Images of Kinship

Abstract

This article surveys representations of kin in trans-alpine Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, with particular attention to the Netherlands and Germany. In the Middle Ages most such images occurred in a religious context where kin appeared in funeral monuments or as donors in devotional images. In the sixteenth century kin images were transformed under the influence of Erasmian Christian humanism and Protestantism into apparently secular portraits Interpreted on a symbolic level, however, they reflect the set of values that kinship ideally supported: the family as an institution, sustaining the moral, spiritual, and material well-being of its members from generation to generation. The symbolic expression of these values shifted from a basically religious idiom in the sixteenth century to a naturalistic one in the eighteenth. The changing treatment of dead members of the family is considered in this light.