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The Reformation of the Image
In "The Reformation of the Image", Joseph Leo Koerner examines the images used in Protestant church services during the period of their definition by Martin Luther. Focusing on Lucas Cranach the Elder's famous altarpiece for the City Church in Wittenberg, and drawing on a mass of other Lutheran images some of which have never been published before he elucidates a founding moment in European history when words were made the model for all communication. In determining why images persisted despite their repudiation as empty idols, Koerner locates the conflict between verbal and visual communication in the emergence of a state-supported, state-supporting faith. Examining the images made for Luther's new religion of inward belief, he shows the process by which, through an interplay between pictures and words, subjects were trained to believe what someone else believed. This ground-breaking study of a decisive but little-known episode in the history of art explores how, by re-describing arguments made against them, visual images persis.
486 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 10, 2023
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.
August 12, 2011
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.
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December 1, 2016In 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).
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).
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews