De mis der hypocrieten (The Mass of the Hypocrites)

This woodcut satirizes religious hypocrisy during the Reformation, showing a pope or bishop presiding over a grotesque ceremony attended by animal-headed figures—foxes, owls, and dogs—representing corrupt clergy and their foolish followers. The text panels in Dutch and French amplify the moral rebuke. Such prints emerged from a vigorous Northern European tradition of religious and political mockery, employing animal symbolism and crude physiognomy to expose vice. These broadsheet satires—predecessors to the modern comic strip—combined image and text to reach a semiliterate public, using exaggeration and visual disgust to shape opinion. The crude distortion of human features and animal substitution reflect period conventions of caricature that would persist through Hogarth and beyond, though often embedded with ethnic and class prejudice inseparable from their satirical intent.