Nine Cards with Satires on Papal Infallibility

This engraved broadsheet presents nine scenes mocking papal authority and Catholic doctrine through sequential narrative—a format that prefigures the comic strip. Each panel depicts religious figures in absurd, degrading situations: false miracles, corrupt practices, and the machinery of priestly deception. The crude, direct etching style and popular Dutch text made this satire accessible to ordinary readers during intense Protestant-Catholic controversy. Such picture-sheets descended from Reformation propaganda and anticipated Hogarth's moral sequences. The sequential panel structure and visual gags established conventions that comic artists would refine for centuries, from Rowlandson through Daumier to modern cartooning.