Designing an exhibition to commemorate the Reformation’s 500th
anniversary is a fairly heroic task for any gallery. Far more art was destroyed than created in
the sixteenth century in those European lands that embraced the teachings of
Luther, Calvin and Cranmer. But the Walters
Art Gallery has made a humble but probing attempt in its single-room
exhibition, “Uncertain Times: Martin Luther’s Remedies for the Soul,” on
display until October 29 at the museum in downtown Baltimore.
Fittingly, many of the most significant pieces on display
are not paintings, but books. The
personal prayer book of Luther’s close associate Philip Melanchthon is there,
worn from heavy use, annotated in the margins.
There’s a handsome early edition of Luther’s Tabletalk, the collection of theological rejoinders and moral
advice dispensed by the aged master in his later years over the daily bread and
beer, carefully recorded by his students.
Words are also the medium of a mesmerizing eighteenth
century German folk art piece featured centrally in the exhibition. The anonymous artist has scripted the many
lines of Luther’s Small Catechism
as a globe around the rose and cross of Luther’s coat of arms, a loyal tribute to the way in
which the theologian has most often been encountered across the centuries—in this
careful summary of Reformation teaching, written to be memorized by children as
they prepared for their confirmations.
