Art Of The Reformation: A Selection

In recognition of the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, the UAMA will exhibit nine Old Master prints from its graphic collection that highlight some of the issues encountered by visual artists working during the Reformation era.  Through these works viewers will understand how art was used to shape public opinion about theological debates and their political and social ramifications. Prints by artists such as Pieter Bruegel, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Theodor de Bry illustrate some of the ways these messages were conveyed through biblical stories, portraits, and allegories.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World guides us through a time so full of innovation that the Western world would not again experience its like until the twentieth century: the new humanism of the Renaissance and the radical religious alterations of the Reformation. 

This was an age in which whole continents and peoples were discovered. It was an era of sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies—and of unprecedented courage, as thousands refused to bow their heads to the religious pieties of the past. In these exquisitely written and lavishly illustrated pages, Cahill illuminates, as no one else can, the great gift-givers who shaped our history—those who left us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found. Volume VI of Thomas Cahill's acclaimed Hinges of History series.

Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World