The Reformation Of Images

With his 95 Theses, Martin Luther advanced the radical notion that all Christians could enjoy a direct, personal relationship with God—shattering years of Catholic tradition and obviating the need for intermediaries like priests and saints between the individual believer and God. The text of the Bible, the Word of God itself, Luther argued, revealed the only true path to salvation—not priestly ritual and saintly iconography. But if words—not iconic images—showed the way to salvation, why didn't religious imagery during the Reformation disappear along with indulgences? The answer, according to Joseph Leo Koerner, lies in the paradoxical nature of Protestant religious imagery itself, which is at once both iconic and iconoclastic. Koerner masterfully demonstrates this point not only with a multitude of Lutheran images, many never before published, but also with a close reading of a single pivotal work—Lucas Cranach the Elder's altarpiece for the City Church in Wittenberg (Luther's parish). As Koerner shows, Cranach, breaking all the conventions of traditional Catholic iconography, created an entirely new aesthetic for the new Protestant ethos. In the Crucifixion scene of the altarpiece, for instance, Christ is alone and stripped of all his usual attendants—no Virgin Mary, no John the Baptist, no Mary Magdalene—with nothing separating him from Luther (preaching the Word) and his parishioners. And while the Holy Spirit is nowhere to be seen—representation of the divine being impossible—it is nonetheless dramatically present as the force animating Christ's drapery. According to Koerner, it is this "iconoclash" that animates the best Reformation art. Insightful and breathtakingly original, The Reformation of the Image compellingly shows how visual art became indispensable to a religious movement built on words.

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.

Scholarship on religious printed images during the English Reformation (1535-1603) has generally focused on a few illustrated works and has portrayed this period in England as a predominantly non-visual religious culture. The combination of iconoclasm and Calvinist doctrine have led to a misunderstanding as to the unique ways that English Protestants used religious printed images. Building on recent work in the history of the book and print studies, this book analyzes the widespread body of religious illustration, such as images of God the Father and Christ, in Reformation England, assessing what religious beliefs they communicated and how their use evolved during the period. The result is a unique analysis of how the Reformation in England both destroyed certain aspects of traditional imagery as well as embraced and reformulated others into expressions of its own character and identity.

Before the Renaissance and Reformation, holy images were treated not as "art" but as objects of veneration which possessed the tangible presence of the Holy. the faithful believed that these images served as relics and were able to work miracles, deliver oracles, and bring victory to the battlefield. In this magisterial book, Hans Belting traces the long history of the sacral image and its changing role--from surrogate for the represented image to an original work of art--in European culture. Likeness and Presence looks at the beliefs, superstitions, hopes, and fears that come into play as people handle and respond to sacred images, and presents a compelling interpretation of the place of the image in Western history. -- Back cover

This pioneering study focuses on the decisive contributions of the three leading artists of the Northern Renaissance--Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger-- to the printed Bible and to the transformation of ecclesiastical art in the Protestant Reformation. A time of artistic and theological revolution, the Renaissance and Reformation also witnessed a visual reformation of the Bible. In David H. Price's new interpretation, these artists emerge as major reformers in their own right who created a dynamic and innovative visual culture of biblicism. In the Beginning Was the Image explicitly addresses a key paradox of the Bible's new cultural status: as divergent Bible editions and translations shattered the unity of Christianity, new artistic approaches arose to accommodate theological and textual diversity. Rulers and theologians produced new Bibles as foundations for transformative socio-political movements, and their success, according to Price's compelling research, depended on the inventiveness and creativity of these artists. Written in a style designed to be accessible to a broad range of readers, Price's richly nuanced study explores the art of Dürer, Cranach, and Holbein and the biblical iconographies they developed to connect the new biblicism to faith and political authority.

Law and gospel and the strategies of pictorial rhetoric -- The Schneeberg altarpiece and the structure of worship -- The Wittenberg altarpiece : communal devotion and identity -- Holy visions and pious testimony: Weimar altarpiece -- Public worship to private devotion : Cranach's Reformation Madonna panels.