I call up matters still fresh in recollection, in proceeding to speak here of a work of art which so justly drew to itself the public attention at the Universal Exposition of 1867. I refer to the grand cartoon of Kaulbach, which, under the title of the Era of the Reformation, figured in the Bavarian department.
The purely artistic critic has already fulfilled his mission in regard to that remarkable composition, and it is not from the artistic point of view that I permit myself to reopen its study. I had already, years ago, admired that magnificent fresco, one of the most beautiful ornaments of the Berlin Museum; and after having a long while contemplated and meditated upon it, it seemed to me that one could not too highly praise the vigor of composition and the marvellous skill with which the artist had been able to group, within so narrow a space, so many different personages, and to render living to the eyes of the spectator one of the most stormy periods of modern times. But in this beautiful drawing there is something else than a work of art: there is a thesis. And that thesis is this: That the sixteenth century belongs wholly to the Protestant Reformation; that that Reformation is its centre, its heart, its vital principle; that everything of that period—theology, letters, science, art, the discoveries of human genius, political and military power—all came of the Reformation. Hence the name given to the tableau—the Era of the Reformation. Hence, also, the selection, the treatment, and the grouping of all the personages in it.
And since I cannot avail myself of the help of an engraving or photograph, I am going to attempt a rapid sketch, as a whole and in its principal details, of this vast composition.
In the centre, and as the culminating point toward which the whole movement of the picture converges, is figured Dr. Martin Luther. The former Augustinian monk holds himself erect, upon the uppermost step of that temple within whose walls a whole century is represented as in motion, and he raises aloft above his head, with both hands, the Bible—the Bible, that world at once both old and new, which, according to the Protestant hypothesis, the genius of Luther discovered, buried under the darkness of ignorance and Roman superstition, as, in like manner, thirty years before him the bold Genoese navigator, Christopher Columbus—whom one sees at the left-hand side of the picture, resting his hand, firm and inspired, upon the map of the world—had found, in the ocean's midst, the vast continents of the American hemisphere.
At the left of Luther stand the theologians and pastors who adhered to his dogmatic teaching: Justus Jonas, and, next to him, Bugenhagen, who is distributing the Lord's Supper to the two princes, John le Sage and John Frederic, the two grand patrons of nascent Lutheranism. At the right of the Saxon monk stands Zwingle, holding also the book of the Scriptures, and Calvin, who is giving the bread and cup of the Lord's Supper to a group of Huguenots, among whom we distinguish Maurice of Saxony and Coligny.
The artist does not tell us, it is true—and I own that his pencil could hardly have told us—whether the Bible which Luther holds speaks the same language as the Bible placed in Zwingle's hands; nor how, within a step or two of the patriarch of the Reformation, Bugenhagen gives a Lord's Supper wherein is really contained, with the bread and wine, the body of Christ, while, alike near to him on the other side, Calvin is giving another Lord's Supper which is only a figure of that same body, and wherein the faithful partake of the communion of Jesus Christ by faith only.
A little beneath Luther, in the attitude of a submissive disciple and admirer, and indicating by a gesture the Wittenberg doctor, as much as to say, "There is the Master!" stands the mild Melanchthon, conversing with two savants of the times—Eberhardt of Tann and Ulrich Sazius. These two men are pressing each other's hands, as if the artist would express thereby the strange accommodations to which, in the matter of the Augsburg confession, the strict Lutherans, on the one side, and those who had a leaning toward the Zwinglian and Calvinistic ideas, on the other, lent themselves. [Footnote 13]
[Footnote 13: It is well known that Melanchthon—who personally inclined toward the ideas of Carlostadt and the sacramentarians respecting the Lord's Supper; who, moreover, upon the question of the outward hierarchy of the church, would have willingly lent himself to a compromise with the Catholics; who, underneath the whole, did not dare to contradict Luther—thought to reconcile all these difficulties by putting forth two editions of the Augsburg Confession—the edition invariata, or strictly Lutheran, and the edition variata, wherein concessions are made to Calvinistic ideas.]
Behind these corypheuses of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the precursors of the grand "liberalizing" movement have not been forgotten.
The Reformation, as is known, holds essentially to having a tradition—a rise and visible continuation, reaching back to the earlier ages. Behold them, then, these prophets and forerunners of the "word of life:" Here, Peter Waldo, Arnold of Brescia, Wickliffe, John Huss; there, Abelard, the bold metaphysician, the merciless dialectician, the same whom St. Bernard accuses of sacrificing faith to reason, and of destroying, by his explications, the essence of the mysteries; [Footnote 14] next, by his side, Savonarola and Tauler, the spiritual sons of the canonized monk of the thirteenth century, (St. Dominic,) to whose memory classic Protestantism never fails to attach the founding of the Inquisition, with all its attendant train of horrors: Tauler, of whom they desire to make one of the precursors of the new exegesis of the Scriptures; and Savonarola, whose animated and fiery gesture recalls at once the popular tribune, the Florentine republican chief, and the head-strong opposer of the church's hierarchical authority.