The Reformation of the Image

by Joseph Leo Koerner

With his 95 Theses, Martin Luther advanced the radical notion that all Christians could enjoy a direct, personal relationship with God—shattering years of Catholic tradition and obviating the need for intermediaries like priests and saints between the individual believer and God. The text of the Bible, the Word of God itself, Luther argued, revealed the only true path to salvation—not priestly ritual and saintly iconography.

But if words—not iconic images—showed the way to salvation, why didn't religious imagery during the Reformation disappear along with indulgences? The answer, according to Joseph Leo Koerner, lies in the paradoxical nature of Protestant religious imagery itself, which is at once both iconic and iconoclastic. Koerner masterfully demonstrates this point not only with a multitude of Lutheran images, many never before published, but also with a close reading of a single pivotal work—Lucas Cranach the Elder's altarpiece for the City Church in Wittenberg (Luther's parish). As Koerner shows, Cranach, breaking all the conventions of traditional Catholic iconography, created an entirely new aesthetic for the new Protestant ethos.

In the Crucifixion scene of the altarpiece, for instance, Christ is alone and stripped of all his usual attendants—no Virgin Mary, no John the Baptist, no Mary Magdalene—with nothing separating him from Luther (preaching the Word) and his parishioners. And while the Holy Spirit is nowhere to be seen—representation of the divine being impossible—it is nonetheless dramatically present as the force animating Christ's drapery. According to Koerner, it is this "iconoclash" that animates the best Reformation art.

Insightful and breathtakingly original, The Reformation of the Image compellingly shows how visual art became indispensable to a religious movement built on words.

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

464 pages, Hardcover

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).