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Andachtsbilder (singular Andachtsbild, German language for devotional image) is a German term often used in English in art history for Christianity devotional images designed as aids for prayer or contemplation. The images "generally show holy figures extracted from a narrative context to form a highly focused, and often very emotionally powerful, vignette".
The term is especially used of Northern Gothic art around the 14th and 15th centuries, when new subjects such as the Pietà, Pensive Christ, Man of Sorrows, Arma Christi, Veil of Veronica, the severed head of John the Baptist, and the Virgin of Sorrows became extremely popular.
The traditional Ecce Homo is a very crowded scene, in which the figure of Christ is often less prominent than those of his captors, but in the andachtsbilder versions the other figures and complex architectural background have vanished, leaving only Christ, with a plain background in most painted versions (see the example by Antonello da Messina in the gallery below).
Andachtsbilder have a strong emphasis on the grief and suffering of Christ and the figures close to him. Their use was encouraged by movements such as the , the Devotio Moderna and German mysticism in late medieval Europe, which promoted affective meditation on the sufferings of Christ by intense mental visualization ("imitation") of them and their physical effects. The most extreme, even gruesome, examples often came from the eastern edge of the Holy Roman Empire and beyond in Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic states, where large carved of congealed blood can cover the body. But the style spread all over Europe, including Italy, although the extremes of emotionalism were avoided there until the Baroque.
In churches such images were often given a side-chapel, and sometimes are given special places in the rituals of Holy Week. For example, consecrated hosts might be stored in the cavity of the Holy Wounds in a sculpted Pietà between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
By the mid-15th century andachtsbilder were influencing large monumental works, a process James Snyder discusses in relation to major works such as Rogier van der Weyden's Prado Deposition, the Isenheim Altarpiece of Matthias Grünewald, and the carved Altarpiece of the Holy Blood by Tilman Riemenschneider at Rothenburg ob der Tauber. The Mass of St Gregory, which included a vision of the Man of Sorrows, was a composition often used on which took a common andachtsbilder subject and expanded it into a subject suitable for more monumental works.
The art historian Jeffrey F. Hamburger observed that the term has now "lost whatever precision it could ever lay claim to, having been applied to virtually any object that might have been used to stimulate devotional experience".. Although works in the andachtsbilder tradition remained very popular in Catholic art for centuries, for example in Baroque Spain Italian Baroque, the term is less likely to be applied to much later images. The English term "devotional image" or "picture" etc. can apply to a wide range of images, in all media, included modern commercially printed reproductions or , especially those featuring a portrait-like image rather than a narrative scene.
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