Martin Luther's Body: The “Stout Doctor” and His Biographers

Abstract

PERHAPS THE MOST DISCONCERTING monument to the Reformation is the double statue of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon in the city market at Wittenberg. There they stand, their feet locked onto grandiose Schinkel pedestals, and can do no other, as they gaze grimly out from under their neo-Gothic baldachins. Melanchthon was an afterthought: Luther’s statue was unveiled in 1821, and Melanchthon’s followed a generation later in 1865, the monumental design of the first dictating the form for the second.1 The two Reformation heroes tower over the meat stands and vegetable stalls like two caged giants. But the effect of their being seen side by side like this, even with the nineteenth-century attempts to minimize the difference, is disastrous: the stout Luther confronts the cadaverous Melanchthon. In the contemporary double portraits by Heinrich Aldegrever and the Cranach workshop, it is even worse: Luther and Melanchthon are twinned like Laurel and Hardy.2 This dilemma takes us to the heart of the representational problem: Luther was stoutly built. Saints and pious clerics tend, on the whole, to come in Melanchthonian shape, their thinness underlining their indifference to the temptations of the flesh. In the history of Western Christianity, Aquinas aside, there were few spiritual figures who were corpulent. From Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting of the bulky Luther of 1529 to the jowly, double-chinned head of Luther that looks out at us from the iconic woodcut of Lucas Cranach the Younger of 1546, Luther was large.3 After