«For there is no power but of God»: Diptych of Philip II and Christ (1568) and Habsburg Printed Propaganda

Rachel  Wise

doi:10.6092/issn.2240-7251/18934

Authors

Rachel Wise University of Pennsylvania
Rachel Wise is an art historian, specializing in the art of early modern Northern Europe. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s held fellowships at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and, most recently, a Belgium American Educational Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the Rubenianum in Antwerp, Belgium. Her research centers on the intersections of politics, religion, violence, and technological change in Northern Europe. Her recent publications include: Loyalty Counts: Spanish Netherlandish Jetons from the Eighty Years’ War with «Revue belge de numismatique et de sigillographie» (forthcoming), Politics for Dinner: Damask and the Eighty Years’ War with the «Riggisberger Berichte» series (forthcoming), and Hendrick Goltzius’s Lucretia and the Eighty Years’ War, in Violence, Trauma, and Memory: Responses to War in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2240-7251/18934

Keywords:

King Philip II of Spain, Eighty Years’ War, Printed Propaganda, Armor, Spanish Habsburgs

Abstract

This article examines one of the few prints taking up the Spanish Habsburg cause during the early years of the Eighty Years’ War: Diptych of Christ and Philip II (1568), presumably engraved by Johannes Wierix. Because prints were less commonly used by the royalist side to distribute their propaganda in the Low Countries, this engraving offers a singular view into what the medium afforded them. Examined against the backdrop of iconoclasm, the engraving puts forward a multi-faceted argument about the protection of King Philip II and devotional objects as well as the sacralization of the king and the preservation of the Catholic faith.