A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany, by Bridget Heal

Abstract

Bridget Heal begins and ends this excellent book with that outstanding baroque building, the Lutheran Frauenkirche in Dresden, whose foundation stone was laid in 1726 at a time when the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich August I, and his heir had both converted to Catholicism in order to be elected as kings of Poland. Heal’s stated aim ‘is to explain how and why Lutheranism—a confession that insisted upon the pre-eminence of God’s Word—became … a faith whose adherents sought to captivate Christians’ hearts and minds through their eyes as well as through their ears’ (pp. 1–2). In this she succeeds convincingly, examining theological and devotional literature, church architecture, altar-pieces, epitaphs and woodcuts, using the visual to tease out ‘what it meant to be a Lutheran at different times and in different places’ (p. 6). The introductory chapter begins in the Wittenberg of Luther, Melanchthon and Cranach and explains how Luther himself came to see images as one of the means of communicating the gospel message and of awakening the believer’s emotions. He also disapproved of iconoclasm because it was associated with Calvinism and with such radical figures as Karlstadt. The rest of the book is divided into three sections, the first of which, entitled ‘The Confessional Image’, discusses how images related to confessional identity in Brandenburg and Saxony and how Lutheranism positioned itself in relation to both Catholicism and Calvinism. Focusing first on Saxony, Heal shows how crucial the local authority figure was, whether territorial ruler, pastor or town magistrate, when it came to preserving or destroying images and church furniture. In Saxony, for instance, the Albertine Electors tended to preserve such things as Michael Wolgemut’s fifteenth-century altarpiece in Zwickau, whereas the Ernestine dukes, espousing the Gnesio-Lutheran cause, cleansed the churches in their territory of what they regarded as papist and idolatrous objects. Heal demonstrates how, by the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, religious images such as altarpieces and crucifixes ‘served as confessional markers’ to distance Lutheranism from Calvinism (p. 95). Among the many astonishing and illuminating illustrations in the book is the altarpiece commissioned by Hans Friedrich von Stuttgerheim (d. 1616) for the village church in Drahnsdorf near Luckau in Lower Lusatia. In it a fifteenth-century statue of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven is placed within a richly decorated frame, surmounting two clear statements of Lutheran confessional identity, one in Latin and one in the vernacular (p. 95).