The Family at Table: Protestant Identity, Self‐Representation and the Limits of the Visual in Seventeenth‐Century Zurich

Abstract

This essay explores issues of Protestant identity, self-representation and the status of the image in seventeenth-century Zurich through the lens of two works depicting ‘the family at table’, one a painted family portrait, the other a printed broadsheet on table manners (“Tischzucht”). Discussion focuses on the ethical dimensions of “Tischzucht” iconography and the ways that the decorative and material accoutrements of domestic life contained in each work articulated and reinforced a peculiarly Protestant set of values. The circumstances of the commission of the “Tischzucht” print and the artist’s subsequent, well-documented clashes with the city’s censor over matters of content, casts a further, revealing light on the problems attendant upon art-making in seventeenth-century Zurich, on the aesthetics of the monochrome print vis-a-vis the painted image, and on the limits of visual representation itself within a society, which since the early sixteenth century, had lived under an official policy of hostility to images.