Portraits From the Past: Huldrych Zwingli, the Iconoclast Who Loved the Arts
Historical Context
By the early sixteenth century, the churches of Europe were fuller of images than they had ever been. Zwingli himself would later claim that paintings and statues in churches had increased a hundredfold between 1500 and 1518.
Reformers across Europe looked at that same excess and reached different conclusions about what to do with it. Zwingli, unlike Luther, came to regard the images used in Christian worship as incompatible with the reforms Scripture required. In Zurich, however, their removal was not simply the work of an angry mob. The process unfolded through disputation, preaching, and ultimately the authority of the city council.
History remembers him for his iconoclasm. What it remembers less often is that Zwingli was, by training and by temperament, a musician, a gifted flutist and singer who found genuine comfort in his art. This is not the story of a man who hated beauty. It is the story of a man who loved the arts enough to ask what place they actually belonged to.
A Village Known for Its Music
Zwingli was born in Wildhaus, a small village in the Toggenburg valley known for its love of, and talent in, music.
At the age of ten, he began formal training in both music and Latin in Basel. He proved a brilliant student in both, and at twelve was sent to Bern to study under the humanist scholar and poet Heinrich Wölflin. Zwingli kept playing throughout. His successor, Heinrich Bullinger, later remembered him as skilled on as many as ten instruments, but especially as a flutist with a gifted singing voice.
Music was not just a childhood talent, either. It followed him into adulthood as a kind of refuge. While earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Basel, and teaching at St. Martin’s church school on the side, Zwingli carried a heavy mental load as both student and teacher. To find rest from mental strain, he would retire to his private quarters and play music.
Not a Man Who Hated Art
That detail matters more than it might first appear.
Some historians, following the nineteenth-century writer Johannes Janssen, have painted the Reformation’s iconoclasts as men who simply hated art. It’s a hard case to make against Zwingli in particular. A man who spent a lifetime finding comfort in music is not an obvious candidate for that charge.
The question for Zwingli was not whether art was beautiful. It clearly was to him, personally. The question was whether a given form of art had a legitimate place in Christian worship.
And yet, he held even his own love of music to the same standard. When the Zurich Reformation reached its liturgical conclusion, Zwingli removed music from public worship altogether. Choir singing was abolished in 1525, and the organ of the Great Minster was destroyed in 1527.
The very thing he used privately for comfort was something he refused to make an element of public worship.
Scripture Alone
What actually drove Zwingli’s view of images was his view of Scripture.
Zwingli held that Scripture was the final authority for the church. Nothing stood above it, not tradition, not councils, not the church’s own institutional weight. In Article 1 of his Sixty-Seven Articles, he wrote that “all who say that the gospel [message of salvation found in the Scripture] is nothing without the approbation of the Church, err and cast reproach upon God.” Article 5 says that those who elevate other teachings to the level of the Gospel err, while Article 16 explicitly says that human traditions are of no use for salvation.
For Zwingli, Scripture was not merely one authority among others. It was the standard by which the church’s teaching and worship were to be judged. Where Scripture gave no warrant for a practice, Zwingli increasingly saw no justification for retaining it simply because tradition had sanctioned it.
Zwingli pressed that principle even into questions as ordinary as diet. In March 1522, several citizens of Zurich broke the Lenten fast by eating meat, and the controversy grew public enough to reach the city council. Zwingli’s answer was that the practice of not following Lent was harmless in itself, since Scripture said nothing on the matter either way, and so no tradition of men could bind the conscience where Scripture had not spoken.
For Zwingli, then, the question was not simply whether a practice was ancient or useful, but whether it could be defended from Scripture. That same question would become decisive when Zurich turned its attention from fasting to images and worship.
The Iconoclast Who Loved the Arts
Zwingli’s lifelong delight in music rules out any reading of his iconoclasm as hostility toward beauty. He loved the arts. He was trained in them from childhood, gifted enough to be remembered for them, and comforted by them under the weight of his own studies. That is exactly what makes his iconoclasm so striking. It didn’t come from a man indifferent to beauty. It came from a man who understood beauty’s pull better than most, and still refused to let it govern worship above what Scripture allowed.
God alone, through the Scripture alone, got to decide what belonged in the church. Not personal taste. Not inherited custom. Not even his own considerable gifts.
Concluding Thoughts
It would be easy to remember Zwingli only as the reformer who stripped Zurich’s churches bare, and read that as the work of a man with no taste for beauty. The record says otherwise.
Here was a man trained in music from the age of ten, remembered by his own successor for his flute and his singing voice, who retreated to his instrument for comfort through the weight of university study. And he was still willing to remove music from public worship when his theology demanded it.
That’s the paradox.
An iconoclast who loved the arts. And yet, loved Scripture’s authority over the church even more.
Further Reading
Zwingli and the Arts — Charles Garside Jr. | https://amzn.to/4iTKDIu
The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli — W. P. Stephens | https://amzn.to/4ikEoxg
War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin — Carlos M. N. Eire | https://amzn.to/4r2XWIM
History of the Christian Church (8-Volume Set) — Philip Schaff | https://amzn.to/4gI7Z2m
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