Virginia Chieffo Raguin postulates in her introduction that since religion plays a major role in shaping a shared social identity and that art serves as one way to understand that sensibility, an examination of the efforts by various groups in the Reformation to alter art or reinforce its use provides a useful tool to understand the dynamics of change in the religious outlook during that period. This collection of essays demonstrates the truth of that assertion. Many of the authors presented the essays in this volume at a symposium at Holy Cross University in 2006, titled “Religious Art, Politics, and Destruction.” Examining different aspects of the impact of the Reformation on art, the essays illustrate the power that the arts have in expressing the religious outlooks of a particular society and the efforts—often extreme—to change the art to reflect a new paradigm. Popular understanding of the power of religious art has changed significantly, Raguin argues, because these artifacts have increasingly become museum pieces rather than objects of veneration in the chapel. Understanding the significance of the artworks in their historical context sheds light on the contemporary cultural and religious attitudes. The central theme holding these essays together is iconoclasm, but from both Protestant and Catholic critics of particular forms of religious art.
These essays draw a very clear distinction between the diverse attitudes of Protestants and Catholics toward religious art. Several of the essays examine these differences. For instance, Jeffrey Smith's essay examines the robust efforts by the dukes of Bavaria to preserve religious relics from Protestant destruction. Particularly threatened was the imperial collection of relics at Nuremberg. When the city became Protestant, Duke Wilhelm planned what Smith terms a heist to retrieve the relics from Protestant hands for their preservation. Smith records how the faithful venerated the relics prior to the Reformation and how the Wittlebachs sought to rescue them from Protestant hands. Corine Schleif recounts how a eucharistic tabernacle in Nuremberg survived while other pieces at St. Lorenz suffered destruction because the local patron's family still resided in Nuremberg. Likewise, Sarah Brown demonstrates that the patronage of a wealthy wool merchant saved the medieval windows at St. Mary's Fairford, despite the windows' celebration of the salvific power of the Virgin. David Karmon argues that the Huguenots spared the Maison Carrée in Nimes, used as a Catholic place of worship, because the Romans had originally constructed it, while the Huguenot town fathers demolished other medieval structures.
Editor Virginia Chieffo Raguin's own contribution presents the particular situation in the Church of England. Here she argues that as the Protestant ethos came to dominate official state position, which dictated the suppression of images and ornaments, Catholic recusants came to cherish these items more ardently. Despite English pride in the fine craftsmanship of communion chalices and patens, many were recast into appropriately Protestant modesty. Only a few medieval examples survived, often preserved by Catholic recusants or in university chapels, exempt from handing over their plate. While the old symbolism faded from the established Church, Catholics became all the more vigorous in their defense of it. Curiously, Raguin includes a discussion of the portraits of Elizabeth I, “the substitution of the Virgin Queen for the dethroned Virgin of the Catholic tradition” (75), which interrupts the flow of her otherwise cogent analysis of the Protestant and Catholic attitudes toward religious artifacts. She concludes the essay with a coda discussing Protestant destruction of religious images and the alteration of physical space within churches, lacking the corresponding Catholic response with which she began her paper.
Two of the articles diverge from the pattern of Catholic protection and Protestant annihilation of religious art. Véronique Pleash describes the “destruction” of paintings by graffiti, which she argues passing pilgrims, often attempting to escape the plague or invaders, perpetrated to memorialize their visit to a particular shrine. She suggests that the graffiti became a form of intercession or devotional act in which the supplicant would place his or her name and the date of the visit on the image of the saint. Charlene Black's essay considers the impact of the Counter Reformation on Spanish-Mexican religious art. While she begins with a discussion of certain modern portrayals of the Virgin Mary, which have caused public outrage and demands for censorship, she points out that similarly the Council of Trent put restrictions on artistic representations of religious subjects, in particular forbidding the depiction of the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus, a rendering quite popular among medieval artists. Black demonstrates how Mexican artists circumvented the restrictions through what she termed “creative solutions” that suggested a lactating mother without any nudity. She also discusses how depictions of St. Anne, downplayed by the Spanish church in favor of the masculine St. Joseph, remained popular among Mexican artists who continued to paint St. Anne because of her association with the goddess Toci. While these last two essays depart somewhat from the central theme, they particularly interest the church historian because they appear to break new ground.
Yet like most of the other articles in this collection, they move from the analysis of the impact of the Reformation on religious art to a detailed analysis of the art itself. Thus Brown's chapter devotes more space to the Fairford windows and the rather spotty efforts at their restoration than to the efforts in the Reformation to spare them. This is not to complain about the emphasis of these essays; art historians present these essays primarily to an art-historical audience. The church historian, however, might desire to learn more about the historical events that led to the preservation or destruction of these pieces. Nevertheless, this collection of essays has considerable value.
One striking aspect of the book is the fine photographs and prints that serve as illustrations. Corine Schlief's visuals, in particular, provide especially useful demonstrations of the craftsmanship of Adam Kraft, including his carved self-portrait, in the Eucharistic Tabernacle. On the other hand, one wishes Sarah Brown had included more examples of the Fairford windows to support her discussion. One serious flaw with the volume stems from its physical production. Almost immediately after opening the book, several pages came loose from the binding. For a book of this quality and price, such shoddy production is a disservice and unacceptable.
