Portret van Heinrich Tettelbach op 68-jarige leeftijd 1637

Sebastian Furck made this print of Heinrich Tettelbach, a sixty-eight-year-old minister, sometime in the first half of the seventeenth century. The cultural context here is that of the Protestant Reformation. You will notice the term 'Ecclesia Evangelica' identifying Tettelbach as a doctor of the Evangelical Church. The proliferation of printed images like this one allowed the leaders of the Reformation to circulate their portraits alongside their writings. How different is this from the ways Catholic saints had once been represented? Here, the trappings of saintly glory are gone, replaced by the somber garb of the protestant pastor and the book he holds in his hand. The writing around the frame elevates Tettelbach as a man of the church, but also one of Frankfurt, a pastor and senior of his community. Looking at this print, the questions it raises can be explored in archives of theological writings and the records of religious institutions. The history of art is always contingent on the history of the world.