However, Luyken matched his work on martyrdom with an impressive production of secular execution prints that are often indistinguishable from their religious counterparts. Taking these similarities as a point of departure, this article will argue that Luyken’s work was not solely concerned with religious and political views, but also with judicial violence as a visual theme in its own right. Besides partisan or sacred readings of violence, Luyken’s prints framed executions in terms of diversity and specificity, leading to the production of a wide variety of explicit and unique images of beheadings, hangings, and burnings. Within this context, Luyken’s execution prints turned scaffold violence into a marketable theme that was eagerly exploited by Amsterdam publishers across a wide variety of illustrated books.
van Duijnen, M. F. (2018). ‘Only the strangest and most horrible cases’: The Role of Judicial Violence in the Work of Jan Luyken. Early Modern Low Countries, 2(2), 169-197. [2]. https://doi.org/10.18352/emlc.73