Most of us know Dutch churches only through Pieter Saenredam's seventeenth-century paintings of what seem to be empty whitewashed interiors, cleansed by iconoclastic rioters of the memory of Catholic splendor found idolatrous by Calvinists who added nothing of artistic or liturgical significance. But a careful study not only of the paintings but also of what remains in the churches reveals a wealth of pre-Reformation church art as well as a large amount of specifically Protestant replacements of pulpits, organs, and choir screens together with the addition of text panels where altarpieces once stood (see J. D. Bangs, Church Art and Architecture in the Low Countries before 1566 [Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1997] and C. A. van Swigchem, T. Brouwer, W. van Os, Een huis voor het Woord, Het Protestantse kerkinterieur in Nederland tot 1900 [The Hague and Zeist: Staatsuitgeverij and Rijksdienst voor de Monumentenzorg, 1984]).
Thoroughly studying the art and furnishings of one church, Haarlem's St. Bavo, Mia Mochizuki describes the physical changes from the liturgical setting of Roman Catholic cathedral use to the surroundings created for Dutch Reformed services in their altered Great Church. Besides comparing similar items made for other Dutch churches with the specific Haarlem additions such as the Ten Commandments panel in place of the former high altar's reredos painting, she ambitiously places her descriptions of objects and their liturgical uses in an analytical conceptual framework that is intended to carry the study of the artworks beyond mere categories of function or style into a world of deeper psychological, anthropological, and theological insight.
Chapter 1 inventories the pre-Reformation church, excellently describing the coherent devotional program that could be imagined by attentive priests entering from the west door and moving in procession past various altarpieces, sculptures, and other furniture to the choir, then leaving again beneath the sequence of statues of apostles, each representing sentences of the creed. The extraordinary completeness of Haarlem's pre-Reformation church account books, together with the survival of a few masterpieces of pre-Reformation art (choir screen, lectern, choir stalls) and Saenredam's depictions of the pre-Reformation great organ, inform a detailed suggestion of the art stimulating Catholic piety. Chapter 2 discusses two engravings to make the point that much was removed under careful supervision rather than being furiously demolished. To indicate that destruction can be seen as preliminary to creation of new religious potential, Mochizuki adds a third engraving, Abraham ben Jacob's Abraham and the Idols (1695), which leads to an expansion of the topic to include Taliban militia's blowing up of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. The argument asserts that Calvinist text boards are, in some appreciable way, equivalent works of art to the paintings and sculpture they replace, as long as we can get beyond the habit of judging with aesthetic (or perhaps theological) prejudice.
Chapters 3 (“The Word Made Material”), 4 (“The Word Made Memorial”), and 5 (“The Word Made Manifest”) discuss Protestant spatial arrangements and text boards, and the pulpit in its enclosure as means to give a new emphasis to the proclamation of the Word. Mochizuki gives serious attention to the Protestant re-conception of the way the church was to be used, repeating in English what was well presented in Een Huis voor het Woord by van Swigchem, Brouwer, and van Os. She adds a type of analysis of materials that I cannot follow, although others may find it illuminating. For example: “In their desire to create a substantive pictorial ideal that could defy centuries of accepted thought on the devotional image, the modest raw materials of oil, wood and stone in fact became a means by which to interrogate the very materiality of the image and engineer its redemption” (128). The Reformed, in other words, used oil paint, wood, and stone to make things that didn't look like Catholic art, and they had well–thought out reasons for their choices. Mochizuki mentions the Calvinist understanding of the biblical prohibitions of making images of God or other idols, but she does not discuss Protestant antagonism toward the late medieval practice of earning indulgence by prayers before particular images.
Occasionally, theorizing results in inaccuracy. “By raising the Pulpit higher than the seats and visually marking its special status … spectacle and sound were raised to new importance” (161). But the Reformed continued to use the pre-Reformation pulpit in its original location and at the same height. Mochizuki ignores this continuity and instead discusses the replacement pulpit from 1674–1679, which she contrasts not with pre-Reformation pulpits but with a Spanish baroque figure of Christ Laid Out for Entombment by Gregorio Fernandez (mis-identified as “15th-century,” 144). In Protestant pulpits, she says, “an imitation of life and the suggestion of animation [as provided by Fernandez's statue] had ceded to an incorporated, reserved space for the real thing, the living Word in place of a ‘dumb’ or ‘mute’ idol” (152), thus suggesting that Catholics had statues in their pulpits rather than living preachers.
Mochizuki is understandably interested in the replacement of pictures by words. Failure to notice an obvious typographical error led her to claim that “circa 1535, still over three decades before outright iconoclasm in the Netherlands, the … image of God as an enthroned old man [in Lucas van Leyden's Last Judgment Triptych] was … replaced with a simple tetragrammaton. Since this exchange of figure for word was made after less than a decade of use, it was most likely a renovation of choice rather than need” (134). The footnoted reference leads us to a photograph of that part of Lucas's painting, where we see both the tetragrammaton and the re-appearing image of God the Father, captioned in 1986 as “during the restoration of 1535 the depiction of God the Father partially exposed.” The restoration photo was made in 1935, and the tetragrammaton was certainly a post-Reformation alteration to the painting. There are similar lapses in editing: “Ora Mundi” (for Orbis Mundi, 37, 38, 113), “proscribed” for prescribed, and “chair organ” for choir organ (both, 218), and so on.
Mochizuki has provided an excellent introduction in English to the subject of Dutch Protestant church furnishing, magnificently illustrated, marred somewhat by fashionable language that “preferences” (217) shifty paradigms, bodies, objecthood, materiality, memoriality, and fundamental subversion. Her valuable book will outlast the time-bound limitations of its analytical ambitions.
