Images of debauchery: The Prodigal Son's revels in Netherlandish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

With the advent of the Reformation, the story of the biblical Prodigal Son in the Book of Luke became the parable most often depicted in both art and literature. The revels of the profligate youth, an episode barely mentioned in the Book of Luke, became popular in Netherlandish paintings and graphic art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My study deals with the portrayal of the Prodigal Son's debauchery from the sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries, and with the shift from moralizing pictures shifted to unashamedly erotic and only slightly monitory images. I review the art in the context of religion, drama and culture of the period.;Calvin, gave particular appeal to the Prodigal Son narrative; its message resonated with the new belief of salvation by faith alone. Sixteenth-century playwrights mined its themes, combining comedic elements with didacticism in their allegories, amplifying the skimpy biblical description of the dissipation into elaborate entertainments with requisite buffoons, scoundrels, whores and pimps. These conventions were also adopted in paintings and graphic imagery, usually engravings and woodcuts, which increasingly focused on the Prodigal Son's revels instead of his redemption, "the heart of the parable," as described by Calvin.;In the seventeenth century the more profane images completely overwhelmed the religious meaning, so much so that many have been identified as generic brothel scenes. However, it seems apparent that the ever expanding Dutch art-purchasing public understood the pictorial tradition of the Prodigal Son parable so well that minimal indicators were enough to allow them to recognize the theme, as the emphasis shifted from the biblical literalism and didactic concerns to humor and entertainment. While these paintings possess few iconographic elements commonly associated with the revels of the biblical Prodigal Son, images of a lewd youth with prostitutes were dynamic contemporary variations of that biblical "hero." Many seventeenth-century Dutch artists welcomed ambiguity in their pictures: they were learned people who liked to offer puzzles. After 1650 a different and distinctly more enigmatic painting style appeared and the debauchery of the Prodigal Son as a theme virtually disappeared.