A Factory of the Holy (Eene Fabriek van Heiligen)

This Dutch wood engraving satirizes Catholic ritual and saint veneration during the tumultuous April Movement of 1853. The print depicts a workshop where religious statues and relics are manufactured and sold at fixed prices—reducing sacred objects to commercial commodities. Figures in clerical dress preside over the production line while crowds of worshippers queue outside.

The work exemplifies the Protestant polemic tradition, wherein caricature and sequential narrative expose what reformers viewed as ecclesiastical fraud. Descended from Hogarth's moral sequences and the German Bilderbogen broadsheets, such prints combined visual satire with densely annotated biblical commentary to reach literate audiences. The anti-Catholic rhetoric reflects mid-nineteenth-century sectarian conflict in the Netherlands, where religious and political reform movements collided.