The Triumph of Christ´s Sacrifice - frontispiece for Das Christliches Jahr

M. H. Rentz, a graduate of the drawing school in Nuremberg, was one of the most distinguished figures of 18th-century printmaking in Bohemia. In 1722 he entered the services of Count Franz Anton Sporck at Kuks in eastern Bohemia, where he spent the rest of his life. In Sporck’s service, he produced more than seven hundred engravings and illustrations with allegorical and symbolic subjects, which he mostly executed based on his own designs. One of his best-known realizations is the graphical decoration of the print Das Christliches Jahr, the work of Nicolas Le Tourneux, a French preacher with Jansenistic views. Sporck published the controversial book translated into German twice. The “grand edition” – a lavishly illustrated – was published in 1733–1735. The allegorical subject matter of the frontispiece is clarified in a separate text. In a temple, in front of a high altar adorned by papal insignia, the figure of Faith crushes underfoot the personifications of Reason, Jews’ Fury and Pagans’ Folly. Faith gazes toward the representatives of the four continents, pointing to the Crucified Christ. Time (Chronos) raises the curtain of the Old Testament in front of the Saviour, together with Truth adorned with Moses’s bronze serpent as the prefiguration of Jesus Christ.