1860 Der Breite und der Schmale Weg, die Weite und die Enge Pforte
DESCRIPTION
Called "The Broad and the Narrow Way, the Wide and the Straight Gate" in English, this text-heavy devotional print instructed Germany's rural and working class public in proper Christian behavior. A masterwork of fear-mongering, this print maps the thoughts and actions of those on their way to either of life's two eternal destinations: damnation or salvation.
Before the figures in this scene pass through either of the gates that decide their eternal fate, they're first faced with two urban architectural manifestations of damnation and salvation: Zur Wollust, an inn filled with all sorts of vice, and a traditional church. Ahead of the townspeople lie two gates, one broad and manned by a gregarious demon and the other narrow, attended by an angel, and leading to the heavenly walled city of Jerusalem. Bridging the two paths are two byways, "Way to Repentance" and "Way to the World," showing behaviors that (for better or worse) lead one astray from the path they're currently walk.
Excepting the heavenly Jerusalem, this print leaves no visual space to breath. Text surrounding every inch of fields between the paths are filled with text akin to a comic-book speech bubble. On the left, common sense excuses like "You only live once" and "God isn't that strict" show the mental gymnastics characteristic of sinners while on the right, excerpts from scripture show true Christians trusting the Word of God over their own intuition. Despite this reverence for God's Word though, the print errs in citing Galatians 6-8 in abbreviating the German Galater to "Jal. 6,7.8." on the stone tablets that divide the two gates.
Bilderbogen
Between 1810 and 1945, three printing houses in Neuruppin, northwest of Berlin, issued some 22,000 designs of Bilderbogen: single-sheet popular prints, lithographed in long runs on cheap paper and usually colored afterward by stencil, much of it by poorly paid women and children. Peddlers and rag collectors sold them for a few pfennigs, and fairs carried them to a largely rural and working-class public. F. W. Bergemann was the smallest of the three houses. Standard accounts credit it with some 1,250 to 1,450 designs, mostly religious, in a run usually given as 1855 to 1863. Bergemann drew this subject at least twice.This sheet is a finer, uncolored, unnumbered redrawing of the original. The Württemberg church archive in Stuttgart dates its copy of this version to about 1860, although the women’s bustled dresses may point to the 1870s or ’80s.
The Two Ways Motif
The picture belongs to an old moral scheme. The choice between two roads goes back to Greek legend, and Christ’s words in Matthew 7 gave it a Christian form: a wide gate and broad way to damnation, a narrow gate and strait way to life. German printmakers had pictured it at least since a Cannstatt engraving of about 1800. Charlotte Reihlen’s Stuttgart version of 1867 then carried the motif into Dutch and English editions and, through the Lahr mission press, into Spanish, Armenian and Hungarian. Bergemann’s sheet stands apart for its maximal style of thick crowd and suffuse speech.
CONDITION
1200 W. 35th Street #425 Chicago, IL 60609 | P: (312) 496 - 3622