[In the following essay, Coupe discusses the relationship between the illustrations and the text in the works of Hans Sachs.]

It is a commonplace of German literary and cultural history that the sixteenth century was the golden age of the illustrated book. It could scarcely be otherwise: the earliest printed books, the Biblia pauperum, the Ars bene moriendi and the like were, after all, essentially picture books whose name, “block books,” bears witness to their origins in the printed pictures for which the blocks were first used. After the invention of printing by movable type, the tradition long continued and in the sixteenth century bore fruit, not only the combination of woodcut and text in the moral satires deriving from Brant's Narrenschiff, but in almost every type of literary product from the richly illustrated bibles of the day to polemical pamphlets with their frontispiece résumés of the contents in graphic form or their portraits of the author designed especially to establish his credentials as a man of God and good learning.¹ In this sense the illustrated broadsheet with its woodcut and text, usually in verse, but occasionally in prose, was a characteristic product of the age, whether used for moral or polemical purposes, or as a simple vehicle for the communication of news.

In the sixteenth century itself the double focus of illustrated literature was usually seen as a means by which the whole community, both learned and unlearned, could be reached. The Church had, after all, long since accepted pictures as an important aid for the propagation and maintenance of the faith amongst those who could not read,² and it was in precisely these terms that Sebastian Brant, in the preface to the Narrenschiff, justified his inclusion of illustrations:

Wer yeman der die gschrifft veracht
Oder villicht die nit künd lesen
Der siecht im molen wol syn wesen(3)

No less a person than Martin Luther demonstrated clearly that he concurred in the view of the picture as a sort of graphic shorthand that subsumed the message of the text. Such works as the Passional Christi und Antichristi, his occasional excursions into broadsheet polemics and his “testament to the whole world” in the Abbildung des Papsttums, as well as his occasional theoretical pronouncements in favour of pictures, set a precedent and an example no informed Protestant could ignore. Precisely in uneducated readers, he suggests, pictures had a powerful psychological impact:⁴ a view happily—if, one suspects, often unthinkingly—conveyed by the subsequent tag:

Was Glerte durch die Schrifft verstahn,
Das lehrt das Gmähl den gmainen Mann.

Superficial modern critics have not unusually accepted this co-equal division unthinkingly and talked in generalities about the “innige Verbindung von Wort und Bild,”⁵ the “ausgewogenes Verhältnis von Bild und Text,”⁶ or—if they had read McLuhan—the “hybridisation of the media.”⁷ Few have attempted to analyze the relationship of text and picture critically or in detail. Not unusually indeed critics have effectively avoided the problem by approaching especially the more ephemeral products of the age in terms of their own discipline. As a Germanist, Friedrich Zarncke could in 1854 publish what has remained the standard edition of the Narrenschiff without reproducing the woodcuts,⁸ and in this he was followed a hundred years later by Manfred Lemmer. As an art historian, Heinrich Röttinger, by contrast, in his Die Bilderbogen des Hans Sachs, barely refers to Sachs' texts at all. In his view the function of the text writer was simply to comment on a picture:

Immer geht der Formschneider, der natürliche Vermittler dabei, bei seinen Unternehmungen vom Schnitte aus[. …] Zur Darstellung reiner Existenzen war der Stift des Zeichners ungleich berufener als die Feder des Dichters, dessen eigentliches Feld die begleitende Erläuterung war.⁹

As a historian, R. W. Scribner, in For the sake of simple folk, takes a more subtly differentiated view of the relative importance of illustration and text and sees it changing as the century progresses. While conceding that listening to texts that were read aloud was important, he suggests that visual communication in the case of largely illiterate “simple folk” was initially the more important element, but was gradually superseded by print as literacy spread.¹⁰ Other commentators, like Siegfried Knauf, by implication put this process earlier and see the text as the dominant element that is then merely illustrated by a sort of visual garnish in the woodcut,¹¹ while Bernd Balzer similarly, in his study of Bürgerliche Reformationspropaganda, applies communication theory in his analysis of the textual element, but gives short shrift to the woodcut as a vehicle of communication.¹²

This discipline-oriented approach to an essentially interdisciplinary topic necessarily presents a picture as distorted as the facile assumption that picture and text existed, if not in a state of pre-established harmony, at least in a happy symbiosis, and the purpose of the present essay is to show on the basis of a limited number of polemical broadsheets associated with Hans Sachs how uncertain the connection between “illustration” and text or picture and “commentary” often is in reality, no matter how harmonious that relationship might be in theory.

First, however, we must seek to correct a common assumption. It is part of our received mythology that pictures are more easily understood than writing. “Do you want me to draw you a picture?” is a question often put to stupid people who have difficulty with verbal explanations, but, it is suggested, would understand a drawing. On one level this is undoubtedly true. But it is also true that any but the simplest picture will often make demands in terms of knowledge and intelligence that many people cannot meet. Practical experiments have demonstrated that a remarkably high percentage of twentieth-century newspaper readers do not understand, or misunderstand, editorial cartoons, for instance.¹³ It will scarcely have been different in the sixteenth century. With all due respect to Sebastian Brant, it would be a very subtle-minded unlettered reader who looked at, say, a woodcut of a fool with a protruding tongue at the foot of a tree on which a woodpecker perches and in whose branches a nest with young birds is to be seen, and drew the appropriate conclusion that this was a lesson in the necessity of not gossiping and talking a lot (Das Narrenschiff 19, “Von vil schwetzen”). Similarly, while the monstrous birth per anum of popes and cardinals in what is usually taken as plate I of the Abbildung des Papsttums (“Ortus et origo papae”) is readily intelligible on one level of interpretation, anyone who could not read the text with understanding would miss a great deal (and significantly Luther himself found it necessary to write a further lengthy explanation for the benefit of Nicholas von Amsdorf, who was clearly somewhat bemused by it).

Paradoxical though it might seem in the light of the Church's espousal of pictures as the book of the illiterate, theoreticians had long been aware of the potentially problematical nature of pictures: Johannes Molanus, for instance, distinguished sharply between realistic pictures that were accessible to all and metaphorical or allegorical pictures that were necessarily reserved for the cognoscenti. But it was not merely the force of tradition that caused polemicists to use pictures in the attempt to win support for their own particular cause. Few Briefmaler rejoiced in the neoplatonic insights that were to lead to the development of the emblem,¹⁴ but it was a matter of practical experience for them that in a world where pictures were still relatively rare a picture had a more profound psychological impact than the communication of news and views in words. And this insight still holds good for us today, bombarded though we are by images of all kinds. However inadequate we may find the often crude woodcuts of the age on one level, they stay in one's mind in a way that the texts never do—just as in the wider sense the pictures in our childhood history books remain with us long after we have read and forgotten the prose of Gibbon and Macaulay. So will it have been in the sixteenth century. This is not to say, of course, that sixteenth-century popular polemical texts are redundant or that visual communication is limitless in scope. The texts provide abstract insights and arguments such as cannot readily be rendered adequately in visual forms, and the Reformation was about abstract concepts! Few “illustrations” are capable of satisfactorily translating a text of any length or complexity into graphic terms, any more than a text that does more than describe a picture is likely to stay within the parameters set by the draughtsman. Only rarely do text and picture harmonise so happily as in the Passional Christi und Antichristi.

The problem is admirably reflected in a broadsheet which Hans Sachs contributed to the agitation surrounding the Lutheranisation of Nümberg in 1524 that appeared with a woodcut by Eberhard Schoen under the title Das Hauß des Weysen vnd das haus des vnweisen manß Math vij. The title immediately refers the reader to the source of the principal imagery and St. Matthew recounts the parable in just four verses. Anyone who hears the word of God and carries it into practice is like a man who builds his house on rock, so that it withstands the worst storms. Anyone who hears the word of God and does not practise it, however, is like a man who builds his house on sand, with the result that the storms sweep it away. But, however convenient and suitable this basic image might be, neither Sachs in his verses nor Schoen in his woodcut is content to retain that image in its simple strength. Both seem to embellish it by the introduction of complex ideas with a consequent loss of focus and impact. Sachs offers a modified Streitgespräch in which virtually every line is a quotation or reminiscence from the scriptures, complete with a note of its source. In this scriptural dialogue the four participants each are given twenty lines of Knittelvers. Christ establishes His credential as the only and eternal foundation and source of hope in a world where the suffering of the true believers enables them to share Christ's own passion and thus assures them of a place in heaven. Verses 24-25 of Matth. 7 are rendered appropriately in Christ's speech:

YSA 40
Mein wort das wirt ewig besteen /
Wer das hört vnnd thůt das mit fleyß
Den vergleych jch eim man̄ weys
MATH. 7
Der auff ein felsen bawt sein hauß /
LUC. 6
So wasser kumpt vnd windes prauß
So bleibt es auff dem felsen bestan[. …]

There is, however, no mention of the foolish man, and the second half of the parable is reserved for a cursory reference in the later speech of the angel. Meanwhile, the Christians in good Lutheran fashion assert the Christocentric nature of their fiduciary faith, reiterate their incapacity to do good by their own works and complain of the suffering that is their lot, before praying that they will by grace remain faithful to the word of God. The second half of the text is taken up by an exchange between “Der Engel” and “Der gottloß hauff.” Forty lines into the text, the angel now refers to the other half of the imagery of Matth. 7 and applies it to his interlocutors, though in such a way that the reference is almost lost:

PS. 115
Auff Gottes wort handt jr nit bawt
Vnd handt auff menschen lügen drawt[. …]

He then goes on to threaten them with destruction as preferring to rely on human wisdom rather than revealed truth. The “gottloß hauff” in turn, in what was to become standard fashion, is made truculently to proclaim its rejection of God's word and to foretell the destruction of their own “house,” though with reference to Judith 6 and Rev. 18 rather than Matth. 7.

Perhaps inevitably, Schoen's woodcut seizes in much more obvious fashion on the central image of Matth. 7. This provided an opportunity to indulge in that antithetical juxtaposition that was a natural polemical device in Reformation imagery, whereas Sachs was not really very interested in Matth. 7, and had merely mentioned the two houses en passant before proceeding to other images, whether of buildings or not. Now, however, the two houses occupy pride of place in the woodcut, so that the spectator is offered a choice between stark alternatives. It seems likely, however, that we have here an example of an illustration of Sachs' text rather than an original invention, and the woodcut is encumbered by a series of further images introduced in an attempt to provide graphic equivalents for what Sachs is saying. Thus Christ appears in the top left-hand corner, His hand raised in blessing over the house of the wise Christians, and the exigencies of Sachs' text in fact convert the “houses” into the rival “churches” that are crowded with occupants. The house of the wise rests on rock on the firm foundation of Christ and the triple pillars of the Old and the New Testaments and the Paschal Lamb. This is contrasted with the house of the unwise and ungodly crew of Roman clerics which rests on the Decretals and the book of Duns Scotus, while in order to capture the reference to Revelation in the text the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse completes the triad, counterpointing the Paschal Lamb. Two synchronistic angels emphasise the apocalyptic elements, but in keeping with Matth. 7 the house is collapsing under the assault of a might river labelled “Das Wort Gottes.”

This is a curiously mixed metaphor—the wise man's house resists the flood and thus logically would resist the word of God if Schoen's imagery were applied consistently! However, the flood is omitted on the left of the engraving in the light of the need to express the perils and sufferings of true Christians in the world so strongly urged by Sachs. Accordingly the house of the wise is no longer seen in terms of its capacity to resist the storms and floods. Sachs had spoken of the Christians' tribulations, and so the house becomes a sort of “feste Burg” under assault from a cardinal, a lawyer, an armed peasant and a monk (?) armed with bow and arrows, while a burning pyre indicates the martyr's lot of many Christians. A defiant member of the wise congregation points to the cross which surmounts the wise men's house.

The garrulity of both text and woodcut have necessitated these lengthy descriptions, but while Sachs' text, though scarcely an adequate commentary on Matth. 7, can stand independently as a Streitgespräch that epitomises the Lutheran principle of sola scriptura in action, the attempt to translate what Sachs says into graphic terms has been less than happy and has involved Schoen in the thankless task of trying to convey meanings that are incapable of adequate graphic representation. Not only is he compelled to mix his metaphors in quite startling fashion, but he also has to introduce elements such as the fire and the armed peasant (we are after all on the eve of the Peasants' War!) in order to illustrate the tribulations that are the lot of the Christians in the world. But while the general thrust of the woodcut would be apparent to any informed reader, those who could not read would have some difficulty as to what the fire in the very centre of the picture was doing. Indeed, given the usual positive role of the peasant in Reformation controversy, the armed peasant may well have posed problems for contemporaries, just as he does for modern interpreters, who have on occasion seen him as a defender of the Church.¹⁵ In the same way, one wonders whether the angels' use of the Upper German “fork” gesture with the index and middle finger, to which Schoen is reduced in order to indicate their disapprobation, would be widely understood.¹⁶ It is not the sort of thing usually associated with angels, and especially in the right-hand(ed) one comes close to looking like a gesture of blessing! Conceivably, sixteenth-century readers were not unduly disturbed by such problems—they loved to “read” the picture as well as the text, and like modern newspaper readers were no doubt adept at ignoring what they did not understand, but to suggest that the broadsheet is in any way a harmonious integrated work of polemical art is surely erroneous.

By contrast, the titleless sheet usually known as Der Schafstall Christi which Sachs produced in the same year in collaboration with the more experienced Hans Sebald Beham, avoids most of the infelicities that marred Das Hauß des Weysen vnd das haus des vnweisen manß. Sachs opts again for a modified Streitgespräch—this time with only three participants: Christ, The Angel and “Der Gotloß hauff,” each of whom are given twenty-four lines of Knittelvers. A parable of Christ once again provides a useful source of imagery. Christ, in John 10, 1-6, explained that “he that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that entereth by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.” Then, mixing His metaphors somewhat a few verses later, Christ spoke of Himself as the door: those who entered through Him would be saved. Sachs' purpose, however, is not to provide a gloss or to elaborate on Christ's words. These are indeed quoted in the speech he gives to Christ along with other texts (Matth. 11,28; John 15,5; John 14,6), but the real point of Christ's speech is, once again, to emphasise with full biblical authority the Christocentric nature of the Christian faith and the inefficacy of good works to achieve salvation—which comes only through faith:

Han ewer sünd auff mich genommen
Bin vor euch an dem Creutz gestorben
Euch bey dem vatter huld erworben
Darumb wer nun durch mich eyngeet
Der wirt selig on wider ret
Wer aber anderst wo steygt eyn
Der můß ain dieb vnd morder seyn
Wan̄ all ewer werk die seind entwicht
Ich han allain es außgericht
Ich bin der weinstock / jr die reben
Bin ewer weg / warheyt / vnd leben.

This basic Lutheran message is then reiterated in the speeches of the angel and of the “godless crew”:

O blindt gotloser hauff sagt an
Was hat euch der frum Christus than
Das jr nit glawbet seynem wort
Sonder steygt eyn an fremdem ort
Sucht ewer hayl / hilff / trost / vn̄ sterke
In den erdichten menschen werke.

Conversely, the “godless crew” reaffirms all its principles, so that the main tenets of the Lutheran faith are rehearsed yet again, albeit in reversed, negative sense.

Beham does not attempt to convey in graphic terms the inefficacy of good works or justification through fiduciary faith. Even though the words of John 10 in fact played only a subsidiary role in the seventy-two lines of text, he seizes on Christ's imagery and merely gives it a contemporary gloss by drawing Christ standing at the door of the sheepfold and beckoning to the peasant, the woman, the middle-class merchant, the scholar and the clerical figure with a chalice on the right (a reference to the reformed faith, which differed from the Roman rite in giving the cup to the laity in the Eucharist). Behind this Protestant group, a host of Roman clerics armed with ladders is climbing onto the roof, while a similar “godless crew” launches another assault from the left, intending to enter by a gap in the wall. The only concession he makes to Sachs' text is the figure of the angel on the left, who confronts a woman bearing a rosary and a lighted candle as symbols of “good works.” The result may not be an illustration of Sachs' text, any more than Sachs' text is in any real sense a commentary on Beham's picture, but it does present a striking image that sticks in the mind and effectively communicates the message that the Romanists are the enemies of Christ and thus prepares the reader for the detailed doctrinal points Sachs' text seeks to convey.

Such a self-limitation on the part of graphic artists was rare: Schoen's garrulity was far more typical and though one likes to think of Sachs and Schoen and Pencz and Beham discussing texts and pictures together in the freemasonry of Nürnberg artistic circles, publishers often show little concern to achieve a harmonious integration of text and picture. An extreme case is presented by Das sibenhabtig Pabstier Offenbarung Johannis Tessaloni 2. Cap.

Here we may fairly conclude that Sachs is commenting on a pre-existing picture. At least he invites the reader in the opening lines;

Schawet an das siben hewbtig tier
Gantz eben der gstalt vnd manier
Wie Johannes gesehen hat
Ein tier an des meres gestat.

In spite of this clear reference to the woodcut, it is doubtful if the reader will have found Sachs' text much of a help. Quite the contrary! The woodcut shows an Egyptian cross to which are affixed the instruments of Christ's passion. From the cross hangs a letter of indulgence, as a parody of Pilate's notice, that reads “Vmb gelt ein sack vol ablas.” One of the seals on this letter of indulgence bears the arms of the Medici, thus emphasising the actuality of the satire (Clement VII was a Medici and was Pope from 1523 until 1534). This theme of the avarice of the papacy is underlined by a large triple-padlocked chest which stands in front of the cross. From under the chest a devil emerges. The chest also functions as a sort of altar, however, on which burns an eternal light in front of a seven-headed beast. Pace Sachs' remarks, quoted above, this is not an apocalyptic beast such as St. John saw. A bearded pope's head is flanked by two cardinals' heads, two bishops' heads and two monks' heads. Banners bearing the papal tiara and St. Peter's keys of Math. 16, 19 complete the allegory, which is given the title Regnum Diaboli.

Sachs' text eschews any attempt to explain this woodcut in favour of a more or less traditional interpretation of the significance of St. John's seven-headed beast. The ten crowns indicate tonsures, the ten horns spiritual power and its trumpetings; the leopard-like nature of the beast signifies the murderous reign of the pope, who executes his opponents, the lion's mouth the greed of the papacy, etc., while the wound of the beast is the wound Martin Luther has inflicted on the papacy. Sachs' text in other words bears no real relationship to the woodcut reproduced. The whole point about the latter, which probably represents the counterblast to Hans Brosamer's celebrated recent mockery of Luther on the title page illustration of Cochläus' Septiceps Lutherus of 1529, is that it is a savage parody of the devotional pictures of the Old Faith that had reproduced the Vision of Pope Gregory the Great. Tradition had it that Gregory (590-604) had been celebrating mass in Rome, when Christ had appeared to him on the altar in the guise of the “man of sorrows.” Around the apparition, the “arms of Christ against sin” were manifested to Gregory in the shape of the instruments of the passion.

The picture of Pope Gregory's vision preserved in the church of S. Croce in Gerusalemme gave indulgence to those praying before it, and this indulgence was subsequently extended to copies of the picture, so that a paternoster said in front of such a copy would secure 14,000 years' remission of Purgatory. Not surprisingly, this ensured that the motif enjoyed wide circulation One would have expected well-informed Protestants to pick up the reference and to see the point of the parody as a devastating attack on the venality of the Church. In so far as the text was necessary for those less well-informed, one would have expected some sort of explanation of the background and of the way the Man of Sorrows who died on the cross as a “unique and sufficient sacrifice for sins for ever” has, by the chemistry of a rapacious papacy, been translated into an obscene monster which seeks to sell for money the grace freely given by the crucified Son of God. Sachs' text makes no attempt at commentary, and were it not for the opening remarks one would be tempted to see it as having been “borrowed” by an enterprising publisher who linked it with the picture in the same sort of indiscriminate way as Murner cashed in on Brant's woodcuts in the first edition of the Narrenbeschwörung and publishers of Volksbücher used stock woodcuts by way of “illustrations.” That the text exists in a longer version, where Sachs identifies himself as the author,¹⁷ would lend colour to such a view. However, it is difficult to sustain such a hypothesis in the light of Sachs' opening words and we must see it as an extreme example of editorial disregard for the integrity of woodcut and text.

Between the three stereotypical examples of popular illustrated literature that we have examined in this article there are, of course, a whole series of gradations. The conclusions to be drawn are obvious. Far from being harmonious integrated works of art, some examples of illustrated literature show a blatant disregard for the relationship between illustration and text. Further, it was only gradually that artists learnt to accept the limitations of their art. Sir Herbert Read once remarked that pictures were concerned with states of feeling, not the communication of ideas: “if we have ideas to express, the proper medium is language.”¹⁸ Not all of us would go quite so far as that, but the mixed metaphors of Schoen's woodcuts and the simple clarity of Beham's show how the way forward lay not in the attempt to communicate a variety of complicated ideas, but to reduce what one had to say to a single principal idea that could then be expressed in a suitable graphic metaphor. The text writer would, at least for some time to come, remain free to develop ideas and propositions in lengthy verse discourses, before he too would experience a similar reduction to the pithy one-liners of the modern cartoon. Only when artists and script writers accepted that their forte did not lie in seeking to inform, instruct and persuade their readers discursively by the weight of the “evidence” advanced, but in subsuming and condensing what their readers already knew from elsewhere, would a true integration of text and picture be achieved, together with that flash of insight that confirms and strengthens the converted and on occasion transmutes doubters and opponents into supporters of the cause they had hitherto denied.

Notes

1. Cf. Herbert Zschelletzschy, Die drei gottlosen Maler von Nürnberg: Sebald Beham, Barthel Beham und Georg Pencz. Historische Grundlagen und ikonologische Probleme ihrer Graphik zur Reformations- und Bauernkriegszeit (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1975), pp. 246 ff.; and Robert W. Scribner, For the sake of simple folk (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), pp. 15 ff.

2. The locus classicus justifying the earlier abandonment of the Jewish prohibition of pictures is a letter of Gregory the Great to Bishop Serenus of Massilia: “Praeterea indico dudum ad nos pervenisse quod fraternitas vestra quosdam imaginum adoratores aspiciens easdem in Ecclesiis imagines confregit atque projecit. Et quidam zelum (?) vos, ne quid manufactum adorari posset, habuisse laudavimus, sed frangere easdem imagines non debuisse indicamus. ideirco (??) einim (?) pictura in Ecclesiis adhibetur ut hi qui litteras nesciunt saltem in parietibus videndo legant quae legere in Codicibus non valent. Tua ergo fraternitas ad illos servare et ab earum adoratur populum prohibere debuit, quatenus et litterarum nescii haberent unde scientiam historiae colligerent, et populus in picturae adoratione minime peccaret.” Migne, Patrologia (Lat.), vol. 77, col. 1027.

3. Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff: Nach der Erstausgabe (Basil 1494) mit den Zusätzen der Ausgaben von 1495 und 1499, ed. Manfred Lemmer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962), pp. 2-3.

4. The best account of Luther's use of pictures is still Hartmann Grisar and Franz Heege, Luthers Kampfbilder, 4 vols. (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1921-1923). See also Scribner, For the sake of simple folk; and William A. Coupe, German Political Satires from the Reformation to the Second World War, 1: circa 1500-1848 (Millwood, NY: Kraus International, 1993).

5. Zschelletzschtky, Die drei gottlosen Maler von Nürnberg, p. 250.

6. Michael Schilling, Bildpublizistik der frühen Neuzeit: Aufgaben und Leistungen des illustrierten Flugblatts in Deutschland bis um 1700 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), p. 3.

7. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding media (London, 1973), as quoted by Scribner, For the sake of simple folk.

8. Sebastian Brant, Narrenschiff, ed. Friedrich Zarncke (Leipzig: Wiegand, 1854).

9. Heinrich Röttinger, Die Bilderbogen des Hans Sachs (Strassburg: Heitz, 1927), p. 19.

10. Scribner, For the sake of simple folk, pp. 1 f.

11. Die Reformation in Nürnberg—Umbruch und Bewahrung. Veranstaltet von der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Landeskirche in Bayern und dem Germanischen Nationalmuseum in Zusammenarbeit mit der Stadt Nürnberg und dem Staatsarchiv Nürnberg zum 18. Deutschen Evangelischen Kirchentag, 1979, ed. Karl G. Kaster and others (Nürnberg: Schriften des Kunstpädagogischen Zentrums im Germanischen Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, 1979), p. 40; p. 116.

12. Bernd Balzer, Bürgerliche Reformationspropaganda: Die Flugschriften des Hans Sachs in den Jahren 1523-25 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973).

13. LeRoy M. Carl, “Editorial Cartoons Fail to Reach Many Readers,” Journalism Quarterly 45 (1968): 533-5.

14. Cf. Ernst H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images (Oxford: Phaidon, 1978), pp. 123 ff.

15. Flugblätter der Reformation und des Bauernkrieges: 50 Blätter aus der Sammlung des Schloßmuseums Gotha, ed. Hermann Meuche (Gotha: Method. Zentrum für wiss. Bibl., Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, 1975), pp. 115 f.

16. Lutz Röhrich, Lexikon der sprichwörtlichen Redensarten (Freiburg i. Br. / Basel / Wien: Herder, 1982), 1: 298, “Gabel.”

17. Hans Sachs, Werke, ed. Adalbert von Keller and Edmund Goetze (Tübingen: Bibliothek des Literarischen Vereins Stuttgart, 1870-1904), 22: 279 ff.

18. Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 36.