The Paralytic Healed by Christ Picks up His Pallet 

Christoph Murer made this engraving, *The Paralytic Healed by Christ Picks up His Pallet*, sometime between the late 16th and early 17th century. Murer was from Zurich, a protestant city in a fractured and warring Europe. In the aftermath of the Reformation, the politics of imagery were hotly contested, particularly in Switzerland and parts of Germany. Although the religious reformer Zwingli was based in Zurich, they did not experience the same levels of iconoclasm as elsewhere in Europe. Murer has chosen to depict a scene from the Gospels, in which Christ heals a man who cannot walk. The artist highlights not just the miraculous event, but also the social dimension, as the healed man is integrated back into society. The image's meaning is contingent on this historical context. If you want to understand it better, you could look at how the Protestant Reformation shaped attitudes towards images, and consider the role of art in shaping religious and political identities.