The Lutheran reformation in Denmark resulted in a through re-evaluation of religious practice and, thus, including the devotional use of images. Danish visitation reports from the early Lutheran period testify to a general reuse of images, combined with disposal of several potential cult-images. During his first visitation, Peder Palladius, the first superintendent of Zealand, instructed the churchwardens in his diocese that “those images that people visited and hung dolls of wax and crutches upon, should simply be removed and burned”.
The present paper will, however, focus on a group of altarpieces that were dismantled, rearranged and inserted into new frameworks after the reformation. By applying seemingly gentle strategies of appropriation, such as light expurgation of specific visual elements and relocation and reframing of others, as well as (often textual) neutralization of devotional and mediating potentials, these altarpieces were gradually Lutheranized. The application of these subtle forms of iconoclasm seem, the paper will argue, to have served as visual communication of a specific Lutheran practice and strategy of religious transition as a balance between and negotiation of continuity and change. As the paper will illustrate, visual elements that represent a certain continuity were visually conditioned, redefined and framed by Lutheran ideals, which may be understood as a subtle form of iconoclasm. ​Taking as point of departure the analyses of specific examples of post-Reformation visual and material appropriation, the present paper investigates the specific Danish Lutheran negotiation of devotion, of visual culture, and, in particular, the specific Danish Lutheran ideal of religious re-formation.