“Here the Pope’s feet are kissed,” are the words over another picture, and, from the Pope who is seated on his throne with the Bull of Excommunication in his hand, two men are seen running away, showing him, as Köstlin says, “their tongues and hinder parts with the utmost indecency.”[1679] The inscription below runs:
“Pope, don’t scare us so with your ban;
Please don’t be so angry a man;
Or else we shall take good care
To show you the ‘Belvedere.’”
Köstlin’s description must be supplemented by adding that the two men, whose faces and bared posteriors are turned towards the Pope, are depicted as emitting wind in his direction in the shape of puffs of smoke; from the Pope’s Bull fire, flames and stones are bursting forth.
Of the remaining woodcuts one reproduces the scene which formed the title-page to the first edition of the “Wider das Bapstum,” viz. the gaping jaws of hell, between the teeth of which is seen the Pope surrounded by a cohort of devils, some of whom are crowning him with the tiara; another portrays the famous Pope-Ass, said to have been cast up by the Tiber near Rome; it shows “what God Himself thinks of Popery,”[1680] yet another depicts a pet idea of Luther’s,[1681] viz. the “reward of the ‘Papa satanissimus’ and his cardinals,” i.e. their being hanged, while their tongues, which had been torn out by the root, are nailed fast to the gallows. “How the Pope teaches faith and theology”; here the Pope is shown as a robed donkey sitting upright on a throne and playing the bagpipes with the help of his hoofs. “How the Pope thanks the Emperors for their boundless favours” introduces a scene where Clement IV with his own hand strikes off the head of Conradin. “How the Pope, following Peter’s example, honours the King” is the title of a woodcut where a Pope (probably Alexander III) sets his foot on the neck of the Emperor (Frederick Barbarossa at Venice).[1682] It is not necessary to waste words on the notorious falsehoods embodied in the last two pictures. Luther, moreover, further embellished the accounts he found, for not even the bitterest antagonist of the Papacy had ever dared to accuse Clement IV of having slain with his own hand the last of the Staufens. Among the ignorant masses to whom these pictures and verses were intended to appeal, there were, nevertheless, many who were prepared to accept such tales as true on the word of one known as the “man of God,” the Evangelist, the new Elias and the Prophet of Germany.
In the “Historien des ehrwirdigen in Gott seligen thewren Mannes Gottes,” Mathesius says of Luther: “In the year [15]45 he brought out the mighty, earnest book against the Papacy founded by the devil and maintained and bolstered up by lying signs, and, in the same year, also caused many scathing pictures to be struck off in which he portrayed for the benefit of those unable to read, the true nature and monstrosity of Antichrist, just as the Spirit of God in the Apocalypse of St. John depicted the red bride of Babylon, or as Master John Hus summed up his teaching in pictures for the people, of the Lord Christ and of Antichrist.” “The Holy Ghost is well able to be severe and cutting,” says Mathesius of this book and the caricatures: “God is a jealous God and a burning fire, and those who are driven and inflamed by His Spirit to wage a ghostly warfare against the foes of God show themselves worthy foemen of those who withstand their Lord and Saviour.”[1683] Mathesius, like many others, was full of admiration for the work.
The woodcuts pleased Luther so well that he himself wrote autograph inscriptions above and below a proof set, and hung them up in his room.[1684]
“The devil knows well, that, when the foolish people hear high-sounding words of abuse, they are taken in and blindly believe them without asking for any further grounds or reasons.” The words are Luther’s own, though written at an earlier date.[1685] That they applied even more to caricatures Luther was well aware, nor was this the first time that he had flung such pictures amongst the masses the better to excite them. As early as 1521, at Luther’s instigation, with the help of Cranach’s pencil, Melanchthon and Schwertfeger had done something of the sort in the “Passional Christi und Antichristi.”[1686] In a booklet of 1526, “Das Bapstum mit seinen Gliedern,” containing sixty-five caricatures and scurrilous doggerel verses composed by Luther, everything religious, from the Pope down to the monks and nuns, was held up to ridicule.[1687]
The use of caricature was, it is true, not unusual in those days of violent controversy, nor were Catholics slow to have recourse to it against Luther; Cochlæus, for instance, in his “Lutherus Septiceps” has a crude illustration of a figure with seven heads. But everything of this nature, his own earlier productions included, was put into the shade by Luther’s final pictures of the Papacy.
At the end of his “Wider das Bapstum” Luther had ventured to hope that he would be able to go even further in another booklet, and, that, should he die in the meantime, God would raise up another man who would “make things a thousand times hotter.” His threat he practically carried out in his “Popery Pictured,” in what Paul Lehfeldt calls his “highly offensive and revolting woodcuts,” which “certainly made things a thousand times worse seeing the appeal they made to the imagination.”[1688] The fact, that, “in spite of the numerous reprints,” very few copies indeed have survived is attributed by Lehfeldt to the indignation felt in both camps, Lutheran and Catholic, which led to the wholesale destruction of the book.