The Reformation of the Image by Joseph Leo Koerner

by Joseph Leo Koerner

"The story begins in Wittenberg, Saxony, in the throes of religious change. In 1522, while Martin Luther was in hiding from Catholic forces, parishioners destroyed the images in the church of his ministry. On his return, the Reformer, instead of lauding their evangelical zeal, repudiated the image-breakers. Arresting the first iconoclasm of the modern era, Luther paved the way for a new type of church art, one modelled on the communicative reliability of words." "The Reformation of the Image studies visual representation after its wilful destruction. Focused on an altarpiece of 1547 by Lucas Cranach the Elder that was set up on the spot of Wittenberg's iconoclasm, it explores how images redescribe the arguments that eradicated them. In a bold historical revision, Joseph Leo Koerner concludes that idolatry is the image-breakers' core belief, that the putative idols had iconoclasm built into them, and that iconoclasm's aftermath is our perennial condition." Koerner illuminates one century of Protestant art and architecture. Instead of promising a means of salvation or imaginative transport, Lutheran images show only what a word-based religion looks like; such images are redundant, exhibiting what a church ordinarily performs. Koernet argues that such portrayals invent an image of society. They are not merely amenable to, but form part of, the pre-history of modern social analysis. By way of this little-known material, Koerner re-evaluates the analytic routines of his own discipline of art history.

Genres: Art, History, Nonfiction, Art History, Academic, Religion

Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Dawson Scriber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Groundbreaking study which has reshaped how art history approaches reformation artwork. For textual historians, it is a reminder that the image it demonstrates how images can be used to challenge/modify current historical scholarship.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb tour of the changes in, and use of painting, illustration, and architecture brought about by the Wittenberg Reformation of the Church. There is much for the contemporary reader in this book, especially by way of its examination of the interplay between theology and its expression in the arts and architecture of the Church, as well as in the daily lives of believers. The examples discussed in this book give much for us in the present-day to consider, primarily in regard to current, common approaches to the liturgical arts and the design of worship spaces.

[Mel]

In The Reformation of the Image (2008), art historian Joseph Koerner suggests more than once that art scholars dislike Reformation art because it “interprets itself.” Yet as Koerner eruditely demonstrates, just because a painting is filled with words does not mean that simply reading the words will tell us everything about there is to know about the painting, much less about its function within the space of the church itself—which is, in the wake of Luther’s reforms, less about the de-sacralized, “purified” physical space of the church and more about the congregation itself, to the extent that observing the congregation as it hears preaching and receives communion is the closest thing to beholding the “true,” invisible church. This is why Koerner is interested in both the image and its apparatus, which Koerner defines as the “machinery of actors, actions, and instruments using the image” (10).

Thus, Koerner centers his discussion on the 1547 Wittenberg altarpiece created by Lucas Cranach the Elder and dedicates much of the book to exploring how Cranach, a close friend of Luther’s, is doing much more than simply filling space with “disenchanted” images appropriate to an increasingly rational church. Rather, Cranach’s art is profoundly shaped by the reforming religious ideas and actions being messily worked out through affirmation, negation, cleansing, and re-appropriation in sixteenth-century Wittenberg. It seems to me that a major point that Koerner is trying to make is that the “reformed” images that Cranach and others produce are performing theological labor. Unlike the religious icons and other images of the medieval church that it displaces, the reformed image is not intended to evoke any sense that it captures or mediates some experience of the sacred for the individual. Instead, in a move that is profoundly self-conscious about its status as created art that can only (badly) interpret and reflect, the reformed image redirects the viewer’s attention back to what is happening in the church itself—baptism, preaching, communion—and, eventually, to the viewer’s subjective apprehension of the paradoxical “visible invisibility” of the church (442).