The culture of early modern Europe was suffused with violence. Christianity's central event prior to the Reformation, and in the case of the Roman Church through the centuries that followed, was the violent death of Christ on Calvary,

a sacrifice whose message was one of atonement and human redemp­tion, an event that was commemorated and re-enacted daily through the clergy's celebration of the Mass. Much visual imagery in the century and a half that followed the Reformation reflected this commemoration of violence and suffering, driven by the salvific possibilities of martyrdom and the need to eradicate heretics and apostates, whether confessional enemies, witches or Jews.

Personal and collective violence, as well as public spectacles of brutal punishment, constituted fundamental instruments for the practice of political power, despite the increasing use of bureaucracies by nascent states. The depiction of such violence could be found in all manner of media - in murals and frescoes on church walls, statues of stone, wood or bronze, illustrations in illuminated manuscripts, panel paintings, stained glass and tapestries, and from the later fifteenth-century invention of print, in the new media of single-leaf prints, book and pamphlet illustrations, and broadsheets. This overview of depictions of violence in Reformation Europe aims to show how violence was refracted through different visual media of the period, the patterns in its representation, how artists, patrons and publishers endeavoured to exploit it, and its relationship to actual violent events and practice.

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