Rhetorica caelestis: Jacob Bidermann,
Jeremias Drexel and the Sadelers at the Court of Maximilian
I in Munich
Christine GA?ttler,
University of Washington
Duke Maximilian I
of Bavaria stands out as a Counter Reformation prince.
In his program of reform, the Jesuits played a major
role. In this paper I present two episodes in the
collaboration between Raphael Sadeler and the Jesuits
at the Munich court and discuss the different ways
in which Sadeler's inventions moved accross various
media, pictorial genres, and techniques.
My first example is
a set of four prints showing death and three disembodied
souls experiencing purgatory, hell, and heaven; the
series can be dated around 1604. This curious, unprecendented
iconography was inspired by the epigrams of the young
Jesuit writer and dramatist Jacob Bidermann (1578-1639),
which Sadeler used as captions without mentioning
the author's name. My second case is about the illustrations
designed by Raphael Sadeler for Jeremias Drexel's
best selling book De aeternitate considerationes: this approximately 500 page work was first published
in Latin in Munich in 1620. Drexel, a Lutheran convert,
became preacher to Maximilian's court in 1615, and
was, with his 31 books, one of the most widely published
authors of his time. Both Sadeler's book illustrations
as well as his series of prints reference texts, while
the texts themselves contain multiple allusions to
pictures, emblems and both visual and perceptual conceits.
In fact, Bidermann's epigrams refer to printed images
(be they imaginary or actual) as a starting point
for meditation. While Sadeler's series of the Last
Things employs the medieval tradition of meditative
poetry to promote a form of self-examination that
would eventually lead to a general confession, his
illustrations for Drexel's De aeternitate considerationes extend Ignatian devices of meditation beyond confessional
boundaries to a larger public. Copies of Raphael Sadeler's
series of four prints seem to have been distributed
mainly among the clerical and secular elite; Drexel's
book, however, was mass-produced.
In this latter case,
the prints by Raphael Sadeler serve as a means to
advocate Drexel's concept of a humble language of
the heart in prayer and meditation. The introspective
view (by far not unusual for manuals of prayer and
meditation) is further developed in Drexel's Rhetorica
Caelestis, a rhetorical treatise published in
1636. Here Drexel promotes, in accordance with Augustine,
a rhetoric of prayer as an internal dialogue with
God, thus distinguishing his "celestial eloquence"
(which focuses on the inner movements of the heart)
from the rhetorical devices and artifices of Aristotle,
Cicero, and Quintilian (directed toward the outer
movements of the tongue).
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