‘Suspend the Sense’
Abstract This article explores the relationship in the Early Modern period between visual culture, spectacle, and technology. It investigates the processes that led machinery to become an essential part of the scenic discourse of the time, taking as reference Il Cannocchiale per la Finta Pazza, a unique document produced in 1641 by the Venetian opera industry and which, to date, has received only scant scholarly attention. It studies the information the manuscript provides on how theater engineering acquired a performative value when employed to affect the audience’s sensory experience. The methodological approach takes account of modern performative studies and the ‘sensory turn’ and reflects on how technology became an integral part of consumption of modern spectacle which, when viewed from the physical, social, and intellectual perspectives, constitutes a complex sensory space.
- Research Article
- 10.5204/mcj.795
- Mar 18, 2014
- M/C Journal
Taste: A Media and Cultural View
- Book Chapter
- 10.4018/978-1-4666-2961-5.ch011
- Jan 1, 2013
This chapter discusses ways in which the database narrative techniques of virtual media can be used to explore the relationship between real-world oral storytelling and embodied performance in the cultural transmission of memory. It is based on an ongoing collaboration between the author and the historical anthropologist, Wendy James, to develop a multilayered associative narrative, which considers relationships between experience, event, and memory among a displaced community. The work is based on a substantial living archive of photographs, audio, cine, and video recordings collected by Wendy James in the Sudan/Ethiopian borderlands from the mid-1960s to the present day. Its critical context relates to the ’sensory turn’ in anthropology and to ’beyond text’ debates within the arts and humanities regarding ways in which we can capture and represent the sensory experiences of the past.
- Research Article
5
- 10.5860/choice.50-5380
- May 22, 2013
- Choice Reviews Online
Introduction David Porter A War of Worlds: Becoming 'Early Modern' and the Challenge of Comparison Ayesha Ramachandran Eurasian Literature Walter Cohen Asia-Centered Approaches to the History of the Early Modern World Luke Clossey Pornography, Chastity, and 'Early Modernity' in China and England, 1500-1640 Katherine Carlitz Hiding in Plane Sight: Accommodating Incompatibilities in Early Visual Modernity Richard Vinograd Cultural Trajectories: The Power of the Traditional within the Early Modern Jack Goldstone Did China's Late Empire have an Early Modern Era? R. Bin Wong Visualizing the State in Early Modern England and China Martin Powers Areas, Networks, and the Search for 'Early Modern' East Asia Kenneth Pomeranz
- Research Article
- 10.1215/10829636-10416684
- May 1, 2023
- Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
New Books across the Disciplines
- Research Article
- 10.14713/ahpp.v3i1.2168
- Dec 31, 2018
- Art History Pedagogy & Practice
In this article, two professors share methods and examples of active learning in order to teach Western European and Byzantine medieval art through a multisensory lens. The course content and pedagogy are situated in the "sensory turn," a conceptual and methodological approach that began in anthropology and has transformed medieval art historical scholarship in recent years. The discipline of art history has traditionally focused on the visual impact of objects and monuments, but the sensory turn has prompted art historians and architectural historians to investigate how art objects and monuments engage all five senses, transforming the "period eye" into the broader "period sensorium." Research in experiential learning demonstrates that the object-based activities that involve the senses, including teaching outside the classroom and hands-on art making projects, are pedagogically appropriate, and students demonstrated success in learning the material, as well as increased engagement. The paper gives practical suggestions for readings and resources, such as local or campus library archives for the topic of medieval manuscripts, and local re-enactors for dress and applied arts. The methods can be used within general art history survey classes as well as dedicated medieval art courses.
- Research Article
7
- 10.1111/1467-9655.13490
- Mar 31, 2021
- Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
The ‘sensory turn’ in anthropology has generated a significant literature on sensory perception and experience. Whilst much of this literature is critical of the compartmentalization of particular ‘senses’, there has been limited exploration of how anthropologists might examine sensory perception beyond ‘the senses’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with people who have impaired vision walking the South Downs landscape in England, this article develops such an approach. It suggests that the experiences of seeing in blindness challenge the conceptualization of ‘vision’ (and ‘non‐vision’). In place of ‘vision’ (as a sense), the article explores ‘activities of seeing’ – an approach that contextualizes the visual to examine the biographically constituted and idiosyncratic nature of perception within an environment. Through an ethnography of seeing with anatomical eyes and ‘seeing in the mind's eye’, it articulates an approach that avoids associating perception with anatomy, or compartmentalizing experience into ‘senses’.
- Research Article
2
- 10.1086/688684
- Sep 1, 2016
- Renaissance Drama
“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging the<i>Aethiopica</i>across the Channel
- Research Article
- 10.1017/s0022046920002614
- Jan 15, 2021
- The Journal of Ecclesiastical History
Do historians look at Luther and the Lutheran Reformation differently in the aftermath of theLutherjahrof 2017, and its frenzy of academic and public activity? As recent publications on Luther demonstrate – notably Lyndal Roper's 2016 biographyMartin Luther: renegade and prophet– there is a still a great deal to say about Luther, and how his friendships, passions, prejudices and physical experiences shaped him. But while Luther was the monumental public figure of 2017, some of the most important work coinciding with the anniversary addressed instead Lutheranism as a movement, and the nature of religious identities in Luther's aftermath. It also demonstrated and furthered the impact of the visual and material turn in history and in Reformation studies. Building upon decades of scholarship on Lutheran visual images, recent Reformation scholarship has demonstrated in increasing depth how religious identity can and should be read through both material and visual culture. The three publications examined here – a monograph by Bridget Heal, a website by Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Bronwyn Wallace and Alexandra Walsham, and the exhibition catalogueLuther! 95 treasures – 95 people– contribute to the material, sensory turn in Reformation and early modern scholarship, and in the latter two cases also reveal the impact of this upon public engagement with Reformation histories.
- Research Article
1
- 10.5204/mcj.310
- Nov 25, 2010
- M/C Journal
Synaestheory: Fleshing Out a Coalition of Senses
- Research Article
- 10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.2.0119
- Jun 1, 2022
- Rhetoric and Public Affairs
Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital
- Research Article
1
- 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00294.x
- Aug 1, 2011
- Religion Compass
Following the introduction of Buddhism to Japan in the sixth century, the faith quickly became a defining feature of Japanese civilization, in large part because of the diverse and abundant visual culture it engendered that both reflected and shaped its religious practice. Although Japanese Buddhism remains a vital living tradition, until the last twenty years, its visual culture created after the 16th century has received little attention by scholars. Since then, Japanese and Western language studies on focused aspects of Buddhist paintings, sculpture, and architecture, with most addressing the early modern period (ca. 1600–1868), have proliferated but until the publication of Patricia Graham’s Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005 (2007), no survey of materials spanning this long time period had been attempted. This brief essay does not summarize Graham’s broad analysis of the thread of change over time and the plurality of later Buddhist practice in Japan manifest in its abundant visual culture. Instead, drawing on the examples presented in Graham’s study, it introduces significant and representative sites of worship from the 17th century to the present to highlight the ways the faith became transformed in tandem with changes in Japanese society, manifested in the convergence of patronage, image production, and religious devotion at these sites. Discussion is presented chronologically in four parts beginning with an overview of studies on Japanese Buddhism’s recent visual culture. This is followed by three sections on the sites and related imagery: Buddhist sites of worship in the early modern period, Buddhist sites of worship in the modern period before World War II, and Buddhist sites of worship in the modern period after World War II.
- Research Article
- 10.1353/pgn.2014.0093
- Jan 1, 2014
- Parergon
Reviewed by: The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600–1800: Early Modern ‘Convents of Pleasure’ by, Nicky Hallett Samuel K. C. Baudinette Hallett, Nicky, The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600–1800: Early Modern ‘Convents of Pleasure’ (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; hardback; pp. 262; R.R.P. £55.00; ISBN 9781409449461. In her book, Nicky Hallett offers an ambitious and highly engaging account of the sensory experiences of an early modern religious community for women. Hallett does an excellent job of presenting a unique and under-studied set of archival materials, that of the English Discalced Carmelite communities of Lierre and Antwerp. By drawing upon a large range of sources, including early modern debates about the senses in theology and philosophy, and modern discussions of the senses in philosophy, history, and anthropology, Hallett is able to explore both how the senses were understood and felt in early modern convents of contemplation. Her study is divided thematically into chapters which each consider how the five senses of touch, taste, hearing, smell, and sight were mediated in the writings of the English Carmelite sisters. The strongest aspect of Hallett’s study is her ability throughout to draw particular connections between developments in early modern scientific notions of sensual perception, such as those found in Descartes, and the notion, so characteristic of the mysticism of Teresa of Ávila, founder of the Discalced Order for women, that mystical union occurs beyond the senses, so that the contemplative must be wary of them. Hallett’s book also provides a careful study of the way the Carmelite sisters employed various techniques in order to authenticate their sensory and mystical experiences against male scepticism about female ecstatic writing. However, Hallett spends very little time directly reflecting on attendant issues regarding the gendered nature of the sisters’ writing, or the responses produced by male religious authorities. Although Hallett briefly touches upon this issue in her Introduction, and returns to it again in her Conclusion, it is surprisingly absent from the actual analysis of her sources. What little discussion there is, occurs in the footnotes, often as an aside. Other ideas [End Page 226] flagged by Hallett in her Introduction for consideration, such as her interest in Antwerp as a sensory space, similarly go unexplored. Ultimately, this book is of great interest to sensory historians and scholars of early modern women’s religious experience alike. Specialists in mysticism, and Teresa of Ávila especially, will also appreciate Hallett’s study for its admirable portrayal of a relatively unknown community who mediate their often self-written sensory reflections in the language of Teresian spirituality. Samuel K. C. Baudinette Monash University Copyright © 2014 Samuel K. C. Baudinette
- Supplementary Content
- 10.7227/tsc.27.3.6
- Sep 1, 2012
- The Seventeenth Century
Review Article: Visual Print Culture in Early Modern Britain Malcolm Jones, The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 352, hb. $95.00, ISBN: 978-0-3001-3697-5 Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010, pp. xxiv + 372, hb. £65.00, ISBN: 978-0-7546-6654-7Cheap woodcuts, fine engravings, single-sheet prints, book illustrations, playing cards, advertisements, wallpaper, satirical prints, portraits, maps, scientific illustrations: these are some of the types and genres of the early modern British printed image. Such is the variety and extent of surviving images (and many more, particularly cheap, images have not survived) that this visual print culture can easily appear bewildering. To say that is to say something that would have been met with a large degree of scepticism until relatively recently. For it had been widely felt among historians that sixteenthand seventeenth-century Britain was a culture of the word rather than the image-a culture preferring textual representation over visual representation, and dramatically proving that in its more enthusiastic moments with outbursts of iconoclasm. We now know this characterization to be wide of the mark, even if it remains to be determined how precisely wide of the mark.That scholars are in a position to make such a reassessment is testimony to some impressive work in the field of print studies over the past two decades. Much of the earlier verdict on visual print culture was due simply to lack of knowledge of what existed-scholars, and even curators, were often unaware of what was to be found in the major print collections. Fortunately such ignorance can no longer serve as a defence. Several important electronic cataloguing projects have immeasurably improved our recognition of the tens of thousands of prints produced before the eighteenth century: notable examples are the Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads; the Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection at the University of Toronto library; Collage, the database of the City of London Libraries and Guildhall Art Gallery; and the online collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum.1 In addition to these collection-based initiatives, the AHRC-funded British Printed Images to 1700 (bpil700) project has sought to develop a database of images with a classificatory system particularly suitable to scholars of early modern Britain; if fully realized, bpil700 would transform work on early modern visual culture much in the way that Early English Books Online has changed the way textual culture is studied.2By making available online a large corpus of images most of which were hitherto effectively unknown and remain difficult to access in their material form, such digital resources exhibit how widespread printed images were in early modern culture. The next step, of course, involves the interpretation of this evidence. Several books over the past two decades have made significant advances in the interpretative scholarship, among them two recent publications discussed further below: a volume of essays edited by Michael Hunter and based on a conference organized by the bpil700 project, Printed images in early modem Britain: essays in interpretation (2010); and Malcolm Jones, The print in early modem England: an historical oversight (2010). These and other works3 constitute an increasingly interdisciplinary and sophisticated endeavour to make sense of the large corpus of printed images and to place them within their social, cultural, intellectual, political and religious contexts. With their publication, it may now be a good point to attempt an initial assessment of the current state of scholarship.In the introduction to Printed images in early modem Britain Hunter looks forward to the day when such studies, which take the printed image as their primary focus, will become 'superfluous as it becomes as natural to historians to invoke visual sources as is currently the case with textual ones'. …
- Research Article
- 10.1111/1467-8365.12305
- Mar 20, 2017
- Art History
Prague workshop, Pietà, c. 1400, from amongst the sculptures found beneath Bern Minster, 1986. Limestone, original height c. 85–90cm. Bern: Historisches Museum. Photo: Bernisches Historisches Museum/S. Rebsamen. The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The iconoclasm precipitated by the Protestant Reformation was unprecedented in its scope: throughout northern Europe sculptures, altarpieces, paintings, stained-glass windows and ecclesiastical treasures fell victim to the purifying zeal of evangelical reformers. Images that had been venerated for generations were labelled as idols, and smashed to pieces (plate 1). Churches that had been filled with representations of sacred history were stripped bare. In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the value of visual representations. Theologians provided detailed guidelines for their production and use, and wealthy patrons stimulated the revival of religious art. While Protestantism devalued images and privileged hearing over seeing, the importance that Catholicism accorded to the visual was made manifest in the art and architecture of the baroque. The broad outlines of this history are familiar and incontestable. With regard to religious images, the Reformation certainly brought about a dramatic bifurcation, both at the level of theological debate and at the level of lived piety. Yet the Protestant destruction and the Catholic defence of images were merely two parts of a more complex story. The essays gathered together in this volume analyze the myriad ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The special issue examines the nature of images produced during the early years of the evangelical movement, asking how both theologians and artists responded to a new understanding of Christian history and soteriology. It traces the rich and diverse Protestant visual cultures that developed during the confessional age, and explores the variety of Catholic responses to pressure for reform. At the volume's heart lies a desire to understand how religious art was shaped by the splintering of Western Christendom that began five hundred years ago with Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther's own position with regard to religious images was far from straightforward. From 1522 he was a determined opponent of iconoclasm. Yet for Luther images were peripheral to true piety. In 1545, towards the end of his life, he preached a sermon in which he spoke of the two kingdoms present upon earth, ‘the kingdom of Christ and the worldly kingdom’. Christ's kingdom, through which we achieve salvation, is ‘a hearing-kingdom, not a seeing-kingdom; for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears must do this’.1 Here Luther privileged hearing above seeing – word over image – in a manner characteristic of evangelical teaching. Reformed theologians went much further. John Calvin undertook a thorough attack on the ‘superstitions of popery’. Idolatry – understood as a diminution of the honour due to God – occupied a more prominent place in his thought that in Luther's. Reformed Protestantism rewrote the Decalogue, making the prohibition of images a decree in its own right, and directed Christian worship towards a God who transcended all materiality.2 Yet Protestant piety was not fundamentally opposed to the visual. Even in his 1545 sermon, Luther accepted ‘visual sensation as part of the work that must be done to create religious conviction’.3 The Reformation, at least in its Lutheran manifestation, sought not to reject religious seeing, but rather to control it and the other senses (including hearing) through faith. The Catholic Church's defence of religious imagery was similarly nuanced. At its twenty-fifth session (3 December 1563) the Council of Trent stated that images were to be honoured, but not in a superstitious manner. Holy images – as opposed to idols – were of great value because through them Christians were moved to adore Christ, to remember the examples of the saints, and to cultivate piety. Theologians – most notably Johannes Molanus (1533–85) and Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97) – expanded on these themes.4 Catholic patrons commissioned illustrated books, devotional prints, paintings, sculpture and architecture, seeking to use images, as well as words, to awaken the senses and to engage Christians’ hearts and minds.5 Catholics continued to trust in the sacred power of images and relics. During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cultic use of images – the veneration of paintings and sculptures of Christ and the saints – flourished throughout Catholic Europe.6 No Protestant image – not even a miraculous portrait of Luther – was a place of holy presence akin to the Jesuit reliquary examined in this volume by Mia Mochizuki.7 Yet Catholic belief in immanence, in the intermingling of the spiritual and material, always coexisted with scepticism about the value of the visual. Catholic reform, from the late Middle Ages onwards, emphasized the importance of inner contemplation.8 During the sixteenth century Catholic commentators wrote, like their Lutheran counterparts, of images’ pedagogical value and affective potential.9 In the seventeenth century new devotional practices encouraged meditation on images as well as texts, and spread amongst Protestants as well as Catholics.10 In this volume, these new devotional practices provide the backdrop for Bridget Heal's investigation of the later history of Lucas Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece, and for Christine Göttler's analysis of the Catholic Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria's religious patronage. What of the visual cultures that evolved across Protestant Europe? Lutherans, driven by their desire to distinguish themselves from radical iconoclasts, allowed many images to survive intact and in situ in churches. They were convinced that God's Word would triumph over idolatry and superstition.11 Luther and his fellow Wittenberg reformers made extensive use of visual propaganda and illustrated key religious texts (the Bible and catechism, most notably), a reflection of their belief in the value of seeing for acquiring religious knowledge and understanding. The copious religious output of the Cranach workshop – altarpieces, epitaphs, portraits and prints – defined Lutheran visual culture for much of the sixteenth century, in Germany and beyond. Elsewhere – in Swiss and Southern German cities during the 1520s and 1530s, in France and in the Northern Netherlands – Protestantism's relationship with art was much more strongly shaped by iconoclasm. Yet memories of recent destruction did not prevent the production of new objects and images. In Calvinist churches Protestantism redirected rather than removed congregations’ desires to adorn and to commemorate.12 The domestic use of religious imagery also continued. Even in Reformed areas – for example in seventeenth-century Zürich, examined here by Andrew Morrall – religious iconographies were used in the home to foster a sense of confessional consciousness.13 The nature of these Protestant visual cultures – the position of art during and after iconoclasm – is an important theme of this volume. Christopher Wood has suggested that ‘Protestant iconophobia … permanently affected the ways in which images were made, exhibited and judged’. He writes of the ‘insulating strategies’ devised by artists in order to avoid charges of idolatry.14 In terms of medium, Protestants tended to favour black and white prints over sculptures and brightly coloured paintings that might seduce the eye. The 1519 woodcut known as Karlstadt's Wagen (wagon), analyzed here in an essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks, and the seventeenth-century Tischzucht (table discipline) broadsheets examined by Morrall exemplify this tendency. In terms of content, Protestant art is most readily associated with polemic, pedagogy, and allegory, and, in the case of the Northern Netherlands, with landscape, still life and everyday scenes filled with moralizing content. Regarding style, Protestant artists supposedly strove for plainness, for a visual culture ‘stripped of conspicuous artifice and deceptive pictorial rhetoric’.15 Here recent scholarship on Cranach is key: Joseph Koerner, for example, has argued that the art produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son in the service of the Lutheran Reformation deliberately eschewed aesthetic pleasure and affective power in favour of communicating evangelical doctrine.16 He speaks of the ‘mortification of painting though text, gesture, and style’.17 But not all religious art was polemical; not all religious art defended itself, as much of Cranach's did, from its enemies, the iconoclasts. Iconoclasm does not, Shira Brisman argues here, help us to read graphic studies of the period. Brisman asks us to dismiss iconoclasm from the privileged position that it has held in studies of sixteenth-century art. We need, she suggests, to erase our knowledge of images’ fall from grace in order to understand the works of Albrecht Dürer and others. Iconoclasm also played remarkably little part in the story of Lucas Cranach the Elder's first evangelical altarpiece, installed in the parish church in Schneeberg in 1539 and eventually, after a traumatic interlude during the Thirty Years’ War, reset in a magnificent baroque frame in the eighteenth century. The creators of some images certainly did respond to contemporary fear of the ‘uncontrolled nature of iconic representation’:18 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt's Wagen, for example, in which Cranach's woodcut images are overburdened with explanatory texts. Others, however, continued to rely on very different modes of viewing: on ambiguity, as with Sebald Beham's small engraving of Moses and Aaron examined by Mitchell Merback; or on the restrained use of the imagination, as with Jan van Goyen's skyscapes, analyzed by Amy Powell. Their creators seem to have recognized, as Dürer did, that ‘pictures are, at best, mediators, affecting without determining what their viewers see in them’.19 The supposed bifurcation between a Protestant aesthetic of plainness and a Catholic effusion of colour and ornament can be seen by juxtaposing Morrall's Tischzucht prints with Mochizuki's seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary. Yet it leaves in interpretative limbo the baroque incarnation of the Lutheran Schneeberg Altarpiece, which presents its central Cranach crucifixion panel as a relic, held aloft by angels and encased within an elaborately carved and gilded frame. This special issue brings together art historians and historians to consider the relationship between art and religious reform. The divisions between disciplines are no longer rigid, as they were in the days when Aby Warburg established his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Historians make effective use of visual and material evidence (though perhaps still not as often as they might); art historians ground their work in detailed historical understanding. For both, the Reformation, with its image disputes and iconoclasm, has acted as an intellectual lodestone since the 1960s.20 The essays assembled in this volume show how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become, but highlight the healthy plurality of methodological approaches that the religious art of the early modern era continues to inspire. Some of these essays tie images firmly to the religious, social and political contexts in which they were produced and received, reconstructed through close readings of texts. Others focus their attention primarily on images’ non-verbal means of communication, suggesting that the power of art can never be fully captured through words. Brisman's and Powell's essays in particular invite us to pay proper attention to artistic processes and to art's tendency to develop through visual conversations. They remind us that art, like music, requires us to exercise our historical imaginations differently.21 The volume has been timed to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, yet Martin Luther himself is more or less absent from its pages. He appears in the analysis of Karlstadt's Wagen, but he did not design this first piece of Reformation visual propaganda. He appears in Merback's discussion of Beham's 1526 engraving, but his thought does not explain the iconography. His theology offered a qualified endorsement of religious images, but cannot account for the flourishing of Lutheran art in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At a moment at which twenty-first-century anniversary culture celebrates ‘The Reformation’, focusing its attention on a particular date and on a particular man, this volume does the opposite. It adopts a broad chronology, ranging from the first decade of reform, the dawn of a new era in northern Europe, through the confessional age to the early eighteenth century. Three essays focus on the period of Umbruch – upheaval – during the early Reformation; five move into the seventeenth century, juxtaposing Protestant with Catholic, Lutheran Saxony and Reformed Zürich with Bavaria and the Jesuits’ overseas missions. These later essays show that although images played an important role in creating confessional consciousness, devotional art did not simply reflect theological divisions. It crossed confessional borders, and also evoked much broader cultural landscapes, landscapes that were being transformed during the early modern period by historical forces other than religion. The essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks that opens this collection focuses on a woodcut produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Wittenberg colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (see plate 1, page 258–259). It was almost certainly the first piece of visual propaganda for the Reformation, produced in January 1519 at a moment at which the evangelical movement was still finding its way. It is a fascinating image: it draws on well-established visual formulae to present a procession of figures, and prefigures later Lutheran propaganda in its use of binary opposition and mockery. Its design is, however, overly complex. Its images are hard to make out because of the abundance of texts, and these texts are hard to decipher and understand. The woodcut was so cryptic, in fact, that Karlstadt had to produce a lengthy written tract to explain it to his supporters. Despite its apparently sequential structure, the woodcut was intended to be read, Roper and Spinks argue, not as a polemical narrative but as part of a devotional exercise. Karlstadt's written explanation suggests that he intended it to be used as a series of discrete points for meditation, as an invitation to reflect on key aspects of Augustinian theology. The woodcut is also intriguing because it was produced at a moment at which the early evangelical movement was still coloured by mystical piety, before the rupture between Luther and the more radical reformers – the Schwärmer or fanatics, as he labelled them – that shaped the 1520s so decisively. Karlstadt himself went on to publish, in 1522, the first evangelical defence of iconoclasm, On the Removal of Images. The 1519 woodcut provides, therefore, vivid testimony of the extent to which iconoclasts understood the religious and psychological power of images. It helps us to understand why image makers became image breakers. Hans Sebald Beham's 1526 Moses and Aaron, examined in Mitchell Merback's essay, is a very different type of image, one of the small-scale engravings for which the Beham brothers were famous (see plate 1, page 288). It is labelled with MOSE and AARON, and signed and dated, but that is all: it suffers from none of the textual overburdening of Karlstadt's Wagen. It shows two half-length figures seated on a mountainside with an open codex on their laps and the blank stone tablets of the Law resting beside them. The image's narrative and its doctrinal message resist easy interpretation, but this time such an opacity is intentional. Merback situates the engraving in the context of the debates about Mosaic Law that followed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, at a time when the split between the Wittenberg theologians and radicals such as Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer had become irrevocable. The engraving was also, however, he suggests, a personal reflection on religious exile, on Beham's own experiences as a ‘non-aligned evangelical’ who had been expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, and labelled a ‘godless painter’. The image testifies to Beham's familiarity with Lutheran teachings on the relationship between the Law and Gospel. But Luther's writings – even his 1525 sermon How Christians Should Regard Moses – offer no simple key for its interpretation. Rather, the artist produced his own reading, an allegory of the parting of ways between the Lutherans and Spiritualists. The priestly Aaron reads the codex before him while Moses, the lawgiver in Luther's interpretation, gazes out, seeking illumination beyond the Word. Beham has, Merback suggests, ‘subtly reasserted the hero's prophetic vocation and charisma’. The image can be read as veiled polemic against Wittenberg, or perhaps as a warning to both sides at a time of discord. Both of these first essays explore the relationship between image and word. The visual cannot, it seems, be reduced to an expression of the verbal, even in the case of Karlstadt's Wagen, with its inscriptions and detailed they are to with their must be allowed to for as Lutheran Shira Brisman's essay on graphic studies made the time of the Reformation these in a very different The she suggests, prophetic of the destruction that images during the most of But we resist seeing them as and iconoclasm from the of Christ's with a piece of and of the Christ with a beside it (see plate 1, page and plate page that cannot be in words. We see Brisman as of a visual that the through a of Images she suggests, their own the by the of the artist to to resist the narrative by or we might by and engravings such as examined by Spinks and we a different type of interpretative – one that not, as for Sebald from to the of the Reformation, but rather from the artistic processes of the While the first essays in very different art's role at the of a new the two us into the confessional Bridget Heal's essay focuses on Lutheran on a Protestant in from the early of the Reformation the eighteenth century, religious art It examines Cranach's Schneeberg and its This has a it was installed in 1539 but by during the Thirty Years’ Its were in Schneeberg in but the was in when the church was were in a and frame that in situ (see plate 1, page The Protestant of which the is a example, our of Lutheran art. Heal's the within the context of two broader the of Lutheran confessional and the of Lutheran piety. in particular the importance of historical not for the image's original and but also for its The of the made use of the visual of the baroque – perhaps not the cultural of the It also, however, a understanding of images’ devotional a new perhaps to them a role in the by which the intellectual (the knowledge of became the affective presence in the Protestants the with Cranach's image through the of and dramatic Andrew Morrall's essay us to Zürich, to a very different religious Morrall his discussion a painting of the of a Hans seated at a The of and a life are here in the of the and and in the domestic that them. The painting Morrall an expression of a Protestant and was part of a broader visual of Tischzucht that to the Morrall also explores the of of the of images by the for Protestantism he suggests, an It the of art, made it and and stripped it of or was by its to and its The images used by Morrall in the to by Brisman – for the image is a message must be out through In Zürich the Reformation brought he suggests, the of images. In the seventeenth-century art flourished in the of iconoclasm, as Amy shows in discussion of the paintings of Jan van argues that of iconoclasm, its of and in the works examined here and in like them. explores van Goyen's his use of and which did not, as art of the period did, filled with like the on the in church a of images that never fully These suggests, be seen as images of the by as to In a however, artistic had to be with – van who van Goyen's in him for not far from the Goyen's paintings were also – he is thought to have been a Catholic, but his works across the confessional responses to iconoclasm have been in through the of church and through the analysis of the religious and of and Here adopts a different one that art recent in and in the found in and early modern art. she van Goyen's of a particular she also against a that images within their historical brings seventeenth-century painting into with modern art, in particular to the use of which later played a role in of Here van Goyen's paintings from their own time and themselves to the With Christine Göttler's essay we move to a Catholic to the Bavaria of the Duke Wilhelm V examines the and the and cultural of within an Catholic focuses on the that the at his and and on a series of engravings of by Jan and that were to Bavaria's and made extensive use of images, and to their and religious from the to the The examined here however, a It not on but on reform, on on or from the – a for the after his in This by the but it was to move beyond confessional It in some Despite the that the on and the was in the at for example, were and that sacred scenes or They suggests, to the that to the religious of the The of the of the religious was key to both Protestant and Catholic reform, but in Duke and it was to be through In the essay of the volume Mia a detailed of one particular a Portuguese reliquary from the of the seventeenth century (see plate 1, page Here the of Catholicism that were present in Göttler's of into a account of the importance of overseas and for early modern religious At the of Mochizuki's reliquary is a of the from in the that the with them on their missions. It is in a that was to and and evoked The image is in this with of It is, suggests, seeking to through its of sacred It is an through its and its brings together two that of the of Western Christendom and the polemical that and that of with the The essay us that while iconoclasm did, without the ways in which religious images were made, exhibited and received, image or also a much cultural In his Joseph the essays within this volume in a broad The Protestant Reformation of merely one in the history of iconoclasm, a history that to the present art to both image making and image how and why iconoclasm to be accorded an important place within the history of art. he a tendency – certainly in this volume – to focus not on of destruction but rather on the in their It was the of iconoclasm that the attention of social history and art history during the and however, against the backdrop of image in and we seem more by the ways in which early modern cultures – both Protestant and Catholic – responded to the of iconoclasm, and were transformed by the that it The workshop that to this special issue was by the and the are very for the also to for to the for their help and and above all to for the
- Research Article
- 10.1086/667982
- Sep 1, 2012
- Isis
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