Joannes Molanus

Born at Lille (a city in the County of Flanders, then under Habsburg rule), he was a priest and canon of St. Peter's Church, Leuven, where he died.

He is best known for his De Picturis et Imaginibus Sacris, pro vero earum usu contra abusus ("Treatise on Sacred Images").

This was published in 1570, four years after the Iconoclastic Fury had swept through the Low Countries, and it defended the production and use of devotional images, but enforcing the restrictions of the Council of Trent, as he interpreted them, in a brutally polemical fashion, which was very influential.

Molanus is today mainly remembered by art historians for being one of the first authorities to turn the Council of Trent's short and inexplicit decrees on sacred images (1563) into minutely detailed instructions for artists, which were then widely enforced in Catholic countries mostly.

His views on the older, originally Byzantine, depiction of the Nativity of Jesus in art are typical: The Virgin is shown pale with pains, the midwives prepare a small (narcotic) drought for the childbirth.

I saw in not a few places the picture of the blessed Virgin lying on a bed, depicting childbirth, and she was suffering pains from this birth, but that is not true.

Rather, those pictures should be promoted which show the birth of Christ in which the Blessed Virgin Mary with arms folded and on bended knee before her little son, as though he was just now brought forth into the light.

[13] Saint Joseph should not be shown as the old, semi-comical figure of the Middle Ages, but as young, vigorous and firmly in control of the Holy Family.