Torture and Teaching

Abstract

Among the projects carried out by the famed German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder for his patron, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, is a set of twelve woodcuts depicting the martyrdoms of the Twelve Apostles (figs. 1-3). In scene after scene the missionaries of Christ are mocked, tortured, and hideously executed:2 they are beaten with clubs and fists, crucified, impaled, sawn in half, flayed, and beheaded. Even from today's perspective of a culture glutted with images of violence, and even in the monochrome of woodblock printing, Cranach's images pack a visceral punch unmatched in the blood-spattered history of European religious art.