The Apostles' Creed (Das Symbolum der Heiligen Aposteln)
Medium
Book with fifteen woodcuts with letterpress in black on cream laid paper, in eighteenth-century full brown sheepskin, sewn on raised bands, with gold tooled decoration on inner-edges of boards, blind lines and gold titling on the spine, hand-sewn silk headbands, marbled endsheets, and a purple silk page marker
Dimensions
Book: 20.4 × 15.4 × 0.8 cm (8 1/16 × 6 1/8 × 3/8 in.); Folio: 19.9 × 14.5 cm (7 7/8 × 5 3/4 in.)
Classification
woodcut
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
153591
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Lucas Cranach’s Saint Simon—naked, trussed upside-down, and partially sawed in half—depicts the apostle en route to his full dismemberment (which made possible his eventual distribution in relic form). Evidently well-received in the single-sheet 1512 Catholic series, here the woodblocks were reprinted to illustrate Martin Luther’s German translation of the Apostles’ Creed. Despite the illustrations’ gratuitously violent detail, the Protestant publisher’s dedication to his daughters referred to t...
About the Artist
Lucas Cranach the Elder · 1472–1553
Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472-1553) was one of the most prominent German Renaissance painters and a key artistic figure of the Protestant Reformation. Born in Kronach, Franconia, to the painter Hans Maler, Cranach began his career in Vienna around 1502, where he became one of the founders of the Danube School, a movement characterized by expressive landscape painting and emotional force. His ea...