Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe
eBook - ePub

Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Nigel Aston

Share book
  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Nigel Aston

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed monumental upheavals in both the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the repercussions rippled down to the churches' religious art forms. Nigel Aston now chronicles here the intertwining of cultural and institutional turmoil during this pivotal century.
The sustained popularity of religious art in the face of competition from increasingly prevalent secular artworks lies at the heart of this study. Religious art staked out new spaces of display in state institutions, palaces, and private collections, the book shows, as well as taking advantage of patronage from monarchs such as Louis XIV and George III, who funded religious art in an effort to enhance their monarchial prestige. Aston also explores the motivations and exhibition practices of private collectors and analyzes changing Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward art. The book also examines purchases made by corporate patrons such as charity hospitals and religious confraternities and considers what this reveals about the changing religiosity of the era as well. An in-depth historical study, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe will be essential for art history and religious studies scholars alike.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe by Nigel Aston in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Art & Art général. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2009
ISBN
9781861898456
Topic
Art

CHAPTER 1
The Reformation and Counter-Reformation Inheritance, c. 1520–1700

The surprising richness of eighteenth-century religious art objects has its origins in evolving attitudes over the previous two centuries, notably a steady movement away from immediate post-Reformation rigidities as the life of the several confessions developed, matured and diversified. It is conventional but not always appropriate to present this world as essentially sundered: a tale of a bibliocentric Protestantism pitted against a Catholic Church where the image as a vehicle for the expression of religious truth remained fundamental. Such a tidy version of the post-Reformation era at once ignores previous crises in Christian visual representation,1 eliminates the national, local, social and gender variations within sharply distinguished camps and, in setting up just two religious monoliths as a model, minimizes the intra-confessional differences about the role of art and its uses in helping men and women attain an assurance of salvation. It is also an essentially clericalist version of culture, one in which the clergy decide what is or what is not appropriate within the life of their faith community. It thereby ignores or overrides the abundant recent scholarship that has put beyond doubt the power and influence exercised by the laity in all the Protestant Churches and, as patrons and opinion formers, inside Catholicism as well. The more exulted the social rank of a layman, the harder it was in any early modern state for the clergy to ignore him. And it was the ineradicable inclination of many men and women in the Protestant Churches to have some form of figurative, visual expression of faith in their lives which helps to explain the survival of religious art within the non-Catholic communions, particularly evident in the ‘turn back to the arts’ discernible in the second half of the seventeenth century. There was more common ground on the subject of religious art between Catholics and Protestants than is often assumed. Lutherans, for instance, were more comfortable with lavish ecclesiastical decoration than the Jansenists of the late seventeenth century, who stayed inside the Roman Catholic Church, where the hierarchy insisted on carefully policing the depiction of the divine and the holy. Images persisted despite the tendency of opinion formers to condemn them as vain idols. And lay Protestants of every colour were less sympathetic to a blanket prohibition than some of their leaders officially stated. Even within Calvinist communities, the expression of the Protestant faith was not incompatible with a reluctant acknowledgement of the positive culture of the visual, albeit one that severely curtailed the scope for men and women to depict the divine. Ministers and elders were ever watchful, but the post-Tridentine Catholic Church was no less anxious to define and police artistic output.

Protestant anxieties about and antipathies to imagery

As Patrick Collinson has stated, ‘The sixteenth century witnessed a holocaust of religious imagery, the most extensive and thorough in history’.2 The explanation behind this destruction is straightforward: all the several branches of Protestantism upheld a Christianity resting on the incontestable supremacy of the Word; the job of the clergy and the godly laity was to teach a scriptural faith and instruct congregations in the means of securing salvation in a fallen world, and the Bible uniquely contained access to the source of grace. Communal worship was important, but it was ultimately for the individual believer to work out his or her salvation, and access to the sacraments could not compensate for that internal assurance of grace that Martin Luther had personally been so desperate to give himself. The century and a half from c. 1520 to 1670 was the era when hard-line Protestant attitudes to religious art could be all too obvious. In a world where confessional compromise was an affront to passionately held assumptions about truth, the repudiation of lavish religious art easily became an official badge of Protestantism, a sign of its doctrinal purity, its repudiation of non-apostolic innovations, and a pointer towards its primitive ideals.3 Non-scriptural subjects of painting and sculpture were anathema; even those drawn from the New Testament were regarded by all non-Lutherans as best preached about rather than depicted, for every Protestant denomination was wary of the possibility of breaching – or being seen to breach – the Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4), which prohibited the creation of graven images representing the deity. It was intensely revealing that the Reformers renumbered the Decalogue so that there was a separate commandment against graven imagery, in clear distinction from the Catholics who lumped the first two into a single commandment. Moses was thus the first iconophobe who had made plain that God was to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, whereas the creation of an image was, given sinful man’s ungovernable nature, likely to become an object of worship in itself, a fetishistic, deceitful token that pointed away from truth, not towards it.4 Protestants had only to look at what (they thought) went on in Catholic places of worship to see that idolatry was still alive in their own time and most of their leaders were disinclined to make sophisticated distinctions between images and idols.5 The history of the Israelites as recorded in the Old Testament also showed how hard it was even for God’s chosen tribe to remain true to the outright ban on creating images contained in the Decalogue; it had been necessary for the Lord through the Prophets to repeat his original injunction in response to the Jews’ sinful disobedience of his commandment. The ban found in the Book of Leviticus was the locus classicus of Protestant justification for this stand, an unambiguous admonition confirmed in the New Testament, where it was listed as one of the ‘works of the flesh’ condemned in Galatians 5. Sixteenth-century Protestant leaders, ever ready in the manner of gathered Churches in early modern Europe to consider themselves to be the new Israelites, were bent on their people remaining obedient to the divine will in a manner which the Jews had never satisfactorily managed. This post-Reformation trend that would minimize the scope of culture in a sacred setting has been represented as a move from a ‘visual’ to an ‘aural’ world, a strategy that entailed respecting the outright ban on idolatry laid down in the Bible and enforcing it unflinchingly. In this Logocentric universe, the image was inherently suspect, and particularly to those within the Calvinist dispensation. Since truth was contained in the word of God, there was little or no need to depict that truth in pictorial format; the Word was incapable of representation in any format other than the written or the spoken, and by those means it could be done precisely and accurately to the lasting spiritual benefit of the Christian. As the Swiss reformer Zwingli pointed out, ‘images are not to be endured, for all that God has forbidden, there can be no compromise’.6 A picture was likely to misrepresent God’s word, perhaps even fail to point to it at all, and in standing apart from the textual, variously contradicting, challenging or neglecting God’s holy word, a picture became a solipsistic image that proclaimed nothing but its own (superfluous) presence. It was not an object to glorify the Lord, but one that insulted the purity and simplicity of the Gospel message of salvation. This was a religion that destroyed externally wrought images in order that the internal, typological image of God’s creation in mankind and the natural world might be more fully visible.7
Iconophobes insisted that there were no religious images at the simple beginning of Christianity: Puritans spoke of them as a ‘varnish on true religion’8 while the 22nd of the Church of England’s 39 Articles (1571) lumped the veneration of images together with other repudiated popish practices:
The Roman Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.
But the Tudor Church looked towards Geneva for its doctrine, if not for its remaining ceremonial practices. Not all Protestant communions were quite so iconophobic, even during this period of maximum inter-confessional wrangling. The Lutheran Church, almost ab initio, was more comfortable with highly decorated churches with colourful interiors and the provision of altarpieces and life-sized crucifixes. Luther himself offered a confusing lead on the visual arts; there was no defining statement on the subject and what he did say was often contradictory. As Collinson has speculated, ‘It may be because Luther was not so strongly attached to images that he came to regard them, and the appeal they had for ordinary Christians, with relative complacency’.9 His line was essentially reductionist and, over time, its positive aspects were increasingly highlighted. He was not against Christocentric art in principle to elucidate Lutheran precepts but offered scant encouragement in practice to those who might wish to produce it. After 1522 Luther was adamant that some imagery was permissible because it coaxed imaginations in the right direction, whereas Catholic imagery coaxed them in the wrong one. But there was no objection per se: if God had meant to hide evidence of Himself from human eyes, Luther preached, why would He have descended to earth in the person of His Son? Iconoclasm thus itself became a form of idolatry, since it overestimated the importance of material objects that were properly viewed as a matter of ‘adiaphora’, things indifferent to the articulation of true faith.10 Luther defended the legitimacy of the images of saints (especially the apostles), while admitting that many of them could be revered in idolatrous ways. Thus Luther condemned an altar in Lüneburg where the life of St Francis was depicted in parallel terms to that of Christ.11 Early Lutheranism deplored a plethora of images in any sacred building that might distract the attention of the worshipper away from the performance of the ministry of word and sacrament, and any image that lacked any basis in scripture. This led to the elimination of most side altars, though the main east-end altar retained its importance because of Luther’s defence of Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist. This defence did not proscribe artists like Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach the Elder or Albrecht Dürer from offering new art for old, producing masterpieces of Reformation Protestant art, with the latter considering that it did more good than harm ‘when it is honourably, artistically, and well made’.12
This was in line with Luther’s 1530 printed defence of the altarpiece (preferably an Institution of the Last Supper) in a commentary on Psalm 111, the first ever general prescription.13 It was akin to an instruction manual about what had to happen in church: pictures were there to teach lessons and the message was often driven home by biblical inscriptions, with depictions of the Last Supper popular as an analogy of the faithful communicating side-by-side with their minister. Thus, not surprisingly, in states adopting Lutheranism, their churches tended to retain the majority of their medieval treasures and fittings. However, the establishment of the new confession was sometimes accompanied by iconoclastic activity as a sign of cleansing and a new beginning, for there were many early Lutherans like Gabriel Zwilling (1487–1558) who held much stronger views on the subject than Luther himself. Thus in 1530 a mob led by the mayor of Copenhagen attacked the altars of the Saints in the cathedral in a country where Lutheranism became the official religion six years later.14 On the whole, iconoclasm was not a leading feature of the German Reformation, whereas iconomachy, or hostility to the use of images, indubitably was.15 A century later, such destructive surges within Lutheranism had become unknown and the resemblances between a Lutheran ecclesiastical interior and a Catholic one could appear superficial though they were, nevertheless, real.16
Not so within the more dynamic and predominant Calvinist variety of the Reformed faith. The radical Protestantism developing in Switzerland in the 1520s was uncompromising in its rejection of all art in the service of religion. This aversion was quickly transmitted to Calvinism, and John Calvin himself was a convinced iconophobe with a horror of idolatry and, as on most other aspects of the Christian faith, proclaimed his beliefs systematically in successive editions of the Institutes of the Christian Religion. Sculpture and painting were gifts from God, but the divine majesty was not to be dishonoured by unbecoming representations for ‘God himself is the sole and proper witness of himself’.17 Even sepulchral art was beyond the pale. In Geneva graves were required to be completely anonymous and there was a preference for recycling existing materials. Responsive to the lead of their founder,18 Churches in the Reformed tradition were particularly strict and sensitive on this point and included anti-idolatrous elements in their catechisms: the 1562 synod of Orléans decreed that printers, painters and other members of the faith should not make anything that would abet Roman superstitions and the Second Helvetic Confession (the strongest and most widely adopted view of what was and was not acceptable within the Reformed Churches) forbade depiction of the person of Christ or employing pictures instead of the Bible to teach the laity.19 Their services tended to be non-liturgical and built around scripture readings and the homiletic exposition of Biblical subjects – at length. Adornment would be a distraction from these exercises and, though psalms were sung, the unwillingness to permit musical accompaniment was habitual. Geneva and its daughter churches had become the dominant force within Protestantism by the turn of the seventeenth century (many territories once loyal to Luther were forcibly required to become Reformed congregations between 1560 and 1620 in the so-called ‘Second Reformation’), and so it was easy for detractors to suggest that all Protestants were iconoclasts, much as Calvin would have wished. It was an undoubted exaggeration, but none the less effective.
Catholic critics of Protestant attitudes could point to the furious iconoclasm that had marked the religious changes of the English Reformation from its inception: ‘It recurred, intermittently and sporadically from the 1530s to the 1640s, and made an important contribution to events at each significant phase of settlement’.20 The Henrician and Edwardian regimes had sanctioned the removal of rood screens and altars from parish churches, ransacked monastic buildings on closure, and destroyed the country’s historic shrines of Canterbury and Walsingham, Ipswich and Willesden, as well as lesser objects like the miraculous rood from the Cistercian house at Boxley, Kent.21 English iconoclasts called upon Old Testament precedents in their destruction and praised Edward VI’s image-breaking policies by comparing him with king Josiah, who had destroyed the images of the Philistines and cleansed the religion of the Israelites of any taint of idolatry.22 The Second Book of Homilies, issued in 1563 in the reign of his half-sister Queen Elizabeth, included a long tripartite discourse expounding the dangers of allowing any images to be set up publicly in churches, underlining again that the Church of England was initially closer to Calvin than Luther in its attitude to the visual arts, vice versa in its approach to sacred music. As the leading historian of this subject has concluded:23
In the sixteenth century, idolatry became deeply engraved on the English conscience. The Reformation made it the deadliest of sins and it was one which no believer could be unaware of.
But, even allowing for the genuine repugnance of most Calvinists for religious art, it was virtually impossible to exclude imagery in its entirety from the life of the Reformed Church. Art that...

Table of contents