The Reception of Christian Devotional Art

Abstract

This issue developed out of a session held at the College Art Association's 1995 annual meeting in San Antonio. Like many art historians, by 1995 I had long been interested in reception. My concern with the reception of Christian devotional art was initially stimulated in the early 1980s by reading Roman Catholic art theory of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, in response to Protestant aniconism, provided a compelling defense of the usefulness of religious art. At the heart of Roman Catholic apologies for sacred art was a belief in the indelible power of visual imagery and a concomitant concern with channeling and exploiting viewer responses in the service of the “true” faith.1 Together with post-Tridentine art theory, the work of such postmodern theorists as Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss heightened my concern with reception as a corrective to an undue stress on production and intentionality.2 Thus, given the theoretical framework within which Christian art was justified in the early modern era—my own period of specialization—a methodological shift in favor of the audience's role seemed particularly warranted and beneficial. It has also been fruitful for the study of modern art—as, for example, Michael Fried and Wolfgang Kemp have demonstrated in a secular context. Several articles in this issue, however, treat the reception of modern art in a religious context.3