Running through October of 2014 at Rochlitz Castle in Saxony a special exhibit celebrates “Story of Strong Women; 500 Years of the Reformation” in advance of the multi-year run up toward the 500 Year Anniversary of Martin Luther and the birth of the Reformation when he nailed his 99 Thesis to the doors of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg in 1517 and translated the bible into common German beginning while in the run following the Diet of Worms in 1521 hiding at Wartburg Castle. A number of events and exhibits are taking place over the next three years in the eastern regions of Germany known as Luther Country where the cleric who inspired a revolution in faith lived and preached. This exhibit is being presented in the Prince’s House at Rochlitz Castle near Leipzig, with a special nod to the lady of the house, Elizabeth Von Rochlitz, a strong willed and famously foul-mouthed convert to Luther’s ideas who was the first royal to sanction the Reformation in Saxony when she was given the lands of Rochlitz and Kriebstein in 1537
The exhibit at Rochlitz focuses on women who were committed to Reformation, which is generally more viewed as a male dominated event and the artists who interpreted a new view of woman in the German protestant Renaissance and Baroque age. The exhibit is centered on the struggles for female self-assertion in the changes of the time. The fates of selected women serve as examples of the changing roles of men and women at the end of the Reformation and the effect of those roles up to our time Among the more prominent Reformation inspired art are many versions of the biblical Judith who beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes’ when he fell asleep before he could ravage her. Judith became a popular subject for Reformation painters like Lucas Cranach the Elder.
Judith is one example meant to represent a different view of men and women than the earlier Catholic view of submissive nurturing Madonna, with a transformation to warrior queen defending her virtue, though more often through self-sacrifice. Also prominent in the exhibit, spread thorough a number of chambers of the castle are variations of Lucretia, more connected to the Reformation era of the 16th Century, based on the legend of the young wife who commits suicide after being raped. She is painted, usually with a dagger to her breast in varying states of near nudity, while certainly a strong act, the image in painting was perhaps more an excuse for connecting sex with religion than a theological interpretation of women’s role, but representative of the changing view of sex in a religious context than the Catholic. The exhibit ends October 31 2014, when the castle museum closes for the season.
The special exhibition “A story of STRONG WOMEN – 500 Years of Reformation”, which will be displayed as part of the Luther Decade (Luther 2017), is promoted on behalf of the German Federal Government for Culture and the Media.
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