De Roomse Hemelvaart (The Roman Ascension)

This engraved broadside satirizes Catholic ritual through a grotesque procession. A serpent-drawn carriage carries papal and clerical figures toward heaven while a demon pulls overhead—inverting Christian iconography into Protestant mockery. Figures on left and right gesture in commentary; dense German text below explicates the scene's theological charges. The print exemplifies Northern European religious polemic distributed as single sheets. Like the Bilderbogen tradition that would develop across the 17th–19th centuries, it combines image and narrative text for popular consumption and argument. Such engravings fed the visual satire culture from which modern editorial cartooning and comics descend, establishing conventions of grotesque bodies, hierarchical composition, and moral instruction through caricature.