Saints and Devotion

About Saints and Devotion

Devotional prints are the oldest kind of European print. Woodcut saints were sold to pilgrims before printed books existed, and the habit of keeping a printed image of a saint, the Virgin or the crucified Christ for private prayer lasted into the 20th century, when German publishers printed them in colour for every home.

This chapel also holds the prints that described the Church itself: popes and cardinals, the habits of the monks and nuns of each religious order, in plates of the 1840s and 1860s, and the martyrs, heretics and reformers of the church histories of Romeyn de Hooghe and others.