The Reformation of the Image

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, 2004 M05 3 - 494 pages
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.

From inside the book

Contents

1 Ideas About the Thing
19
A Tragedy for Art?
27
Territorial Battles
38
Appropriations
52
A Reformation Altarpiece
69
CLEANSING 6 Actions
83
Beliefs
94
Fictions
104
Preaching
252
Teaching
282
Ubiquity
308
SACRAMENT 18 From Custom to Rule
321
Behind the Mass
340
The Tables Turned
362
Ministry
377
Church Building
402

Communications
137
The Arrested Gesture
153
THE WORD 11 The Cross
171
The Outstretched Finger
191
A Hidden God?
201
Crude Painting
212
Epilogue
441
References
445
Photo Acknowledgements
483
Index
484
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

Joseph Leo Koerner is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. His books include The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art and TheReformation of the Image, copublished by Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press. In 1995 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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