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Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment, and Romanticism:

www.prshockley.org

+Renaissance Review:

Renaissance art captured a new notion of "Humanism," a philosophy which had been the foundation for many of the achievements of ancient Greece such as democracy.

Renaissance Humanism downplayed religious and secular dogma and instead attached the greatest importance to the dignity and worth of the individual.

+Review: Renaissance:

Renaissance:

How can we overcome neo-Platonism (dualism)?

Answer: Humans must rule over nature for we are created in the image of God.

The ideal human is “both of this earth and heaven… the unifier of the universe.”

+“What is beauty?”

+Protestant Reformation:

Sought a unified worldview:

Luther rejected the dualism of the monastic mindset.

Protestant doctrine of vocation: any honest work can be a calling from God, a way to fulfill the cultural mandate to cultivate the earth.

Reformation artwork sought to capture the life of the ordinary people for everyday life is infused with spiritual dignity and significance.

+Netherland Reformed Confession:

“The world is before our eyes like a beautiful book, in which all created things, great and small, are like letters, which give us the invisible things of God to behold.”

+Humans Reflect God’s Image:

Reformers argued that a living person better reflects the image of God than any carving of wood, stone, or any other object seen in churches.

+ Counter-Reformation: Defense of the Use of Image:

They argued that images were acceptable for tools of worship because “Christ is the image of the invisible God.” The Word had become flesh.

“God Himself through Christ had taken on human form and thus revealed the earthly world to be capable of bearing the Divine.” With this justification, “the Christian use of images sought to lift the visible and earthly to the dignity of reflecting the invisible or eternal.”

~ John Phillips, The Reformation of Images, 11.

+Why defense needed? Iconoclasm:

1566 Dutch - an engraving by Franz Hogenberg in Michael Aitsinger's "De Leone Belgico" (Cologne, 1588)

+Iconoclasm had nothing to do with the opposition to art per se, but it had everything to do with concerns over theology.

Allegorical interpretations of Scripture: Excessive use of symbolism and metaphor Obscure the Gospel. Rejected devotional practices: relics, stained glass,

confessions, indulgences, pilgrimages, processions, holy water, and mass itself.

Why? Rituals were akin to magic as through spiritual powers inhered in material objects where they could be controlled and manipulated by human beings.

+Reformers: Uncluttered form of worship focused on the Word instead of image or ritual:

Emphasizing God’s transcendence, people white washed over religious paintings and left the walls plain.

Plain speech in sermons… kids could understand.

+Catholic Baroque:

God’s presence and power is immanent in and through the material world.

Creation carries the weight of spiritual glory.

Michelangelo Carravagio, The Deposition, 1604

+ Creation carries

the weight of spiritual glory.

Hebrew word for glory is “kabod” which literally means weight or substance (e.g., This person has a weighty presence). Thus, the style itself was saying that the material world has the dignity of being the dwelling place of God.Peter Paul Rubens, The Raising of the Cross, 1611

+Enlightenment:

Generated by Modern Science, Enlightenment’s leading metaphor was that nature is a great machine. Therefore, by learning the laws by which machine operates, we would be able to control it.

Attitude of confidence in human dominion over nature.

Nature is property.

Nature is domesticated.

Confidence, pride, and even complacency.

Consider this 1750 painting by Thomas Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews.

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+Romanticism: Reaction to the Enlightenment:

Romanticism was marked: Feeling over rational and empirical knowledge. Truth is found in the instinct of a genius Expressiveness and passion Unity over division Intuition and imagination had primacy over empirical reasoning. Nature is alive, free, imbued with spiritual force/life Nature is a source of religious experience Sunlight (God, transcendent Creator of Nature) Artists became more valued.

+A Transcendent Creator: “Autumn on the Hudson River” (1860) by

Jasper Francis Cropsey.

+Bibliography:

Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo (Nashville: B&H Publishers, 2011).