Printmaking and the Renaissance

 

It makes sense to start a talk about the Renaissance and the Reformation by looking at a library. The library at San Lorenzo in Florence had books and functioned almost like a public library. In Florence, the Medici family supported humanistic education. They believed that the more educated a person was, the better they could participate in government and become a more moral person.

At the beginning of what became known as the Reformation, books and the way information was shared became especially important. A major innovation during this time was the invention of the movable type printing press. To us, that might not seem like a big deal, but it completely changed how information was spread. A helpful comparison is the way copy machines and the internet allowed people to create and share content without needing permission from a central authority. Just like social media helped spread ideas during events like the revolution in Egypt, printing allowed people in the 15th and 16th centuries to share new ideas more freely.

Johannes Gutenberg is usually credited with inventing the movable type printing press in the 1450s, though others were working on similar ideas around the same time. Movable type was actually invented earlier in China, but it wasn’t widely adopted there—possibly due to the complexity of the Chinese writing system, which includes thousands of characters.

Gutenberg’s key insight was that instead of carving a full page of text, you could make small, reusable letter blocks. These could be arranged to form words and lines, then reset and used again. The letters were organized alphabetically in boxes, and a typesetter would place them in a frame to form a page. They had to be set backward, like a mirror image, because printing reverses the layout.

This process was much faster and cheaper than carving each page by hand, which could take weeks. Typesetting a page might take only a day or two, and dozens of copies could be printed from a single setup. Once finished, the letters were sorted back into their boxes for reuse. This method lowered the cost of producing books dramatically and made printed material far more accessible.

After printing maybe 50 or 100 copies of a page, the printer could reuse all the letters again for a new page. This made printing way faster and much cheaper—cutting costs by about 95%. It was such a change that even the idea of children’s alphabet blocks comes from the way these letters were stored and used during printing.

One person who used this printing revolution was Erasmus of Rotterdam. He was a major thinker during the Reformation and wrote a book in 1503 called The Handbook of the Christian Knight. In it, Erasmus said people should read the Bible for themselves, think about its meaning, and try to live more like Jesus. This idea wasn’t totally new—people like Saint Francis had pushed similar ideas earlier—but Erasmus helped popularize it by publishing it in book form.

He also made a new translation of the Bible by going back to the original Hebrew, Greek, and Latin sources. That made his version of the Bible more accurate and readable for scholars of the time. Once people started reading it for themselves, they began to question the church’s teachings and how information had been controlled.

Most students are taught that the church didn’t allow regular people to read the Bible. While that’s partly true, it wasn’t just about control. Books, even printed ones, were expensive, and not everyone was literate. Still, Erasmus's ideas encouraged people to read for themselves and ask questions.

His work had a big impact on Martin Luther. Luther was born to a peasant family, though his father was fairly wealthy and wanted Martin to move up in the world. He sent Luther to study law. One day, while traveling home across a field, Luther got caught in a thunderstorm. A lightning strike hit nearby, and he panicked. He dove into the mud and made a vow to God that if he survived, he would dedicate his life to God and become a monk.

When he made it home safely, he remembered the promise and followed through, even though his father wasn’t happy about it. As a monk, Luther took his vows seriously—maybe too seriously. His superiors noticed and asked him to read more theological texts to help him balance his thinking.

Luther read works by Saint Augustine and other theologians. One idea stood out to him: that people could be saved through faith alone. This idea of salvation by faith—rather than by doing good deeds—helped him ease his own guilt and anxiety. It was also something he found in the Bible, which made it even more important to him. This idea eventually became a core part of his beliefs and actions later during the Reformation.

Martin Luther really thought deeply about these issues. He was educated and committed to his beliefs, and his thinking came from the humanistic tradition that had been developing since the 1300s in places like Florence and Rome. This tradition focused on critical thinking, and Luther became one of the people who took it seriously. He read Erasmus, thought about salvation, and found the idea of salvation by faith—the belief that one could be saved through belief in God rather than by doing good works—especially important.

This all came together for him when he saw what he believed to be corruption within the Catholic Church. Around that time, there was a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel who worked with Pope Leo X, a member of the Medici family. Pope Leo had spent a lot of money and was looking for ways to refill the papal treasury. So, they increased the sale of indulgences—documents people could buy that supposedly reduced their time in purgatory. These were sold widely, and salesmen were sent out to promote them.

To Martin Luther, this idea seemed totally wrong. He didn’t think someone could buy their way into heaven. The sale of indulgences had been around before, but under Pope Leo X, they became a major source of income. Alongside this, Leo’s advisors also pushed the idea of papal infallibility, which was the claim that the pope could not be wrong when making decisions about doctrine. While the idea had been around before, it hadn’t been clearly stated in this way. Some of these declarations even suggested the pope had authority over the Bible itself.

Luther reacted by writing a list of 95 points of concern—what we call his 95 Theses. He didn’t actually nail them to a church door in Wittenberg, as many people believe. Instead, he sent a letter to the pope and to Tetzel, calling out what he saw as abuse and overreach in the church. He mostly focused on the sale of indulgences and didn’t even go into papal infallibility at first.

Tetzel and other church leaders were furious. They accused Luther of heresy and summoned him to defend his ideas. This led to a formal meeting called the Diet of Worms in 1521. The term diet here means a council or formal assembly, and Worms is a city in present-day Germany. This meeting was part of the Holy Roman Empire’s way of handling political and religious debates.

Luther was promised safe conduct—meaning they guaranteed his safety even if he was found guilty. He went, explained his views, and was asked to recant, or take back, what he had written. At first, the focus was on indulgences, but the discussion shifted to the idea of papal infallibility. According to historian Andrew Fix of Lafayette University, the church pressed Luther hard on this issue. Luther said no—he could not agree that the pope was infallible. That statement was a turning point.

After the meeting, Luther had 48 hours to leave town. His refusal to back down from his beliefs, especially his rejection of papal infallibility, marked a key moment in the conflict between reformers and church authorities.

After Martin Luther was found guilty of heresy, he was excommunicated by the Catholic Church. But one of the local nobles helped him escape and hid him for a while. Word of what Luther had done spread quickly, and many people supported him. Luther probably never intended to spark a large-scale rebellion, but that’s what happened. A lot of people, especially in the northern parts of Europe like Germany and the Netherlands, were frustrated with the Catholic Church—not just over indulgences, but also over taxes and other ways the Church had control over their lives. People didn’t want to keep sending money to Rome or have Italian Church leaders influencing their governments.

Luther ended up becoming a kind of symbol for resistance against Church control, even if he didn’t plan for that to happen.

This whole movement also affected art. For example, Lucas Cranach, a German artist who supported Luther’s ideas, made prints that were basically visual arguments for Reformation beliefs. One of his woodcuts uses a scene from Matthew, chapter 21, where Jesus enters the temple and throws out the merchants and money changers. According to the story, Jesus said, “My house shall be a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves.” This was about stopping people from doing business inside a sacred space on the Sabbath, which was against Jewish law.

In Cranach’s woodcut, that story is updated. On the left panel, Jesus is shown in 1500s-style clothing, throwing out merchants dressed like German businessmen. The apostles are behind him. On the right panel, it shows the pope seated with a table in front of him, counting money and indulgences. The top of that panel is labeled A. Christie, short for Antichristus—meaning Antichrist. The idea here is that while Jesus acted to clean up religion, the pope was doing the opposite, focused on wealth. It’s set up as a diptych, or two-panel image, showing this contrast.

This kind of visual propaganda wasn’t limited to art. Pamphlets and broadsheets—single printed pages meant for wide distribution—were used to share Reformation ideas. By the 1540s, Martin Luther’s writings were published all over the Holy Roman Empire. One broadsheet published in Wittenberg was titled “Roman Devil” (Der Römer Teufel) and used bold imagery. It showed a Hellmouth, a popular image in medieval art, which was thought to be the entrance to Hell where the damned would be dragged during the Last Judgment.

In the print, there’s a figure sitting on a flaming stairway being crowned by demons. He’s got donkey ears and is wearing the papal tiara, the triple crown worn by popes. Though he looks like he’s praying, he’s shown being pulled into Hell. This is another example of how artists and writers during this period used familiar symbols and updated them to match their views about the Church. These images weren’t just illustrations—they were tools meant to convince people that the pope and the Church had lost their way.

This print ties into some of the ideas that were already being developed earlier in art and literature, like what we saw with Giotto in the 1300s. That work was still very much Catholic. Over time, ideas about the pope’s role began to shift, especially through the writing of figures like Dante and eventually Martin Luther, who believed the role of the pope had become corrupt.

In terms of art, the rise of printmaking really changed the game, especially in the north. Albrecht Dürer, a German artist, was the son of a goldsmith and trained in various techniques, including printmaking. He also traveled to Italy and was exposed to Renaissance ideas. As the Protestant Reformation spread, and the Catholic Church lost influence in parts of northern Europe, many churches were stripped of their artwork. Some art was even burned or removed. Stained glass windows were broken. Artists who used to rely on Church commissions were out of work, and many of them either went to Italy or had to figure out a new way to make a living—especially if they supported Protestant ideas.

Dürer found one way around that by making prints and selling subscriptions. It worked a lot like a magazine: you could subscribe and receive a series of printed images. Prints were cheaper than paintings and could be made in multiples, which let him reach more people and possibly even earn more money. Instead of making one painting for one buyer, he could make hundreds of copies and sell them individually.

But these prints also needed to line up with the beliefs of his audience. In Protestant areas, religious art was only acceptable if it clearly supported Christian teachings. Art couldn’t just be decorative or secular anymore. It had to be focused on religious instruction or moral ideas.

One of Dürer’s best-known prints from this period is called Knight, Death, and the Devil. While not directly quoting anyone, this piece lines up with the idea from Erasmus’s Handbook of the Christian Knight. That book talks about the idea that a Christian should be spiritually strong—like a knight—protected by faith the way a knight is protected by armor.

In the image, there’s a knight riding forward. Up in the background is a castle, which might be a symbolic reference to the City of God—a spiritual goal in Christian theology. The knight himself seems calm and focused. Right beside him is a skeletal figure holding an hourglass—this is a reference to memento mori, a Latin phrase meaning “remember that you will die.” Behind him is a creature representing the devil. The devil looks like he’s following, trying to distract or challenge the knight.

At the knight’s feet is a small dog, which could be a symbol of loyalty or faithfulness. There’s also a lizard or salamander near the ground, which might be meant to represent temptation or evil. At the very bottom is a skull, another memento mori symbol, reminding the viewer of mortality.

There’s also a little signature plaque worked into the image. It says 1513 and includes Dürer’s monogram—“AD”—which acted like his logo. The whole print was made with copperplate engraving, a technique that allowed for really fine detail and multiple reproductions. These prints would have been sold to individuals, especially those who supported the ideas of Martin Luther or were part of the Protestant movement.

Imagine having a print like Knight, Death, and the Devil in your home. If you were raising a kid and wanted to teach them to be a good Christian, you might pull out this image and use it to explain how to resist temptation, how to stay faithful, and what it means to live a moral life. These prints were copper engravings, and they were detailed and reusable. Later, we’ll look at how copper engraving differs from woodcut and intaglio printing.

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