Protestants And Pictures

In exploring the rise of this culture, author David Morgan shows how Protestants used mass-produced images to dedicate religious revival, proselytism, mass education, and domestic nurture to the aim of national renewal."--BOOK JACKET.

In this lavishly illustrated book, David Morgan surveys the visual culture that shaped American Protestantism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--a vast record of images in illustrated bibles, Christian almanacs, children's literature, popular religious books, charts, broadsides, Sunday school cards, illuminated devotional items, tracts, chromos, and engravings. His purpose is to explain the rise of these images, their appearance and subject matter, how they were understood by believers, the uses to which they were put, and what their relation was to technological innovations, commerce, and the cultural politics of Protestantism. His overarching argument is that the role of images in American Protestantism greatly expanded and developed during this period.

What is Protestant Art? explores the history of Protestant images from the Reformation to the present. The book analyses historical images such as prints, paintings, illustrations, and maps, as evidence of changing Protestant attitudes and visual practices.

"Sacred gaze" denotes any way of seeing that invests its object—an image, a person, a time, a place—with spiritual significance. Drawing from many different fields, David Morgan investigates key aspects of vision and imagery in a variety of religious traditions. His lively, innovative book explores how viewers absorb and process religious imagery and how their experience contributes to the social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality. Ranging widely from thirteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century Tibet to contemporary America, Thailand, and Africa, The Sacred Gaze discusses the religious functions of images and the tools viewers use to interpret them. Morgan questions how fear and disgust of images relate to one another and explains how scholars study the long and evolving histories of images as they pass from culture to culture. An intriguing strand of the narrative details how images have helped to shape popular conceptions of gender and masculinity. The opening chapter considers definitions of "visual culture" and how these relate to the traditional practice of art history. Amply illustrated with more than seventy images from diverse religious traditions, this masterful interdisciplinary study provides a comprehensive and accessible resource for everyone interested in how religious images and visual practice order space and time, communicate with the transcendent, and embody forms of communion with the divine. The Sacred Gaze is a vital introduction to the study of the visual culture of religions.

Covering a vast geographical and chronological span, and bringing new and exciting material to light, The Reformation and the Visual Arts provides a unique overvie of religious images and iconoclasm, starting with the consequences of the Byzantine image controversy and ending with the Eastern Orthodox churches of the nineteenth century. The author argues that the image question played a large role in the divisions within European Protestantism and was intricately connected with the Eucharist controversy. He analyses the positions of the major Protestant reformers - Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Karlstadt - on the legitimacy of religious paintings and investigates iconoclasm both as a form of religious and political protest and as a complex set of mock-revolutionary rites and denigration rituals. The book also contains new research on relations between Protestant iconoclasm and the extreme icon-worship of the Eastern Orthodox churches, and provides a brief discussion of Eastern protestantizing sects, especially in Russia.

This book offers a unique analysis of visual religion in Reformation England as seen in its religious printed images. Challenging traditional notions of an iconoclastic Reformation, it offers a thorough analysis of the widespread body of printed images and the ways the images gave shape to the religious culture.

The part religion played in questions of national identity in early modern England is a familiar historical theme, yet little work has been done on how this worked culturally. Nowhere is this more visible than in the seeming contradiction of a militantly Protestant nation such as England, that had a high regard for Catholic art. It is this dichotomy, the tensions between art and anti-Catholicism, that forms the central investigation of this book. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, religious art was closely identified with idolatry, and the use of images was one of the most obvious markers of the boundary between Protestantism and Catholicism. This manifested itself in an unease about the status of the religious image in English society, which was articulated in religious tracts, anti-Catholic propaganda, polemical debate, court cases and numerous other places. In light of these attacks upon 'idolatry', the fact that a great deal of Catholic art was so highly regarded and sought after seems puzzling. By discussing English attitudes towards the works of Italian painters (including Raphael, Michelangelo and Domenichino) and the ways in which native artists sought appropriately Protestant ways of emulating them, this volume offers a fascinating perspective on the dichotomy that existed between English appreciation and disapproval of Catholic culture. By taking this cultural and artistic approach and applying it to the broader historical themes, a new and invigorating way of understanding religion and national identity is offered.

Although American Protestants often claim that they are opposed to the use of devotional images in their religious life, they in fact draw on a vast body of religious icons to disseminate confessional views, to teach, and to celebrate birthdays, baptisms, confirmations, and sacred holidays. This fascinating book focuses on the production, marketing, and reception of one such set of religious illustrations, the art of Warner Sallman (1892-1968), whose 1940 Head of Christ has been reproduced an estimated five hundred million times. Five scholars--three art historians, a church historian, and a historian of material culture--investigate various aspects of Sallman's career and art, in the process revealing much about the role of imagery in the everyday devotional life of American Protestants since the 1940s. The chapters examine Sallman's work in terms of the visual sources, media, and forms of use that shaped its making; its mass production, marketing, and distribution by publishers and vendors; and the commercial nature of Sallman's training and his work as an illustrator. Other chapters explore the reception of his religious imagery among those who admired it and saw in it a vision of the world as they would have it exist; the religious and theological context of conservative American Protestantism in which the imagery flourished; and its critical reception among liberal Protestant intelligentsia who despised Sallman's work and what it represented in popular Christianity. By placing Sallman's art in theological, ecclesiastical, and aesthetic perspective, the book sheds light on the evolving shape of twentieth-century American evangelicalism and its influence on modern American culture.