A Nuremberg Via Crucis at the Crux of the Reformation, 1521
This remarkable book’s sequence of elaborate woodcuts (attributed to Erhard Schön) illustrates a splendid mental and spiritual itinerary through the seventeen moments of Christ’s Passion. Though it appeared in print and in the German vernacular in a city known for its own well-worn via crucis pilgrimage route, the book serves a rather more otherworldly and liminal function. Allowing its readers imaginatively to walk in the footsteps of Christ’s Passion—from Bethany to Golgotha to the Entombment—its titular die geystlich (the spiritual way) engenders the reader’s intended contemplative and internal journey of the heart and soul through a composite mental sequence of holy images and allied devotional texts.
Each chapter begins with a full-page illustration depicting a sculptural relief that captures a particular moment along Christ’s way of sorrows; each relief is mounted on an ornate, and often classicized, pedestal such as one might find in a basilica or a monastic setting. Though it is tempting to interpret these perhaps as faithful representations of built structures that have since been lost, such as the work of the prominent Nuremburg sculptor Adam Kraft, the historical record about their precise source or point of origin is silent. Their conception may at least have drawn some inspiration from Kraft’s dramatic emotional reliefs of Christ’s canonical “seven falls” (ca. 1490s), which were placed at precisely measured intervals along Nuremberg’s famous burial procession route, the kreuzweg or kreuzgang, extending from the city gate near St. Sebaldus to the parish cemetery of the Johanniskirche.
Some among Nuremberg’s elite had sought to fashion the city as a “New Jerusalem” as embodied in the city’s rich devotional offerings of art, its built environment, and pious printed books such as this. For those persons without immediate physical access to such structures (cloistered religious, extra-urban residents of the region et al.), even imaginary devotional stations such as these—perhaps envisioned within secular streetscapes and the bustling public squares of an early modern metropolis—could serve as a didactic guide to spiritual renewal inside a vibrant city.
It is also perhaps important that this deeply visual, pietistic text appeared in Nuremberg amid the firestorm unleashed just a few years earlier by Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” (1517) and his subsequent excommunication and appearance in 1521 before the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms. The original papal bull of excommunication, Decet Romanum Pontificem, issued on January 3, 1521, had also included Luther’s followers, among whose numbers some ecclesiastical authorities were inclined also to count the prominent Nurembergers and city fathers Lazarus Spengler and Willibald Pirckheimer. The imaginative devotional itinerary embodied in this work charts an important spiritual path just as Nuremberg itself continued to proceed upon its own years-long march toward formal adoption of Lutheranism in March 1525.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Richard Muther, Die deutsche Bücherillustration der Gothik und Frührenaissance (1460–1530) (1884), 1253; Herbert Thurston, The Stations of the Cross: An Account of Their History and Devotional Purpose (1914), 9–82; Kathryn Blair Moore, The Architecture of the Christian Holy Land: Reception from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance (2017), esp. 206–12; Christian Kiening, “Mediating the Passion in Time and Space,” in Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture (2018), esp. 136–39. On Adam Kraft, see Georg, Nagler, Die Monogrammisten, vol. 2 (1860), 650–52; Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 3 (1936), 218–20; Corine Schleif, “Adam Kraft (fl. 1490; d. Schwabach, nr Nuremberg, Jan. 1509),” Grove Art Online.
