A terminus post quem (earliest date) for the drawing can be established on the basis of its most prominent image, the archangel St. Michael armed with a flaming sword and bearing a shield inscribed hoc tegmine tuta florebit (“with this protection, it [i.e., the faith] will safely flourish), which was taken directly from a print by Balthasar Sigmund Setletzky (after Johann Lorenz Haid) commemorating the Augsburg Jubilee of 1730 and now in the collection of the British Museum.

Balthasar Sigmund Setletzky After: Johann Lorenz Haid, 1730 Engraving

This print circulated in a contemporary commemorative booklet, Johan Michael Roth’s Augspurgisches Iubel-Gedächtnüs (Augsburg, 1730), and it is likely the artist who drew the image found it there. Other elements of Seletzky’s print have found their way into the drawing, including a censer wafting its smoke and the two obelisks sitting atop the crudely drawn church, one of which bears the inscription Deo conservatori pacis s. (“dedicated to God, preserver of peace”), which in the print are set upon an altar bearing the same inscription.

At the top of the print is a sun surrounded by plus ultra (“more beyond”), the motto adopted by Charles V and still the motto of Spain, but in the drawing the sun tops the steeple of the drawing’s church and is now surrounded by non plus ultra (“nothing beyond”), an explicit rejection of the print’s motto.

In fact, the print’s imagery has in each case been altered to challenge to the legitimacy of the Augsburg Confession and Lutheran theology. In the print, the Augsburg Confession is represented as an open book under St. Michael, and thus is the “protection” (hoc tegmine) that will allow Christianity to flourish, but in the drawing it has been replaced by a similar open book with verses from the Vulgate asserting the unbroken continuity of the church, topped the miter and crossed keys symbolizing the papacy; the drawing even emphatically and directly rebuts the print with capitalization (HOC tegmine) in a direct rebuttal to the print.

While the drawing is not organized according to a schematic plan, there is a general arrangement of the material.

The left side is dominated by images of the proper divine order as guaranteed by the established church, with the column on a base inscribed Virtus

an allegorical representation of three clerical duties (foveo, rego, faveo)

leading down to the image of St. Michael atop the church

which is constructed out of individual proof-texts for Catholic sacraments (e.g., baptism, eucharist, extreme unction) interlaced with images of saints and martyrs that represent these sacraments. With one exception, these images can be found in Jacques Callot, Les images de tous les saincts et saintes de l’année suivant le martyrologe Romain (Paris, 1636), though in reverse, suggesting some intermediary source.

The center of the drawing is filled with images of sinful behavior rooted in earthly desire, beginning with greed and gluttony, but with a particular focus on sexual lust.

These lead down to the large image of Luther as apocalyptic beast, whose body and limbs are adorned with appropriate texts, and whose excrement is the lex sancta et pura Lutheri (“the pure and holy law of Luther”). On his back is a reclining Venus with a rotting thigh (an allusion to the punishment for an adulteress found in Numbers 5:27), and he tramples with his hind legs saints, bishops, and symbols of the the church, while his forelegs step on the the Epistle of James (which Luther had called “an epistle of straw”).

There is even a swipe at Calvin, who is represented as a goat coming to “milk” on Luther’s phallus, labelled as the stimulus Novi Evangelii (“the goad of the New Testament”).

The right side offers a somewhat looser arrangement, but highlights the punishments arising from Luther’s heretical teachings, including an image of Luther in hell, Luther beaten by his wife, and Luther threatened with a beating from his teacher.

The lower register reflects the same movement from left to right: the lambs as symbols of Christ’s sacrifice on the far left

moving to demonic creatures and aerumnae hominum (“the torments suffered by mankind”)

and ending in the right corner with a crab, an astrological image of Cancer symbolizing the summer solstice (considered the point of decline) taken from Setletzky’s Jubilee print.

In addition to the verses from the Vulgate (occasionally in a form that suggests the artist was working from memory), there are numerous Latin maxims and proverbs scattered throughout the drawing, in most cases close to an illustrative image. Although such sayings were in wide circulation, especially after the publication of the Adagia of Erasmus in 1500, a likely source for the drawing’s texts is Jacob Meier’s Hortulus Adagiorum Germanico-Latinorum (Zurich, 1692).

Of the German texts, some simply provide a translation or adaptation of the Latin maxims, but the more prominent, enclosed within undulating borders, serve as captions to specific scenes, and in some cases represent the speech of an individual figure. Most are rhyming couplets, apparently original compositions, that identify Luther by name and in some instances refer to well-known episodes from Luther’s life; they also display frequent double-entendre.

von Bora is also portrayed in the scene below, in which Luther seeks a liaison with a young beauty, and again on the far right, in which she beats Luther with a bundle of switches as he lifts up her skirt.

The prominent pair of women in the lower center, a nun who looks to her right back toward the church and a worldly woman, dressed in a mannish fashion, who looks to her left towards the more sinful side of the drawing, may represent the two sides von Bora, criticizing her for abandoning her monastic vow in favor of earthly pleasures. A serpent between the pair, whose attacks symbols of religious life (a flagellum, breviary, and abbatial crozier), bearing on its side a Latin text mocking Luther for pouring out songs not on his harp, as David did, but for “his nun” (Nonna sua). In satirizing Luther’s relationship with von Bora, the drawing draws on a tradition of Counter-Reformation polemic that portrayed Luther, Calvin and their followers as overturning the divinely-sanctioned relationship between the sexes, which to their critics was only one of the elements of their theology that undermined religious and social traditions.