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The Family at Table:
Protestant Identity, Self-Representation and the
Limits of the Visual in Seventeenth-Century Zurich
Andrew Morrall
In 1643 or in the years following, Hans Conrad Bodmer, Landvogt von Greifensee
and Bürgomeister of Zurich, and his second wife, Anna Barbara Gossweiler, neé
Collin, commissioned a family portrait of themselves and their respective children
(plate 1).1 They chose to have themselves represented in the family Stube, disposed
around the table, saying grace. Bodmer and his wife sit at its head. On their right side
six boys are seated in order of age; on their left, six girls. The children stem from the
parents’ respective first marriages; each is neatly identified by family coats-of-arms of
either the Bodmer (three linden leaves) or the Gossweiler (ducks heads); their initials
and ages are similarly listed.2
Two hierarchies underlie the composition, one artistic, the other social. The
stiffly formal arrangement, by which the children are ordered by age and gender,
and which places the males on the ‘superior’ right hand, the females on the ‘inferior’
left, follows the heraldic convention traditional to donor family groups in altarpieces,
epitaph paintings and tomb sculpture. In this case, the painter has used this device
to emphasize the unity of two families now conjoined into a single entity. The
date, 1643, rendered three times within the picture, was the year Hans Conrad
Bodmer, aged thirty-four and a widower of three years, and Barbara Gossweiler, also
widowed, remarried. It is reasonable to assume that the portrait was commissioned
to celebrate the union of two prominent Zurich families in that year and that it was
this commemorative function that determined the solemnly ordered composition.
A second kind of hierarchy is evident in the apportioning of drinking vessels and
cutlery: the head of the household uses a gilded double cup or Doppelpokal; the mother
a large gilded cup or Humpen, the children, simpler beakers (plate 2). The parents have
personalized étuis that contain a full set of eating utensils, the older boys have knives
and forks, while the daughters and smaller children each have a single knife.3 Such
details reveal the hierarchies within family life: they serve as material manifestations of
the patriarchal order that ruled the early modern household. It is clear from the outset,
therefore, that the actual and the symbolic are closely intertwined within the painting.
The interior furnishings include a credenza, to the rear left, which bears the
Detail from Rudolf Meyer, family plate, symbol of the family’s wealth and social prestige; the imposing Kachelofen,
Zum abscheulichen Exsëmpel, or tiled stove, decorated with the Seasons and the Virtues; a decorative tablet on
1633 (plate 11).
the wall behind the stove, containing a written inscription (plate 3); and further
DOI: inscriptions decorating the beams of the kitchen ceiling, glimpsed through the door
10.1111/1467-8365.12309 to the left. Four glass panels, set into the upper window casings, contain scenes from
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790
40 | 2 | April 2017 | pages 336-357 the Old Testament combined with family coats of arms (plate 4).
© Association of Art Historians 2017 337

Protestant Identity, Self-Representation and the Limits of the Visual in Seventeenth-Century Zurich
Using the content and character of the Bodmer family portrait as a starting
point, this article will address issues of Protestant identity and self-representation
in reformed Zurich, a puritan society, whose citizens lived under a regime of strict
social and religious discipline: a society, therefore, whose members’ conception
of individual selfhood was to a considerable degree socially, culturally, and
theologically determined. It is striking that by posing in the act of saying grace,
1 Unknown artist (attributed

to Heinrich J. Sulzer?),
Family Portrait of Hans
Conrad Bodmer, Landvogt
von Greifensee, 1643. Oil
on canvas, 73 × 93 cm.
Zürich: Schweizerisches
Landesmuseum (on loan
from a private collection).
Photo: Schweizerisches
Landesmuseum.
2 Detail from Family Portrait of

Hans Conrad Bodmer, Landvogt
von Greifensee, showing table
and accoutrements.

Andrew Morrall
3 Detail from Family Portrait

of Hans Conrad Bodmer,
Landvogt von Greifensee,
showing tiled stove and wall
panel.
the chief value the Bodmer family has chosen to commemorate is its religious
probity. This is a moment not of individual, private devotion or interiority, but
of demonstrative, outward, collective prayer: an essentially social construction
of religion. The domestic interior space, moreover, projects an ideal of home and
family life – the Stube as site of harmonious accord – not least by means of the overtly
religious and moralizing domestic decorations. The first part of the article will
accordingly examine the nature of this kind of ornamental imagery and investigate

the important ways the decorative and material elements of domestic life articulated
and reinforced a peculiarly Protestant sense of identity – in life as much as in art.
Another, engraved, image of a family at table, by the Zurich artist Conrad
Meyer, made only two years later, in 1645, sheds further light upon the Bodmer
family portrait and upon the nature of Protestant identity in Zurich (plate 5). The
image forms part of an instructional broadsheet, a so-called Tischzucht (literally, Table
Discipline), aimed specifically at the young to teach them good manners and proper
comportment at table. Yet, like the Bodmer group, the print is also a form of portrait,
for the artist has included himself and members of his family at table.
By placing these images within an iconographic tradition the article aims to
provide a deeper understanding of the compositional and stylistic forms employed.
The well-documented conditions of the commission of Meyer’s Tischzucht and of
his subsequent productions, moreover, will allow a revealing light to be cast on
the problems attendant upon art-making in seventeenth-century Zurich, indeed
upon the issue of visual representation itself, within a society, which, since the early
sixteenth century, had lived under an official policy that was hostile to images and
had become inured to various forms of iconophobia.
Religious Decoration in the Home

The decorative objects within the Bodmer family portrait certainly conform to the
various registers of domestic decoration that had been recommended by reformers
and moralists since the early sixteenth century. The tradition of displaying bible
stories in visual form within the home had immaculate Protestant credentials. Martin
Luther expressed a wish for ‘the whole Bible to be painted on houses, on the outside
and inside, so that all can see it’.4 John Calvin, too, allowed that biblical scenes,
shown in their historical function, could be of ‘use in teaching or admonition’.5
In Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli and his successor Heinrich Bullinger, while strictly
banning images from churches, also justified their presence in houses for purposes
of moral example, teaching and as decoration. As Bullinger insisted, images `should
be removed from the churches but be tolerated in the streets, in houses, in windows,
4 Detail from Family Portrait

of Hans Conrad Bodmer,
Landvogt von Greifensee,
showing decorated glass
panels with biblical scenes.
5 Conrad Meyer,
Tischzucht. Neujahrblatt
der Bürgerbibliothek auf das
Jahr 1645, 1645. Engraving,
14 × 24 cm. Zürich: Zürich
Zentralbibliothek (inv. no.
ZBZ, GS, Kupf 210). Photo:
Zentralbibliothek Zürich,
Graphische Sammlung und
Fotoarchiv.

341
© Association of Art Historians 2017
Andrew Morrall
where, without the offices (dienst) or worship offered to them, they can serve as
decoration, and thus not be open to misuse’.6
This kind of pious display also followed the educational ideals of European
humanism, epitomized in the influential writings of Desiderius Erasmus, who urged
his readership to decorate walls, doors, galleries, even wine cups with improving
images and sentences, so as to create an environment, in which, as he said, there is
‘nothing inactive, nothing that is not saying or doing something’. Everything should
remind and impress upon the family members the lessons of piety and good morals.7
In his treatises Upon Christian Marriage (Institutio Christiani Matrimonii, 1526), and De Pueris
Instituendis (1529), it is in the home where the foundations of belief and of social
duty are to be laid.8 The Englishman, Thomas Elyot, representing a pan-European
Erasmian tradition, gave a very explicit sense of the different ways such images and
inscriptions might act upon the beholder when he advised the wise householder to
paint ‘some monument of virtue’ on his walls:
wherby other men in beholdynge may be instructed, or at the lest wayes

to vertue persuaded. In like wise his plate and vessaile wolde be ingraved
with histories, fables, or quicke and wise sentences, comprehending good
doctrine or counsailes: whereby one of these commodities may happen,
either that they which do eate or drinke havying those wisedoms ever
in sighte, shall happen with the meate to receive some of them: or by
purposinge them at the table, may sussitate some disputation or reasonynge:
whereby some parte of tyme shall be saved, whiche els by superflouse eating
and drinkyng wolde be idely consumed.9
Beyond the issue of straightforward visual instruction or edification, therefore, the

‘speaking presence’ of images and inscriptions might also create an atmosphere of sober
piety to inculcate virtue even as one ate; or serve as props to stimulate pious conversation.
Within the Bodmer family portrait, each decorative element speaks to a similar
variety of functions and intentions. The Cardinal and Theological Virtues that
decorate the tiled stove express the ethical code by which the family conducted
themselves. The stove compares closely with the products of the Pfau family of
Winterthur potters, who specialized in monumental, richly historiated tiled stoves
(plate 6).10 Such stoves became prestige items for wealthy families of the alpine regions
in the latter part of the sixteenth century and were often commissioned as wedding
gifts. In that sense they came to symbolize quite literally the idea of ‘hearth and
home’, their decorative programmes speaking to the moral order upon which the
family was founded and around which they were taught to conduct their lives.11
The tablet on the wall behind the stove (see plate 3) is decorated with a written
inscription, which (in its rubbed state) reads:
In the hot oven of afflictions, God tries his children … O Jesus Christ,
saveguard us from hell’s fires by your dear blood.12
According to Dietrich W. H. Schwartz, the place between the wall and the stove,
the warmest place in the room, was often described as Helle or Hölle in early modern
times.13 The inscribed words are based on such biblical foundations as Isaiah 48:10:
`Behold I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of
affliction.’ Regarded in the light of Thomas Elyot’s prescriptions, one can begin to
understand how such biblical metaphor would have hovered over and mingled with

Andrew Morrall
6 Attributed to David II the heat of the physical environment, charging the atmosphere with the force of holy
Pfau, possibly assisted by
Hans Heinrich III Pfau, Tiled injunction, and evincing a powerfully affective response to the fear of hellfire.
Stove, c. 1684–85. Tin- The four glass panels, set into the upper window casements (see plate 4), contain
enamelled earthenware,
315 × 137.8 × 181 cm. New scenes from the Old Testament, each combined with an Allianzwappen, a pairing of
York: Metropolitan Museum family coats of arms. From left to right the biblical scenes are identifiable as: the Fall
of Art (The Rogers Fund,
1906, 06.968.2). Photo: © of Man; Cain Killing Abel; the Sacrifice of Abraham; and Jacob’s Dream of the Ladder
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
of Angels. These four Old Testament episodes lay out in condensed typological form
the entire course of human redemption. Their lesson is essentially providential and,
in a sense, testamentary: man by his actions at the Fall became subject to sin and loss;
this is symbolized by Cain Killing Abel, the first entrance of death into the world of
man. To contemporary commentators, Cain stood for all those cut off from the grace
of adoption, and his descendants for the unrighteous of the world.14 Yet through faith
and obedience to God’s will, repesented by Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, man regains
Eden and Paradise, symbolized in the conjoining of heaven and earth by Jacob’s
Ladder. In typological terms, Jacob’s dream of a meeting place between Heaven and
Earth (Genesis 28:12) was understoood to point towards Christ who would reunite
heaven and earth, as in the Gospel of St John 1:51: ‘And he said to him, “Truly,
truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and
descending on the Son of Man.”’ Familiarity with the biblical text, garnered by habits
of close reading of Scripture (suggested by the leather-bound volumes on the rear
shelf), would have strengthened the image’s appropriateness for a Christian home, for

on waking from his dream Jacob says, ‘“Surely the Lord is in this place … This is none
other than the house of God…”’ (28:20–22), and vows to build his home on that spot.
The coats of arms that are integrated in pairs below each scene within this
redemptive programme belong to Bodmer’s father and his immediate forebears.15
The family, extending backward and forward over three generations from the glass
panels to those at table, thus stand literally under the arc of Providence, their line
tied to its salvific promise, suggesting their righteousness in God’s sight and, by
implication, their state of election.
The Tischzucht
In all these respects, the decoration and furnishings appear sufficiently personal
credibly to suppose that these were the actual possessions of the Bodmer family;
and that in surrounding themselves with such images and inscriptions they were
conforming to well-established reformed kinds of domestic decoration. Nonetheless,
7 Georg Pencz., Tischzucht,

text by Hans Sachs, c. 1534,
Woodcut, 37.3 × 27.9 cm.
Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Museen (inv. no.
638-7). Photo: Art Resource,
NY/Jörg P. Anders.

Andrew Morrall
8 Abraham Bosse, The as its similarity with Conrad Meyer’s print of the same subject suggests, the painting
Benediction at Table, c.
1635. Etching, 17.3 × 40 cm. conforms closely to the iconographical tradition of the Tischzucht. In perhaps the
New York: Metropolitan earliest surviving example of this type, printed in Nuremberg in 1545, with text by
Museum of Art (The Elisha
Whittelsey Collection, The Hans Sachs and an image attributed to Georg Pencz (plate 7), the text, a catechism
Elisha Whittelsey Fund, of dos and don’ts at table – no grabbing the best bits, no smacking of lips, no
1951, 51.501.2253). Photo: ©
Metropolitan Museum of Art, picking of noses and so forth – is accompanied by the saying of grace, a blessing,
New York.
and thanksgiving to God. Piety and good manners, obedience and self-discipline
are thereby mutually reinforced in the child’s consciousness. As the text says: `Do
not commence eating until a blessing is said, Dine in God’s name … proceed in a
disciplined manner … and return diligently to your business or work.’16 Through
acts of decorum and simple thanksgiving, the meal becomes an important ritual, an
outward show of pious living, linked explicitly to the diligent industry of daily work.
A print tradition of the Tischzucht can be traced well into the seventeenth century
in which the same elements apply. An engraving by the French Calvinist artist,
Abraham Bosse, La Benédiction de la table (plate 8), consciously recalls the prototypical
meal of the Last Supper in a severely ordered composition, in which a Christ-
like authority radiates out from the central pater familias, enframed by two massive
tablets containing the rules of the household, akin to the tablets of Mosaic law. The
hierarchical character of the family home is spelt out in the text beneath, which
lays down the specific roles of father, mother and children. The same tradition
runs through Dutch seventeenth-century art. Claes Jansz. Visscher’s print of 1609
(plate 9) shows particularly close iconographical and compositional similarities to the
Bodmer portrait: in the disposition of domestic elements; the view into the kitchen;
and comparable symbolic elements. The theme of the glass panels in the window
that frame the family patriarch is the story of Tobias and blind Tobit. Like Abraham
and Isaac in the Bodmer painting, it was an exemplary tale of filial piety and of
vindicated faith, as well, in this case, of the purity of marriage.17 It is clear, therefore,
that the artist of the Bodmer family group drew upon well-established iconographic
conventions in his portrayal of an actual family.
Conrad Meyer’s Tischzucht of 1645 provides an explicit link between this tradition
and the Bodmer portrait. It is accompanied by verses by the Zurich theologian,
Johann Wilhelm Simler, which lay out the rules of good conduct of children at table
in the, by then, well-established manner (plate 10).18 Here too, the family is at table

9 Claes Jansz. Visscher, saying grace, with a similar hierarchical arrangement of persons and accoutrements.
Prayer before the Meal,
1609. Etching, 17.3 × 40 cm. Here too, the walls are hung with a pictorial progamme showing the providential
New York: Metropolitan direction for Creation, running from the Fall, via the Nativity and the Adoration of
Museum of Art (The Elisha
Whittelsey Collection, The the Shepherds, to the Last Judgment. A further scene on the right, partially obscured,
Elisha Whittelsey Fund,
1989, 1989.1119). Photo: ©
of John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness, displays a prominent foreground axe
Metropolitan Museum of Art, laid next to a tree, as if ready to fell it. It illustrates Matthew 3:10: ‘And now also the
New York.
axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth
good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.’ This stern admonitory note is further
reinforced by the presence of a vase of flowers, a clock, surmounted by a skeleton,
and an acompanying birch swatch. Such vanitas elements were intended constantly
to bring home the intimate relationship between the individual’s everyday actions
and the divine order of election and damnation. The scene is further sanctified by
the unseen presence of Christ, implied in the empty seat in the foreground, with its
prepared place setting. It evokes the familiar saying of Matthew 18:20: ‘Where two or
three are gathered together in my name, I am there in the midst of them.’19
Surviving documentation surrounding Meyer’s Tischzucht helps place it
more precisely within a local social and religious context.20 The broadsheet was
commissioned from Meyer and Simler in 1644 by the overseers of the Bürgerbibliothek,
the city library. Heralded as a Neujahrsblatt, or ‘New Year’s sheet’, the print was intended
as a part of a long-standing custom by which citizens would give a monetary gift

Andrew Morrall
(Gutjahr) to a civic institution. The practice had begun as a tax to cover the heating
costs of the Guild Hall during the winter and had since been extended to other
institutions. By tradition, the gift was delivered on 2 January, St Berthold’s day, by the
donors’ children, who would receive baked goods and sweets in return. In 1645, the
library officials decided to replace the gift of sweets with Meyer’s and Simler’s ‘pretty
theological or moralizing poem’, thereby instigating a tradition of Neujahrsblätter that
would appear continuously every year until 1939. With a print run of 400, at a price
of 1 pfennig 2 Kreuzer, the Neujahrsblatt was therefore made specifically for children,
with an educational, edifying intent.21
As an official commission of the Bürgerbibliothek, Meyer’s image of domesticity
assumed a broader civic meaning. The wider context of its production was a
particularly austere form of puritanism that reigned within the town under the
influence of Johann Jakob Breitinger (1613–45), the Antistes or head of the Reformed
Church in Switzerland. During his tenure, he sought to control the flood of luxuries
made possible by Zurich’s burgeoning economy and concomitant prosperity, its trade
and silk industries largely untouched by the Thirty Years’ War. In 1644, as one of many
regulatory mandates issued to control civic behaviour, Breitinger expressly forbade the
distribution of sweets as part of the Gutjahr celebrations. The Neujahrblatt was therefore
developed in a spirit of conformism to the prevailing religious authority, as an edifying
alternative, whose content, aimed at the common good, was intended to reflect and
promote the civic values of the trustees of the library and their contributing citizenry.
The text, by Simler, a poet, church minister, teacher and one of the Library’s
overseers, sets forth the children’s various tasks of preparing and serving at table,
and the rules of proper comportment during and at the end of the meal. A final
10 Detail of Conrad Meyer, ‘admonition to the children’ (Vermahnung an die Kinder) places good table manners in a
Tischzucht, showing family at
table. larger context of social discipline:

So much for the rules of the table. Once you have absorbed them / you must
also lead a pious life: willingly obeying your parents and showing obedience
to your elders before the Lord.22
Good table manners are the first step on the path to a pious Christian life, achieved
by obedience to parental and, it is implied, the broader civil authority. This echoes
advice given in the first section to ensure that, when laying the table, all was
conformant with regional customs (nach Landes Sitt). These injunctions thus implicitly
impose a wider conformity upon the assembled family, in effect underwriting
the larger civil order and its regime of social discipline. So long as children were
inculcated with the proper norms of behaviour, the civic and religious status quo
was assured. The elision of civil obedience and the child’s religious destiny is further
powerfully expressed in the latent violence of the waiting axe in Meyer’s image, and
in the dreadful injunction of St Matthew 3:10 that it was intended to summon up.
As mentioned above, Meyer’s image, moreover, possesses a further, personal
dimension in that the participants included members of his own extended family.
Meyer himself sits opposite and directly addresses the viewer; while his father,
Dietrich Meyer and third wife, Elisabeth Bossart, are accorded primary status at the
head of the table, as indicated by their grander chairs and drinking vessels.23 Their
likenesses can be compared with an ink sketch of the family workshop (plate 11),
11 Rudolf Meyer, Zum
abscheulichen Exsëmpel,
made by Conrad’s older brother, Rudolf, eleven years earlier, showing the fifteen-
1633. Lead pencil, ink and year-old Conrad in the centre at his easel, and his sixty-one-year old father (‘V’, ‘D’)
watercolour wash, 12.7 ×
24.3 cm. Zürich: Zürich busy drawing, and his mother (‘M’), spinning, seated on the left. Conrad’s younger
Zentralbibliothek (inv. no. brother ‘Iacob’, a future goldsmith, stands behind her by the stove; two other
ZBZ, GS, Rudolf Meyer
ZEI 1.1633.001). Photo: brothers, Hans (‘H’) a future cobbler and ‘Caspar’, already a potter, and a sister,
Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Agnes, are also included.24 The meaning of the (presumably ironic) inscription, zum
Graphische Sammlung und
Fotoarchiv. abscheülichen Exsëmpel – ‘an odious example’, is unclear. Yet it is worth noting how it

Andrew Morrall
12 Conrad Meyer, ‘Mahler

und Künstler’, engraving
in Sterbensspiegel, das ist
sonnenklare Vorstellung
menschlicher Nichtigkeit durch
alle Ständ und Geschlechter:
vermitlest 60. dienstlicher
Kupferblätteren, lehrreicher
Uberschrifften und beweglicher
zu vier Stimmen aussgesetzter
Todtengesänge, Zurich: Johann
Jakob Bodmer, 1650, plate 29.
Photo: © Herzog August
Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.
reinforces even in this informal sketch, the ethical tenor underlying its conception,
even as it affectionately stands the exemplary on its head.
Conrad’s features and those of his father are recognizable in another, later print
by Meyer of Death striking an atelier of ‘painters and engravers’, from his Sterbenspiegel
(Mirror of the Dying), of 1650, based on Holbein’s Dance of Death (plate 12).25 Using family
members as convenient models, as many contemporary artists, including Rembrandt,
were apt to do, was nevertheless deliberately pointed in the context of a publicly
circulated broadsheet in seventeenth-century Zurich, where the family members

would have been widely recognized among its recipients. The Meyer family was
reasonably prominent within the city. Conrad’s grandfather, a potter/craftsman, had
followed a political career, rising through the guild system: from 1557 as a member of
the city’s Grossrat, and from 1565 the Kleinrat; in 1572 he became Landvogt nach Eglisau,
and in 1583, Obervogt von Wollishofen. His son, Dietrich, now, as we see him, the
family patriarch, had trained as a glass painter and engraver, and followed a similar
course in public office: in 1600 he became one of the Zwölfer for the Zimmerleuten; in
1614, a Kämmerer zum Grossmünster; in 1630, a member of the Grosskeller and in 1641, the
Kleinrat.26 In social terms, therefore, Dietrich Meyer’s family were both longstanding
members of the craftmen-citizenry and belonged to the governing class.
These facts allow one to look at Meyer’s family group in a somewhat sharper light.
As in the case of the other, earlier Tischzuchte, the image refers beyond the text’s narrow
invocation of good manners to present the fruits of such childhood conformity
to family rule in the picture of well-ordered and harmonious family life. Meyer is
explicitly holding up himself and his family as model citizens. Commissioned by a
prominent public institution and reflecting the values of important segments of the
community, the portrait acts as an exemplary mediation of Meyer’s own family’s
private ethics, religious practice, and household order into the public sphere of civic
duty and social norms.
The Visual Arts in Seventeenth-Century Zurich

Such conformity with public expectation speaks more generally to the constrained
role of the arts in mid-seventeenth-century reformed Zurich, where the influence of
Zwingli’s and Bullinger’s teachings cast a heavy pall of suspicion over the visual arts.
As discussed above, they tolerated certain kinds of domestic art and decoration of an
historical and edifying nature. Nonetheless, in general, all forms of art, including
the secular genres, were regarded as dangerous pathways to the world of the senses,
and as such in need of careful patrolling. Even the collected objects that formed part
of the public library’s Kunstkammer were subjected to the Antistes’s censorship.27 Printed
images, especially Protestant emblematics and homiletic illustrations, while also
to be monitored for their potentially sensual aspects, were nonetheless of value in
aiding the spread of the new religious doctrines.28 In this profoundly iconophobic
culture, priority tended in fact to be given to printed images over paintings: in
an important sense the monochrome print was regarded as more acceptable than
painting for it lacked the latter’s natural proclivity towards colour and its claim upon
the senses, especially when closely connected to text, as in emblems, homiletic
broadsheets and tracts. Indeed, the arts, generally, tended towards the monotone and
the expressively anaemic, a condition characterized by Yvonne Boerlin-Brodbeck in
a consideration of art in eighteenth-century Zurich, as ‘an autochthonous middling
quality’ (ein autocthone mittlere Qualität) that persisted into later centruries.29
One can trace the forces and pressures that led to the development of such a
home-grown, self-imposed ‘middle way’, a style of sober matter-of-factness and
self-regulating restraint – in essence, an exemplary reformed aesthetic – in the
works of Conrad Meyer. By the 1650s and 1660s he had become the city’s leading
portraitist and a prolific print maker of topographical landscapes as well as of
didactic and edifying subjects, of which his Neujahrsblatt of 1645 was a pioneering
example. He seems above all to have been instrumental in making acceptable a
form of religious-ethical emblematics. In three books he produced in the following
decades, the Sterbenspiegel (Mirror of the Dying) (1650), the Christenspiegel (Mirror of Christians)
(1657) and the Fünff und Zwanzig Bedenkliche Figuren (Twenty-five Images for Reflection) (1673),

Andrew Morrall
which were all explicitly oriented towards what he termed ‘neighbourly edification’
(des Nechsten erbawung),30 one can witness within the longstanding – and largely
imageless – genre of Erbauungsliteratur, of edifying literature, the evolution of a type
that employed words and images in inventive, and for Zurich, unprecedented ways.
The prefaces to these volumes contain repeated justifications for the use of images,
demonstrating all too clearly the artist’s sense of the precariousness of the visual
medium within this sphere of activity and the thin median line he walked between
official approval and censorship.
A continuously repeated theme is the Christian imperative Meyer feels to edify
and to exhort his neighbour towards the Christian life via his didactic engravings.
‘Although I am not a preacher, but rather a painter by profession’, he wrote in the
preface to the Sterbenspiegel of 1650, ‘I am nonetheless a Christian; and I have therefore
decided to make it my absolute professional calling until my life’s end … to edify my
neighbour.’31 Later, in the introduction to his emblem book of 1673, Meyer justifies
his images – indeed his profession – in the same terms:
I too, in my own small way, work according to … the vocation to which

the Lord has called me. And as in all my previous little works … the goal
is the same: that the Word of the Almighty be disseminated, that virtue be
planted, that vice be scattered to the wind and my neighbour be edified and
improved.32
Similar, somewhat defensive sentiments are found in the encomiastic poems, written
by friends and sponsors, that strategically preface these works. In the Christenspiegel
(1657) Meyer’s long-standing literary collaborator, Johann Wilhelm Simler, wrote an
encomium in which he explicitly addressed the interplay between image and word,
clearly conscious of the abiding suspicion that hung over images and anxious to justify
their use. He praised Meyer’s pleasing artistic presentation, but insisted that the images
acquired pedagogical force only through the author’s, Georg Müller’s, accompanying
verses, which ‘impart to the work its life and endow it with a certain radiance that
lays bare the measure of our sins in our hearts and unites us in Christian duty’.33 For
Simler, text was necessary to clarify and to confer a precise meaning on the image.
In a similar encomium accompanying Meyer’s emblem book of 1670, Conrad
Wirz, since 1668 deacon at the Predigerkirche in Zurich, compared Meyer’s work to
that of a preacher and proclaimed the engraved image – the product of the hand – a
worthy medium that could complement and enrich teaching via the word:
As Blessed is the mouth/ that teaches the Word of the Lord,
As blessed is the hand /which increases God’s dominion. …
The one issues from your mouth / the other by your hand is praised/ By
which, through engraved and painted art, you apply yourself, in praise of
God, … Therefore blessed be the mouth/ which loves the Lord’s word/ And
blessed be the hand/ that carries out the Lord’s work.34
Even in this endorsement, it is striking that Wirz values the image not for any
qualities of intrinsic visuality, but rather as the product of manual activity – the hand
rather than the eye – where the pious labour of its production is emphasized over the
actual product.

In a final example, Georg Müller, the author of verses accompanying both the
Sterbens- and the Christenspiegel, described the relation of image to word in his own
prefatory address. Though Meyer, Müller says, has engraved a number of beautiful
designs that show Christian folk their proper behaviour, the artist asked Müller to
provide verses to give clarity to his images. Yet Müller acknowledges that even his
words, drawn from ‘the fantasy of the human brain and from human poetry’ are
insufficient; what was required were words from ‘the book of the words and deeds of
great God himself’.35 And indeed, his verses are supplemented with apposite passages
from Scripture.
Underlying Müller’s words stands a clear hierarchy with respect to the expression
of Truth. Only in the Scriptures – in God’s Word – is the Truth to be found, pure
and unadulterated; human words, though necessarily imperfect, occluded by man’s
fallen state, possess some power to clarify and explain; images are the least clear and
require the medium of words to ‘complete what they only begin’.
These justifications by Müller, Simler and Wirz of humanly created images
and poetry in respect to divine truth are a clear nod to the city’s board of censors,
whose job it was to monitor all printed works produced or sold within the city.
Since a first decree in 1523, that limited printers’ freedoms in what they could
publish (followed by further restrictions in 1553, 1560 and 1563), all published
works produced in Zurich were sent before a board of censors, made up of three
citizens, one spiritual, and one drawn from each of the large and small councils.36
The aim was to ensure that all published content conformed to the policies of
the city’s authorities, providing clear guidance to the citizenry, while, equally,
preventing provocative attacks on Zurich’s Catholic confederate neighbours. These
ordinances were extended in the seventeenth century: as of 1628, the approval
of the Antistes, the head of the Reformed Church, was required; and from 1650
onwards, engraved images and illustrations in books were also made subject to
scrutiny. Indeed, Conrad Meyer’s preface to his Sterbenspiegel in that year was the
direct result of a dispute with the censors over certain aspects of the work.37 This
was the volume, cited above, that, in the manner of Holbein the Younger’s Dance
of Death, showed Death carrying off representatives of the various estates (see
plate 12). Meyer’s version included verse dialogues by Müller between Death and
his victims, together with appositely chosen biblical passages. A prolonged dispute
ensued, following objections from the censors to several early printed page proofs.
The issue was not so much the images per se, as the manner of their ordering and
the appropriateness and propriety of certain accompanying texts. Both Meyer
and Müller expressed themselves ready to compromise, although in Meyer’s case
not over pages already printed, because of the costs involved in remaking them.
When it became evident that there was a split among the censors as to what was
required and that a number of Zurich spirituals were sympathetic to the artist’s
case, Meyer became increasingly obdurate, so that the affair was placed before the
city council.38
As a compromise, the censors suggested the inclusion of a written introduction
that would explain the images and ensure a correct reading of the Sterbenspiegel.
Meyer’s preface to his printed version was the result, for which two surviving
drafts survive.39 The first part of the draft introduction that justified his endeavour
on didactic grounds, is almost word for word as it appears in the printed version,
quoted above. The second part, in which Meyer counters the censors’ complaints,
did not appear in print.40 But it is here that the nature of the censors’ objections are
revealed. One complaint, for instance, concerned the inappropriate positioning of

Andrew Morrall
the figure of a Reformed preacher at the tail end of a series of Catholic clerics that
began with the Pope. In the surviving draft, Meyer claimed that by placing the
Preacher thus, he wished to criticize the ‘external world order’ (äusserliche Weltordnung)
which placed the unworthy before the worthy.41 A second charge was that the bible
passage, Hebrews, 7:5, that Meyer had associated with the Pope, was potentially
blasphemous, for, it was felt, it could refer properly only to Christ: ‘Who is made,
not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life’.
Meyer’s response was that the bible passages were to be understood either as self-
evidently satirical, as a juxaposition of opposites, as here, to highlight the Pope’s false
position and arrogance; or elsewhere, they were meant positively to accompany
exemplary deeds and actions.
Word and Image

The complicated interactions between artist, author and civic authorites that
determined the final outcome of the work reveal something of the social mechanics
that shaped visual imagery as it made its narrow way within the city’s reformed
culture, amid all the doubts, suspicions and hesitations that pressed upon it. Above
all, the elaborate justifications by Meyer and his literary colleagues reveal what was
to become an important characteristic of a reformed aesthetic: that is, the overriding
dependence that visual imagery now bore to text, in a descending hierarchy, as
Müller articulated, from the Scriptures, to the written or verbal communication, to
the visual.
Such an understanding of texts and images, which raised the verbal over the
visual – and which, crucially, saw the one in terms of the other – was grounded in
notions about experiencing God and about the nature and limits of representation
that had been formulated by the early reformers. It is exemplified in Bullinger’s
agreement with Calvin in the Zweite Helvetische Bekenntnis of 1566, to prohibit all
representations of God the Father (as well as Christ) on the grounds that:
as God is invisible, omnipresent and eternal spirit, he cannot be represented

by any image or picture …; neither did Christ assume human form in
order to serve as a model for sculptors and painters. Instead, in order to
instruct men in faith and about divine things and their salvation, the Lord
commanded that the Bible be preached (Mk 15, 16).42
Luther, too, had declared that ‘Christendom will not be known by sight, but by faith,
and faith has to do with things not seen’.43 For the reformers, the sacred was invisible.
Images by their nature could not possess or communicate the inherently ungraspable
nature of the divine; at best, they could serve as material pointers to something
ineffable beyond themselves.44 Words, by contrast, being immaterial, were deemed
inherently closer to an invisible God. As Carlos Eire put it, the Word of God was
allowed to ‘stand as an image of the invisible reality of the spiritual dimension’.45
This new theological paradigm, which instituted a new ontology of the visual,
helped engender over time a shift from image to word within Western cultural
consciousness, and which led ultimately to a largely logo-centric culture, whose
assumptions live on into the present day.46
One can observe this process taking shape in reformed Zurich, where the visual,
and with it, notions of visuality, bent to the tyranny of the word. Despite his differences
with the censors, Meyer seems to have shared with them a reformed understanding
that visual images might be deemed legitimate in matters of religion only in so far as

13 Conrad Meyer, Fünf

und zwanzig Bedenkliche
Figuren mit erbaulichen
Erinnerungen: Dem tugend
und Kunstliebenden Zu gutter
Gedechtnus in Kupffer gebracht
durch Conrad Meyer, Mahler in
Zürich 1674, Zürich, 1674, n.p.,
Emblem 15. Photo: Courtesy
of Emblematica Online,
University of Illinois Library
at Urbana-Champaign/
Herzog August Bibliothek,
Wolfenbüttel.
they were reducible to language. This is implicit in Meyer’s championing of image-

word combinations in broadsheets, and in particular, of the emblem, which became
so predominant a form of devotional and educational mnemonics in Protestant Zurich,
and which perfectly exemplified this reformed relationship between image and word
(plate 13). For emblems are not strictly pictures so much as visual signs: in Meyer’s own
words, they are Sinnenbilder figuren, that is, ‘symbolic figures’ or, better perhaps, ‘signifying
images’.47 Not being properly pictorial, they provided, rather, a kind of matrix of visual-

Andrew Morrall
verbal material that proved a highly effective tool in religious teaching as well as in
more broadly educational endeavours. Meyer’s Tischzucht is an early example of this type,
pointing, in its tripartite division of title, image and verse text, towards the emblem form,
its image in essence completing the implications of the text and in that sense dependent
upon it. Subsequent Neujahrsblätter by Meyer show the continuing educational value of
this format, which was retained, often with the explicit heading, ‘Sinnenbild’ (‘symbolic
image’), to illustrate themes relating to ethics and behaviour (‘Hercules at the Crossroads’
(1652), ‘The Prodigal Son’ (1669));48 or the Protestant work ethic (‘The Ages of Man’
(1667));49 or meditations upon sin and self-awareness (‘Memento Mori’ (1665)).50 In all
these examples, the image is conceptualized as a communicative message containing a
meaning, significance or truth that must be teased out in language.
In this limited context, the expressive qualities of art were carefully adjusted
down, as it were, to such basic values as clarity of exposition and perspicuity
of – literally, a seeing through to – meaning. That meaning is manifest in Meyer’s
dedication of his 1670 emblem book to ‘lovers of virtue and art’.51 Art and virtue
have become inextricably entwined: art’s purpose is the clear communication of
virtue, set down in a modest and decorous form, divested of rhetorical flourish or
ornament – that is, of the independently visual. Artistic form itself thus becomes a
reflection of the artist’s own exemplary self-restraint, a quality that might extend
just as well to dress or comportment and other kinds of social custom or intellectual
work. For just as the ideal Protestant behaviour that these kinds of broadsheet sought
to inculcate was designed, as David Brett put it, ‘as one designs a house, around an
inward principle of proportion which regulates the rest’,52 so a reformed aesthetic of
disciplined restraint was equally closely bound up with a sense of self.
Conclusion
Regarded in this retrospective light, both the Bodmer family portrait and Meyer’s
Tischzucht can be seen to embody these stylistic-ethical principles. Meyer’s, the more
accomplished, achieves a convincing naturalism by means of a persuasive perspective
space, infused with an even light such that every element in his carefully ordered
composition is drawn with complete descriptive clarity: a sobriety of style that exactly
matches the tenor of its subject, yet which also allows symbolic content to emerge
unforced, whether in the unoccupied place setting, the cat and dog eating in harmony,
the pictorial programme on the walls, or the light of Grace flooding the scene.
The Bodmer family group, more naively drawn, with its unnaturally steep
perspective, doll-like figures and odd scale-relationships, nonetheless possesses
a similar impulse towards factual presentation and the frankly testamentary:
the prosaic detailing of facial features, dress, and the minutiae of the material
surroundings constitutes a descriptive mode that is intended literally to be ‘read’. By
adopting the Tischzucht’s compositional strategies, moreover, the portrait would have
bodied forth at this structural level the same didactic principle that equated orderly
comportment and aesthetic sobriety with moral virtue and a wider conformity to
civic norms. Like Meyer’s Tischzucht, the portrait, itself an object of commemoration
to later generations and a mirror and lesson in virtuous living to the present,
perfectly illustrates in its material details, composition and its very manner of
painting, the extent to which Protestant identity was deeply bound up with the
aims of a reformist cultural and civic ideal: with the correct ordering of family life
through the ordination of civility, the control of appetite, the transformation of
nature by careful nurture, and the inculcation of piety, to form even, in a sense, a
means of Grace.

Notes 16 Max Geisberg, The German Single Leaf Woodcut, 1500–1550, revised and
1 Oil on canvas, 73 × 93 cm, Zurich, Schweizerisches edited by Walter L. Strauss, New York, 1974, 3, 967.
Landesmuseum (on loan from a private collection). In the older 17 For other examples of family groups, similarly disposed, see Wayne
literature the painting is attributed to Johann Jakob Sulzer Franits, ‘The family saying grace: A theme in Dutch art of the
(1631–65). See Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon seventeenth century’, Simiolus,16, 1, 1986, 36–49.
der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Leipzig, 1907–50, 18 Graphischen Sammlung der Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Aeg 468:1.
23, 29–30, with further early bibliographic reference. The obvious 19 A family portrait of the Basel goldsmith Hans Rudolf Faesch, 1559,
problem is that the artist would have been twelve years old in by Hans Hug Kluber (Basel, Kunstmuseum) uses the same motif.
1643, the date within the painting. It is not impossible, though See Lanz, ‘“Komm Herr Jesus, sei unser Gast”’, 221–5. The much
inherently unlikely, that the painting was completed rather later reproduced painting by Fritz von Uhde, Komm, Herr Jesu, Sei Unser
and the date is a commemorative marker of the Bodmer/Collin Gast, of 1885 (Berlin, Alte National Galerie), showing Christ as
marriage of that year, not a date of completion. Ueli Bellwald the table guest of a contemporary peasant family, testifies to the
(Winterthurer Kachelöfen. Von dem Angang des Handwerks bis zum Niedergang continuing idea of the sanctity of the Protestant family table well
im 18. Jahrhundert, Bern,1980, 135 and 138) invoked the name into the nineteenth century. See Guido Fuchs, Tischgebet und Tischritual,
Heinrich Sulzer, but without further reference. However, a faithful Regensburg, 1988.
watercolour copy of the Bodmer painting by the Zurich painter 20 See Martina Sulmoni, ‘Einer Kunst-und Tugendliebenden Jugend verehrt’. Die
and historian Johann Martin Usteri (1763–1827) clearly bears the Bild-Text-Kombination in den Neujahrblättern der Burgerbibliothek Zürich von 1645
signature ‘H. J. Sulzer’ (‘Collectaneen’, Nachlass Usteri, Studien L. bis 1762, Deutsche Literatur von den Anfängen bis 1700, Bern, 2007,
52, Graphische Sammlung, Kunsthaus Zürich). I thank Dr Daniel esp. 17–23.
Hess of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, for 21 29. 12. 1644: 6. Archiv St 5 Acta der Burgerbibliothek, 18, Handschrift
this reference. Thus, despite a dearth of bibliographic reference Abteilung, Zentralbibliothek, Zurich. Sulmoni, 2007, 17–18.
or source material on the artist, the existing evidence points to 22 So vil von Tisches Zucht. Sol aber sie dich zieren /
Heinrich Sulzer as the most likely candidate as author. Dione So solst hierneben auch ein frommes leben fuehren:
Flühler-Kreis unconvincingly attributed the work to the Zurich Den Eltern und zugleich den Fuergesetzten dein
artist, Conrad Meyer, by virtue of its closeness to Meyer’s engraved Im Herren / williglich undstets gehorsam seyn.
Tischzucht (on which see below) in: ‘Die Stube als sakraler Raum. 23 The young woman beside Conrad Meyer is not his wife, Susanna
Das Familenporträt des Zürcher Landvogts von Greifensee, Murer, as they didn’t marry until 1649; nor can the children be his.
Hans Conrad Bodmer’, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und They are presumably other members of the extended Meyer family.
Kunstgeschichte, 61, 2004, 211–20. Sulmoni, ‘Einer Kunst-und Tugendliebenden Jugend verehrt’, 131.
2 Flühler-Kreis, ‘Die Stube als sakraler Raum‘, 212. 24 1633, pencil and wash in brown-black ink, Graphische Sammlung
3 Hanspeter Lanz, ‘“Komm Herr Jesus, sei unser Gast”’, Zeitschrift für Zentral Bibliothek, Zurich, , inv. no. ZEI 1.1633.001.
Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, 61, 2004, 221–5. 25 Sterbensspiegel, das ist, Sonnenklare Vorstellung menschlicher Nichtigkeit durch alle
4 Quoted in Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Ständ und Geschlechter … durch Rudolf Theodor Meyer, Conrad Meyer und Johann
Reformation, Chicago, IL, 1986, 35. Georg Müller, Zurich, 1650, ‘Maaler und Verwandte’, 65, no. 29.
5 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), trans. Ford Lewis 26 The father’s, Dietrich’s, biographical details are recorded in
Battles, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols, Library of Christian Classics, 2, Conrad Meyer’s Familienbuch, Ms B 302, Handschriftabteilung der
1961: Book 1 ch. 11, section 12. Zentralblibliothek, Zürich, fol. 7. See Sulmoni, ‘Einer Kunst-und
6 Heinrich Bullinger, Summa christlicher Religion / durch Heinrychen Bullingern Tugendliebenden Jugend verehrt’, 130, fn. 144.
Zuo Zueriych durch Christoffel Froschower, Zurich 1597, 53v, 54r.: Vund 27 In 1641, the Antistes, Johnann Jakob Breitinger sought the removal
deren keines soellend wir waeder gottes noch der heiligen / oder from the library of a small organ, as well as various paintings,
goetteren bildtnussen bewysen: ka zuo soelichem bruch vund zuo including portraits of the Swedish King Gustavus-Adolphus and
vereerung soellend wir gar ueberal keine bilder haben. Gmaelde of Carlo Borromeo, as well as a decorated reliquary. See Johann
vssert den kilchen / uff den gassen / in hueseren / in fensteren/ Jakob Horner, Geschichte der schweizerischen Neujahrsblätter. Aus den
vnd one dienst vnd vererung moegend zur zierd gebrucht/ vnnd so Neujahrsstücken der Stadtbibliothek in Zürich besonders abgedruckt, Zurich,
sy keinen missbruch zogen / geduldet werden. 1856–58, 49–51.
7 The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson, Chicago, IL, 1965: 28 For an account of the arts in seventeenth-centruy Zurich, see
46–78, 53. Irmgard Müsch, Geheiligte Naturwissenschaft Die Kupfer Bibel des Johann Jakob
8 William Harrison Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus concerning the Aim and Scheuchzer, Gottingen, 2000, esp. 49–51.
Method of Education, New York, 1904, reprinted 1964, 154–60, and 29 Yvonne Boerlin-Brodbeck, ‘Malerei und Graphik’, in Hans
180–222. Wysling ed., Zürich im 18. Jahrhundert, Zurich, 1983, 253–70, 189.
9 Thomas Elyot, The book named the governor, London, 1531, O4r. 30 Sterbenspiegel, 1650, ‘Vorrede’ (unpaginated).
10 See Bellwald, Winterthurer Kachelöfen, 1980, 139 and 240, cat. no. 21. 31 ‘Der halben ob ich gleich kein Prediger; sonder meines beruffes
11 On reformed attitudes to the virtues and their place in domestic ein Maaler; darbey aber … ein Christ bin: so habe ich mir
contexts, see Andrew Morrall, ‘The Reformation of the virtues in billich/ … gantz entschliesslich vorgesetzt; künftig in allen meinen
Protestant art and decoration in sixteenth-century Northern Europe’, Bereuffgeschäfften/ neben des Höhesten ehre des Nechsten
in Tara Hamling and Richard Williams, eds, Art Reformed? Reassessing the erbawung bis zu ende meiner lebtagen/ zusuchen’. Sterbenspiegel 1650,
Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts, Newcastle, 2007, 105–26. ‘Vorrede’ (unpaginated).
12 ‘Im heyssen Ofen / Der truebsal …./ Probiert Gott sin / Kinder 32 ‘… Ich für meine wenige Person/ arbeite auch / wie Gott
a …/ O Jesu Christ / Dein tueres [Blut?] / Bewar uns vor / Der ausgetheilet / und wie mich der Herr beruft hat. Und wie meine
hellen [Gluot].’ vorige Werklein/ … einig dahin zielen/ dass des Allerhöchsten Her
13 Dietrich W. H. Schwartz, Sachgüter und Lebensformen: Einführung in die ausgebreitet/ die Tugend gepflanzet/ den Lastern gesteurt/ und
materielle Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, Berlin, 1970, 19; mein Nebenmensch erbauet werde.’ Fünf und Zwanzig Bedenkliche Figuren
cited in Flühler-Kreis, ‘Die Stube als sakraler Raum’, 215–16. mit Erbäulichen Erinnerungen, dem Tugend und Kunstliebenden zu gutter gedechtnus
14 See Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries in Küpffer gebracht, 1673, ‘An den Tugenden-und Kunst-liebenden
on Genesis, 1527–1633, Chapel Hill, NC, 1948, 143, who cites the Leser’ (unpaginated). Cited in Ingeborg Ströle, Totentanz und Obrigkeit.
commentaries of Luther, Calvin, and the Jesuit commentator, Benet Illustrierte Erbauungsliteratur von Conrad Meyer im Kontext reformierter
Pererius. Bilderfeindlichkeit in Zürich des 17. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt-am-Main/New
15 From left to right, these are: the arms of the Bodmer-Haffner family; York, 1999, 206–7, fn. 797.
the Bodmer-Hottinger; Bodmer-Escher; and Bodmer-Collin and an 33 ‘Nun gibet abermal des Herren Meyers fleiss/ ein Werklein an
inscription, partly overpainted: ‘Bodmer-Collin 1643’. Flühler- das liecht / dem billich hört der preiss / dass es zu rechter-zeit/
Kreis, ‘Die Stube als sakraler Raum’, 214–15. kunstmässig sey gegeben:// Herr’n Muellers Poesie mittheilet ihm

Andrew Morrall
das leben// und einen solchen glantz/ der auch im hertzen zeigt // 50 Sinnenbild. Stirb, eh du sterbst, dass nicht verderbst… Neujahrsblatt auf das
die sünden-maasen / und zur Christen-pfl icht uns enigt.’ Christen Jahr 1655.
Spiegel 1657, ‘Lobgedicht Simlers’ (unpaginated). 51 Fünff und Zwanzig Bedenkliche Figuren mit Erbäulichen Erinnerungen, dem Tugend
34 Wie gesegnet ist der Mund/ der das Wort des herren lehret/ und Kunstliebenden zu gutter gedechtnus in Küpffer gebracht, Zürich, 1670.
So gesegnet ist die Hand/ welche Gottes Her vermehret. 52 David Brett, The Plain Style, Cambridge, 2004,105.
Beides/ wehrter Freund/ von Euch kan mit Grund geredet werden:
Gottes Wort und Gottes Her Euch das Liebste ist auf Erden:
Jenes führt Ihr stäts im Mund/ dise mit der Hand Ihr preiset/
Der durch Etz- und Mahler-Kunst/ Gott zu Ehren/ Euch befleisset. …
Drum gesegnet sey der Mund/ der das Wort des Herren liebet/
Und gesegnet sey die Hand/ die das Werk des Herren übet.
Bedenkliche figuren 1673, ‘Lob-Bezeugung I von Conrad Wirz’, unpaginated.
Ströle, 208, fn. 801.
35 … Ihr grabet in das Ertz ein anzal schöner Rissen/
Die bilden wie die Ständ im Christentum befl issen
seyn sollen jeden orts: und weil das Bild nicht stimt/
so wolt ihr das mein Vers das rede was sich zit;
Nicht bloss nach hirnes wahn; und menschlischen gedichten:
Nein; sonder auss dem Buch der worten und Geschichten
des grossen Gotes selbs. Mein freund/ was ihr begährt
wer würdig meiner Folg; und dass ihr des gewährt
seyn solten auf das best: wo nur mein schwaches sinnen
im Vers erfüllen möcht/ was ihr im Riss beginnen.
Christen Spiegel 1657, ‘Der Dichters Schreiben/ an Herren Conrad Meyern/ den
Verleger dises Christenspiegels’, unpaginated.
36 Ströle, Totentanz und Obrigkeit, 167–8.
38 Ströle, Totentanz und Obrigkeit, esp.174–83.
40 Numerous modifications ot the text were made and survive in
the fi nal printed version, the result of the prolonged negotiations
between the board of censors and artist and author. These included
the censors’ (vain) attempt to induce Meyer’s father, Dietrich, to
influence his son in the matter. Ströle, Totentanz und Obrigkeit, esp.
84–92.
41 No. 26, fol. 9r/v. Ströle, Totentanz und Obrigkeit, 183, fn 687.
42 ‘Weil nun Gott unsichtbarer Geist und unendlichen wesens ist,
kann er auch nicht durch irgendeine Kunst oder ein Bild dargestellt
werden; … Denn obschon Christus menschlisches Wesen
angenommen hat, hat er das nicht deshalb getan, um Bildhauern und
Malern als Modell zu dienen. Er hat gesagt, er sei nicht gekommen
Gesetz und Propheten aufzulösen (Matt. 5.7). … Damit aber die
Menschen im Glauben unterweisen und über Göttliche Dinge und
ihre Seligkeit belehrt würden, hat der Herr befohlen, das Evangelium
zu predigen (Mk 16, 15) aber nicht zu malen oder mit er Maleriei das
Volk zu lehren.’ Heinrich Bullinger, Zweite Helvetische Bekenntnis (1566).
43 Martin Luther, Werke: Kritische Gesamptausgabe, Weimar, 1883–, VII: 418
(on Hebrews 11:1), quoted in Joseph L. Koerner, The Reformation of the
Image, London, 2004, 210, and discussed 201–11.
44 As Koerner put it, ‘Luther proclaims that faith can only be a
commitment to the representation of truth, rather than to the truth
embedded in a representation’, Koerner, The Reformation of the Image,
206.
45 Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from
Erasmus to Calvin, Cambridge, 1986, 316.
46 For a stimulating analysis of this process leading from a Reformed
‘visual theology’ to its rationalization in German aesthetic theory, and
thence to its institutionalization in art-historical practice, see Michael
Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, Cambridge, 2009, chapter
1: ‘Protesting Protestant art history: The Lutheran debts’, 15–89.
Squire’s account of Reformation art closely follows Koerner.
47 ‘… Also gibe ich nun zu einem gleich guten Ende heraus dise XXV.
Figuren oder Sinnenbilder/…’, Fünf und Zwanzig Bedenkliche Figuren …
1670, ‘An den Tugenden-und Kunst-liebenden Leser’ (unpaginated).
48 ‘Sinnenbild. Am Scheidewaeg nit verfehl; die rechte Strass erwehl...’, Neujahrsblatt
auf das Jahr 1652; and Treuhertziges Vermahnungsgesang / so wol für scon
erwachsene / alss auch für die noch minderjaehrige Jugend: Selbige hierdurch; neben
Vorstellung des verlohrnen Sohns; ab dem gefaerhlichen Lasterwaeg / auf die sichere
Tugendbahn zubringen… Neujahrblatt auf das Jahr 1669.
49 Betrachtung Menschlichen Alters, nach anleitung der vier Tags- und Jahrs-Zeiten.
Neujahrsblatt auf das Jahr 1667.

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14678365, 2017, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8365.12309 by Cochrane Saudi Arabia, Wiley Online Library on [09/11/2022].

© Association of Art Historians 2017 337

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Religious Decoration in the Home

4 Detail from Family Portrait

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wherby other men in beholdynge may be instructed, or at the lest wayes

Beyond the issue of straightforward visual instruction or edification, therefore, the

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7 Georg Pencz., Tischzucht,

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12 Conrad Meyer, ‘Mahler

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The Visual Arts in Seventeenth-Century Zurich

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I too, in my own small way, work according to … the vocation to which

As Blessed is the mouth/ that teaches the Word of the Lord,

As blessed is the hand /which increases God’s dominion. …

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Word and Image

as God is invisible, omnipresent and eternal spirit, he cannot be represented

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13 Conrad Meyer, Fünf

they were reducible to language. This is implicit in Meyer’s championing of image-

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