Rusconi abstract

The Last Sermon: Antichrist Preaching in Late Medieval and Renaissance Representations

Roberto Rusconi

Università Roma Tre

Around the middle of the fourteenth century, some manuscripts containing religious works with didactic purposes made their appearance in Southern Germany. Their main feature consisted in the tight relationship between text and illustration, and the use of the vernacular. In Bavaria a Life of the Antichrist had a very favorable reception among its potential readers. In a few decades this illustrated text was reproduced through all stages of the introduction of printing. The unknown author, probably a clergyman, delineated a true "antichristology” - or a “Gegenheiligengeschichte”, outlining essentially a kind of anti-hagiographical legend. The theme of the preaching runs along the structure and the articulation of this legend of a false Messiah. His mission is to convert the people through the preaching of his false doctrine. According to a common iconography of the late Middle Ages, he was represented as a sort of official preacher, who spoke from a pulpit erected outdoors in front of different audiences.

In the last decades of the fifteenth century some editions appeared in France with a very different inspiration. They were copied in Italy in the same period and also in England before the Reformation. In the iconographic tradition of these texts the Antichrist is referred as a royal figure. It is interesting to note that, at least in one case, its role as one who leads his followers to deviate from the true faith is reconnected to an instruction given by a pulpit. He was represented like a preacher who "reverses" the true faith, wearing a crown and ermine, giving money to his audience, while the statues of St. Peter and of St. Paul lie shattered on the ground.

Between 1494 and 1504 the Florentine Luca Signorelli painted the walls of the Cappella Nova dedicated to St. Brizio in the cathedral of Orvieto, on the border between Umbria and Tuscany. The eschatological program executed by the painter appeared unique for its breadth in representing the latest events in the history, between the end of the world and the last judgment. On the wall Signorelli painted the Deeds of the Antichrist: a subject that until then had been entrusted only to the miniatures in the manuscripts and, more recently, to the engravings in printed books. The image of the Antichrist who preaches, for his ostentatious Christic iconography, referred to the large iconographic parallels between the deeds of the Christ and of the deeds of Antichrist.

Lucas Cranach illustrated with its engravings the Passional Christi und Antichristi by Martin Luther, printed in German and Latin. Following the heritage of the religious reformation in Bohemia inspired to Jan Hus, the role of the Antichrist and of his preaching were deeply changed, with its anti-papal orientation.