur is symbolic of the changing role of the artistic images in Christian churches. We may recall how the Church of Rome played an important role in promoting the arts as the patron of great artists. Julius II (Pope from 1503 to 1513) is known for employing Michelangelo (1475-1564) and Raphael (1483-1520) to convert St. Peter’s Cathedral from a simple basilica of worship into an ostentatious cathedral with magnificent art works. Clement VII (Pope from 1523 to 1534) commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment. For the Church of Rome, the arts served as an effective didactic device to teach Christians about Christian doctrines. Even after the Reformation, such artists as Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) and El Greco (1541-1614) continued to create visual exhibitions of Christian doctrines.

In the Protestant West, on the other hand, artists gradually lost their sense of mission as the glorifiers of the Christian ideal with the gradual separation of the church from the political authority. In the hands of Cranach, for example, even a painting of a religious theme was filled with real-life figures. Thus, the Last Supper, the altarpiece Cranach created in 1547 at Stadtkirche in Wittenberg, shows Luther and Cranach the Younger in attendance, in addition to Jesus and his apostles. As with other human activities, arts were gradually converted into secular activities. The Reformation, with its emphasis on individual salvation, marks the start of the individual search for self for the people in the West. Besides Cranach, we may also note such artists as Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) and Hans Holbein (1497-1543), whose portraits are as realistic and remarkable as those by Cranach in capturing the individuality and the inner character of their subjects.

As for Cranach, we wonder what was behind his transformation from an artist into an entrepreneur. According to Luther, fulfilling worldly duties for the individual was, in fact, fulfilling the will of God. As Max Weber puts it in his authoritative work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the individual was asked to strive to fulfill the will of God by restraining “his worldly activity within the limits imposed by his established station in life.”² By establishing himself as the manager of a workshop and devoting his time and energy to running it, Cranach could have found a new calling as an entrepreneur. Indeed, to the extent that making money from that business venture became his personal duty and devotion, Cranach may have transformed himself from a Lutheran into a Calvinist.

1. Clark, Kenneth, Civilisation, New York: Harper and Row, 1969, p. 158.
2. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Scribner and Sons, 1958, p. 105.

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

This year, 2017, marks the quincentenary of the Protestant Reformation, which triggered profound changes and transformations in the character of Western civilization—and of the modern world we have inherited. According to popular history books that explain history in terms of heroic actions taken by heroic individuals, the Reformation started when Martin Luther (1483-1546) posted a copy of his 95 Theses, or Arguments against the Power of Indulgences, on the door of the church at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. What prompted Luther to take this heroic action was what he regarded as the corruption of the Church of Rome as represented by the idea of Papal infallibility and its shady financial practices as an international banking house. What upset Luther most was, however, the selling of indulgences by the Church for salvation of Christians.

Excommunicated by Pope Leo X in 1521, Luther decided to pursue the path of a reformer. With a series of pamphlets, such as The Babylonish Captivity of the Church and To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, Luther attacked the Pope and called on the German princes to reform the Church. As a matter of fact, the term “Protestants” came from the document of protest some of these German states published at the meeting of states held at Speyer in 1529. As an Augustinian, Luther held that individual Christians have no way of knowing, or influencing, the will of God regarding their salvation. Salvation for Christians, Luther argued, did not come through buying indulgences but through faith and faith alone.

Another important figure in the Reformation was Jean Calvin (1509-1564). Although raised in a devout Catholic family, Calvin was exposed to Protestant ideas while he was studying law at the University of Paris and became a Protestant in 1533. As the leader of a Protestant congregation in Geneva, Calvin exercised his administrative skills in enforcing a strict set of ethical rules that included the enforcement of sexual morality, the regulation of taverns, and the prohibition of dancing and gambling. Despite such strict rules, Geneva under Calvin’s leadership became a magnet of Protestant refugees from France, England, Scotland, and even from Eastern Europe.

Calvin is best known today for his idea of “predestination.” Initially, it was a belief in divine providence that grants salvation for a faithful Christian. Later on, during the period of Counter-Reformation, it was converted into a more radical doctrine that God’s decree determined in advance an individual’s salvation or damnation. Predestination was made the central doctrine of Calvinism at the Synod of Dort held by the Dutch Reformed Church in 1619. It is this radical form of Calvinism that was transmitted to later generations of Protestants, which was characterized by Max Weber as the spirit of capitalism in his influential work on the rise of capitalism in the West.¹

There is no question that these two individuals—Martin Luther and Jean Calvin—did play crucial roles in reforming the religious institutions in the Christian world and reviving the devotion of individual Christians. However, if we are to understand the profound changes and transformations in the character of Western civilization the Reformation unleashed, we need also to look into other changes taking place in Europe around this period. As a matter of fact, the period from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries was the period of dramatic changes taking place in all areas of people’s lives, as Roger Osborne points out in his book on the history of the Western world: “A growing sense of national identity and power; an incipient tendency towards personal devotion; the development of secular learning and classically inspired humanism; the introduction of printing; the growth of an urban commercial culture, together with an embryonic distrust of the institutions of the Church at both civic and universal papal levels, provide some of the backgrounds to the cataclysmic events of the first decades of the sixteenth century.”²

Luther was helped by a growing sense of national identity and power in the political arena, for it was Frederick of Saxony, one of the German states calling for reforming Christian council, who provided protection for him when he was condemned for heresy by Emperor Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire. The invention of movable type by Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398-1468) was a technological factor behind the quick spread of Luther’s message across Germany and beyond, as evidenced by the printing and distribution to the public of Luther’s 95 Theses in the following month of his posting. In the economic arena, Protestantism, especially Calvinism, appealed to the rising bourgeoisie and middle classes of European cities, for Calvinism did not condemn them for making money but extolled it as performing Christian duty. And the fact that the 95 Theses and other pamphlets Luther produced quickly spread among the public attests to not just the development of secular learning and classically inspired humanism as represented by such figures as Erasmus (1466-1536) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) but also the increasing number of literate citizens in Germany and other nations in Europe.

The political philosophy of sovereign nation-states, the economic doctrine of capitalist development through individual entrepreneurship, and the cultural diversity among different ethnic and national groups can be regarded as the major legacies we have inherited from the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent changes and transformations in the character of Western civilization. The important question for us today is whether or not we should embrace these legacies as positive factors that contribute to the welfare of the people in the globalized world of the twenty-first century.

While the freedom from oppression by religious and secular authorities and the freedom of choosing one’s calling and pursuing one’s passion that we have come to enjoy ought to be embraced, the inequality of income and wealth among individuals and nations as evidenced, for example, by the OXFAM report that in 2016 eight top individuals held about the same amount of wealth of the bottom half of the world population must be addressed and dealt with by policymakers around the world as a serious threat to the dignity of human lives, as Pope Francis points out: “The dignity of each human person and the pursuit of the common good are concerns which ought to shape all economic policies.”³ In fact, though he is addressing himself to Christians, the following words of Pope Francis need to be embraced as a valuable advice for all of us who are living in the divided and fractured world of the twenty-first century: “Small yet strong in the love of God, like Saint Francis of Assisi, all of us, as Christians, are called to watch over and protect the fragile world in which we live, and all its peoples.”⁴ Indeed, with the embracement of the communal spirit like this, 2017 will hopefully go down in history as the year the Reconciliation started—not just between Protestants and Catholics but also among peoples of all faiths and devotions.

1. Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Allen and Unwin, 1930.
2. Osborne, Roger, Civilization: A New History of the Western World, New York: Pegasus Books, 2006, p. 223.
3. Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, Frederick: The Word Among Us Press, 2013, p. 148.
4. ibid., p. 155.