The First 'Peasant Festivals': Eleven Woodcuts Produced in Reformation Nuremberg by Barthel and Sebald Beham and Erhard Schon, ca. 1524 to 1535

This iconographical study explains the meaning of eleven wood- cuts (ca. 1524-1535) depicting peasant festivals by three Nuremberg artists--Barthel and Sebald Beham, and Erhard Schon--and places the works in their cultural and historical context. These followers of Durer created large numbers of prints with secular subjects after the master's death in 1528, yet that period of German art has not been studied in depth because of a "death" of German painting after Durer. Younger contemporaries of Holbein, Cranach, Erasmus and Luther, the Nuremberg artists present in the first Peasant Festivals a wide variety of amusements that took place at contemporary peasant celebrations. These woodcuts can be explained by studying German folklore, popular literature and art, writings of humanists and Reformers, habits of dress, popular customs, and legislation issued by Nuremberg's town council. This includes Sebastian Franck's Book of Proverbs (1541), Hans Sachs's poems, Luther's works, and heretofore unpublished mandates and minutes of town council meetings. The abundant verbal expressions of sixteenth-century German, especially its proverbs and idioms that humanists were then compiling, offered fruitful sources for the Nuremberg artists' imagery. The visual sources consulted include Northern paintings and woodcut illustrations of German broadsheets, printed books and pamphlets, especially those treating the social problem of excessive drinking. The first Peasant Festivals represent church festivals, peasant wedding celebrations, and a spinning room, which are festivals and festival-like occasions that Nuremberg's council first reevaluated in 1526 under the impact of the Lutheran Reformation, officially adopted there the year before. The criticism of the festivals included in the legislation is reflected in the woodcuts, thus linking them with the Reformed movement in Nuremberg. Far however from offering dry critiques of these celebrations, the festival woodcuts combine the council's criticisms with extensive observation of folk culture, and visualizations of idioms and carnival play-like texts. The woodcuts are here shown, therefore, to be burlesque-like in their presentation of the earliest representations of peasant festivals in the history of art.