This introduction situates the essays of this special issue within current scholarship on art and religious reform in early modern Europe. The first section considers iconoclasm and the settlements reached in its aftermath, and emphasizes the richness and diversity of the Protestant and Catholic visual cultures that evolved alongside movements for religious reform. The second section considers the individual essays, and draws out common themes: the relationship between image and word; artists’ and patrons’ responses to new understandings of Christian history and soteriology; images’ role in the construction of confessional boundaries, but also their ability to transgress those boundaries. The introduction highlights the plurality of methodological approaches adopted by the contributors, which reminds us that although attention to the social and political contexts in which images were produced and received is an essential part of both historical and art-historical analysis, the power of art can never be fully captured through words.

中文翻译：

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导言：近代欧洲早期的艺术与宗教改革

本导论将本期特刊的文章置于现代早期欧洲艺术和宗教改革的当前学术范围内。第一部分考虑了偶像破坏及其后果，并强调了与宗教改革运动一起发展的新教和天主教视觉文化的丰富性和多样性。第二部分考虑个人散文，并引出共同的主题：图像与文字的关系；艺术家和赞助人对基督教历史和救赎论的新理解的反应；图像在构建忏悔界限中的作用，以及它们超越这些界限的能力。引言强调了贡献者采用的多种方法论方法，