‘By the Grace of God, a Guardian Angel wrests the soul of a man from the world and the devil’

From the pages of Vidimus comes this intriguing little roundel.  The theology of it (salvation comes through belief and grace, not via indulgences and priests) would have been quite radical in its day.  But I love the literal tug of war and the hermaphroditic devil!  (Though we can't see its genitals, I'm assuming from the prominent breasts that the artist was following in the tradition of depicting the devil as a hermaphrodite.  There's a similar depiction in the painted ceilings of the John Knox House in Edinburgh.)

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