Five Saints 

Pieter de Jode the Elder created this pen and brown ink drawing, Five Saints, sometime between the late 16th and early 17th centuries. This image, with its gathering of holy figures, speaks to the religious environment of the artist, who worked in Antwerp, a city in the Spanish Netherlands, which was a center of Catholic art production during the Counter-Reformation. You’ll notice the artist has included the figures of angels above the saints; this iconography was designed to reinforce the spiritual authority of the Church in response to the rise of Protestantism in Northern Europe. The artist also depicts the saints as strong and authoritative, which perhaps speaks to the Church’s attempts to reassert its dominance and appeal to its followers amid religious conflict. To more fully understand the image, one could research the political and religious history of the Spanish Netherlands, as well as the histories of the artistic institutions of Antwerp. Looking at the social context in which art is made reminds us that the meaning of art is never fixed but changes with history.