A Card Game on Papal Infallibility

This Dutch engraving presents religious and political satire as a fifty-two-card deck, each panel a playing card suit showing scenes of Catholic ritual, clerical corruption, and papal authority. The format—sequential narrative panels with Latin captions—descends from earlier German and Flemish satirical broadsheets and anticipates the strip-cartoon form. Protestant mockery of Rome's claims to infallibility runs throughout: clergy drink, gamble, and traffic in indulgences while invoking divine sanction. The card-game structure allowed layered critique: viewers could read individual scenes or follow thematic sequences. This work exemplifies how 18th-century printmakers weaponized popular entertainment formats—cards, prints, broadsides—for religious polemic, a strategy that would shape graphic satire from Hogarth through Gillray and into modern comics.