The Artistic Patronage of Albrecht V and the Creation of Catholic Identity in SixteenthCentury Bavaria
A dissertation presented to
the faculty of
the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University
In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Adam R. Gustafson
June 2011
© 2011 Adam R. Gustafson All Rights Reserved
2
This dissertation titled
The Artistic Patronage of Albrecht V and the Creation of Catholic Identity in SixteenthCentury Bavaria
by
ADAM R. GUSTAFSON
has been approved for
the School of Interdisciplinary Arts
and the College of Fine Arts
_______________________________________________
Dora Wilson
Professor of Music
_______________________________________________
Charles A. McWeeny
Dean, College of Fine Arts
3
ABSTRACT
GUSTAFSON, ADAM R., Ph.D., June 2011, Interdisciplinary Arts
The Artistic Patronage of Albrecht V and the Creation of Catholic Identity in SixteenthCentury Bavaria
Director of Dissertation: Dora Wilson
Drawing from a number of artistic media, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary
approach for understanding how artworks created under the patronage of Albrecht V
were used to shape Catholic identity in Bavaria during the establishment of confessional
boundaries in late sixteenth-century Europe. This study presents a methodological
framework for understanding early modern patronage in which the arts are necessarily
viewed as interconnected, and patronage is understood as a complex and often
contradictory process that involved all elements of society.
First, this study examines the legacy of arts patronage that Albrecht V inherited
from his Wittelsbach predecessors and developed during his reign, from 1550-1579.
Albrecht V‟s patronage is then divided into three areas: northern princely humanism,
traditional religion and sociological propaganda. The final chapter follows the influence
of Albrecht V‟s patronage through the Thirty Years‟ War, during the reign of his
grandson, Maximilian I. During the early years of Albrecht V‟s reign, his patronage
reflected his values as a noble who pursued a particularly northern, humanist agenda.
During his reign, a resurgence of traditional religious experience occurred in Bavaria that
the Jesuits, supported by Albrecht V, used to rouse support for Catholicism. This
movement affected Albrecht V‟s identity, and his patronage and the legacy of his
4
patronage reflected and supported the entrenchment of traditional Bavarian Catholicism.
Jacque Ellul termed the establishment of such structures sociological propaganda.
That Bavaria remained staunchly Catholic during the Protestant Reformation is
often attributed to the absolutist policies and social discipline of Albrecht V – a process
known as confessionalization. However true the confessionalization thesis is, any
approach for analyzing Bavarian artworks of the period must also include the possibility
that the lower classes were as influential in shaping the patronage and religious identity
of Albrecht V as the Wittelsbach court was in shaping the religious identity of Bavaria.
Approved: ________________________________________________________
Dora Wilson
Professor of Music
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would not have completed this work without the guidance and support of my
academic advisor and committee chair, Dr. Dora Wilson. I am eternally grateful. I would
like to thank the hard work of all of the professors at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts
and throughout Ohio University. I no longer see the world or the arts in the same way as I
did before beginning this journey. Especially, I would like to acknowledge my committee,
Dr. William Condee, Dr. Charles Buchanan and Dr. Michele Clouse.
There are so many other people that were vital to this project and to my
development as an artist, a scholar and as a person. I will forever appreciate Dr. Jay
Peterson for insisting that I am a worthy musician and scholar, despite my own doubts.
Dr. Diane Brewer gave me a love for theater that I did not know I had. Finally, I owe a
note of appreciation to Dr. Elizabeth Crowley, who started me on this trip.
I cannot thank my family enough, especially my parents, Jessie and Mike and
James and Sheila. I‟m certain that you know not what I do, but you have always been
supportive nonetheless, and that is all a son could ask. My brother, James Gustafson, was
the first college graduate in my family, and his accomplishments and character have
always been a beacon. My sister, Niki Gustafson, has been a listener and a best friend.
Charles Leverton‟s huge dreams inspired me to have some of my own. To the entire
Kosmalski clan, your disfunctionality somehow works and often keeps me sane. James
Morehead, Blake Arthur and Trevor Kaul are of no relation, but I count them as brothers.
A big thank you goes to Josephine Kosmalski; thanks for the extra set of eyes.
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To Grace:
Thank you for your patience, your lack of patience and for giving me Athens and my
dream. This is as much yours as it is mine.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ 3
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 5
DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... 6
LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................ 8
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 10
CHAPTER I: Confessionalization and Patronage: Defining a Methodology..................22
CHAPTER II: Precedence: Wittelsbach Patronage before Albrecht V .......................... 41
CHAPTER III: The Early Years of the Reign of Albrecht V: the Kunstkammer,
Northern Princely Humanism and Courtly Patronage... .........................83
CHAPTER IV: Pious Patronage: The Chapel at Altötting, the Virgin Mary
and Jesuit Support for Traditional Religion...........................................118
CHAPTER V: Sociological Propaganda in Bavaria: The Legacy of Albrecht V
to the Thirty Years‟ War.......................................................................150
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 196
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 200
APPENDIX A: Timeline of Bavarian History: 1300-1650 ............................................ 226
APPENDIX B: Family Tree of the Munich Line of Wittelsbach Dukes ........................ 231
8
LIST OF FIGURES
PAGE
Figure 1: Aventinus, Map of Bavaria (1523) ..................................................................45
Figure 2: Genealogical Mural (c. 1460)........................................................................ .49
Figure 3: Michael Wolgemut, Munich, Nürnberg Chronicle (1493) .............................56
Figure 4: Completed Munich Frauenkirche (1525)........................................................56
Figure 5: Tombstone of Conrad Paumann (c. 1473).......................................................59
Figure 6: Matthes Maler, Woodcut of Argula von Grumbach (1523) ............................67
Figure 7: Hans Schwartz, Sketch of Ludwig Senfl (1519) .............................................74
Figure 8: Jörg Breu the Elder, Death of Lucretia (1528)................................................82
Figure 9: Hans Wertinger, Wilhelm IV of Bavaria (1526) ..............................................82
Figure 10: Hans Mielich, Albrecht V of Bavaria (1545)................................................ 90
Figure 11: Mielich, Miniature of jewelry in Book of Jewels (1552-55)...... ...................93
Figure 12: Mielich, Albrecht V and Anna playing chess in Book of Jewels (1552-55)..94
Figure 13: Mielich, Portrait of Lasso in Penitential Psalms (1571) .............................102
Figure 14: Mielich, Illuminated music manuscript in Penitential Psalms (1571) ........110
Figure 15: Mielich, Lasso and the Munich hofkapelle in Penitential Psalms (1571)...110
Figure 16: Black Madonna of Altötting (c. 1300s) .......................................................128
Figure 17: Hans Mielich, High Altar (1572) ................................................................145
Figure 18: Hans Mielich, Virgin as Queen of Heaven w/ Ducal Family (1572) ..........146
Figure 19: Titian, Assumption of the Virgin Mary (1518) ............................................147
Figure 20: Mariansäule (1638) .....................................................................................152
Figure 21: Hubert Gerhard, The Virgin and Child (1590) ............................................153
Figure 22: Ferdinand Murmann, Heresy Putto, Mariansäule (1638) ...........................154
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Figure 23: Hubert Gerhard, Perseus Fountain (1590) ..................................................186
Figure 24: Friedrich Sustris, Redesigned Antiquarium (1600) .....................................187
Figure 25: Façade of St. Michael‟s Church, Munich (1597) ........................................192
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INTRODUCTION
If we do not concentrate all our energies on the defence of Bavaria, our poor Germany
will have as good as nothing left that is orthodox and genuinely Catholic. The Duke must
therefore be encouraged and stirred up to glowing zeal for the protection of religion; he
must be admonished not to remit or modify any of the Church’s commands if he wishes to
maintain peace and loyalty among his subjects.1
Albrecht V, duke of the Munich line of Bavarian Wittelsbachs from 1550-79,
pursued an aggressive program of arts patronage during his reign. The work of the artists
and collectors who received his support positioned Munich as a center of European
culture in the sixteenth century. Albrecht V established several of Bavaria‟s most
important landmarks, including the Bavarian State Library, the Residenz and the High
Altar in Ingolstadt. Collectors such as Samuel von Quiccheberg and Hans Jakob Fugger
created the early modern museum and library in Munich. Influential artists of every
discipline were part of the Munich court, including Orlando di Lasso, Hans Mielich, Jörg
Breu the Elder, Martin Eisengrein, Albrecht Altdorfer and many others. The duke‟s
legacy provided for the creation of the Mariansäule, one of Munich‟s most recognized
artworks. His support of the Jesuits allowed for the rise and promotion of Jesuit theater,
perhaps the most popular genre of theater anywhere in Europe during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. At its climax, Albrecht V‟s court rivaled the largest in Europe in
both number and splendor.
Set in the larger religio-political context of the sixteenth century, Bavaria under
the reign of Albrecht V was unique in that it was one of the few non-Habsburg duchies in
the Holy Roman Empire that remained, by and large, Catholic during the Protestant
1
Peter Canisius quoted in Johannes Janssen, History of the German People at the Close of the
Middle Ages, vol. 8, trans. A.M. Christie (London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner & Co., 1905), 313.
11
reform movements of the sixteenth century. This dissertation will examine how, if at all,
Albrecht V‟s artistic patronage reflected and shaped Bavarian Catholic identity during
this time of great religious fragmentation. By engaging with similar studies and with
current historical methodologies, this study demonstrates that Albrecht V and the
artworks that were created through his patronage supported a growing popular movement
of “traditional religion” that was responsible for creating a uniquely Bavarian form of
Catholicism in the second half of the sixteenth century.2 Ultimately, traditional religious
expression through the arts evolved into a form of what Jacques Ellul called “sociological
propaganda,” which represents a deeply instilled sense of identity at every level of
society that is simultaneously reflected and reinforced in the actions and expressions of
all levels of that society.3
This position is meant to augment and in some ways challenge the widelyaccepted position that Albrecht V transitioned Bavaria into an early modern, absolutist
Catholic state through the implementation of state and religious mechanisms and the use
of top-down social control. Historians, such as Wolfgang Rheinhard, labels this process
confessionalization and recognizes it as a sixteenth-century movement that occurred in
the Holy Roman Empire and was practiced by both Protestant and Catholic rulers.4
2
Traditional religion is defined in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of Altars: Traditional Religion in
England c.1400-c.1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
3
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: the Formation of Men’s Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean
Lerner (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1973).
4
Wolfgang Rheinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: a
Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989): 383-404.
12
Supporters and critics of the theory have come to see Bavaria as the most obvious
example of Catholic confessionalization.5
Since it was introduced in the 1980s, scholars of the arts have increasingly
adopted the confessionalization theory into their scholarship. The increase in scholarship
about the role of the arts in the process of confessionalization is indicated by a growing
number of book titles, such as: Rebecca Wagner Oettinger‟s Music as Propaganda in the
Reformation, Philip M. Soergel‟s Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation
Propaganda in Bavaria, Noel Malcom‟s Reason of State, Propaganda and the Thirty
Years’ War and Luc Racaut‟s Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant
Identity during the French Wars of Religion. These works represent a small sampling of
scholarship that has increasingly come to see early modern art as a form of political
propaganda that was used by all sides in the fight to shape cultural and religious identity.6
This study, however, reveals Albrecht V‟s patronage as, often times, reactionary.
Whether it be to other nobles or to the larger culture in which he lived, his patronage was
the result of cyclical influences between artists, other nobles and peasants. As such, his
patronage was less in control than linear, top-down notions of social control can support.
This is not meant to suggest that Albrecht V was always out of control, nor is it meant to
make a blanket statement that all artworks created at the Munich court were haphazard
5
Marc R. Forster, “With and Without Confessionalization. Varieties of Early Modern German
Catholicism,” Journal of Early Modern History 1, no. 4 (1997): 326.
6
Rebecca Wagner Oettinger, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate Publishing Company, 2001); Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation
Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), accessed June 21, 2010,
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft738nb4fn/; Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda and the Thirty
Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Luc
Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2002).
13
and without a goal. Rather, this study is an attempt to provide a balance to the increasing
amount of scholarship that takes confessionalization and its artistic byproduct, political
propaganda, as a fundamental aspect of the Holy Roman Empire in the late sixteenth
century. This dissertation shows that not all art had political concerns. Further, art that
existed at the religio-political level was often a reflection of the collective will of
Bavarians rather than the assertion of identity onto Bavarians against their will.
There are many resources for understanding the individual artists who received
the patronage of Albrecht V. To name a few, Jeffrey Chipps Smith has done extensive
research on the visual arts in Bavaria and throughout the Holy Roman Empire in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.7 Dorothea and Peter Diemer have documented the
vast catalogs of Albrecht V‟s collections.8 Lorenz Seelig has written a great deal on the
context and meaning of Albrecht V‟s collections.9 Horst Leuchtmann, Peter Bergquist
and David Crook are a small representation of the many great scholars studying the
musicians of sixteenth-century Bavaria.10 William H. McCabe has provided an excellent
introduction to Jesuit theater, and the collection of articles on Catholic theater by Kevin J.
7
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation
in Germany (Princeton University Press, 2002); Smith, The Northern Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press
Limited, 2004).
8
Dorothea Diemer, Peter Diemer, Lorenz Seelig, Peter Volk, Brigitte Volk-Knüttel, et al., Die
Münchner Kunstkammer, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse,
Abhandlungen, Neue Folge, Heft 129, 3 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2008).
9
Lorenz Seelig, “The Munich Kunstkammer, 1565-1807,” in The Origins of Museums: The
Cabinets of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur
MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
10
Horst Leuchtmann, Orlando di Lasso: Sein Leben (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1976);
David Crook, Orlando di Lasso’s Imitation Magnificats for Counter-Reformation Munich (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994); Peter Bergquist, ed., Orlando di Lasso Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
14
Wetmore Jr. is an invaluable introduction to the genre.11 As mentioned, Philip M. Soergel
has produced an impressive work on the dissemination of pilgrimage texts.12 The bulk of
these studies are primarily focused, rightfully so, on biographical information and the
analysis and interpretation of the actual artists and artworks. There are only a few studies
of the arts as a whole at the Bavarian court. Rainer Babel‟s study of the Wittelsbachs
provides an exceptional overview of the court, but it deals with such a long period that it
cannot go into great detail.13 Samuel John Klingensmith‟s book, The Utility of Splendor:
Ceremony, Social Life, and Architecture at the Court of Bavaria, 1600-1800, and
Andreas M. Dahlem‟s dissertation, “The Wittelsbach Court in Munich: History and
Authority in the Visual Arts (1460-1508),” both provide amazing overviews of Bavarian
court life, but as the dates of their studies indicate, they focus on either side of the reign
of Albrecht V.14
Likewise, the amount of scholarship on sixteenth-century Catholicism, in general,
has undergone a resurgence since the 1980s, with many studies adopting the notion of
confessionalization as a methodological framework. The historiography of
confessionalization is examined in detail in Chapter One. While confessionalization
happened in both Protestant and Catholic circles, the former has traditionally been given
more consideration. Two books of note that represent the growth of scholarly focus on
11
William H. McCabe, An Introduction to Jesuit Theater (St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit
Sources, 1983); Catholic Theater and Drama: Critical Essays, ed. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland and Company, Inc., 2010).
12
Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints.
13
Rainer Babel, “The Courts of the Wittelsbachs c. 1500-1750,” in The Princely Courts of Europe,
ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999), 189-210.
14
Samuel John Klingensmith, The Utility of Splendor: Ceremony, Social Life and Architecture at
the Court of Bavaria, 1600-1800 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993); Andreas M. Dahlem,
“The Wittelsbach Court in Munich: History and Authority in the Visual Arts (1460-1508)” (PhD diss.,
University of Glasgow, 2009).
15
Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire during the sixteenth century are R. Po-Chia
Hsia‟s, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540-1770 and Robert Bireley‟s, The
Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700.15
Concomitantly, scholarship since the late 1980s has also increasingly begun to
adopt the confessionalization thesis as a means for understanding sixteenth-century art.
Andrew L. Thomas‟ wonderfully detailed study of Wittelsbach court culture, for example,
contains a great deal of information on the arts and other areas of court life. In his study,
he explicitly states that Wittelsbach actions were part of a “process of confessionalization
in which rulers created state churches and used the resources of the churches, such as
schools and monasteries in attempts to further increase their own control over their
subjects as well as demonstrate their commitment to their respective faiths.”16
Rebecca Wagner Oettinger also cites confessionalization as the basis for her study
of music in early modern Germany. Critical musicologists might note that Oettinger‟s
work contains only the slightest amount of music and focuses instead on the
dissemination of song texts. Her work, whatever the focus, is fascinating and is one
example of the number of studies mentioned that have taken confessionalization one step
further by presenting sixteenth-century artworks as a form of political propaganda used to
shape and control society.17 Philip M. Soergel uses a similar approach in his study of
15
R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540-1770, New Approaches to European
History (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999).
16
Andrew L. Thomas, “A House Divided: Wittelsbach Confessional Court Cultures in Bavaria,
the Palatinate, and Bohemia, c. 1550-1650” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2007), 1-2. Thomas‟
dissertation has since been published as A House Divided: Wittelsbach Confessional Court Cultures in the
Holy Roman Empire, c. 1550-1650, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions (Leiden, The
Netherlands: Koninlijke Brill NV, 2010).
17
Oettinger, Music as Propaganda.
16
pilgrimage texts from Bavaria.18 These works are quite good in that they combine
contemporary historical methods with a detailed understanding of the arts. However, they
do not step far beyond their specific artistic medium. Each provides a glimpse of the
larger artistic culture of their subject, but they do not expand their scope in any great
detail beyond the artifacts within that medium. In their defense, neither work claims the
understanding of larger artistic contexts as a goal.
This is the only comprehensive, multidisciplinary study of the artistic patronage
of Albrecht V, a figure who proved to be one of the great fulcrums upon which religion in
sixteenth-century Europe was balanced. His patronage is presented from three
perspectives: northern princely humanism, Bavarian traditional religion and sociological
propaganda. These divisions are meant primarily as way of focusing on the various
aspects of his patronage and are not necessarily intended to be a set of chronological
delineations. While certain periods of the duke‟s reign certainly focused more and less on
each of the three aspects, Albrecht V‟s patronage simultaneously engaged with all three
categories throughout his reign. The common denominator in each category is the idea
that Albrecht V was as much reacting to his environment as he was in control of it.
Chapter One begins in 1563 with the arrest of Joachim von Ortenburg, a Bavarian
noble, who tried to establish Calvinist reforms in his lands. Ortenburg‟s case shows how
precariously balanced religious identity was in Bavaria and throughout the Holy Roman
Empire during Albrecht V‟s reign. Cases of religious rebellion similar to Ortenburg‟s are
also presented in order to show how far-reaching rebellious attitudes were and how
integral the arts were in the formation of religious identity.
18
Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints.
17
The second half of the chapter places these cases within the context of
confessionalization with the intention of understanding the strengths and the weaknesses
of the methodology as it relates to patronage. A historiography of confessionalization is
provided along with a working definition of patronage. The chapter concludes by
adopting Linda Levy Peck‟s definition of patronage as a “symbiotic” process in which
the patron, artist and consumer all maintain a certain amount of authority in the creation
of an artwork.19
Chapter Two traces the legacy of Bavarian Wittelsbach patronage back to the
fourteenth century. The family‟s patronage at the end of the Middle Ages generally
reflected an attempt to create a body of works that would validate their authority and
greatness. Prior to the sixteenth century, Bavaria‟s history is that of a fragmented territory,
divided amongst various competing factions of the Wittelsbach family and other minor
nobles and merchants. Initially, patronage provided artworks and artifacts that supported
each family member‟s claim of authority. For the Munich line, patronage was used to
assert the concept of the Haus Bayern, which resulted in the centralization of Wittelsbach
authority. The construction of the Neuveste, the commission of Aventinus‟ Bayerische
Chronik and other works aided in the manufacture of a sense of heredity, unity and
greatness meant to convince others that Wittelsbach status within the duchy of Bavaria
was longstanding. Early Wittelsbach patronage was constantly a matter of proving their
identity to other nobles and especially to the people over which they ruled, who always
maintained some authority because of their willingness to rebel.
19
Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in early Stuart England (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 3.
18
Outside of convincing, early patronage also became a particularly effective means
of providing expressions of communal identity that served to pacify the general
community and strengthen the reputation of the Wittelsbachs. This idea manifested itself
in the form of the Frauenkirche in Munich, which was a project undertaken at all levels
of society.
The Wittelsbachs of the late-fifteenth and early sixteenth century came to value
art as a primary indicator of their greatness – an early modern version of Pierre
Bourdieu‟s notion of objectified cultural capital – and they began to seek the most
talented artists as an expression of their inherent goodness.20 The career of the organist
and lute player, Conrad Paumann, demonstrates the lengths to which the family went in
order to secure top artists. The Wittelsbachs were even willing to overlook religious
difference in the case of exceptional talent. This was the case with Ludwig Senfl, a court
musician and open supporter of Martin Luther, and with the Beham brothers, who were
both miniaturists and open disbelievers.
By the reign of Albrecht V‟s father, Wilhelm IV, the seeds for centralized
Catholic authority and identity were seemingly not in fertile ground. The establishment of
the university in Ingolstadt provided a base of Catholic defense in the Holy Roman
Empire, but the Munich line was rather tolerant or just ineffective in silencing opposing
religious views. In fact, the dukes often held opposing views themselves. The cases of
Argula von Grumbach‟s writings, the general resistance of the Wittelsbachs to support
the establishment of the Jesuits and the corrupt religious dealings of the family all
20
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(New York: Harvard College and Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1984).
19
underline a rather lax attitude toward the official doctrine of Catholicism. Chapter Two
concludes with an overview of the history cycle of paintings that was commissioned by
Wilhelm IV and his wife, Jacobäa. The cycle, which was Wilhelm IV‟s last major
commission, is an indicator that Wittelsbach patronage was turning toward humanist
pursuits.
Chapter Three outlines the beginning of Albrecht V‟s reign, which in many ways
followed in the tradition of his father. In pursuing art as the stick by which his rule was
measured, Albrecht V was willing to ally himself with any artist that had talent, including
artists of differing religious and political creeds. This chapter defines Albrecht V‟s early
patronage within the context of northern princely humanism. This form of humanism is
defined using the works of Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Erwin Panofsky, Michele Foucault and
others. Northern princely humanism began to focus on particularly German, as opposed
to classical, history, and eventually, it came to value collected knowledge as a measure of
greatness on par with great art. This aspect of Albrecht V‟s patronage led to the
establishment of the ducal library, the Kunstkammer and the Antiquarium, all buildings
that were constructed to house the duke‟s insatiable appetite for collecting.
Like many other European rulers, Albrecht V‟s continued interest in obtaining
quality artists resulted in the massive expansion of his court, often in financially
irresponsible ways. As it became imperative for nobles and wealthy merchants
throughout Europe to vet and maintain the best artists they could find, the relationship
between artist and patron was altered in such a way that even more agency was placed in
the hands of the artist. The musician, Orlando di Lasso, and the painter, Hans Mielich,
20
were often treated more like family than employees, and both lived rather comfortably
throughout their lives at the expense of their duke. In the case of Lasso, Albrecht V was
even willing to defend his composer‟s sometimes lewd taste against the admonishments
of Rome.
Chapter Four traces a series of events that transpired in the middle of Albrecht
V‟s reign, after which the duke began to embrace something akin to Eamon Duffy‟s
definition of traditional religion. Duffy defines traditional religion as the continuance of
regional varieties of late-medieval Catholicism that were never in decline, transcended all
levels of society and relied on forms of expression that often went against the official
confessions and reform measures that were being adopted by the Catholic Church.21
Albrecht V was simultaneously caught up in and responsible for perpetuating Bavarian
traditional religion, and he used patronage to fuel the growing popular support for local
versions of Catholicism even when they contradicted official Catholic doctrine. The duke
became especially supportive of the emergence of the Jesuits and of artworks that
demonstrated the importance of the role of the Virgin Mary in Bavarian Catholicism at a
time when Christocentrism was a major concern of European Christian reform
movements. The exorcism of Anna von Berghausen, Martin Eisengrein‟s book, Our Lady
of Altötting, the reemergence of pilgrimage to Bavarian sites and Hans Mielich‟s High
Altar in Ingolstadt were all popular movements and artworks that went against official
Catholic doctrine even while creating a strong sense of local Catholic identity.
Chapter Five begins by presenting the Mariansäule, which was erected during the
reign of Albrecht V‟s grandson, Maximilian I. This public sculpture is the final
21
Duffy, The Stripping of Altars, 2-6.
21
manifestation of Albrecht V‟s legacy of patronage and the embodiment of Bavarian
Catholic sociological propaganda, which stemmed from Bavarian traditional religion. In
addition to the Mariansäule, the emergence of Jesuit theater in the early seventeenth
century and the support of the Jesuits in building St. Michael‟s Church were all actions
that functioned as much on behalf of the larger social fabric as they were responsible for
making that fabric.
That Albrecht V planted the seeds for the confessionalization of Bavaria is too
aggressive a stance, but this is not because social discipline, state mechanisms or
religious reforms were inexistent in Bavaria. Scholars are correct in their recognition of
early modern Bavaria as a highly-ordered state mechanism, and they are correct in
interpreting artworks as a means of supporting the mechanism. However, art, artists and
citizens were considered of such high value to the duke that they had also had a major
impact on every phase of his reign, including his patronage.
Chapter Five concludes that Albrecht V‟s patronage was one thread in the fabric
of what Jacque Ellul calls sociological propaganda. As opposed to confessionalization,
sociological propaganda questions top-down – or even the down-top – linear hierarchies,
and it suggests that cultural identity in sixteenth-century Bavaria was a cyclical
arrangement of mutual agreement and influence between all levels of Bavarian society.22
22
See Ellul, Propaganda.
22
CHAPTER I
Confessionalization and Patronage: Defining a Methodology
I knew a very wise man, that believed that if a man were permitted to make all the ballads,
he need not care who should make the laws of the nation.1
In December 1563, Albrecht V seized the castle of Count Joachim von Ortenburg.
Ortenburg was a Bavarian noble who introduced reformed religious practices into his
region, an action that he felt was in line with his standing as a noble. A few years earlier,
in 1556, Albrecht V conceded that Bavarian nobles could allow some Protestant practices
to exist in Bavaria. Ortenburg, perhaps empowered by this earlier success, felt he had the
right to invoke the Peace of Augsburg policy of cuius regio eius religio and was
attempting to abolish Catholicism altogether from his lands. The count‟s actions were a
direct affront to Albrecht V‟s authority and his wishes to maintain Catholicism as the
official religion in all of Wittelsbach-controlled Bavaria.2
The Ortenburg incident placed Albrecht V in the same position as rulers across
German-speaking lands who were attempting to navigate their role in the emerging
religious and political upheaval of the sixteenth century. Albrecht V took a stern, yet
conciliatory, attitude concerning the Ortenburg case. His response reveals a sensitivity to
the increasingly complex religio-political environment he inhabited. The duke stated,
“„For, however glad and thankful I should be if I could keep my land and my people, all
1
Scottish noble, Andrew Fletcher, quoted in Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern
Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 111.
2
James Brodrick, Saint Peter Canisius (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1980), 604-606. Also see
Johannes Janssen, History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages, vol. 8, trans. A.M.
Christie (London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner & Co., 1905), 309-12; Wilhelm Volkert, Geschichte
Bayerns (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), 50-51; Andreas Kraus, Geschichte Bayerns: von den Anfängen bis zur
Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1983), 216-19.
23
and every of them, in the old Catholic faith, I do not insist on sounding and directing the
heart and spirit of every one of my subjects: that would be an impossibility, and indeed it
is the prerogative of the Almighty alone.‟”3 Ortenburg, and those found to be acting in his
favor, received punishments, which, while harsh, were primarily meant to embarrass and
intimidate. At the same time, the duke also allowed Ortenburg the opportunity to openly
defend himself in a series of court actions that lasted into the 1570s.4
For the Jesuit missionary, Peter Canisius, Ortenburg‟s rejection of Catholicism
was a long time coming. Canisius‟ assessment of the religious environment in midsixteenth-century Bavaria is described in a letter he sent to Father John Polanco,
Secretary-General of the Society of Jesus in 1550. Canisius wrote, “The situation is
enough to numb the heart of one who gives it serious thought. Heresy is not being
overcome either by force or by reform, and, with the best will in the world to restore the
faith that has been lost, we are powerless owing to the fact that priests are too few, or,
indeed, entirely lacking.”5 Canisius‟ letter coincides with the beginning of Albrecht V‟s
reign and represents a continuous series of warnings from his advisors to treat the
existence and propagation of Protestant ideologies within the duchy with the utmost
seriousness, and they were insistent that he begin to take a harder line against the actions
of Protestant Bavarian nobles.
3
Albrecht V quoted in Janssen, History of the German People, vol. 8, 310-11.
The Cambridge Modern History, vol.3, The Wars of Religion, ed. A.W. Ward, G.W. Prothero
and Stanley Leathes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), 160. The case as presented to the
Reichstag can be found in Deutsche Reichtagsakten Reichsversammlungen 1556-1662, Historische
Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (München, Oldenbourg
Wissenschaftsverlag GmbH, 2010), 392-95.
5
Peter Canisius quoted in Brodrick, Saint Peter Canisius, 145.
4
24
Ortenburg‟s religious forthrightness was not a confined instance. Robert W.
Scribner shows precisely how active various levels of society could get in his article,
“Ritual and Reformation.” He describes a conflict between the Catholic Fugger family
and the Evangelical warden of St. Mortiz church, Marx Ehem, in the Bavarian free-city
of Augsburg in 1533. Ehem had taken several bold steps to block the celebration of Mass
at St. Mortiz, which included removing sacred objects and locking up certain parts of the
church. The Fuggers countered by purchasing new items to replace those removed by
Ehem. The conflict climaxed when the Fuggers attempted a theatric raising of a statue of
the Lord through a hole in the roof on Ascension Day. Ehem first attempted to board up
the hole, after which he sought to have the statue removed during the middle of the
ceremony. Scribner reports that the situation became so tense that knives were eventually
drawn. In a final attempt to control the situation, Ehem dropped the suspended statue, and
it was destroyed.6
The growing issue of religious identity during the middle of the sixteenth century
even divided the Wittelsbachs. Friedrich III, of the equally powerful Palatinate line of
Wittelsbachs, had already renounced his Catholic upbringing in 1546 in favor of
Lutheran doctrine, which he then renounced at the outset of his reign as Elector of the
Palatinate in 1559 in favor of Calvinism. The resulting growth of Calvinist iconoclasm in
the Palatinate led to the destruction of organs, baptismal fonts and other religious works
of art throughout Heidelberg.7 In his dissertation, “A House Divided: Wittelsbach
6
Robert W. Scribner, “Ritual and Reformation,” in The German People and the Reformation, ed.
R. Po-Chia Hsia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 128-29.
7
Julius Ney, “Frederick III., the Pious,” in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious
Knowledge, vol. 4, Draeseke – Goa (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1952), 375.
25
Confessional Court Cultures in Bavaria, the Palatinate, and Bohemia, c. 1550-1650,”
Andrew L. Thomas states that Friedrich III began to cut support of the arts in an effort to
secure the finances of his court and to align it with Calvinist principles. The condition of
the arts deteriorated to such an extent that visiting courts wishing to be entertained had to
supply their own musicians.8
The Fuggers, Friedrich III and Ortenburg may have been from wealthy and noble
families, but their actions were part of a larger movement. During the sixteenth century,
seemingly every level of society, including merchants, peasants, clergy and nobles, began
to engage in both personal and communal reassessments of religious and political identity
in Bavaria and throughout Europe. Both Scribner‟s article and Thomas‟ dissertation
discuss multiple instances of people of every class reacting publicly for and against their
notions of proper religious belief. Peter Blickle echoes these sentiments in his book,
Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal, in which he traces the number of peasant uprisings in the
sixteenth century in an attempt to show how active and powerful that element of society
was in shaping the affairs of their lands.9
Scribner and Thomas also highlight the integral role of the arts in helping to shape
and destroy identity. Every realm of religious life in the Holy Roman Empire was imbued
with images, songs, words and play or the active elimination of those elements. More
than a mere accompaniment to ritual or an accessory to learning, the arts were
fundamental to the formation and rejection of religious identity during the sixteenth
8
Andrew L. Thomas, “A House Divided: Wittelsbach Confessional Court Cultures in Bavaria, the
Palatinate, and Bohemia, c. 1550-1650” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2007), 101.
9
Peter Blickle, Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal: A New View of German History, trans. Thomas A.
Brady, Jr. (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997).
26
century. Indeed, as both the Fugger incident and the conversion of Friedrich III show, it
was often the arts that bore the brunt of Protestant and Catholic attacks against each other.
As with any historical endeavor, the interpretation of these events varies
depending on the lens through which they are viewed. Before moving forward, it is
necessary to clearly outline a specific methodology for understanding how the arts were
supported, produced and understood. A brief investigation of the historiography of
sixteenth-century studies will be helpful for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of
past methodologies in order to shape an appropriate methodology for this study.
By most accounts, the body of historical literature on sixteenth-century studies
has traditionally been a one-sided affair, with the balance of scholarship given to the
Protestant reform movements.10 John Bossy states that this is the result of the historian‟s
propensity for valuing the nonconformist over what is perceived to be the everyday. In
the case of sixteenth-century scholarship, the Catholics who went about everyday life
much in the same way as Catholics had been doing since the Middle Ages were much
less interesting than the rise of the reformers.11
John W. O‟Malley states that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars allowed
their religious leanings to shape their research, and he traces the term “Counter10
For essays on the historiography of sixteenth-century Catholicism, see Trevor Johnson, “The
Catholic Reformation,” in Palgrave Advances in the European Reformations, ed. Alec Ryrie (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 190-211; John W. O‟Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the
Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); David M. Luebke, “Editor‟s
Introduction,” in The Counter-Reformation, Blackwell Essential Readings in History, ed. David M. Luebke
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 1-16; Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 14501700 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999); Marc R. Forster, “With and
Without Confessionalization. Varieties of Early Modern German Catholicism,” Journal of Early Modern
History 1, no. 4 (1997): 315-43; Jeffrey R. Watt, “Introduction,” in The Long Reformation, Problems in
European Civilization, ed. Jeffrey R. Watt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), 1-10.
11
John Bossy, “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” in The CounterReformation, Blackwell Essential Readings in History, ed. David M. Luebke (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
1999), 86-87.
27
Reformation” to Protestant historians of the eighteenth century.12 Counter-Reformation
was a pejorative understanding of the period in which Catholics forced their doctrine
back onto unwilling Lutherans.13 Later the term Counter-Reformation was replaced by
notion of the Catholic Reformation, which suggested that the Protestant movements were
an impetus for the Catholics to reassess their own corruption. This angle, while a bit more
sympathetic, still presented Catholicism as a negative institution.14
By the twentieth century, some historians came to understand Catholic reform as
something independent of and more complex than the reaction to the rise of Protestantism.
The Catholic Reformation was presented as an independent, internal reform movement
with its beginnings in the fifteenth century.15 This movement was carried to fruition with
reform initiatives that were created at the councils at Trent. This understanding of history
tended to regard Protestantism as a mere byproduct of a much larger reform movement
rather than as an impetus for reform.16
These two ideologies competed in various guises until Hubert Jedin‟s seminal
1946 article, “Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation?”17 Jedin proposed that the
two ideologies were complementary rather than contradictory. His article suggested that
larger reforms within the Church were indeed afoot prior to Luther‟s break from
Catholicism, but it took a schism such as the Protestant Reformation to compel the
12
O‟Malley, Trent and All That, 20.
Ibid.
14
Ibid., 21.
15
Trevor Johnson, “The Catholic Reformation,” 192.
16
R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540-1770, New Approaches to European
History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2-3.
17
Hubert Jedin, “Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation?” in The Counter-Reformation,
Blackwell Essential Readings in History, ed. and trans. David M. Luebke (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 1999), 19-46.
13
28
Catholic Church to accelerate its own pursuit of internal reform.18 Jedin‟s article invited
scholars to move past their own contemporary religious infighting and begin looking at
the sixteenth century on a more objective, macro level for the relationships and
movements that shaped the era.
Building on Jedin‟s approach, scholars in the 1950s began to look to macro
religio-political movements as a means of understanding the sixteenth century. One of the
stronger theses that developed after Jedin‟s article was that of confessionalization. Ernst
Walter Zeedin is commonly credited for laying the foundations of the theory in 1958.19
Zeeden‟s approach was further developed and clearly defined by Heinz Schilling and
Wolfgang Reinhard in the 1970s and 1980s.20 Reinhard‟s 1989 article, “Reformation,
Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: a Reassessment,” is considered the
clearest outline of the confessionalization thesis.21 In this article, Reinhard was looking to
summarize a system that could avoid the religious pitfalls of earlier historians.22
A top-down approach, confessionalization views Protestant and Catholic
initiatives in the Holy Roman Empire as two sides of the same ideological coin. Both
were religions that underwent similar processes of defining in which religious advocates
aligned with secular rulers to form religio-political structures that could clearly display
and enforce specific belief structures, or confessions. These institutions then undertook
18
Ibid., 37.
Johnson, “The Catholic Reformation,” 204; O‟Malley, Trent and All That, 108; Luebke,
“Editor‟s Introduction,” 11. Also see Ernst Walter Zeeden, “Grundlagen und Wege der Konfessionsbildung
in Deutschland im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe,” Historische Zeitschrift 185, no. 2 (1958): 249-99.
20
Johnson, “The Catholic Reformation,” 204.
21
Ibid.; O‟Malley, Trent and All That, 111-12; Luebke, “Editor‟s Introduction,” 3. Also see,
Wolfgang Rheinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: a Reassessment,”
Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989): 383-404.
22
Rheinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Early Modern State,” 383-84.
19
29
the process of enforcing their new confessional identities, which allowed Christians to
clearly identify themselves and, just as importantly, to distinguish themselves from those
who participated in other confessions. A legal and cultural phenomenon,
confessionalizing states used civil codes, religious rigidity and cultural persuasion to
control the information and, in theory, the mindsets of the people under their charge.23
The emergence of early modern state structures such as codified education, systematized
legal systems, political propaganda, censorship and social discipline were all developed
out of the need to ensure that the citizenry of the now fragmented Holy Roman Empire
clearly recognized what it meant to be of a certain religious confession, what it meant to
be of a specific region and to guarantee that they adhered to those belief systems and
modes of identity.24
The councils, institutions and works of art developed on behalf of Catholic and
Protestant identities in the Holy Roman Empire helped to define, create, promote and
enforce respective confessional identities.25 R. Po-Chia Hsia suggests that the
development and establishment of these confessionalized states occurred over very long
periods of time – from 1540-1770 by his assessment.26 Thus, the events of the sixteenth
century are often presented as smaller pieces in a much larger movement that began at
some point in the fifteenth century and did not end until the eighteenth century. This has
come to be known as the “long sixteenth century” or the Long Reformation.27 According
to this model, the councils at Trent and the subsequent events of the Catholic Counter23
Ibid., 398-99.
Ibid., 390-92.
25
Rheinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State,” 403.
26
Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal.
27
Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 2. Also see Watt, The Long Reformation.
24
30
Reformation were smaller steps in a larger movement toward the centralization and
assertion of monolithic confessional authority.
Three assumptions are inherent in this view. The first is that there is a group in
need of control. The second is that those doing the controlling actually accepted the
official confessions of their faith and sought to enforce them. The third, most
fundamental, assumption is that rulers were ever really in control in the first place. Critics
of confessionalization have pointed out that in many cases, sixteenth-century Catholics
were content observing local Catholic customs and needed very little persuasion to
remain in the fold.28 In Bavaria, as well as Spain, France, and Italy, the standards defined
at the councils at Trent often stood in direct opposition to rulers, who saw themselves as
the primary stewards of the faith in their lands. The following chapters present multiple
instances where the Wittelsbachs and their Jesuit allies altered or just ignored the decrees
of Trent whenever those decrees conflicted with the personal and political needs of the
court. The events that took place at Altötting, which is presented in Chapter Four, show
that Albrecht V was happy to embrace what Eamon Duffy calls traditional religion –
often containing practices that the councils were hoping to eliminate – to attract members
back to the faith.29
Eamon Duffy states that forms of traditional religion were maintained, in part, on
an immediate level, and local Catholic traditions were still very appealing throughout the
Holy Roman Empire in their ability to allow interaction with demons, angels, saints and
28
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 4.
29
Ibid., 2-3.
31
even past relatives.30 In many cases, these superstitious beliefs, as they came to be known
by many Protestant and humanist Catholic activists who were trying to mock them, were
maintained by everyday adherents of the Catholic faith, and these often proved much
more effective at attracting and sustaining the faithful than any officially sanctioned
reform. Martin Luther repeatedly acknowledged his own frustration with the prevalence
of traditional Catholic religion as one of his biggest hurdles. Statements such as,
“Superstition, idolatry and hypocrisy have ample wages, but truth goes a begging,” recur
frequently in the reformer‟s writings.31 The ever-growing pilgrimage movement in
Altötting in the middle of the sixteenth century that was alluded to earlier was
specifically centered on the healing powers of a statue. Wittelsbach support of and
interaction with pilgrimage sites and pilgrimage books, such as Martin Eisengrein‟s Our
Lady of Altötting, are a testament to the idea that social discipline and the codification of
religious belief were often less effective in early modern societies than a numinous
experience could be. This was true at every level of society, and Albrecht V and his
advisors were as caught up in the mass fervor surrounding the events at Altötting as the
peasants who came seeking miraculous intervention. Alötting is not an isolated instance,
leaving the question: Was Albrecht V shaping his people, or was he being shaped by
them? Or, did a hierarchy of control really exist in the sixteenth century?
Critics and scholars working with other methodological models have asked
similar questions. Several have accused proponents of confessionalization of
misinterpreting popular social movements as something created and controlled by
30
31
Ibid.
Martin Luther, The Table Talk, trans. William Hazlitt (Orlando, FL: Bridge-Logos, 2004), 34.
32
authority.32 With its focus on top-down social control, confessionalization assumes that
the majority of Europeans living in the Holy Roman Empire were powerless in the face
of authority. It is particularly interesting to note that, Ernst Walter Zeeden, Heinz
Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, the three scholars commonly acknowledged for
developing the notion of confessionalization – with its focus on political propaganda,
social discipline and other modes of social control – were active during the height of the
Cold War. Thomas A. Brady Jr. alludes to the notion that theories of top-down rule
specifically developed in post-World War II Germany as a means of explicating the
atrocities that took place:
One does not have to be particularly well read in modern European history to
recognize the image of the Germans in modern times as a politically passive, even
docile people, who are more readily swayed than other Europeans by appeals to
authoritarian values and methods. This image is often advanced to explain how a
nation of philosophers and poets came to strive for world power and employ
methods of brutality rarely displayed by Europeans, at least in Europe.33
In other words, the best way to explain away mass participation in horrific events is to
explain away the agency of those perpetrating them by providing a lineage of social
control. Brady‟s statement, which is found in a book on peasant empowerment in early
modern Germany, indirectly suggests that scholars of confessionalization might have
32
See John O‟Malley, Trent and All That; Jean Delemeau, “Christianization,” in The Long
Reformation, Problems in European Civilization, ed. Jeffrey R. Watt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Corporation, 2006), 61-69; Marc R. Forster, “With and Without Confessionalization. Varieties of Early
Modern German Catholicism,” Journal of Early Modern History 1, no. 4 (1997): 315-43; Mary Laven,
“Recent Trends in the Study of Christianity in Sixteenth-Century Europe: 3. Encountering the CounterReformation,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2006): 706-20.
33
Thomas A. Brady, Jr., translator‟s introduction to Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal, by Peter
Blickle (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1997), ix.
33
been shaped by their own contemporary biases in the same way as their nineteenthcentury counterparts, whose views were shaped by their religious differences.
Other scholars have tried to broaden the notion of confessionalization in order to
include all levels of society. The research of Jean Delumeau and John Bossy is centered
on popular religious movements and everyday life.34 Both scholars even go so far as to
acknowledge that the mechanisms put in place to control society often failed. However,
each of these scholars, despite the variances in their methods, still ultimately advocates
for a top-down hierarchy of power, which is a fundamental aspect of the
confessionalization thesis.
A further objection to confessionalization is that it is too broad in its scope and
fails to recognize the importance of some of the finer points of the religious schism in the
sixteenth century. John O‟Malley acknowledges the benefits of confessionalization, but
also questions whether lumping religion, politics and society together negates some of the
unique aspects of each field.35 An almost Schenkerian approach to history,
confessionalization tends to pay more attention to the Ursatz than to the foreground.
While it may be true that Protestantism and Catholicism were part of the same
macrostructure, not realizing the drastic differences between the two and the ways in
which these differences affected the formation of identity leaves a highly inaccurate view
of the time. Eliminating the personal and regional religious nuances involved in
understanding the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century in favor of looking on a
34
See John Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the CounterReformation, trans. Jeremy Moiser (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977); John Bossy, “The CounterReformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” in The Counter-Reformation, Blackwell Essential
Readings in History, ed. David M. Luebke (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 85-104.
35
O‟Malley, Trent and All That, 138-39.
34
general level at overarching tools of social discipline reduces religion to an
unrecognizable, neutered state.
Mary Laven in her essay, “Encountering the Counter-Reformation,” argues that
the biggest fault of confessionalization is its tendency to “project modernity backwards
onto the past.”36 She and others, including John W. O‟Malley, argue that researchers
must be careful not to assume that state and religion were all that well organized. For
example, O‟Malley argues that the Jesuits, who are often presented as some of the
staunchest promoters and biggest innovators in creating confessionalizing tactics, rarely
knew what the outcome of their actions would be, contradicted each other as often as not
and many times took actions that suggest an utter lack of planning on their part.37 In
projecting the organization of modernity backwards, scholars run the risk of distorting the
actions of sixteenth-century figures to fit desired outcomes. Just as states today often fail
in their attempts to operate efficiently, sixteenth-century rulers often failed to effectively
assert any type of real control over their subjects. O‟Malley warns against the problem of
applying a model to data, which always results in “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”38
Despite its weaknesses, confessionalization has become one of the more
prominent means for interpreting the scope of the sixteenth century – and for good reason.
It has provided a system for viewing the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Empire outside
of the context of purely Protestant-Catholic divisions. In doing this, scholars have
36
Mary Laven, “Recent Trends in the Study of Christianity,” 709; O‟Malley, Trent and All That,
138.
37
See John W. O‟Malley, “Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early
Modern Catholicism” in The Counter Reformation, Blackwell Essential Readings in History, ed. David M.
Luebke (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 65-82.
38
O‟Malley, Trent and All That, 138.
35
developed a new lens with which to look at the early modern period. For all of its
weaknesses, the fact remains that German princes did, with great frequency, align
themselves with religious organizations in order to promote and enforce certain modes of
faith in their lands. In Bavaria, in particular, there is a distinct shift in the way that
religion was presented and promoted at the Wittelsbach court in Munich by the end of the
1560s. Disregarding the collaboration of government and religion in this region during
this time fails to capture many of the innovations of Albrecht V, and it negates much of
what made him such a pioneering patron of the arts.
In the spirit of Jedin, this study accepts that certain elements of
confessionalization and certain criticisms can be complementary rather than subtractive.
As he suggests, “It is not a matter of either or, but one of both and.”39 Albrecht V was a
ruler who used coercion, censorship and social discipline, which are all qualities of the
confessionalized state. He also participated in and was shaped by the same forms of
unofficial, traditional religion as even the most common Bavarian. Just as often, he was
reacting to, rather than influencing, many of the identity shifts occurring in Bavaria.
Certainly these shifts had an impact on his patronage and the artworks that were
produced during his reign. This recognition is paramount given the role of patronage in
sixteenth-century culture. Linda Levy Peck suggests that “patronage structured early
modern society.”40 In the sixteenth century, patronage conveyed a variety of relationships
that existed between the ruling and upper classes and those in need of their support.
Throughout Europe, this process played itself out in every imaginable way. Patronage
39
Jedin, “Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation?,” 45.
Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in early Stuart England (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 2.
40
36
was provided not only to artists but seemingly to anyone who had a skill to offer and
needed support. As the number of arts scholars who have integrated notions of
confessionalization into their works increases, a growing body of literature is increasingly
positioning the arts as political propaganda. The implication is that artists were part of the
mechanism for implementing social control. Given the changing role of the patron and
the artist, and the importance of this relationship, it is necessary to understand how, if at
all, patronage and confessionalization came together.41
Melissa Miriam Bullard points to a shift in the importance of artists during the
sixteenth century that was responsible for positioning patronage as a complex power
relationship.42 Bullard, whose subject is the Medici, understands sixteenth-century
patronage as a means of support in which both patron and artist were able to exert power
in order to reach a mutually beneficial goal.43 Jacques Barzun makes a similar
observation. He asserts that sixteenth- century princes
. . . needed the propaganda of art to give luster to their reign, to associate
monarchy with civilization. They gathered at their court painters, sculptors,
architects, poets, musicians, dramatists, choreographers, plus an historian or two
to make sure the cultural largess was recorded for posterity. Like their
predecesors [sic] – the Italian princes and popes – the kings managed to get a lot
41
See Introduction, n. 6, 16, 19.
Melissa Miriam Bullard, “Heroes and Their Workshops: Medici Patronage and the Problem of
Shared Agency,” in The Italian Renaissance, Blackwell Essential Readings in History, ed. Paula Findlen
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 305-06.
43
Ibid., 306.
42
37
of good work done, and in the course of it established the custom that a great
nation owes it to itself to support the arts.44
For Bullard and Barzun, sixteenth-century art was, in many ways, the rule by which
nobles and wealthy merchants measured their greatness. The competition to find the best
artists put a certain amount of authority in the artists‟ hands, blurring the hierarchy in the
relationship between patron and artist. Barzun cites the popular story of Michelangelo‟s
response to Cardinal Marcello and the Pope, who were complaining about his
unwillingness to share his artistic plans with them. The artist assured them that he was
under no obligation to share information with them and that their responsibility was
merely to gather money and to ensure that it stayed safe.45 With Michelangelo, and others,
it seems evident that for many artists, establishing authority was sometimes a confusing
process.
The power of the artist and the needs of the patron ensured that patronage existed
beyond a purely businesslike patron-client relationship. Linda Levy Peck states, “At once
symbiotic and symbolic, these private, dependent, deferential alliances were designed to
bring reward to the client and continuing proof of power and standing to the patron.”46
For example, the Wittelsbachs repeatedly provided patronage that extended generous
support to generations of an artist‟s family and provided status to the artist that implied
much more than a working partnership. The case of Orlando di Lasso is the most obvious
in the case of the Munich court and is presented in Chapter Four.
44
Jacques Barzun, “An Insoluble Problem: The Patronage of Art,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 131, no. 2 (June 1987): 124.
45
Ibid., 126.
46
Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption, 3.
38
Francis William Kent has tried to turn the focus away from the people involved
in the act of patronage altogether, suggesting that too much agency is given to the patron
and the context of an artwork and not enough to the actual artifact. “All of us, we suppose,
have sat through papers where the details of an art patron‟s life and ideas loomed larger
than the commissioned artist‟s work, on which they anyway appeared to have had only
the most general – or even far-fetched – bearing.”47 Implicit in Kent‟s statement is the
possibility that a patron often was not overly involved in the works being produced and
collected on their behalf. The number of collectors under the employ of Albrecht V and
the amount of objects collected were certainly too numerous for the duke to track.
Similarly, many of the miniatures produced by Hans Mielich and the musical works of
Orlando di Lasso were part of the everyday function of the court and more than likely
would have been created outside of the duke‟s supervision.
In the case of Albrecht V, many of the artworks that were created in Bavaria in
the sixteenth century were part of an agenda that valued collecting items and artists of the
highest caliber. His relationship with the members of his court was, as Peck says,
symbiotic.48 Thus, the framework for understanding his patronage must always take into
consideration the situation in which art was created or collected. Sometimes the situation
fits the top-down notion of patronage. Sometimes it was an act of singular piety. Other
times, it was to fulfill the ego of a duke who saw his city as one of Europe‟s great cultural
centers. Just as often, he had little to do with the creation of art at his court.
47
Francis William Kent with Patricia Simons, “Renaissance Patronage: An Introductory Essay,” in
Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy, OUP/Humanities Research Centre of the Australian
National University Series, ed. F.W. Kent and Patricia Simmons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
17.
48
Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption, 3.
39
The methodology for the chapters that follow presents Albrecht V‟s patronage as
a complex relationship between the patron, the artist and the larger cultural environment
in which both lived. This study accepts that the arts were highly influential in creating
and reinforcing confessional identity. However, patronage was not a top-down process.
Rather, it was cyclical. All levels of society played a major role in determining Albrecht
V‟s own sense of identity, and he, in turn, used his artists to project that sense of identity
back onto the larger fabric of Bavarian identity. Marc R. Forster defines this process as
confessionalism, and he suggests that it was one of the greatest strengths of early modern
Catholicism. He states:
Decentralization and relative disorganization of the Catholic Church at the
national level left considerable room for the population to shape Catholic
religious practice as it needed and desired. . . . Even where the state took a major
role in enforcing church discipline, as in Bavaria, the population retained
autonomy in organizing everyday religious life. . . . In the end, Catholic
confessionalism was not imposed from above, but created at the intersection of
church reform, state policy, and popular needs and desires.49
A similar process is defined by Jacques Ellul as sociological propaganda.50 Ellul,
like Forster, asserts the power of all elements of society in the creation of an overarching
mechanism of social definition. Ellul posits sociological propaganda as the expression
49
Marc R. Forster, “With and Without Confessionalization. Varieties of Early Modern German
Catholicism,” Journal of Early Modern History 1, no. 4 (1997): 343.
50
See Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: the Formation of Men’s Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and
Jean Lerner (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1973), 62-63.
40
and enforcement of collective identity.51 These approaches are valuable because they
allow for all of the elements of confessionalization to exist but only as one small part of a
larger expression of group identity. Like Brady‟s criticism of obedient Germans,
sociological propaganda and confessionalism empower all elements of society.52 The
following chapters show that the patronage of Albrecht V, who was a product of the
zeitgeist of sixteenth-century Bavaria, served as a means by which a collective traditional
Bavarian Catholic identity was able to express itself.
51
52
Ibid., 118.
Ibid., 65-70.
41
CHAPTER II
Precedence: Wittelsbach Patronage before Albrecht V
This chapter surveys the role of Wittelsbach patronage in Bavaria during the
centralization of Wittelsbach authority in Munich from the fourteenth through the early
sixteenth century. During this time, the family began to adopt Munich as the center of
Bavarian rule. Initially, late-medieval Wittelsbach patronage supported artworks that
were created to establish physical artifacts and indicators that proved their right to rule
the duchy. These works were meant to convince other elements of Bavarian and German
society to accept their authority, which was essential given Bavaria‟s many noble
families, guilds and merchants and their propensity for rebelling against the Wittelsbachs.
The family promoted the use of architecture as a means of protection and
diplomacy during the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Munich was an unusual
late-medieval city in that it was governed by two interests that often came into conflict,
the Wittelsbachs and an independent city government. The uncertainty of the fourteenth
and the fifteenth centuries made the establishment of protective structures a necessity.
Other buildings were meant to unify the duchy around religious identity. Establishing
points of communal pride, such as the Frauenkirche, was an indirect way of keeping all
sides at peace.
Finally, as Renaissance notions of art began to permeate the court in Munich,
patronage of music and visual art was used to reflect the general greatness of the patron
and as a means of guidance. The new view of artists as a symbol of the cultural capital of
the court, empowered many musicians and visual artists. This chapter shows that artists
42
were even able to maintain religious views that differed from their patron so long as their
art remained of high quality. By the sixteenth century, Albrecht V‟s father and
grandfather, began to commission works that were meant to provide instruction on how
to properly rule. This made for a unique power relationship in that the artist was the one
realizing the vision of what the ideal ruler should be.
Each of these elements of patronage implies an act of convincing. Despite the
centralization of ducal authority, power in Bavaria in the sixteenth century continued to
be a loose concept. Free imperial cities, merchants, guilds, minor nobles, dukes, princes
and electors all participated in a variety of localized legal systems that ensured that every
member of society was accountable to someone else. Add to this a peasant class that was
prone to rebellion, and the Wittelsbachs found themselves in an environment where they
were unable to merely disregard people of lesser standing. They also found themselves
competing with artworks that were produced by Bavarians outside of the Munich court
and that often carried contradictory ideas. Whether it be to other nobles, to their people or
to themselves, Wittelsbach patronage prior to Albrecht V was a powerful means of
establishing and maintaining the family‟s acceptance by the larger structure of Bavarian
society.
In 1255, seventy-five years after the Wittelsbachs gained control of Bavaria, the
duchy was partitioned into two areas: Upper and Lower Bavaria. Ludwig II, who ruled
Upper Bavaria until 1294, established a residence, the Alte Hof, in Munich.1 Munich‟s
position in Upper Bavaria was solidified when Ludwig IV, who became the twice-
1
Enno Burmeister, “Alter Hof, München,” in Historisches Lexicon Bayerns, accessed June 18,
2010, http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/artikel/artikel_45034.
43
excommunicated King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, claimed the Alte Hof as
the permanent seat of his authority in 1317.2 Ludwig IV united and reigned over Bavaria
from 1301 to 1347, and he brought trade to Munich by granting the city a monopoly on
tolls for the transportation of salt throughout the region.3
Munich is situated on the Isar River at the intersection of several major land- and
water-based trading routes that were in use since the Romans occupied the territory (fig.
1). Despite its location, the free cities of Nuremberg and Augsburg, with their
independent city governments, dwarfed Munich in almost every way, especially in terms
of trade and culture during the Middle Ages. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, points out that
Nuremberg‟s population, for example, was approximately forty thousand by 1500
compared with Munich‟s thirteen thousand five hundred inhabitants at the same time.4
Further disadvantaging the city was the fact that while Munich rested on a major tributary
of the Danube, it was not actually situated on the Danube, such as other Bavarian free
cities like Regensburg that also eclipsed Munich in size.
In addition to the Wittelsbachs, Munich also maintained an independent city
charter, which enabled it to function like a free city.5 The division of power between the
city council and the royal family had a major impact on shaping the role of Wittelsbach
2
Michael Menzel, “München: Ludwig der Bayer und der Alte Hof,” in Schauplätze in der
Geschichte in Bayern, ed. Alois Schmid and Katharina Weigand (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2003), 134.
3
The importance of salt is demonstrated by the names of some of the region‟s most important
cities, such as Salzburg. Munich‟s founding is said to have been a result of a salt trade conflict between a
Bavarian duke and the Bishop of Freising. See E. Ritz, “The History of Salt – Aspects of Interest to the
Nephrologist,” Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation 11 (1996): 969-75; Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World
History (New York: Penguin, 2003).
4
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “A Tale of Two Cities: Nuremburg and Munich,” in Embodiments of
Power: Building Baroque Cities in Europe, ed. Gary B. Cohen and Franz A.J. Szabo (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2008), 164.
5
Merry E. Wiesner, “Political, Economic, and Legal Structures,” in Early Modern Europe: Issues
and Interpretations, ed. James B. Collins and Karen L. Taylor (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006),
225.
44
patronage in Munich. Like many of the neighboring free cities, Munich began to flourish
in the middle of the fourteenth century, giving certain residents in the city a sense of
power. Compounding the issue, Ludwig IV ensured political instability when he once
again decided to divide his territories among his sons after his death in 1347.6
Tension between the Wittelsbachs, the lesser noble families and the guilds of
Munich, reached a boiling point by the end of the fourteenth century. The lower nobility
and merchant classes in Bavaria took Ludwig IV‟s division of the family as a symbol of
the weakness of Wittelsbach rule and eventually decided to challenge the family and each
other. As Hermann Neumann states, “Dividing the imperial legacy meant a loss of power
to the Emperor‟s descendants so that his grandsons found it prudent around 1385 to raise
defences against a mercantile class that had become proudly assertive.”7 The merchants
and lesser nobles of Munich became so assertive by 1397 that, during a major dispute
about the rights of Munich‟s citizens, the Wittelsbachs were forced to barricade
themselves in the Alte Hof, which was located in the center of the city. For the duration of
the dispute, the family was barred from freely entering and leaving the structure.8 Similar
conflicts continued to arise until 1403 when a new city constitution was created that
appeased both the guilds and the nobles. By the fifteenth century, city government was
divided into two councils that in theory, though not always in practice, permitted
landowning, taxpaying residents the right to take part in government affairs.9
6
Wilhelm Volkert, Geschichte Bayerns (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), 53.
Hermann Neumann, The Munich Residence and the Treasury (Munich: Prestel, 2008), 9.
8
Andreas Kraus, Geschichte Bayerns: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck,
1983), 167-8.
9
Ibid., 167-68.
7
45
2
5
3
1
4
Fig. 1. Aventinus, Map of Bavaria from the Bayerische Chronik, 1523. Originally a
woodcut. Facsimile reproduced by the Geographischen Gesellschaft in München, 1899.
Bavarian Regional Library Online: Historical Maps of Bavaria, accessed January 27,
2011, http://www.bayerische-landesbibliothek-online.de/histkarten/suche?kartenid=95.
Important cities include: 1. Munich, 2. Ingostadt, 3. the location of Altötting, 4. Salzburg
and 5. Augsburg.
46
The conflicts with citizens of Munich exposed the vulnerability of the Alte Hof’s
centralized location, so the Wittelsbachs set out to build a new palace, the Neuveste, in
1385 on the outskirts of the city.10 The Neuveste‟s first incarnation was as a small fortress
that allowed protection from the citizens of Munich by providing direct access to beyond
the city wall. This enabled the Wittelsbachs to come and go as they pleased. It was a
luxury that they did not always have in the Alte Hof. The Neuveste reflected its function
as a fortress. The early structure was surrounded by a large moat and high walls. It sent a
clear message to the residents of Munich about which of the city‟s inhabitants really held
sway. In 1466, the citizens tried to assert the authority of the city over the ducal family.
They decreed that the Wittelsbachs could not use the Neuveste as a residential palace, and
so the family remained in the Alte Hof until the sixteenth century when Wilhelm IV
began a palatial conversion toward permanent residence in the Neuveste.11
By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Wittelsbachs had divided Bavaria into
four major duchies: Bavaria-Straubing, Bavaria-Ingolstadt, Bavaria-Landshut and
Bavaria-Munich.12 Each ruling member now acted as an individual agent. The familial
infighting that ensued promoted more instability throughout the region. During the first
half of the fifteenth century, as many as eight different Wittelsbachs maintained control
over various portions of Bavaria, creating a political scene that, as often as not, bordered
on chaos.13 The family, which was once powerful enough to have one of its own elected
10
Menzel, “München: Ludwig der Bayer und der Alte Hof,” 147.
Samuel John Klingensmith, The Utility of Splendor: Ceremony, Social Life and Architecture at
the Court of Bavaria, 1600-1800 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 21.
12
Gerhard Immler, “Wittelsbachische Primogeniturordnung 1506,” in Historisches Lexicon
Bayerns, accessed June 18, 2010, http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/artikel/artikel _45352.
13
Reinhard Stauber, “Staat und Dynastie Herzog Albrecht IV. und die Einheit des ”Hauses Bayern”
um 1500,” Zeitschrift für Bayerische Landesgeschichte 60 (1997): 540-41.
11
47
Holy Roman Emperor, had gone relatively silent by the fifteenth century amidst yet
another fragmentation.
In the late 1400s, Albrecht III and his son, Albrecht IV, began to call for the
Wittelsbach family to unite around the notion of the Haus Bayern.14 The House of
Bavaria implied several ideas, the most important of which was that Bavaria be unified
under a centralized authority. For Albrecht III, this meant authority that was based on
familial cooperation.15 Albrecht IV, who reigned from 1465 to 1508, saw things
differently. For the young duke, the Haus Bayern was possible only if that house had one
roof. Albrecht IV was used to asserting himself. He was the third of Albrecht III‟s five
surviving sons, and he was only able to play a political role by demanding it after the
death of his oldest brother, Johann IV, in 1463, and after his second oldest brother,
Sigmund, abdicated from public life in 1467, thereafter maintaining a primarily
ceremonial role.16
Bringing order to Bavaria under the concept of the Haus Bayern required the
Munich Wittelsbachs to focus much of their patronage on legitimizing and providing a
lineage for their authority. Of the four main branches, Munich was not the most powerful.
Andreas M. Dahlem, who has written a thorough study on the use of visual culture in
late-medieval Munich, reports that by 1438 the Landshut line of the family was the most
14
Ibid., 539-40.
Ibid., 540-41.
16
Hans and Marga Rall, Die Wittelsbacher in Lebensbildern (München, Piper Verlag GmBH:
1986), 109.
15
48
reputable, which only furthered the need for the patronage of artworks that could prove
the Munich line‟s long dynastic greatness to onlookers. 17
The first large-scale, semi-public artwork was a genealogical mural created for
the Alte Hof in the 1460s.18 Only two fragments from the mural remain (fig. 2).
Combined, the original work is estimated to have been nearly seventy feet long and over
six feet tall.19 It was probably meant for display in a public space within the Alte Hof and,
according to Dahlem, it represents the family‟s earliest attempt at publicly presenting
images of the lineage of the Munich Wittelsbachs. The mural originally contained sixtyone figures depicting both real and imagined Wittelsbach ancestors.20 The sheer size of
the mural is impressive even today. If, as Johan Huizinga suggested, late-medieval art
“had to be enjoyed as an element of life itself, as the expression of life‟s significance,”
then surely the Munich Wittelsbachs felt significant in its presence. More importantly, the
mural asserted their significance to the noble families and merchants who visited the Alte
Hof.21
17
Andreas M. Dahlem, “The Wittelsbach Court in Munich: History and Authority in the Visual
Arts (1460-1508),” (PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 2009), 17-18.
18
Burmeister, “Alter Hof, München.”
19
Dahlem, “The Wittelsbach Court in Munich,” 134-35.
20
Ibid.
21
Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Toronto: General Publishing Company, 1999),
224.
49
Fig. 2. Remaining Fragments of the Alte Hof Genealogical Mural, c. 1460s.
Approx. 70x6 ft. Bavarian National Museum, Munich.
50
The genealogical mural was the visual manifestation of a genre of medieval
literature the purpose of which was to prove noble descent. According to Helen
Watanabe-O‟Kelley, descent served an important function throughout Europe because it
distinguished various classes of nobles. Descent shaped every part of a noble‟s life, from
marriage, to authority, to participation at festivals and tournaments. Even more
importantly, descent was something that only certain nobles could prove.22
Dahlem‟s research reveals that in Munich, the mural was part of a larger program
of lineage works that were created throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.23
Beyond genealogical works, which primarily proved descent, another genre, the historic
chronicle, was also promoted by the Wittelsbachs. Chronicles aimed to prove legitimacy,
and they became popular during the fifteenth century as nobles attempted to inextricably
tie themselves to the people and regions in which they ruled.24 The chronicles were not
passive or objective. The author‟s main goal was to present their patron as part of a long
tradition of greatness, even when that contradicted actual historical events.
The various lines of Wittelsbachs began a race to present their version of the
family‟s history in the 1420s with Andreas von Regensburg‟s Chronica de principibus
terrae Bavarorum. This chronicle of Bavarian princes was commissioned by Ludwig VII
of the Bavaria-Ingolstadt line and was translated into German a few years later.25 The
commission of the work paralleled a dispute about Ludwig VII‟s claims to certain
22
Helen Watanabe-O‟Kelley, “Literature and the Court, 1450-1720,” in Early Modern German
Literature 1350-1700, Camden House History of German Literature 4, ed. Max Reinhardt (Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2007), 628-29.
23
Dahlem, “The Wittelsbach Court in Munich,” 134-35.
24
Watanabe-O‟Kelley, “Literature and the Court, 1450-1720,” 630-31.
25
Ernst Ralf Hintz, “Chronicles, Regional/ Territorial, German,” in Medieval Germany: an
Encyclopedia, ed. John M. Jeep (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), 194-95.
51
territories after the death of Johann III of Bavaria-Straubing-Holland in 1425 that led to
the establishment of the four main fifteenth-century Bavarian lines.26 The tone of the
chronicle is set in the opening sentences, where Andreas von Regensburg quickly praises
God and moves directly to heaping praise and validity upon Ludwig VII. In the opening
three sentences, Regensburg positions Ludwig VII as a direct descendent of Otto I, the
first Wittelsbach ruler of Bavaria, Ludwig IV, the most powerful Wittelsbach, and he
creates a connection between Ludwig VII, the Wittelsbach family and the Carolingian
empire.27
Albrecht IV also commissioned several historic chronicles. One of the early
authors who received his patronage was the painter and poet Ulrich Füetrer. Füetrer was
as much a writer of fiction as he was a historian, and his Buch der Abenteuer was a
retelling of the Arthurian legends that Albrecht IV commissioned during his reign.
Füetrer came to the Munich court in 1453, and completed a chronicle of Bavarian history,
the Bairische Chronik, by 1481.28 In the Chronik, Füetrer outlines the history of the
Wittelsbachs from 60 BCE to 1481. His work comes to the unsurprising conclusion that
Albrecht IV is the one true and right heir of Bavaria because he descended direclty from
Ludwig IV.29 This conclusion served to further validate Albrecht IV‟s assertion that the
Wittelsbach family should centralize Bavaria under his rule.
26 Dorit-Maria Krenn, “Straubinger Erbfall, 1425-1429,” in Historisches Lexicons Bayerns,
accessed June 18, 2010, http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/artikel/artikel_45582.
27
Andreas von Regensburg, Chronik von den Fürsten zu Bayern, in Andreas von Regensburg:
Sämtliche Werke (Munich: G. Himmer, 1903), 591.
28
Christine M. Kallinger-Allen, “Fuetrer, Ulrich (ca. 1420- ca. 1496/1502),” in Medieval
Germany: an Encyclopedia, ed. John M. Jeep (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), 410-11.
29
Watanabe-O‟Kelley, “Literature and the Court, 1450-1720,” 631; Dahlem, “The Wittelsbach
Court in Munich,” 127-30.
52
The historical chronicle reached its pinnacle in Munich in the 1520s when
Johannes Aventinus compiled his Bayerische Chronik. A linguist and one of Germany‟s
great humanist historians, Aventinus was hired to tutor Albrecht IV‟s two youngest sons,
Ludwig and Ernst. In 1517, Aventinus was appointed official historian for the court, and
he was commissioned to write the Bayerische Chronik.30 The work originally appeared in
Latin, and it was later translated so that the Wittelsbachs could read it.
Unlike Füetrer‟s work, Aventinus took an unabashedly humanist approach. He
understood history as an objective pursuit and derided the earlier histories for their
attempts to praise rather than find the truth.31 He pursued archeological and literary
evidence to prove his claims.32 In short, he did not primarily pursue the ambitions of his
patrons, who were concerned with the creation of a history that, once again, would
legitimize their greatness. Aventinus‟ objection to what he saw as poor scholarship
caused a delay in the actual publication of his chronicle, which did not happen until the
1550s.33 Aventinus was often in trouble at the court, and his works and actions were
indicative of a larger shift taking place at court and throughout the Holy Roman Empire.
Despite his assertion that history is a laborious pursuit of the truth, the bulk of
Aventinus‟ history is still spent trying to tie Bavarians to Christian Rome. Two of the
four volumes that comprise the German translation investigate the years prior to 500. The
30
Pia F. Cuneo, Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany: Jörg Breu the Elder and the
Fashioning of Political Identity, ca. 1475-1536 (Boston, MA: Brill, 1998), 194.
31
Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 257-58.
32
Cuneo, Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany, 195-96.
33
Watanabe-O‟Kelley, “Literature and the Court, 1450-1720,” 631-32.
53
other two volumes comprise the next one thousand years of history.34 This lopsided
attention was probably a combination of the humanist scholar‟s own interest in early
history and his need to fulfill the wishes of his patrons, who still wanted to be tied to
great historical periods.
The historical chronicles were meant to validate dynastic claims and provide
models of greatness. They were meant for a literate class, and they were probably not
consumed outside of the realms of nobility. Outside of convincing nobles, however, a
constant concern was the age-old question of how to peacefully align the unique makeup
of Munich‟s class structure behind the notion of a clear leader. As mentioned, Albrecht
IV believed that the concept of the Haus Bayern included himself as that clear leader, and
during his reign, he took the position that civic cooperation was advantageous to nobles,
merchants and the Wittelsbachs. This approach briefly managed to work, and the seeming
willingness of the entire community to work together led to the creation of one of
Munich‟s greatest buildings, the Frauenkirche.
Munich‟s population was approaching 13,500 people by 1500. The combination
of the city‟s growing populace and their willingness to line up behind a powerful royal
family that was again becoming firmly established created a certain amount of civic pride
that began to move the wealthier merchants to push for a new church that symbolized
Munich‟s arrival as a major metropolitan area and that could rival the cathedrals of
neighboring cities such as Bamberg and Regensburg. Perhaps more important was the
34
Martin Ott, “Römische Inschriften und die humanistische Erschliessung der antiken Landschaft:
Bayern und Schwaben,” in Deutsche Landesgeschichtsschreibung im Zeichen des Humanismus, vol. 56,
Tübinger Beiträge zur Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, ed. Franze Brendle, Dieter Mertens,
Anton Schindling, Walter Ziegler (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001), 213.
54
need to create a structure that could rival the new, two-hundred-foot-tall Church of Our
Lady in Ingolstadt that was commissioned by Albrecht IV‟s first-cousin twice-removed,
Ludwig VII, Duke of Bavaria-Ingolstadt.
On February 9, 1468, Albrecht IV‟s brother, Sigmund, placed the cornerstone for
the building of a new Frauenkirche. Jörg von Halspach, an area mason with close ties to
the Wittelsbachs, was chosen to lead the project.35 Funding for the church was a truly
multi-faceted affair, with income provided by the city council, the Church and by the
Wittelsbachs. The most notable source of income was through the sale of indulgences
from 1480 to 1482, an act that required the Wittelsbachs to get the approval of the Pope.36
The Frauenkirche forever altered the city of Munich, and it still stands as one of the most
impressive buildings in the city (figs. 3-4).
Each of the works mentioned were attempts at documenting or presenting a
history of Bavarian greatness and thus Wittelsbach greatness. The Frauenkirche was the
expression of the collective will of great people. The genealogical mural inserted the
Wittelsbachs into that tradition. The chronicles proved a past that not only empowered
the ruling class, but all Bavarians. It is particularly important to note that with these
works, the greatness of the Wittelsbachs is only determined in relation to the greatness of
Bavaria. Even though the works follow the actions of heroic Wittelsbachs, the
perspective positions communal identity first and individual identity second. Andreas von
Regensburg acknowledges that Ludwig VII is a great Bavarian ruler, not a great ruler of
Bavarians. These works show the Wittelsbachs in an ideal light, but they also underscore
35
Hans Ramisch, “Frauenkirche, München,” in Historisches Lexicon Bayerns, accessed June 18,
2010, http://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/artikel/artikel_45380.
36
Dahlem, The Wittelsbach Court in Munich, 101-04.
55
the Wittelsbachs‟ need to convince themselves and others that Bavarians are people
worth ruling. They do this by empowering those very people with acts of civic expression
and by creating histories that link the community with the greatest societies in history.
The fifteenth century also saw the rise of the court in Munich as a musical center.
The patronage of musicians in the late fifteenth century was different than that of the
Frauenkirche, the Alte Hof genealogical mural and the historical chronicles. With these
works, the artists were attempting to create tangible documents that proved Bavaria‟s
greatness. The prose in the chronicles and the form of the architecture were all part of the
overall message, which was always clear. By the end of the fifteenth century, as
Renaissance ideas were established, musicians became a commodity in and of themselves.
Great leaders were still attaching themselves to the past, but artists were becoming
increasingly valuable as artists.
Germany was particularly well known for its instrumentalists in the same way that
the Franco-Netherlands region was known for producing singers. The importance of
instrumental music in Bavaria was so great that Keith Polk has uncovered twenty-five
cities within one hundred miles of Munich and Augsburg that budgeted for professional
instrumental ensembles with municipal funds between 1380-1450.37 Masters of both haut
(loud) and bas (soft) instruments, German instrumentalists found themselves travelling
throughout Europe and performing in some of its most lavish courts.38
37
Keith Polk, “Instrumental Music in the Urban Centres of Renaissance Germany,” Early Music
History 7 (1987): 176.
38
Keith Polk, “Voices and Instruments: Soloists and Ensembles in the 15 th Century,” Early Music
18, no. 2 (May 1990) 180. Also see Keith Polk, “Patronage and Innovation in Instrumental Music in the
15th Century,” Historical Brass Society Journal 3 (1991): 151-78.
56
1
2
3
Fig. 3. Michael Wolgemut, Illustration of Munich from the Nürnberg Chronicle, 1493.
Woodcut print. Bavarian State Library, Munich Digitization Center, accessed January 27,
2011, http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00034024/image_524.
View of Munich from the southeast. Important structures include: 1. Frauenkirche, 2.
Alte Hof, 3. Neuveste. The onion domes of the church were not finished at this time.
Fig. 4. Frauenkirche with onion domes, which were added in 1525. The church was
restored after being damaged in World War II. Munich.
57
From Boethius to Guido d‟Arezzo, medieval instrumentalists and singers were
typically portrayed as the lowest type of musician.39 In the fifteenth century, however,
instrumental music had integrated itself into the greater community and reached a point
of amazing technical complexity. Suddenly, instrumental performers who mastered their
instrument – usually instruments – with all of the unwritten rules for ornamentation and
improvisation were highly prized. Patrons began to view the support of quality
performers as a symbol of their own quality. Towns and courts began to import musicians
from other countries. Polk points out that the culture of international travel in the
profession became so common that cities and courts began earmarking money in their
annual budgets to pay for the additional costs of out-of-town musicians in addition to
their support of permanent ensembles.40
The growing value of musicians as a means of cultural capital caused a shift in the
power structure of the patron-artist relationship. For the first time, fifteenth-century
musicians in Germany were known and valued by name. As they came to realize their
talents, instrumentalists began to ask for and receive certain concessions from their
patrons. This phenomenon was not unique to musicians, and as mentioned, it is one of the
distinguishing features of the beginning of the Renaissance. However common it was,
this movement still promoted a certain amount of empowerment on the part of the artist.
One example of the relationship between the patron and the empowered artist is
the life of the blind organist and lute player, Conrad Paumann. Paumann was born in
39
Dolores Pesce, “Guido d‟Arezzo, Ut queant laxis, and Musical Understanding,” in Music
Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Publications of the Early Music Institute, ed. Russell E.
Murray, Jr., Susan Forscher Weiss and Cynthia J. Cyrus (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010),
26-27.
40
Polk, “Instrumental Music in the Urban Centres,” 177.
58
Nuremberg around 1415, and he maintained a very successful career in that city for the
first half of the century.41 As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Nuremberg was
widely acknowledged as a far more commercially and culturally advanced city than
Munich at the end of the Middle Ages. Jeffrey Chipps Smith points out that many
considered Nuremberg the cultural and commercial capital of the Holy Roman Empire if
not all of Europe.42 In 1447, Paumann was awarded the post of city organist in
Nuremberg but only upon promising not to leave the city for another post without gaining
the permission of the city. In Nuremburg, Paumann had the opportunity to play on a new,
and large, organ at St. Sebald Church, and he had the freedoms that came from working
in a free city.43 However, Paumann broke his promise. In 1450, he secretly left
Nuremberg for the court of Albrecht III. In Munich, the duke provided Paumann and his
wife with an annual salary and a house. To smooth things over with the city of
Nuremberg, Albrecht III‟s second wife, Anna, personally went to Nuremberg to have
Paumann absolved from his contractual obligations.44 Luring the organist from his post
with the promise of a home, the personal intervention of the duke‟s wife and with the
prestige of international travel underline just how important Paumann was as an addition
to Albrecht III‟s court.
41
Christoph Wolf, “Paumann, Conrad,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
accessed June 18, 2010, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/21114.
42
Smith, “A Tale of Two Cities,” 165.
43
George Ashdown Audsley, The Art of Organ Building, vol. 1 (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,
1965), 45.
44
Wolf, “Paumann, Conrad.” Incidentally, Albrecht III‟s first wife, Agnes Bernauer, was a
commoner, which did not sit well with Albrecht III‟s father, Ernst. To remedy this, Ernst had his son‟s wife
accused of witchcraft, and she was drowned in the Danube in 1435. See Marita A. Panzer, “Ermordung der
Agnes Bernauer,” in Historisches Lexicon Bayerns, accessed June 18, 2010, http://www.historischeslexikon-bayerns.de/artikel/artikel_45822.
59
Paumann‟s fame spread throughout Europe, and the Wittelsbachs shared their
prized musician with courts in Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. On these travels, he
was lavished with gifts and offers to work at some of Europe‟s most prestigious courts.45
Paumann – also a virtuoso on the lute – wrote some of the earliest extant method books
for musicians, including the Fundamentum organisandi. This work was compiled in 1452
and served as the standard training manual for organists during the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries.46 Paumann died before the new Frauenkirche was complete, but he
was buried on that site. The image on the organist‟s epitaph in the Frauenkirche, depicts
the organist holding a hand-pumped organ surrounded by other instruments (fig. 5).
Fig. 5. Relief on Conrad Paumann‟s tombstone, c. 1473. Red marble. Frauenkirche,
Munich.
45
Wolf, “Paumann, Conrad.”
Willi Apel, The History of Keyboard Music to 1700, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1972), 48.
46
60
Paumann‟s career also reveals how personal patronage in the fifteenth century
could be. When the Wittelsbachs obtained a talented artist, their patronage of that artist
often extended to his family, and it is common to find the court supporting that artist‟s
family for generations. Conrad‟s son, Paul Paumann, served as a court musician in
Munich after his father‟s death.47 Albrecht V supported Orlando di Lasso sons, and Hans
Mielich‟s father worked at the court prior to his son‟s position at the court. During Paul
Paumann‟s tenure, a new organ was built in the Frauenkirche in 1491, marking the
continued growth of music at the Munich court.48 At great expense, Albrecht III and
Albrecht IV created a music culture that rivaled the court of Philip the Good of
Burgundy.49
Albrecht IV‟s goal of centralizing the Wittelsbach court went beyond establishing
civic unity and promoting courtly life in Munich. His aim was to raise Bavaria‟s status as
a political leader in the Holy Roman Empire as Ludwig IV had once done. One of the
first major political moves that Albrecht IV – “the Wise” as he came to be known –
undertook was a bold act of provocation. Through several aggressive deals, Albrecht
initiated a land grab that extended Wittelsbach reach into Habsburg territories, a move
that incited the ire of the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich III.50
Making matters worse for the Habsburg emperor, Albrecht IV had taken a liking
to one of his daughters, Kunigunde. The two arranged a secret marriage in 1487, an event
that nearly drove Friedrich to military action. At the Peace of Augsburg in 1492,
47
Wolf, “Paumann, Conrad.”
Horst Leuchtmann and Robert Münster, “Munich,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music
Online, accessed June 18, 2010, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/ music/19360.
49
Polk, “Voices and Instruments,” 187.
50
Herman Weisflecker, Kaiser Maximilian, vol. 1, (Vienna: R. Spies and Co., 1971), 251-52.
48
61
Friedrich was eventually pacified through deals brokered by his son Maximilian I, who
saw to it that Albrecht IV returned some of the land that he had recently taken from the
Habsburgs as a payment for the right to marry Kunigunde.51
While this move initially provoked the Habsburgs, Albrecht‟s marriage to
Kunigunde proved the first of several very tentative steps toward strengthening
Habsburg-Wittelsbach relations. Tentative remained the operative word throughout much
of the sixteenth century, however, as both the Wittelsbachs and Habsburgs seemed more
than ready to squander any relationship with their in-laws if the right opportunity
presented itself. Despite the setbacks caused by these opportunities, of which there were
many, the marriage established a trend that saw the two families allied with each other by
the 1600s around the cause of reestablishing and maintaining Catholicism within the
Holy Roman Empire.
Albrecht IV‟s marriage to Kunigunde created valuable external relationships for
the Wittelsbachs, but, like his medieval ancestors, he still had to deal with the fragmented
political system within Bavaria. By the end of the fifteenth century, the majority of
Bavarian power rested primarily in two duchies. Bavaria-Landshut was ruled by Duke
Georg, son of Ludwig IX, who had peacefully co-ruled Bavaria with Albrecht III under
the original notion of the Haus Bayern. Bavaria-Munich was controlled by Albrecht IV.
The two cousins had an agreement that should either one of them fail to produce a male
heir, their lands would be inherited by the male heir of the other. It was Duke Georg who
failed to produce a son. When he tried to name his daughter, Elisabeth, as his successor,
Albrecht IV took issue, resulting in the 1503 War of Landshut Succession. The war lasted
51
Ibid.
62
two years, during which both Elisabeth and her husband, Ruprecht of the Palatinate,
died.52 By 1505, Maximilian I, who became the Holy Roman Emperor in 1508, saw an
opportunity to maintain Wittelsbach instability and to increase his own lands. He
intervened just as he had with Albrecht IV‟s marriage to Kunigunde, and tried to keep
both sides fighting for as long as possible. Eventually, he brokered an agreement between
the two warring factions of the family. The intervention resulted in the unification of the
Landshut and Munich territories, with land concessions given to Maximilian I, the
Palatinate and several free cities and smaller territories as payment for their political and
military support during the conflict.53
Thus, the reigns of Albrecht III and Albrecht IV trended toward the centralization
of authority within the duchy of Bavaria. This process was not unique to Bavaria, and it is
seen as one of the hallmarks of Europe‟s transformation out of the Middle Ages into the
early modern period. Karin Jutta MacHardy explains, for example, that the Habsburgs
underwent a similar process:
Maximilian I . . . was succeeded by rulers whose main aim it was to expand and
consolidate the Habsburg dominions, centralize the administration and improve
their military capacity. Although political culture retained many feudal elements
in the following two and a half centuries, they are usually considered to be part of
52
Gerhard Tausche and Werner Ebermeier, Geschichte Landshuts (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2003), 4849. Also see Immler, “Wittelsbachische Primogeniturordnung 1506.”
53
Immler, “Wittelsbachische Primogeniturordnung 1506.”
63
a stage in modern state-building; and this process, while slower and on a smaller
scale, resembled the road to absolutism in other European countries.54
Now unified, Albrecht IV set out to ensure that the duchy would never again
fracture by implementing the rule of primogeniture in 1506. Unlike Georg of Landshut,
Albrecht IV‟s misfortune was that he produced too many potential male heirs, and shortly
after his death in 1508, the rule of primogeniture was put to the test. That Albrecht IV
unified Bavaria under what many believed to be aggressive circumstances did not sit well
with many lesser Bavarian nobles. They feared control being in the hands of one person
and tried to use Albrecht IV‟s abundance of sons against him.
Each of Albrecht IV‟s sons, Wilhelm IV, Ludwig X and Ernst, was born before
the 1506 decree, and as none were of age to rule at the time of Albrecht IV‟s death, the
duchy was left in a precarious position. Wilhelm IV was the oldest son, and by rule, he
was to assume his father‟s position as Duke of Bavaria. The two younger sons were
groomed to assume roles within the Church as a means of extending Wittelsbach reach in
that realm. This plan quickly fell apart. Bavarian nobles recognized the potential to
fragment Wittelsbach power. Wilhelm IV‟s mother, Kunigunde, who was supported by
the Habsburgs – who saw this as yet another chance to further ensure the instability of
their neighbor – began to urge Ludwig X not to accept religious orders and to challenge
the rule of primogeniture.55 Ludwig X forced the issue and claimed that the decree did
not apply to him because he was born before it went into effect. The younger brother won
54
Karin J. MacHardy, War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria: The Social and
Cultural Dimensions of Political Interaction, 1521-1622 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 21.
55
Max Spindler, Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte, vol. 2, Das Alte Bayern Der
Territorialstaat (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1988), 327.
64
his case, much to the delight of those working against Wilhelm IV. In 1514, an agreement
was brokered calling for both dukes to co-rule Bavaria while maintaining separate
estates.56
Unexpectedly and much to the surprise of the supporters of both Wilhelm IV and
Ludwig X, the brother‟s policies were pursued in the spirit of cooperation, and the two
brokered a deal in 1516 to co-rule under a unified agenda until Ludwig X‟s death in 1545.
After this, the law of primogeniture was not questioned and rule over Bavaria was passed
from Wilhelm IV to Albrecht V and subsequent generations of oldest sons.57
In 1525, the onion-shaped domes of the Frauenkirche were finally installed,
marking the true completion of that great landmark (fig. 4). It also marked the end of a
period of artistic growth in Bavaria. Economically, the duchy, which was mostly
comprised of rural, illiterate farmers, began to go into a state of decline after the reign of
Albrecht IV. As with the rest of the Holy Roman Empire, church corruption, a general
disinterest in the affairs of Rome and an ongoing distrust of papal authority consumed
every level of Bavarian culture. Jeffrey Chipps Smith describes the state of the duchy:
By the mid-sixteenth century two generations of strife had left broad scars, and
many of Germany‟s Catholics were either wavering in their faith or dispirited. A
deep-seated suspicion of Rome, that „foreign‟ center of Catholicism, predated the
56
Gerald Strauss, “The Religious Policies of Dukes Wilhelm and Ludwig of Bavaria in the First
Decade of the Protestant Era,” Church History 28, no. 4 (December 1959): 351-52.
57
Rall, Die Wittelsbacher in Lebensbildern, 110.
65
Reformation, as did complaints about a bloated clergy known, deservedly, as
much for its moral laxity as for its piety.58
While Bavaria never officially waivered from Catholicism, the actual state of Bavarian
religious affairs was very similar to that of the rest of Germany in the years surrounding
the dissolving religious stability of the early sixteenth century. James Brodrick describes
a papal official‟s report about the state of Bavaria:
(Dr. Augustine) Paumgartner, the Bavarian ambassador at Trent in 1561,
informed the Council that among the parochial priests of his country were to be
found men professing the views of Zwingli, Luther, Flacius Illyricus, and other
sectaries, and that at the visitation of 1558 more than 90 per cent [sic] of the
clergy were discovered to be living in open or secret concubinage.59
The Wittelsbach court was initially passive and even sympathetic at times to the growing
Protestant movements after 1517. Indeed, Munich‟s unique political structure created
religious complexities that came from unusual sources and ended with unusual results.
The actions of Argula von Grumbach are an example of the Protestant sentiment
that was spreading through Bavaria after 1517. Grumbach was a minor noble who served
as lady-in-waiting to Albrecht IV‟s wife, Kunigunde. She was one year older than
Albrecht IV‟s son, Wilhelm IV, and the two maintained relatively close ties throughout
childhood. Grumbach proved a very passionate theologian who sympathized with the
views of Martin Luther. Peter Matheson describes that both open Protestant sympathizers
and Catholics who secretly held Protestant views were common throughout Bavaria in
58
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation
in Germany (Princeton University Press, 2002), 13.
59
James Brodrick, Saint Peter Canisius (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1980), 131-32.
66
the years following 1517.60 Grumbach was a part of the long tradition of independentminded Bavarian nobles, and in 1523, she came to the defense of a young teacher at the
University in Ingolstadt who had been accused of being sympathetic to Lutheran doctrine.
She wrote a letter to the faculty explaining why they were wrong to censure the teacher
(fig. 6).61 She also sent a letter directly to her long-time acquaintance, Wilhelm IV.
Neither letter received an official response. Unofficially, Wilhelm IV had Grumbach‟s
husband stripped from his civic position, and he was warned to control his wife.62 In
hindsight, the duke might have wished to have been sterner. Grumbachs‟s writings were
subsequently published, and nearly 30,000 copies of her works, including the letters to
Ingolstadt and Wilhelm IV, were circulating throughout Bavaria and Germany in 1524.63
Another long-time Wittelsbach acquaintance was the subject of a similar religious
fiasco. Aventinus, the humanist author of the Bayerische Chronik, had also become
disenchanted with many of the policies of the Catholic Church that he found to be
hypocritical or outright incorrect. His criticisms were not unique, and they followed in
the tradition of Erasmus and other humanist Catholics who wished to see the Church
undertake reforms. He was also very vocal about how he thought these criticisms should
be remedied, which led to his arrest in 1528. However, Aventinus was eventually
released after promising to soften his tone toward religion. 64
60
Peter Matheson, Argula von Grumbach: A Woman’s Voice in the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T
Clark, 1995), 13.
61
Merry Wiesner, “Women‟s Response to the Reformation,” in The German People and the
Reformation, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 168.
62
Matheson, Argula von Grumbach, 18. Early historians claim that the Grumbach‟s were expelled
from Bavarian, but Matheson states that these claims cannot be substantiated.
63
Peter Matheson, “Argula von Grumbach,” The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to
Theology in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carter Lindberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 95.
64
Strauss, “The Religious Policies of Dukes Wilhelm and Ludwig of Bavaria,” 350.
67
Fig. 6. Matthes Maler, Cover of the Erfurt edition of Argula von Grumbach‟s letter to the
faculty at the University of Ingolstadt, 1523. Originally a woodcut.
68
These incidents highlight the precarious religious position that the Wittelsbach
dukes, and dukes throughout the Holy Roman Empire, occupied during the religious
schisms of the sixteenth century. The religious schisms presented potential opportunities
and pitfalls. Wilhelm IV was a ruler who wanted to see to it that Bavaria was
strengthened, and he wanted to maintain ties with those whom he perceived to be the
strongest allies. As each side of the religious debate began to take irreparable steps away
from reconciliation, the Wittelsbachs, who remained strategically ambiguous, were
forced to take action. By the Edict of Worms in 1521, the Wittelsbachs began to solidify
their stance by decreeing that all teachings of Luther were to be banned in Bavaria.65
However, Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X still took a soft line when dealing with violations of
their decrees by Lutheran sympathizers. The worst offenders received banishment from
Bavaria, but the more likely results were public apologies and assurances of future
compliance with the Catholic Church. Gerald Strauss states that the Wittelsbachs
religious policy in the early sixteenth century was “based on purely indigenous
considerations.”66
The most internal support for maintaining ties with Catholicism came from the
Northern Bavarian city of Ingolstadt. There, the university, which was founded in 1472,
had become for German Catholics what the university in Wittenberg was for Lutheran
thinkers. Ingolstadt became the home for some of Catholicism‟s greatest German
supporters, including the theologian Johannes Eck, and it eventually served as a
headquarters for the Jesuits, whose impact on patronage is investigated in Chapter Four.
65
66
Ibid., 362.
Ibid., 363
69
However, the source of guidance concerning Bavaria‟s religious policy primarily
came from Wilhelm IV‟s political advisor, Leonhard von Eck. Eck, perhaps more so than
even Wilhelm IV, was very quick to realize the shifting landscape across Germany in the
second decade of the sixteenth century.67 He was also keenly aware of the WittelsbachHabsburg rivalry and wanted as much as Wilhelm IV to thwart any Habsburg advances
within the Empire, so long as it could be done without damaging Bavarian interests.
Repeatedly, the dukes proved that they were happy to forget their Catholic devotion if it
meant political advantage over their neighbors. When Charles V had his brother
Ferdinand I installed as the next in line to become Holy Roman Emperor, the
Wittelsbachs became convinced that the Habsburgs were trying to establish hereditary
rights to the throne. To prevent this, Eck advised Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X to ally
themselves with Francois I of France, who had brought together an alliance of German
Protestant princes and Turks to oust the Habsburgs.68 Particularly inviting for the
Wittelsbachs was Francois I‟s promise to have Wilhelm IV installed as Holy Roman
Emperor should he cooperate against the Habsburgs.69 It was not until Eck accepted that
Charles V and his successor, Ferdinand I, were too powerful to topple that he urged
Wilhelm IV to throw the full support of Bavaria behind the Catholic Church.70
This type of political and religious ambiguity and the willingness to serve the
family first was further demonstrated in the career of Albrecht IV‟s youngest surviving
son, Ernst. Ludwig X‟s assertion as partial head of Bavarian lands after the death of his
67
Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: The Reformation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1967), 170.
68
Kraus, Geschichte Bayerns, 205-06.
69
Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 215.
70
Kraus, Geschichte Bayerns, 205-06.
70
father in 1508, because of the primogeniture loophole, had the unintended effect of
leaving the same challenge open to his younger brother, Ernst, who was born in 1500.
Troubled at the prospect of losing even more control to a third party, the two older
brothers, Ludwig X and Wilhelm IV, set out to find a way to pacify the younger brother‟s
wont for power and to insure that he would not assert his right to a third of Bavarian
lands.71 The two older brothers found a solution that they hoped would both satisfy their
brother and put a dent in the growing authority of the Habsburgs. In 1513, they set out to
establish Ernst as the Archbishop of Salzburg, a city that rested on the border of Bavaria
and Austria. Their mission, however, proved to be a failure during the early years of their
attempt, and Ernst, who had no interest in taking holy orders, maintained the position that
he should control a third of Bavaria. 72
Initially, Ernst‟s predicament could not have been better for the Habsburgs, who
once again threw their support behind the youngest brother, the same as they had done
with Ludwig X. However, by the 1530s, the Habsburgs were embroiled in much larger
conflicts. The 1520s saw the need for the Habsburgs to reorganize a governmental
structure that had been weakened by family deaths and the growing threat of invasion by
the Turkish Empire. Given the enormity of these problems, they were forced to stop
focusing on the Wittelsbach primogeniture controversy. With the Habsburgs weakened,
71
Felix F. Strauss, “The Effect of the Council of Trent on the Episcopal Tenure of Duke Ernst of
Bavaria, Archbishop-Confirmed of Salzburg, in 1554,” The Journal of Modern History 32, no. 2 (June
1960): 120.
72
Ibid., 120-22.
71
Ernst‟s primogeniture claim fell apart, and he agreed to renounce his claim to the throne
in exchange for a large sum of money.73
Ernst‟s renunciation put Salzburg back on the table. The area, with its vast salt
deposits and its position as a European crossroads, was extremely valuable. With the
Habsburgs dealing with political issues in almost every corner of their realm, the brothers
finally fulfilled their mission of obtaining the archbishopric. In 1525, they made a secret
deal with the Bishop of Salzburg that Ernst would be next in line in exchange for military
support during a skirmish involving the bishop. The two older brothers flirted with both
sides in the debacle by maintaining ties with the Habsburg opposition while at the same
time signing a treaty with the Habsburgs at Linz in 1534. In 1538, the two brothers
asserted their claim, and by October 1540, Ernst was installed in Salzburg. 74
The first of the councils at Trent was held midway through Ernst‟s tenure in
Salzburg. The councils highlighted the glaring flaw in Ernst‟s position, namely that he
had not taken holy orders. Pressures from Rome about the issue began to mount prior to
the opening council in 1545; how the Wittelsbachs handled the issue suggests that
perhaps they were only as Catholic as was politically advantageous. Ernst never did take
holy orders, and for fourteen years, his brothers were kept busy fabricating excuses in
order to maintain his position. The earliest reason was that he could not take orders for
dynastic purposes. Neither of the older brothers had children, and they argued that Ernst
needed to remain a secular leader in case he was needed to produce a male heir. After
Albrecht V was born, raised and married, this reasoning became less convincing to
73
74
Ibid., 121.
Ibid.
72
Church reformers. The Wittelsbachs continued to try various excuses until Ernst was
finally ousted in 1554.75 The story of Ernst suggests that Wittelsbach interest in
Catholicism was primarily as a political alignment meant to strengthen the duchy.
The same religious indifference in the face of political gain can be found in
Wilhelm IV‟s patronage. Two cases exemplify the initial religious tolerance of the
Wittelsbachs during the early years of the reformation. The first example is the tenure of
Ludwig Senfl, who served as a court musician in Munich during approximately the same
years that Ernst served in Salzburg. The second study focuses on a series of humanist
paintings commissioned by Wilhelm IV.
The tradition of musical excellence that began with Conrad Paumann, under the
patronage of Albrecht III, was maintained during the reign of Wilhelm IV. The most
famous person to receive Wilhelm IV‟s patronage was Ludwig Senfl, a singer and vocal
composer. Senfl was born in Basle around 1486 (fig. 7). He was a well-travelled
musician who joined the court of Maximilian I as a choir boy and remained under the
Emperor‟s patronage until his death in 1519.76 When Charles V came to power, he
disbanded Maximilian I‟s court, and Senfl spent several years trying to convince Charles
V that he should remain with the court. These attempts failed, and Senfl found himself
without a patron in 1522 when he composed music for the wedding of Wilhelm IV and
Maria Jacobäa von Baden.77 A year after the wedding, Wilhelm IV sought after Senfl to
75
Ibid., 126-28.
Martin Bente and Clytus Gottwald, “Senfl, Ludwig,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music
Online, accessed June 21, 2010, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/ grove/music/25409.
77
Bente and Gottwald, “Ludwig, Senfl.”
76
73
serve as a composer at the Bavarian court. Senfl came to be recognized as one of the
leading composers of lieder in the early sixteenth century.
Germany maintained a very vibrant, yet provincial, vocal-music culture in the
sixteenth century that was embraced by all levels of society, including the courts.
Melodies and poetry from popular songs were often used as models for larger works, and
most vocal composers working in Germany during the sixteenth century were expected to
be equally adept with popular as well as larger, polyphonic musical forms.78 Such was the
case with Senfl, who led the Bavarian hofkapelle out of the Middle Ages, bringing it in
line with other European centers and allowing the Wittelsbachs to compete when
recruiting new singers. At the same time, Senfl‟s secular works were almost exclusively
written in German, using traditional German forms such as the Tenorlied.79
Senfl was so respected by his peers, Catholic and Protestant alike, that his motet,
Ecce quam bonum, was chosen to open the Diet at Augsburg in 1530. Taken from Psalm
133, the opening lines of the text read, “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred
live together in unity!”80 Invoking the original intent of the council, this motet served as a
call to unity within the Holy Roman Empire and earned Senfl praise from all sides.81
78
Howard M. Brown, Music in the Renaissance, Prentice Hall History of Music Series
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976), 229.
79
Bente and Gottwald, “Ludwig, Senfl.”
80
Psalms 133: 1 (New Revised Standard Version).
81
Rebecca Wagner Oettinger, “Ludwig Senfl and the Judas Trope: Composition and Religious
Tolerance at the Bavarian Court,” Early Music History 20 (2001): 213.
74
Fig. 7. Hans Schwarz, Sketch of Ludwig Senfl, 1519. Berlin National Museum.
While working for the Catholic Wittelsbachs, Senfl also maintained open
communication with Martin Luther, who considered Senfl‟s works the pinnacle of
German music.82 Senfl and Luther maintained contact even after the confutation of the
Augsburg Confession by Charles V, who by this time was receiving the support of the
Wittelsbach family in the religious affairs of the Holy Roman Empire. Rebecca Wagner
Oettinger reports that at one point Senfl and Luther were involved in communications
82
Bente and Gottwald, “Ludwig, Senfl.”
75
wherein Luther asked to receive certain arrangements of Senfl‟s music and admitted that
he had grown weary of the overall religious conflict. Senfl responded by sending him two
arrangements.83 In his letter, Luther fully articulated the dangers inherent in
communicating with Senfl, but acknowledged that Senfl‟s talents were so great that the
letter was worth the risk:
Grace and peace in Christ! Although my name is so thoroughly hated and
despised, dear Ludwig, that I must fear you will receive and read my letter hardly
with safety, my love for music, with which I perceive God has adorned and
talented you, has conquered all my fears. My love for music leads me also to hope
that my letter will not endanger you in any way, for who, even in Turkey, would
find fault with anyone who loves music and praises the artist? I, at least, love
your Bavarian dukes, even though they certainly dislike me. I honor them above
all others because they cultivate and honor music.84
This series of correspondence between the two men took place in October 1530, in the
midst of the Diet at Augsburg and almost ten years after Pope Leo X excommunicated
Luther with the papal bull, Decent Romanum Pontificem, which put into effect the threat
leveled against Luther in the earlier document, Exsurge Domine.
Senfl remained at the court in Munich until his death, around 1543. By this time,
the Wittelsbachs were under pressure to see to it that Ernst took holy orders in order to
fall in line with Catholic doctrine. Wilhelm IV was receiving attention from advisors and
friends from within Bavaria and Rome about the loose nature of his enforcement of
83
Oettinger, “Ludwig Senfl and the Judas Trope,” 214-15.
Quoted in Walter E. Buszin and Marin Luther, “Luther on Music,” The Musical Quarterly 32,
no. 1 (Jan 1946): 84.
84
76
Catholicism in Bavaria. As early as the 1520s, the duke‟s advisor, Leonhard von Eck, and
Luther‟s great rival, Johann Eck, both pressured Wilhelm IV to take stronger measures
against Lutheran ideology, which both Ecks saw as a gateway ideology to Anabaptist
beliefs.85 The Anabaptists, whose views sought to erase larger religious organizations
altogether, seemingly proved to be too far from the Catholic fold for even Wilhelm IV,
and he spent a great deal of energy and wealth trying to eradicate that system of belief
from his duchy.86 By 1524, a system was set up that provided financial rewards to those
who reported suspected heretics; however, even the payment system seemed to support
the notion that Wilhelm IV was fairly tolerant of Lutheran ideology. He offered 32
Gulden for exposing Anabaptists while Lutherans only fetched 20 Gulden.87 And while
Wilhelm IV imposed legal regulations on religion in Bavaria and went so far as to
support the ousting of extreme heretics from the duchy by either banishment or death,
Senfl‟s career suggests that he did not seem to mind a bit of religious diversity when it
was advantageous.
If the Wittelsbachs wished to use art as propaganda, or if they intended to use the
artists in residence at the court in Munich as examples of proper religious leanings, they
could have used Senfl‟s death as an opportunity to put an end to any doubts about their
religious ambiguity by supporting a musician of proper Catholic heritage. Instead,
85
Strauss, “The Religious Policies of Dukes Wilhelm and Ludwig of Bavaria,” 366-68.
Beginning in the late 1520s, Wilhelm IV‟s intolerance of Anabaptists did lead to a number of
executions, including the execution of a young woman that was witnessed by the painter Jörg Breu the
Elder. See Pia F. Cuneo, Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany: Jörg Breu the Elder and the
Fashioning of Political Identity, ca. 1475-1536 (Boston, MA: Brill, 1998), 179.
87
Strauss, “The Religious Policies of Dukes Wilhelm and Ludwig of Bavaria,” 367.
86
77
Ludwig Daser was installed as the new Kapellmeister in Munich in 1552.88 While Senfl
sympathized with Luther, Daser was outright open about his Protestant beliefs. Daser,
who had been with the court as a singer since childhood, was eventually dismissed, but it
was much later, during the reign of Albrecht V. While the composer appears to have been
dismissed for his beliefs, there is evidence that suggests that Daser was merely cleared
out of the way to make room for the much more talented composer, Orlando di Lasso.89
Whatever the reasons, Daser spent eleven years as an openly Protestant Kapellmeister
with the Munich court during the height of Tridentine reform.
Wilhelm IV was no more discerning with the religious beliefs of his painters than
he seems to have been with his musicians. In 1524, a minor storm was brewing for three
visual artists in Nuremberg. Two brothers, Barthel and Sebald Beham, and fellow painter
and miniaturist, Georg Pencz, had been accused of renouncing Catholic doctrine and, for
Barthel Beham, religion in general. When questioned about his beliefs, “Barthel held
baptism and the Eucharist „as wicked human fraud.‟ Nor could he believe in Holy Writ,
and would therefore bide his own belief „till the truth came.‟”90 The three were banished
from the city. Sebald and Georg stayed relatively close to Nuremberg, but Barthel headed
south. He ended up in the court of Wilhelm IV where he apparently dulled his rhetoric
but never recanted his statements.91 Wilhelm IV certainly would have known about his
banishment, and the idea that he would have kept Barthel employed seems in line with
88
Daniel T. Politoske, “Daser, Ludwig,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
accessed June 21, 2010, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/07237.
89
James Haar, “Lassus,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, accessed March 29, 2011,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/16063pg1.
90
Dr. Adolf Rosenberg, “The German Little Masters of Durer‟s School,” in The Early Teutonic,
Italian, and French Masters, ed. Robert Dohme and Augustus Henry Keane (London: Chatto and Windus,
1880), 144.
91
Ibid., 144-45.
78
his lack of concern for the religious leanings of talented artists. Under the employ of
Wilhelm IV, Barthel went on to paint portraits of the two dukes, Wilhelm IV and Ludwig
X, and their family, creating a series that reinforced the ever-lingering notion of the Haus
Bayern by displaying the lineage and scope of Wittelsbach rule, much the same as the
genealogical mural commissioned for the Alte Hof in 1460.92
Aside from retaining one of the “three godless painters,” as Barthel Beham came
to be known, Wilhelm IV also pursued paintings whose subjects helped to usher in
Renaissance Humanism north of the Alps. Indeed, his largest contribution to the world of
painting was the commissioning of a history cycle meant for the Residenz. This series of
sixteen paintings was undertaken as a joint project with his wife. The entire series
involved eight artists and took thirteen years to complete.93
The subject of these large panel paintings are divided into two categories. Eight
horizontal paintings depict famous heroines from various historical periods, including
figures from Ancient Greece and Rome, the Old Testament and Catholic saints. Eight
vertical paintings depict famous battles from the same periods.94 As Ashley West
describes, these paintings served to engage the viewer with a Humanist understanding of
history. She points out that humanist historical paintings generally fit into two categories:
92
Ibid.
Ashley West, “The Exemplary Paintings of Hans Burgkmair the Elder: History at the Munich
Court of Wilhelm IV,” in Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Early Modern German Culture: Order and
Creativity 1550-1750, ed. Randolph C. Head and Daniel Christensen (Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninlijke
Brill NV, 2007), 199.
94
Ibid. Also see Pia F. Cuneo, Art and Politics in Early Modern Germany;” Pia F. Cuneo, “Jörg
Breu the Elder‟s Death of Lucretia: History, Sexuality and the State,” in Saints, Sinners, and Sisters:
Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 26-43; Barbara Eschenburg, “Altdorfers Alexanderschlacht und ihr
Verhältnis zum Historienzyklus Wilhelm IV,” Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft 33 (1979): 36-67;
and Gisela Goldberg, Die Alexanderschlacht und die Historinbilder des Bayerischen Herzogs Wilhelm IV
und seiner Gemahlin Jacobaea für den Münchner Residenz (München: Hirmer Verlag, 1983).
93
79
those of the Nine Worthies and those of the virtuous exemplars. Both categories used a
number of historical characters to represent certain virtuous deeds or qualities. These
paintings provided a means of historical study that allowed a contemporary viewer to
learn from the lessons of the past. She states that “Renaissance thinkers widely
maintained that history should not only be true, but also useful.”95
Certainly Wilhelm IV could have used exemplars to help him navigate the
fragmented religious and political landscape of the 1530s. Splitting his attention between
local religious skirmishes, the installment of his brother Ernst, his failed bid at
challenging Charles V and the constant threat of the invading Turks might have provided
the inspiration for wanting to produce works of art that were more than merely inspiring.
These paintings served as instructions for how to apply the appropriate virtue to any
given situation. As West explains, “Knowing the cycles of history thus became a tool for
prognostication, more reliable than reading the stars.”96
Like Aventinus‟ Bayerische Chronik, this series of paintings was also meant to
establish the Wittelsbachs as powerful rulers to all who participated with the work. In
several cases, such as Breu‟s Lucretia and Hans Schöpfer‟s Virginia, the likeness of
Wilhelm IV or Maria Jacobäa were painted into the works. Pia F. Cuneo points to the
similarity between the fourth figure from the left in Breu‟s painting and Hans Wertinger‟s
portrait of Wilhelm IV (figs. 8-9).97
More than vanity, being depicted in paintings was a means of accessing the
universal virtue implicit in the subject of the painting. After all, this was an era in which
95
Ibid., 201.
Ibid., 201-02.
97
Cuneo, “Jörg Breu the Elder‟s Rape of Lucretia,” 35.
96
80
great power was given to images. Such was their power that most European legal systems
had adopted the legal term, “Punishment in Effigy,” which allowed punishment to be
inflicted on the image of a criminal if that criminal was not actually present to receive the
punishment. In Spain, for example, of the nearly 32,000 people sentenced to death
between 1481 and 1809 during the inquisitions, more than half were executed in effigy.98
Furthermore, the Iconoclasm debate was one of the driving factors in the dissolving
religious scene in Germany during the sixteenth century. Religious symbols, ritual and
spaces of ritual all factored into the power given, or not given, to religious images, and
there seems to have been a general acceptance throughout Europe that many different
types of images could have magical properties. This made them dangerous or, in the case
of Wilhelm IV‟s inclusion in several of the paintings of the historical cycle, powerful
tools.
Power was a strong motivation, and once again, religious diversity amongst the
artists receiving his patronage was more than acceptable, so long as the resulting products
fit his needs. At least three of the eight artists commissioned for the series were openly
sympathetic to some aspect of the Protestant movements that were occurring throughout
the Holy Roman Empire. Beham, who scared Catholics and Lutherans alike with his
godlessness, was commissioned, as was Jörg Breu the Elder, whose journal, the Chronik
des Augsburger Malers Jörg Breu, was highly critical of both Wilhelm IV in particular
and religious institutions in general. In his journal, Breu went so far as to describe
98
Dr. Wolfgang Schild, “Punishment of the Dead and Inanimate Objects and in Effigy,” in
Criminal Justice Through the Ages: From Divine Judgment to Modern German Legislation, trans. John
Frosberry (Rothenburg o.d. Tauber: Mittelalterliches Kriminalmuseum, 1993), 223.
81
Wilhelm IV as one of the most cruel and intolerant rulers of the day.99 The third
Protestant-leaning painter, Hans Burgkmair, who painted two scenes for the cycle, went
on to illustrate the Apocalypse section of the reissue of Luther‟s German translation of
the New Testament.100
Because his patronage reflected ambiguous religious values, it is hard to define an
outward religious program for the artworks and artists under the patronage of Wilhelm IV.
Wilhelm IV died on March 7, 1550. At his death, Bavaria found itself at the end of a long
period of centralization on behalf of the Munich line of Wittelsbachs. Like his father,
Wilhelm IV‟s vision for Bavaria included a return to prominence as one of the most
powerful duchies in the Holy Roman Empire, and he was willing to pursue any means
necessary to strengthen the duchy, including changing political and religious alliances,
and promoting his family to religious posts for which they were not qualified. His
patronage reflected these values. From the artists he supported to the artworks that he
commissioned, Wilhelm IV was one in a long line of Wittelsbach patrons who
understood the power of art. The works of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance
were meant to offer guidance to rulers by providing historical examples of the superiority
of Bavarians and, by extension, the Wittelsbach family. Wilhelm IV‟s son, Albrecht V,
took up his father‟s torch during the early years of his reign, but he also took Bavaria in a
different direction. It was with Albrecht V that art and the patronage of artists became
fully integrated with the promotion and enforcement of specific political and religious
policies in Bavaria.
99
Cuneo, “Jörg Breu the Elder‟s Rape of Lucretia,” 36.
Tilman Falk, "Burgkmair," in Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, accessed March 29, 2011,
http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T012373pg2.
100
82
Fig. 8. Jörg Breu the Elder, Death of Lucretia, 1528. Oil on panel; 40x58 in. Alte
Pinakothek, Munich.
Fig. 9. Hans Wertinger, Wilhelm IV of Bavaria, 1526. Oil on panel; 18x27 in. Alte
Pinakothek, Munich.
83
CHAPTER III
The Early Years of the Reign of Albrecht V: the Kunstkammer, Northern Princely
Humanism and Courtly Patronage
These were truly generations born on a threshold, shaken and often confused by the
violence of the change that took place within them.101
The history cycle of paintings, with its ancient and early biblical subjects, and the
Bayerische Chronik, with its focus on new historical objectivity, represent a shift in the
patronage of the Wittelsbachs. Whereas late medieval artworks and artists, such as the
Frauenkirche and the court musician, Conrad Paumann, stood and worked to signify the
greatness of Bavaria and, by extension, the Munich Wittelsbachs, the painting cycle and
the Chronicle both functioned as works meant for the enrichment of the individual.
Undoubtedly, attaining and supporting great artists such as Altdorfer, Ludwig Senfl and
Aventinus was still a means of validating the power of the court at Munich; the new
works, however, were created in a humanist spirit, and it is this spirit that Albrecht V
inherited when he began his reign in Bavaria.
The purpose of this chapter is to show that, in many ways, Albrecht V‟s patronage
was a continuation of his father‟s patronage, which became more concerned with the
personalized questioning of princely value and the demonstration of that value.
Understanding the early years of Albrecht V‟s reign helps to highlight how drastic and
personal his conversion from a humanist patron to an obsessive religious devotee was. It
101
Reinhard P. Becker, “Introduction,” in Erasmus, Luther, Müntzer, and others: German
Humanism and Reformation, ed. Reinhard P. Becker (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company,
1982), xv.
84
also emphasizes how unfocused the duke‟s patronage could be, which casts doubt on his
role as a top-down social organizer. As mentioned in the Introduction, these aspects of
Albrecht V‟s patronage tend to get overlooked in favor of presenting his entire reign as
motivated by an organized, early modern, agenda of confessionalization.102
Describing the patronage of the Wittelsbachs in the early sixteenth century as
humanist is only helpful when the concept of humanism is explicitly defined. Today‟s
humanist, for example, is a far cry from the definition used to describe humanists of the
fifteenth and sixteenth century. Compounding matters is the shift in the use of the term
Renaissance humanist. For example, today‟s understanding of Renaissance humanism
compared to a nineteenth-century scholar‟s understanding of the same concept is quite
different. Indeed, the term has undergone so many changes in definition and usage that in
1962, Paul Oskar Kristeller stated:
Humanism can be, and has been, defined in a variety of ways, and we might very
well take the view that any definition is acceptable provided it is explicitly
formulated, the range of its application is clearly indicated, and its original
meaning is consistently maintained, especially if the definition seems to have
some relevance or validity for the phenomena which is it intended to describe.103
102
See, Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), accessed June 21, 2010,
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft738nb4fn/; Andrew L. Thomas, “A House Divided: Wittelsbach
Confessional Court Cultures in Bavaria, the Palatinate, and Bohemia, C. 1550-1650,” (PhD diss., Purdue
University, 2007); Joel F. Harrington and Helmut Walser Smith, “Confessionalization, Community, and
State Building in Germany, 1555-1870,” The Journal of Modern History 69, no. 1 (March 1997): 77-101.
103
Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Studies on Renaissance Humanism During the Last Twenty Years,”
Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962): 7. Also see, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
85
Michel Foucault similarly asserts that “the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple too
diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection.”104
Following the lead of Kristeller, and perhaps not living up to the charge of
Foucault, this chapter defines and uses the term, “northern princely humanism,” when
referring to the patronage of the Wittelsbachs. More than an exercise in pedantry,
northern princely humanism precisely describes the unique role that humanist ideology
played at the court in Munich during the sixteenth century.
The quote at the beginning of this chapter describes Renaissance humanism as a
rather intimate undertaking. The highly individualized nature of the movement led Erwin
Panofsky to say that humanism “was not so much a movement as an attitude.”105 While
this attitude resided in the minds of individuals, there were certain shared characteristics.
For Panofsky, who was studying Italian humanism, humanists began to refocus on
classical Greek and Latin texts and a humanities-based education as a new way of
informing, but not replacing, theological training. Panofsky emphasized that humanism
was more than a secular movement that focused on man at the expense of theological
study, and he suggested that the study of humanities was an attempt to reconcile the
classical concept of a relationship between civilized and uncivilized man with the
medieval concept of the relationship between man and divinity.106 In short, Panofsky‟s
definition of Renaissance humanism might be summed up as an attempt to understand
104
Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984),
105
Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 2.
Ibid.
44.
106
86
how to fully live as a Christian in the context of Renaissance society by using classical
texts as a guide.
The history cycle of Wilhelm IV exemplifies such a notion. These paintings were
intended to be used for more than reflection and representation. Humanist historical
investigation was meant to be practical. Artists sought to provide patrons with valuable
instructions and inspiration within their works of art. When Wilhelm IV saw the paintings,
he was to examine the virtues of each so that he might understand how better to rule his
own duchy. The paintings that portrayed ancient subjects were not to be interpreted as a
secular understanding of history; rather, they were understood as tools to be used within
the context of a duchy that viewed living outside of Christianity, and specifically
Catholicism, heresy.
The coupling of great military and political leaders with virtuous women in the
history cycle was in line with what Diarmaid MacCulloch termed, “princely
humanism.”107 Generally, humanism was an individual process of discerning how man
should behave toward other men in accordance with God, and this allowed for various
interpretations depending on the social status of the person doing the thinking. Humanism
was attached to a growing literate, merchant population, as much as it was to nobility,
and two very different ideologies emerged from both camps. While ideas about the
liberty and republican values of the ancients were being adopted by those who had the
most to gain from them, nobles focused on different aspects of classical Greek life,
including examples of how great leaders ruled and fought.108 The history cycle, much like
107
108
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 77.
Ibid.
87
Machiavelli‟s The Prince was more a treatise on how leaders should govern. Like The
Prince, the history cycle equally advocated the concepts of nurture and might.
Unlike their Italian counterparts, who saw ancient Greek and Roman writings as a
part of their cultural lineage and who lived every day surrounded by remnants of these
cultures, the German princes and scholars who took an interest in humanist pursuits
expanded the scope of their historical investigation by looking at the lineage of
specifically Germanic peoples.109 The first generation of German humanists were
educated in Italy, but second and third generation northern humanists began to take the
concepts of their Italian counterparts into completely different directions given the
different cultural landscapes that they occupied. By the beginning of the sixteenth century,
a form of humanism had taken hold in Germany that was entirely discernable from the
movement that had been taking place in Italy.110
The Bayerische Chronik is an example of an early humanist treatise about the
people that resided north of the Alps. Like the medieval chronicles, it was meant to
provide a justification of Wittelsbach rule through lineage. However, it also sought to
provide historical examples of effective rule for the contemporary leaders of Bavaria.
According to Reinhard P. Becker, this new type of northern humanism “involved
primarily neither classics nor philosophy but what might be roughly characterized as
literature.”111 Jeffrey Chipps Smith supports Becker‟s statement in describing a uniquely
northern Renaissance in the visual arts: “I argue that there was indeed a distinctively
northern European Renaissance, but one in which curiosity about the individual and the
109
Becker, “Introduction,” German Humanism and Reformation, xvi.
Ibid.
111
Ibid.
110
88
natural world was valued more than a renewed dialogue with antiquity. The latter
occurred in the sixteenth century but never to the same degree as in Italy.”112
Court patronage in Munich at the beginning of the sixteenth century was a mix of
MacCulloch‟s notion of princely, as opposed to civic, humanism and Becker‟s and
Smith‟s understandings of northern humanism. The result is best defined by the term,
northern princely humanism. Northern princely humanism clarifies all of the nuances that
were mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. In short, northern princely humanism was
the study of classical, biblical and Germanic texts for the purpose of proving the
legitimacy of a ruling family‟s reign and for discerning models for the most effective
ways for a Christian prince to rule his duchy.
Although not unique to the north, northern princely humanism gave rise to a spirit
of inquiry about all knowledge, allowing those who could afford it a great deal of
freedom to explore, through artworks and objects, not only the past, but also the greater
world in which they lived. The same curiosity and training that drove humanist scholars
to look backwards also drove them to look outward, creating a movement, especially
among princes, that pushed the collection and maintenance of as many objects of
knowledge, of any kind, as possible.113
Northern princely humanists could also be superficial. Humanism as an act of
artistic patronage was much different than actually embracing and living as humanist.
Albrecht V avidly sought classical texts and artifacts. He amassed some of the best
collections in Europe. However, the humanist spirit of inquiry and proof through the
112
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, The Northern Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2004), 12.
Paula Findlen, “The Modern Muses: Renaissance Collecting and the Cult of Remembrence,” in
Museums and Memory, ed. Susan A. Crane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 162-63.
113
89
study of the past and of the foreign was mostly the result of those doing the collecting
rather than those paying for it. Albrecht V‟s impressive collections were more a testament
to his ability to hire good collectors than to his personal humanist leanings. In short, it
was the collectors themselves who provided the substance of his humanism.114
Albrecht V was born in 1528, the same year that Wilhelm IV and his wife began
their commission of the history cycle of paintings (fig. 10). The cycle marked one of
several shifts taking place at the court during the beginning of the sixteenth century, both
physical and ideological. Wilhelm IV finally completed a full transfer of residency from
the Alte Hof to the Neuveste, which allowed the Wittelsbachs freedom to come and go as
they pleased. The Neuveste had begun as a medieval fortress; the dukes of the sixteenth
century began to convert the property into a Renaissance palace, the Residenz.115
Albrecht V‟s upbringing coincided with the maturation of humanism north of the
Alps. Clergy such as Erasmus were advocating for the application of humanist principles
to help reform the Catholic Church. The young duke began his education at the university
in Ingolstadt. In Ingolstadt, Albrecht V was exposed to the teachings of Johann Eck,
under whose leadership the university became the center of Catholic humanist thought in
the Holy Roman Empire.
114
Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1996), 58
Samuel John Klingensmith, The Utility of Splendor: Ceremony, Social Life and Architecture at
the Court of Bavaria, 1600-1800 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 21.
115
90
Fig. 10. Hans Mielich, Albrecht V of Bavaria, 1545. Oil on panel; 26.5x34 in. Alte
Pinakothek, Munich.
91
Albrecht V continued the tradition of strengthening Wittelsbach ties with their
traditional Catholic rivals, the Habsburgs. In 1546, he married Anna of Austria, the
daughter of the soon-to-be Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I. On the cusp of the
Schmalkaldic War, the marriage signified the continuation of recent political cooperation
between the two families. However this move was as much about Wilhelm IV‟s political
belief that siding with the Habsburgs would offer the biggest eventual rewards as it was
about uniting behind Catholicism. As the tensions between Charles V and the
Schmalkaldic league increased, Wilhelm IV created an escape route from Catholic
loyalty in case the Protestants prevailed. Rather than siding with Charles V, the Bavarian
duke merely asserted the neutrality of his duchy and allowed the Habsburg armies to pass
freely through Bavaria.116
When he began his reign, Albrecht V continued to nurture the importance of the
arts at the Munich court. He expanded the size of the court from 308 members at the
beginning of his reign in 1552, to 866 members by 1570, a fourfold increase from the 162
members of the court that were employed in 1508.117 During Albrecht V‟s reign, the costs
of maintaining the choir alone grew to account for nearly twenty percent of all wage
payments at the court. Despite warnings from his advisors, Albrecht V maintained an
aggressive program of patronage, driving the duchy to near bankruptcy by the end of his
reign. Bavaria did not recover until the middle of the seventeenth century.118
116
Alastair Duke, Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries, ed. Judith Pollman and
Andrew Spicer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009), 128.
117
Rainer Babel, “The Courts of the Wittelsbachs c. 1500-1750,” in The Princely Courts of
Europe, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999), 193-97.
118
Ibid.
92
One avenue of Albrecht V‟s patronage was the continuation and expansion of the
humanist principles of his father. In 1552, he commissioned Hans Mielich to create the
Book of Jewels, which contains over one hundred miniatures documenting the inventory
of the duchess‟ collection of jewelry (fig. 11). Interestingly, the book‟s first image depicts
Albrecht V and Anna playing chess surrounded by onlookers, perhaps signifying the
duchess‟s intellectual equality (fig. 12). The book was so highly prized that it remained in
the private collection of the Wittelsbachs until 1843, when King Ludwig I of Bavaria
donated it to the Bavarian State Library.119
The Book of Jewels was an early incarnation of Albrecht V‟s passion for
collecting and documenting. Both qualities are hallmarks of northern princely humanism,
and the tiny book was just the beginning. In the early 1560s, Albrecht V commissioned
plans to build a four-winged structure that would serve as a repository of humanist
collecting. The building, designed in accordance with the latest German Renaissance
styles, eventually contained the court library, the house treasures, an Antiquarium and a
Kunstkammer.
119
Marianne Reuter, “Beschreibung der Handschrift Cod.icon. 429 Tresorhandschrift,” in BSB
CodIcon Online, Elektronischer Katalog der Codices iconographici monacenses der Bayerischen
Staatsbibliothek München, accessed January 27, 2011, http://codicon.digitalesammlungen.de/inventiconCod.icon.%20429.pdf.
93
Fig. 11. Hans Mielich, Miniature from the Book of Jewels of the Duchess Anna of
Bavaria, 1552-55. Watercolor on vellum and parchment; 8x6 in. Cod. Icon. 429, Image
11, Bavarian State Library, Munich Digitization Center, accessed January 27, 2011,
http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00006598/image_11.
94
Fig. 12. Hans Mielich, Miniature from the Book of Jewels of the Duchess Anna of
Bavaria, 1552-55. Watercolor on vellum and parchment; 8x6 in. Cod. Icon. 429, Image
10, Bavarian State Library, Munich Digitization Center, accessed January 27, 2011,
http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00006598/image_10.
95
Construction of the new building began in 1563 on the site of recently-acquired
Franciscan property.120 The building was partially based on the plans of Jacopo Strada.
Strada was a Mantuan-born collector and architect who came to know Albrecht V
through a mutual acquaintance, Hans Jakob Fugger of the famous Augsburg banking
family. Strada was well known in Germany by the late 1540s as a successful collector in
both Nuremberg and subsequently in Augsburg for the Fuggers. He and Albrecht V
began their relationship in the 1550s, and Strada served as one of Albrecht V‟s main
buyers of Italian art.121 Strada, however, was not selected to oversee the actual
construction of the building. That responsibility was left to Simon Zwitzel, another of
Hans Jakob Fugger‟s employees.122 Rather, Strada was charged with finding artifacts to
fill the building. Most notably, Strada was able to acquire the sculpture collection of
Andrea Loredan on behalf of Albrecht V, a collection that was large enough to prompt
another phase of building for a room big enough to hold the entire collection.123
The Antiquarium wing, which was constructed in 1568, was specifically designed
to house “antique and pseudo-antique sculptures, in particular busts and statues, clearly
named and of the highest quality.”124 It was one of a series of rooms that comprised a
larger program of collecting. Alongside the Antiquarium, the duke was quickly amassing
120
Dorthea Diemer and Peter Diemer, “Das Antiquarium Herzog Albrechts V. von Bayern
Schiksale einer fürstlichen Antikensammlung der Spätrenaissance,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 58, no.
1 (1995): 56.
121
Dirk J. Jansen and Annemarie C. van der Boom, "Strada." in Grove Art Online. Oxford Art
Online, accessed March 29, 2011, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/
art/T081694pg1.
122
Diemer and Diemer, “Das Antiquarium Herzog Albrechts V,” 59.
123
Hermann Neumann, The Munich Residence and the Treasury (Munich: Prestel, 2008), 10.
124
Lorenz Seelig, “The Munich Kunstkammer, 1565-1807,” in The Origins of Museums: The
Cabinets of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur
MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 77.
96
objects to place in his Kunstkammer. The concept of the Kunstkammer was set forth by
another collector who worked for both the Fuggers and the Wittelsbachs, Samuel von
Quiccheberg. The Flemish-born Quiccheberg was trained as a physician and collector,
and he found his way to Germany by serving initially as a physician and later as a
librarian at the court of Hans Jakob Fugger in the 1550s. Quiccheberg is credited with
creating the concept of the early modern museum.125
Rather than earlier Kunst- or Wunderkammern, which were primarily collections
of oddities that had been around since at least the fourteenth century, the Kunstkammer in
Munich was arranged according to Quiccheberg‟s concept of the theatrum. The theatrum
was a program of organization meant to lead viewers toward an encyclopedic
understanding of the world.126 Items in the Munich Kunstkammer were situated so that
viewers, upon entering the room, would be overwhelmed with the amount of material in
the collection. Viewers were led throughout the room in a prescribed manner, with
various tables each containing articles that embodied a different aspect of knowledge.127
The range of materials in the collection was extensive and often blurred the lines
between art and artifact. Tables arranged with minerals were located in the same room as
gold works from modern-day Mexico, a region from which the Wittelsbachs had amassed
quite a large collection of items. Portraits of Wittelsbachs hung on the walls over tables
that contained unicorn horns – which were later identified as the tusks of male narwhals.
Scientific instruments appeared next to relics, each object a testament to the amount of
knowledge collected by the Wittelsbachs. In all, Quiccheberg‟s theatrum was divided
125
Ibid., 84-86.
Ibid.
127
Ibid.
126
97
into five general categories: 1. religious art and princely lineage, 2. sculptures and applied
arts, 3. natural sciences, 4. instruments, games and weapons, and 5. paintings, heraldry
and textiles.128
If Panofsky‟s assertion that humanism was more an attitude than a definable
movement is correct, Albrecht V seems to have embodied the general spirit of the
acquisition of knowledge that led so many humanists to rediscover ancient texts and
philosophies when he created the Kunstkammer. The Munich Kunstkammer was one of
the earliest rooms to attempt the organization and categorization of objects of
accumulated knowledge in a systematic manner. By 1598, the Munich Kunstkammer held
nearly six thousand items, not counting a coin collection that was one of the largest in
Europe.129
The Antiquarium and the Kunstkammer comprised two of the four wings in the
building that contained the Wittelsbach collection. A third wing was meant to house the
princely treasures, which Albrecht V began to amass and to designate as such in 1565,
when he decreed seventeen objects to be the sole property of the Wittelsbachs in
perpetuity.130 As with the objects for the Kunstkammer and most other works receiving
Albrecht V‟s patronage, the duke‟s advisors did not always support his need to create
such large collections at the expense of the family‟s wealth.
128
Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, (New York: Routledge,
1992), 108-09.
129
Seelig, “The Munich Kunstkammer,” 80. Also see Dorothea Diemer, Peter Diemer, Lorenz
Seelig, Peter Volk, Brigitte Volk-Knüttel, et al., Die Münchner Kunstkammer, Bayerische Akademie der
Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Abhandlungen, Neue Folge, Heft 129, 3 vols. (Munich,
C. H. Beck, 2008), an exhaustive three-volume resource with detailed explanations of many of the works
listed in the 1598 inventory of the collection.
130
Neumann, The Munich Residence and the Treasury, 95.
98
Albrecht V was as concerned with literature as he was with objects, and the fourth
wing of his collection was devoted to a library. The Wittelsbach dukes had amassed a
small collection of literature, mostly Arthurian legends and gifts from other royal families,
during the reigns of Albrecht IV and Wilhelm IV.131 If the commissioning of Aventinus‟
Bayerische Chronik showed the family‟s long-held interest in attaining and creating texts
specifically about Bavarian glory, it was Albrecht V‟s aggressive pursuit of several of
Europe‟s prized libraries that allowed him to amass a library of eleven thousand volumes
that was only rivaled in size by the imperial library in Vienna as the largest library in the
Holy Roman Empire.132
In 1558, Albrecht V was presented with the opportunity to purchase the library of
Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter. Widmanstetter was part of the early generation of
northern humanists. Born in 1506, he was trained in the humanist tradition and spent
much of his early career in Italy, where he became proficient in Greek, Arabic and
Hebrew. In 1533, Widmanstetter was called before Pope Clement VII to explain
Copernicus‟s cosmological theory, and in 1555, he produced the first edition of the
Syriac New Testament.133 During his travels, Widmanstetter managed to amass quite a
serious collection of oriental and ancient texts. In 1557, a year after his death, Albrecht V,
acting on the advice of Hans Jakob Fugger, acquired Widmanstetter‟s library for one
131
Jeffrey Garrett, “The Bavarian State Library,” in International Dictionary of Library Histories
(Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001), 202.
132
Felix F. Strauss, “The „Liberey‟ of Duke Ernst of Bavaria (1500-1560),” Studies in the
Renaissance 8 (1961): 128.
133
Robert Wilkinson, Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First
Printing of the Syriac New Testament (Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2007), 140-41.
99
thousand florins.134 The collection of approximately two hundred and sixty manuscripts
included one hundred and forty works in Hebrew and forty in Arabic.135
Albrecht V‟s second acquisition was a little closer to home. After being ousted
from the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1554, Albrecht V‟s uncle, Ernst, retired to Glatz, a
county which is now located in southern Poland and was then within the boundaries of
the kingdom of Bohemia. Ernst‟s resignation from Salzburg came as a surprise, not so
much because it happened, but because Ernst sought no financial gain in return for his
resignation.136 That Glatz was in Bohemia led Albrecht V to worry that Ferdinand I
would claim Ernst‟s possessions as was his right to do as ruler of that duchy. To solve
this, Albrecht V sought to have Ernst donate his possessions to Munich before he died in
order to avoid leaving things to Ferdinand I. Over twenty-five hundred manuscripts were
donated at a cost of eighteen thousand florins, which included their transport back to
Munich. Proving the true sentiment of Albrecht V and his wish to obtain Ernst‟s
possessions rather than to help the elder Wittelsbach in any way, Felix Strauss notes that
part of the overall transport costs included the cost of bringing Ernst‟s body back to
Munich, a fact that was barely mentioned and seen as incidental in light of recovering his
uncle‟s collection.137
Ernst‟s books represented a hodgepodge accumulation of knowledge that he
received throughout his career in Salzburg. The manuscripts and books, which were kept
in barrels and mostly unbound, covered a great deal of liturgical knowledge with other
134
Strauss, “The „Liberey‟ of Duke Ernst of Bavaria (1500-1560),” 129.
Garrett, “The Bavarian State Library,” 202.
136
Strauss, “The „Liberey‟ of Duke Ernst of Bavaria (1500-1560),” 130.
137
Ibid.
135
100
works on science and philosophy. Strauss suggests that such a state of disarray attests to
their lack of mention or display at Albrecht V‟s court, where books served the dual
purpose of providing actual knowledge while at the same time making the duke‟s library
look aesthetically pleasing.138
The third acquisition that formed the nucleus of Albrecht V‟s early library was
that of Hans Jakob Fugger. Fugger‟s relationship with Albrecht V was professionally
very close. In the building of the Antiquarium, the Kunstkammer and the library, Fugger‟s
advice and knowledge of capable buyers and artists proved invaluable. Fugger‟s
contribution to the artistic affairs of the Wittelsbachs was rewarded in the 1560s when
Albrecht V hired Hans as a personal advisor to the Munich court after the Fugger family
had been financially devastated by Habsburg loan defaults and the family‟s own
propensity for putting patronage before sound financial policy. Albrecht V also agreed to
acquire Hans‟ library in order to help the Fuggers financially. This library was especially
extensive, being the result of the Hans Jakob Fugger‟s far-reaching connections, both in
Europe and beyond. Through his network of buyers and traders, Hans Jakob Fugger was
able to accumulate a huge collection of texts of the highest quality as indicated by the
fifty thousand florins that Albrecht V paid for the collection.139
With the Antiquarium, the library, the treasury and the Kunstkammer all located in
the same building, Albrecht V created a nexus for scholarship north of the Alps. More
than placing several collections in one area, what makes Albrecht V‟s efforts more
interesting is the amount of cataloging and organization that went into creating the
138
Ibid., 140-41.
Ibid., 129. Strauss suggests that this was actually under the value of the collection which was
estimated to be worth seventy to eighty thousand florins.
139
101
collections. Viewers were supposed to marvel at the sheer size of the collections; more
importantly, they were also supposed to use them. The library underwent several
librarians in its first years in order to find someone who could catalog the works in a
manner as useful as Quiccheberg had done with the Kunstkammer and Antiquarium.
Albrecht V‟s patronage of those involved in each avenue of his collections went
well beyond the notion of patronage as a hierarchy of power whereby the patron controls
the aspects of the project. For example, Albrecht V‟s relationship with Hans Jakob
Fugger suggests that a large part of the patronage of collecting was trusting the
knowledge of the collector.
The Munich collections are a testament to Albrecht V as a northern princely
humanist. He created a collection designed for other leaders to admire, but there is also a
sense that Albrecht V fervently wanted to surround himself with as much accumulated
knowledge about the world as possible. The collections were the foundation of an
optimism about man‟s ability to exist in the world and to understand the wonders put
forth by God. This notion extended into other areas as well, including music.
Music played a large role in courtly life at Munich, and Albrecht V continued the
Wittelsbach program of court expansion in this realm. Like his father, Albrecht V showed
a high level of ambivalence about the religious disposition of his artists. Albrecht V
named Ludwig Daser, the openly Protestant singer, Kapellmeister in 1552. The previous
chapter mentioned the ongoing suspicions about the true reasons for Daser‟s early
departure from Munich. One side suggests that religious leanings were the culprit. The
other suggests the fame of Orlando di Lasso is a more accurate cause (fig. 13). Clearing
102
the road for Lasso would not have been an illogical step in a court that prided itself on
having the best that culture could offer. Stories of Lasso‟s abductions as a child due to the
beauty of his voice were so prevalent that many scholars often still begin biographies of
the composer by disputing the legend. False or not, the stories only serve to underscore
just how important this musician was to Bavaria and all of Europe.140
Fig. 13. Hans Mielich, Portrait of Lasso in the Penitential Psalms, 1571. Black and White
reproduction from Mus. Ms. A II, Bavarian State Library, Munich Digitization Center,
accessed April 6, 2011, http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00035009/image_187.
140
For more on the life of Lasso, see Horst Leuchtmann, Orlando di Lasso: Sein Leben
(Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1976); James Haar, “Lassus,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music
Online, accessed August 6, 2010, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article
/grove/music/16063; Wolfgang Boetticher, Orlando di Lasso und seine Zeit (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1958).
103
Lasso was part of the Franco-Netherland tradition of singing that stood as the
pinnacle of vocal music in the sixteenth century. Born around 1532, Lasso was a
cosmopolitan artist who traveled extensively throughout Europe during his youth,
spending time in Italy, the Netherlands and finally settling in Bavaria. Through the
suggestion of Hans Jakob Fugger, Albrecht V convinced the singer to join the court in
Munich along with a new crop of singers from the Netherlands in 1556. This was no
small feat, as Lasso had attained a reputation for being an outstanding musician, and he
had already accrued a handsome number of publications by the time he went to Munich.
According to Jerome Roche, “Lassus‟s fame in his own day was perhaps comparable
only to Mozart‟s in his.”141
Lasso was an exceptionally talented polyglot who composed as many French
chansons, Italian madrigals and German lieder as he did Latin masses, motets and other
sacred works. Lasso was adept with both sacred and secular styles and keenly aware of an
array of international styles, and he proved the crowning gem in a court that had a bounty
of excellent musicians. His output was so prolific that Roche states, “Between 1555 and
his death there appeared 530 publications with at least one item by Lassus – more than
one per month – and these constitute roughly half of all the music printed in the last four
and a half decades of the 16th century.”142 Lasso was so well respected that Albrecht V
ensured that the composer was given a full salary for life just before the duke‟s own death
in 1579, and the court continued the patronage of Lasso‟s family for two more
generations, keeping two of his sons and one grandson on staff at the chapel. Lasso‟s
141
Jerome Roche, “Lassus Yesterday and Today,” The Musical Times 123, no. 1671 (May 1982):
142
Ibid., 354.
353-54.
104
tenure corresponded with the rise of northern princely humanism in Munich, but his
music did not always fit as neatly into the humanist mold as the duke‟s collections.
Don Harrán defines sixteenth-century musical humanism as a movement toward
the assertion of a hierarchy which placed music in the service of text.143 Music and text
were to stand as a unified piece, allowing music to fully enhance the meaning of the text.
In secular works, this manifested itself in songs that attempted to either set classical texts
or to use classical subjects. Lasso‟s Prophetiae Sibyllarum are examples of the latter.144
These motets present the sibyls of antiquity as prophesiers of the coming of Christ. While
the motets were probably composed before Lasso‟s employment in Munich, the works
were meant to function much in the same way as Wilhelm IV‟s history cycle of paintings,
doubling as both a guide for Christian living and as proof of the bridge between ancient
and contemporary cultures.
Accepting the Prophetiae Sibyllarum as humanist due to the subject of the text
raises several questions concerning the distinction between text and actual music. Perhaps,
the most glaring question stems from the fact that musicians of the Renaissance had no
idea what Greek music sounded like, a problem that largely exists still today. Unlike
humanist painters who could study classical examples, musicians had only a few treatises
on the subject of Ancient music with which to work and no examples of the actual music.
Musicians who devoted themselves to studying Greek music were stuck primarily
discussing the acoustic and aesthetic qualities of sound based on the writings of a few
143
Don Harrán, In Defense of Music: The Case for Music as Argued by a Singer and Scholar of
the Late Fifteenth Century (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 53.
144
A thorough overview of the music and paintings involved in the Prophetiae Sibyllarum is
found in Peter Bergquist, “The Poems of Orlando di Lasso‟s „Prophitiae Sibyllarum‟ and their Sources,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society 32, no. 2 (Autumn 1979): 516-38.
105
philosophers. These discussions of modes and universal harmonies were interesting
enough, but very little of those theories were actually put into practice by working
musicians.145 This left musicians in a peculiar spot. Even though the subjects of the texts
that they set to music often involved classical subjects, such as the Prophetiae Sibyllarum,
there was no way of knowing whether or not the music being composed actually
resembled anything close to the sounds of Greek music.
In grappling with this dilemma, scholars have generally accepted Harrán‟s
assertion that text and music were intertwined in such a way that both functioned as one
unit, and that this was the way that humanism was made manifest within this art form. In
short, sixteenth-century music and text were not conceived of as two parts of a whole
because of the inextricable relationship between the two. Thus, if music became so
complex as to muddle the meaning of the words, it was no longer functioning according
to Greek ideals. Both sides of the religious divide were wrestling with this exact concept.
Luther, who loved music, sought to make texts more accessible to churchgoers by writing
songs in German and simplifying music so that all could participate and understand the
words that they were singing. Calvin rejected the notion of music altogether both in
church and at home unless it contained clearly understood Biblical texts. For Calvin, the
polyphonic music of the Catholic Church was a distraction from the all-important Word
of God.
Musical reforms within the Catholic Church were also afoot. Erasmus, the father
of northern humanism, summed up one charge for reform when he stated, “We have
145
Ruth Katz, The Powers of Music: Aesthetic Theory and the Invention of Opera (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 95-96.
106
introduced an artificial and theatrical music into the church, a bawling and an agitation of
various voices, such as I believe had never been heard in the theatres of the Greeks and
Romans.”146 It is interesting to note that Erasmus, who became famed for his use of
historical investigation when analyzing and often correcting biblical translations, would
make such a statement, considering the complete lack of understanding about how Greek
music actually sounded. Nevertheless, his criticism of church music was popular and it
was one of the many issues addressed at the councils at Trent. The recommendations
from the councils were vague at best, instructing churches to dispose of “impure,”
“worldly” and “profane” music without actually defining what those words meant.147
Within Catholicism, ideals about how proper music should sound were abundant,
with some conservative members of the Church going so far as to recommend that
polyphonic music should be stricken from the Church altogether in favor of a return to
monophony. By 1564, a council of cardinals, headed by Carlo Borromeo and Vitellozo
Vitelli, convened around the issue of music reform in the Church. Despite the vagueness
of the decrees from Trent, several common problems with polyphonic music were
addressed. First, the music had become so complex as to render the words
incomprehensible. Second, composers were borrowing music from secular sources to use
along with sacred texts. Third, music had become so affected and theatrical that it
distracted from the solemnity of the church service and from the meaning of the texts that
were set in the work. Rather than return to monophony, the councils concluded that a
146
Quoted in Hugo Leichtentritt, “The Reform of Trent and its Effect on Music,” The Musical
Quarterly 30, no. 3 (July 1944): 319.
147
Edward Schaefer, Catholic Music Through the Ages: Balancing the Needs of a Worshipping
Church (Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2008), 84-86.
107
simpler, more easily understood form of polyphony was the answer, and, as the
unfounded legend goes, when the cardinals met in 1565 to test new styles of polyphonic
writing, Palestrina‟s Missa Papae Marcelli won over the council. Although unlikely that
his Mass was actually performed at that meeting, the reformed style of church music is
commonly attributed to Palestrina, who has become known as the master of High
Renaissance music, despite not being as well known or as musically diverse as Lasso
during the sixteenth century.
In Lasso‟s case, the hierarchy of text always stood on shaky ground. Many of
Lasso‟s sacred works are described as imitation works. Imitation works were
commonplace during the sixteenth century, and they involved borrowing polyphonic
material from one piece in order to create another. It was common for composers to use
another composer‟s well-known piece as a starting point for the creation of a new work.
Composers would then manipulate that composer‟s materials as they saw fit. In other
cases, the imitation would be a direct application of new words to borrowed music.
Lasso‟s imitation works came from an astonishing array of sources and materials,
and he often added a bit of humor to his imitation works by using risqué secular pieces as
the model for his new sacred works. Such is the example with Lasso‟s setting of the
Magnificat text to his chanson, Dessus le marché d’Arras.148 The chanson was actually a
setting of a folk song about a Spaniard who meets a young girl while traveling through
the market in the northern French town of Arras. The two strike up a conversation in
which the soldier propositions the girl and the two run off. The original folk song was
148
A diagram outlining which parts of Dessus le marché d’Arras were used in the imitation
Magnificat is provided in David Crook, Orlando di Lasso’s Imitation Magnificats for Counter-Reformation
Munich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 234-35.
108
popular and was used by both Lasso and the maestro di cappella of St. Mark‟s, Adrian
Willaert. Lasso‟s setting of the Magnificat uses very little newly composed music; the
original chanson is kept intact for the first half of the Magnificat.
Debate still exists as to whether these settings were meant to be humorous at the
expense of religious solemnity or, as David Crook suggests, whether they were attempts
at raising the profane through the application of sacred text.149 Given Lasso‟s often wry
sense of humor, which is indicated in his many letters to Albrecht V‟s son, Wilhelm V,
the latter argument seems a bit revisionist. It is hard to imagine a churchgoer hearing a
portion of the Magnificat set to his favorite drinking song or a popular song about sex
without having a less than sacred reaction.
Publishing music was given as much consideration as the actual works. A
byproduct of the humanist spirit was the need to catalog information. The Book of Jewels
and the collections were systems of organization that developed in order to keep tabs on
the attainment of knowledge. Catalogs tracked the value of the collections, and they were
also an account of contemporary society and its values, especially among wealthier
families. Mary Lewis, in her article “The Printed Music Book in Context: Observations
on some Sixteenth-Century Editions,” points out that catalogs of works detailed much
more than the basic information about a book. Descriptions of bindings and contents,
about how music was received and about the level of prestige afforded to the book all
indicated “an edition‟s intended status as routine or deluxe.”150
149
Ibid., 82.
Mary S. Lewis, ”The Printed Music Book in Context: Observations on some Sixteenth-Century
Editions,” Notes 46, no. 4 (June 1990): 900.
150
109
Albrecht V encouraged and financially supported the cataloging of the
composer‟s works and musical life at the court. One result was the Patrocinium musices,
a five-volume compendium of Lasso‟s sacred music that was compiled from 1573 to
1589.151 Another compilation, Lasso‟s Penitential Psalms, shows just how involved the
creation of music books could get. This collection of seven psalms was a private gift to
Albrecht V. The music is thought to have been completed by 1559. The compilation of
artworks for the book, however, took another eleven years and was not completed until
1570. The result, with miniatures by Hans Mielich, is considered one of the most
expensive music books ever produced (figs. 14-15).152
Hans Mielich was born in Munich in 1516, where his father was a municipal
painter. He spent his life in Munich with short trips to Regensburg to study with Albrecht
Altdorfer in the 1530s and to Italy where he studied briefly with Titian in the early
1540s.153 By 1545, Mielich returned to Munich where he began to receive the direct
patronage of Albrecht V. In 1558, he became the head of the Munich painter‟s guild.
Mielich painted in a variety of genres, but he excelled at miniatures, including those
found in the Penitential Psalms, which are some of the best secondary sources for
understanding musical culture in the sixteenth century.154
151
James Haar, “Lassus.”
Orlando di Lasso, The Seven Penitential Psalms and Laudate Dominum de Caelis, ed. Peter
Bergquist, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vols. 86-87 (Appleton, WI: A-R Editions,
Inc., 1990), vii.
153
There is some debate as to the dates of Mielich‟s visit to Italy. This issue is outlined in Charles
Hope, “Hans Mielich at Titian‟s Studio,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 60 (1997): 26061.
154
For more on Mielich, see Bernhard Hermann Röttger, Der Maler Hans Mielich (München: H.
Schmidt, 1925); Kurt Löcher, Hans Mielich, 1516-1573: Bildnismaler in München (München: Deustcher
Kunstverlag, 2007); Kurt Löcher. "Mielich, Hans," in Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online,
accessed August 6, 2010, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/ art/T057859.
152
110
Fig. 14. Hans Mielich, Illumination of music manuscript in Penitential Psalms, 1571.
Black and White reproduction from Mus. Ms. A II, Bavarian State Library, Munich
Digitization Center, accessed April 6, 2011, http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/
bsb00035009/image_10.
Fig. 15. Hans Mielich, miniature of Lasso leading and the Munich Hofkapelle in
Penitential Psalms, 1571. Black and White reproduction from Mus. Ms. A II, Bavarian
State Library, Munich Digitization Center, accessed April 6, 2011, http://daten.digitalesammlungen.de/ bsb00035009/image_186.
111
The Penitential Psalms also received a two-volume commentary by the collector
and librarian, Samuel von Quiccheberg, who, as mentioned, was responsible for
designing the layout and cataloging system for the Kunstkammer. The completed work,
coupled with the two-volume commentary, remained in Albrecht V‟s private collection
until his death in 1579 when it was finally allowed to be presented for mass
publication.155 It might be dangerous to presume the motivations of a sixteenth-century
duke, but it is easy to imagine that a person so invested in collecting and cataloging the
past would want to leave as much detailed proof as possible of his own greatness for
future generations.
The notion of proof was one of the most important elements of humanist
understanding during the sixteenth century. Textual analysis was undertaken because
scholars of the sixteenth century began to demand that biblical and historical texts be
presented as accurately as possible. The urge to purge illogic and misinformation in favor
of learning pervaded humanist culture.156 Humanism in the sixteenth century played a
major role in the mass redefining of culture in Europe, and it was based on a more
accurate understanding of the past, which resulted in a more aggressive attempt to record
the present. The works of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and Erasmus stemmed from a new
logic that came from an intimate understanding of old religion. The councils at Trent
served as a reassessment of the Catholic faith. Royal families throughout the continent
were examining classical literature in order to better understand how to govern and live
155
Orlando di Lasso, Seven Penitential Psalms with Two Laudate Psalms: An Edition of Munich,
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. MS. A, I and II, ed. Charlotte Smith (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated
University Presses, 1983), 7-8. Also see, Philip Weller, “‟Notre divin Orlande‟: Lassus in His Time and in
Ours,” Early Music 27, no. 3 (August 1999): 493-99.
156
MacCulloch, The Reformation, 81-82.
112
as leaders.157 In each case, defining was a project accompanied by growing pains,
especially in relation to those who resisted being swept up in the new current of thinking.
For those in charge of doing the sweeping, the notion of humanism occurred in fits and
starts.
Like so many other nobles in Europe, Albrecht V embraced certain humanist
principles, but he also retained some of the late medieval policies of his Wittelsbach
ancestors. His sons, for example, were an extension of the earlier Wittelsbach policy of
the Haus Bayern. He sought to use his children as tools to maintain the unification of the
duchy under his family while concurrently extending their power to other areas in Europe.
Albrecht V‟s oldest surviving son, Wilhelm V, was educated in Ingolstadt, which was
beginning its transition into a Jesuit stronghold. Wilhelm V maintained his father‟s love
of overspending on the arts, an obsession that led the young duke to nearly drive Bavaria
into financial ruin and to his early abdication as duke of Bavaria.
Prior to Wilhelm V‟s reign, Albrecht V saw to it that his son was positioned to
enhance political life in Bavaria as much as possible. In 1568, at the age of twenty,
Wilhelm V was married to Renata of Lorraine, who came from a duchy that had long
shared diplomatic relations and Catholic identity with Bavaria.158 No less than three
accounts of the wedding festivities, which lasted from February 21 to March 9, were
recorded, the most famous of which was Massimo Troiano‟s Dialoghi. Troiano, who was
employed under Lasso at the Munich court in 1568 and whose writing was exceptionally
157
Ibid., 81-85.
See Paulette Choné, “Lorraine and Germany,” in Glasgow Emblem Studies, vol. 5, The
German-Language Emblem in its European Context: Exchange and Transition, ed. Anthony J. Harper and
Ingrid Höpel (University of Glasgow, 2000), 1-22. The two duchies had a policy of exchanging secretaries
between Munich and Nancy in order to provide legal and language education.
158
113
biased toward presenting a magnificent account of the proceedings of his patrons, depicts
festivities in which no expense was spared.159 Orlando di Lasso played a very large role
in producing the entertainments at the festivities. Showing a great range of diversity, the
master musician is documented by Troiano as leading instrumental and vocal music, and
he is described as organizing and even acting in comedia dell’arte performances, in
which the choir master performed as Pantalone.160 Continuing in the vein of extravagance,
Lasso also conducted a forty-part motet that was presented to Albrecht V as a wedding
gift on behalf of Alessandro Striggio, who was under the patronage of the Medici family
at the time.161
Extravagance was essential when it came to the marriages of Albrecht V‟s
children, and a similarly huge ceremony was given in 1571 when his daughter, Maria of
Bavaria, married her uncle, Charles II Archduke of Austria, son of the Holy Roman
Emperor, Ferdinand I. The wedding took place in Vienna, and the Wittelsbach delegation
did their best to make a show of their participation in the events, beginning with their
arrival in Vienna by ship after sailing down the Danube.162 Entertainment at the festivities
surrounding the wedding included knightly tournaments, music and plays. The
entertainments included an entire day devoted to a tournament that was embedded in a
larger theatrical presentation based on humanist-inspired themes. The tournament was
159
Troiano‟s account has become a boon for Renaissance theater and music scholars, as his
account primarily deals with these two art forms. Mielich was also present at many of the ceremonies, and
he painted several performances by Lasso.
160
M. A. Katritzky, The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte 1560-1620 with
Special Reference to the Visual Records (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2006), 55.
161
David S. Butchart, “A Musical Journey of 1567: Alessandro Striggio in Vienna, Munich, Paris
and London,” Music and Letters 63, no. 1/2 (Jan – Apr 1982): 8.
162
Robert Lindell, “The Wedding of Archduke Charles and Maria of Bavaria in 1571,” Early
Music 18, no. 2 (May 1990): 258.
114
part of a plot in which Juno, who was defended by the continents of Africa, Asia and
America, challenged Europe to a contest. The day involved costume parades, horseback
riding games and music.163 Robert Lindell, however, asserts that most spectators did not
understand the humanist themes because explanations were only given to the highest
nobles. Rather, for the majority of the audience, the parade served as a chance for the
Habsburg family to show off its own collection of costumes and other cultural artifacts
from around the world.164
Collecting, both in terms of objects and artists, became such a preoccupation for
Wittelsbachs and Habsburgs, and other European nobles, that their humanist intentions
risked becoming detached from the actual act of collecting. Both the Wittelsbachs and the
Habsburgs very quickly went from collecting ancient texts to collecting elephants, from
maintaining pieces that served cultural and scientific purposes to amassing as much
exotica as possible. Despite the knowledge accumulated through his collections, despite
the number of madrigals and lieder that entailed classical subjects and despite the number
of paintings in the Wittelsbach residence depicting sibyls and other classical figures,
Albrecht V was sometimes more than willing to abandon humanist thinking in favor of
merely collecting interesting things.
Christianity was as much a part of sixteenth-century humanism as the
investigation and presentation of ancient themes. Indeed, Martin Luther‟s ninety-five
theses were initially part of a growing reform movement within the Catholic church that
was concerned with how the Church understood God‟s salvation and whether the Church
163
164
Ibid., 261.
Ibid.
115
was providing the correct means for society to access that salvation. These questions lay
at the heart of humanist inquiry. Researching and collecting historical biblical texts and
church documents was as much part of the humanist spirit as was collecting narwhal
tusks. Luther and other reformers were initially seeking to understand how an individual
was supposed to relate to God. This question was so important that it led reformers such
as Luther, who was initially a devout Catholic, to take drastic measures.
The first large-scale Catholic attempt to clean its own house occurred in the form
of the councils at Trent. Certainly it is arguable whether or not the councils at Trent were
centered on the application of humanist thinking, but there is little doubt that reorganizing
the church, finding new justifications for the faith and documenting everything were, at
least in part, byproducts of the humanist spirit. Wilhelm IV reigned in Bavaria when the
first of the councils began in 1545, and, as with other European nobles, he was more than
willing to eschew the decrees coming from Trent when it was advantageous. For example,
when Wilhelm IV sought for his brother Ernst to become archbishop of Salzburg, he was
directly standing in the way of a Catholic Church in the midst of reorganization.
Like his father, Albrecht V had little use for religious reforms if they did not
prove advantageous to Wittelsbach interests. For example, while the heads of
Catholicism were trying to ensure that members of the clergy were actually trained
priests, Albrecht V had his youngest son, appropriately named Ernst, elected bishop of
Freising in 1565 at the untrained age of twelve. However, the child, who spent very little
time in Freising, was destined for something greater, and throughout the same period of
time that the reforms from Trent were being implemented, the Wittelsbachs were
116
attempting to position the younger Ernst as the bishop of Cologne, an act that eventually
came to fruition under the reign of Albrecht V‟s oldest son, Wilhelm V, and which has
come to be seen as one of the early victories during the Counter-Reformation.165
By the time Ernst ascended to the bishopric in 1583, Cologne had already begun
its transition to the Lutheran cause, a shift that would have proven disastrous for
Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire. The conflict, however, ended when Wilhelm V
sent Bavarian troops under the command of his younger brother, the militarily adept
Ferdinand, to put down the Protestant uprising that was developing in opposition to
Ernst.166 Even Catholics agreed that Ernst was not an ideal candidate for the bishopric, as
he never took holy orders and was considered a “great sinner” by one papal nuncio.167
Despite his less-than-stellar qualifications, most of the Catholic leadership also agreed
that it was better to have a sinful Catholic in charge at Cologne than no Catholic at all,
and they were willing to turn a blind eye to Ernst‟s faults if it meant the continued
military support of Wilhelm V.
Ernst‟s story is a reminder that Albrecht V‟s interest in humanist pursuits did not
always result in an actual adoption of humanist reform, which for the Catholic powers
that be included clergy who were properly trained. As the quote that opens this chapter
suggests, Albrecht V was of a generation on the threshold, who was shaken by the
changes that were taking place within him. Humanism was an attitude; but, attitudes
change, and in the individual, changes likely to occurred again and again. With Albrecht
165
Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: The Reformation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1967), 288-89.
166
Hans and Marga Rall, Die Wittelsbacher in Lebensbildern (München, Piper Verlag GmBH:
1986), 121-25.
167
Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 288-89.
117
V, humanism was only one facet of his patronage and of his reign, but it was not the only
one. By the middle of his reign, Albrecht V adopted new reasons for commissioning the
artworks that he did. His later patronage reflected a different set of values, which very
often contradicted the logic that northern princely humanism valued.
118
CHAPTER IV
Pious Patronage: The Chapel at Altötting, the Virgin Mary and Jesuit Support for
Traditional Religion
Lake Starnberger, located just southwest of Munich, is by no means an imposing
body of water. However, it must have seemed like an ocean to Albrecht V when he found
himself facing peril in its midst in 1570. “The royal yacht had been caught in a terrible
storm and all on board had given up hope of being saved from death. When the duke
cried out to Our Lady of Altötting, the boat was brought to safety and all came ashore
unharmed.”1 This story, while anecdotal in the grand scheme of Albrecht V‟s reign,
affirms a particular form of spirituality that began to experience a resurgence in Bavaria
in the middle of the sixteenth century. Albrecht V‟s plea for the intercession not only of
the Virgin Mary, but specifically of the statue of the Black Madonna at Altötting suggests
that by 1570 Albrecht V‟s piety was firmly rooted in what Eamon Duffy calls “traditional
religion.”2
In this chapter, the focus shifts from Albrecht V‟s patronage as a northern
princely humanist and focuses on his patronage as an early modern Catholic defender.
Albrecht V‟s initial support of artists in the creation of religious art and the resulting
artworks were initially an attempt at demonstrating his individual spiritual views. These
views were rooted in and shaped by traditional Bavarian Catholicism, which was a local
1
David Crook, Orlando Di Lasso’s Magnificats for Counter-Reformation Munich (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 68.
2
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 4-5.
119
form of late-medieval Catholicism that began to reemerge during the middle of the
sixteenth century and was promoted in the actions of Jesuits who came to work in
Bavaria. Albrecht V was heavily influenced by traditional Bavarian Catholicism.
Locating the influence of Albrecht V‟s patronage in the collective identity of the people
of Bavaria eliminates the top-down notion of patronage. In short, Albrecht V was still in
charge of what art was produced, but his actions were a reflection of a culture that shaped
him rather than an imposition of his views on that culture.
This chapter begins by analyzing the resurgence of traditional Catholic religious
culture in Bavaria during the second half of the sixteenth century. Eamon Duffy‟s
description of traditional religion serves as the basis of this conversation.3 Second, it
posits that the initial success of the Jesuit order was tied directly to the appropriation of
traditional religious practices in Bavaria. This chapter accepts John W. O‟Malley‟s
assertion that the organization‟s early development was often highly individualized, not
focused on reform and mildly dysfunctional.4 The introduction of the Jesuits into Bavaria
and the initial support – more accurately, the initial lack of support – of the order by
Albrecht V is presented through the lens of traditional religion.
The Jesuits, perhaps more than any other group, played a key role in abetting the
resurgence of traditional religion in Bavaria. Their support of traditional religion was
responsible for returning many to the fold. However, the movement often ran contrary to
the reform efforts taking place within the Church, including the work being done at Trent.
3
Ibid.
See John W. O‟Malley, “Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early
Modern Catholicism,” in The Counter-Reformation, Blackwell Essential Readings in History, ed. David M.
Luebke (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 65-82; John W. O‟Malley, The First Jesuits
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
4
120
The controversy surrounding Albrecht V‟s patronage of Martin Eisengrein‟s book, Our
Lady of Altötting, is the starting point for a discussion of the duke‟s patronage of works
portraying the Virgin Mary. The importance of the Virgin Mary was paramount in
Bavaria as she simultaneously served as an anti-Catholic target, a locus of Catholic
identity and a cross-confessional traditional cultural icon. The importance of the Patrona
Bavariae, as she came to be known, was tremendous. The artworks that were created in
Bavaria depicting the Virgin immediately put that artwork under the scrutiny of all sides
of the Bavarian religious cultural divide.
It is appropriate, or perhaps convenient, to begin this chapter with the disclaimer
that history is messy, and Albrecht V was often engaged in the patronage of humanist,
traditional religious and other pursuits during the same periods of his reign. The diverse
nature of the duke‟s patronage highlights the necessity of maintaining several lenses with
which to view the overall scope of the works that resulted from his support. This is
precisely the case with the arrival of the Jesuits in Bavaria, especially the arrival of Peter
Canisius, their influence on Albrecht V and their early support of traditional Bavarian
religion as a tool for Catholic resurgence.
Bavaria‟s guardian of the Catholic faith and one of Luther‟s most capable
opponents, Johann Eck, died in 1543, ending thirty-three years of service to the university
in Ingolstadt. When he died, Eck took the reputation of the university as a bulwark of
Catholic theology with him. Six years later, in 1549, Wilhelm IV – on the eve of his own
passing – began a campaign to secure the intervention of an upstart religious order to help
reinvigorate the beleaguered university. The Jesuit order had been founded ten years
121
earlier by Ignatius Loyola.5 Three men, Peter Canisius, Alfonso Salmeron and Claude
Lejay, were sent to Ingolstadt upon Wilhelm IV‟s assurances that the Jesuits would be
allowed to set up a college within the university. 6
Their reception was lukewarm at best on the part of both Wilhelm IV‟s court and
the faculty in Ingolstadt. Making matters worse for the three Jesuits, Wilhelm IV died
shortly after their arrival, leaving Albrecht V as the new leader of the duchy. Albrecht V,
who was more interested in pursuing his northern princely humanist agenda than he was
the religious affairs of Ingolstadt during the early years of his reign, saw to it that praise
was heaped upon the three Jesuits in place of actual money and support. Albrecht V‟s
bluff was called in 1550, when Ignatius, who had quickly grown tired of the unfulfilled
promise of Wittelsbach support for the founding of the Jesuit college at Ingolstadt, pulled
Lejay from Bavaria with Salmeron following suit a few months later. Canisius, who was
the only Jesuit of the three who could speak German in the first place, was left to see to it
that Albrecht V fulfilled the promise of his father.7
Despite these actions, Albrecht V remained only passively committed to the Jesuit
cause until two years later when Ignatius instigated the humbling maneuver of sending
Canisius on loan to Vienna, an action that aroused the Wittelsbach duke‟s jealousy of the
Habsburgs.8 Despite this tenuous beginning, Albrecht V funded the opening of a Jesuit
school in Ingolstadt in 1556. Once on board with the Jesuit educational mission, Albrecht
5
James Brodrick, St. Peter Canisius (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1980), 124-25.
Ibid.
7
Ibid., 166-67.
8
Otto Braunsberger, “Blessed Peter Canisius,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York:
Robert Appleton Company, 1911), accessed October 11, 2010, http://www.newadvent.org/
cathen/11756c.htm.
6
122
V fully committed. Just three years later, a similar school was founded in Munich. Both
schools marked the establishment of a permanent Jesuit presence in Bavaria, a presence
that remained under the constant supervision of Canisius, who came to be known as the
“second Apostle of Germany.”9
That Canisius became such an integral part of Catholic resurgence in the Holy
Roman Empire was both a testament to the priest‟s own willpower and a result of the
Jesuit mission and philosophy. The Jesuit program was centered on allowing individuals
to experience and understand God‟s grace. The spiritual exercises that were developed by
Ignatius were a tool for guiding a participant who might be faced with a major life
decision on what appeared to be an exceptionally personal journey toward a more devout
life.10
In this light, the purpose of the exercises was rather generic. There were many
orders devoted to attaining a more intimate devotion with God. What made the Jesuit
order so successful was its adaptability. For instance, the exercises were created so that
anyone could participate under the proper supervision. If the exercises, with their intense
day-long investigations, proved too much, Ignatius provided an abridged, unofficial
version. The exercises were open to priests and laymen alike, and they could be
administered on location rather than requiring one to commit to long-term stays at a
monastery, college or church.11
9
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in
Germany (Princeton University Press, 2002), 17.
10
O‟Malley, The First Jesuits, 37-38.
11
Ibid.
123
The Jesuit program typified a larger trend that was taking place in the middle of
the sixteenth century toward a more personal form of Catholic piety and spirituality in
general. The act of confession, for example, was increasingly becoming a private affair.
In his book, “Poor, Sinning Folk:” Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation
Germany,” William David Myers traces this development in his analysis of the
confessional practices of the Middle Ages through the first half of the seventeenth
century. Myers describes late-medieval confession as a public, communal affair. He
states of the Middle Ages, “One could not find a confessional booth in medieval Europe,
because this product of the late sixteenth century appeared in Germany only after
1600.”12 By the sixteenth century, it was established practice in German-speaking lands
that those partaking in confession did so in front of their peers and in front of their priest.
The public nature of late-medieval confession led to all types of interesting situations,
and it influenced how interactions outside of confession took place within the larger
community. Public confession ensured that the sacrament was as much about settling
communal disputes as it was a religious affair, and priests often found themselves both
resolving the personal conflicts that arose among their parishioners and absolving their
sins.13
Public confession also ensured that people with needs that might have seemed
publicly embarrassing or worse, publicly incriminating, did not attend confession. During
the second half of the sixteenth century, confession began to move toward becoming an
entirely private affair, with even the priest being separated from the confessor. The
12
William David Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk” Confession and Conscience in CounterReformation Germany (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press 1996), 3.
13
Ibid., 48.
124
intended effect was that penitents could begin to focus on their personal sins without fear
of public reprisal.14 The privatization of confession changed the way in which Catholics
came to view their own spirituality. As with Ignatius‟ spiritual exercises, the focus of
confession became focused entirely on the individual, marking a gradual shift during the
middle of the sixteenth century in which Catholics began to see faith in general as an
individual matter.
The movement toward individualization has traditionally been thought of as a
harbinger of the Protestant Reformation. Certainly, vernacular Bibles and liturgy and the
belief that justification was not through actions but one‟s personal faith put the onus of
salvation squarely in the hands of the individual. Protestant movements may have
proclaimed individuality the loudest, but Catholics remained active in coming to
understanding faith and the consequences of faith as an individual matter during the
sixteenth century. John O‟Malley states that Ignatius‟ Spiritual Exercises were created as
a means of accessing an individual‟s religious experience.15 The original purpose of the
exercises was very much in the same spirit as Luther‟s personal investigations of
religious salvation.
In his book, The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy notes that Catholicism was
still a very active and common, if disorganized, body prior to the Protestant movements
and remained so after them. He argues that while many see the Protestant movements as
the fulfillment of early modern individuality and a reinvigoration of Christian identity,
there is plenty to suggest that Catholicism, which never stopped being a vibrant faith,
14
15
Ibid., 5.
O‟Malley, The First Jesuits, 42.
125
embraced the same ideas as their Protestant counterparts.16 Marc R. Forster supports
Duffy‟s assertion. He suggests that the formation of all Christian religious identity in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a result of the active participation in religion by
all levels of society.17 John Bossy also points out that Catholicism was trending toward
individuality. He asserts that Catholic reform could only have happened at the hands of
willing participants of all levels, and that Catholicism in the sixteenth century was “a
conglomerate of autonomous communities” rather than a monolithic structure of
nonparticipants.18
Duffy defined traditional religion by studying early modern Catholic culture in
England. Given Bossy‟s assertion that Catholicism was largely defined locally, relating
English traditional religion to Bavaria presents several challenges. England underwent a
religious schism in which the rulers largely supported a Protestant agenda. The
Wittelsbachs remained allied with the Catholic church. England was a more cohesive
political entity than the Holy Roman Empire. Bavaria was physically surrounded by
politically powerful competing entities. England‟s borders were, in general, well defined
given the geography of the island. Like Forster‟s definition of confessionalism, however,
the biggest strength of traditional religion is that it is regional. Thus, regional variance is
seen as an indication of the existence of traditional religion, not as a disqualifier.
16
Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 4.
Marc R. Forster, “With and Without Confessionalization. Varieties of Early Modern German
Catholicism,” Journal of Early Modern History 1, no. 4 (1997): 315-16.
18
John Bossy, “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” in The CounterReformation, Blackwell Essential Readings in History, ed. David M. Luebke (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
1999), 88-89.
17
126
Scholars studying religion throughout Europe have presented several variations
on the theme of traditional religion, Forster‟s confessionalism being one example.
Popular piety is another term that recognizes the cyclical nature of early modern society.
However, as Tessa Watt has suggested, the term, popular, often points to a complex set of
issues.19 To avoid confusing confessionalism and confessionalization and to avoid the
pitfalls of defining what it means to be popular, Duffy‟s term, traditional religion, seems
an accurate summation of the cultural situation in Bavaria in the sixteenth century.
Traditional religion has three features. First, it refutes the notion of Catholic
religious decay during the Middle Ages by recognizing the existence of a vibrant
religious tradition that lasted throughout the late Middle Ages. 20 Duffy argues that
despite the attention of scholars on the fringes of early modern society, the largest
percentage of people in Europe were still committed to the Catholic Church – at least to
their perception of what the Catholic Church was – and they still based their lives around
the lifecycles that the Catholic liturgical year provided. Second, traditional religion does
not draw a distinction between elite and lay culture. The symbols and rituals inherent in
early modern Catholicism were shared by all levels of society. Third, traditional religion
was not perceived by those participating in it as superstitious or magical. Rather, actions
that have since been presented as such were being interpreted by reformers who were
trying to eliminate the practices or biased historians who were looking back at them
rather than by the experiences and logic of the people actually taking the actions.21
19
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern
British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1-4.
20
Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 5.
21
Ibid., 2-6.
127
Despite the changes that occurred in Bavaria during the sixteenth century, the
fundamental traits of traditional religion never went away, and the culture of latemedieval traditional Catholic religion saw a resurgence in the early modern individual.
The revival was supported by the Jesuits and led to the reclamation of the faith within the
duchy.
Albrecht V‟s calls to the Virgin of Altötting during his accident is an example of
traditional religious expression. Altötting, a town sixty miles east of Munich, was a
popular late-medieval pilgrimage site because of a number of miracles attributed to the
Black Madonna, a fourteenth-century, linden wood sculpture of Mary (fig. 16). The Black
Madonna‟s role in the revival of two children in 1489 – one had drowned and the other
was crushed by a wagon – sparked a flurry of pilgrimage to the statue.22 Pilgrimage to the
chapel began to wane in 1503 as the War of Landshut Succession created unstable
conditions in the region and for the chapel, which saw its resources diminished by
Palatinate dukes in order to finance their failed end of the dispute. Despite a brief revival
after the war, Altötting did not return to its previous state as a pilgrimage site until the
second half of the sixteenth century.23
22
Linda K. Davidson and David Gitlitz, Pilgrimage: from the Ganges to Graceland: an
Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002), 24.
23
Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 29, accessed June 21, 2010,
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft738nb4fn/.
128
Fig. 16. Our Lady of Altötting, c. 1300s. Linden wood; 25 in. Photo used with permission
by Ella Rozett, accessed January 27, 2011,
http://www.interfaithmarianpilgrimages.com/pages/Alt%F6tting.htm.
129
Philip M. Soergel asserts that late-medieval pilgrims who traveled to Altötting
were motivated by the belief that such places were very real centers of healing where
saints, who were still active in a spiritual and sometimes physical sense, intervened on
behalf of people in order to resolve conflicts more efficiently than could be done by those
still confined to an earthly existence.24 Pilgrimage sites were centers where people from
all classes gathered in order to share in their collective belief about the healing power of
faith. These sites were not only for the poor, the unintelligent or the superstitious. Then
Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, was reported to have visited Altötting in 1491, and
the Wittelsbach family became increasingly devoted to making annual pilgrimages to the
site after a resurgence of pilgrimages began around 1570.25 Frederick III and the
Wittelsbachs were among thousands of peasants, merchants and lower nobles who also
visited the site. The prayers of Albrecht V for the intercession of the statue at Altötting
and his subsequent pilgrimages were acts of partaking in a tradition that had been shared
by Bavarians of every social strata for at least a hundred years before his boating accident.
He was but one of many threads in the fabric of traditional religion in Bavaria.
In part, the decline of pilgrimage in the early sixteenth century can be attributed to
Protestant beliefs. The everyday religious experience of Bavarian Catholics and Catholics
throughout Europe came increasingly under attack by Protestants, and Catholic reformers,
after 1517. The following quote by Martin Luther is an aggressive affront to what he felt
was the prevailing religious experience throughout the Holy Roman Empire:
24
Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints, 211.
H.C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 292.
25
130
Besides, consider what in our blindness, we have hitherto been practicing and
doing under the Papacy. If any one had toothache, he fasted and honored St.
Apollonia; if he was afraid of fire, he chose St. Lawrence as his helper in
need…such abominations, where every one selected his own saint, worshipped
him, and called for help to him in distress…For all these place their heart and trust
elsewhere than in the true God, look for nothing good to Him nor seek it from
Him.26
Luther‟s accusation positioned the entire notion of empowering saints as a misguided act
and was a direct assault on the traditional religious logic that led to actions such as
Albrecht V‟s prayers to a statue while adrift on Lake Starnberger.
As the sixteenth century progressed, and as more Germans pursued various
Protestant agendas, stories of attempts to position the logic of Catholic traditional
religious behavior as little more than superstition or to outright mock Catholic practices
became more common. For instance, Robert Scribner describes the actions of the
parishioners of a church in Magdeburg in 1524 who went around town during the feast of
the Assumption of the Virgin scattering flowers and herbs that had been blessed and
placed in churches throughout town after being incited by their preacher. The whole
affair eventually dissolved into an outright display of public disorder as citizens began to
tear images out of the churches to destroy them.27
26
Martin Luther, Large Catechism, Project Wittenburg, trans. by F. Bente and W.H.P. Dau,
accessed October 17, 2010, http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/ wittenberg/luther/catechism/web/cat03.html.
27
Robert W. Scribner, “Ritual and Reformation,” in German People and the Reformation, ed. R.
Po Chia-Hsia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 126-27.
131
In Bavaria during the 1520s, the number of Protestant sympathizers and
disenchanted Catholics gained such momentum that the citizens of Neuötting, which
neighbored Altötting, began to publicly decry pilgrimages to the Black Madonna and
Marian worship in general. The city even removed the image of the Virgin from their city
seal, and citizens actively attempted to block pilgrims from reaching the chapel at
Altötting.28 Johannes Jannsen points out that these protests sometimes took a violent turn.
He states, “On one occasion a priest, who was making a pilgrimage to Altötting with a
cross, was attacked and fatally injured.”29
While accusations of superstitious activity came from the outside, the Catholic
Church fervently continued its own process of trying to dispel some of the elements
within its structure that it perceived to be superstitious. The Jesuit mission, however,
seems to have eschewed many of the Church‟s reform measures during the order‟s
formative years. Indeed, the order‟s early success was based on its malleability, which
was maintained by purposefully avoiding attaching itself to many of the larger reform
measures being implemented by the Catholic Church, opting instead on instilling
religious zeal through their highly-localized and personalized style of training and
education.30
Rather than trying to directly enforce the decrees that were coming from Trent,
Jesuits often found themselves adopting local traditional religious practices in order to
nourish those forms of Catholic identity that were already in place, even if that meant
28
Reinhold and Jörg Zellner, Altötting die Geschichte der Wallfahrt: Dargestellt anhand der
Raumbilder in der “Schau” im Marienwerk (Burghausen: Blick-Punkt Verlag, 1984), 14.
29
Johannes Jannsen, History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages, vol. 7
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner & Co., 1905), 173.
30
O‟Malley “Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer?,” 78.
132
occasionally breaking away from the conventions of the Catholic Church and the reforms
that it set out to introduce. R. Po-Chia Hsia explains that what might have been perceived
as laxity in terms of implementing strict Tridentine reforms during the early years of the
Jesuit order was actually an attempt to adapt the goals of the order to the many forms of
traditional religion that still existed. He explains that “Tridentine Catholicism succeeded
in the long term not by suppressing „superstitions,‟ but by grafting orthodoxy onto
traditional and popular spirituality.”31
The personal nature of Ignatius‟ exercises aimed to ensure that those who passed
through the process were absolutely devoted to Catholicism, even if that meant
accommodating for the nuances of a practitioner‟s local customs when they ran contrary
to the official dictums of the Church. Many in the Jesuit order probably had little
experience with any of the reform measures being handed down at the councils taking
place in Trent or elsewhere, leaving doubt as to how observant of new decrees converts
could be if those doing the converting lacked a knowledge of what those decrees
entailed.32
Despite being based on an individual coming to God, the spiritual exercises were
a highly codified experience that simultaneously removed the individual from what was
perceived as an individual experience, ensuring that Ignatius‟ order remained, on the
whole, steadfastly devoted to a system that both liberated and controlled its participants.
In short, the order was centered on convincing members who came to operate within a
rather strict corporate hierarchy that they were acting as individuals.
31
R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540-1770, New Approaches to European
History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 200-01.
32
O‟Malley, “Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer?,” 78.
133
The fierce devotion that members of the order often displayed, both to their own
order and to Papal authority, caused sixteenth-century Jesuits to be perceived as
aggressive proponents of a confessional agenda and as reformers of Catholicism. As tools
of the Counter-Reformation, their educational mission has come to be seen as a method
of indoctrination, and their publishing mission is often understood as an act of
propaganda meant to counter those of the various Protestant confessions. Moreover, their
near-militant social discipline has become the subject of countless legends, mostly
negative. A. Lynn Martin suggests that, since their inception, the Jesuits have been
treated and understood according to a certain, often inaccurate, mystique, which included
the notion that “. . . the Jesuits were the shock troops of the Counter-Reformation. They
were the stage directors of the Church‟s reaction to Protestantism.”33 Martin describes the
common view of the order as a group that sought connections with the European power
elite at every turn in order to ensure the broadest influence possible.34 Jeffrey Chipps
Smith has written a fascinating study about the artistic program of the Jesuits in which he
suggests that even the arts were part of a program meant to influence those who came
into contact with the order.35 Their political influence, coupled with a brilliant
organizational structure, allowed the Jesuits to flourish in the sixteenth century, and that
led many of their contemporaries to see them as “assassins, ferocious wild boars, thieves,
traitors, serpents, vipers, . . . filthy billygoats.”36
33
A. Lynn Martin, “The Jesuit Mystique,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 4, no. 1 (April 1973): 31.
Ibid.
35
See Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic
Reformation in Germany, (Princeton University Press, 2002).
36
Martin, “The Jesuit Mystique,” 31.
34
134
Like Martin, John O‟Malley argues that historians have perhaps gone too far
when they label the early tactics of the Jesuits as early modern and confessionalizing. He
points out that, in its early years, the group was not organized enough to present a
confessionalizing agenda or concerned enough to implement such an agenda.37 As
mentioned, O‟Malley proposes that the Jesuit order was more occupied with the salvation
of individual Catholics, whatever form that faith took, than it was with the reassertion of
the Catholic faith as an organization. Citing a dearth of language concerning reform
during the early years of the order, O‟Malley concludes that the concept of using the
Jesuits as a tool for reform was, at best, never made explicit by the order and, at worst,
entirely foreign to Ignatius.38
Ignatius acknowledged the inroads that the Protestant movements were making in
Germany. Peter Canisius kept Ignatius informed concerning the Peace at Augsburg, an
agreement which distressed the leader greatly. However, this was an organization that
had spread quickly to various corners of the world, and, for Jesuits such as Canisius,
Protestants were to be understood, less as Christians in need of reform and more in a
manner similar to natives of lands where Christianity had not yet been introduced.
Canisius repeatedly remarked that the majority of German Protestants, and Catholics for
that matter, were simple-minded folk who were entirely honest but misguided about their
faith.39 Indeed, Canisius initially warned that more extreme forms of social discipline –
one of the most basic elements of confessionalization – would be counterproductive in
the quest for souls. His initial rejection of Catholic strategies that hinted at social
37
O‟Malley, “Was Ignatius Loyala a Church Reformer?,” 69-71.
Ibid., 78.
39
Brodrick, St. Peter Canisius, 129-31.
38
135
discipline is summed up in a letter warning against attacking Protestant writers by
belittling them. The letter produced his now famous quote, “We do not heal the sick by
such medicine, we only render their disease incurable.”40
Rather than seeing the years surrounding the Reformation as the end of traditional
Catholic religion, as the drawing of sides or as an age of Catholic decay, it is more
accurate to assert that, at least in Bavaria, a large part of the population was initially more
interested in trying to come to terms with what the changes being brought about by the
Protestant upheaval meant for them. For example, Canisius was amazed to find that the
library in Ingolstadt had many Protestant texts despite their being deemed heretical and
banned in Bavaria, a sure sign that they were being read. Likewise, James Brodrick tells
of a good number of students who reportedly turned in their own copies of banned books
to Canisius once the Jesuit had gained their trust.41 Throughout Bavaria and Germany,
individual priests were found trying to accommodate to both belief systems by offering
Catholic and Lutheran services. In 1556, Albrecht V submitted to the wishes of his
people and allowed communion in both kinds.42 Official Catholic leadership in Bavaria
after Eck was admittedly lacking given Albrecht V‟s obsession with princely pursuits.
This left a hole for the early Jesuits who came to Germany to fill, but it is inaccurate to
describe the area as entirely void of religious devotion or to suggest that it had gone the
way of Protestant observation. The more accurate picture rests somewhere in the middle.
40
Johannes Jannsen, History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages, vol. 8
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner & Co., 1905), 237.
41
Brodrick, St. Peter Canisius, 138.
42
Andreas Kraus, Geschichte Bayerns: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck,
1983), 215.
136
In the 1570s, the confusion surrounding religious practices in Bavaria, the
traditional religious patronage of Albrecht V and the non-traditional methods of the Jesuit
agenda all came together during a debacle surrounding Martin Eisengrein‟s book, Our
Lady of Altötting. The publication of this book, Albrecht V‟s patronage of its author and
the influence of Peter Canisius on both suggests that the Jesuits were often willing to
accept and support the traditional religious practice and patronage of the Bavarian duke,
even when it contradicted their own judgment, as long as it meant bringing more
members to the fold.
In 1569, the Fugger family of Augsburg summoned Peter Canisius to exorcise
demons that had possessed Sybil Fugger‟s maid-of-honor, Anna von Bernhausen. Anna
was one of two young girls in the employ of the Fugger family who suffered from
apparent demonic possession. The other girl, Susanna, maid of Ursala Fugger, was so
afflicted that she had reportedly begun to eat glass.43 Susanna was taken to Loreto by
Johann Fugger to have her demons exorcized. Anna‟s caregivers, Mark and Sybilla,
called Canisius to Augsburg to handle her situation locally.44 Despite his reservations and
the direct protests of the Jesuit Superior-General, Francisco Borja, about the validity of
exorcisms, Canisius agreed to come to the aid of one of Europe‟s most powerful financial
dynasties and one of Catholicism‟s most fervent German supporting families. He arrived
in Augsburg on October 18.45
During the second half of the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church began to
reevaluate the rite of exorcism. Moshe Sluhovsky states that during the fifteenth century a
43
Brodrick, Saint Peter Canisius, 695.
Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints, 119-20.
45
Brodrick, Saint Peter Canisius, 696.
44
137
trend away from practices that were increasingly coming to be seen as superstitious had
begun. Among the practices was the exorcism of demons, which, by the end of the
century, was the domain of very specifically trained priests. Further, the Catholic Church
began to understand the definition of possession as a conflict of the mind and soul.
Possession was the result of impure thoughts – something more akin to a mental illness –
rather than an actual infestation of demons in the body.46
The changing definition of exorcism makes the exorcism at Altötting all the more
interesting, not because it happened, but because of the logic that was used to support its
happening. Canisius was warned by Borja not to undertake the exorcism because he
feared that the Fuggers were acting out of a superstitious belief that Anna was actually
possessed by a physical demon. In other words, Borja was okay with the act of exorcism
so long as it fit the early modern definition. When it did not, it became an act of
superstition that he could not support. Even Canisius began to grow weary with the
wealthy family when he discovered that they were acting less than Catholic toward the
situation. “It was the news that Johann had taken up astrology and necromancy which
caused St. Peter to pull up and become suspicious.”47
Despite Borja‟s protests and Canisius‟ attempts to sway the family away from
exorcism, the Fuggers held fast to the belief that Anna was indeed physically possessed
by seven demons, six of which were exorcised at public ceremonies at St. Ulrich in
Augsburg.48 The seventh demon proved more difficult, and in 1570, after Anna had
46
Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early
Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1-2.
47
Brodrick, Saint Peter Canisius, 696.
48
Crook, Orlando Di Lasso’s Magnificats, 68.
138
received instructions in a vision from the Virgin Mary, Canisius led a small group to
Altötting. The shift in location happened as much out of political necessity as spiritual.
The leaders of the city of Augsburg, who were leaning heavily in the direction of
Protestantism in the second half of the sixteenth century, banned exorcisms in 1568 and
were none too happy about the actions of the Jesuit priest.49 Upon arriving in Altötting,
Canisius set to work, at first reciting the Litany of Loreto, which proved to be the start of
an effective exorcism.
In 1571, shortly after Canisius performed the exorcism, Martin Eisengrein, who
was appointed provost to Altötting in 1567, had his miracle book, Our Lady at Altötting,
published in Ingolstadt by Wolfgang Eder.50 The book recounts the exorcism and many
other miracles that took place at the shrine. Apparently, the same Catholic authorities
who initially attempted to turn the Fuggers away from their mission on the grounds that it
was a superstitious undertaking were happy to print the very same story, knowing of its
appeal to the traditional religious atmosphere in Bavaria. Eisengrein was a Protestantraised convert who made a name for himself in Vienna at St. Stephen‟s and came to work
in Ingolstadt later in life. He was as zealous as converts are wont to be, and his book
quickly circulated throughout Germany, undergoing at least ten editions between 1571
and 1625.51 Borrowing from Aventinus‟ Bayerische Chronik, Eisengrein‟s two-hundred
49
Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, 318-20.
Philip M. Soergel, “The Counter-Reformation Impact on Anticlerical Propaganda,” in
Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought,
ed. Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1994), 639.
51
Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, 318.
50
139
page book attempted to inextricably link Catholicism and Bavaria, arguing that Altötting
had been a Catholic holy site since the age of Charlemagne.52
Both the exorcism and the book forced Bavarians, including the ruling
Wittelsbach family, to publicly take sides concerning the irreconcilable issues of image
worship, saints and, most importantly in Bavaria, the power and role of the Virgin Mary
in religious life. One of Eisengrein‟s intentions was to prove that Catholics were more
effective at warding off the devil than Lutherans, a notion that went against the reformed
Catholic definition of exorcism, but which fit rather nicely within the traditional religious
spirit of Bavaria.53 According to Philip Soergel, the Lutheran response was swift, “At
Strasbourg, Johannes Marbach, President of the Lutheran Church, hastily wrote and
published a 400-page reply entitled On Miracles and Miraculous Signs, which denounced
Canisius as a sorcerer.”54 The resurgence of late-medieval religious traditions at
pilgrimage sites across Bavaria grew until it peaked in the first half of the eighteenth
century, with a reported 160 group pilgrimages and 115,000 confessions annually taking
place at the tiny chapel in Altötting.55
Beyond pilgrimage, the small, rural, town of Oberammergau in Alpine Bavaria
also maintained ties with medieval traditions. The city opted for the performance of a
medieval passion play as an appropriate thanksgiving after being spared from an outbreak
of the plague in 1633. The village‟s choice of a medieval form of theater is interesting
because it occurred seventeen years after the death of Shakespeare and more than thirty
52
Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints, 115.
Soergel, “The Counter-Reformation Impact on Anticlerical Propaganda,” 639-40.
54
Ibid.
55
Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 1999), 111-12.
53
140
years after Jakob Bidermann introduced Jesuit drama to Bavaria with his play,
Cenodoxus, which is discussed in Chapter Five. Oberammergau might be an instance of a
rural community being out of touch with the latest dramatic trends, as was the case with
much of Bavaria, which was a primarily rural duchy, and it is out of line with the
extensive nature of Jesuit drama, which permeated even the most remote parts of Europe.
For his part, Albrecht V did his best to support and encourage traditional religion.
The Bavarian duke concentrated a great deal of his creative efforts on nourishing the
burgeoning popular support of what Bridget Heal describes as “the cult of the Virgin
Mary” that was again taking hold in Bavaria and throughout Europe during the middle of
the sixteenth century.56 In 1570, just after the exorcism of young Anna in Altötting,
Munich adopted the Litany of Loreto into their liturgical schedule, to be sung no less than
twenty times throughout the year. In 1571, the duke and his wife made their own
pilgrimage to Altötting in thanksgiving for his rescue the year before on Lake
Starnberger.57
Albrecht V also pursued the patronage of music that began to lean heavily on
Marian themes. Orlando di Lasso, for example, wrote or had the bulk of his 102
Magnificat settings published between the late 1560s, just as the cult of Mary was
beginning its resurgence in Bavaria, and his death in the 1590s when Albrecht V‟s son,
Wilhelm V, had fully latched onto Marian worship. That Lasso set the Magnificat is not
an indicator of the support that the Virgin received in Bavaria. The number of times that
the composer set the text, however, is telling. David Crook points out that “no composer
56
Bridget Heal describes the Marian phenomenon in The Cult of the Virgin Mary in early Modern
Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
57
Crook, Orlando Di Lasso’s Magnificats, 71.
141
in the entire history of European music set even half the number of Magnificats that
Lasso did.”58
With the support of Albrecht V, the Pope and the Jesuit order, Canisius also got
into the Marian act. In 1577, a few years after the exorcism, he wrote the first Jesuit
treatise on the Virgin Mary, De Maria Virgine incomparabili.59 David Crook describes
this work as the quintessential apologetic Marian text of the sixteenth century, and it was
but one of many already impressive devotional credits gained on behalf of the Bavarian
Jesuit.60
One of Albrecht V‟s earliest and perhaps biggest contributions to the cult of Mary
and the revival of traditional Bavarian Catholicism in general was the High Altar that was
commissioned for the centennial celebration of the university in Ingolstadt in 1572 (fig.
17). The altar was the first major work of public, religious visual art commissioned by the
Bavarian duke during his reign. This was not unusual given the state of public Catholic
works throughout the middle of the sixteenth century. Jeffrey Chipps Smith states,
“Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire, shocked by the continuing threats of iconoclasm
and, perhaps, chastened by Protestant criticisms of religious art, commissioned relatively
few new, non-memorial paintings and sculptures for their churches. . . . The revival of
large-scale Catholic religious art occurred only rarely before the 1580s.”61 If the risk of
Protestant interference created a decline in the creation of large public religious works
58
Ibid., 4.
Walter S. Melion, “‟Quae Lect Canisius Offert Et Spectata Diu’ The Pictoral Images in Petrus
Canisius‟s De Maria Virgine of 1577/1583,” in Early Modern Eyes, ed. Walter S. Melion and Lee Palmer
Wandel (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill NV, 2010), 207.
60
Crook, Orlando Di Lasso’s Magnificats, 71.
61
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, The Northern Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2004), 12.
59
142
during the first half of the sixteenth century in Bavaria, the High Altar served as the
resounding reentry of the Munich Wittelsbachs into the world of religious art patronage.
Interestingly, Albrecht chose to commission the court painter in Munich, Hans
Mielich, to oversee the creation of the altar. Mielich, who was primarily known for his
work as a miniaturist and portrait artist, seems an odd choice for such a large undertaking.
The piece was commissioned in 1560, twelve years before the university actually
celebrated its centennial. Mielich was given twenty-two hundred gulden as payment, an
amount that was almost sixty times the normal fee.62 Appropriately, the setting of the
altar was the Liebfrauenmünster in Ingolstadt. The altarpiece stands over thirty feet tall
and contains ninety-one paintings by Mielich and a great number of statues and carvings
by the sculptor, Hans Wörner.63
The altar‟s focal painting is the Stifterbild, or founder‟s painting, entitled Virgin
as Queen of Heaven with the Ducal Family (fig. 18). Above this painting sits an image of
the likeness of Christ. Small paintings of the twelve apostles are situated on each side of
Christ. The founder‟s painting itself sits in the center of the altar with another six
paintings on each side, twelve total, that comprise a cycle detailing the life of the Virgin,
from her birth through the trials of Jesus to her assumption. The last painting in the cycle
depicts the Assumption of the Virgin. Wörner‟s carving of the Coronation of the Virgin,
which sits atop the entire altar serves as the last piece in the cycle. The remaining sides of
62
63
Bernhard Hermann Röttger, Der Maler Hans Mielich (Munich: H. Schmidt, 1925), 111.
Smith, The Northern Renaissance, 376.
143
the altar contain their own cycle of paintings in which the Virgin is figured
prominently.64
Commissioning cycles depicting the life of the Virgin Mary reached its climax
during the late Middle Ages, at least a hundred years before the altar in Ingolstadt was
created, raising the question of why the duke and his artists chose to bring back a
seemingly antiquated form of presenting the life of Mary. The Italian-centered view
might hold that it was just another example of the Holy Roman Empire being slow to
catch up with the innovations of the Italian art movements. However, the artists in the
Wittelsbach court at Munich made regular travels throughout Europe; Mielich visited
Rome and Venice in the early 1550s, meeting with Titian along the way.65 The Munich
court was considered an artistic innovator in many areas. This makes the plausibility of
the notion that the altar‟s construction was yet another example of northern artists being
behind the times rather weak. It seems just as likely that, much like the play at
Oberammergau, the High Altar was a revival of traditional ideas. Indeed, the paintings
show that while Mielich certainly was not an artistic innovator, he was capable of
reproducing the methods being used throughout Europe in the sixteenth century.
Mielich‟s painting, Virgin as Queen of Heaven with the Ducal Family, shows the
influence of Titian‟s Assumption of the Virgin Mary (fig. 19). Titian‟s work, which was
completed early in the sixteenth century, is arranged in a three-tiered structure. The lower
layer depicts the apostles. The middle layer shows the Virgin surrounded by putti, and the
upper-most layer reveals God. Mielich‟s painting has only two layers. Mielich opted to
64
Röttger, Der Maler Hans Mielich, 124-130.
Charles Hope, “Mielich in Titian‟s Studio,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 60,
(1997), 260-61.
65
144
place Mary in the highest tier, omitting God altogether. The top layer depicts the Virgin
with the infant Jesus on her lap, while the bottom layer shows Albrecht V with his wife
and two children, surrounded by other family members praying to the Virgin, leaving
little doubt as to whom the object of Wittelsbach piety was directed.
Wittelsbach devotion to Mary continued throughout and long after the reign of
Albrecht V. His son, Wilhelm V, “the pious” as he came to be known, helped found,
along with the help of his father, Munich‟s first Marian sodality in 1578. Wilhelm V‟s
wife, Renata, was responsible for founding devotional services to Mary in 1575. After the
death of their first son, Wilhelm V and his wife began making pilgrimages to Marian
shrines throughout Bavaria, including trips to Altötting which became an annual affair.
Wilhelm V‟s son Maximilian I, who was best known for reclaiming the duchy after it had
been occupied by the Swedish, Gustavus Adolfus, followed in his family‟s passion for
Mary by, among many other actions, beginning the tradition of signing a blood oath to
the Virgin at Altötting.66
66
Crook, Orlando Di Lasso’s Magnificats, 72-3.
145
Fig. 17. Hans Mielich and Hans Wörner, Front of the High Altar, 1572. Mixed media.
Church of Our Lady, Ingolstadt.
146
Fig. 18. Hans Mielich, Virgin as Queen of Heaven with the Ducal Family, on the High
Altar, 1572. Church of Our Lady, Ingolstadt.
147
Fig. 19. Titian, Assumption of the Virgin Mary, 1518. Oil on panel; 22.5x11.6 ft. Basilica
di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice.
148
The earlier quote by Martin Luther rather succinctly outlines one of the main
points of contention that early Protestants had with their Catholic counterparts during the
sixteenth century. That Catholics would worship what amounted to false idols in the eyes
of Lutherans was a main point of concern for Luther. It was also an issue for the
Calvinists, who saw this type of devotion more as superstition than proper Christian
practice. Luther and Calvin were not far removed from the daily march of Bavarian life;
the other half of the Wittelsbach family who still ruled in the Upper Palatinate were
steadfast devotees to Calvinism, and they maintained a very vocal opposition to
Catholicism and the Munich line of Wittelsbach‟s support of it. In other words, the very
debates that caused the schism between Protestants and Catholics were coming to be a
regular feature of the interactions between Catholics and non-Catholics in Bavaria.
Despite the growing trend in Germany – even in Bavaria – toward Protestant
ideals, the question of how to understand the Virgin Mary‟s place within either side of the
faith was still something of a mixed bag. The importance of the Virgin as a religious
symbol for both Protestants and Catholics is presented in Bridget Heal‟s description of
pre-Reformation Germany:
On the Eve of the Reformation the Virgin Mary was, without doubt, the most
frequently depicted, described and invoked saint in Germany. The proliferation of
Marian images and devotional practices that occurred during the late Middle Ages
testified to the deep attachment that people felt for the Mother of God. By 1500
149
most German churches had at least one altar dedicated to Mary and some, such as
the parish church of St. Laurenz in Cologne, had two or three.67
Heal cites various writings by Luther suggesting that he still held special place for Mary
within religious life. After 1517, Marian devotion remained a vital part of both sides of
the confessional divide for the majority of the sixteenth century.68 The movement both
toward the reassertion of Mary‟s importance within the Catholic faith and her demotion
on behalf of Protestant belief systems only occurred after both sides began to
aggressively define their confessions. Likewise, the use of Mary as a tool for religious
identity occurred only after she was revived through the patronage of art that presented
and encouraged the resurgence of traditional religious piety that swept through Catholic
Bavaria, causing those qualities that separated Catholics and Protestants to be drawn into
sharper contrast.
67
68
Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in early Modern Germany, 1.
Ibid., 3-4.
150
CHAPTER V
Sociological Propaganda in Bavaria: The Legacy of Albrecht V to the Thirty Years‟ War
As, in the case of bodily illness, it is first necessary to remove what causes the disease
and then to apply restoratives which renew health or establish it firmly, so in this plague
of souls which various heresies have made to rage in the King’s dominions, the first thing
to be done is to see how the causes of it may be rooted out, and then, how the vigour of
healthy Catholic doctrine may be restored and confirmed.1
In 1638, Albrecht V‟s grandson, Maximilian I, erected the Mariansäule in
thanksgiving for Munich‟s liberation from the occupation of King Gustavus Adolphus
and his Swedish army, which lasted from 1632-34 during the Thirty Years‟ War. For
much of Munich and Bavaria, the Swedish occupation made manifest the worst elements
of war. Even worse for the Wittelsbachs was the way in which the occupation began.
Gustavus Adolphus struck at the heart of the courtly prestige that the Wittelsbachs had
established and maintained in Munich for well over two hundred years. Geoffrey Parker
describes the arrival of the occupiers in Munich: “Gustavus and Frederick V held a
triumphal entry on 17 May [1632], reviewed their victorious troops, played tennis
together on the ducal courts, surveyed the ducal art collection, and plundered it as
thoroughly as the Bavarians had plundered Heidelberg ten years before.”2 Jeffrey Chipps
Smith also describes events in which Swedish soldiers used religious relics and church
stalls for firewood, destroyed images of the saints and damaged church organs in
1
Quoted in James Brodrick, Saint Peter Canisius (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1980), 211.
This quote was taken from Ignatius Loyola‟s response to Peter Canisius‟ requests for advice on the decline
of Catholicism in Austrian lands.
2
Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years’ War, ed. Geoffrey Parker (New York: Routledge, 1997), 120.
151
3
Bamberg. Munich was largely spared in comparison with many of the outlying
communities in Bavaria. Many of the rural communities in the duchy were plundered and
leveled, sending the duchy into a time of deep famine.
The Mariansäule was a symbol of Bavaria‟s belief that through faith in the Virgin
Mary – the same faith that had been fervently cultivated nearly seventy years before by
Albrecht V at Altötting – the duchy had come through the worst of times (figs. 20-22).
The monument consists of a pedestal and column that rises to a height of approximately
thirty-five feet in the midst of one of Munich‟s busiest public squares. At the top of the
column, a bronze sculpture, The Virgin and Child, depicts Mary holding the infant Jesus
while sitting on a crescent moon. The statue was created by Hubert Gerhard, and it was
originally intended to adorn the tomb of his patron, Wilhelm V, the exceptionally pious
son of Albrecht V. Four bronze putti are situated at each corner of the base of the marble
structure, each one meant to guard against the afflictions of plague, war, famine and
heresy.4 Appropriately, the putti at the base of the artwork are depicted battling the
maladies that had recently laid the country low and from which Maximilian I and the
citizenry of Munich wished to be protected in the future.
3
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation
in Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 203.
4
Verena Beaucamp, et al. “Munich,” in Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, accessed January 4,
2011, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T060321.
152
Fig. 20. Mariansäule, 1638. Marienplatz, Munich. Photo courtesy of Hither and Dither,
accessed January 27, 2010, http://www.vanderkrogt.net/.
153
Fig. 21. Hubert Gerhard. The Virgin and Child on top of the Mariansäule, 1590. Gilded
bronze. Marienplatz, Munich. Photo courtesy of Hither and Dither, accessed January 27,
2010, http://www.vanderkrogt.net/. The statue was placed atop the Mariansäule in 1638.
154
Fig. 22. Ferdinand Murmann, Putto at the base of the Mariansäule defeating heresy, 1641.
Bronze. Marienplatz, Munich. Photo courtesy of Hither and Dither, accessed January 27,
2010, http://www.vanderkrogt.net/.
155
Three of the four putti battle physical dangers that constantly threatened the duchy
throughout the Thirty Years‟ War. War and famine were direct results of the Swedish
invasion of Bavaria. Further adding to the bleak situation, the entire duchy was ravaged
by an outbreak of the plague that killed fifteen thousand Munich residents during the
same year that the Bavarian Wittelsbachs saw the end of the Swedish occupation.5 The
plague hit close to home for all elements of society, including the Wittelsbachs, who saw
the plague claim the lives of several influential court artists, including the Jesuit-trained
court organist, Anton Holzner and his wife, who decided to stay in Munich throughout
the Swedish occupation despite a one-third pay reduction in the former‟s salary.6 As the
myth goes, the outbreak of the plague in 1633 also led city leaders in the small Alpine
town of Oberammergau to vow that they would perform a passion play every ten years as
an act of faith if God would spare the city from further affliction. Even today, the city
upholds its end of the bargain by performing the play in years ending in zero.
The putto that stands out in relation to the three depictions of physical threats to
the duchy is battling a serpent that represents heresy (fig. 22). The inclusion of heresy as
an affliction on par with the suffering that accompanies the other three maladies indicates
just how seriously the duchy – perhaps more accurately the Wittelsbachs – had come to
understand the correlation that existed between the duchy‟s heavily Marian-based
Catholicism and the health of the community. For the Catholics of Bavaria, the act of
heresy could often manifest itself as a malady that was just as physically afflicting as
famine, war and plague.
5
Alexander J. Fisher and Anton Holzner, “Introduction,” in Viretum pierium (1621) (Middleton,
WI: A-R Editions, Inc., 2009), viii.
6
Ibid.
156
Despite being erected fifty-five years after his death, the Mariansäule in
many ways represents the highest manifestation of the patronage of Albrecht V. By the
end of his reign in 1579, he had begun to integrate his Catholic confessional identity with
the mechanisms of state. Wittelsbach patronage, from the final years of Albrecht V‟s rule
to the reign of his grandson, Maximilian I, began to promote art as a platform for
presenting, enforcing and reinforcing notions of Bavarian Catholic identity, which was
obsessed with Marian devotion.
Beginning with the altarpiece at Ingolstadt in 1572, Albrecht V‟s patronage began
to promote artworks that expressed the duke‟s peculiar mixture of traditional religious
observance and Jesuit-influenced spirituality. Under the influence of the Jesuits, who
used assimilation and education as a strategy, Wittelsbach patronage shifted during the
second half of the sixteenth century from the support of artists who created works that
presented and reinforced the political greatness and spiritual steadfastness of the
Wittelsbach family to the creation of religious art that was intended for mass public
consumption by every level of Bavarian society.
In Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion, Andrew Pettegree asserts that such
large public works were part of a diverse program of identity building:
Reformers recognized a necessary double process of engagement: with the
individual Christian, and with a collective religious consciousness that also had to
be nurtured and reinforced. Hence in this study an attempt is made to relocate the
role of the book as part of a broader range of modes of persuasion that used every
medium of discourse and communication familiar to pre-industrial society.
Preaching, singing and drama would all play their part, alongside the careful
157
private tutelage of the new Protestant family in catechism class and Bible
reading.7
While his subject is Protestant works, Pettegree would have been accurate in asserting
that the same modes of persuasion existed for Catholics, and they also included the visual
arts and architecture. Like Pettegree, many historians of the early modern period have
increasingly become interested in understanding the social impact of the arts, and a
growing number of scholars are presenting a strong case for the influence of the arts as
political propaganda in confessionalizing countries.8
As it has turned into one of the central methodologies for studying early modern
Germany and especially Bavaria, this chapter begins with a reevaluation of the notion of
confessionalization as it relates to the arts. Confessionalization has provided valuable
insights into understanding the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the rise of the
early modern state on a macro level, and it is very useful in pointing out the similarities
that existed within the development of each religious confession. However,
confessionalization and its artistic byproduct, political propaganda, are not entirely
accurate tools for understanding Bavarian patronage during the latter half of the sixteenth
century on a micro level. These works of art were not acts of propaganda in the political
7
Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 2005), 8.
8
See Rebecca Wagner Oettinger, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2001); Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: CounterReformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), accessed June 21,
2010, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft738nb4fn/; Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda and the
Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of
Religion (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2002). It should be noted that Pettegree also acknowledges
the existence of confessionalization, but he criticizes what he considers an exaggerated focus on the success
of top-down authority. Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion, 186-87.
158
sense. Rather, Wittelsbach patronage that expressed traditional Bavarian Catholic
values was part of the emergence of sociological propaganda in the duchy.
Understanding patronage and the resulting artworks as a sociological rather than
as a political process dismantles the notion of a top-down hierarchy of patronage and
posits that each of the individual parties involved in the patronage, creation and reception
of an artwork maintained a certain level of autonomy in their relationship with the
artwork. This is not meant to suggest that the power and influence wielded by the
Wittelsbachs were in any way lacking. However, by reexamining the relationship
between all parties, it is possible to view the artworks and the patronage of artworks
throughout the duchy as a cooperative effort that required both action from the top and
pressure, acceptance and support from the bottom.
In many ways, Bavaria has become the standard example for the development of
early modern absolutism in which a ruling body imposes its belief structure upon the
masses through the use of social discipline. R. Po-Chia Hsia describes late-sixteenthcentury Bavaria as a place of centralized authority and enforced Catholic conformity. 9
Ulrike Strasser, presents Bavaria as Germany‟s first absolutist state.10 Similarly,
Wolfgang Behringer describes Bavaria as absolutist, mentioning that the Wittelsbachs
were the first to “crush” their religious opposition.11 Marc R. Forster repeatedly points
9
R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540-1770, New Approaches to European
History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 76.
10
Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic
State (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 3.
11
Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, trans. J.C. Grayson and David
Lederer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 18.
159
out that sixteenth century Bavaria is often presented as the closest example of a
duchy where the confessionalization thesis seems fit without issue.12
Interpreting early modern Bavaria as absolutist supports one of the most basic
components of confessionalization: social control. The extension of social control into the
realm of the arts is perhaps most strongly conveyed in the increasingly accepted
understanding of the early modern artwork as a piece of political propaganda. Wolfgang
Reinhard, in his foundational article on the establishment of confessionalization, posits
that political propaganda was the first of many tools used to spread and enforce new rules
of governance in a particular region.13
The history of the term, propaganda, however, presents multiple challenges to
scholars trying to apply it. Since the end of World War II, propaganda has come to
represent a mode of communication necessarily tied to politics, and it is generally
perceived as something sinister, akin to brainwashing and subversion. The following
statement from David Welch‟s book, Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: a Historical
Encyclopedia, 1500 to Present, echoes the opening sentences of any number of works on
the study of propaganda. He notes that the contemporary usage of the term “suggests that
propaganda is a cancer on the body politic that manipulates our thoughts and actions and
should be avoided at all costs.”14 Welch calls for a repositioning of the term, but he
concedes that the usage of propaganda as a cultural weapon during the early twentieth
12
Marc R. Forster, “With and Without Confessionalization. Varieties of Early Modern German
Catholicism,” Journal of Early Modern History 1, no. 4 (1997): 326. For other examples, see Introduction,
note 6. Forster goes on to assert that even in Bavaria, the definition is too general in nature.
13
Wolfgang Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: a
Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989): 391-92.
14
Nicholas J. Cull, Davic Culbert and David Welch, Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: a
Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to Present (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2003), xv.
160
century has made it difficult to salvage a neutral notion of propaganda that is
applicable to earlier time periods.15
Given how loaded the modern understanding of propaganda is and given the
growing acceptance and application of the confessionalization thesis and its focus on
social control, the importance of defining propaganda is paramount. It means the
difference between understanding the Mariansäule as a work that was positioned in a
public space by a ruler who wanted to impose Catholic identity in his lands and who
wanted to control, actively and passively, the art to which the citizens of Munich had
access, and understanding the monument as the public manifestation of a unified set of
communal beliefs. It means the difference between the patronage of public works that
reflected the identity of Bavaria and the patronage of works that forced an identity on
Bavaria.
Evonne Anita Levy explains that the modern term “propaganda” is derived from
the Latin term, propagare, meaning “to sow.” The term was put into use by the Catholic
Church during the Thirty Years‟ War.16 In 1622, Pope Gregory XV founded a missionary
organization called the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. The initial purpose of
the organization was to oversee the foreign missions of the various Catholic religious
orders.17 The term originally described the creation of an organization whose mission it
was to ensure that those going to preach in the field were fully knowledgeable about the
tenets of their faith. Propaganda was a specific type of education meant to ensure that
15
Ibid.
Evonne Anita Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: University of California
Press 2004), 56.
17
Cull, Culbert and Welch, Propaganda and Mass Persuasion, 340.
16
161
those who went on to spread the faith actually knew something about the subject
matter they were disseminating.18
Scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries understood the lineage of
propaganda as at first representing the people and then the strategies that were employed
in order to convert others to a certain idea or confession. With this transformation,
propaganda became less about the information being conveyed and more about the
various methods used to convey that information. Propaganda as a strategy was
increasingly used for political ends. Ideologies were the property of leaders; propaganda
itself merely provided the method for imposing the ideology. As Philip M. Taylor states,
“There is no real point, in other words, in making moral judgements concerning whether
propaganda is a „good‟ or a „bad‟ thing; it merely is. Rather, one needs to redirect any
moral judgement away from the propaganda process itself and more to the intentions and
goals of those employing propaganda to secure those intentions and goals.”19
Wolfgang Reinhard applied the modern understanding of political propaganda
within the context of confessionalization. Propaganda was a complex system of
communication and censorship, in which the arts, literature, music, sermons and ritual
were all tools used to control every level of society under the ruling elite. As with
Taylor‟s definition, Reinhard recognized that both Catholics and Protestants were using
the same methods to present entirely different ideologies. For Reinhard, patronage in the
18
Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque, 56.
Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to
the Present Day (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 8.
19
162
early absolutist state, which did not separate religion from politics, was employed to
create propaganda for all religious confessions.20
While the notion of the term, propaganda, was not in modern use until the
seventeenth century, the modes of delivery of which Taylor, Levy and Reinhard speak
when they describe propaganda existed alongside other forms of communication, such as
rhetoric and polemic, early in the sixteenth century. Scholars of propaganda in the early
modern period have typically separated propaganda from these other modes. Both
Rebecca Oettinger and Andrew Pettegree cite Miriam Usher Chrisman‟s distinction
between polemic and propaganda in order to fully articulate the political nature of
propaganda.
Polemic can be defined as a controversial argument, a discussion in which
opposite views are presented and maintained by opponents. It connotes a two-way
process, a dialogue, although it may be a dialogue between the deaf. Propaganda
lacks that quality of interchange. It is one-sided, a systematic attempt to propagate
a particular opinion or doctrine. Its purpose is to influence men‟s opinions and
attitudes and thus their actions and behavior.21
Similarly, Norman Davies presents five rules for political propaganda that have become
widely acknowledged: “simplification,” where all data is reduced to a choice between
good and bad; “disfiguration,” in which ridicule and other illogical means are used to
discredit opponents; “transfusion,” in which the general consensus is manipulated to
match one‟s needs; “unanimity,” which is the act of presenting one viewpoint as the only
20
Rheinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State,” 392.
Oettinger, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation, 10; Pettegree, Reformation and
the Culture of Persuasion, 183.
21
163
viewpoint of logical people using peer and social pressure; and “orchestration,”
which consists of endlessly repeating the same message in many different ways. 22
These definitions, and other variations on the same theme, are all tied to notions
of political control. While some are more detailed than others, each maintains that
political propaganda, as a form of communication, is an act of convincing that involves
dishonesty – or omission at the very least – for the sake of control. Randal Marlin posits
the following definition of propaganda: “The organized attempt through communication
to affect belief or action or inculcate attitudes in a large audience in ways that circumvent
or suppress an individual‟s adequately informed, rational, reflective judgment.”23
Certainly, artworks and policies that pursued a political agenda were present
during the early modern period. Broadsides, songs, sermons, poetry, public sculptures
and public displays were often created with the direct objective of influencing the ideals
of the population. In her book, Catholic Belief and Survival in Late Sixteenth-Century
Vienna, Elaine Fulton states, “For the Dukes of Bavaria, Catholicism thus became the
tool with which they imposed unity on and asserted control over their own lands.”24
Fulton draws attention to the growing number of initiatives aimed at perpetuating
Catholic belief within Bavaria. During the years leading up to 1563 – the same year as
the debacle surrounding the expulsion of the Count of Ortenburg and the end of the
councils at Trent – there were plenty of signs that point to the fervent establishment of a
mechanism of bureaucratic social control in Bavaria. William David Myers describes the
22
Norman Davies, Europe: a History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 500-01.
Randal Marlin, Propaganda & the Ethics of Persuasion (Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press,
LTD., 2002), 22.
24
Elaine Fulton, Catholic Belief and Survival in Late Sixteenth-Century Vienna: the Case of
George Eder (1523-87) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 106.
23
164
establishment of the notion of “pietas Bavarica, a Bavarian piety inculcating
devotion, discipline, and obedience by employing local religious traditions in the service
of a larger Roman Catholic orthodoxy overseen by secular institutions.”25 Diarmaid
MacCulloch supports a similar notion, noting that Albrecht V‟s son, Wilhelm V, working
in conjunction with certain Habsburgs, intended to establish control “‟not with sound and
fury, but surreptitiously and slowly; . . . not with words, but with deeds.‟”26
Under the influence of the Jesuits, Albrecht V began to establish organizations
that saw to it that Bavarians remained appropriately Catholic, according to his definition
of what it meant to be Catholic. In 1558, he established an ecclesiastical council, the
Geistliche Rat, with the mission of ensuring unified religious practices throughout the
duchy and reporting on those areas that were still noncompliant. Punishment could be
stiff. For example, cases where parishioners refused to give proper confession sometimes
resulted in imprisonment.27
Adding to the notion of pietas Bavarica was a policy that encouraged the
marriage of Bavarian Wittelsbachs only to other Catholic nobles, thus keeping the
religious identity of the court unified.28 These marriages were typically to Habsburgs,
which served to maintain a strong Catholic bloc within the Holy Roman Empire. During
the final decade of Albrecht V‟s reign, the duke began issuing decrees forcing Munich‟s
Protestants to either leave the duchy or face severe penalties. In 1567, the duke decreed
that citizenship in Bavaria only be granted to Catholics. By the early 1570s, regular
25
William David Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk” Confession and Conscience in CounterReformation Germany (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 117.
26
Quoted in MacCulloch, The Reformation, 451.
27
Myers, “Poor, Sinning-Folk”, 119.
28
Andrew L. Thomas, “A House Divided: Wittelsbach Confessional Court Cultures in Bavaria,
the Palatinate, and Bohemia, C. 1550-1650,” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2007), 164.
165
tribunals were being held to investigate accusations of the religious leanings of
various lower nobles throughout Munich.29
As a patron, David Crook suggests that Albrecht V was trying to adopt artistic
policies that were more in line with the reforms that were being presented in Trent and in
Rome. In tracing the Mass settings of Orlando di Lasso, Crook shows that by the 1570s,
much of Lasso‟s liturgical music moved from using texts from the Freising liturgy, a
locally developed set of rites that were quite varied from Rome and other principalities,
to adopting texts as set forth in the Tridentine Breviary.30 Philip M. Soergel positions
Albrecht V‟s patronage of Martin Eisengrein‟s book, Our Lady of Altötting, as part of a
series of “propagandistic campaigns that Bavarian counter-reformers and state officials
waged for local devotions.”31 Soergel goes on to state that the Wittelsbachs often used
pilgrimages as an extension of state power and order.32
Despite the evidence supporting confessionalization, top-down social hierarchies
have increasingly been questioned as a valid method for understanding artworks of the
early modern period. Concurrent with his absolutist laws, Albrecht V also took part in a
tradition of finding local solutions to Bavarian issues. He sent delegates to Trent to try
and convince the Pope to relax policies on the celibacy of clergy and for communion of
both kinds to be permitted in parish churches. In 1564, he received permission by the
29
Strasser, State of Virginity, 17-18.
David Crook, Orlando di Lasso’s Imitation Magnificats for Counter-Reformation Munich
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 56-63.
31
Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 4, accessed June 21, 2010,
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft738nb4fn/.
32
Ibid.
30
166
33
Pope to permit the latter. According to Peter G. Bietenholz, Albrecht V, due to his
poor financial management, often found himself adopting proposals from the Bavarian
Landtag that went against his Catholic wishes. The parliament went so far as to ask for
acceptance of the Augsburg confession. When challenged by Rome, Bietenholz states
that “the duke answered that he could not ignore the will of his people and that the Italian
and Spanish curials in Rome could not understand the situation because the proverbial
Germanic love of freedom meant nothing to them.”34
Throughout the 1570s, the duke successfully managed to keep Munich‟s convents
open to the outside world, allowing the nuns the freedom to host outsiders, a privilege
that the reforms coming from Trent were trying to end.35 The abuses mentioned in earlier
chapters concerning the placement of his children into positions of power within the
Church, despite their being toddlers in some cases, points to the notion that Albrecht V
was not looking necessarily to abide by the rules and regulations laid down by Rome.
The reactionary nature of Wittelsbach policy is also worth noting. The
increasingly restrictive laws that were being put forth were typically set in place only
after a minor crisis. This was a government that was continually trying to keep up with
the demands of Bavarians. Even with the help of the Jesuits, who were doing their best to
establish the foundation of a confessional state, it is hard to imagine top-down social
control working in a duchy with an overwhelmingly rural populace and a reactionary
government. Further compounding the issues of religion, Augsburg and Nuremberg, both
33
Andreas Kraus, Geschichte Bayerns: von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck,
1983), 215.
34
Peter G. Bietenholz, ”‟Petra Scandali‟: The Index of Rome and the Dilemmas of Catholic
Reformers in Southern Germany,” in Le contrôle des idées a la Renaissance, ed. J.M. Bujanda (Geneva:
Librairie Droz S.A., 1996), 143.
35
Strasser, State of Virginity, 78-79.
167
bi-confessional cities, sat within the borders of the duchy, ensuring a fresh influx of
ideas no matter how strict Wittelsbach policies were.
With Albrecht V, and throughout much of the Holy Roman Empire, there is as
much a history of peasant influence and leaders working to appease the lower classes as
there is a history of top-down rule. Indeed, the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire
during the sixteenth century was in large part the result of minor nobles, lower-ranking
clergy and masses of common people who acted upon their own disenfranchisement with
the views and actions of the ruling class.
In his book, Obediant Germans? A Rebuttal, Peter Blickle suggests that the
stereotype of Germans throughout history as orderly, rule-following people needs to be
erased. As mentioned, Thomas A. Brady, Jr., who penned the introduction to the English
translation of Peter Blickle‟s book, states, ”This image is often advanced to explain how a
nation of philosophers and poets came to strive for world power and employ methods of a
brutality rarely displayed by Europeans, at least in Europe.”36 The atrocities of the
twentieth century were a motivating factor in finding a root cause that could justify why
so many everyday people would go along with such terrible events. The traditional
answer, Blickle argues, is to blame incorrectly a supposed part of German nature that
strives to be controlled or to live in an orderly environment. Blickle suggests that
historians have typically placed the root of this form of passive obedience in the Middle
Ages.37
36
Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “Translator‟s Introduction,” in Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal, by Peter
Blickle (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1997), ix.
37
Blickle, Obedient Germans?, 97-101.
168
Blickle asserts that the notion of obedient Germans has very little basis in
actuality. He points to the nearly four hundred notable urban and rural peasant uprisings
that took place in the Holy Roman Empire from 1300 to 1800, an average of one major
revolt nearly every year.38 These revolts were both urban and rural, a testament to the
varying class levels that took part in the uprisings. The willingness of people of all
classes to revolt caused a shift in the relationship between nobles and non-nobles from a
linear hierarchy in the Middle Ages, to something more cyclical in the early modern
period.
Remarkably, there were no major rebellions by the citizenry of Munich and
Bavaria during Albrecht V‟s reign; the only major uprisings within the duchy occurred in
1634, well after Albrecht V‟s death. Sigrun Haude points out that the uprising was the
result of peasant dissatisfaction with the status of Bavaria and with military conscription
that took place during the Thirty Years‟ War. During the uprising, Albrecht V‟s grandson,
Maximilian I, actually met many of the needs of the peasants, an action that supported the
duke‟s theory that “a prince should abhor excessive punishment as much as a physician
abhors corpses.”39
The relative stability of Bavaria during a time of great turmoil in the rest of the
Holy Roman Empire tends to be explained by describing just how intricate the system of
social discipline was in Bavaria. However, the peasant classes were much more active
and influential in determining how they were governed than is typically presented, which
draws attention to the weakness of the notion of social control. As Blickle states,
38
Ibid., 62.
Quoted in Sigrun Haude, “Social Control and Social Justice under Maximilian I of Bavaria,” in
Politics and Reformations: Communities, Polities, Nations, and Empires: Essays in Honor of Thomas A.
Brady, Jr., ed. Christopher Ocker et al. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2007), 426.
39
169
“Historically, subjects in Germany were not just faceless peasants, pawns without
strategic worth whom the lords pushed about on the chessboard. On the contrary, the
subjects were actors, black playing against white.”40 In other words, the peace that was
sustained in Bavaria was not entirely an act of top-down social discipline. The success of
Wittelsbach policy was as much an act of general acceptance from below as it was
enforcement from above.
Similarly, Marc R. Forster presents sixteenth-century identity as a cycle of
influence in which all classes participated. As mentioned, his notion of confessionalism,
as opposed to confessionalization, attempts to show that religious reforms could not have
happened if they were imposed from the top. Forster asserts that religious uniformity and
obedience never took place in the Holy Roman Empire, because the Empire remained a
region full of stratified, local religious customs, both Catholic and Protestant.41 He states,
“Many central aspects of German Catholicism developed out of the interplay between
elite initiatives and popular religion. Studies of pilgrimages, the cult of saints, and
eucharistic piety show not only how these traditional Catholic practices changed their
character during the early modern period, but also how vital a role the population played
in their development.”42
As scholars continue to challenge the notion of early modern top-down social
hierarchies and social discipline, it is important to apply their findings to the arts and to
patronage. Peter Burke has set out to prove, for example, that diversity of communities
and the cultures that each member of a community identified with were typically quite
40
Blickle, Obedient Germans?, 97.
Marc R. Forster, “With and Without Confessionalization. Varieties of Early Modern German
Catholicism,” Journal of Early Modern History 1, no. 4 (1997): 318.
42
Ibid., 319.
41
170
strong. Nobles constantly found themselves being influenced by popular art forms.
Carnival celebrations, folk songs and folk tales are all examples of elements of culture in
which the entire population participated. In short, all classes were involved in a process
of shaping and of being shaped.43 Albrecht V‟s participation in pilgrimages to Altötting is
one of several examples where the leader followed the actions of his people.
Elaine Fulton‟s assertion that the Wittelsbachs used Catholicism as a political tool,
presents power as something more important than religious confession. Indeed, this study
has mentioned several instances of Wittelsbach actions that directly contradicted official
Catholic doctrine. However the Wittelsbachs felt about official Roman Catholicism, it is
inappropriate to adopt the notion that early modern people, of any class, saw traditional
Catholic piety and salvation as a political choice. Faith was an integral part of defining
community. The sacraments were intertwined with life cycles. The saints and the
immediacy of traditional Catholicism often provided the population with a means of hope
and direct access to a perfectly real and logically numinous world.
Conversion often meant a tectonic shift in how life was to be lived and, more
importantly, how truth was to be revealed. As Patrick Collinson states, “Cuius regio, eius
religio made many martyrs from all faiths, destroyed families, and broke consciences, a
heavy price to pay for the stability of the state. Not that it made for a stable state,
either.”44 Diarmaid MacCulloch echoes the magnitude of maintaining or changing faith in
early modern Europe. He states, “The old Church was immensely strong, and that
strength could only have been overcome by the explosive power of an idea. The idea
43
44
Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 49-56.
Patrick Collinson, The Reformation: A History (New York: Random House, Inc., 2006), 149-50.
171
45
proved to be a new statement of Augustine‟s ideas on salvation.” It is not a far leap
to assert that MacCulloch‟s statement could just have easily read that, for many the
strength of the old Church was overcome by the explosive power of the revelation of a
new truth, rather than a new idea, about salvation.
On practical grounds, changing faith meant dissolving relationships with loved
ones. Religious shifts could put one‟s life and the lives of one‟s family in danger. In the
case of cuius region eius religio, it meant literally losing a sense of community, as the
only legal provision for those with belief systems that did not correspond with the ruling
duke was a one-time allowance of safe passage out of their native territory and into one
that would accept them. The only other options were silence or uprising.
Descartes‟ self-realization of observable, abstract truth was still quite distant to
the average early modern mind; and for all of the Renaissance humanist‟s attempts at
discovering the truths of antiquity, the ability of the lower classes, and most of the upper
classes for that matter, to conceive of an environment in which abstract truth existed
beyond the still-very-physically tangible truth of a particular form of salvation is not
accurate. The immediacy of religious faith, coupled with the responsibility felt by rulers
to oversee the spiritual foundation of their people, calls into question the validity of
applying a primarily political function to the works of religious art such as the
Mariansäule.
The late sixteenth century was fraught with uncertainty and fear about the future,
or the lack thereof. These issues created an environment in which salvation was just as
45
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 107.
172
important as the political atmosphere in Europe for all people. Wolfgang Behringer
describes late-sixteenth-century Bavaria:
Broadly speaking, we can observe a shift away from the life-loving, open, sensual
mentality of the Renaissance, with its orientation to this world and its points of
contact with a widespread popular culture of pleasure, and a flight towards
dogmatic, confessional-religious, ascetic modes of thought and behaviour, their
sights fixed on the next world, which appeared to offer a refuge in a situation that
was growing more and more precarious.46
The constant threat of the Ottoman Empire, plague, poverty, and religious and political
fragmentation existed for every level of society. Most of Europe was trying to deal with
the very real threats of famine, an apparent resurging threat of witches, demons and
devils, the access to and proliferation of information and misinformation throughout the
upper and lower classes the likes of which Europe had not previously seen, and, most to
be feared, the coming wrath of God, which for many seemed all too imminent given the
list of maladies affecting their communities. The importance of the notion of salvation
and the obsession with the end of days leaves the possibility that another purpose of
Albrecht V‟s artistic patronage was to save souls, which was of primary concern after
beginning his fervent devotion to traditional Bavarian Catholicism in the 1560s. The
hierarchy of salvation-over-power continued with the reign of his son, Wilhelm V, who
went so far as to abdicate in order to more fully devote himself to his religious lifestyle.
It would be deeply naïve to suggest that religion was never abused for the sake of
power. It would be equally naïve to suggest that patronage did not pay for artworks that
46
Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, 104.
173
served political means along the lines of political propaganda. However,
interpretations of religious artworks need to account for more than purely political ends
or motives of power during the early modern period.
Patronage was a part of the cultural exchange between various facets of Bavarian
society, and it was subject to the same symbiotic relationship as was Wittelsbach
governance. The patronage of the Munich Wittelsbachs as far back as the fourteenth
century reflects the amount of power that all classes wielded. Wittelsbach relations with
the citizens of Munich during the building of the Alte Hof and Neuveste is an appropriate
example of a group of citizens who were more than willing to keep their leaders in check.
The Frauenkirche involved the unification of the entire community as relative equals
working toward one goal. The domes of the Frauenkirche were added in 1525, during the
middle of the Peasant‟s War, a conflict that had consumed several of the duchies
surrounding Bavaria. Bavaria itself remained relatively unscathed by the uprisings. The
Peasant‟s War, the furthering growth of imperial free cities and the proliferation of
artworks and other media throughout the empire all point to an era in which various
elements of the population were becoming more powerful than ever. Albrecht V was born
into this environment, and despite the turmoil that surrounded his duchy during his
upbringing and early rule, his passive demeanor appeased the peasant classes, which
ensured a mostly peaceful duchy.
Patronage during the latter part of Albrecht V‟s reign and throughout the reigns of
his son and grandson was shaped by the relationship between artist, ruler and society.
With the High Altar, Wittelsbach patronage shifted away from artworks meant only for
the upper classes toward artworks that sought to allow the public to identify with what it
174
was to be Bavarian. The ever-increasing role of Jesuit advisors and concomitantly
the growing role of formal education allowed more people than ever a say in determining
what these public works of art should be. The need for mass appeal, and the almost
universal fear of the unknown, ensured that artworks began to take on a highly emotional
character, ushering in the era of the Baroque. Trying to simplify the notion of Bavaria
during the second half of the sixteenth century as an absolutist state, full of political
propaganda, social discipline and a militant ruling class, omits the confusion and
contradiction that often surrounded the duchy in the sixteenth century.
A more passive and all-encompassing notion of propaganda includes the
participation of all classes of society in the proliferation of a specific identity is a more
accurate way in which to view late-sixteenth-century Wittelsbach patronage. Jacques
Ellul described this notion as sociological propaganda. He defined sociological
propaganda as:
The group of manifestations by which any society seeks to integrate the maximum
number of individuals into itself, to unify its members‟ behavior according to a
pattern, to spread its style of life abroad, and thus to impose itself on other groups.
We call this phenomenon “sociological” propaganda, to show, first of all, that the
entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate,
secondly, that its influence aims much more at an entire style of life than at
opinions or even one particular course of behavior.47
Ellul contends that sociological propaganda is nearly the opposite of political propaganda
in that it does not try to promote an ideology that is meant to mislead or control the
47
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: the Formation of Men’s Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean
Lerner (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1973), 62-63.
175
masses. Rather, sociological propaganda is a self-reproducing propaganda in which
everyday life and identity becomes a means of social control that is enforced at every
level of society.48 For an early modern Catholic in Bavaria, identification as both
Catholic and Bavarian automatically conferred notions of good and bad. These notions
were not shaped by universal, abstract, logical truths about good and bad; they were
shaped by the everyday, lived existence of being Catholic and Bavarian.
Sociological propaganda is necessarily passive. It does not come about through
planned action, and once established, it is typically practiced without awareness. Ellul
states, “As a result, man adopts new criteria of judgment and choice, adopts them
spontaneously, as if he had chosen them himself. But all these criteria are in conformity
with the environment and are essentially of a collective nature.”49 One of the major
characteristics of Ellul‟s theory of sociological propaganda is the notion of prepropaganda, which is the establishment of the norms that people eventually come to
adopt as logic. Pre-propaganda involves the psychological preparation of people in order
to get them to accept the ideas presented in the propaganda.50 This is done through the
propagation of myths, beliefs and feelings of identity.
What makes Ellul‟s idea so interesting is that, by his definition, it was Albrecht V
who seems to have become conditioned by the sociological propaganda of traditional
Bavarian Catholicism. This conditioning guided how he viewed the world, and ultimately,
it affected how he chose to direct his patronage. For the better part of a hundred years, the
Wittelsbachs may have flirted with Catholicism insomuch as it could be used as a tool for
48
Ibid.
Ibid., 64.
50
Ibid., 30-33.
49
176
strengthening their own political structure; but in doing so, they were also constantly
exposed to the myths and beliefs of that culture. Albrecht V‟s acceptance of that culture
on a spiritual level was the final act in the establishment of sociological propaganda from
above and below.
After he accepted and sought to propagate traditional Bavarian Catholicism, his
actions were less about establishing and controlling and more about maintaining and
encouraging a structure that was already in place. This did result in direct disciplinary
action in some cases, as with the expulsion of many Lutherans. It also resulted in direct
political action, as with the establishment of an organized educational system that
integrated Catholic doctrine. But it is only seen as social control in light of those
Protestants who were expelled. For the Catholics of the region, Albrecht V‟s actions were
a matter of doing good. They were a matter of reinforcing and protecting an already
existing culture that he adopted. This was a different set of circumstances than that facing
the Lutheran nobles of the Holy Roman Empire, who had to rely on the more traditional
form of political propaganda because they had no history, no pre-propaganda, upon
which to build. They were establishing practice rather than maintaining, and that involved
a fundamentally different strategy. The Wittelsbachs, on the other hand, had several
hundred years worth of documentation and lineage from which to work, including
genealogical murals, historical chronicles, museums, libraries and pilgrimage sites all
devoted to the greatness of Bavarian Catholicism.
A large part of maintaining the effectiveness of sociological propaganda was the
establishment of an education system in Bavaria. Three factors played into the explosion
of education within the duchy in the second half of the sixteenth century: the increasing
177
need to be literate, the establishment of education as central to the Jesuit mission and
the need to combat the ideologies that were being presented by competing confessions. It
was of such importance that, according to Gerald Strauss, every parish in Bavaria had an
elementary school by 1560.51 The Jesuit takeover of Ingolstadt, which took place under
the watch of Peter Canisius, was the beginning of an equally concentrated effort on
higher education. Later, this led to the establishment of a Jesuit college in Munich and
others throughout Bavaria and the Holy Roman Empire.
However, formal education was potentially dangerous. Much like Ignatius‟
exercises, literacy and education were vital for the formation of individual thought, but
they also functioned as an extra means of control so long as the information and materials
that were presented were in line with maintaining the larger sociological norms. One of
the strategies at which the Jesuits were experts was the ability to assimilate rather than to
dominate, and this became part of their program of education. In 1569, Peter Canisius
undertook the task of rewriting the Augsburg Breviary, which by Tridentine standards
was unusual because it meant rejecting the more centralized Roman Breviary.52 Canisius
guided the breviary toward the notions of the Roman work, but the very idea of adopting
such a localized text emphasizes the nature of Jesuit assimilation. The breviary was a
minor work in comparison to Canisius‟ most widely-read volume, his Small Catechism,
which was published in 1558 and was used throughout the Holy Roman Empire as a
51
Gerald Strauss, “Techniques of Indoctrination,” in Literacy and Social Development in the West:
A Reader, ed. Harvey J. Graf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 98-99.
52
Brodrick, St. Peter Canisius, 440.
178
primary tool for Catholic education. In 1569, Albrecht V ordered that the catechism
be obligatory in all schools in Bavaria.53
One of the most effective tools within Jesuit education was Jesuit theater, which
became one of the most popular art forms of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. These dramas were quite affecting to their audiences due in large part to the
great spectacle of the works. Jesuit productions employed music, bright costumes and
supremely complex special effects, including scenes of Hell and the appearance of ghosts
on stage. They mingled popular forms of entertainment into productions, recruiting
jugglers, jousters and others when the need arose. Considered by Jesuit leaders as a tool
for training students in the art of public speaking, Jesuit theater coupled the spectacle of
the productions with a very basic, often highly emotive, plotline in which rather generic
characters chose whether or not to live good lives and dealt with the ramifications of that
choice. In other words, for all of the emotion and spectacle involved, audience members
were never left in the dark about why things turned out the way they did.54
The plays were typically free to attend and open to all members of society,
Protestant and Catholic alike. Joohee Park recounts several instances of Protestant
audience members, even nobles, being moved to the point of donating money to the
school that produced the play.55 Often, the plays were in competition with Lutheran
equivalents, and the subject matter sometimes took jabs at specifically Protestant themes.
53
Ibid., 700-01.
See William H. McCabe, An Introduction to Jesuit Theater (St. Louis, MO: The Institute of
Jesuit Sources, 1983); Catholic Theater and Drama: Critical Essays, ed. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2010); The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, ed.
John W. O‟Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2006).
55
Joohee Park, “Not Just a University Theatre: The Significance of Jesuit School Drama in
Continental Europe, 1540-1773,” in Catholic Theatre and Drama: Critical Essays, ed. Kevin J. Wetmore,
Jr. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2010), 35.
54
179
Park tells of a production in Cologne in which characters playing Luther, Calvin and
an Anabaptist are all condemned to eternal damnation, much to the delight of the crowd.
Certain rules were even established about how to best write a drama so as to attract and
retain the greatest number of viewers.56
In Munich, these plays were supported as fervently as elsewhere. However, the
subjects were typically aimed at folks who were already Catholic. William H. McCabe,
who has written one of the best introductions the genre, holds Munich as the height of
spectacle for these plays. The most spectacular was a 1577 production of Esther that
included an opening procession of approximately seventeen hundred people, “some
mounted, others on foot, others riding on floats or in carriages, all richly dressed.”57
Musicians took part in the procession in large numbers, including bagpipers, drummers,
trumpeters, kettle drums and many others.58 Orlando di Lasso composed several motets
based on texts taken from the work. He went on to do this several more times with other
notable Jesuit plays.59 Albrecht V even had direct involvement with the work, lending
valuable furnishings from his vast collections to serve as stage props. This particular
performance lasted three days and was comprised of three hundred participants.60
Jesuit theater remained a vital part of Munich‟s culture well into the seventeenth
century, reaching its height under one of the most famous playwrights within the genre,
56
Ibid.
McCabe, An Introduction to Jesuit Theater, 57.
58
Franz Körndle, “Between Stage and Divine Service: Jesuits and Theatrical Music,” in The
Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, ed. John W. O‟Malley et al. (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press Incorporated, 2006), 480.
59
Peter Bergquist, “Introduction,” in The Complete Motets 3: Motets from Four to Eight Voices
from Thesaurus musicus (Nuremberg, 1564), by Orlando di Lasso, ed. Peter Bergquist (Middleton, WI: AR Editions, Inc., 2002), xiv. Also see Körndle, “Between Stage and Divine Service;” Philip Weller, “Lasso,
Man of the Theatre,” in Orlandus Lassus and His Time: Colloquium Proceedings Antwerpen 2426.08.1994, ed. Ignace Bossuyt et al. (Peer, Belgium: Alamire POB, 1995), 89-128.
60
McCabe, An Introduction to Jesuit Theater, 57.
57
180
Jakob Bidermann. Born in 1578, Bidermann entered into the Jesuit order in 1594 and
began teaching as a rhetoric instructor in Munich in 1606, during the reign of Albrecht
V‟s grandson, Maximilian I.61 Bidermann is most known for the advances he made in
theatrical forms. Descriptions of him tell of a man who was obsessed with every aspect of
theater. Roger Savage quotes a description from 1666: “I‟ve often heard grave men say
that they believed that the leader of a great army on the day he had to fight with a fierce
enemy was not troubled with more cares than the choragus of a big show on the day it
was to descend into the theatrical arena.”62 Savage goes on to explain that Bidermann
was responsible for every aspect of a production, from costumes to programs.63
Bidermann‟s most lasting work was Cenodoxus, which is often considered one of
the first to blur the Renaissance genres of comedy and tragedy. He labeled it a comicotragoedia, and it became a hallmark of Bidermann‟s style to begin his plays in a
humorous manner to attract an audience, only to have them take a turn for the worse by
the end. The plot of Cenodoxus is a predecessor of Goethe‟s Faust, and it tells the story
of a Parisian doctor who falls from God‟s grace because he chooses only to do good
when others notice. After being damned by God, the final scene shows Cenodoxus‟
friends attending his funeral when, what is now rather comical but was then quite
astonishing, Cenodoxus‟ corpse shoots up, decrying, “Ah me! Most wretched of all men!”
61
Richard Tierney, “James Bidermann,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert
Appleton Co., 1907), accessed January 14, 2011, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02558c.htm.
62
Quoted in Roger Savage, “Precursors, Precedents, Pretexts: The Institutions of Greco-Roman
Theatre and the Development of European Opera,” in Ancient Drama in Music for the Modern Stage, ed.
Peter Brown and Suzana Ograjensek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.
63
Ibid.
181
Cenodoxus goes on to inform his friends that he has been eternally damned for his
actions.64
Perhaps more important than Cenodoxus‟ role is that of Bruno, one of his friends.
Bruno‟s final scene also comes at the funeral where he is confused because he has only
known the doctor to do good things. After Cenodoxus‟ warning, he is left with the
decision that pride must have done Cenodoxus in, and he had better do his best to avoid
such folly. The scene ends when Bruno, who represents the choice of a good man says, “I
leave this ominous corpse; and being unable/ To save another, seek my own salvation.” A
final scene shows Cenodoxus in Hell, being ridiculed by other inhabitants.65 As the myth
goes, when the play was premiered in Munich in 1609, all were stunned silent and
fourteen audience members directly requested to undergo the spiritual exercises. The
player in the role of Cenodoxus joined the Jesuits. In the end, it was said that “the play
accomplished more than a hundred sermons.”66
From the perspective of the audience, it is hard to perceive Jesuit theater as
anything other than political propaganda. Nor is it the intention of this study to try and
dismiss its existence. After all, Cenodoxus and the earlier Jesuit plays of Albrecht V‟s
time exhibit all of the qualities that Norman Davies described. These plays were an
oversimplification of reality, providing the audience with choices that were very
obviously meant to be understood as choices between good or bad. The Cologne play
featuring caricatures of Luther and Calvin sought to demonize and ridicule opponents of
Catholicism. These plays served to push a Catholic agenda as the only truth, leaving out
64
Jacob Bidermann, “Cenodoxus, 1602,” in Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary
Sources, ed. Robert S. Miola (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 349.
65
Ibid., 350-52.
66
Quoted in Miola‟s introduction to “Cenodoxus,” Early Modern Catholicism, 344.
182
all other perspectives. Jesuit playwrights often expected audiences to react with
emotion rather than logic. Finally, these plays were repeated throughout Europe in great
number, allowing a singular message to permeate the culture. William H. McCabe asserts
that Jesuit theater “constituted one of the most extraordinary dramatic collections that
history has known, unified in its larger aims, methods, and animating principle,
diversified by the variations in form and taste imposed by the surroundings in which it
locally flourished.”67 McCabe‟s most conservative estimate places the number of Jesuit
plays written from 1550 to 1650 at nearly one hundred thousand.68
However, theater has many elements, and at least a modicum of credence must be
lent to the idea that the Jesuits did not hold the audience as the main focus of the genre.
The plays were part of a larger educational program that was meant to train young
students in the ways of public speaking and rhetoric. From a practical standpoint,
students who were attending Jesuit schools were already predominantly Catholic, and so
for them, the subject matter would have been one of reinforcement more than convincing.
Joohee Park states that these plays were meant to help students envision aspects of the
spiritual exercises that they were having trouble with.69 From the perspective of the actor,
the plays were merely rehashing a doctrine that was already accepted by the participant.
McCabe also points out that the Jesuits were keenly aware of their audience and
tailored their plays to fit in with the local culture. The early Jesuits accepted the notion of
change through assimilation rather than force, giving rise to an amazing diversity of
forms within the genre. There are as many examples of plays written for a Catholic
67
McCabe, An Introduction to Jesuit Theater, 47.
Ibid.
69
Park, “Not Just a University Theatre,” 32-34.
68
183
audience as there are of plays written for audiences in need of conversion. Ellul saw
this notion as critical to his understanding of sociological propaganda. He used the
example of an American filmmaker who makes a film with no regard to spreading a
political or ideological message and certainly with no regard to serving a propagandistic
end. However, this filmmaker, by virtue of having been brought up in the context of
American society, will automatically make choices, even if subconsciously, that reaffirm
and promote notions of what it means to be an American.70 Likewise, Cenodoxus was a
play written by a Catholic about Catholics for a Catholic audience. Given its internal
nature, Cenodoxus was more apt to strengthen preexisting identity than it was to change
identity. Again, this is not to dismiss the political nature of Jesuit theater, but it is equally
important not to dismiss the sociological function of the genre by not forgetting the
educational and internal focus that many of the plays had. In Bavaria, where folks were
still very likely to identify themselves within some spectrum of traditional Catholic
identity, the latter definition seems equally necessary.
By his death in 1579, Albrecht V accepted the traditional religion of his people,
and he began to promote artworks that reflected his piety. Although he never left the
northern princely humanist entirely behind, he passed a legacy of patronage in support of
Bavarian Catholicism to his children. The duke managed to install a major Jesuit
presence into an already thriving environment of traditional religion, and that order
assimilated itself within the traditional framework, using the arts as a means of promoting
sociological propaganda. Andrew L. Thomas shows that even the duke‟s funeral was an
act of pious spectacle, a multi-day affair complete with music, prayer, services,
70
Ellul, Propaganda, 64.
184
71
almsgiving and processions. Ulrike Strasser points out that the duke even had
“honorable mourners” from Munich‟s Ridler and Pütrich convents, an act of thanks for
the duke‟s support in resisting the implementation of Tridentine reforms, which would
have effectively closed their convents off to the outside world.72
Albrecht V‟s heir, Wilhelm V, was ill-prepared to rule. He was even more
irresponsible with court expenses than his father, and he continued to drive the duchy into
financial ruin. He was also as passively Catholic as his father had initially been. Rather
than religious pursuits, Wilhelm V embraced his father‟s northern princely humanist
leanings and maintained an entirely independent court in Landshut. While in Landshut,
Wilhelm V began an ambitious architectural campaign by hiring the painter Friedrich
Sustris and architect Georg Stern to remodel and decorate Trausnitz Castle.73 Wilhelm
V‟s penchant for updating and extravagance followed him to Munich, with Sustris in tow.
Wilhelm V entered Munich after his father‟s death with a close, trusted group of
very capable artists at his disposal, including Sustris, Hubert Gerhard, a sculptor, and the
duke‟s close friend, Orlando di Lasso. He wasted little time leaving a mark. Susan
Maxwell describes Wilhelm‟s patronage as follows:
Under Wilhelm‟s reign, the capital city of Munich attracted artists from all over
Europe, who were deployed in projects ranging from large-scale architectural
undertakings, designing court festivities and fireworks, creating paintings,
71
Andrew L. Thomas, “A House Divided: Wittelsbach Confessional Court Cultures in Bavaria,
the Palatinate, and Bohemia, C. 1550-1650,” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2007), 105-06.
72
Strasser, State of Virginity, 79.
73
For information on Wilhelm V‟s transformation, see the chapter, “Landshut – eine Stadt der
Renaissance,” in Gerhard Tausche and Werner Ebermeier, Geschichte Landshut (Munich: C.H. Beck,
2003), 51-59.
185
tapestries, and sculpture, as well as producing liturgical and luxury goods in
gold, crystal, and other precious materials.74
Sustris immediately began remodeling the Residenz, which included lush gardens at the
palace‟s inner Grottenhof that were based on Classical themes such as Ovid‟s
Metamorphoses and the building of a Grotto Hall which was decorated to showcase the
theme of nature and included displays of animals, minerals and other objects. In the
middle of the grotto stood the Perseus Fountain. It was created in 1590 by Gerhard, who
also sculpted the statue of Mary that sits atop the Mariansäule.75 The sculpture, which is
the centerpiece of the small fountain, shows Perseus standing on Medusa while holding
her head in his hand. Marble statues were taken from Albrecht V‟s personal collection
and placed in the courtyard to signify Medusa‟s earlier victims (fig. 23).76
Perhaps the greatest secular work commissioned under Wilhelm‟s patronage was
Sustris‟ remodeling of the Antiquarium, which Hermann Neumann rightfully describes as
“one the supreme achievements of the Renaissance north of the Alps.”77 Wilhelm began
using the Antiquarium as a hall for affairs of state, and the splendor of the room, with
every square inch painted or featuring a sculpture, underlies, once again, the northern
princely humanist‟s concern with making clear to the privileged few who were able to
enter the room the cultural prestige of the Wittelsbach family (fig. 24).
74
Susan Maxwell, “The Pursuit of Art and Pleasure in the Secret Grotto of Wilhelm V of Bavaria,”
Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2008): 414.
75
Hermann Neumann, The Munich Residence and the Treasury (Munich: Prestel, 2008), 31.
76
Ibid., 32.
77
Ibid., 34.
186
Fig. 23. Hubert Gerhard, Perseus Fountain, 1590. Bronze with additional figures from
the Munich Residenz. The Residenz was reconstructed after bombings in World War II.
Residenz, Munich.
187
Fig. 24. Friedrich Sustris. Redesign of the Munich Antiquarium, which was completed in
1600 and reconstructed after World War II. Residenz, Munich.
188
Wilhelm V also continued the Wittelsbach policy of following only those
aspects of Catholicism that were good for Bavaria. In 1583, he oversaw the forceful
installation of his uncle, Ernst, as the bishop of Cologne. He arranged the marriage of his
daughter, Maria Anna, to Ferdinand II, the son of Charles II, who later became the Holy
Roman Emperor. Wilhelm V saw to it that his son, Philipp Wilhelm, was installed as the
bishop of Regensburg in 1579, when Philipp was only three years old.78
Wilhelm V underwent a spiritual conversion that came on the heels of several life
changing events and that fostered a fervent adoption of local traditional religious customs.
His marriage to Renata of Lorraine, who came from an area that also maintained a strong
devotion to Mary, put the duke in constant contact with the pious life. Renata was very
devout, and even before Wilhelm V ascended to Munich, she was establishing regular
Marian pilgrimages throughout Germany, which included a journey to Tutenhausen in
1577 in thanksgiving for the birth of their first son Ferdinand.79 During the 1570s,
Wilhelm V suffered several severe illnesses that were followed with pilgrimages of
thanksgiving after his recoveries. During these journeys, he began, more and more, to
seek solitude so that he might spend time in prayer. His lifestyle increasingly became
centered on ascetic pursuits. He also began to rely on the Jesuit order, which was
responsible for his education at Ingolstadt, in his pursuit of the spiritual life. Jeffrey
Chipps Smith reports that by the late 1570s, the “duke attended mass daily and spent four
hours praying and in spiritual observation.”80
78
Hans and Marga Rall, Die Wittelsbacher in Lebensbildern (München, Piper Verlag GmBH:
1986), 125-27.
79
Crook, Orlando di Lasso’s Imitation Magnificats, 70-71.
80
Smith, Sensuous Worship, 58.
189
Wilhelm V held the Jesuits in such high regard that they began to occupy a
larger space in the sphere of his patronage. Particularly, he revered Peter Canisius. James
Brodrick relates the story of the elder Jesuit dictating in his room one day in 1577 to a
scribe in Landshut where he was tutoring Wilhelm V. The scribe had to leave in the
middle of the session to run errands. As Canisius continued to sit in his room, Wilhelm V
entered, and Canisius, mistaking the duke for the scribe, ordered the young prince to sit
and begin writing again. Wilhelm V did as he was told. As the scribe returned, he shouted
to Canisius that he had been making the prince work. After apologizing, Wilhelm V
responded that it was his honor to be a part of the work of such a brilliant man.81
His poor financial dealings coupled with the increasing amount of time that he
spent in devotion caused Wilhelm V to abdicate the throne in 1597, leaving the duchy
under the control of his son, Maximilian I. Maximilian I was raised entirely under the
care of the Jesuits. The Jesuits and his parents‟ religious devotion ensured that
Maximilian I was brought up in a rigidly devout environment. Under the watch of the
Maximilian I and Wilhelm V, the traditional Catholic piety of Albrecht V blossomed, as
the two sought to glorify Mary and other saints. Sodalities with services devoted
specifically to Mary began popping up throughout the duchy; pilgrimages to sites at
Altötting became even more popular as the dukes began taking high-profile trips to such
places. Wilhelm V even ordered certain members of his court to travel to Marian sites,
including Orlando di Lasso and other court musicians who traveled to Loreto in 1585 to
pay homage to Mary at one of Europe‟s most popular shrines.82
81
82
Brodrick, Saint Peter Canisius, 744.
Crook, Orlando di Lasso’s Imitation Magnificats, 71.
190
With the responsibility of governing no longer an interference, Wilhelm V
took up his father‟s support of public artworks. Jesuit theater continued to be supported
throughout Bavaria as it had under Albrecht V. Likewise, Wilhelm V began collaborating
with the Jesuit Order for the biggest religious building project in Munich since the
Frauenkirche.
In 1582, plans were announced for the construction of a new Jesuit church and
college, which served to solidify the presence of the order in Munich. Fifty homes were
torn down to make room for the complex, an action that no doubt displeased certain
residents of the city.83 The façade of the church is imposing and, according to Jeffrey
Chipps Smith, unique in its style (fig. 25).84 Adorning the front are three levels of statues,
each representing various Bavarians who helped to bring the duchy to its current state. In
the center of the façade, Hubert Gerhard‟s enormous statue, St. Michael Vanquishing
Lucifer, stands as an imposing welcome to all who enter. The building took fourteen
years to build and was completed in 1597. When it was finished, it stood as the largest
Renaissance church north of the Alps, with some local publications even referring to it as
the eighth wonder of the world.85
The choice of St. Michael as the guardian of the Jesuit church and college was an
easy one for Wilhelm V to make. The duke was born on St. Michael‟s day. The saint
represents the defense of good from evil, a position that the duke felt he occupied. St.
Michael was closely allied as a caretaker of the Virgin Mary, which played into the
popularity of Mary in Bavaria. Jeffrey Chipps Smith provides an outstanding analysis of
83
Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, 106.
Smith, Sensuous Worship, 64.
85
Ibid., 58-59.
84
191
the church, and any further description here will only do a disservice to his
wonderful scholarship.86
Smith points out that every aspect of the church was related to a unified program.
The outside served as a dedication to the greatness of the duchy and, by extension, the
Wittelsbachs and by extension Bavarian Catholicism. The inside was entirely about the
glorification of God and the Catholic Church.87 No detail was spared, with the intention
of creating an experience that would bring one closer with God, or at least the Bavarian
Catholic Jesuit version. Again, Smith does a wonderfully detailed job of describing the
exact program, so that will not take place here. What is more important to this study is
how the church was received and how it functioned within the context of everyday
Munich life. More to the point, it is important to understand whether St. Michael‟s
Church existed as a form of political or sociological propaganda.
It is interesting to note that Smith describes the church as a representative of the
Bavarian Catholic Church, a term that rightfully acknowledges the extremely localized
traditional identity of the duchy at that time.88 It is also hard to describe the façade, with
its past rulers and large inscription of dedication to Wilhelm V, as anything other than
Wittelsbach self-aggrandizement. However, the purpose of this study is not to deny the
role of political propaganda within the framework of patronage. The goal is to locate the
political, absolutist, confessionalized and socially imposing nature of the artwork as only
one thread in a larger fabric of patronage.
86
For a detailed analysis, see Smith‟s third chapter, “A Militant Paradigm: St. Michael‟s in
Munich,” in Sensuous Worship, 57-68. The subsequent chapter, “St. Michael‟s and the Worshipper: Ways
to Read a Church,” is of equal value.
87
Ibid., 61.
88
Ibid., 75.
192
Fig. 25. Friedrich Sustris, Façade of St. Michael‟s Church, and Hubert Gerhard, St.
Michael Vanquishing Lucifer, 1597. Reconstructed after World War II. Munich.
193
To begin, as with Jesuit theater, the church stands as a public testament of
identity. This is a change from earlier works that were primarily meant for private, noble
consumption. The public nature of the work again raises the question of what or whose
identity it is supposed to be representing. If it is supposed to represent the will of
Wilhelm V, the question then turns to how Wilhelm V envisioned himself, and while this
may seem impossible to answer, there are some clues.
Throughout this study, the Wittelsbachs have been shown to have thwarted the
notions of a centralized Catholic Church over and over again. The third chapter of this
work argued for the adoption by Albrecht V of a localized form of traditional Catholicism
that maintained a specifically Bavarian flavor and that often went against centralized
Catholic authority. Further, the cultural exchange between classes was much more blurry
than the notion of top-down rule can explain, meaning the Wittelsbachs were often as
influenced by those below them as they were the ones providing the influence. The close
association between the Wittelsbachs and the Jesuits, who maintained an agenda of
assimilation, suggests that Wilhelm V may very well have been acting as a top-down
ruler, and he may well have been imposing his building upon the citizens of Munich, as
leaders are often wont to due. However, it is also possible that he was not imposing an
ideology on the citizens of Munich. Rather, he was representing and strengthening an
ideology that was already a fundamental part of a large segment of Bavarian identity that
spanned across culture and class.
There was absolutely dissent from traditional Catholic culture in Bavaria. There
was absolutely political pressure to rout that dissent on the part of the Wittelsbachs. But it
is equally true that a prevailing identity of local Catholicism was already ingrained in the
194
people of Bavaria, which allowed for the presence of a very strong element of
sociological propaganda. The Wittelsbachs reflected traditional Bavarian religion and
supported the sociological propaganda of Bavaria in the large public artworks that were
created by Albrecht V, his son, Wilhelm V, and his grandson, Maximilian I. The presence
of sociological propaganda does not make the duchy any less absolutist. The artworks
created by the Wittelsbachs were certainly made to send a very specific message.
However, that message was part of a larger mechanism of cultural expression that existed
long before the Wittelsbachs began their patronage of great public displays. In short,
Bavarian religious identity was reflected in Wittelsbach patronage as much as
Wittelsbach patronage shaped it.
This brings the focus of this study back to the artwork that began this chapter, the
Mariansäule. How is this joint effort, this hodgepodge of artworks that were
commissioned by artists under both Wilhelm V and Maximilian I and then thrown
together to form one of Munich‟s most recognizable monuments, to be understood? In a
very large sense, the monument stands as a testament to an absolutist state. Maximilian I
could be frighteningly devout, and he expected the same of all Bavarians. He instituted
laws requiring a rosary to be carried at all times.89 He had the Virgin Mary officially
declared the patron saint of Bavaria in 1610, and he had his heart deposited at Altötting
upon his death.90 But there is just as much evidence to suggest that the Mariansäule was
an extension of the identity of all Catholic Bavarians. The monument was built by their
89
Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper
Palitinate, St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 239.
90
Crook, Orlando di Lasso’s Imitation Magnificats, 65-66.
195
leader to support an identity that, through years of sociological propaganda,
developed into a more organic and deeply-entrenched form of intolerance.
196
CONCLUSION
From a historiographic standpoint, the Wittelsbachs of sixteenth-century Bavaria
have suffered from an identity crisis in terms of both artistic and social history. Not as
politically influential as their Catholic rivals, the Habsburgs, and not as revolutionary as
the Protestant reformers of the Holy Roman Empire, the Wittelsbachs and the court at
Munich often stand on the fringes of historical inquiry. Always the bridesmaid, the court
at Munich is usually presented, when it is mentioned at all, in passing reference within a
discipline-specific study of art, creating a sense that the artists who worked for the
Wittelsbachs were great despite being in Bavaria. Contrast this with notions of sixteenthcentury Italy or Vienna, for example, where artists seemingly became genius by merely
touching the soil. Scholars of political and social history have come to adopt a view of
Bavaria in which rulers embraced confessionalizing strategies and forced their populace
to do the same through social discipline, thus preserving a manufactured Catholic identity
throughout the Reformation. Within this context, Bavaria has come to be seen as a fluke
within an otherwise disrupted Holy Roman Empire or a minor player in the larger arena
of early modern Europe.
The original motivation for this study was borne from a dissatisfaction with the
common and often unchallenged presentation of Catholic identity in Bavaria during the
sixteenth century as something forced from the top and from the lack of interest that the
court in Munich seems to suffer when compared to other great courts of the period.
During the initial research for this dissertation, it became apparent that the court was
seldom presented in an interdisciplinary manner. A painting would be studied here, a
music work there, but there were very few attempts at providing a unified vision of the
197
court and even fewer that sought to place that vision within the social context of the
period.
The first goal of this study is to address this deficiency by examining the artistic
patronage of the Wittelsbach dukes during the years leading to and following the
establishment of multiple religious confessions in Europe in the sixteenth century.
Attempting to do this is fraught with peril. Which works stand as representative of a
duke‟s intent? Which works and which artists should be included in the study? Is it
possible to get an accurate understanding of the intention or impact of a patron, an artist
or an artwork on those consuming the artwork? Who was the intended audience for each
work? Further compounding this issue are the number of methodological viewpoints
from which each work, patron and artist can be analyzed, each one fascinating and
enlightening in its own way, and each influenced and limited by the context of its own
particular time and place.
Thus, this study is necessary because it brings together multiple artistic disciplines
under the umbrella of patronage without eliminating the unique power of the arts in the
face of the political will of the patron. It also shows the diversity of patronage without
compartmentalizing each art form into disparate fields, creating a perspective that is
certainly more akin to how the artworks were conceived and consumed. The intended
result, if it has succeeded, has been to break beyond discipline-specific barriers and topdown notions of social order in order to uncover the dynamism of the arts and the
interrelated role they often played in shaping late-medieval and early modern Bavarian
identity, an identity that depended on the ability of both the ruling and peasant classes to
exert more or less influence on each other at any given time.
198
Accepting that Albrecht V and the Wittelsbachs who preceded and followed
him were as shaped by those below them as they were responsible for shaping those
below them creates an entirely new way of understanding their policies and the artworks
that were created in support of those policies. The Wittelsbachs were certainly interested
in power and the maintenance of that power through means very similar to modern
notions of political propaganda. Certainly, Jesuit drama and architecture were often
employed in this manner; however, the dukes also participated in and were highly
influenced by a peasant culture that often times supported a version of Catholicism that
ran counter to the official doctrines of Trent. In locations such as Altötting and with
artworks such as the Mariansäule, the dukes produced works that both reflected and
created the cultural identity of a large segment of Bavaria. In doing so, the dukes were
participating in the already strong sociological propaganda that was perpetuated
throughout the region by the traditional religion of all classes.
In summation, the goal of this study has been to adopt a methodology that
acknowledges that specific events in society are influenced by multiple factors, and it is
the obligation of the historian to be open to the idea that artworks and actions can
simultaneously maintain entirely opposite functions. In doing this, historians must accept
that a building like the Frauenkirche, for example, is only a complete work of
architecture when it is filled with its people, its music and its art, even when each of these
parts seem to contradict one another. Further, the multi-disciplined approach of this
study has repositioned the importance of sixteenth-century Bavaria, both culturally and
politically, so that it is no longer seen as a fringe duchy. Like its geography, Bavaria, its
199
artworks, its people and its rulers were situated in the middle of the struggle for
identity during the long sixteenth century.
200
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APPENDIX A
Timeline of Bavarian History: 1300-1650
Date
1301
1317
1330
1340
1347
1380
1385
1401
c. 1415
1420
1437
1439
Dec. 15, 1447
1450
1452
c. 1460
1460
1463
1466
1467
1468
1472
c. 1475
1481
1482
Jan. 1, 1487
1489
1493
1495
1500
1503-1505
1506
1508
March 18, 1507
Event
Ludwig IV begins his reign in Bavaria.
Munich is established as the seat of ducal authority in Bavaria.
Black Madonna is replaced in Altötting's Gnadenkapelle (Chapel of the
Miraculous Image).
Bavaria is reunited under Ludwig IV.
Ludwig IV dies. Bavaria is divided amongst Ludwig's sons.
Munich Residenz is constructed in Munich.
Wittelsbachs put down an uprising by Munich citizens over use of the
Residenz. They construct the Neuveste.
Albrecht III is born.
Conrad Paumann is born.
Ludwig VII commissions Andreas von Regensburg‟s Chronica de
principibus terrae Bavarorum.
Johann IV, son of Albrecht III, is born in Munich.
Sigmund is born, third son of Albrecht III.
Albrecht IV is born in Munich.
Conrad Paumann joins the Wittelsbach court in Munich.
The Fundamentum Organisandi is compiled.
The Genealogical Mural is created for the Alte Hof.
Albrecht III dies.
Johann IV dies.
The city of Munich forces the Wittelsbachs to agree that they will not
occupy the Neuveste as a residence.
Sigmund abdicates, leaving Albrecht IV as sole ruler of Bavaria-Munich.
Building of the Frauenkirche commences.
The university at Ingolstadt is founded.
Jörg Breu the Elder is born.
Ulrich Füetrer completes the Bairische Chronik for Albrecht IV.
Jan Pollack is listed as head of the Munich painter's guild.
Kunigunde, daughter of HRE Friedrich III of the Habsburg family, marries
Albrecht IV.
A drowned, three-year-old boy is reportedly revived in front of the Black
Madonna at Altötting.
Wilhelm IV is born, the oldest son of Albrecht IV.
Ludwig X is born, second oldest son of Albrecht IV.
Ernst is born, third son of Albrecht IV.
Munich's population reaches 13,500.
War of Landshut Succession gives Albrecht IV control of a mostly unified
Bavaria.
Albrecht IV instates primogeniture.
Employees at the Munich court number 162.
Albrecht IV dies leaving Wilhelm IV as the heir to Bavaria. Wilhelm is too
young and must wait 3 years under regency to gain power.
227
1509
1510
1511
Aventinus is hired as tutor to Ludwig and Ernst.
Johann Eck accepts position at Ingolstadt.
Wilhelm IV claims his place as Duke of Bavaria. Ludwig soon lays claim to
his share of control, citing the timing of the rule of primogeniture, which
was enacted after he was born, as his claim to legitimacy.
1512
Leonhard von Eck becomes councilor of Wilhelm IV.
1513
Ludwig X goes to Worms in order to gain the post of Archbishop of
Salzburg for his youngest brother Ernst.
An agreement is reached whereby Wilhelm and Ludwig would co-rule
along with an advisory committee comprised of the estates of Bavaria.
Hans Mielich is born, the son of Wolfgang Mielich, who was an influential
painter and teacher in Munich.
Wilhelm and Ludwig forbid the sale of indulgences in Bavaria.
Luther posts his theses in Wittenberg.
Johann Eck, who had expressed interest in becoming a friend to Luther,
rebukes his theses in his Obelisci. The two become theological adversaries.
1514
1516
1517
Oct. 31, 1517
1518
c. 1518
1519
June 15, 1520
1521-23
1521
May 8, 1521
1522
1523
1525
c. 1525
Feb. 29, 1528
1528
Oct. 1528
1529
1530
1531
1532 (1530?)
Sept. 11, 1534
Wilhelm IV moves the Munich court to the Neuveste.
Leonhard von Eck becomes chancellor to Bavaria.
Pope Leo X issues the Exsurge Domine, demanding retractions by Luther
over some of his theses.
Wilhelm IV commissions Aventinus‟ Bayerische Chronik.
Pope Leo X dies.
Peter Canisius is born.
Wilhelm and Ludwig agree to enact policies of allegiance to the Catholic
Church across Bavaria as set forth in the Edict of Worms. Those not
professing allegiance to the faith are penalized or exiled.
Pope Adrian VI is elected.
Ludwig Senfl is hired to the court's Hofkapelle after presenting
compositions to Wilhelm IV during his wedding to Maria Jacobaa von
Baden in 1522.
Domes are added to the Frauenkirche.
Barthel Behem is banished from Nurnberg. Moves to Munich.
Albrecht V is born.
Wilhelm IV begins the commission of the history cycle of paintings.
Wilhelm V begins trying to align the powers of France, England and
Lorraine to oust Charles V. His argument was that Charles V was failing in
his ability to maintain the faith.
Dukes Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X arrest Aventinus, sparking the first major
actions taken in Bavaria by the rulers to oust Lutheranism.
Samuel Quiccheberg is born.
Senfl composes: Ecce quam bonum et quam iucundum habitare fratres in
unum for the Diet of Augsburg as a plea for Christian unity.
Wilhelm enters into a brief alliance with the Schmalkadic League in an
effort to oust power from the Habsburgs.
Orlando di Lasso born.
Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs sign the Treaty of Linz, an agreement of
friendship.
228
Jan. 10, 1540
1540
1543
May 8, 1543
1546
1545-47
1546-47
1547
1548
Nov. 13, 1549
1550
March 7, 1550
1551
1552
1555
Dec. 17
1556
1558
1559
1560
After a secret deal fifteen years earlier, Wittelsbachs lay claim to the
Salzburg seat.
In October, Ernst is officially elected into the seat at Salzburg.
Johann Eck dies. Ingolstadt begins a precipitous decline.
Canisius joins the Society of Jesus.
Martin Luther dies.
The councils at Trent begin.
The Schmalkaldic War ends with Charles V as victor; Bavaria backs
Charles.
Albrecht V marries Anna von Habsburg as part of an attempt to end a
family rivalry with the Habsburgs.
Wilhelm V is born.
Canisius arrives in Ingolstadt at the request of Wilhelm IV with two other
Jesuits, Claude Lejay and Alphonsos Salmeron.
Canisius becomes rector at Ingolstadt.
Wilhelm IV dies; Albrecht V becomes Duke of Bavaria.
Canisius begins a program of banning books at the University of Ingolstadt
and creating inquisitorial workers, whose job it was to seek out and expel
heretic writings.
Munich Court employees number 308.
Canisius moves to Vienna, on loan from Albrecht V.
Hans Mielich completes the Book of Jewels.
Charles V calls for a meeting in Augsburg, resulting in the Augsburg
Confession. Cuius regio, eius religio is the resulting policy.
Jesuit College at Ingolstadt University is established.
Canisius becomes Provincial of Upper Bavaria; he remains until 1569.
Lasso accepts invitation by Albrecht V to join the court in Munich as a
tenor under Ludwig Daser.
Munich court employees number 485.
Albrecht V appoints Simon Eck, a Catholic stalwart as his chancellor. Eck
takes an increasingly paranoid view of Protestant tolerance in the duchy.
Albrecht V establishes the Geistliche Rat, a council to oversee religious
conformity throughout Bavaria.
Canisius publishes his Small Catechism.
Albrecht V purchases the library of Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter.
A Jesuit college is established in Munich.
Albrecht V commissions Hans Mielich to begin plans for a new altarpiece
to be built at Ingolstadt in celebration of the centennial of the university.
1563
Work on the Antiquarium, with plans by Jacapo Strada, begins.
One of Albrecht V's vassals, the Graf von Ortenburg, abolishes Catholicism
from his territory as a reaction against the ban on freely exercising the
Augsburg Confessions by the Ingolstadt Landtag. Albert seizes the Schloss
Ortenburg in December, 1563.
1564
Albrecht V's son, Ernst, is elected as bishop of Freising and later as bishop
of Hildesheim, Liege, Halberstadt, Munster and Cologne.
Samuel Quiccheberg writes the Theatrum Sapientiae.
First mention of Lassus as maestro di cappella in Munich.
1565
1567
229
1568
1570s
1570
Jan. 21, 1570
1571
1572
1573
1573-1579
1577
1578
1579
Albrecht V's three-year-old son, Phillip, is elected bishop of Regensburg.
Massimo Troiano records Wittelsbach court culture in his Dialoghi.
Wilhelm V maintains an entirely separate court in Landshut, at great
expense to the Wittelsbachs.
Albrecht V prays to the Virgin of Altötting during a yachting incident.
In Altötting, Peter Canisius exercises demons from seventeen-year-old
Anna von Bernhausen, lady-in-waiting of the Fugger family from
Augsburg.
Court employees at Munich number 866, bigger than the Medici court.
Martin Eisengrein publishes Our Lady at Altötting, capitalizing on the
exorcisms and the resurgence of pilgrimage to that site.
Albrecht V's daughter, Maria, marries Archduke Charles of Inner Austria,
uniting the Habsburg and Wittelsbach family in their common cause to
maintain Catholicism in their lands.
The altar in Ingolstadt is completed.
Hans Mielich dies.
Lasso's Patroncinium musices is compiled and completed with miniatures
painted by Hans Mielich.
Canisius publishes De Maria Virgine incomparabili.
Carlo Barromeo publishes Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis
Ecclesiasticae, an instruction manual for the thematic building of churches.
The Jesuit play, Esther, is produced, involving 1700 people.
Jakob Bidermann is born.
The first Marian sodality is founded in Munich by Albrecht V and Wilhelm
V.
The two-volume Penitential Psalms, with music by Lasso, miniatures by
Mielich and commentary by Quiccheberg is released after Albrecht V's
death.
Oct. 24, 1579
Albrecht V dies. His library holds approximately 11,000 volumes upon his
death, making it the second largest library in Germany. Wilhelm V succeeds
Albrecht as Duke of Bavaria.
1582
Wilhelm V announces plans to build St. Michael's Church and a new Jesuit
college in Munich.
Wittelsbachs gain control of the Bishopric of Cologne. They hold it, without
interruption, until 1761.
Lasso composes an imitation Magnificat based on his Dessus le marché
d’Arras.
Hubert Gerhard installs the Perseus Fountain at the Residenz in Munich.
Orlando di Lasso dies amidst an ongoing reduction in the number of artists
at the Munich court.
After nearly driving the court into financial ruin, Wilhelm V abdicates in
favor of his son, Maximilian I.
Peter Canisius dies in Fribourg.
Albrecht V's Kunstkammer houses nearly 6,000 items.
Lasso's Prophetiae Sybillarum is published. The motets were probably
composed much earlier.
Jakob Bidermann becomes the rhetoric instructor at the Jesuit college in
Munich.
Bidermann's Cenodoxus is premiered in Munich.
1583
1587
1590
June 14, 1594
1597
Nov. 21, 1597
1598
1600
1606
1609
230
1610
1618-1648
1634
1638
The Virgin Mary is announced as the patron saint of Bavaria.
Thirty Years War.
An outbreak of the plague decimates the population of Munich and Bavaria.
The residents of Oberammergau vow to produce a passion play every ten
years in exchange for being spared from the plague.
The Mariansäule is erected in Munich, with sculptures by Gerhard.
231
APPENDIX B
Family Tree of the Munich Line of Wittelsbach Dukes
Ludwig IV (1282-1347)
Duke of Bavaria, 1294; King of Germany 1314; Holy Roman Emperor 1328
Ludwig V
Stefan II (1319-1375) Ludwig VI Wilhelm I
Joint reign through 1375
Stefan III
Albrecht I
Friedrich
Johann II (1341-1397)
Joint reign through 1397
Ernst (1373-1438)
Wilhelm III
Joint reign through 1438
Albrecht III (1401-1460)
Reign 1438-1460
Johann IV
Sigmund
Albrecht IV (1447-1508)
Joint reign through 1508
Wilhelm IV (1493-1550)
Ludwig X
Joint reign to 1545, when Ludwig X abstained
Albrecht V (1528-1579)
Reign 1550-1579
Wilhelm V (1548-1626)
Reign 1579-1598: Abdicated
Maximilian I (1573-1651)
Reign 1598-1651
Ernst
Otto I