The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation by Steven Ozment (review)
- The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation by Steven Ozment
Ozment provides a reliable and passionate study of an exceptionally energetic artist, also involved in the printing industry (profiting from Lutheran propaganda), and one of the biggest fish in Wittenberg’s small urban pond. Ozment does not fight shy of Cranach’s puzzles: this apparently passionate supporter of Luther’s revolution happily worked for Luther’s great adversary Cardinal Albrecht. We must not bring hindsight to that relationship: there long seemed a possibility of a religious “Third Way,” embracing even the cardinal in a new Catholic Church freed from papal obedience. Ozment is good on Cranach’s interest in the theme of Venus, a Saxon dynastic symbol as much as a sexual icon, and he understands how Cranach’s ostensibly secular art (female nudes especially) was part of an urgent theological conversation following on Luther’s sidelining of clerical celibacy. Ozment’s breezy style and emphasis on the exclusive importance of his Saxon Lutherans in the Reformation may irritate some, but these are venial sins. [End Page 135]
Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of church history at Oxford University and a fellow the British Academy, is the author of Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700, which received the British Academy Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received the Cundill Prize for History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, which informed a six-part BBC television series for which he was the presenter. His other books include Thomas Cranmer: A Life, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and, most recently, Silence: A Christian History.
