Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature)

UNDER THE HAMMER

the clarendon lectures in english 2009

Frontispiece: Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk (1967), in Second Floor, Public Space, The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, The David and Peggy Rockefeller Building, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reproduced by permission q 2009 The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

UNDER THE HAMMER Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition

* JAMES SIMPSON

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York q James Simpson 2010 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid–free paper by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc ISBN 978–0–19–959165–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

I dedicate this book, with love and admiration, to my children Emile, Olivier, and Clelia Simpson

Ac k n o w l e d g e m e n t s A confession: throughout the deeply pleasurable, not to say exhilarating process of writing this book, I developed a taste for the illicit. All but one of the following chapters is an act of breaking and entering academic shops not my own. I can only hope that my readers will also experience the frisson of transgression I enjoyed, although of course they may be provoked every now and again, when they feel I have strayed too far, to phone the police. Books are the product and source of conversation. The conversation that began this book was over breakfast with the inspiring Andrew McNeillie, who invited me to deliver the Clarendon Lectures, under the auspices of both Oxford University Press and the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, in May 2009. The two weeks I spent in Oxford were unquestionably the most pleasurable of an academic life, thanks in no small part to the hospitality of Sally Mapstone and Vincent Gillespie. Many friends, colleagues, and students have tried to keep me on the straight and narrow, for which I offer the warmest thanks. The following were especially generous: Amy Appleford, Tim Bahti, Larry Buell, Ian Donaldson, Milad Douehi, Philip Fisher, Jorie Graham, Grazia Gunn, Nicholas Halmi, Jeffrey Hamburger, Anna Huber, Jason La Fountain, Barbara Lewalski, Nina Lu¨bbren, Luke Menand, Carl Schmidt, Peter Sacks, Daniel Shore, Nicholas Watson, and Nicolette Zeeman, who first started me thinking about iconoclasm. Many of these interlocutors and friends are colleagues in the Department of English, Harvard University, whose collective intellectual ambition and warmth of intellectual friendship nourished the book at every turn. Dozens of graduates in

Acknowledgements

vii

this department enlivened my thinking. I do not mean to enlist the colleagues here named as supporters of the positions taken in this book: many are not. Neither is Richard Strier, of the University of Chicago, who nonetheless provided the most tenacious and exacting opposition I have ever encountered in academic debate. My thanks to him are very warm indeed. My wife and daughter, Luisella and Clelia Simpson, both offered penetrating comment at different moments. Nicole Miller courageously and successfully undertook Herculean tasks at every level of the project. My debt to her is very large. The librarians of the Lamont Library, Harvard University, gave detailed help with the bibliography. I completed the notes to this book in the magnificent Biblioteca Berenson of the Villa I Tatti, thanks to the warm and humane hospitality of its Director, Joseph Connors, and his wife, Franc¸oise.

This page intentionally left blank

Co n t e n t s List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Introduction

x xiii 1

1. Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and the Museum of Modern Art

18

2. Learn to Die: Late Medieval English Images before the Law

49

3. Statues of Liberty: Iconoclasm and Idolatry in the English Revolution

85

4. Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm and the Enlightenment Conclusion

116 155

Notes

159

Bibliography

196

Index

209

L is t o f I l l u s t r a t i o n s Frontispiece: Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk (1967), Museum of Modern Art, New York.

ii

1. Statue of Buddha, Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

2

2. Destruction of statue of Buddha, Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

3

3. Space left by destroyed statue of Buddha, Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

14

4. Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting (1960–61). Oil on canvas, 60.25’’  60.25’’, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

19

5. Tom Roberts, Shearing the Rams (1890). Oil on canvas on composition board, 122.4 cm  183.3 cm, National Gallery of Victoria.

21

6. Connoisseur admiring Painting of a Dark Night (1771), British Museum.

23

7. Ad Reinhardt, Black paintings. Installation at the Jewish Museum, New York, November 23, 1966–15 January 1967.

31

8. Hiroshima, after the dropping of the atomic bomb in September 1945.

33

9. Barnett Newman, Abraham (1949). Oil on canvas, 210.2 cm  87.7 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reproduced by permission q 2009 The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

35

10. Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939). Oil on canvas, 81.9 cm  101.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

37

11. Floor plan, Peterborough Cathedral, begun 1118.

43

12. Congregational Church, South Canaan, Connecticut. Church Interior (1804).

44

13. Unitarian Church, Interior, Duxbury MA, 1840.

45

14. 1730 pew plan, Old South Meeting House, Boston.

45

List of Illustrations

xi

15. Pulpit Eye and Elder Bench; preserved until mid-nineteenth century.

46

16. Limbourg Brothers, ‘Flight into Egypt’, The Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry (1405–9).

52

17. ‘Moses breaking the tablets of the Law and rebuking worship of the Golden Calf’, La Somme le Roi, late thirteenth century, London, British Library, MS Add. 54180, f. 5v.

53

18. Matthew Paris, Lives of St Alban, ‘St Alban refuses to Sacrifice to Apollo’, c.1250. Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS E.I.40, f. 34v.

54

19. ‘Indians Offering a Sacrifice to the Gods’, in Livres des Merveilles du Monde, c.1413, Paris, Bibliothe`que Nationale, MS fr. 2810, f. 185r.

55

20. John Lydgate, Troy Book (1412–20), Helen sees Paris, with Shrine of Venus. Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS 1, f. 50r (c.1420–35).

56

21. ‘King Edward delivering the Bible to the Prelates’, in John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1570), 2.1483.

62

22. Thomas Hoccleve, Regement of Princes (1412), Portrait of Chaucer, British Library, MS Harley 4866, f. 88r (1410–20).

66

23. Augustine, City of God, frontispiece, Paris, Bibliothe`que Nationale, MS fr 22912, f. 2v, early fifteenth century.

73

24. Thomas Hoccleve, Lerne to Dye (c.1420), Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden supra 53, f. 118r.

80

25. Sacred Heart; fifteenth century. State Library of Nuremberg, MS Will, VII 1447.8.

84

26. (?)William Dowsing (d. 1668).

87

27. Lady Chapel, Ely Cathedral.

91

28. Engraving of John Milton, eighteenth century, after engraving by William Fairthorne (1670), British Library.

96

29. Nicholas Poussin, Adoration of the Golden Calf, 1633–34. Oil on canvas, 153.4 cm  211.8 cm.

100

30. Interior of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, London, designed by Inigo Jones.

107

31. Frontispiece, John Milton, Eikonoklastes in answer to a book intitl’d Eikon Basilike (London, 1649).

118

xii

List of Illustrations

32. Frontispiece, Charles I, Eikon Basilike (London, 1649), London, British Library, detail.

119

33. Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome (1757). Oil on canvas, 170.2 cm  244.5 cm.

127

34. Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome (1757). Oil on canvas, 170.2 cm  244.5 cm, detail.

129

35. Artist Unknown. King Edward VI and the Pope (c.1570). Oil on panel, 62.2 cm  90.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London.

135

36. Pieter Saenredam, Interior of St Bavo, Haarlem (1636), Bu¨hrle Collection, Zurich. Oil on wood, 43 cm  37 cm.

136

37. Hieronymus Francken II and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector’s Cabinet (1621–23). Oil on panel, 94 cm  123.3 cm. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

139

38. Hieronymus Francken II and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector’s Cabinet (1621–3). Oil on panel, 94 cm  123.3 cm, detail.

140

39. Hieronymus Francken II and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector’s Cabinet (1621–3). Oil on panel, 94 cm  123.3 cm, detail.

141

40. Hieronymus Francken II and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector’s Cabinet (1621–23). Oil on panel, 94 cm  123.3 cm, detail.

142

41. Willem van Haecht, The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest (1628). Oil on panel, 100 cm  160 cm. Rubenshuis, Antwerp. 142 42. Egbert van Heemskirk, Satire on Picture Auctions, c.1766 (originally published c.1730). The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

143

43. Plan of Principal Floor, Houghton Hall, Norfolk.

146

44. Salvator Rosa, Prodigal Son, 1651–55. Oil on canvas. 253 cm  201 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

149

45. Pierre Joseph Lafontaine, Alexander Lenoir Defends the Royal Tombs at St Denis against Revolutionary Iconoclasts (1793). Drawing. Muse´e Carnavalet, Paris.

152

Li s t o f A b b r e v i a t i o n s AFP EETS es JWCI ODNB PL RSTC

SR Wing

Agence France-Presse Early English Text Society extended series Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Paradise Lost A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, ed. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edn. rev. W. A. Jackson et al., 3 vols (Bibliographical Society, 1976–91) Statutes of the Realm, ed. T. E. Tomlins, et al., 11 vols (London: Dawsons, 1810–28; rpt. 1963) Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, compiled by Donald G. Wing, rev. and ed. John J. Morrison and Carolyn W. Nelson, 2nd edn (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994)

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

N February 26, 2001, the Taliban leader of Afghanistan, Mullah Mohammad Omar, issued a decree ordering the destruction of all statues in Afghanistan. ‘Only Allah, the Almighty’, he decreed, ‘deserves to be worshipped, not anyone or anything else.’1 In the weeks leading up to this judgement, it was credibly reported that ‘Taliban officials had destroyed over a dozen pre-Islamic artifacts in the national museum.’2 The principal targets of the decree were, however, the two huge statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, Central Afghanistan (Figure 1). Carved into the rock face in the second century ce, these statues were reportedly visited by pilgrims from across Central Asia. It took about one week for rocket launchers to destroy the statues (Figure 2). The Taliban’s principal justification was that a UNESCO delegation had, earlier in that same February, offered money to protect the statues, while Afghanistan was subject to economic sanctions. This had apparently enraged the Taliban mullahs: ‘If money is going to statues while children are dying of malnutrition next door, then that makes it harmful, and we destroy it.’3 Immediately following the destruction, the Taliban leadership was subject to a barrage of criticism from across the world, including criticism from Islamic countries. An AFP article of

O

2

Introduction

1. Statue of Buddha, Bamiyan, Afghanistan. ‘Picture dated 07 December 1997 shows two Afghans sitting under the world’s tallest standing statue’. AFP Collection, photographer Jean Claude Chapon. Reproduced by permission of Getty Images.

Introduction

3

2. Destruction of statue of Buddha, Bamiyan, Afghanistan. ‘Taliban Destroy Buddhas of Bamiyan’. AFP image, photographer CNN. Reproduced by permission of Getty Images.

March 2, 2001, headed ‘Medieval Taliban Lashed over Buddha Demolition’, reported that the Taliban militia was ‘internationally lashed . . . as ‘‘medieval’’ vandals of the world’s cultural treasures’. The Indian Foreign Minister condemned the Taliban action as ‘a regression into medieval barbarism’.4 The universal condemnation of the Taliban was characterized by the horror of barbarity and backwardness. The Taliban were branded as ‘medieval’, ‘barbaric’, and ‘regressive’. Idol destruction, by this account, happens elsewhere in time and space; it is retrogressive to modernity. Across the four chapters of this small book, I take issue with this projection of iconoclasm as historically and geographically ‘other’ and ‘backward’, at least as far as the West goes, and in particular as far as Anglo-American culture

4

Introduction

goes. Instead, I argue that iconoclasm is a recurrent feature of Anglo-American, as of other Western modernities. In theory and/or practice, revolutionary Western cultures habitually mark their own self confidence and novelty by breaking representations of the previous dispensation. Western modernities project their own violence in this, as in many other matters, onto that which they regard as definitively repudiated, the ‘medieval’.5 It’s suggestive in this respect that the very word used to designate the Taliban as regressive (i.e. ‘vandals’) was first used, in its current sense, not of a movement that regarded itself as regressive, but rather of the French Revolutionary mob as they confidently purified Paris of the ancien re´gime and its monuments.6 So far from being ‘medieval’, this is precisely what the Taliban are not. If we are to make European parallels, the Taliban are, in their iconoclasm at least, Early Moderns; legislated iconoclasm in England, for example, was unknown in what came to be called ‘medieval’ England. It dates only from the first third of the sixteenth century, as the direct weapon of those who simultaneously created and repudiated the very concept of the medieval.7 Iconoclastic legislation of a revolutionary clerical elite, an elite of the often non-elected elect, divinely driven by textual conviction, is the most obvious similarity between the Taliban and early modern English evangelical Christians. The clerical elite is prepared to wield the hammer, in the name of liberty, persuaded as it is of popular idolatry and popular submission to an enslaving, mesmerizing past and, often, to enslaving foreign influence (the Taliban reportedly hanged televisions). As we shall see, Anglo-American modernities provide some signal examples of analogous actions by clerical elites, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A lesser similarity is the intense rivalry between warm, suffering flesh and cold but voracious stone. Idolized objects are felt to absorb the care and tenderness that should by rights go to suffering humans. In this case, the Taliban described Afghan children as victims of the images. The images are, effectively,

Introduction

5

Moloch-like idols, barbarously devouring sacrificial children. We shall see other, Early Modern iconoclasts who also posit a lifeand-death competition between images and suffering humanity. Only one side can survive, the images or the suffering humans. In England, legislated iconoclasm lasted a century, between 1538 and 1643, despite periods of respite and image-making within those years. Such sustained legislation was unique in Reformation Europe for its jurisdictional extension and duration.8 The task of destroying all religious images was large and primary, made all the more arduous by the periods of backsliding into images. Like its partner biblical literalism, iconoclasm was in England a weapon of a radical yet non-progressive modernity.9 That century of legislated early modern English iconoclasm stands at the core of this book. I Focus on that century of early modernity transforms our understanding of two histories, that of Anglo-American painting, and that of English poetry.10 In this book my primary concern is the fate of the image, or—a richer term—of visual representation. The obvious and frequent account of early modern evangelical iconoclasm describes the matter as doctrinal: the triumph of the biblical Word demanded the suppression of all that was unscriptural and/or forbidden by Scripture, notably the religious image, which usually fell foul of evangelical stricture in both ways (i.e. it was both unscriptural and forbidden by Scripture).11 That account is persuasive if partial. Here I wish additionally to describe the image’s passage from church to museum as part of the larger, violent drama of Protestant modernity and abstraction, a drama of which doctrinal positions are symptoms as much as motors of change. The principal task of that drama of modernity was to reconfigure jurisdiction by extending and centralizing it—the process of what Max Weber called ‘rationalization’.12 Those concentrations

6

Introduction

of power produced increasingly transcendent imaginations of power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those movements of transcendence, both religious and political, required violence towards what was now described as past and foreign. They also demanded violence against the material, artistic representations of the repudiated jurisdictions. This reconfiguration of jurisdiction leaves its scars on every aspect of the image: its place, its form, its audience. We understand the history of the image so much more deeply once we look to what threatened it, and what it survived. All these issues—historical, organizational, and artistic—are embedded in different senses of the single word ‘representation’. The philosophical sense of the word ‘representation’ (‘making present again’) is what determines both the social, or organizational sense (‘standing in for, interceding for’) and the artistic sense (‘a likeness’, or ‘figure’). That is to say, how we allow the past to be made present again is determined by who intercedes for us, who ‘re-presents’ us; and those two decisions can determine licit artistic representation. In the passage from the ‘medieval’ to the early modern, or, in England, the passage from pre-Reformation to evangelical religion, the intercession of the saints represented an idolatrous, non-scriptural past. The saints were, accordingly, not to be made present, not to stand in for anyone, and not to be represented. In the movement from a ‘represented’ to an unmediated religion, it was necessary to break representations that encouraged illicit ways of interceding and illicit ways of making present again.13 It was also necessary to redefine representation; what had been intercession was now channeled into political ‘representation’, with its own iconographic corollaries.14 The question of jurisdiction, with its immediate consequences for the image, was also, simultaneously, geographical. The need to reconfigure historical geography was vividly fed by evangelical, literalist reading of the Hebrew Scriptures in early modern England. The Hebrew tradition of iconoclasm was driven by geographical, territorial pressure: in the crowded cultural geography

Introduction

7

of ancient Canaan, preservation of the cultural identity of the tribes of Israel was best expressed by repudiation of adjacent religions. This repudiation manifested itself in two deeply related ways: destruction of the idols of foreign religion, and repudiation of foreign wives. Both the idols and the women were a source of cultural mixing; the connection between them was so deep as to produce one of the prime metaphorical formulations of idolatry, as ‘whoring with strange gods’ (e.g. Deuteronomy 31:16).15 The metaphorical power of Exodus 34 makes the connection between intermarriage and idolatry of the foreign gods explicit: 14

For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: 15Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice; 16And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods.

Deuteronomy 4:23–8 makes the territorial connection clear: 23

Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the LORD your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, which the LORD thy God hath forbidden thee. 24For the LORD thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God. 25When thou shalt beget children, and children’s children, and ye shall have remained long in the land, and shall corrupt yourselves, and make a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, and shall do evil in the sight of the LORD thy God, to provoke him to anger: 26I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land whereunto ye go over Jordan to possess it; ye shall not prolong your days upon it, but shall utterly be destroyed. 27And the LORD shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be left few in number among the heathen, whither the LORD shall lead you. 28And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.

Introduction

8

And so it is that Deuteronomy 12:1–3 makes the call to iconoclasm explicit: 1

These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the LORD God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth. 2Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: 3And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.

The call to destroy the cultic places of adjacent, ‘foreign’ religions is extraordinarily consistent across the Hebrew Scriptures, from the prohibitions and Mosaic punishments for idolatry in Exodus, to the exhortations of Deuteronomy, to the narrative of the Book of Kings, and to the meditations of the Hellenized Wisdom (although classed as apocryphal by evangelical translators), where the two great sources of Western iconoclasm, Hebraic and Greek, meet.16 The story is always the same: national integrity and strength, not to speak of national survival, is primarily dependent on the destruction of the idols of neighbouring peoples. This Hebraic template was transferred with literalist vengeance onto the iconic geography of Early Modern England. Proper treatment of images and destruction of idols was in fact very nearly the prime issue for early modern evangelical cultures: much Reformation historiography is arranged according to the terms, we might say, mutatis mutandis, of Art History. Whether or not a historical period fell victim to the idolatry of the religious image is the primary historiographical question. By that criterion, one cultural dispensation marks its distinction from a proximate historical and/or geographical competitor. Focus on England’s century of early modern iconoclasm transforms our understanding of the fate of the image, which was

Introduction

9

subject, then, to forces that extended well beyond doctrinal fiat. Jursidictional redefinition demanded historical, social, and geographical redefinition: each of these leaves its aggressive scar on the image. Focus on this century of image breaking also transforms our understanding of the deeply intertwined histories of AngloAmerican painting and poetry. Only by focusing on that century of legislated iconoclasm, indeed, can we understand how intertwined and how fraught the histories of the image and the poetic word are. The Herculean struggle for supremacy between Word and non-scriptural image was in England won by the Word, but also by the poetic word and the poetic, verbal image. That victory shaped and energized a grand tradition of English poetry whose greatest representatives are Spenser, Milton, and Wordsworth (Shakespeare comments on it from outside the tradition). However much this book is principally concerned with the fate of the image rather than of the poetic word, the chapter on Milton does define the moment in which literature definitively assumed vivifying, salvific status after its long and violent struggle with the idolatrous visual image. II It may be, then, that there are similarities between the Taliban and early modern European iconoclasms. Even so, one will nevertheless surely object that Mullah Omar appears to be ignorant of one later category, distinctively Western in origin, that of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment category of Art. What’s missing from the Mullah’s reasoning, that is, is any concept of ‘heritage’, let alone any concept of the autonomy of art. What’s missing is the Enlightenment’s achievement of having detached images from the web of religious practices and beliefs from which many images had derived their meaning. Any such concept is certainly absent from the Mullah’s statement, and so marks a huge difference between contemporary

10

Introduction

Western and Taliban attitudes to the image. The Enlightenment, ‘heritage’ defence, in the form of the UNESCO delegation’s offer of protection for the statues, was, indeed, precisely what provoked the Taliban in 2001. After the Taliban demolition of 2001, the spokesman for the Japanese government, a government with a clear religious reason to protest against destruction of the statues of Buddha, made his protest in Enlightenment terms: ‘Those statues’, he said, ‘are assets to all human beings.’17 This, we could argue, is what really distinguishes the Taliban from civilized practice, from progressive modernity. Even if we might allow certain limited similarities between Taliban iconoclasm and the practice of Reformation iconoclasts in the early modern period, we will surely want to place an absolute distinction between the Taliban and the Western Enlightenment tradition of the eighteenth century, a tradition that protected and prized the image. Here, too, however, this book will demur from the absoluteness of this distinction. Ours is a culture that repeatedly labels old cultures as the habitation of old gods, whose images must be broken. Those images, whither the old gods have taken refuge, become the prime sites of superstition, in which past belief is described as idolatrous belief. The breaking takes analogous forms across the centuries since the Reformation. Every culture has its understandings of what things are legitimately and illegitimately thought of as animate. Moments of ‘Enlightenment’ consist of forced redistributions of the animation. This involves chasing out the unclean spirits and making new homes for the clean spirits. Targeting superstition is a question of targeting what is improperly regarded as animate, or what might be improperly regarded as angry if you break it. The Reformation and Enlightenment are, I’ll be suggesting, correlative; they both activate iconoclasm. The less ambitious form of the argument would have it that the Enlightenment produced the museum and the category of Art in defensive response to early modern iconoclasm. The category of Art and the space of the museum protect the image, neutralize the image, and revalorize the image. Any moment in which a society

Introduction

11

turns against its own images is shocking to behold for us. We think that only barbaric ‘others’ are capable of destruction of that kind. Our shock is itself, perhaps, the product of the Enlightenment, because we regard it as the defacement of Art. I will pursue this less ambitious argument about the formation of the museum as an alternative to iconoclasm in Chapter 4. The more ambitious form of the argument, which I shall also pursue in this book, is that the Enlightenment treatment of the image, and in particular the Enlightenment museum, shares many of the iconoclast’s aims. Enlightenment reception of the image is iconoclastic in two ways. In the first place, it neutralizes and commodifies images so as to transform them (one might note in passing that the fragments of the Bamiyan statutes immediately found their way into the art market).18 The ‘iconoclasm’ of the art market transforms the image proper. A second form of metaphorical Enlightenment iconoclasm applies to the much larger field of the human sciences. Different Enlightenment traditions exercise a philosophical iconoclasm, by describing ideology as false consciousness, an idol that enthralls the naive and that must be broken. Even as the Enlightenment attempts to master Reformation religion, it borrows the methods of Calvinist religion.19 Even as it protects the image itself, that is, it draws on the structure of evangelical critique of idolatry, and applies that critique to a vast epistemological field. It practices historiography by detecting enthrallment, superstition, and error;20 the entire past becomes a museum of error, a museum of artefacts now observed with condescension by ‘an age advanced to the highest degree of refinement’.21 II I The simplest point at the heart of this book, then, is this: that iconoclasm is not ‘somewhere else’. Instead, it lies buried deep within Western modernity, and especially deep within the

Introduction

12

Anglo-American tradition. This tradition insistently and violently repudiates idols and images as dangerous carriers of the old regime. The repudiation takes different but analogous forms across the centuries from the sixteenth to the twentieth. Those analogous forms will be the principal subject of this book. Iconoclasm is a continuous, powerful, though usually hidden strand with the Anglo-American tradition, whose scholarly history is relatively recent.22 Such a scholarly history needs to range historically. Why? My basic answer to this question is twofold: (i) iconoclasm is always unfinished; and (ii) iconoclasm is itself a historiographical act that seeks to close off historical process. Precisely because iconoclasts wish to separate one historical period from another absolutely, the history of iconoclasm is of necessity a diachronic history. Iconoclasm’s historian must resist the closures that its own subject would wish to impose. This lack of closure is signaled already by the Decalogue. The Protestant Reformation redesigned the Ten Commandments.23 In this new version, which physically replaced the image on the altar in sixteenth-century English churches,24 the commandment concerning images occupies a separate place all its own. Exodus 20:4–5 now presents this as the second commandment: 4

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.25

The prohibition’s formulation insists on the historical nature and process of iconoclasm. Idolatry characterizes the past (it is the ‘iniquity of the fathers’); and it is not a one-off event: those guilty will be responsible for visiting their guilt on their descendants, down at least to the third generation. This places an obvious and terrible pressure on the iconoclast: if the sanction concerning the

Introduction

13

punishment of the third and fourth generations is not to be permanently reactivated, the repudiation of the idolatry must be decisive, systematic, and complete. Iconoclasm is a generational struggle, children fighting for survival against the punishments visited upon them for the idolatry of their fathers. This command activates an unbearable, exhausting, and energizing historical process. The pattern of historically attested English iconoclastic activity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exemplifies the unfinishable nature of this process. I refer to this pattern as the ‘kinesis of iconoclasm’. Baldly, this is how it worked (we will be seeing specific examples and later variations across these chapters). The process begins with some irregular smashing of religious images. But iconoclasm is inevitably systematic: breaking one image necessarily implies the need to break others. Not only does an iconoclastic act rightly imply that the past had its semiotic system; iconoclasm institutes a system of its own. So the irregular smashing of images is followed by legislated destruction of specific images to which idolatrous worship is paid. Very soon after, however, the first legislation is seen to be ineffective, since it’s impossible to distinguish between those images that provoke idolatry and those that don’t. Clerical despair at effective means of detecting idolatry derives from the obvious fact that idolatrous practice is always, necessarily, in the eye of the clerical beholder; no one ever confesses to idolatry, and there can be no reliable empirical test for it. So the first wave of iconoclasm is characteristically followed by a second. This subsequent wave commands destruction of all religious images (exception is made at this point for secular images of the noble, which must on no account be damaged). This second wave of legislation is followed by more irregular breaking, since there are gaps left by the first waves, reminding us of the spectral presence of the image, as, we might note in passing, the Bamiyan statues left gaps (Figure 3). This is the stage where the really difficult iconoclasm must begin, once most of the material images have been systematically destroyed: after the material destruction, that is, the committed

14

Introduction

3. Space left by destroyed statue of Buddha, Bamiyan, Afghanistan. ‘AfghanBamiyan-Buddha-General View’. AFP image. Reproduced by permission of Getty Images.

iconoclast must begin on what Francis Bacon in 1620 called ‘idols of the tribe’, the idols of every human mind, which by its very nature produces idols.26 Calvin (1509–64) declared that scarcely ‘a single person has ever been found who did not fashion for himself an idol or specter in place of God. Surely, just as waters boil up from a vast, full spring, so too does an immense crowd of gods flow forth from the human mind.’27 The very intensity with which Reformation evangelicals imagined a transcendent God paradoxically, though perhaps predictably, spawned hundreds of all too material gods and goods potentially subject to idolatry.28 Pursued from material idols and pursued from false imaginations, however, the old gods are not yet exhausted: they now take up residence in ideology, whence they must also be chased by the enlightened critique of ideology. This is the moment at which certain forms of disenchanted art are produced, usually still, either still lives or landscapes, or, perhaps, in the case of eighteenthcentury England, innocuous if self-aggrandizing portraits of self, family, or horses; later in the United States, as we shall see,

Introduction

15

the choice is abstract art, which is not only still but also flat. Images survive the violent passage from church to museum, just, but they bear the scars of the journey. This apparently final stage, that of abstract art, might look like the end of iconoclasm, when the hot, localized energies of hammerwielding anger have given way to the cool, managed, even dispersal of iconoclastic energies across space. But the job remains undone, since the iconoclasm of abstract, imageless art itself replays the trauma of iconoclasm and thereby reactivates the dangerous enchantment of the image. It thereby prolongs the twilight of the idols; that is why it is powerful. Abstract art also occasionally provokes literal iconoclasm, although this is a minor phenomenon.29 In short, iconoclasm tries to stop time and tradition itself, by reverting to an originary, imageless state.30 But iconoclasm initiates its own tradition; each attempt to stop the process feeds the process, refreshes energies, and, in many cases, produces new materials for the next iconoclastic wave. Very often, as we shall see, the iconoclast targets not so much the original idols, but rather the idols erroneously erected by the previous generation of failed iconoclasts. Iconoclasm is driven by a set of paradoxes: it wants to reinstate true history by subtracting accretions; it attempts to reinstate true history by an act of violence that is always anti-historical; by that anti-historical act it activates a new historical tradition. The task is endless. As we shall see, the prime psychological characteristic of the iconoclast is, unsurprisingly, exhaustion. The effects of the century-long, ferocious repression of the preReformation visual regime by early modern evangelical English and Scottish clerics are profound. They continue to ripple through Anglo-American culture. Only by traversing boundaries between the late medieval and the Early Modern, and between the Enlightenment and the twentieth century, can we understand how images are capable of activating such intense and violent response, a response designed to separate one historical period from another. We remain locked in ignorance or short-sightedness if we remain within any one of these ‘periods’.

16

Introduction

As an attempt to create periodic divisions, then, iconoclasm is a tradition that can be understood only by traversing periodic divisions. It is, to repeat, both a historiography and, like all powerful historiographies, productive of a historical tradition itself. I hope this understanding of the subject will go some way to excusing my temerity in ranging quite so far from my scholarly home bases. The chapters will focus respectively on the following periods, places, and art forms: late medieval and sixteenthcentury English image theory and practice; seventeenth-century English Protestant iconoclastic poetry; the eighteenth-century museum; and American abstract painting in the twentieth century. At the book’s end I point towards, but do not directly address, the vast subject of the visual in nineteenth-century England. Why do I not address this subject? The nineteenth century, in England, undertakes a massive rapprochement with the pre-Reformation and the Catholic. The present chapters are devoted to the breaking, not the making of images; that breaking is also, always, an attempt to break with the tradition of Rome. However much the great English nineteenth-century tradition of artistic making is most fruitfully understood as a reflex of Reformation history, this is a history of making, not breaking art. Most medievalists who write cultural history beyond the medieval centuries write about medievalism—that is, about revivals of the medieval. They naturally gravitate to the nineteenth century. In writing about iconoclasm, I write as a medievalist about the repudiations, not revivals, of the medieval. For this reason I jump from the eighteenthcentury museum to the museums and abstract art of twentiethcentury New York. In fact this is where I start, with the kind of question about one’s own experience that ideally prompts all historical inquiry: how did we get here? I begin with my own experience of iconoclasm, in the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, when I saw mid-twentieth-century New York abstract painting for the first time.

Introduction

17

A final word about the manner this book. Each chapter was originally designed and delivered as a lecture. I have tried to preserve the direct address of the lecture format, and as much of the brevity of oral delivery as scholarly written practice permits. The ideal to which I aspire here is that of a small book capable of activating a large theme. The footnotes and bibliography are designed to direct the reader to the large network of scholarship behind the slimness of the present volume. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are mine.

chapter 1

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and the Museum of Modern Art

I N June 1967, at the age of thirteen, I accompanied my mother to an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia, entitled Two Decades of American Painting. The show was dominated by abstract painting by many of the painters we now associate with Abstract Expressionism: Davis, Hofmann, de Kooning, Motherwell, Newman, Rothko, and Pollock. As I walked my fascinated but bewildered way through the exhibition I was particularly struck by this image (Figure 4), painted in 1960, by the New York painter Ad Reinhardt (1913– 67): Abstract Painting. In fact I was doubly, and then triply struck by it, since apparently identical paintings, painted in 1962 and 1963, were hung beside it.1 I did not detest or love these images, but I was certainly deeply puzzled and not a little awestruck by them: how, I asked myself, did we arrive here? By what mysterious path did the grown-ups end up paying to look at black squares? What struck me so forcefully was that these paintings were clearly breaking the rules of what painting was supposed to do. And they broke the rules in such a way as to create cerebral difficulty. In the first place, there was nothing to look at in any

I

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

19

4. Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting (1960–61), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Oil on canvas, 60.25’’  60.25’’. Reproduced by permission q 2009 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.

painting, at first sight: one was supposed to look at what was in paintings, but here I couldn’t see anything but the painting. Or not at first, at any rate: in fact Abstract Painting is not completely black, but reveals a barely distinguishable (perhaps, in reproduction, indistinguishable) black Greek cross on a black background. The fact that it took so much looking to perceive the sole source of distinction, and therefore, presumably, of meaning, in the painting, told me what everything else about these almost non-images told me: understanding these paintings was going to be hard work, an austere process of ascesis, whereby we were

20

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

being challenged to enter a logic of subtraction: near-total subtraction of form, subtraction of colour, subtraction of nature (the painting is perfectly geometrical and symmetrical, 60.25 inches high and wide), subtraction of narrative (this is timeless), and subtraction of depth (these are entirely flat surfaces). We were also being required to bid farewell to the personality of painting, since, as far as I could make out, the industrial precision of these surfaces was resolutely impersonal. These pictures aspired to the status of what Byzantine theorists of the icon called the ‘acheiropoetic’, or made without hands.2 Any search for the stroke of a paint brush, the mark of the maker, on these impersonal surfaces was to be fruitless. They had no maker. The titles of the paintings were of no help to me as I peered at them: the title of the first was Abstract Painting; and of the second, painted in 1962, Abstract Painting. The deliberately uncommunicative titles were telling me that these paintings were probably not about anything at all; they told me to look at the painting instead of its subject; if the painting was about anything, its subject was likely to be painting itself. Even if the cross was there, the titles weren’t saying so. And the difficulty of seeing that cross, and of making sense of it, predominated over any referential force it might have. The titles were telling me that painting was very nearly done with images; this was a farewell to the image. Once I’d tried, and largely failed, to get some foothold on the sense of the formal properties of this object, I reflected on its very strange combination of rudeness and refinement with regard to its viewer. My adolescent eye had been trained on the so-called Australian Impressionists. I suppose I was accustomed to pictures having what I would now call a rhetorical relation with their viewers: pictures like Shearing the Rams (Figure 5), for example, by Tom Roberts,3 painted in 1890, had trained my eye to a kind of decorum. This painting told me what to look at first (the central figure of the foremost shearer); what next (the pattern of variations on that central figure receding into the shearing shed); what next (the thirsty shearer drinking at the very end); and

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

21

5. Tom Roberts (1856–1931), Shearing the Rams (1890), National Gallery of Victoria. Oil on canvas on composition board, 122.4 cm  183.3 cm. Reproduced by permission of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Felton Bequest, 1932.

after this we are invited to retrace the steps of the eye to observe the subsidiary figures: the young barefooted shed hand, or rousabout, on the left, about to trace the very path we have, down to the back of the shed, and the watchful, stable, older foreman on the right. Roberts’ painting has excellent manners. It observes a decorum between painter and viewer. Animal and human, and the ages of men, are all arranged in an architecturally framed argument. It is, in short, a rhetorical painting, taking care to shepherd the eye through an imagined, structured, deep space. The Reinhardt, by contrast, rudely repels us at nearly every refined turn. As the painting aggressively rejects every formal resource, it forbiddingly tells us ‘no: do not try to make sense of me in all the usual ways’. Unable to enter the painting, we become conscious of ourselves on the point of error or repudiation. Should I be looking at the cross? Does it mean anything?

22

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

Will the title help me? Should titles matter? So far from looking at this painting, the painting tends rather to look at us, abruptly challenging us to decide whether we are up to its austerities, abruptly challenging us to abandon tradition itself. We find ourselves rather in the position of this satirized eighteenthcentury connoisseur (Figure 6), admiring the picture of a dark night. Here we tend to look more at the viewer than the picture. If this painting was to be understood, then understanding clearly involved joining an exclusive club, in possession of arcane knowledge. To step wholly within the circle of this painting, one was going to need abruptly to dismiss the broader circle of one’s cultural affinities. One had also to abandon a tradition of painting as persuasive, or rhetorical. The history of Western Christian painting was legitimated by Gregory the Great in the late sixth century.4 Certainly the crucial theological underpinnings of the Christian image had been established by fifth-century ecumenical councils devoted to settling nature of the incarnate Christ, both God and man.5 Once that theological question had been agreed, the way was clear for certain classes of religious image. In two letters to Serenus, the iconoclastic bishop of Marseilles, Pope Gregory famously declared in 599 and 600 that images were books for the unlettered.6 For Gregory, that is, the key relation in a painting was not a philosophical, or theological relation, between the painting and its prototype, or divine subject. This was to be the prime issue in the Byzantine controversies between 726 and 843.7 In the West that ultimately Platonic idea survived in key discussions of the channels through which veneration of the image was to pass;8 but it was not at all the central Western defence of the existence, or nature of the image itself. That Western defence was, instead, grounded on a rhetorical relation between the image and its viewer. Painting must take into account the capacities and the needs of that viewer, a viewer who might be illiterate but who stood in need of instruction and compunction. The key,

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

23

6. Connoisseur admiring Painting of a Dark Night (1771), BM Satires 4683, reproduced by permission q The Trustees of the British Museum.

24

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

generative relation is horizontal, between image and viewer, rather than vertical, between image and divine prototype. Returning to the Reinhardt image, this is clearly on the side of the vertical, theological, anti-rhetorical conception of painting. It sides, that is, with the conception whereby the philosophical and/ or theological issue is so pressing as to banish, or at least mock, or both, the rhetorical altogether. This was not, clearly, a painting for a broad public. That public will number among the painting’s many repudiations. Paradoxically, however, the painting’s demand that I join an exclusive club was premised, apparently, on the opposite of exclusivism. That’s to say, this object was making a claim to an ahistorical universalism. It implicitly characterized all the resources of painting as pathological particularities specific to this tradition or that. Here, instead, was a work that stood outside tradition, by taking us back to a pure end, or a pure beginning, of all painting, regardless of place and time. The object was laying claim to a universalism that was true regardless of the place and persons to whom it was addressed, and also regardless of the place and persons from which it originated. No one made it; it addressed no one and everyone, regardless of time and place: beyond the rhetorical specificities of time and place, it just was. And it existed universally, even if only a small and elite group was capable of answering the austere call of that universalism. This universalist account of truth left me being looked at. Instead of me looking at something, I was myself the object of attention. And, consonant with iconoclastic programmes, which necessarily involve X-ray vision into the mind of the potentially idolatrous viewer, the impulse of this anti-painting was to peer into our deepest selves. It demands that we step up and repudiate the idolatries of this object or that, this cultural particularity or that. It replicates the experience of black obscurity powerfully imagined in the late sixteenth-century sonnet by Fulke Greville (1554–1628), which begins thus:

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

25

In night when colours all to black are cast, Distinction lost, or gone down with the light; The eye a watch to inward senses plac’d, Not seeing, yet still having power of sight, Gives vain alarums to the inward sense.9

Paintings of this kind set up surveillance systems, looking as they do for signs of error and resistance in their public. Iconoclasm generally draws on a placeless account of seeing, and, therefore, establishes a regime of being seen from everywhere. To look at an abstract painting of this kind is less, that is, to see than to be seen. But to acknowledge the universal one had, paradoxically, to step into a very particular circle of the ascetic and exclusive, who needed neither instruction nor compunction. II In my account of how I looked at the Reinhardt painting in 1967, I have largely restricted myself to reflections available from the image as I saw it, close up, as an adolescent. Let us now set childish things aside and move to a middle distance. I’ll sketch the larger public discourses in which the image might have made sense. Some of these were available to informed viewers at that time, and some not. The first, most obvious master discourse that made a kind of sense of these paintings was an Enlightenment argument about the progress of art and the liberty of the artist. The second master narrative into which these paintings have been placed is that of the Holocaust. These two master narratives are, on the face of it, contradictory: the first is an Enlightenment, classical tradition, confident in the revolutionary stabilities of rational geometry. That same tradition insistently associates iconoclasm with liberty. The other is a Romantic tradition, expressive of a terrible sublime beyond the capacities of reason. The first, Enlightenment discourse was the one available in Melbourne in 1967. In the fierce Melbourne debates that

26

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

surrounded this exhibition, this was the principal card played by its defenders.10 I heard this defence many times around dinner tables, a defence always made by the young (though not by me) against the ‘conservative’ parental generation (this was 1967, after all): that artistic progress must respect artistic liberty, and that many great artistic movements began with public incomprehension. That argument was underwritten by Enlightenment persuasions. Abstract geometry best expresses the rational confidence of Enlightenment thought. Revolutionary art is characteristically abstract and geometrical, expressing as it does the power of the revolution to measure space and to stop time, both precisely. We can see this in art history, in the art produced by the French Revolution,11 or in such revolutionary works as Malevich’s Suprematist Black Square of 1915, the most obvious forerunner of Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting. The sources of abstraction are, however, very deeply set into Enlightenment thought: for just as the Enlightenment practices a historiography of error, defining the past as a series of pathological submissions to this idolatry or that, so too must it produce an iconoclastic art, purified of all but the rational order. Just as the Enlightenment proclaims the equality of all humans, so too must it redefine all cultural and historical particularities as enemies of the rational order of liberty. That Enlightenment pressure towards abstraction was literalized as a world historical phenomenon in the United States. One class of migrants (the Europeans) were literally abstracted from (‘drawn from’) the pathological inequalities and particularities of an oppressive Europe left behind. The United States was destined to produce a great movement of Abstraction, since abstraction (from Europe) to the rational space of equality is one of the fundamental historical narratives of the United States.12 Abstraction proclaims a world freed from this pathological affiliation or that, an ideal all the more desirable after the violent clash of intense affiliations across the first half of the twentieth century in Europe.

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

27

Geometrical abstraction, then, was the Enlightenment form. Not only that, but abstraction was, despite the apparent vacuity of its ‘message’, necessarily expressive of liberty.13 As we shall see frequently throughout this book, Western anti-idolatry discourse is remarkably consistent in its identification of idolatry with thralldom. The call to liberty is what justifies and characterizes iconoclasm. Idolatrous art enslaves. Inhabited by the old gods, it mesmerizes and captures its viewer. An art freed from all taint of idolatry is an art that necessarily promotes ‘freedom’. This is a tradition that, as we shall see in Chapter 3 especially, had to invent the Statue of Liberty. So defenders of the Melbourne exhibition in 1967 were defenders of the Enlightenment, both its thought and its characteristic art form; they had no doubt but that abstract form was a cardinal sign of our liberty. This turned out, however, to be Enlightenment and Liberty with a twist. Reinhardt was himself unwilling to be enlisted in any larger, non-aesthetic movement. He rejected even the residual Enlightenment argument in favor of liberty, claiming instead that his art was nothing but itself: The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive—non-objective, nonrepresentational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.14

This statement of the via negativa accepts only the way of negation; it has deep resonances with the larger movement of Abstract Expressionism.15 Despite that declared path of renunciation, to which Reinhardt steadfastly held,16 Reinhardt’s art was in fact being enlisted in a larger, Cold War cultural campaign. No one in Melbourne could have fully understood this campaign in 1967. For it is now clear

28

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

that the movement known as Abstract Expressionism was a cultural instrument in the hands of the CIA (itself founded in 1947) and the State Department, from the later 1950s.17 In its effort to persuade left-leaning intellectuals, especially in Western Europe, to remain within the Western bloc, the CIA and the State Department conducted a concerted cultural campaign, using a variety of mediating organizations to promote different art forms.18 President Eisenhower, who became President in 1953, stated the political ideology that swung behind Abstract American art. Modern art was, he said, a ‘pillar of liberty’: As long as artists are at liberty to feel with high personal intensity, as long as our artists are free to create with sincerity and conviction, there will be healthy controversy and progress in art . . . How different it is in tyranny. When artists are made the slaves and the tools of the state . . . progress is arrested and creation of genius is destroyed.19

There were various contexts to a speech of this kind: most immediately, it represented a victory of the CIA’s understanding of modern art over McCarthyite enemies who regarded it as communist art.20 No less immediately, however, such art offered the perfect aesthetic response, by way of diametrical opposition, to Soviet Realism (instituted as official policy in 1932). Most artists of the movement known as ‘Abstract Expressionism’ had left-wing sympathies, even if they rejected the Soviet Union in disillusion at the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1937; most had also emerged from the statefunded Works Project Administration, a New Deal organization designed to provide work for artists through the Depression and beyond.21 By the 1950s, however, their art was deployed in an international arena as the American alternative to Soviet art. If the Soviet Union had relentlessly smiling peasants and workers, the United States had relentlessly happy consumers. But that was advertising, not Art. And American Art proclaimed liberty, not propaganda. The CIA actively and generously funded the movement through mediating organizations such as the Congress for

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

29

Cultural Freedom, run from Paris. This organization, founded in 1950, was designed to appeal to left-leaning Western intellectuals by offering plausible alternatives to communist intellectual and artistic forms. It was funded by the CIA; the CIA’s own official web site says about the Congress that it ‘is widely considered one of the CIA’s more daring and effective Cold War covert operations’.22 Tom Braden, a CIA operative who initiated the CIA’s International Organization Division, wrote in an article published in 1967, that ‘CIA-financed foundations were . . . generous when it came to the national interest’. Money, he said, was distributed according to the following rule: ‘limit the money to amounts private organizations can credibly spend’.23 The International Program of the Museum of Modern Art worked with the Congress for Cultural Freedom in organizing traveling exhibitions of American art, much of it abstract art, particularly from the later 1950s.24 Both exhibitions in the United States and traveling exhibitions were thus generously but clandestinely promoted. Working directly through Congress was impossible, both because of hostility to this art within Congress and because the foreign intellectuals targeted by such traveling exhibitions would have resisted had they known of direct promotion by the CIA. ‘It had’, said Tom Braden, ‘to be covert because it would have been turned down if it had been put to a vote in a democracy. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret.’25 Whether or not the exhibition I saw in Melbourne in 1967 was sponsored indirectly by the CIA I have no idea (the Congress for Cultural Freedom was closed down in 1979).26 Such sponsorship is however, probable, since the show was sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art’s International Council, under the patronage of the United States Ambassador, with the assistance of the Commonwealth Government. The same exhibition was taken to Japan and India. Only historical distance could uncover the historical forces that moved Abstract Expressionism to such prominence. In 1967 the citizens of Melbourne, those who promoted and those who

30

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

derided this show, were all necessarily unaware of the deeper forces behind the exhibition. In retrospect, however, we can see that this art was perfect for its moment. It would have had to have been invented had it not existed. It was capable of being invested with the West’s essential Cold War message: freedom and initiative. It could not have been more radically opposed aesthetically to Soviet Realism. And it brought enormous cultural capital to the United States, shifting the centre of gravity in the Western art market decisively from Paris to New York, a translatio studii that marked the decisive post-war translatio imperii.27 It was intensely political because it promoted the artist’s freedom, and yet it was intensely quietist because it promoted nothing but the artist’s Freedom. Thus the optimistic, if covertly driven, Enlightenment placing. There is, however, an alternative, pessimistic, Romantic reading of Abstract Painting. Ad Reinhardt’s work was, despite his own disclaimers about his art not being about anything, taken up as fit to bear the force of the Holocaust. In 1966–7, the same year as the Melbourne show,28 the Jewish Museum in New York presented an entire room of repeated black squares by Reinhardt. So far from being a celebration of the Enlightenment and of liberty, this context repeatedly signals the defeat of the Enlightenment and, possibly, of religion itself. So far from being classical paintings, cool and controlled by rational geometries, they become paintings of the terrible sublime, of what Conrad calls the ‘sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror’.29 The repetitiveness of the opaque darkness beggars the confidence of the square’s geometry: each time we aim for the rational, this exhibition declares, we end up faced with a ‘darkness, which the blind do see’. For, as we brood on the Holocaust, down goes each cultural norm that might project a culture onto and into the future, whether it be a culture of religion or of the Enlightenment: down they all go into a black pit of appalled and reverential silence. All the products of culture potentially become the instruments

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

31

7. Ad Reinhardt, Black paintings. Installation at the Jewish Museum, New York, November 23, 1966–15 January 1967. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Ad Reinhardt/q ARS, New York. Photo: The Jewish Museum, NY/Art Resource, NY.

of barbarism.30 All that remains is memory of an unspeakable catastrophe. All that remains are the repetitive gestures of the near paralyzed, responding to the unanswerable, forever unfulfillable claims of past victims. The Holocaust, that is, threatens to kill historical thinking for the best reasons, as we try to honour it with remembrance. Only abstraction—and bleak, black, blank, abstraction at that—could possibly express the depth of reverence, along with the appalled sense of history having ended. Abstraction, by this account, was not in any way celebratory; it was instead an antilyrical, penitential form, abjuring all the resources of culture that would otherwise disguise cultural and spiritual defeat.31 Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross (National Gallery of Art, Washington), painted between 1958 and 1966, were subtitled ‘lema sabachthani?’ (‘why hast thou forsaken me?’).32

32

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

Whether or not certain Abstract Expressionist painters can be described as working within a specifically Jewish tradition is not my task here. Anthony Julius’ recent, sprightly and stimulating book denies it.33 It’s true that some of the painters involved (Newman and Rothko, for example) were secular Jews; and many of the titles by Newman signal a Jewish affiliation, such as Abraham, Joshua, and Covenant. Reinhardt himself was born into a Lutheran tradition, and was influenced by traditions of Christian mysticism.34 Regardless of confessional affiliation or tradition, nonetheless, Reinhardt’s paintings were used to express the terrible sublime of the twentieth-century Jewish experience, just as they were used to express an Enlightenment tradition. Abstraction, by its nature, lends itself to the power of the beholder’s eye.35 III At this point we could attempt to adjudicate between the eyes of these beholders—between a rationalist, Enlightenment reading on the one hand and a sublime, penitential, Romantic reading on the other. We might look to Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and argue that, faced with that flattening, choices between the promises of technology and the terrible sublime, between the Enlightenment and the end of history, each become in any case indistinguishable (Figure 8).36 Rather than remaining in that middle distance from Abstract Painting, of immediate historical circumstance, let us instead step back to a longer historical perspective. I suggest we practise what might be described as cultural etymology—a practice of historical investigation that assumes, as a hypothesis, that artefacts carry their secrets embedded in their form. The very fact that the painting offers itself up to two such opposed, competing models from within its near immediate environment suggests that we need to find our bearings by a longer historical view of this work. I argue that the painting is distinctive of a certain, repetitive form of iconoclastic modernity, of a kind originating in the sixteenth century. The colourless flat plane has much deeper sources

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

33

8. Hiroshima, after the dropping of the atomic bomb in September, 1945. National Archives, United States. Public domain.

than the Enlightenment or than the twentieth century; the source of the flat picture plane lies particularly in an earlier form of modernism, that of Puritan iconoclasm. In making deeper connections between Abstract Expressionism and earlier forms of, for the most part, Protestant iconoclasm, one might emphasize the similar social relations around and informing both. In both cases a small group of clerical elect proclaim the message of liberty; the elite group effects that message by repudiating the art of the naive and superstitious. As Anthony Julius has recently argued, defenders of Abstract Expressionism presented themselves as an elite promoting liberty, who

34

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

claimed an antinomian ‘exemption from legal regulation or moral censure’.37 This approach could, however, very easily lead to trivial and superficial similarities. Instead of pursuing external parallels between Abstract Expressionism and earlier elitist iconoclastic movements, I’ll look instead to the more telling and fertile area of formal categories. I argue that Abstract Art is, in the way of both Mosaic and Protestant textuality, specifically modern and necessarily iconoclastic. The apparent opposition between an optimistic Classicism and a pessimistic Romanticism gives way to deeper, iconoclastic connections of many Western modernities. In particular, I focus on the flatness of the abstract surface as the cardinal sign of modernity. That flatness is a sign of non-mediation with the absolute; this is not democratic art, since its flat, non-representational surface is the sign of a flat, non-representative symbolic order. It’s the sign of equality before the absolute. This is a painting of non-representation, in all three senses: no re-presenting the past, no intercession, no images. In sum, no representation, or, if we bear in mind the barely discernable Greek cross, representation at the point of evanescence. I begin with some contemporary parallels by way of focusing the issue of flatness, and by way of finding our way back into the deeper past. Let us consider Barnett Newman’s Abraham, painted in 1949 (Figure 9). The painting has obvious connections with Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting. It’s almost entirely black, with one geometrical shape distinguishing areas of blackness on the surface from others. Like the Reinhardt images, it rejects tradition by its repudiation of almost all the resources of Western painting: natural forms, represented forms, and colour. Those manifold repudiations imply an anti-rhetorical conception of painting: this is universalist, even as it repudiates what Newman calls the ‘impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth . . . that have been the devices of Western European painting’.38

9. Barnett Newman, Abraham (1949), Museum of Modern Art, New York. Oil on canvas, 210.2 cm  87.7 cm. Philip Johnson Fund. Reproduced by permission q 2009 The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

36

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

Above all, and this is what I want especially to focus on, it rejects depth, and promotes near evenness. There are minor gradations of colour intensity along the vertical axis of this painting: the upper and lower reaches of the column are less easily distinguished from the surrounding black than the middle section. But if there are minor distinctions of colour intensity on this surface, the surface itself is unremitting in its flatness. Even if we read the vertical strip as laid on the black background, the terms ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ threaten to evanesce even as we use them. The strip is almost as accurately redescribed as a black continuity with the rest of the picture plane, a continuity interrupted by two very fine white lines. The distinctive formal features of Abraham come more sharply into focus if we compare it with the work of a painter whose kind of painting was excluded by Cold War cultural warriors from the modernist canon, Edward Hopper.39 His New York Movie (1939) (Figure 10) actually has many of the formal features of the Newman image, most notably the central, totemic pole of the movie house that divides the image, itself juxtaposed with a broad vertical strip of almost identically coloured black space to its right. One might also notice the colourless space of the flat screen to the left of the image. Like the Newman image, Hopper also uses the ‘sad and fuscous colours’ recommended by Edmund Burke for images of the sublime.40 Those formal similarities with Abraham having been noticed, the image is otherwise quite different formally: the imagined space is recessive, descending away from us towards the cinema screen to the left, and ascending away from us up the stairs, behind the curtains. Unlike Abraham, it has depths. New York Movie suggests the consolations of religious vision and the dangers of idolatry: the half-opened curtain evokes an ancient tradition of the veil of the mysteries,41 opening onto the ascesis of illumination, whereas the central pole evokes the totemic pole of idolatry. These religious possibilities are,

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

37

10. Edward Hopper, New York Movie (1939). Oil on canvas, 81.9 cm  101.9 cm. Given anonymously (396 1941). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reproduced by permission q The Museum of Modern Art, licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

however, resolutely played down: the pole is made of stucco, just as the potential idolaters in thrall to the new images on the flat screen are doing nothing more than innocently watching a film, alone. The angelic, slightly larger-than-life usherette’s torch will not point through to the space beyond the veil of the mysteries. The overall effect is one of infinite grief, quiet alienation, and disenchantment. The promise of intercession by the image, and of an illumination beyond the image, up those stairs, has somehow been neutralized. We are left instead with the pose of static Melancholia, chin resting disconsolately on the folded palm. The Hopper image has areas of both depth and flatness; the depth comments on the flatness. Clement Greenberg, the gifted critic who best described the formal qualities of Abstract Expressionism, focused on the flatness of the picture plane as the distinguishing

38

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

formal characteristic of this movement. In his famous essay ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, written in 1940, Greenberg rightly says that the history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance consists chiefly in the flat picture plane’s denial of efforts to ‘hole through’ it for realistic perspectival space . . . The picture plane grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the real and material plane which is the actual surface of the canvas.42

This is a perfect description of the plane of Newman’s Abraham. Why should this formal feature be the defining feature of so many Abstract Expressionist paintings, so different in many other respects? And why should the cardinal formal feature of flatness have such resonance? Greenberg’s own description is purely formal, but even that formal description suggests the cultural stakes involved in the maintenance of the flat plane: ‘A vibrating tension is set up’, says Greenberg, as the objects struggle to maintain their volume against the tendency of the real picture plane to re-assert its material flatness and crush them to silhouettes. In a further stage realistic space cracks and splinters into flat planes which come forward, parallel to the plane surface.

Greenberg’s revealing language in this passage about what happens on the picture plane evokes the violence of iconoclasm: volume is ‘crushed’; the realistic space ‘cracks and splinters’; the advance of the picture’s actual surface has the effect of ‘slamming the various planes together’; the overall effect of flattening is ‘the destruction of realistic pictorial space’.43 This account of vibration, struggle to retain volume, iconoclastic crushing, slamming and splintering, is an accurate prediction of what the strip in Newman’s Abraham, painted nine years later than Greenberg’s essay, is doing. But what are the larger cultural stakes in this formal vibration and struggle? Why should a drama of evenness, flatness, and crushing excite our awe?

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

39

A central vertical strip is a recurrent feature of Newman’s paintings. Unlike Rothko’s primarily horizontal lines, Newman’s are insistently vertical. The simplest interpretation of them is that they evoke the simple archaic art, including totem poles, that both Rothko and Newman claimed as inspirations for their own art (and, indeed, for Broken Obelisk, which Newman produced between 1963 and 1967 (Frontispiece)).44 Given the title of this painting, however, Abraham, one is permitted to introduce another ‘archaic’ background, that of Abraham the iconoclast. The suggestion that Abraham repudiated the polytheism of his father Terah is minute in the Hebrew scriptures.45 The hint is, however, fully developed into iconoclastic narratives in Midrashic materials that Newman seems likely to have known.46 In these narratives Abraham’s father Terah is the priest or sculptor of three-dimensional statues of Mesopotamian gods, whereas his son Abraham variously mocks or smashes the statues.47 In Newman’s painting, as in Broken Obelisk, the central pole is evocative of the ‘sacred pillars’ and ‘poles’ of Canaanite religions that are repeatedly broken down in the Book of Kings by the iconoclastic kings Hezekiah and Josiah.48 The resonance with those biblical narratives is especially powerful, it seems to me, precisely given what Greenberg calls the ‘vibrating tension’ provoked as the ‘objects struggle to maintain their volume against the tendency of the real picture plane to re-assert its material flatness’. That struggle, I suggest, is the last, faint gasp of the idolatrous three-dimensional image. But why, I repeat, might this iconoclastic drama, a drama whose antagonists are flatness versus depth, evenness versus concentrations, be so resonant for American modernity? Here I suggest that this drama of spatial distribution is the fundamental drama of modernity, whether it take the form of Calvinist spirituality or egalitarian politics. These are cultures in which equality must be symbolized at every turn, whether that equality be spiritual or political. The even distribution of spiritual and/or political entitlement across extensive space necessitates both the

40

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

iconoclasm and the lack of depth. An image, and especially a totemic pole, concentrates energy in one place at the expense of others, just as depth hierarchizes space. The iconoclasm clears the concentrated representations and intercessors of the past order, while the flat, even distributions proclaim equality of relation between viewer and absolute. These images, like the unambiguous textuality of modernity, have nothing to hide; there are no hidden depths (however much Reinhardt’s black recalls depth), and no irresistible concentrations of energy across the flat plane (however much Reinhardt’s cross faintly recalls such concentration).49 This spatial drama replicates a modernist aesthetic built deep into Anglo-American modernity. We have moved northwards in space and backwards in time from Melbourne to the Museum of Modern Art; I now propose moving further north and further backwards in time, to seventeenth-century Massachusetts. For we can see the spiritual form of this drama, both as iconoclasm and depthlessness, most thoroughly realized in the way the Puritan churches of New England manage space. The Protestant tradition is historically uneasy with both historical tradition and spatial concentration: historical continuities imply tradition and therefore obfuscating accretion on a Word to which nothing must be added or from which nothing must be subtracted.50 Spatial concentration implies hierarchized, not to say hieratic concentrations of both expertise and spiritual power. Sixteenth-century evangelical revolutionaries of many stripes instituted a Donatist concept of an invisible, ideal, transcendent Church of the Elect at the heart of their ecclesiology. A cardinal sign of this True Church was privative: the Church was placeless. Once instituted, the True Church must always be in suspicious flight from any material instantiations the Church might take. In the first instance, it must take flight from the material geographies of the saints. Those pilgrimage sites, and their attendant material relics, offer jurisdictions that compete with the true, placeless Church. Those sites imply that spiritual energy is more intensely compacted in one place than another. In the True Church, by

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

41

contrast, spiritual jurisdiction must be evenly dispersed across a single, unbroken jurisdiction. This purist, exclusivist account of the Church, never to be confused with any material instantiation the Church might have, produced an insistent, perhaps embarrassing, yet predictable question: where is the Church? Proto-Protestant and Protestant movements in England had, since the late fourteenth century, answered that question with a placeless, literally ‘u-topian’ account of where the True Church was located.51 The Westminster Assembly, convened ‘with a charge to advise parliament on religious matters’,52 offers a clear and classic example in its influential Confession of 1646. That Confession expresses a deep and abiding commitment to ecclesiological placelessness: Neither prayer, nor any other part of religious worship is, now under the gospel, either tied unto, or made more acceptable by, any place in which it is performed, or towards which it is directed: but God is to be worshipped everywhere in spirit and truth.53

This evangelical refusal to locate the Church in one place more than another had an immediate context, of legislated iconoclasm, in the 1640s, designed as it was to obliterate special places in which spiritual charisma was more intensely concentrated than others.54 Evangelical refusal to locate the Church set the True Church in flight from any material instantiation it might take. That flight included a flight to New England, where, only three years after the Westminster Confession, Thomas Shepard wrote in 1649 that ‘Under the New Testament, all places . . . are equally holy.’55 That New England commitment to spiritual homogeneity across space involved a refusal to use the very word ‘Church’, since this word implied that one place was more spiritual than another.56 However much New England Puritans might have tried to establish what one historian has called ‘a time and space of homogenous sanctity’,57 the very impulse to do that initiated a permanent revolution of space, a permanent relocation of the True Church

42

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

to another, ideal place, somewhere else. Thus Joshua Scottow, writing in New England as soon as 1628, already deplored the collapse of the transplanted Church: the ‘Churches of old, and late’, he wrote, ‘have degenerated into anarchy, or confusion, or else given themselves up, unto the dominion of some prelatical teachers to rule at pleasure, which was the poison and bane of other primitive churches.’ The upshot of this deep logic of permanent, locational supercession is a paradoxically utopian, no-place location of the Church. By this logic, here is not here: ‘Corn-fields, orchards, Streets inhabited, and a place of merchandise’, wrote Scottow, ‘cannot denominate New England . . . NEW ENGLAND is not to be found in NEW ENGLAND, nor BOSTON in BOSTON.’58 Ideal place takes flight from material place, ideal Church from material Church. Disgust at perceived spiritual corruption generates renewed commitment to the True Church, and so, in this case, drives a wedge between two Bostons, one material, one ideal. Homogeneity of spiritual place also determined, as it had to, the interior space of the meeting house and its basilica-like successor (the interior disposition of churches always being an especially revealing cultural index).59 The pre-Reformation church was divided in many ways, but principally between the nave for the laity and the chancel for the clerisy. Sacramental mystery was concentrated in the altar at the east end of the church, or the separate altars of the ambulatory behind the high altar. Spiritual charisma was also concentrated in the crypt, under the high altar, in which the relics of the patron saint, no representations but the real thing, were preserved (e.g. Figure 11). In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English parish churches and cathedrals, this highly subdivided set of spaces was subject to homogenization. The altar table moved back and forth, turning as it went, between the chancel arch and the far east-end, depending on the current regime’s belief, or lack of belief, in special places. Lack of belief in special places also determined the fate of altar rails and chancel steps, by removing and levelling them.60

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

43

11. Floor plan, Peterborough Cathedral, begun 1118; reproduced from Die kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes: historisch und systematisch dargestellt, by G. Dehio and G. von Bezold (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1887–1901), Plate 81; Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library.

The architecture of both New England meeting house and, subsequently, the basilica-like church, built from the 1730s, resolved that spatial argument, by deleting the recession of the chancel altogether. What had been a recessed space comes forward to create a flat wall faced by the congregation. The geometrical symmetry and colourlessness of New England churches effaced any possibility of recessive places, or any places set aside, except the pulpit. If recession of any kind remained, it consisted of a few inches of depth, the last trace of the space of mystery, into which writing, in the form of the Decalogue, is set. Calvinist preference for flat over ‘protruberant’ representations (‘The worse and more flat the work is, the less danger there is of its abuse’, according to Thomas Tenison, in his tract On idolatry (1678)) find expression in the flat interior surfaces of Calvinist buildings.61 Even distributions across of space, completely devoid of images; entirely white walls; transparent, imageless glass; and an often purely symmetrical floor plan:62 all these features insist on the homogenization of space. They also insist on the denial of one place’s charisma, unless that one place be the whole place, unrepresentable to itself. These are buildings in flight from themselves (e.g. Figures 12–14). Dramas of history and space are, then, played out within the forms of Puritan ecclesiastical architecture.63 Many Abstract

44

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

12. Congregational Church, South Canaan, Connecticut. Church Interior (1804), photographed by E. W. Hutchinson. Courtesy of Franklin Trask Library, Andover Newton Theological School and the American Theological Library Association (ALTA).

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

45

13. Unitarian Church, Interior; Duxbury MA, 1840; photograph by Jon Lehman, reproduced with permission of First Parish Church Unitarian Universalist of Duxbury.

14. 1730 pew plan, Old South Meeting House, Boston, reproduced with permission from An Architectural History of the Old South Meeting House, published by the Old South Association, Boston, MA, 1995.

46

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

15. Pulpit Eye and Elder Bench; preserved until mid-nineteenth century. Reproduced from David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 123; reproduced by permission of the artist, Jennifer Brody; by David Hackett Fischer; and by Oxford University Press Inc.

Expressionist paintings replay, I suggest, that spatial drama of Calvinist ecclesiastical architecture. We might notice one last touch to the similarity: just as I suggested that we become looked at as we are denied the depth and concentration of looking ourselves, sometimes the one image that did survive in the Puritan church was the painted eye of surveillance, staring out at the congregation (Figure 15).64 If we do become aware of ourselves being looked at by the austerity of an abstract painting, this is unquestionably an experience of self-consciousness. More deeply, it is what both cultural polemicists and historians have celebrated as the birth of equality. In this they are right, though they mistake the precise nature of the equality: individuals become aware of their equality,

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

47

and of themselves, precisely as a transcendent force rises forbiddingly, staring them in the face: we’re all equal confronted by that power. Such equality is defined by, though etiolates, horizontal identities in the face of a power that forever transcends any image. This is the kind of equality of which Tocqueville was acutely conscious in the second volume of his De la de´mocratie en Ame´rique (1840), arguing as he did that equality is necessarily measured in relation to an external source of power. It was, he says, the absolutist kings of Europe who were most assiduous to reduce difference among their subjects.65 It is for this reason that Tocqueville sees despotism as a close cousin of democracy, and declares that despotism will most easily establish itself among democratic peoples.66 This is an equality formed by convergent vertical relations, an equality that establishes even as it weakens horizontal relations. If Abstract Expressionism (of the Newman and Reinhardt kind, at least) is a democratic art, as the CIA would have had us believe, it is an art on the edge of democracy, playing a drama of equality, but an equality produced by our equidistance from a single, unmediated, nonrepresented source of power. It plays out a sombre drama of the disappearance of the image, of intercession and, therefore, of representation. Political or religious, Enlightened or Romantic, classical or sublime, optimistic or pessimistic: none of these oppositions need detain us for long with Abstract Expressionism, once we consider it from a mediated, historical distance. This often beautiful and unquestionably powerful art plays out, I suggest, the profound cultural dramas of American modernity, a modernity in which equality before an absolute power necessitates abstraction, the abolition of spatial depth, and of images themselves. These paintings bid farewell to representation. The only standard opposition that survives this argument is whether these paintings are about anything. It’s true that they were for the most part absorbed within the institutions of the Enlightenment, the galleries and secular spaces for which art is

48

Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and MoMA

autonomous. Despite that placing, they are most certainly about something, even as some of the artists, such as Reinhardt, deny that: they are about representation, intercession, and mediation at vanishing point. The Enlightenment museum neutralizes the full force of the image; but the new puritan temple of MoMA (see frontispiece) reactivates the image’s numinous power. It does so through repeated acts of iconoclasm, of crushing and flattening the image across an almost entirely even plane. The broken obelisks of Newman, the written-over surfaces of Twomby, the flat, even, colourless dispersals of Reinhardt: all are set in the space of vast white walls and transparent windows of the Enlightenment museum, which resembles nothing so much as the Puritan temple. That temple-cum-museum replays the traumas of the everunfinished business of iconoclasm, of the ceaseless process of crushing volume. The museum performs abstraction even as it displays abstraction on its walls.67 As it does so, it resacralizes the image. The Museum of Modern Art, no less than the museum of modern art, thereby promises to intercede for us even as it ceaselessly disavows the image’s status as representation. The Enlightenment museum rehearses the traumas of the Puritan temple. Both repudiate the regressive, medieval barbarism of the image as intercessor. Abstract Expressionism, no less than the puritan museum for which it was destined, are in part derived from Puritan iconoclasm and flattening. That is one element of the story of how we came to look at black squares. To understand that history more deeply we need, however, to go back to England and back to the fifteenth into the sixteenth centuries. For the story of modern AngloAmerican iconoclasm begins then.

chapter 2

Learn to Die Late Medieval English Images before the Law

H

OW, then, did we end up looking at those black paintings in the museum? The Puritan cultures of New England explain the deeper story in part. The following three chapters go yet deeper. They move back from the United States to England. I engage in what I have called cultural etymology, looking for recognitions between present and past obscured by the passage of time and the urgency of the present. In Anglo-American cultural history, a new chapter in the story starts in the early fifteenth century, when orthodox defenders of the religious image faced attack, for the first time in late medieval English history. I

Between 1412 and 1420 the Lancastrian poet John Lydgate produced his Troy Book, a text he translated from the Latin prose version of the Troy narrative (1287) composed by the Sicilian Guido de Columnis.1 In the course of narrating how the Greeks deliberated the wisdom of going to war with Troy, Guido has occasion to explicate the structure of pagan religion, and in particular the origin of idolatry, to his Christian readership. Lydgate follows him in this. The statue of Apollo on Delos, to which

50

Learn to Die

the Greeks make embassy, is particularly associated with prophecy. Apollo’s temple is described thus: And in his temple large, longe, and olde, Ther was a statue al of purid golde, Ful gret and highe, and of huge weighte, And therin was, thorugh the devels sleighte, A spirit unclene, be false illusioun, That yaf answere to every questioun— Nat the ydole, doumbe as stook or stoon. And thus the peple, deceyved everychon, Were by the fend brought in gret errour, To done worschip and swiche false honour, With sacrifise and cursed mawmentrie. And in this wyse began ydolatrie.2

[refined] [trickery] [gave] [stock] [every one]

[idolatry] [way]

This originary moment of idolatry occasions an excursus on the topic. Lydgate relates the history of idolatry as from a comfortable distance: idolatry is somewhere else. It’s characteristic of someone else’s primitive religion, and that practice has, happily, been superseded by a more civilized dispensation. As Lydgate says elsewhere, the definitional function of idolatry is to bring ‘folkes that be ffre’ into ‘servage’, or servitude.3 Here he looks back to pagan spiritual thralldom from the comfort of Christian liberty. The very form of Lydgate’s presentation implies cultural distance, since it is a mini-encyclopaedia, breaking his narrative and providing basic information about a benighted past. The most obvious sign of Lydgate’s distance is his account of euhemerism, the theory whereby the putative gods were, in fact, originally famous and powerful humans, with illicit pretension to divinity.4 He immediately accentuates the fact that most of the idols that pretend to be gods in fact represent humans. The Assyrian Ninus, for example, had a statue of his father Belus made, and forced his people to reverence it as a god. Euhemerism underlines the cool detachment of the Christian from pagan idols, for it is a way of simultaneously accounting for

Learn to Die

51

and neutralizing the ancient gods. It exactly follows the structure of later, Enlightenment ideology critique.5 It exposes, that is, a force that pretends to divinity. It shows that this force is instead a human artefact, the product of specific, and purely human interests and histories. Euhemerism has it both ways, recognizing and denying the value of the object. The idol’s pretension to divinity justifies the scholarly attention, whereas the exposure of humanness dismisses the god’s value by demoting it and its cult. Any statue, however much it may have divine pretensions, is, once exposed as merely human, culturally manageable. We contemplate the idol as from within the protected space of the museum. Lydgate’s sense of distance and detachment is also underlined by the passage immediately following, which relates the late medieval tradition of the classical idols spontaneously exploding at the birth of Christ (e.g. Figure 16).6 When Christ went to Egypt, he says, ‘Ther was non ydole upright myght stonde j But to-schiverede [shattered] unto pecis smale’ (2:5502–3). Once Christ came, idols lost their power through spontaneous iconoclasm. So either idols are fakes or they self-destructed, or both. As Lydgate looked back across Christian history, he was looking back across successive moments of the triumph of his own Christian culture; each stage of that cumulative triumph was marked by iconoclastic breaking of the old dispensation’s pantheon. The spontaneous breaking of the idols at Christ’s own infantile journey into Egypt replays Moses’ pulverization of the Golden Calf on the exodus from Egypt (Figure 17).7 The period of persecution is marked by refusal to worship idols (Figure 18).8 And the period of early Christian triumph as the official religion of the empire is marked by Christian iconoclasm of ancient, pagan art, both literal and metaphorical.9 So too was the inferiority of cultural competitors most luridly visible in their barbaric idolatry (Figure 19).10 All these moments, except perhaps the last, were very and comfortably distant from the early fifteenth century in England. The distance and detachment of the late medieval Christian, then, characterize Lydgate’s presentation of the classical pagan

52

Learn to Die

16. Limbourg Brothers, ‘Flight into Egypt’, The Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry (1405–1409), f. 63r. Manuscript, tempera and gold leaf on vellum. Reproduced by permission The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.1).

Learn to Die

53

17. ‘Moses breaking the tablets of the Law and rebuking worship of the Golden Calf ’, La Somme le Roi, late thirteenth century, London, British Library. Reproduced by permission Ó British Library Board, MS Add. 54180, f. 5v.

54

Learn to Die

18. Matthew Paris, Lives of St Alban, ‘St Alban refuses to Sacrifice to Apollo’, c.1250. Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS E.I.40, f. 34v. Reproduced by permission of the Board of Trinity College Dublin.

gods. He is dealing with a prior, benighted, distant, and superstitious dispensation, from whose error his own culture has been decisively liberated. On closer inspection, however, comfortable detachment is not the whole story in Lydgate’s text. The ancient statue speaks, and it gives authoritative prophecy. It can do this because it has been inhabited by ‘a spirit unclene’, who ventriloquizes the god’s

Learn to Die

55

19. ‘Indians Offering a Sacrifice to the Gods’, in Livres des Merveilles du Monde, Paris, c.1413. Bibliothe`que Nationale, MS fr. 2810, f. 185r. Reproduced by permission Bibliothe`que Nationale, Paris.

voice.11 Of course, as soon as Lydgate animates the idol, he takes care to de-animate it: the idol did not speak, since it was ‘doumbe as stock or stoon’. But speak it does, and it speaks prophecy, in exactly the same manner as the statue mentioned a few lines later, that of Assyrian Belus. These statues, compacted statements of dead, past error, are nonetheless vivacious and sensitive to the future. This vivacity is in fact the working assumption of Lydgate’s narrative, since representations of the pagan gods are motive forces in the narrative of the Trojan War. Consider, for example, this image of Venus’ shrine, surrounded by male violence (Figure 20). Insofar as we become engaged in the catastrophes of this narrative (which we do), we feel the moving power of idols. Lydgate’s presentation of the pagan gods does, then, admit a certain troubling vivacity into the dead ‘stok or stoon’. He nevertheless tries to write with the detachment of the encylopaedist about a previous, definitively repudiated cultural dispensation. Even as Lydgate wrote, however, the very terms of his account of pagan worship had already been targeted at what Lydgate took

56

Learn to Die

20. John Lydgate, Troy Book (1412–1420), Helen sees Paris, with Shrine of Venus. Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS 1, f. 50r (c.1420–35). Reproduced by courtesy of the University Librarian and Director, The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester.

Learn to Die

57

to be his own, orthodox, Christian practice, for Lydgate is writing just after the very beginning of the Christian iconoclastic tradition in England. John Wyclif (d. 1384), the university theologian who inspired the Lollard movement, had gently questioned images and their attendant idolatry, in Latin, as early as 1375.12 Soon after, since at least the last decade of the fourteenth century, Lollardy, the English proto-Protestant sect that rose to prominence between 1390 and 1420, had vigorously attacked images in the vernacular.13 Images were clearly a high profile issue in the detection of heresy. Thus Henry Knighton, writing earlier than 1396, distinguished Lollard heresy primarily by reference to rejection of images: ‘it was’, he says, ‘characteristic of that sect of Lollards that they hated and inveighed against images, and preached that they were idols, and spurned them as mere simulacra.’14 Knighton refers more than once to the ‘doctrines’ of the Lollards; of these doctrines, however, we hear but one: rejection of images, by way of introducing the striking narrative of two iconoclastic Lollards of Leicester who, as early as 1382, burned an image of St Katharine, in a mock martyrdom, to prepare some soup.15 The initial attacks, made by Wyclif in Latin, and by others in the vernacular, were moderate: images are unnecessary but permissible, as long as they were not worshipped. That backhanded defence is, however, inevitably the sign of a more aggressive attack about to come. For as soon as a potential iconoclast says that images are permissible as long as they are not subject to worship, he will start imputing acts of worship to the naive, into whose minds he feels confident to look (clerical X-ray vision into the minds of the credulous is the principal constant of iconoclastic practice). By 1395, The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, for example, declares that the prayers made to ‘deve ymages of tre and of ston, ben ner of kin to ydolatrie’ [‘deaf images of tree and stone are closely related to idolatry’]. The learned Lollard author acerbically evokes, in order to invert, St Gregory’s famous dictum about images being books for the illiterate: deaf images of tree

Learn to Die

58

and stone are, he asserts, ‘forbodin ymagerie’, that is ‘a bok of errour to the lewid puple’ [‘a book of error to the unlearned’].16 What especially attracted the ire of Lollard iconomachs was the same argument that prompted the Taliban to blow up the Bamiyan statues six hundred years later: both Lollards and the Taliban register an intense rivalry between warm, suffering flesh and cold but voracious stone. Idolized objects are felt to absorb the care and tenderness that should by rights go to suffering humans. The dead, false images made by human hand are receiving the dues of the poor, who are the starving, true, living image of God. The images are dead, but they consume the sustenance of the living.17 One early fifteenth-century Lollard writer, for example, takes his cue from Psalm 115:4–8, writing about the idols of surrounding peoples. This Psalm, a stand-by for Christian iconoclasts, reads thus: 4

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. 5They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not: 6 They have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not: 7They have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they walk not: neither speak they through their throat. 8They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.

Taking his cue from this insistent denial of vivacity, the Lollard writer emphasizes the deadness of images, even as they are being treated as if alive: they neither thirst or experience hunger, neither feel cold nor suffer disease, ‘for they may not feel, nor see, nor hear, nor speak, nor look, nor help any man of any disease’.18 At this point he goes one further than the biblical source, by attributing deadly voracity to the images, since they eat the food of the poor. Those who sustain the images should instead be nurturing the ‘meek true poor man that is the true image of God’. This is the clearest Lollard emphasis, that the images are definitively dead matter. On the other hand, the Lollard attacks, as with Lydgate, also recognize a certain liveliness. For a start, as we have just seen, the

Learn to Die

59

dead idols are strangely voracious. Secondly, they are potentially inhabited by the devil. The Lollard William Thorpe was, by his account, interrogated by Archbishop Thomas Arundel (probably before 1407). Among the many points on which Arundel tests Thorpe, he presses him about the miracles reported to have occurred at sites of especially famous images of the Virgin. Thorpe charged that such miracles were diabolical: on account of human unfaithfulness, the ‘fend [devil] hath power for to worche manye of these miraclis that now be done in siche [such] placis’.19 At her trial for heresy in 1429, the Lollard Margery Baxter declared that demons had entered images in churches; hiding within the images, these demons lured the people into idolatry.20 Already by the time Lydgate wrote soon after 1412, then, the intellectual arsenal upon which he had drawn to attack pagan idolatry was being redeployed against Christian idolatry. The highest profile set of censorship regulations in Lydgate’s immediate context, the draconian Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel (1409), gave primacy to textual and sacramental issues; article 9, however, refers to images as part of a general interdiction on disputing ‘established articles of the Church’. Let no one teach contrary to the determination of the Church, ‘especially about the adoration of the glorious cross, of images, the veneration of saints, or pilgrimages to places, or their relics’. The cross and images of the saints are to be duly honored, as by custom, with ‘processions, genuflections, bowings down, burning incense, embraces, offerings, kindling of lights and pilgrimages’.21 Lydgate’s material on pagan idolatry, then, which would have seemed innocuous twenty-five years before 1412, was now potentially more dangerous, since orthodox attack on pagan idolatry supplied ammunition for Lollard attack on Christian practice. In attacking contemporary idolatry, Lollards are of course unable to speak with detached, encyclopaedic distance about a cultural system well passed. They do nevertheless share one crucial similarity with Lydgate’s account of pagan idolatry: like Lydgate, they are undecided about whether the images are dead

60

Learn to Die

or alive. The images are dead matter, but they do, unsettlingly, act as if they were alive. This is the key issue that we will consider across this chapter: whether images are alive, and whether their vivacity preserves the pathological past. The year 1538 marks the first iconoclastic legislation in England. I look to the fate of the image from the beginning of the fifteenth century up to and across the legislation of 1538, and then up to 1563, the date of the most influential statement of state iconoclasm. Across this period we can observe profound indecision about whether images are alive. And precisely because images are, as we shall see, the lightning rods of historical consciousness, fifteenthcentury images and ‘idols’ make spectacular shows of vivacity. Not only that, but, as an especially sensitive historical index, as symptoms of culture, images point to their own demise. One way or another, fifteenth-century images thereby prophesy their fate at the hands of iconoclasts from the late 1530s. When Lydgate characterizes the dead pagan idols as curiously alive and certainly prophetic, he unwittingly defines the status of the Christian image in fifteenth-century England. Fifteenth-century images are, I argue, practising a kind of ars moriendi, learning to die, well before the first iconoclastic law of 1538.22 In order to understand the agonies of the fifteenth-century religious image, we need first to look directly to the sixteenthcentury death sentence and attempted burial. In the next two sections I sketch, respectively, the iconoclastic legislation, and the historiographical challenges of that legislation. I then return in my final two sections to the fifteenth century image, learning to die. II First, then, a brief sketch of the sixteenth-century legislation and its challenges. The legislative story is simply recounted, concentrated as it is in the twenty-three-year span between 1536 and

Learn to Die

61

1559.23 Already in Henry’s 1536 Injunctions to Bishops, priests were prohibited from showing ‘any images, relics, or miracles for any superstition or lucre’.24 By 1538 the prohibition was for the first time iconoclastic: all visible cult of the saints before their images was forbidden, and all images ‘abused with pilgrimages or offerings . . . ye shall, for avoiding that most detestable sin of idolatry, forthwith take down and delay [destroy]’.25 Legislation of this kind has a fatal weakness, since it confidently assumes the ease of X-ray vision with which the bishop can see into the minds of those who might be idolatrous. So that first injunction was, needless to say, followed up by two more. By 1547, at the very beginning of Edward VI’s reign, the reign that was to introduce the purifying iconoclasm of the boy king Josiah, Archbishop Cranmer frankly declared how difficult it had proved to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate images: ‘in almost every place is contention for images, whether they have been abused or not.’ The simple solution is that ‘all the images remaining in any church or chapel . . . be removed and taken away’.26 This, too, evidently proved inadequate, since the fully fledged Edwardian iconoclastic programme of 1550 plainly declares, by statute, that parsons having ‘anye images of stone tymbre allebaster or earthe graven carved or paynted’, shall ‘deface and destroye or cause to be defaced and destroyed the same images and everie of them’.27 That Edwardian iconoclasm is celebrated in, for example, the leading image of Foxe’s account of Edward VI, as if it characterized the entire reign (Figure 21). The Elizabethan articles and injunctions of 1559 are, it’s true, more nuanced with, and tolerant of, some images than the Edwardian statute. The nuance is limited, though, since the Elizabethan articles did direct bishops to enquire of their parish clergy as to whether they had ‘removed, abolished and destroyed’ ‘all images, shrines . . . pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned and false miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition’.28 What challenges did the legislation of 1536–59 face? PreEnlightenment, the religious image was much more intimately

62

Learn to Die

21. ‘King Edward delivering the Bible to the Prelates’, in John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London, 1570), 2.1483. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Learn to Die

63

and evidently connected to sources of salvation and damnation. It was, therefore, much more potentially vulnerable. The two most subtle pre-Reformation English defenders of the image in the vernacular, Reginald Pecock in the 1440s and Thomas More in the late 1520s, both defend the image in the context of a larger set of practices: they defend the image as they defend pilgrimage, relics, miracles, and the adoration of saints. Images are, that is, part of a larger system of travel, religious geography, intercession, the miraculous, memory, money, and salvation (the system, we might note in passing, of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). The very position of the religious images defended by Pecock and More itself declares their place deep set in the structure of a culture. These images were not portable, private, or contained within the culturally hygienic museum. They were, instead, immobile, public, and set deep within the material fabric of ecclesiastical buildings. Of course Pecock and More were writing in a period of the proliferation of the private, mobile, devotional image, which may well have provoked anxieties about all images; their defences of the image are, however, directed to public, cultic representations.29 So pre-Reformation understanding of images extends over a much wider discursive field than does post-Reformation thinking, in what recent art historians have called ‘the era of Art’.30 We can see the same logic in reverse, when we look to evangelical repudiation of images. The way sixteenth-century evangelicals use the language of idolatry declares the wide field across which the image is understood to operate. Through a powerful logic of metonymy, or association, the language used of images (and in particular the word ‘idolatry’) spreads rapidly across a range of cultic practices not intrinsically related to visuality. In that culture of the Word and the Word alone, all unwritten verities were by definition idolatrous. The sheer anger and violence visited on the image in the sixteenth century must in part be explicable by the deep filiations of image with many other, non-visual practices.

64

Learn to Die

Thus John Bale’s agit-prop play God’s Promises, written in the 1530s, has God the Father declare that he hates ‘the vyce of ydolatrye’ above all, even if he should ‘suffer all other vyllanye’.31 Israel (a code for Catholic England in these plays), is ‘given all to superstycyons’; the Israelite nation ‘provoketh me to hate by their ydolatryes’. Idolatrous practice is by no means restricted to visual enslavement; in Bale’s plays it extends to Israel’s ‘offerynges’, to, as God says, ‘your fastes and your solemnyte. j For your tradycyons my wayes ye set apart. j Your workes are in vayne: I hate them from the hart’.32 So a whole range of cultic and penitential practices, including, of course, the Eucharist, is redescribed as idolatry. In evangelical polemic more generally, idolatry is the principal and most capacious charge leveled against ‘tradition’, itself shorthand for the entire panoply of non-scriptural Catholic practice. The charge of idolatry rapidly extends, rhizome-like, everywhere, across the entire range of cultic practice and into the psyche. As William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) says of any good intention not grounded in the written Law: ‘Serve God as he hath appointed thee and not with thy good intent and good zeal . . . God requireth obedience unto his word and abhoreth all good intents and good zeals which are without God’s word. For they are nothing else than plain idolatry and worshiping of false gods.’33 Historically considered, then, the question of images is evidently uncontainable within the realm of art history. Understanding the function of the visual clearly entails a readiness to understand the way in which visual experience is embedded in, and comes to stand for, a wide set of practices that save or damn the soul. III The iconoclastic legislation, then, faced a profound challenge of uprooting an entire system of practices around, and dependent on, the image. Historically, though, the legislation faced an even greater challenge.

Learn to Die

65

Why, and how, was treatment of the image the source of historical differentiation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? The simplest answer to that question comes from defenders of the image. Images are containers of the past, means of activating memory.34 Thus Pecock, for example, expresses a powerful tradition of late medieval devotional writing that defends the image, and the imagination, by reference to the image’s power of nourishing memory. He argues that it is ‘licit and useful to have visual images, engraved and carved, of Christ’s person, made like his person, with the circumstances of his passion and death, designed to make us remember him, his passion and his death’.35 Just as we make images of men and women so that they are more often thought on and loved, so too ‘seable rememoratiif or minding signes and tokenes’ of God and his holy saints are also valuable.36 We can see this in practice in Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes (1412). Hoccleve produces a portrait of Chaucer with the admonition that his readers can find Chaucer’s dead ‘person’ again through the memory aid of the image (Figure 22): They that han of him lest thought and mynde By this peynture may ageyn hym fynde.37

Hoccleve defends the secular portrait of his absent master by reference to the way in which images of the saints also provoke salutary memory. That argument would, however, apply to books as well, which are also repositories of the past. For very much stronger arguments about the ways in which images contain and represent the past, we need to look at attackers of the image. In England, attackers of the image, in the period from the late fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, consistently regard the religious image as a sign of the following: of a whole and oppressive system; of popular superstition; and, above all, of the resurgence of different repudiated pasts, and especially the pagan past. All that Lydgate had comfortably suggested about pre-Christian pagan idolatry was leveled throughout this period, with a vengeance, against Christian idolatry.

66

Learn to Die

22. Thomas Hoccleve, Regement of Princes (1412), Portrait of Chaucer. Reproduced by permission Ó The British Library Board, MS Harley 4866, f. 88r (1410–20).

Learn to Die

67

We can see all these positions expressed in the highest profile, official attack on idolatry, the hugely influential Book of Homilies. First published in 1547, preachers throughout England were required to read from these sermons.38 The first Elizabethan edition, published in 1563, added a ‘Homily against the Peril of Idolatry’. Reading to congregations from this volume was required by Article 35 of the 39 Articles of the English Church (1563).39 The newly added homily came in three parts, and formed what was now the longest homily in the collection.40 Authorized by an official, state Church, the sermon posits idolatry or its alternative twin iconoclasm as the defining characteristic of all historical periods. A culture’s handling of the image becomes so fundamental, indeed, that it, more than anything else, determines or impedes historical progress. Historical periods, no less than historical success and failure, can easily be read off as a function of whether religious images were destroyed. The images do not merely stand for an oppressive system; they are that system. Just as the Hebrew Scriptures insistently identify enslavement and national weakness with idolatrous practice, so too does this homily reinstate the pressing need to break religious images as the central act in a programme of national strength and defence. The sermon is presented as a history of idolatry in the Church. From the beginning the writer makes it clear that image and idol are to be used as synonyms for all the pictures within a church.41 Idolatry determines the failure of the nation. Deuteronomy 4:25–8 is paraphrased to set the theme of the entire sermon: if you make to yourselves any similitude . . . ye shal quickly perishe out of the lande which you shall possesse, you shall not dwell in it any long tyme, but the Lorde wyll destroy you, and will scatter you amongest all nacions . . . and then shal you serve gods which are made with mans handes of wood and stone, which see not, nor heare not, neither eate, nor smell. (images 17–18)

The unavoidable primacy of the prohibition against idolatry is equally an unavoidable demand for iconoclasm. As long as the

68

Learn to Die

Israelites had no images, God was with them, and their enemies were unable to inflict damage upon them. Deuteronomy 7:5 is called to witness as a demand for iconoclasm of the altars of foreign idols: ‘Overturne their aulters and brake them to peeces, cut downe their groves, burn theyr images, for thou art an holy people unto the Lorde’ (image 21). Ezechiel 6:5 is cited to underline the fate of all those who ‘suffer them [idols] undestroyed among you’: God will himself become the iconoclast, breaking the idols and killing the idolatrous: ‘dead carcases of the children of Israell wyll I caste before theyr idols’ (image 22). This unsettling scheme drives an entire historiography in the Elizabethan sermon: Part 2 recounts the history of both Israel and of the Christian Church as a history of defeat and division caused by image weakness. The divided monarchy of Judah and Israel; the empire ruled from Constantinople internally weakened in the ninth century; and the Christian Church divided in the eleventh century: each was riven, and therefore profoundly weakened, as a result of image abuse, ‘upon occasion of ydols and ymages’ (image 43). Idolatry is the key to unlock and explain all historical catastrophes. The loss of Christian territories to the rise of Islam was itself caused by the abuse of images. All this ‘captivitie and moste miserable thraldome’ we ‘owe to our myghtie gods of golde and sylver, stocke and stone, in whose helpe and defence, where they can not helpe themselves, we have trusted so long’ (image 44). For this official writer, idolatry leads not merely to spiritual serfdom: it leads directly to actual captivity and enslavement. This sermon, then, is a kind of policy paper, with one simple theme: history is divisible according to religious image use, and national strength derives from the demolition of those images. The fundamental categories of historical thinking (i.e. historical periods) derive from what would now be called, mutatis mutandis, Art History. This is a plausible application of the historiography prescribed in Deuteronomy, and witnessed in the Book of Kings. Here the history of Israel’s strength and weakness is, respectively, a history of Israel’s destruction of, or idolatry before,

Learn to Die

69

the altars of strange gods. For the sixteenth-century author, that historiographical formula is also an entirely persuasive way of unlocking the code of English history. History is the history of the image, and historical freedom means demolition of the religious image. For this writer, religion was originally imageless.42 Purification of the Church is, therefore, necessarily an act of subtraction. The first and primary scriptural quotation cited by this text is Deuteronomy 4:2: ‘Ye shal put nothyng to the worde which I speake to you’ (image 17). Images and their resultant idolatry are, accordingly, always sure signs of historical backsliding into adjacent, pagan religions. Thus images of the saints are a resurgence of pagan polytheism, of local deities to whom ‘we attribute the defence of certain countries, spoilyng [depriving] God of his due honour’; they are nothing but ‘dii tutelares of the Gentyles idolaters, such as were Belus to the Babilonians and Assyrians’ (image 54). ‘We seme’, says the official author, to have learned our religion, not out of god’s worde, but out of the pagan poetes . . . And where one saint hath ymages in divers places, the same saint hath divers names thereof, most like to the Gentiles. When you heare of our lady of Walsingham, our lady of Ipswich, our lady of Wylsdon . . . what is it but an imitation of the Gentiles idolatours: Diana Agrotera, Diana Coriphea, Diana Ephesia. (image 56)

In keeping with the iconoclasts’ ideal of an imageless beginning, and in keeping with the iconoclasts’ hostility to place, to accretion, and to intercession, this writer demands that images be broken. Not to do so is to incur the violence of divine wrath for backsliding into a previous historical dispensation. To treat saints as intercessors is to act according to the ‘Gentiles idolatrious usage . . . as thogh he [God] did not heare, or shoulde be wery yf he did all alone’ (image 56). Images are idols and idols represent the resurgent and debilitating captivity of the old cultural order.

70

Learn to Die

Given the intimate connection of image use and historical dispensations, then, images must be destroyed as a matter of urgent national security: idolatry is not at all a ‘thing indifferent’ (image 53). For all the clarity with which the problem is seen, however, the author of the homily underlines the sheer difficulty of destroying images. They are full of energy, and very deeply set in the culture. Just how deeply images were set in the culture was powerfully evident by 1563, when England had already been subject to the first twenty-five years of legislated iconoclasm since 1538. At the very beginning of that process, in 1535, an English translation of a work promoting iconoclasm in Strasbourg by Martin Bucer was published. The treatise declaring . . . that pictures and other images . . . are in no wise to be suffered in the temples or churches is the first English treatise promoting systematic iconoclasm in England. It recognizes that hard handling will be necessary. Images must not be attacked ‘softly and so tenderly handled’, in the manner of weak minded men who, with a ‘folisshe imagination’ are ‘wont to have compassyon and to sorowe somewhat whan they ar broken’. These would-be iconoclasts are moved to pity because the images resemble suffering humans, ‘as though with the fygure and symilitude of man they had also mans wyttes and reason’. The breaking must, accordingly, be official and applied with what Spenser would soon call ‘rigour pittilesse’.43 It must also work according to the dictates of Scripture: ‘we oughte to breke them, yea, and that all to powder that they might never be made whole agayne nor be restored into so wycked an abuse’.44 Even as evangelicals insisted on the utter lifelessness of the image, their attack evokes the spectral presence of the image. As often as the homily writer insists on the lifelessness of the image, he evokes its spectral vivacity: They have eyes and see not, hands and feel not, feet and cannot go . . . though some of them have an axe, some a swoorde, some a speare in theyr handes, yet . . . they cannot once sturre to defende themselves from . . . thieves; naye, if the temple or church be set

Learn to Die

71

afire . . . they cannot once move, but tarrye stylle lyke blockes as they are, and be burned (image 21).

The homilist must, paradoxically, deploy personification in order to deny personhood. To deny vivacity, he evokes it. He knows, as John Jewel, writing in 1565, knew, that images come to life; as Jewel says, although images are mere matter, they strike the senses of the weak minded so powerfully, ‘that they seem to have life and to draw breath’. These dead images have been made to ‘sweat, to weep, to laugh, and to shift themselves from place to place’. Above all, they ‘have been able to speak whatsoever their . . . sexton listed’.45

IV For evangelical legislators and polemicists, then, idolatry was the central cultic and historical issue. Idolatry was shorthand for targeting an entire system of sacramental practice that must be broken before a new age of cultic purity and national security could begin. Destruction of images was, however, exceptionally difficult, because they were so deep set and so lively. Precisely because the idols represent such compacted statements of dead, past error, they became vivacious and sensitive to the future. The question of idolatry is inherently the question of historical distinctions and continuities. The task of the iconoclast is to ensure distinctions; he must break pathological continuities. By focusing so relentlessly on them, however, iconoclasts brought images to life. If the image is indeed the bearer of history and the sign of historical continuity, we might expect it to say so. We might expect the image, that is, to speak, and to prophesy. When we look to late medieval orthodox English defences of the image, this is in fact precisely what images do. I devote the last two sections of this chapter to the prophetic powers of the late medieval image. I begin with a brief survey of orthodox texts that

72

Learn to Die

imply orthodox uncertainty about the vivacity of images. In the final section I focus on one expressive, talkative image of the dead. This image not only prepares its hearers for death, but also, as the symptom of a culture under threat, trains images themselves to prepare for a kind of death. Some fifteenth-century images register the strains of a culture of transcendence just over the horizon. They tell us the following: that they know more than we do; that they feel the strains of things to come and foresee their demise; and that it’s tough being an image. There are very few Western cultures in which the image is not in any kind of trouble. Very often those who defend images with their right hand turn out to be destroying images with their left.46 All the cultures of Western Christianity, from late Antiquity to the Reformation, nevertheless managed a delicate balancing act between the transcendent and immanent, between the invisible and the visible, between the desire to see and the need to pass beyond sight.47 In differing contexts, and with differing accents, the image’s balancing act was maintained between heaven and hell, and between competing cults regarded as idolatrous. We can see as much in the early fifteenth-century frontispiece to a Parisian edition of Augustine’s City of God (Figure 23).48 The image mediates between the living Christ and the Eucharist, a relation that legitimates this very image by distinguishing it from pagan idolatry on the left and Jewish idolatry of the Word on the right. Dangerously poised (idolatry is the highway to Hell), the image nevertheless manages to preserve a licit space of transit between the earthly seen and the heavenly unseen. That said, fifteenth-century England betrays signs that this delicate balance was becoming unstable.49 We have already observed heterodox, Lollard attacks, from the late fourteenth century, on images. There are also signs of images being in trouble in various orthodox traditions. Orthodox, Christian-Platonist, aniconic traditions found vernacular expression in late medieval England. The most vibrant such figure in Middle English was the iconoclastic author of the

Learn to Die

73

23. Augustine, City of God, frontispiece, Paris, Bibliothe`que Nationale, MS fr 22912, f. 2v, early fifteenth century. Reproduced by permission Bibliothe`que Nationale, Paris.

74

Learn to Die

late fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing and related texts, who paradoxically encourages his elite, probably Carthusian readers to make ‘an ymage of his nakyd, unmaad and unbigonne kynde’ [‘an image of God’s naked, unmade and uncreated nature’]. We must ‘pare awaye’ all hindrances to this imageless image, every ‘merveilous fantastik ymage, conielid as it were in a kumbros clogge abouten hym’ [‘marvellous fantastic image, congealed, as it were, in a cumbrous impediment around him’].50 Such Christian-Platonist attacks on the image were, however, institutionally restricted, and they were resolutely epistemological rather than theological. They certainly contained no larger project of image demolition, even if these same Carthusian circles did make the first English welcome, in the mid-fifteenth century, to the imageless devotio moderna, in the form of Thomas a` Kempis’ Imitation of Christ.51 Outside these elite traditions of aniconic spirituality, however, orthodox defenders of the devotional image struggled to maintain the image’s unsteady, increasingly untenable balance. A vast tradition of orthodox late medieval spirituality, known as ‘devotional piety’, had, from the thirteenth century, promoted imaginative, theatrical, visual engagement with the narrative of Christ’s life.52 As Nicholas Love says about the readers of his Mirror of the Blessed Life, in 1410, ‘symple creatures . . . as childryn haven nede to be fedde with mylke of lyghte doctryne and not with sadde mete of grete clargye’ [‘unlearned people . . . like children, need to be fed with the milk of easy doctrine, and not with the solid food of high theology’]. Even though these simple creatures can read, they need images: for them ‘is pryncipally to be sette in mynde the ymage of crystes Incarnacion, passion and Resurreccion so that a symple soule that kan not thenke bot bodyes or bodily things mowe have somwhat accordynge unto is affection’ [‘the image of Christ’s incarnation, passion and resurrection is principally to be set in mind, so that an unlearned person, who can conceive only of bodies and corporal things, may have some idea, according to his desire’].53 These readers must actively imagine, but never believe, that what they see is alive; they must ‘imagine by reson . . . not

Learn to Die

75

by errour affermyng bot devoutly ymagining and supposyng’ [‘imagine within reason . . . not erroneously affirming, but devoutly imagining and supposing’] (74). This tradition had immediate and vast upshot for the visual arts, since it was inherently visual. It also had immediate upshot for the relation of text and image, since it simultaneously made images speak, and submitted those words to the power of the image.54 As we have seen, in the late fourteenth century English Lollards charged that images were being treated idolatrously, as if they were alive. As they responded to that charge, orthodox defenders of the image found themselves colliding with the vast tradition of devotional piety, of the speaking image. On the one hand, the orthodox needed to defend the imaginative, salutary vivacity of images; on the other, those same orthodox needed absolutely to deny that the images were in any way alive. This was a fine balance; it produced trouble, since to get the balance wrong was to incur the charge of idolatry. I briefly sketch that ‘imagetrouble’ in the present section, before focusing on one text in the next. The late fourteenth and early fifteenth century already produced two major English orthodox defences of the image.55 These were written in Latin. Here I discuss the vernacular treatments of the image, with a broader appeal. These manifest a variety of positions, none wholly at ease with the image. Impeccably orthodox mid-century texts of wide public address appear to attack images. John Capgrave (1393–1464) was Prior Provincial of the Augustinian friars in England between 1453 and 1457.56 In his impressive, five-book Life of St Katherine (c.1445), the key test of orthodox submission to the pagan imperial order is a readiness to acknowledge the pagan pantheon’s images. In Book 4 the tyrannical pagan emperor Maxentius decides that the cult and ‘dew rente’ of the old gods must be renewed (4.305). Katherine confronts Maxentius directly with a double and unresolved attack on the idols by which he is surrounded: they are either devils, or else they are irredeemably dead matter:

76

Learn to Die Thi goddis are develes, and thi prestis eke, [deceivers] Deceyvoures of the puple, rith for covetyse; Thei wote as weel as I, thow men hem seke— [know] [though] These maumentis, I mene—thei can not sitt ne ryse, [idols] Thei ete not, thei drynke not in no maner wise. Mouth wythout spech, fote that may not goo, [also] Handes eke have thei and may no werke doo.57

Between the ultimate source of this passage (Psalm 115) and Capgrave’s text must surely stand Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale (1390s). There, too, the early Christian female convert Cecilia repudiates her powerful male suitor by repudiating pagan idolatry. Like Katherine, Cecilia insists on the insensible, material deadness of the pagan statues to the gods: That ilke stoon a god thow wolt it calle. [very stone] I rede thee, lat thin hand upon it falle, [counsel] And taste it wel, and stoon thow shalt it finde.58 [feel]

Capgrave, however, massively expands both his sources, Psalm 115 and Chaucer’s saint’s life: Katherine demystifies the statues and the pagan gods through euhemerism (4.632), and in Book 5 she recurs to, and further expands on, the following: the material wastefulness of the proposed statue; the violence associated with it, designed to punish those who refuse to kneel down before it; and, again, the irremediable deadness of its legs, hands, eyes, and tongue. It will be fit for nothing but birds to defile (5.400–525). Now of course, as is obvious, Capgrave has his saint repudiate pagan statuary, in which case there is nothing surprising whatsoever about the iconoclastic impulse. In the context of orthodox fifteenth-century English defences of religious imagery in the face of Lollard attacks, however, it is surprising. The effort of imagination required to shift the referent of Katherine’s speech from pagan to Christian imagery is minimal. Here is a Christian saint vigorously repudiating the visual cult of what would be a statue to her, ‘a solenne ymage like an empresse’, as Maxentius says to Katherine, ‘As liche as craft wil countirfete your face j It shal be

Learn to Die

77

made’ (5.401–4). What’s more, Katherine repudiates this offer by using the topoi and vocabulary of Lollard polemic concerning images, including ‘maumetis’ and ‘stokes’ (4.701). In orthodox Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen (1443–7), too, the following saints either break images or insist on their insensate materiality: Cristina, Agnes, Dorothy, Mary Magdalene, and Cecilia.59 No less telling than these implicit orthodox attacks on the image are the orthodox defences of the image, made in response to Lollardy. I focus here on the extraordinary figure of Reginald Pecock (?1395–?1460), Bishop of Chichester until 1457, when he was arraigned for heresy, and sent to Thorney Abbey, Cambridgshire, there to be confined to one room and deprived of writing materials until his death.60 Pecock’s treatment of images in his laboriously titled Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy (c.1445) is the most extensive and systematic vernacular treatment of the image question in the period between the Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel (1409) and the first iconoclastic legislation of 1538.61 Pecock astutely understands the fundamental issues on which the orthodox must engage ‘the lay party’, as he politely calls Lollards. Part One of the Repressor is devoted to biblical interpretation, and Part Two to images, taking up 143 pages of the only modern edition. I focus on one key issue: whether the orthodox laity treat, and whether they are in any way permitted to treat, images as alive. Pecock’s fundamental position is that of the learned orthodox. Images are in no way forbidden in Scripture or by any ground of the faith.62 In no way are they treated as alive. That orthodox position once stated, Pecock qualifies it in various ways. He nervously asserts that no adult in Christendom who is not simple minded (‘a natural fool’) would believe that a statue is alive. He then shifts his ground. Even if men do believe that images sweat and speak, wise people ‘oonli laughe at suche folies . . . of which no moral harme cometh’.63 The evils that arise from misuse of images are no worse, he says, than the evils that that arise from lay men reading the Bible in the vernacular.64

78

Learn to Die

After a long defence of images and their affective power, however, Pecock moves to the intimately related question of relics and pilgrimage. Here, however, his orthodox defence of pilgrimage practice depends precisely on what he described earlier as the risible fancy of the credulous, or even of the ‘natural fool’. God does choose one image over another as the fit destination of a pilgrimage; therefore, Pecock declares in his own voice: it is not inconvenient that God make thilk ymage of stoon or of tre forto swete and that the ymage be mooved fro oon place unto an othir place withoute mannis bering and . . . that the yghen of the ymage be turned hidirward and thiderward verrili or semyngly as though the ymage sie, and that the ymage (in such maner as God made the asse of Balaam) speke.65

In short, Pecock shifts ground a good deal in the Repressor. In one section, images are most certainly dead; it is inconceivable that anyone, even the witless, should think otherwise. In another, he concedes that the ignorant do treat statues as if they were alive, but dismisses the idea of moral harm from such well-meaning idolatry. In a third and separate section, however, he actively promotes the idea that the images have shown signs of life, by sweating, eye movement, and apparent speech. This sequence of orthodox defenders and attackers of the image, each manifesting what might be called ‘image trouble’, could be much expanded.66 We can already say, however, that high profile orthodox writers manifest clear unease about the evident proximity of idolatry and the worship paid by the faithful to ‘ymages of tymber and off ston’.67 Orthodoxy needed images to be simultaneously alive and dead.

V High profile symptoms of trouble with images are clearly visible, then, within orthodoxy: are they alive or dead? Let me focus this closing section, however, on one searing account of a prophetic

Learn to Die

79

image disappearing before our eyes, an image that trains us how to die. This image is not a relic, and neither is it vulnerable to the charges of being subject to idolatrous worship. It is, instead, a teaching image, apparently the least contentious type of image use. Even here, however, the image is under extraordinary and, in retrospect, prophetic threat. Thomas Hoccleve’s Lerne to Dye forms part of his so-called Series, a loosely connected set of works written in 1420.68 The work is designed to reincorporate Hoccleve with his audience after a period of mental instability. He has a problem with his public ‘image’, as we say: his readers and friends think him still insane. He might insist to us, his readers, that he is sane, but the problem of his public image, or what he calls ‘the peoples imagination’, persists. In fact it’s driving him insane, since he cannot persuade his readership that he is in fact mentally sound. Part of his response to this painful situation is to translate an ars moriendi by way of proving his fitness for arduous and salutary poetic work. He translates from Henry Seuse’s Horologium Sapientiae (1334), which, after the Imitation of Christ, was the most ‘widely read devotional book of the Middle Ages’.69 On the face of it, Lerne to Dye offers an extraordinary defence of the image. A young man prays to Wisdom for wisdom; the first step in the path to wisdom consists of learning how to die. The young man is encouraged to conjure up a ‘sensible ensaumple’ of a dying man, which he does by actively searching his ‘conceit’ (Figure 24). As soon as the image appears, it talks about its parlous condition, on the point of death and deprived of any repair from that menace. It echoes the voice of Hoccleve himself earlier in the Series, complaining of being thought insane: ‘I am not reedy in the grownd to creepe’ (l. 182), the image painfully declares. The image also declares that he could have seen the terror of this condition before, but ‘gave no charge’. This, of course, is the cue for the young scholar to learn what the image did not. Paradoxically, however, the ignorant image knows more than the scholar in whose psyche it has been called up: the young scholar’s image can

80

Learn to Die

24. Hoccleve, Lerne to Dye (c.1420), Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden supra 53, f. 118r. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

see the future in ways the young man cannot.70 Be penitent, the young man blithely recommends to the image terrified by death. In response, the image relates and intensifies the existential terror of his condition: he’s so afraid that ‘my wit is cleene fro me past’

Learn to Die

81

(l. 347), and besides, his panic is so intense that he’s incapable of deciding whether his penitence is authentic or merely feigned (ll. 358–64). He has already begged some spiritual treasure from his friends, but they refused and left him ‘destitute’.71 This searing account of existential terror and isolation, produced by an imagined voice, would seem to constitute a powerful defence of the image as a teaching device. I end this discussion by arguing that the very extremity of this defence of the image, and the sheer intensity of work required of the image, underlines instead the image’s exhaustion. Recognizing the hopelessness of the image’s predicament, the young scholar asks how he should prepare for death. From this point, the image becomes the authority, knowing ‘more’, as it were, than the conscious psyche from which it derives. The first answer is sacramental: the young man should undergo the three stages of penitence. These sacramental resources are, however, insufficient. The young man needs instead to imagine himself burning in the furnace of Purgatory; he should imagine his own destitute and desolate voice crying out helplessly to friends for succour: Forsake y am. Frendshipe y can noon fynde. [person][needy] Ther is no wight that to the indigent Puttith his helply hand. Slipt out of mynde [roll and turn] I am. In peynes sharpe I walwe and wynde, And of my wo ther is no wight that recchith. [person who cares] (ll. 506–11)

All other resources, indeed, are insufficient: friends are unreliable at death, and only this imagination of existential horror will prompt the young man to think of penitence. The image’s very insistence on loneliness and helplessness provokes us to realize that the image itself is the only source of solidarity and help; the dialogue between image and young disciple is the only real exchange in this text. Deprived of all other reliable resources, however, the image can only insist on more

82

Learn to Die

imagination, the figuring of more visualized, imagined terror. Friends are in fact the soul’s enemies, since they are given to deception. The image is being freighted with more than it can reasonably bear here. That unreasonable freighting of the image finds voice at the moment the image disappears from view. By the time the image has impressed the intense perils of his situation on the young scholar, the image’s work is effectively done. The text does not, however, stop at that point. On the contrary, it closes in on the terrified, friendless image, the ‘soule abiect’ of the image as it helplessly drifts, in the here and now of the poem, over the edge of the psyche into the flames of purgatory. The image, now fully personified, is surrounded by ‘horrible feendes’ whom it sees with its/his ‘yen mental’ (ll. 666–71). The image also imagines both the eyes of the stern judge, just as he hears the helpless voice of the purgatorial sinners lamenting their abandonment by friends. The image’s own imagination imagines dying ‘in thy presence’, his worst suffering being the absence of God’s own, seen face. ‘Heer’, he terrifyingly bids farewell to the young man, ‘y die in thy presence’ (l. 740). The image is fully equipped with eyes, ears, an imagination, and a soul, and it’s dying. Is this example of a lively image a celebration of, or a funeral for, the image itself? The argument that the text celebrates the image is powerful: only the affective, dramatic force of the image can effect the beginning of wisdom.72 Hoccleve fully animates the image. The case for Hoccleve as avid defender of the image is strong.73 Hoccleve also, however, has the image die. In fact the image is most fully alive as it’s dying. The very extremity of the defence of the image more cogently suggests the reverse: in this text images are being asked to bear intolerable weights. Whenever the image seems to reach its limits, we are not given recourse to institutional and/or sacramental practice.74 Instead

Learn to Die

83

we are asked to imagine some more: the image demands that the imagining scholar imagine himself burning in purgatory, and, finally, the image itself imagines. So far from presenting a defence of the function of images in a larger set of practices, the text presents a mise-en-abyme of the image, an image struggling to believe itself and only itself when all other resources, both social and ecclesiastical, are shadowy at best, wholly unreliable at worst. In such a state, the image itself loses its credibility: just as friends are, according to the image, untrustworthy (l. 550), so too does the image not trust its own state of soul. Learning wisdom from this source is exhilarating, but also a bit like dying: after the death of the image, the young man declares that he is ‘brought to the deeth almost, j So troublid is my spirit and my goost’ (ll. 748–9). The lonely, sick, and overburdened image of this text disappears, unaided by friends, unaided by any sacramental system. Like other orthodox texts that express the exhaustion of the image, Lerne to Dye teaches us that this version of the image must also learn how to die. It is not without significance that the culture that produced the original of Hoccleve’s text, Seuse’s Horlogium Sapientiae, also produced, in accounts of the wounds of Christ and the instruments that inflicted them, an image of Christ’s heart which is deliberately and materially sliced through the folio (Figure 25). The image predicts, we might suggest from the perspective of this chapter, the violence that the image itself will soon undergo in Protestant Europe. In this chapter, we have already seen that violence enacted in sixteenth-century England. Violence against the image lasted for almost precisely a century in England. In the next chapter, I turn to seventeenth-century revolutionary violence against the image, and in particular to Milton as iconoclast.

84

Learn to Die

25. Sacred Heart; fifteenth century; parchment, 8.9 cm  6.7 cm. State Library of Nuremberg, MS Will, VII 1447.8, reproduced by permission of State Library of Nuremberg.

c ha p t e r 3

Statues of Liberty Iconoclasm and Idolatry in the English Revolution

I

CONOCLASM, like the revolutions of which it is consistently a part, is rarely a single or a containable act; it triggers multiple, further acts, each exponentially more aggressive than the previous wave. First one attacks the material idols; then one attacks them again; then one must begin on the more elusive, disobedient idols of the mind; and after all that work, one must remain ever vigilant against the resurgence of idolatrous tradition. A striking feature of iconoclasm, then, whether in Constantinople or in England, is this: it comes in waves. Once started, it’s difficult to stop. As permanent revolution, so, too, resurgent iconoclasm. Each wave detects contagion and infection less from the original source of infection, and more, as we shall see in this chapter, from the previous, failed effort of cultural hygiene. Idolatry is never merely an error; like the sexual deviancy with which it is habitually associated, idolatry is always a repeatable and a repeated error. This kinesis of iconoclasm continues, with ever purer, narrower historical affiliations, and it continues until the logic of destruction is stabilized. Stabilization is only ever possible by the erection of an alternative idol, an idol capable of disguising and disowning its status as idol. Nothing can arrest iconoclasm in the name of liberty, that is, but the erection of statues of Liberty. Precisely because statues are

86

Statues of Liberty

most likely to become idols and thereby most likely to enthrall us, the only permissible statues are monuments to liberty, statues of Liberty itself. Such statues had to exist, as the chief expression of revolutionary, iconoclastic, regimes. In Milton’s case, as with many other post-Reformation iconoclasts, the animate monuments are books, living acts and monuments. So in this chapter I pursue two themes in particular, as we turn to a new phase in the iconoclasm of English modernity and liberty. In the first place, after a century of failed effort, the exhausted seventeenth-century iconoclast must succeed this time. For as he attacks, he confronts not only failed pre-Reformation iconoclasm, but also monuments, and images, erected in response to those previous, failed iconoclastic efforts. Secondly, as the iconoclast erects his own animate monuments—his own statues of Liberty—those monuments must, in order not to trigger further acts of iconoclasm, disguise their own status as mesmerizing idol. I As we approach Milton Eikonoklastes, let us join another iconoclast, Mr William Dowsing,1 as he met resistance in Cambridge on 26 December 1643. Dowsing was in Cambridge prior to his tour, hammer and crowbar in hand, of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk parish churches. Of the 245 parish churches Dowsing visited, he destroyed more than 90% of the images.2 On 28 August 1643 Parliament had issued an ordinance requiring the removal and/ or destruction of all fixed altars, altar rails, chancel steps, and ‘all crucifixes, crosses, and all images and pictures of any one or more persons of the Trinity, or of the Virgin Mary and all other pictures of saints or superstitious inscriptions in or upon all and every church’.3 The Earl of Manchester issued a warrant to Dowsing, of uncertain authorization, on 19 December 1643, to set this ordinance into action. Dowsing’s response was rapid and vigorous. He set to work on the chapels of various Cambridge colleges.

Statues of Liberty

87

26. (?)William Dowsing. Oil on canvas, 75.8 cm  63 cm, reproduced by permission of Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service.

On 26 December, however, he met resistance at Pembroke. We can listen to the Pembroke confrontation thanks to Dowsing’s meticulous recording of his destructive work: ‘In the presence of fellows . . . we broak 10 cherubims. We broake and pulled down 80 superstitious pictures.’ At this point, Dowsing reports, a resistant fellow fetched a statute book to prove that only clergy should

88

Statues of Liberty

have jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters. Dowsing expertly cites Acts, via Calvin, to the effect that 120 believers had voted to replace Judas; he then cites the example of the iconoclast Josiah, and, he reports, ‘I told them the Book of Homilys did prove it . . . and alledged [five specified pages] against the Peril of Idolatry [and the Queen’s Injunctions].’4 The debate continued, before Dowsing retreated in acrimony. Let us leave Dowsing—in the words of a recent scholar a ‘sincere and godly’ man, and ‘no mindless vandal, but . . . driven by personal conviction’—let us leave Dowsing to his sincere work.5 While he works (he has a long way to go before he’s done in East Anglia), let us turn instead to the larger picture that might explain the driven, systematic quality of Dowsing’s activity. From the evidence of the previous two chapters, it’s easy to understand the cultural programme of the ordinance within whose terms Dowsing was smashing his way around these eastern counties. The standard account of such Puritan violence pitches Word against image: a culture of the biblical Word clears a destructive path through a culture of the unscriptural image. That is persuasive, but not, in my view, the deepest issue. The real driver within Dowsing’s own moment is one of jurisdictional clarity. Jurisdictions need symbolic expression, and they need to clarify the relations of subjects to power; in this case, a jurisdictional simplicity needs to reshape both place and history, through new representations. A single jurisdiction (of a Puritan Parliament) replaces a triple, overlapping jurisdiction of monarch, Parliament, and clergy; and those new jurisdictional imperatives seek symbolic realization in physical shape of churches. The very notion of privileged places was targeted as objectionable by evangelicals, since spiritual charisma was now evenly distributed across all space. It was not concentrated in one place, in one Church, and in part of one church, such as an image, or beyond the chancel arch, more than in another place. This commitment to placelessness is found in Luther, and in Lollard writings in England well before Luther. It was also,

Statues of Liberty

89

predictably, vibrant in the revolutionary period of the 1640s. As noted in Chapter 1, the Westminster Confession of 1646 expresses this deep and abiding commitment to ecclesiological placelessness: ‘Neither’, it declares, is prayer, nor any other part of religious worship [that] is now under the gospel, either tied unto or made more acceptable by any place in which it is performed, or towards which it is directed: but God is to be worshipped everywhere in spirit and truth.6

Within the intensely symbolic space of the parish church, divided spaces and jurisdictions are undivided: altar rails are to be removed, and chancel steps leveled. The divided jurisdictions of heaven had also to be simplified: brass ora pro nobis plaques set into church floors had depended on, and enacted, a system of intercession, now superceded by evangelical soteriology. Intercession implies divided heavenly jurisdictions. Images both represent intercession and themselves intercede; they must, accordingly, be broken. Images claim themselves to be special places (they are often placed in the special place of the altar or the saint’s shrine); they are metonyms for the complexly divided jurisdictions of heaven. Just as there are to be no saintly representations, so too will there be no representations of saints.7 The cultural logic of this hammer and sledge work, aimed at intercession and designed to simplify jurisdictions, is clear. What, though, of the systematic quality of Dowsing’s work, the sheer intensity of destructive energy implicit in his notes, and the obsessive detail of those notes? In this chapter I suggest that Dowsing, and his fellow iconoclast Milton, are not only fighting a battle for jurisdictional clarity; they are also fighting a historical battle whose worst enemy is exhaustion in the face of the resurgent past. True revolutions take at least 150 years to work their way into relatively stable form. The cultural revolution of the Act of Supremacy of 1534 cannot be said to have settled into a relatively stable form until at least 1688, or 1778, or, perhaps, 1832.8 In the

90

Statues of Liberty

next section, then, I turn to the historical battle against the image, and to the fight against exhaustion. II In 1643, after many waves of image breaking and, therefore, culture breaking already behind them, actors like Dowsing knew that, this time, they had to be tireless and systematic, because to these actors nothing was clearer than the failure of previous efforts to destroy images. Even by the time of the Elizabethan homily of 1563, which Dowsing confidently cites by page number eighty years later in Pembroke College, the inadequacy of previous destructive measures was painfully obvious. In 1563 those measures had been undertaken, in waves, over the previous twenty five years, since 1538. Writing, preaching, assembling in councils, decreeing, and the making of laws: all these, in the words of the 1563 Homily, ‘could nothyng helpe, ether to pull downe ymages . . . or against idolatry’.9 Foxe’s image of 1570 (Figure 21) would soon insist that the temple had been well purged: the iconoclasts pictured in the top frame have cleared the Church, pictured in the bottom right frame, of all sacraments but the Eucharist and Baptism, with the Word being preached in an imageless, neo-classical structure, pared back to bare brick. The ubiquitous evidence of twentyfive years’ physical destruction might also insist that the work had been well begun, as the Edwardian decapitations of images in the Lady Chapel at Ely suggest (Figure 27). The homily writer of 1563 nonetheless betrays a certain despair at the sheer difficulty of eradicating idolatry. At the very least, he screws his listeners up for one last, definitive material push against images. Nothing helps against idolatry but the destruction of religious images. After such consistent legislation, and after such actively prosecuted iconoclasm, the voice of the 1563 homily writer is on the point of desperation. He is certainly aware of the material work yet to be done, just as he is aware of the new

Statues of Liberty

91

27. Lady Chapel, Ely Cathedral; photo Martin Hurlimann. Reproduced by permission q Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Pro Litteris, Zurich.

iconoclastic frontier. For, he acknowledges, echoing Calvin, ‘idolatry standeth chiefly in the mynde’ (image 53). Mankind is ‘exceadynge prone’ to idolatry. As few are inclined to credit sound doctrine, ‘as many, and almost al, [are] prone to superstition and idolatry. So that herein appeareth not onely a difficultie, but

92

Statues of Liberty

also an impossibilitie of the remedy’ (image 65). We are listening to the voice of a person undoing an entire sacramental system. He does so by inflicting as lasting damage as he can on an entire system of visual representation. This is clearly hard and exhausting work. That sense of exhaustion is visible in what I call idolatry history, which has a standard pattern of worsening repetition and failure. Take for example An arrow against Idolatrie, published in 1611 by Henry Ainsworth. Ainsworth, who died in 1622, was the leader of the Calvinist group of Ainsworthians in Amsterdam, a breakaway group from the breakaway Calvinist Ancient Separatist Church.10 Ainsworth defines the target of his arrow against idolatry broadly, as against the use of any religious image, of any similitude, shew, or likenesse; any frame, figure, edifice or structure, of man or beast, fowl or fish, or any creeping thing; any image, type, or shadowed representation; any imagined picture, fabrick, or shape; any statue, erected-monument or pillar; finally, any thing graven or carved, or molten; drawn-out, painted or poutrahed.11

All are idols, if set to religious use, forbidden by divine commandment. Ainsworth mounts his case especially through rehearsal of the narrative of the Book of Kings, which is a story of constant filial backsliding: Hezekiah might break the images that pollute Israel, but Manasseh, his son, reverts to the disgusting service of strange, adjacent gods. The narrative of repetition has, though, a characteristic twist: the repetition is always worse than the original idolatry: Manasseh ‘repeated all the former evils, and added more unto them, if ought mought be’ (image 14). The backsliding is inevitable because idolatry is an addiction, an obsessive, pathological habit of ‘suck[ing] the milk of idol superstition’, unto which the tribes of Israel were, says Ainsworth, ‘addicted’. Idolatry is delicious but enervating, ‘a bewitching sin . . . which as a harlot stealeth away the heart of man’ (image 16). Idolatry is also

Statues of Liberty

93

ineradicable: citing Jeremiah 17.1, and unknowingly evoking Kafka, Ainsworth says that idolatry was ‘written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond graven upon the table of their heart; shewing that the inmost affections are most deeply and continually inffected with this vice, and addicted unto it’ (image 20).12 And so, the circular argument goes, idolatry always gets worse: Jeroboam’s idolatrous Israel was but ‘babe to the Beldam’ of the much more idolatrous Catholic Church. Just as the heathens had their divided celestial jurisdictions, so too does the Catholic Church derogate from the absolute, unmediated power of God: And as the heathens had their gods and goddesses of divers ranks, supreme, inferiour, and middle ones called Daemones, by whom as by mediators and intercessors . . . so hath this synagogue of Satan [i.e. the Catholic Church] . . . saints of all sorts, whom she hath canonized. (image 56)

The kinesis of iconoclasm replicates the addictive kinesis of idolatry itself. Protestant historiography asserts the existence of a true, though invisible church. The function, the entire function, of the visible, material church is hypocritically to disguise the existence of the True Church. This historiographical scheme has a visual concomitant: it alerts the eye to permanent distrust, and it prompts the hand to sudden motions of tearing, stripping, and breaking. The job, though, never can be done. Both iconoclasm and idolatry are on the lookout for another hit. Neither can ever be single acts; iconoclasm is, instead, a dynamic process, precisely because the iconoclast thinks idolatry is an addictive habit, impossible to kick. So by the time Dowsing is breaking images in East Anglia in the revolutionary period of 1643, a long history of failure preceded him.13 That melancholy history challenged him to a final resolution. Only such a history of failure explains his meticulous zeal. But the idolatry historian is haunted by the near certainty of failure: for, just as idolatry becomes worse, so too, distressingly,

94

Statues of Liberty

do efforts to eradicate idolatry only render the problem more intractable. In the first place, the effort to eradicate idolatry produces histories of idolatry, and those histories actually tell the same, repetitive story, of the iconoclast’s failure. The ideas of the evangelical English iconoclastic writer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might be old, deriving as they do from the Hebrew Scriptures in particular. But the materials at his disposal are abundant, and in many cases new. Not only does he have a new, evangelical commitment to the narrative and injunctions of the Hebrew Scriptures, but he also has access to Greek learning, including a detailed account of the struggle for, and ultimate failure of, iconoclasm in Byzantium. He also has access to early Christian apologists, and in particular to Tertullian (d. 222), who appeared in print in 1545.14 Each of these new sources energizes and informs the attack on idolatry, but each equally tells the same old story: the story of iconoclasm’s failure, and of idolatry’s resurgent victory. Tertullian, for example, wrote at the end of the second century. He writes from within the heat of the fight, when idolatry is by no means merely symbolic, and by no means incidental to the Christian mission. Idolatry is instead, by his account, ‘the chief crime of mankind, the supreme guilt of the world [Principale crimen generis humani, summus saeculi reatus,] . . . for even if every sin retains its own identity. . . each is still committed within idolatry.’ For Tertullian, the idols are most definitely alive, since they are subject to ‘demons and impure spirits’ (‘daemoniis et immundis spiritibus . . . quibus idola mancipantur’).15 The new learning might have energized the attack on idolatry with a sharper sense of historical periodization, and with new histories of the fight against images. But that new learning equally underlined the resurgent energies of the old past, represented by the ever resurgent image. This is endless work, never done. Not only that, but, even more distressingly, iconoclasm actually nourishes idolatry. The Pembroke chapel, for example, will have provoked

Statues of Liberty

95

Dowsing’s especial ire, since that chapel had been embellished under the impulse of Laudian reforms, in response to earlier bouts of sixteenth-century iconoclasm; in 1636 Archbishop Laud (1573–1645) had commended Pembroke’s Master for beautifying the chapel; a choir and organ had been introduced.16 Dowsing’s zeal is explicable, that is, from the fact that new forms of idolatry keep resurfacing, in response to iconoclasm itself. Perhaps Dowsing might seem a loose cannon.17 Perhaps Ainsworth and his splinter group from a separatist church might seem like a lunatic fringe. Let’s turn, then, to the poetic tradition, and to the indisputably central figure of Milton. He also faced the same challenges of idolatrous repetition. In Milton’s writing, too, the repetitions are always worse, since idolatry gains new energies after, and, more troublingly, from the bouts of destruction. The more actively one demolishes the idolatrous monument, the more energetically does it resurface. II I My Milton (perhaps yours) is the Milton of paradox.18 The antimonarchical revolutionary who demonizes those who attempt to overthrow a monarch; the proponent of liberty and choice who writes a poem whose most emphatic theme is obedience; the shaper of individual conscience whose poem represents epic forces that far outstrip the resources of individual conscience: the mover, in short, of the modern small whose representational specialty is the overwhelming scale and force of the modern big. The iconoclast who has his own portrait taken (Figure 28). The Milton of paradox is perhaps the deepest theme in the history of Milton reception, brilliantly formulated by Blake’s comment that Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.19 In that single remark Blake not only points to the paradox of new Christian Milton being under the sway of old Satan; Blake also adumbrates the revolutionary’s experience of paradox across time. The revolutionary inevitably, unwittingly, and paradoxically

96

Statues of Liberty

28. Engraving of John Milton, eighteenth century, after engraving by William Fairthorne (1670), q British Library Board, Add. 34816, f. 353.

Statues of Liberty

97

produces dark consequences by pursuing bright revolutionary programmes. In my view this perception characterizes more than Milton. It characterizes, perhaps, the historical predicament in which many of us find ourselves, creatures of revolution as many of us are. In this discussion, however, I restrict myself to saying that dynamic paradox best describes early modernity, and especially the early modernity of Milton’s moment. This is the moment in which a massively centralized and authoritarian theological programme imagined, despite itself, a highly decentralized polity and ecclesiology. A theological movement that underlined nothing so much as human abjection produced a doctrine of free will. Milton’s is the point at which a theological culture that had despised reason will soon produce the Enlightenment. The main lines of a Whig historiography have focused on the democratic decentralization and the affirmation of free will leading up to the Bill of Rights of 1689; they have not yet focused on the paradox of how a centralized, free-will-denying theology produced its obverse. Neither have they focused on the ways in which that absolutist, free-will-denying theology survived its repudiation. The metal of the statue of liberty was dug from a variety of sources, not directly from Liberty’s mine. Historiography has not, in short, appreciated the dynamic and dangerous historical paradoxes of the Miltonic moment, or of Milton. We have yet, perhaps, to exploit the full force of Blake’s profound perception. How does Milton’s iconoclasm participate in these generative paradoxes? Milton’s poetic project is driven, in part, by what I have called the kinesis of iconoclasm. Even as he destroys the idols of the foreign gods in the name of Liberty, that is, he is haunted by the possibility that he is himself encouraging idolatry. Even, that is, as Milton aggressively clears away the idols of the foreign gods; even as he aggressively clears a space around the temple of the ‘upright heart and pure’ (1.18), he is haunted by contagion, proximity, promiscuity. He is haunted, and driven, by what he calls the ‘audacious neighbourhood’,20 not to speak of the

98

Statues of Liberty

identity, of ‘shrines, j Abominations’ (1.388–9). What Milton fears most is the syntactic apposition of that very phrase: ‘shrines, j Abominations’. That fear drives Milton, across his career, into further repudiations, repudiations by which he replicates the passage of powerful currents in English ecclesiology through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: he first rejects Anglicanism for Presbyterianism, then parliamentary Presbyterianism for non-parliamentary, puritan military rule, before ending with a Miltonic dissention all his own.21 Through such dynamic rejections Milton paradoxically constructs his poem; he paradoxically contributes to the erection of Liberty’s statue from the materials of the rejected idols. Here I dwell on especially rich paradoxes concerning idolatry. I look to these two themes in Milton’s oeuvre: the resurgence of idolatry in response to iconoclasm; and the need to disguise the potentially deadening, potentially mesmerizing materiality of the newly erected statues of Liberty. I begin by looking to Milton’s account of the dynamic historical process of idolatry’s resurgence on the one hand, and to his iconoclastic response on the other. IV I focus on Book 1 of Paradise Lost, the poem Milton first published in 1667, but which he had probably begun already in the period of the revolutionary cause’s failure, from 1658.22 We should also note, though, that Milton’s attempt at idol clearance from his poetic jurisdiction began much earlier in his career. Already in The Nativity Ode, for example, written in 1629 (in the context of puritan anxieties about Laud’s ‘popish idolatry’), but not published until 1645 (in the context of civil war and legislated iconoclasm), Milton participates in a verbal iconoclasm.23 He evokes the long tradition observed in Chapter 2 (Figure 16), of representing the pagan gods self-destructing at the birth of Christ, or, as Milton puts it in stronger form, of ‘the gods that were suddenly destroyed in their own shrines’.24 Some of the dispossessed gods

Statues of Liberty

99

are dark and dangerous, to whom Milton bids good riddance: Peor and Baalim, or the paedophage ‘sullen Moloch’, who ‘hath left in shadows dread, j His burning idol all of blackest hue’.25 Not all the farewells here are so joyful, however: with a certain nostalgia Milton observes other divinities depart from poetry’s newly disenchanted jurisdiction, rudely torn from deep set protections: From haunted spring and dale Edged with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent, With flower-inwoven tresses torn The nymphs in twilight shade the tangled thickets mourn. (ll. 184–7)

The new and unified jurisdiction of Christ necessitates expulsion of each ‘peculiar power’, both man-eating idol and gentle genius.26 A more vigorous poetic battle, even if with more uncertain outcome, is waged in Paradise Lost. There Miltonic pursuit of future liberty demands the unfinishable work of destroying the ever resurgent idols of past tyranny. Deuteronomy 12:2–3 demands destruction of other religious cultures in the land of Canaan: Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree. And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.

Deuteronomy 20:16–18 extends the injunction concerning religious fixity to the annihilation of the peoples who inhabit the land of Canaan, on account of their idolatry: But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded

100

Statues of Liberty

29. Nicholas Poussin, Adoration of the Golden Calf, 1633–43. Oil on canvas, 153.4 cm  211.8 cm. Bought with a contribution from the National Art Collections Fund, 1945. Reproduced by permission q The National Gallery, London.

thee. That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the LORD your God.

Rejection of adjacent, invading idolatries is, however, more easily commanded than definitively done. The Hebrew Scriptures tell the story of a long and unending love affair of Israelites with foreign gods. That affair starts with the telling coincidence of the Mosaic prohibition against making graven images and worship of the Golden Calf (e.g. Figure 29). That adoration is by no means over eight hundred years later in the narratives of the Book of Kings. The tradition of Israel is itself internally riven, forever subject as it is to what the prophets describe as enthralled subjection to the tyranny of idolatry. Within the Hebraic tradition itself, that is, one must be ever vigilant for the impure contagion of adjacent idolatry.

Statues of Liberty

101

Repudiation of all non-Hebraic traditions is therefore exceptionally difficult, not least because the Israelites are inevitably and repeatedly absorbing the adjacent cultures of a culturally crowded Canaan, particularly by intermarriage. Idolatry is a kind of sexual deviancy in the family, and, therefore, especially difficult to eradicate.27 That Israelite history of repetitive backsliding is, for Milton, England’s history. However much Milton represents the idolatries to which Israel fell subject as fallen and imprisoned, they spring relentlessly back into present life. Even as he would describe Israel’s past as dead, defeated error, that distant past leaps disconcertingly into England’s potent, living error. When the fallen angels reanimate, Milton must commit himself to the kinesis of iconoclasm, that ongoing process of ceaseless vigilance and destructive energy. He must, like the prophets and kings of ancient Israel, commit, and then recommit, himself to that process of liberating purification from the thralldom and contagion of idolatries within his own tradition. His position is comparable to those actual iconoclasts who in 1641–3 were conducting, under legislative command, a destructive campaign of iconoclasm of ‘monuments of superstition’, even if none so systematically as Dowsing. Iconoclasts in both Norwich and Canterbury Cathedrals, for example, were targeting both Laudian innovations and Edwardian (i.e. evangelical) service books that were now regarded as popish, carriers of the virus of the Catholic past. Thus in August 1642 at Canterbury Cathedral the revolutionary soldiers ‘defaced the goodly screen . . . violated the monuments of the dead, spoiled the organs . . . and mangled our service books, and books of Common Prayer’.28 Not only, it bears repeating, did they destroy pre-Reformation and Laudian images; they also targeted Protestant imagery: thus one report from Aylesbury in 1643 records an agent poking out the eyes in a portrait of the most radical of English Protestant monarchs, Edward VI, saying that ‘all this mischief came from him, when he established the Book of Common Prayer’.29

102

Statues of Liberty

How does Milton present idols in Paradise Lost? He says of the fallen angels that they are to be ‘blotted out and razed’ from the Book of Life; imitating the routine language of iconoclastic legislation, Milton says that there should be ‘no memorial’ of them in the records of Heaven (PL 1.361–3).30 But does the divine obliteration deal once and for all with that divagation from Deuteronomic law, or does Milton’s poem reinvest the fallen angels with the resurgent and vital energy of idols? Repudiation of idols and idolatry forms the overture to Paradise Lost, as the main business of Book 1. Between lines 375 and 527 of that book, Milton lists and localizes the fallen angels. He localizes idolatry in the geography of Canaan especially. Despite the fact that the originary angelic names have been obliterated in heaven, Milton imitates the heroic list of epic poetry in giving the fallen angels new names. These are the names that the angels-cum-devils would soon have ‘among the sons of Eve’ (1.364), names that are, curiously, already known in hell. That renaming itself suggests resurgent energies of the fallen, since the names and forms of idolatry are known even from the beginning of historical beginnings. But, you might object, these are fallen heroes; unlike the Homeric list of heroes who are named as armies muster for battle, these figures have already been decisively defeated. Or have they? They are already imprisoned in defeat. Or are they? Even if the fallen angels are first seen in ‘abject posture’, they spring up at Satan’s call. Milton no sooner represents them as defeated and imprisoned than he underlines their vivacity. They may have been erased from the memory of heaven, but Paradise Lost reinscribes their memory, their future liberty, and their sway in Milton’s England. These are the forces who: By falsities and lies the greatest part Of mankind they corrupted to forsake God their Creator and th’invisible Glory of him who that made them, to transform

Statues of Liberty

103

Oft to the image of a brute adorned With gay religions full of pomp and gold, And devils to take for deities! Then were they known to men by various names And various idols through the heathen world. (PL 1.367–75)

No sooner do we witness their fall (a fall to be repeated in Book 6), than we hear about the escape of the fallen angels; we observe their power to transform both themselves and their worshippers (‘the greatest part j Of mankind’) into the shape of error. Milton decidedly rejects a humanist account of idolatrous religion, that of euhemerism. Euhemerism neutralizes the radioactivity of the pagan gods by secularizing them: they were in fact famous humans elevated through human delusion to the status of the divine.31 Their statues are, accordingly, mere unthreatening matter. No, for Milton the idols of the gods are vivacious, inhabited as they are by malicious spirits. The very prepositional placing of the fallen angels underlines their revitalization as animate idols. The most obvious prepositional opposition in Book 1 is between up (in heaven) and safely down (in hell). As Milton localizes the idols in a specific geography, however, the prepositional terms are changed: they become terms of juxtaposition on a level plane. The idols are to be found ‘next the seat of God’ (1.383), ‘among the nations round’ (1.385), ‘often placed j Within his sanctuary’ (1.388), ‘right against the templ’of God’ (1.402), and so on. As in Homer, epic lists are intensely geographical. Milton’s list of fallen angels is also a cultural geography of the land of Canaan. In moving across that geography, Milton replicates the geographical iconoclasm of, say, the boy king Josiah (seventh century bce), as related in the Book of Kings. Josiah’s iconoclasm reaffirms Joshuan territorial possession, since the list of idolatrous sites destroyed by Josiah reads like a map of the land of Canaan before the victories of Joshua seven centuries earlier. The altars of Baal,

104

Statues of Liberty

the Philistine god to the West; of the goddess Astarte, chief deity of the Sidonians to the North; of Chemosh, god of the Moabites to the South East; and of Milcom, god of the Ammonites to the East: the king ‘brake in pieces the images, and cut down the groves, and filled their places with the bones of men’ (2 Kings 23:14). Milton’s list includes each of these gods, even if Milcom is here called Moloch. That cultural geography might suggest cultural control of distant territory. There is, however, nothing distant about Milton’s fallen angels transformed into the unclean idols of neighbouring peoples. On the contrary, the uncleanness is scandalous in its contagious proximity to the Temple. More shockingly still, the idolatrous image finds its way into the Temple itself, ‘yea, often placed within His sanctuary’ (1.387–8). We see the idols move ever closer: the grim, child-eating idol of Moloch is at first in Rabba, to the east of the Jordan (1.397); not content with such ‘audacious neighborhood’, Moloch persuades Solomon to build an altar ‘right against the templ’of God’ (1.402). Chemosh follows him by moving his ‘lustful orgies’ ‘even to that hill of scandal’ (1.415– 16). Soon Astoreth also follows onto the ‘offensive mountain’ beside Sion, welcomed by the ‘uxorious king’ who has been ‘beguiled by fair idolatresses’ (1.438–45). Here the idols remained until ‘good Josiah drove them thence to Hell’ (1.418). In sum, idols and idolatry are close to home; between Solomon and Josiah (300 hundred years or so), indeed, they are at home.32 Josiah’s driving them to hell, however, only underlines their liberty, for a number of reasons. In the first place, we hear about these idols only apparently trapped in hell, long before Josiah drove them back (implying that they later escaped). Secondly, the mention of Josiah’s driving them back is immediately followed by the continuation of Milton’s list, which now itemizes the metamorphic, hermaphroditic gods of Baal and Astaroth. And thirdly, mention of Josiah underlines the fact that these gods cannot, and never will, be definitively restrained in hell. In fact the mention of Josiah underlines the reverse: these animate

Statues of Liberty

105

idols have geographic freedom. They are evidently not under house arrest in hell, and neither are they restricted to the crowded cultural geography of ancient Israel. They are also, patently, at work in Milton’s England. Just as Israel did not ‘escape j Th’infection’ from ‘borrowed gold’ (1.482–3), neither did England, in Milton’s account, by any means escape the infection of ‘deceivable traditions’, being, as he says in 1641, dragged ‘so downwards, as to backslide one way into Jewish beggery, of old cast rudiments, and stumble forward another way into the new-vomited Paganism of sensuall Idolatry’.33 That Eikonoklastes Milton should use these idols to suggest English idolatry is hardly tendentious. After all, Milton as iconoclast and silencer of idols is a consistent theme in Milton’s writing career, from the silenced and exiled idols of The Nativity Ode at the beginning of that career (as we have seen), to his role as imperial, self-named Eikonoklastes bent on breaking the idol of the executed king in mid-career, to his representation of terrorist Samson’s suicidal temple-breaking in Samson Agonistes, published in 1671, at career’s end.34 Across his poetic and polemical life, Milton forcefully wields, and forcefully exhorts his readers to wield, an iconoclastic hammer.35 In his Animadversions of 1641 (just two years before Parliament’s iconoclastic ordinance), for example, Milton encourages his readers to respond aggressively to the books of antiquity, and to Antiquity itself: Why doe wee therefore stand worshipping, and admiring this unactive, and livelesse Colossus, that like a carved Gyant terribly menacing to children, and weaklings lifts up his club, but strikes not, and is subject to the muting of every Sparrow.36

So then, Milton continues, ‘use all your art, apply your sledges, your levers, and your iron crows to heave and hale your mighty Polyphem of Antiquity to the delusion of Novices and unexperienc’t Christians’. Armed with the weapon of Scripture, he exhorts those same readers to go further and knock down Catholic

106

Statues of Liberty

practice; ‘without stepping a foot further’ after demolishing the ‘Polyphemus’ of Antiquity, he and his readers will set to more work: we ‘shall not doubt to batter, and throw down your Nebuchadnezzars Image, and crumpble it like the chaffe of the Summer threshing floores, as well the gold of those Apostolick Successors.’ And in his most explicitly iconoclastic work, Eikonoklastes (1649), Milton sees himself extending the English tradition of breaking the shrines of saints to breaking the idols of kings. The author of the best-selling book published in Charles’ name and in defence of Charles, Eikon Basilike (1649), titled the book well by Milton’s account, since ‘by the Shrine he [the book’s author] dresses out for him [the now executed king], certainly, would have the people come and worship him’.37 Milton responds by adopting the posture, and the hammer, of the Byzantine iconoclasts, who, ‘in their zeal to the command of God, after long tradition of Idolatry in the Church, took courage and broke all superstitious Images to peeces’ (3:343). Whether or not this act of breaking the king’s representation will succeed is immediately put in doubt: ‘But the people,’ Milton continues, ‘excessive and exorbitant in all thir motions, are prone oftentimes, not to a religious onely, but to a civil kind of Idolatry in Idolizing their kings’ (3:343). In representing the irrepressible forces of idolatry in ancient Israel, then, Milton has his contemporary England precisely in mind. Let us end this section by observing more closely the work of Book 1’s great architect-artist, Milton’s anti-type proxy Mulciber. The architectural style of his infernal architecture resembles nothing so much as the architecture of Laudian (not pre-Reformation) England. This was the architecture and the polyphonic musical culture targeted by iconoclasts in precisely the period that Milton encouraged his readers to take up their sledge and crowbar.38 Mulciber digs golden riches, borrowed gold, from the soil of hell itself. With it, his devilish workers construct a building with striking similarities to Caroline churches, designed by Inigo Jones in Palladian style, and built in Milton’s London (e.g. Figure 30). Mulciber

Statues of Liberty

107

30. Interior of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, London, designed by Inigo Jones. Reproduced by permission of the Rector, St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, London.

. . . had formed within the ground A various mold and from the boiling cells By strange conveyance filled each hollow nook, As in an organ from one blast of wind To many a row of pipes the soundboard breathes. Anon out of the earth a fabric huge Rose like an exhalation with the sound Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a temple where the pilasters round Were set and Doric pillars overlaid With golden architrave, nor did there want Cornice or freize with bossy sculptures graven. The roof was fretted gold. Not Babylon Nor great Alcairo such magnificence Equaled in all their glories to enshrine Belus or Se´rapis their gods, or seat their kings. (PL 1.705–21)

108

Statues of Liberty

Laudian architecture, and Laudian ornament of this kind, were among the targets of revolutionary iconoclasts operating under the legislation of 1643. At Canterbury Cathedral, for example, Bishop Hall recounts the civic authorities at work on the Cathedral in early 1644: Lord, what a work was here, what clattering of Glasses, what beating down of Walls, what tearing up of manuscripts, what pulling down of seats, what resting out of irons and Brass from the Windows and Graves, what defacing of Arms, what demolishing of curious Stonework . . . what Tooting and Piping upon the destroyed Organ Pipes, and what hideous Triumph on the Market-day before all the Country, when in a kind of Sacrilegious and prophane procession, all the Organ Pipes, Vestments . . . together with the Leaden Cross . . . were carried to the Fire in the publick Market-Place.39

V Milton begins Paradise Lost, then, with a vigorous but knowingly doomed campaign of idol breaking. Post-Reformation English poetry had, of course, already been here, fighting losing battles against an ever-resurgent Archimago, spinner of deceptive, doubling images impossible to distinguish from the real thing. Laying Archimago to rest proves to be an impossible task for Spenser (?1552–99) in the Faerie Queene (1590–6), since Archimago is uncontainable and unkillable. Even when trapped and chained by Una’s royal father, he ‘often semblance made to scape out of their hand’.40 And there he is again at the beginning of Book 2, ‘his shackles emptie left, him selfe escaped cleene’ (2.1.1). Not even the despoliation of the Bower of Bliss (2.12) can stop the genius imago-maker, since attempts to break the imagination habitually activate the imagination. However much Guyon, the figure of Temperance, intemperately breaks the imaginative genius’s Bower ‘with rigour pittilesse’, ‘And of the fairest late, now made the foulest place’ (2.12.83), Archimago is still in lively pursuit in the following book (3.4.45).41

Statues of Liberty

109

Milton, great admirer of Spenser, seeks to finish the ‘endlesse work’ of the Faerie Queene. In 1649, as he imagines his iconoclasm of the executed idol-king, Milton wishes both to break the idol of monarchy and, in a sense, to deal with Spenser’s own poem, with Spenser’s own creation. Milton wishes into being a ‘man of Iron, such as Talus, by our poet Spencer’, who was ‘fained to be the page of Justice, who with his flaile could do all this, and expeditiously, without all those deceitfull formes and circumstances of Law, worse than ceremonies in Religion’. If he could wish such a pitiless iconoclastic creature of emergency into existence, then, says Milton, ‘I say send it don, whether by one Talus, or by a thousand’ (3:390). In 1658, when Milton probably began composing Paradise Lost, the vigor of pursuing idols was, however, already underwritten by knowledge that the pursuit was about to fail again. Milton argued in defence of emergency powers for the less number [to] compel a greater to retain . . . their liberty. . . [since] those who seek nothing but their own just liberty have always right to win it and to keep it whenever they have power, be the voices never so numerous that oppose it.42

But that text, The Ready and Easy Way (February 1660), is clearly underwritten by a knowledge that the fight is about to be lost, again. The task of purging the infection of gold borrowed from the Golden Calf was looking hopeless as Milton turned to his long-projected plan of writing epic poetry, drawing aggressively as he did on the materials of pagan classical epic, the spoils of the Egyptians, to shape a non-idolatrous poem. The iconoclast artist will be committed to originality and to the absolute purgation of tradition. Milton comes down fiercely on borrowing pagan material for Christian ends; he thus condemns Charles I for borrowing a prayer from Sidney’s Arcadia, for presuming to ‘robb Sr Philip and his captive Shepherdess of their heathen orisons’ (3:366). To write epic is, however, to borrow gold from beautiful heathen poetry, to produce a poem whose borrowed materials are everywhere visible. So Milton cannot be

110

Statues of Liberty

original, even as he aims at ‘things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ (PL 1.16). Instead of pure originality, Milton maintains the action of the iconoclastic hammer as he shapes his own poetic monument. The material of Milton’s poetry is, to use Milton’s own phrase, ‘borrowed gold’ (1.483), by which he means the gold borrowed from Egypt and used to cast the Golden Calf. Even as Milton destroys the idols of the foreign gods, he builds his own poem from those very materials. He has to borrow the gold, but the gold is dangerous and must be broken even as it is used. Paradise Lost, then, finds its occasion in destruction; it finds its materials in the broken idols of historical error. However much his entire writing career is devoted to decisive intervention in what I have called ‘idolatry history’, Milton’s career, and individual poems within it, are themselves driven, and riven, by resurgent idols even as those idols are broken. This is clearly productive of a psychic pain peculiar to Protestant modernity; it is also, clearly, a dynamic, unstable process, nourished by that which it destructively consumes. Take, for example, the artist figure Mulciber again, whose rising architecture we have already observed. After the rise of that glorious, Laudian architecture, we hear of Mulciber’s fall. Or, rather, Milton recounts the narrative of Mulciber’s fall in order to break that very narrative. We are told that Mulciber worked as architect in heaven. ‘Nor’, Milton goes on, . . . was his name unheard or unadored In ancient Greece and in Ausonian land. Men called him Mulciber, and how he fell From heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o’er the crystal battlements. From morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day, and with the setting sun, Dropped from the zenith like a falling star On Lemnos th’Aegean isle. Thus they relate, Erring. (PL, 1.738–47)

Statues of Liberty

111

The structure of this verse paragraph encapsulates an attitude to history that is at once fascinated and appalled. The passage momentarily enters into a myth as believed history. Milton’s syntax extends Mulciber’s fall into a breathtaking spectacle of astonishing plummet (‘From morn j To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve’). But as Milton takes our breath away, he steps back to take a breath himself: even as Mulciber is plummeting, Milton takes time out to remark on the length of his dive—‘A summer’s day’, an inserted phrase that extends the fall even further, though by seeing it with epic detachment. Of course Milton loves, here and elsewhere, imitating these gigantic falls across the vast expanses of Miltonic syntax. Here, however, Milton’s fascination with the fall of the artist has a strict and sudden arrest. The last word in our passage breaks the entire sequence, the sequence into which we have imaginatively entered, as a false imagination: in believing this narrative, the ancients were ‘erring’; we enter into, and identify with, a history of belief only to repudiate it. History is drawn on only to be exposed and broken as hollow error.43 In small space Milton here rehearses the fundamental posture of evangelical polemicists towards history itself. Evangelical theology fundamentally prohibits addition to or subtraction from a single sacred text. Such a textual culture demands thereby the impossible, since it demands exact replication of the text, regardless of history’s passage, regardless of tradition. Tradition, indeed, is precisely the mark of all that is fallen, since tradition is by definition a disfiguring accretion upon the single pure text, a single source of legitimate authority. Milton initially promoted this fundamental textual posture. He never explicitly repudiated it, even if he found it unbearable in his writings on divorce.44 Such a posture activates an aggression against history: history springs into threatening life precisely as a history of error, of what Milton elsewhere, in 1641, had called the ‘huge overshadowing traine of Error’, which ‘had almost swept all the starres out of the firmament of the Church’.45 History takes shape precisely as

112

Statues of Liberty

an idol, its very liveliness alerting the evangelical to reach for his hammer. The revolutionary hammer, however, needs material; the hammer’s presence in the hand prompts the eye’s vigilance for idols of past error. In this small passage Milton spies the belief of the ancients. His poetry dwells on the vivacious image of what was believed, for nine spectacular lines, before breaking it as ‘erring’: Milton dismisses belief in Mulciber’s fall as itself fallen. That dismissal of course disguises the fact that Milton’s poem is elsewhere deeply indebted to this very narrative of spectacular fall: he draws on this Homeric topos elsewhere in his account of falling angels (Satan falling through the ‘vast vacuity’ at 2.932; the nineday fall of the angels at 6.871). Milton could not, in short, do without this borrowed gold, just as the Israelites used the gold from Egypt to build the Golden Calf, and just as Hell’s artist/ architect Mulciber is dependent on materials dug from Hell.46 VI Part of such a predicament’s instability derives from the fact that the destruction of idolatrous monuments must itself be monumentalized. I now turn to that subject in the final section of this chapter. We can see the processes of monumentalization at the very end of Milton’s poetic career, as he imagines blind Samson mustering energies for one last murderous push at idolatry. In the brilliant poetic drama of Samson Agonistes (published in 1671), Samson’s position fairly brims with intense and painful echoes of Milton’s own biography. Like Milton at one point or another in his life, Samson is blind, unhappily married, and defeated, ‘his giantship . . . gone somewhat crestfall’n’ (l. 1244), even as the noble idolaters celebrate their victory over him. Like Milton, Samson castigates his own people for loving ‘bondage more than liberty, j Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty’ (ll. 270–1). Perhaps like Milton, Samson’s worst shame is to have ‘oped the mouth of idolists, and atheists’, and to have produced

Statues of Liberty

113

‘doubt j In feeble hearts’ already given to ‘waver, or fall off and join with idols’ (ll. 452–7). Like Milton, Samson resists appeals to accommodate the idolaters, to prostitute ‘holy things to idols’ (l. 1358). And so Samson exercises a lonely, final, violent repudiation of all that would engulf him. Milton imagines Samson targeting the Philistines of Gaza, ‘drunk with idolatry’, ‘chanting their idol’; setting himself against the pillars of the Philistine temple, He tugged, he shook, till down they came and drew The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder Upon the heads of all who sat beneath, Lords, ladies, captains, counsellors, or priests, Their choice nobility and flower.47

This act of destruction interestingly produces memorialization in the form of a monument, a statue of Liberty. Samson’s father Manoa vows that he will fetch Samson’s corpse home, and . . . there will I build him A monument, and plant it round with shade Of laurel ever green, and branching palm, With all his trophies hung, and acts enrolled In copious legend, or sweet lyric song. (ll. 1733–7)

However unquestionably tragic a figure Samson is, and however unquestionably he resembles Milton himself, maybe Milton was nonetheless appalled at Samson’s terrorism. Certainly Samson’s complacent father Manoa registers none of the horror at Samson’s act that the messenger does (ll. 1541–51).48 And so it may be that Manoa’s monument is too complacent an art form for fierce Milton.49 Maybe this monument is incapable of disowning its status as a captivating, deadening reification of spiritual power. Maybe Milton implicitly practices a kind of iconoclasm on this monument adorned with mere lyric song, just as he writes a Greek drama pitched against the visuality of Greek

114

Statues of Liberty

drama in Samson Agonistes, rather as from the perspective of the blind.50 However much that may be the case, when Milton had earlier imagined liberty newly recovered, he had nonetheless imagined a desecrated statue restored to statuesque form from the malevolent ravages of history. Thus in Aereopagitica (1644) Truth is imagined to have been ‘a perfect shape’ while Christ and the Apostles were on earth; immediately after their departure, a wicked race of deceivers ‘took the virgin Truth, hewd her lovely form into a thousand peeces and scatter’d them to the four winds’. The ‘sad friends of Truth’ must repair this desecration, gathering the limbs of the ‘mangl’d body’; only with the Second Coming will Christ ‘bring together every joynt and member, and shall mould them into an immortall feature of loveliness and perfection’.51 To impose licensing restrictions on books is to obstruct the building of that statue, and to hinder those who continue their ‘obsequies to the torn body of our martyr’d saint’ (2:550). Paradoxically, then, Milton’s ideal world is one in which the destructive work of the iconoclasts is repaired. He uses precisely the language of the memorialized virgin martyr and her relics to imagine a statue of Truth. But the language is used in such a way as to deny material deadness, and to underline the indisputable, life-giving animation of this statue. The crucial shift is to make the new idol verbal. By Milton’s account, books are like the sainted martyr’s lively monument:52 Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s Image; but hee who destroyes a good Book, kills reason itselfe, kills the Image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit, imbalm’d and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life (2.492–3).

The books, however, must deny their status as monuments. Within Milton’s stirring lines, so dear, and so natural, to lovers of

Statues of Liberty

115

the book, lies a compacted violence against, and metaphorical dependence upon, sacred relics and images, ‘embalmed and treasured up to a life beyond life’. The passage effects a transfer of animation, from relics to books, from ‘stocks and stones’ to the living ‘groans’ recorded in Milton’s poetry.53 Now books will become the ‘trophy’ of Liberty, as Milton says about his own tract Aereopagitica (2.487). Milton uses the language of preserving relics in such a way as to justify his life’s work of destroying relics and idols.54 But Milton’s relic is the book of ‘pure reason’, the image of God, and so capable of disguising its status as material, mesmerizing monument. Passages of this kind bear the scars of the fierce struggle between Word and image, between alternative forms of representation, in English cultural history. They mark the victory of text over visual representations after a century of struggle, as we definitively enter the age of Art.55 Now texts are the life-giving statues of Liberty, more durable, and less subject to idolatry, than monuments of brass or stone.56 The very existence of the statue of Liberty must imply wholesale destruction of alternative forms of representation. Reference to statues of Liberty brings us naturally to the question of iconoclasm and the Enlightenment, to which the next and final chapter turns.

chapter 4

Under the Hammer Iconoclasm and the Enlightenment

T

HIS book began by looking to the Taliban iconoclasm of 2001. Even if there are similarities between the ferocity of early modern European and Taliban iconoclasms, one will nevertheless surely object that Mullah Omar appears to be ignorant of one, distinctively Western, category. Omar, we remember, declared that either the Bamiyan statues were subject to idolatrous worship (in which case they must be destroyed) or they were inert, dead matter: if they are ‘only part of the history of Afghanistan, then all we are breaking are stones’.1 What was missing from the Mullah’s reasoning, as I suggested in the Introduction, is any concept of ‘heritage’, let alone any concept of the autonomy of Art. What’s missing, that is, is the Enlightenment’s achievement of having separated sacred images from the web of practices and religious beliefs from which images had derived their meaning. In this chapter we shall see, however, that the Enlightenment attitude to art is intimately responsive to, and shaped by, iconoclasm. Not only that, but, more interestingly, the Enlightenment is itself an iconoclastic movement in three profound ways. After 150 years or so of failed iconoclasm, Northern Europeans were exhausted. They invented three alternatives to literal iconoclasm.

Under the Hammer

117

In the first place, the scientific Enlightenment exercised a philosophical iconoclasm by describing ideology as false consciousness, an idol that enthralls the naive and that must be broken. Secondly, the sentimental Enlightenment neutralized the image by placing it in the museum and by calling it Art. And thirdly, Enlightenment taste commodified the image under the market’s hammer. We shall look to each of these in this chapter. Let me begin, though, by noting the changed status of the image in late eighteenth-century England. I John Milton’s Eikonoklastes, which champions regicide as an act of iconoclasm, appeared in 1649 (Figure 31). Milton’s title answers to that of the massively successful book published under Charles I’s name earlier in the same year, Eikon Basilike, the Image of the King (Figure 32). Milton is grateful to the person responsible for the title of King Charles’ book, since, ‘by the Shrine he dresses out for him, certainly would have the people come and worship him’. Milton’s own book is, accordingly, entitled Eikonoklastes, the ‘famous Surname of many Greek Emperors, who in their zeal to the command of God, after long tradition of Idolatry in the Church, took courage, and broke all superstitious Images to peeces’.2 Eikonoklastes was published in 1649. One hundred and forty or so years later, Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791), to be followed by his other great counter-Revolutionary work, the Letters on a Regicide Peace of 1796.3 For Burke, societies must be like works of art, both beautiful and affecting;4 the Revolution is above all a failure of aesthetic decorum: ‘Good taste, manners, morals, religion, all fly, where the principles of Jacobinism enter,’ he declares (5.486).5 For Burke, the failures of decorum evident in the Revolution are by no means superficial, or merely a matter of ‘bad manners’; manners, indeed,

118

Under the Hammer

31. Frontispiece, John Milton, Eikonoklastes in answer to a book intitl’d Eikon Basilike (London, 1649). Reproduced by permission q The British Library Board, E.578.(5).

are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in great measure, the laws depend . . . Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like the air we breathe in. They give the whole form and color to our lives. (Letter 1, 5.310)

Under the Hammer

119

32. Frontispiece, Charles I, Eikon Basilike (London, 1649). Reproduced by permission q The British Library Board, C.118.d.136, detail.

Both Milton and Burke use terms drawn from art to describe the great articulations of history, but they do so in opposite ways. Revolutionary Milton wishes to bear the iron flail against the statues of the past order. Breaking images is the central task of the revolution, one whose purifying violence excuses the iconoclast not only from manner but also from law itself.6 For Burke, by contrast, the Revolution offends most shockingly in its failure of decorum, in its readiness to break the unifying pictorial qualities of a society: manner is what gives our lives ‘the whole form and color’. Between the English and the French Revolutions, then, something striking has happened to the language of art. This difference is not merely a matter of contrast between a revolutionary and a

120

Under the Hammer

counter-revolutionary writer; much more deeply, both Milton and Burke draw on the dominant languages of art of their times to capture the most vibrant currents of revolutionary politics. Milton draws on a well-established tradition of evangelical iconoclasm that sees world history in art historical terms: images signal corruption, and the idolatrous power of images spreads contagiously to all that enthralls us, including monarchs. Burke, by contrast, draws on a language of art that had not been fully developed in England when Milton wrote.7 Burke’s is the language of taste, a language drawn from works of art, but designed more to denote response to the work than the work itself. We judge actions as we would judge works of art, for their artistic manner. Artistic qualities are formal qualities, and those formal qualities ideally inform the action of the man of taste. Tasteful action in the world should itself possess the due decorum of ‘form and color’. The period from the Act of Supremacy of 1534 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 is the period of most obvious religious convulsions in England, a set of convulsions provoked by Reformation, counter-Reformation, and Revolution. Those 150 years are also, needless to say, the period in which the subject of iconoclasm is most startlingly, inescapably evident, from the legislation of 1538 to that of 1643. In this chapter I look at iconoclasm in the century after that long period of religious convulsion. I consider the century between the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution, between 1688 and 1789, by way of understanding how Burke could use the language of artistic decorum to repudiate revolutionary politics. On the face of it, the century, in Britain, is primarily antiiconoclastic, in its cultivation of taste as a prime value. And so, in part, it is. We shall see, however, that the eighteenth-century language of art, and of taste, is at every point inflected by recurrent fear of idolatry. The Enlightenment does not reject the iconoclastic tradition so much as adapt to it, and adapt it, by a massive work of image neutralization. This is especially true in

Under the Hammer

121

Britain, where iconoclasm had been most fierce, and where philosophic discussion of taste was most developed. The art collection, so characteristic of the age and its cultivation of taste, is in part produced as a place of asylum from iconoclasm. It offers the secular space in which we are permitted to contemplate images. Even as that asylum was being shaped, however, it registered, and attempted to neutralize, the dangers of the image, the incantatory dangers of what it would have protected. Iconoclasm always leaves an empty space (see Figure 3), a space once occupied by the broken image; faced with that empty space, we remember, and adapt to, the spectral presence of the destroyed image. The history of taste is, I shall argue here, intimately bound with the fear of idolatry. Iconoclasm, once started, is difficult to stop. II In eighteenth-century Britain, the pictorial imagination faced two, ostensibly opposed, attacks on the image and all it stood for. On the one hand it faced the ongoing tradition of evangelical iconoclasm. On the other, it faced a relatively new, Enlightenment, empirical tradition that described its science as a form of iconoclasm. I briefly consider each of these iconoclastic movements in turn, before looking to our principal subject, taste. The tradition of evangelical iconoclasm was still vigorous, as was anti-Catholicism, throughout the eighteenth century in Britain.8 In 1709 the brother of James Owen (1654–1706), for example, published his brother’s History of images, and of image-worship. Shewing, the original and progress of idolatry among pagans, Jews, and Christians: with a refutation.9 Owen had been prompted to write, he says, by the appearance of pictures in books of English devotions and Bibles. These spoils of the Egyptians, he argues, threaten to reproduce the Golden Calf (295). Owen writes squarely in the tradition of the Elizabethan ‘Homily Against the Peril of Idolatry’ (1563), which, indeed, he cites at

122

Under the Hammer

length. ‘An image is an image, call it by what name you will. Not images of such a denomination, but all images without distinction are forbidden in the Word of God, and all image worship is there condemned as idolatrous’ (288). All religious images are idols, and idolatry is the ‘greatest of all abominations’ (5). Using, and extending, arguments drawn from the 1563 Homily, Owen casts the attack on images as a historical drama of liberty’s struggle, in which the barbaric and captivating past constantly resurfaces, only to enslave the spirit: ‘If Romish pictures come to have any influence in our devotions’, he says, ‘they will in time capture our mind and command our adorations’ (6). Owen imagines his brother in the Preface as a Spenserian hero in search of the core, the visual core, of Roman corruption: ‘He traverses the idolatrous beast, through all the abstruse meanderings of antiquity, and wounds him in the most sensible part [i.e. the image], and by this one blow has transfixed the very bowels of popery’ (Preface, A2v). III Unqualified evangelical hatred of images and idols survives in pure form, then, into the eighteenth century. By the eighteenth century, that tradition of hostility to religious images was old in English Christianity, dating as it does from the end of the fourteenth century. What, though, of the opposite, new tradition, that of the scientific Enlightenment? Was it just as hostile to religious representation as the evangelical tradition? No, but this Enlightenment tradition nevertheless preserved evangelical iconoclasm in the forms, and self-descriptions, of its own disciplinary practice. The hostility is less to material pictures than to pictures of the mind; the iconoclasm is less of material objects and more of scientific systems. The enchanting power of religious images is, nonetheless, targeted along the way. Item 266 of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique, published in 1764, is devoted to discussion of the ‘Idol and Idolatry’. It begins in irenic manner towards those who appear to reverence idols. No

Under the Hammer

123

people, Voltaire (1694–1778) begins, ever willingly accepted the term ‘idolater’ as a self-description. No people have ever said ‘we worship idols or images.’10 The charge of idolatry is always an insult generated by others, who impute false thinking to those who pay respect to images: ‘it is rather an abusive word, a term of detestation’ (184). Voltaire’s tolerance to religious images is, however, only apparent. Without ever saying so, Voltaire practices a comparative anthropology, in which he quietly compares pagan reverence of images with Catholic image worship, all with apparent tolerance towards reverential treatment of the image. The comparison is so insistently and so strategically urged, however, that Voltaire’s derision of all these practices, both pagan and Christian, smiles irresistibly through the poker-faced, ironic, and irenic surface. Thus Voltaire quickly pretends to distinguish pagan from Catholic practice. Both traditions reverence images, yes, but adepts of neither thought that they adored a piece of ‘wood or marble’. The real difference was that the pagan images ‘represented imaginary beings, and in a false religion; whereas ours represent real beings in a true religion’ (185). The examples Voltaire offers rapidly efface this distinction: ‘The Greeks’, he argues, ‘had the statue of Hercules, and we have that of St Christopher; they had Esculapius and his goat, we St Roch and his dog’ (185). So Voltaire makes a difference between pagan and Catholic image practice, only to efface it. He then effaces it again. Among pagans, he suggests, it was possible that the simpleminded, seized with a religious horror of a statue of Jupiter, may, indeed, ‘without knowing it, worship the statue itself’. This also happens, he quietly adds, to ‘our ignorant peasants’, even if they are instructed not to seek intercession from ‘images of wood and stone’ (187). Voltaire’s attack on religious images, then, points less to iconoclasm than it does to dismissal of images altogether. The image is so useless as not even to deserve breaking. Iconoclastic Muslims, like Protestants, are mistaken, he says, in breaking images, since

124

Under the Hammer

the images do nothing but represent men, when in fact Christians only worship God. All the images of saints, he avers, amount to nothing, since ‘the Christians, in reality, worship only one God’ (191). Voltaire practices a systematic euhemerism on images, tracing them back to their fragile human origins in such a way as to neutralize them altogether. They are so useless as to be unworthy even of the iconoclasts’ hammer. Even, however, as Voltaire distances himself from evangelical iconoclasm, he practices it on a much larger scale. For Voltaire’s larger object here is not the image, but the larger structure of the human sciences, which he exposes as based on superstition and error. To this shape of error he must bring a totalizing, if metaphorical iconoclasm. Like evangelical polemicists in the Reformation period, though with entirely different intent, Voltaire generates a historiography of error; the historian, writing from the placeless, prejudice-less site of the universal encyclopaedia, demolishes all other forms of knowledge as idols that have enthralled their devotees. Enlightened scholarship is generated, as Cassirer said about Pierre Bayle, not by the discovery of truth, but, paradoxically, by the discovery, and therefore destruction, of error.11 Now of course the figures I am discussing here are French, but they derive their inspiration from an English master, Francis Bacon (1561–1626).12 As Bacon laid the foundation for empirical science, he imagined the preparatory iconoclasm required. Men, he says in his Latin Novum Organon of 1620,13 are subject to four sources of idolatrous intellectual enslavement: idols of the Tribe (produced by the inherent distortions of human perception); idols of the Cave (the idols that populate the ‘cave or den’ of the individual mind); idols of the Market Place, which derive from the ‘commerce and consort of the market place’, especially though the distortions of language; and, finally, idols of the Theatre, derived from all received systems of knowledge, which are ‘but so many stage plays’. These include the idols of ‘religion and theology’ that have occupied men’s minds ‘now for many ages’.

Under the Hammer

125

Bacon takes up the aggressive intellectual tools of an evangelical programme, then, and applies it to a much vaster intellectual field. Error itself has become the idol. Error occupies the intellectual place for Bacon that the Catholic idol occupies for the evangelical: ‘for the worst thing is the Apotheosis of error; and when reverence sides with rubbish [‘si vanis accedat veneratio’], we should regard it as a plague on the intellect’ (Section 65, p. 103). The seeker after science must above all exercise suspicion, especially with regard to ‘whatever ravishes and possesses his intellect; and with such matters should be all the more careful to keep his intellect impartial and pure’ (Section 58, p. 93). He must exercise the pitiless hammer of the iconoclast: as Bacon says in another work, the Cogitata et Visa (1607), the young seeker after the truths of Nature must ‘radically destroy, as far as his rigor of mind and constancy of purpose permits, theories, opinions and received ideas, in order that the intellect, as a plane and even surface, might have access to the particulars of nature’.14 Instead of falling victim to idols of error, the seeker after truth must act instead act with ‘with rigour pittilesse’.15 He must be like the Spenserian hero in the eradication and continued protection of his own mind. Idols have, says Bacon, taken deep root in human understanding, so much so that truth can hardly find entrance. Even as truth does find entrance, however, the idols will ‘oppose the actual instauration of the sciences and plague it, unless men are forewarned and arm themselves against them as far as they possibly can’ (Section 38, p. 79). IV Neither evangelical polemic nor empirical science, then, offers space for the image. Both regard the image, and especially the religious image, as the metonym of an entire system of imaginative enthrallment, of either spirit or mind. The evangelical focuses his wrath especially on the image itself, whereas the Enlightened secularist regards the image as merely one, insignificant part of a

126

Under the Hammer

much vaster epistemological field populated by idols. Ideology critique is formed with the tools of evangelical iconoclasm (especially euhemerism), even if one of the objects of its attack will be evangelical iconoclasm itself.16 These iconoclastic cultural strands, however, in no way account for our initial question about Burke’s use of aesthetic terms as the standards by which to judge political forms. On the contrary, evangelical and enlightened iconoclastic traditions merely frame Burke’s aesthetics of the political, by contrast, and underline the force of our initial question. Let us then approach the principal high-cultural tradition of the eighteenth century, a tradition apparently favourable to images, via the painting in Figure 33. For here we see that if some eighteenth-century traditions repudiate the image through violent aggression, others create cultural spaces for the loving, though detached apprehension of error. The work was not itself the product of a British artist, nor produced for a British patron. It nevertheless offers a strong model for the eighteenth-century tradition of taste developed so powerfully in England and Scotland. This painting is by Giovanni Pannini, a celebrated view painter of Rome. Pannini painted it in 1757 as one of four souvenir paintings commissioned by the Duc de Choiseul, who had been French Ambassador to the Vatican. On the one hand, the work celebrates the image as the central locus of culture. On the other, it works very hard to neutralize the image. To suggest that this painting celebrates the image is uncontentious: above all, we observe that paintings fill every wall. Even where the ekphrastic paintings stop, that boundary only produces yet more images, painted as frescos, onto the architectural fabric itself, in the dome. These images promise a cultural garland of salvation, as held by the topmost figure in the dome, and as lying nonchalantly in the right foreground, just to the left of the lion’s paw. If the picture does promise cultural salvation, the focus of that salvation is unquestionably the central figure of the duke

33. Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome (1757). Oil on canvas, 170.2 cm  244.5 cm. Reproduced by permission Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

128

Under the Hammer

himself. The duke’s extended arm runs along the perspectival axis of the painting, and itself encourages us to enter the perspective of passing from Michelangelo’s Moses back to Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, via Bernini’s David. The duke, as the man of unprejudiced taste and means, is clearly among the saved, and offers salvation to others. In what possible ways could this painting be said to neutralize the image? There are two answers to this question. First, the relation between viewer and image is insistently, consistently, cool. The very colours imply evenness of response: paintings, fabrics, and statues all participate in the same, narrow, cool chromatic range. Taste produces, and is produced by, perspectivized distance and detachment. The duke is no less cool about his collection than the splendid women depicted in the painting on the far left, who admire the vast, naked male forms in the Piazza Navona without apparent fright or loss of decorum (Figure 34). All these images are exterior images of baroque Rome—we see things from afar, without entering into the interior of churches and experiencing the sacral image at closer quarters. Second, Rome is miniaturized and commodified. Moses loses all his force as iconoclast, and, indeed, all his force as lawgiver. Here Moses is good for you not because he delivers the law, but because he was sculpted by Michelangelo. The religious force of the image is recategorized as Art. Moses is no less good for the soul than Daphne and Apollo, if one is sculpted by Michelangelo and the other by Bernini. The curtain framing the entire gallery might evoke the veil of the mysteries, but opens only onto transportable commodities.17 Look also to the image of St Peter’s (Figure 34), whose painful construction costs Luther had attacked so vividly more than two hundred years earlier. The fiftieth of Luther’s ninety-five theses (1517) expressed an intensely compacted, poetic appreciation of the relation of magnificent ecclesiastical architecture and the hidden, human suffering upon which that magnificence rose: Christians should be taught that the Pope would rather that

34. Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome (1757). Oil on canvas, 170.2 cm  244.5 cm. Reproduced by permission Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, detail.

130

Under the Hammer

‘the basilica of St Peter’s were burned to ashes than built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep’.18 Here, by contrast, St Peter’s is small, entirely manageable, framed, portable, and ready for purchase. In fact it can’t even be fully seen, crowded out as it is by other possible mementoes of the Grand Tour. This image, part of a northward translatio imperii, registers the neutralization of St Peter’s as a radioactive space. Before we can have a proper relation with the image, this painting says to us, we need to delimit its force. The task of the Enlightenment with regard to the image is to drain the object of power, to delimit the ‘work of art’, in this sense: to delimit the way art works on us. The space that protects art from the iconoclast’s hammer also empties art of what had been its raison d’eˆtre. Here that work of neutralization is effected especially by intense work of framing: the images of the religious spaces are literally framed as Rome is broken up into bits by all those gilt frames. The architectural frame of the image is no longer the church, but the fantastic classicizing gallery. This gallery is ungrounded (it somehow floats), and the columns of its principal arch do not actually stand on the same plane. And the whole is framed socially: the figure who admires the image is now the detached and cultivated aristocrat, rather than Voltaire’s credulous peasant. V One central eighteenth-century tradition, then, did love and protect the image, against iconoclasts of either evangelical or scientific cast. This tradition decisively protected the image by recategorizing its function as Art. No longer was painting numinous and salvific; it was now framed, buyable, socially specific, and a fit ground for the cultivation of the gentleman’s taste. No longer, indeed, was the image a representation, let alone an idol, but it was Art. The space of the image shifted from the church to the private, though semi-public space of the gallery, but that passage also drained the image of much of its life.

Under the Hammer

131

So far my argument may have persuaded you that art had gained an autonomous space by the time Pannini painted his Picture Gallery in 1757. We may also be nearer to understanding how it was that Burke could deploy the language of taste in his critique of the French Revolution. But why should I be saying that this tradition achieved that autonomous space ‘against iconoclasts of either evangelical or scientific cast’? Why should we seek any kind of dialogue between these antithetical traditions? What could the enlightened connoisseur have to do with the Puritan, hammer-wielding iconoclast or the scientific empiricist? Might it not be the case that the autonomous space of art is indeed autonomous? I think not. The Enlightenment, in all its forms, is, rather, a reflex of the Reformation. I now turn to that argument as it applies to the image. One way of underlining the Enlightenment’s dialogue with the Protestant Reformation is via eighteenth-century definitions of taste. Hume and Kant, for example, were both trained in Reformation cities (Edinburgh and Ko¨ningsberg, respectively). Their discussion of taste is silently informed by evangelical disgust at idolatrous Catholic treatment of the image. For Kant, for example, taste is focused on the form, not the content of the image. Kant, whose definition in his Critique of Judgment (1790) is the most thoroughgoing in its severance of taste from truth, defines taste as contemplative, or ‘indifferent to the existence of an object’.19 Above all, the experience of beauty is free and independent, without interest in the object of its attention: ‘The cognitive powers brought into play by this representation are here engaged in a free play, since no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition’ (Section 9, p. 48). That free judgment of taste, which amounts to the recognition of beauty, is made in response to the form of the object: ‘For . . . the ground of pleasure’, Kant says, ‘is made to reside merely in the form of the object for reflection generally, consequently not in any sensation of the object, and without reference, either, to any concept that might have something or other in view’ (Introduction, Section 7,

132

Under the Hammer

p. 25). At a stroke, though without ever saying so, Kant, consistent with a long sequence of principally British discussions of taste, opens the way up for contemplation of the Catholic image, while carefully fencing out the dangers of the Catholic image. Because we consider only form, not the rational truth content or intention of the admired object, the range of objects now capable of producing beauty is infinite, from the Catholic image to the beauties of Nature. We are now permitted to contemplate an infinitely wider range of objects than would have been permitted by the evangelical iconoclast, but we are simultaneously protected from them.20 Kant’s discussion of the freedom of taste’s judgment is everywhere concerned to neutralize the image’s power to enchant and enslave us. The judgment of taste is free and wholly disinterested, in no way subject to the enthralling power of the image. Kant preserves a space for the ‘work of art’, but he delimits that work very neatly and strictly. Kant’s account of the beautiful negotiates, I suggest, without ever mentioning, idolatry (he barely mentions painting at all).21 In his account of the sublime, however, Kant is explicit about the aniconic ideals of his aesthetics. He defends abstraction by reference to the Deuteronomic prohibition on the making of graven images: We have no reason to fear that the feeling of the sublime will suffer from an abstract mode of presentation like this, which is altogether negative with regard to the sensuous. For though the imagination, no doubt, finds nothing beyond the sensible world on which it can lay hold, still this thrusting aside of the sensible barriers gives it a feeling of being unbounded; and that removal is a presentation of the infinite. As such it can never be anything more than a negative presentation—but still it expands the soul. Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Law than the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth . . . The fear that, if we divest this representation of everything that can commend it to the senses, it will thereupon be attended only with a cold and lifeless

Under the Hammer

133

approbation and not with any moving force or emotion, is wholly unwarranted. (Section 29, p. 104)

The Enlightenment understanding of taste is, I contend, deeply indebted to Protestant accounts of the Catholic image as capable of working on us and enthralling us. The cool detachments of enlightened Taste, within the larger field of aesthetics, is shaped as a concessive Enlightenment response to evangelical critiques of the image. By defending the image as a training ground for taste, by creating an autonomous space for Art, Enlightenment thinkers conceded the fundamental critiques of Protestant iconoclasts. Taste is the product of a Western Europe whose artistic tradition had been profoundly fractured by theological difference. Taste, with its focus on form, is a strategy designed to reunify that artistic tradition at least. Taste is a strategy designed to look at Rome again. But one could only look at Rome by neutralizing its power to enthrall. Focus on the form, ignore the content. Experience freedom, even as you look at religious art. The category of the aesthetic is itself, in sum, a historical product of iconoclasm. To understand the Enlightenment’s neutralization of the image more deeply, we need momentarily to look backward. English sixteenth-century iconoclastic legislation initially insisted that images be only for remembrance. Of course that tactic failed; already by 1547 all images in churches were to be destroyed, since it had become clear that distinguishing between those images subject and those not subject to idolatry was impossible. By 1550, when the blanket destruction of images was reissued, a distinction was made that was crucial for the future direction of English art. Each parson shall ‘deface or destroy. . . images and every of them [i.e. religious images]’, though one class of images was to be protected, for the first time. The act was not to extend to ‘any image or picture set or graven upon any tombe in any church or chapel or church yard, only for a monument of any king, prince, nobleman or other dead person which hath not been

134

Under the Hammer

commonly reputed for a saint’. Such pictures and images ‘may stande and continue . . . as if this act had never been made’.22 Injunctions of this kind were repeated in the revolutionary iconoclasm of the seventeenth century.23 This exception draws a protective circle around one class of images, but only by insisting that the carved or painted portrait had no numinous force whatsoever. Here too, where outright iconoclasm did not dominate, licit spaces and functions were defined for the image in such a way as to neutralize it. The Lutheran position was less hostile to religious images than the Calvinist. Luther argued that images were adiaphora, things indifferent, but needed all the same to be removed from churches and placed in private homes, where they would be both protected and neutralized.24 That this transfer of images from church to private home did in fact occur in Elizabethan England seems certain: the Queen herself complained in 1561 (in the wake of the 1559 legislated iconoclasm) of the contrast between the pitiful sight of the despoiled churches on the one hand and the extraordinary beauty of private homes on the other.25 The beauty of the homes had, she said, been achieved at the expense of the churches. In any case, royal and noble portraiture is protected even as the religious imagery is destroyed: we can see both in this recollection of Edward’s reign, painted in c.1570, where the royal portraits are framed by the act of destroying the religious image in the upper right (see Figure 35).26 This protection of the portrait was of signal importance for the directions of painting in Britain from the middle of the sixteenth century, since portraiture, especially royal portraiture, was one class of permissible imagery in Elizabethan England. This account of English art remains enshrined in many popular histories of British art, which begin with Holbein portraits in the 1520s, often with no mention of the massive iconoclastic background to those portraits.27 The Tate Gallery, whose official title is the National Gallery of British Art (founded in 1897) itself enshrines and effaces the iconoclasm, since the Tate, like the popular art

Under the Hammer

135

35. Artist Unknown. King Edward VI and the Pope (c.1570). Oil on panel, 62.2 cm  90.8 cm. Reproduced by permission q National Portrait Gallery, London.

history books, also begins the story of British art from Holbein court portraits of the early sixteenth century. That iconoclast Dowsing, or Milton for that matter, should have their portraits etched or painted (see Figures 26, 28) is characteristic of the new visual regime. English response to images was clearly influenced, not to say determined, by Continental polemic against images. Calvin’s position on religious images is notoriously hostile; it produced those utterly whitewashed churches, of the kind described by Zwingli as beautiful (e.g Figure 36).28 Calvin (1509–64) locates idolatry deep within the human psyche, describing the imagination as ‘a perpetual workshop of idols’.29 The busy workshop produces not only images of God; Calvin says that superstition also arises through images of the dead.30 Faced, however, with the idolatry of the vast category of the religious image, and recognizing that image-making can be a gift of God,31 Calvin limits the power of images. He restricts them to representation of things that could

136

Under the Hammer

36. Pieter Saenredam, Interior of St Bavo, Haarlem (1636). Oil on wood, 43 cm  37 cm. Reproduced by permission Foundation E. G. Bu¨hrle Collection, Zurich.

have been perceptible to the eye. Within this category, ‘some are histories and events’, and some ‘images and fashions of bodies, without expressing any of the things done by them’.32 What Calvin precisely means by this rather opaque formulation is, presumably, history painting and non-history painting. That he felt the formulation to be unclear is, however, suggested by the fact that his own French translations expanded it. The 1560

Under the Hammer

137

French translation of the Institutes runs as follows: ‘Quant a` ce qui est licite de peindre ou engraver, il y a les histoires pour en avoir memorial, ou bien figures, ou me´dales de bestes, ou villes, ou pais.’33 Calvin’s 1545 vernacular edition had been explicit about what genres of painting he has in mind, and what value he attaches to them. After specifying history painting, he goes on: ‘en la seconde, les arbres, montaignes, rivie`res, et personnages qu’on paint sans aucune signification’.34 In this second set of licit subjects, then, Calvin clearly designates landscape and portraiture, and clearly permits still life. Subjects such as these provide nothing but pleasure, nothing ‘praeter oblectationem’. They have no didactic or other function; in fact they are, in Calvin’s account, without meaning of any kind, ‘sans aucune signification’. By this blunt expression I presume he means without allegorical significance, but even tempered thus, the bluntness of the expression ‘sans aucune signification’ unsettlingly survives.35 Once again, as with permissible portraiture, we can see future directions in Northern European painting: documents such as these give an enormous impulse to landscape, portraiture, and still life. What we had taken as a new secular culture is in fact in silent dialogue with a repressed religious culture.36 The neutralization of art is not only a challenge for both Lutheran and Reformed Protestants. Already the Council of Trent, in its final session in 1563, had dictated the form of Counter-Reformation Catholic painting by neutralizing the image. Certainly saints are to be worshipped as intercessors, but the language about images is very cautious, and could not more clearly express a silent dialogue with Protestant attacks on the image. Reverence for saints should in no way spill over into belief that any ‘divinity or power’ resides in the images themselves; neither is anything to be expected from the images, and confidence should not be ‘placed in images as was done by the pagans of old’.37 The decree even goes so far as to draw on the hygienizing language of modernity, as it expresses the Church’s earnest desire to ‘root out utterly any abuses that may

138

Under the Hammer

have crept into these holy and saving practices; all superstition is to be removed from the invocation of saints . . . and the use of sacred images’. The decree also directs the style of sacred art, in what was to become the dominant, sober, not to say sombre, tone of early Catholic, Counter Reformation art: ‘all sensual appeal must be avoided, so that images are not painted or adorned with seductive charm’.38 Catholic Europe, indeed, actively contributed to the formation of the gallery in Northern Europe, the gallery that served simultaneously as the site of protection for the image and the place of its neutralization and transformation. A small sequence of paintings, known as Cabinets d’Amateurs, dates from between 1617 and 1630 or so. Our example was painted by Jerome Francken and Jan Brueghel the Elder between 1621 and 1623 (Figure 37). The scene (painted in exactly the same decade as, and not far from, Saenredam’s spectral, blanched church, referred to a moment ago) represents a visit by the Habsburg rulers of the Southern Netherlands, the Archduke Albert and his wife Isabella, to a private collection. The collection is in part a Wunderkammer (note the shells and strange flowers and animals), but principally a space of art.39 Paintings such as these offer a clear model for the kind of thing we saw in the Pannini painting of Roman views, painted more than a century later: in both we have the cool aristocratic figures permitting access to art, in the protected space of the gallery. Here, however, the dialogue with Calvinist hostility to the image is explicit. One painting is given exceptional, literally oblique place in the gallery: just to the right of the Archduchess’s shoulder we are taken by surprise by an image that represents the reverse of the larger image in which it is set (Figure 38). Whereas all is order and protection for the image in the larger scene, the smaller represents the short but extraordinarily violent iconoclasm that occurred in the Netherlands in 1566.40 Here the figures masked as animals, representing the Dutch iconoclasts, smash images and musical instruments. That built-in reference drives the rest of the scene in the larger image: this is a place of protection for

Under the Hammer

139

37. Hieronymus Francken II and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector’s Cabinet (1621–1623). Oil on panel, 94 cm  123.3 cm. Reproduced by permission The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

culture. There are soldiers waiting outside (Figure 39). And the largest painting of the gallery replicates the theme of protection, as Fame and Minerva raise the personification of painting from the ground, after the attack by the now defeated donkey figure in the bottom left of that painting (Figure 40). That theme of patronal protection is also underlined by the presence of many religious paintings among the collection, paintings that, the image as a whole encourages us to assume, have been taken from despoiled churches. It is also underlined by the broken statues on the bottom left that have now found a place of protection. Even as the painting protects the religious image from the evangelical breakers of the image, however, it also underlines the neutralization of the religious image. The image is now recategorized, along with other precious and strange things. The very category

140

Under the Hammer

38. Hieronymus Francken II and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector’s Cabinet (1621–1623). Oil on panel, 94 cm  123.3 cm. Reproduced by permission The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, detail.

of taste comes into focus as the generic term that will permit acceptance of a wide range of collectable, saleable items. Here the homogenizing forces of the market are held discreetly at bay, like the little monkeys playing innocently in the foreground. In other cabinet paintings of precisely this period, however, the potentially shocking neutralizations of the image are underlined, as in the painting of 1620 by William van Haecht in Figure 41. Here the market values are explicit, and all is for to sell: note, for example, the visual parataxis of the three paintings displayed for the patron’s eye, in order a Madonna and child; an image of some monkeys playing; and a naked Venus. This is the scene that will produce the explicitly satirical eighteenth-century representations

Under the Hammer

141

39. Hieronymus Francken II and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector’s Cabinet (1621–1623). Oil on panel, 94 cm  123.3 cm. Reproduced by permission The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, detail.

of the English art market, in which the buyers have, according to the terms of Psalm 115, become brutalized by their idolatry, and where the hammer of the auctioneer, poised as it is over it a painting, is inseparable from the hammer of the iconoclast (Figure 42). This is the audience that simultaneously idolizes and destroys art.

40. Hieronymus Francken II and Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting a Collector’s Cabinet (1621–1623). Oil on panel, 94 cm  123.3 cm. Reproduced by permission The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, detail.

41. Willem van Haecht, The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest (1628). Oil on panel, 100 cm  160 cm. Reproduced by permission Rubenshuis, Antwerpen q Collectibeleid.

Under the Hammer

143

42. Egbert van Heemskirk, Satire on Picture Auctions, c.1766 (originally published 1730). Reproduced courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

The intellectual and material spaces of Enlightenment taste, then, have their origins in the space of imagined idolatry and the space of actual violence. They originate in the church in which iconoclasts had destroyed the image. As with the museum culture of late Antiquity after the iconoclasm of pagan statuary, the Enlightenment manages and replicates key aspects of the iconoclastic activity out of which the museum arises.41 The Enlightenment museum manages and replicates Protestant fear

144

Under the Hammer

of the image, just as the Catholic Counter-Reformation participates in the same historical drama of retreat from the full power of the visual representation. VI The eighteenth century, then, had new protections for, and new defences against, the image. It had a new space for the image: gallery not church; it had a new way of looking at pictures: detached taste, not engaged hope of salvation; it had a public newly self-conscious of its function as the ideal receiver and judge of art: aristocrat, not credulous peasant; and it had a new, autonomous category: Art, not idol. It also produced a new language of great persuasive power—that of aesthetics—so persuasive as to be transferable to the realm of the political, as it was by Burke. The eighteenth century also, willy-nilly, had a newly vibrant space for the revaluation and neutralization of art, which was the market, produced by many factors. Initially the result of objects ejected from churches, by the late seventeenth century in England this burgeoning market was a matter of translatio imperii from the Mediterranean to the new Atlantic powers. The Grand Tour may have been designed to cultivate taste; it was also part of a larger system whereby impoverished Italians sold paintings to the newly enriched English.42 In 1737 Hogarth, for example, attacked ‘shiploads of dead christs, holy families and madonnas’ pouring into England from the Continent.43 The move of paintings from Italy to England in the eighteenth century parallels the twentiethcentury movement from Paris to New York: both are translations of power and culture. In both cases, however, the imported pictorial culture of the old power must contend with the iconoclasm of the new. The need to make a space for specifically Catholic pictures became an urgent cultural and economic necessity across the eighteenth century in England. In all this, however, the fear of the Catholic image did not disappear. As I have been arguing

Under the Hammer

145

throughout this chapter, the accommodations of the image are at every point responsive to the dangers of the image. In this final section I look to one particular collection whose presentation brings all these issues together. Horace Walpole (1717–97) arrived home from his two and a half year grand tour to Italy in September 1741. He spent the following three summers in Norfolk at Houghton Hall, the home of his father Robert Walpole (1676–1745), Prime Minister between 1730 and 1742, and then First Earl of Orford. In 1742 Horace composed a Sermon on Painting, to be preached in the private chapel of Houghton Hall; the following year he published a detailed catalogue of the extraordinarily rich collection of paintings owned by his father. This was privately printed in 1747, but reissued, with the catalogue followed by the sermon, in 1752, as the Aedes Walpolianae.44 In the composite text, the reader is taken on a tour of the house, supplied at first with the fronts of the house and detailed floor plans (e.g. Figure 43), before moving through each room of both floors. The catalogue starts in the small breakfast room, and moves progressively through the supping parlor, the hunting hall, the coffee room, the common parlor, and so on. Each room has many paintings, and genres are promiscuously mixed. The common parlour provides a good example: here we find a very mixed bag—there is a bacchanalian scene by Rubens; a nativity, ‘where all the light flows from the child’; a Van Dyck portrait of Sir Thomas Chaloner; a portrait of Erasmus by Holbein; a copy of Raphael’s School of Athens; two portraits by Rembrandt of his wife; a portrait of Locke; and a cook’s shop. For the most part the site, the owner, and the contents of the collection correspond with the model of eighteenth-century taste we defined earlier: the site is the neo-classical home of an aristocratic owner. The whole is emblematic of that owner’s taste: Walpole promises his father, to whom the book is dedicated, nothing but a ‘work of your own’ in presenting the catalogue, ‘a plain description of the effects of your own taste’ (p. iv).

146

Under the Hammer

43. Plan of Principal Floor, Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. q Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission of www.cengage.com/permissions, and by q The British Library Board. The Works of Horatio Walpole, 9 volumes (London, 1798; first published 1752), 2: 277. British Library, 831. bb. 1.

What might strike the tourist, however, is the high frequency of Catholic religious paintings. These images poured into the British art market in large numbers from the late seventeenth century, and cultural space had to be found for them. The most powerful philosophical space was, as we have seen, taste, the appreciation of art works via their form and not for their subject matter. Rarely does Walpole stumble over the Catholic image; for the most part his comments are restricted to notes on form, such as the nativity, for example, ‘where all the light flows from the child’. Sometimes he cannot forbear to enter into doctrine,45 but on the whole paintings from very different cultural sources are thoroughly mixed: there are portraits of Charles I and Archbishop Laud, and very many Catholic paintings, among the Whig heroes, the cooks’ shops, and the studs of horses.

Under the Hammer

147

Walpole seems more aware of the leveling ignorance not of the iconoclast’s, but of the auctioneer’s hammer. Judgments are to be made, but they should ideally be made on the grounds of assured taste, and not by either cost or theological objection. We gain some sense of the leveling power of the market from Walpole’s preface, in which he complains of the inconsistency of judgment made by connoisseurs: ‘You will hear a virtuoso talk in raptures of Raphael, of Correggio’s grace and Titian’s coloring; and yet the same man in the same breath will talk as enthusiastically of any of the first masters, who wanted all the excellencies of all the three’ (p. ix). Prices, too, are unrelated to quality: ‘you will perhaps see more paid for a picture of Andrea del Sarto, whose coloring was a mixture of mist and tawdry. . . than for the most graceful air of a Madonna that ever flowed from the pencil of a Guido’ (p. ix).46 If we take all this, however, to suggest an established visual culture with a relaxed place for the Catholic image centrally within it, we would be badly mistaken. Walpole’s Sermon, coming immediately after the relaxed catalogue, tells an entirely different, fraught story of the Catholic image. At every giddy turn, it expresses a love for painting and a fear of idolatry. The text of the sermon is drawn from Psalm 115: ‘They have mouths but they speak not; eyes have they but they see not; neither is there any breath in their nostrils’ (99). In the psalm, these words are of course directed at the idols themselves; in Walpole’s sermon they are instead mobile in their referent, sometimes referring to the Catholic pictures, sometimes to the insensate viewers. The first pagans bowed and adored the first ray of truth they perceived, but we Christians, says Walpole, we ‘have eyes but do not see’. The words of the text refer to idols, but they ‘are equally referable to the pictures of the Romish Church’ (100). Walpole cannot decide who is more gross in their idolatry— Catholic worshippers of the picture, the pictures themselves, or Protestant admirers of Catholic painting. Catholic worshippers of the image are the easy targets:

148

Under the Hammer

They would worship! They bow to a shadow! They would adore the incomprehensible God! but they revere the faint produce of their own idea! Instead of Him who is the Eye of the universal world . . . they adore shadows, that have eyes, but see not, mouths but speak not; neither is there any breath in their nostrils. These are thy gods, O Rome! (100–1)

Even as Walpole attacks the images, however, he cannot help but excuse them. Walpole goes so far as to reverse the sense of his biblical text at this point—the paintings are so lifelike that they represent figures, ‘who though they see not, yet have eyes; and have mouths that scarce want speech’ (103). The paintings are so expressive that one can almost excuse the ‘credulity of the populace’ who see ‘miracles made obvious to their senses by the hand of a Raphael or a Guido’. The person who can reject fables, painted thus, must be endowed with a ‘courage, a strength of reasoning beyond the common standard’—‘no wonder then the ignorant should adore’ (103). Besides, the credulous are not responsible, since it’s the devil’s work: the devil finds subtle ways to deceive, by propagating sin under the veil of piety. In the case of painting, the devil has taught them ‘to worship the copy for the original. Nay, what might have tended to heighten their devotion, he perverted to the means of their destruction’ (101). Even as he rises to this denunciation of Catholic painting, however, he excuses it— ‘Painting, in itself, is innocent; no art, no science can be criminal; ’tis the misapplication that must constitute the sin.’ It’s we who are the idolaters, by treating mere human performance as divine. Once he has considered how the devil might exploit painting, Walpole goes to the other extreme, of singling out painting as the art best designed to provoke piety in us. God himself was a painter, and he has taught us to ‘call forth little worlds from the blank canvass’, with ‘formless masses of colors and diversifications of light and shade’ (102). Having blamed and excused the paintings and their viewers as idols, Walpole turns to the Catholic clergy, those ‘ministers of

Under the Hammer

149

44. Salvator Rosa, The Prodigal Son, 1651–55. Reproduced by permission of The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photograph q The State Hermitage Museum, by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets.

idolatry’, who are the real sinners here. If only the clergy used paintings to promote piety, then painting would replace scripture. At this point Walpole breaks into an enthusiastic, not to say passionate account of the affective force of these paintings, where ‘each touch of the pencil is a lesson in contrition; each figure an apostle to call you to repentance’ (109). Whoever is not intensely moved by these images is ‘as the idol that has a mouth but speaks not, and eyes that cannot see’ (109). In short, Walpole is massively, revealingly, confused. Let us end with his account of the painting, in Houghton Hall collection, of the Prodigal Son by Salvator Rosa (painted in the 1650s). As we witness the son eating not with swine so much as with beasts who resemble idols, we should, says Walpole, arise with him and go to the father (Walpole, recently returned from more than two years’ absence, is writing for his father, we should remember), and confess.

150

Under the Hammer

Even as Walpole can hear the father, in the living painting, speak his words of comfort and forgiveness, he attacks the Roman saints: That father will hear, will not turn from the cry of the penitent: he is not like those idols, that have ears and hear not. Will the Romish saints do thus? Will their hallowed madonnas thus incline to their supplications? Can those gaudy missionaries, whose consecrated portraits elbow the altars of the living God, can they cast their unseeing eyes on their prostrate votaries? Can their speechless mouths say ‘I will, be thou clean’? (110)

In short, Walpole is profoundly conflicted as he accounts for the function of these images: nowhere does he have recourse to the language of taste; no, these pictures are simultaneously dangerous idols and the source of salvation, the mirrors of a captivating religion and the very springs of life. The more Walpole fulminates against Italian painting, the more he falls in love with it. The love is intensely devotional, and richly pious. The language of idolatry and death in the sermon is exceptionally mobile, sliding unpredictably between the paintings, their viewers, and the Catholic clergy. This extraordinary text reveals the deeper dialogue still clearly audible in eighteenth-century discussions of taste. Walpole’s sermon comes wrapped in a neo-classical stately home, and is presented by Walpole to his father as no more than ‘a plain description of the effects of your own taste’. The sermon itself cannot, however, help but express an intense desire for a more imaginative, devotional response to the astonishingly beautiful images. In the Aedes Walpolianae as a whole we can, that is, see the function of taste: it permits, neutralizes, and disguises a profoundly embarrassed, passionate embrace of the Catholic image. VII The Enlightenment discussion of taste, and the Enlightenment category of Art, is, then, produced from a three-cornered dialogue: the definitions of taste (corner 1) concede evangelical attacks on idolatry (corner 2), and secretly desire the Catholic

Under the Hammer

151

image (corner 3). That these partners in the dialogue are still vibrant and resurgent in the middle of the eighteenth century is evident. Walpole, not at all coincidentally, also produced the first gothic fiction with his Castle of Otranto (?1764), a work about which Walpole says that he ‘rather wanted to be brought back to imagination, than to be led astray by it’.47 That Gothic horror was, one way and another, to become Gothic revival, the movement of massive renegotiation with the Catholic image in nineteenth-century England. But the revolutionary strain of iconoclasm was also to resurface, much more quickly. Before the eighteenth century was out, radical distrust of the imagination was also about to resurface in its Enlightened form, across the channel, in the form of revolutionary iconoclasm (Figure 45).48 The topic of French Revolutionary iconoclasm is huge and fascinating; it touches and extends the narrative of this book at every turn. We cannot permit ourselves more than two glimpses of the iconographic struggle, the first by Chateaubriand, recalling events before, though pointing towards, the Terror of 1793–4 that he had witnessed in 1792. He describes the Cordeliers at work in the church the faction had overtaken. The vivid glimpse of revolutionaries at work exemplifies the relation between iconoclastic aggression toward the old order and the iconology of the new: Les tableaux, les images sculpte´es ou peintes, les voiles, les rideaux du couvent avaient e´te´ arrache´s; la basilique, e´corche´e, ne pre´sentait plus aux yeux que ses ossements et ses areˆtes. [Chateaubriand then describes the presidential bench up to which speakers stepped, describing it as resembling a ‘scaffold’ (‘e´chafaud’)]. Derrie`re le president, avec une statue de Liberte´, on voyait de pre´tendus instruments de l’ancienne justice, instruments supple´e´s par un seul, la machine a` sang.49 [The pictures, the sculpted or painted images, the veils, the curtains of the convent: all had been ripped down. The scored church showed only its skeleton and ribs . . . Behind the president, with a statue of Liberty, one could see the instruments of alleged, old justice, instruments now replaced by a single one, the guillotine.]

152

Under the Hammer

45. Pierre Joseph Lafontaine, Alexander Lenoir Defends the Royal Tombs at St Denis against Revolutionary Iconoclasts (1793). Drawing. Muse´e Carnavalet, Paris. Reproduced by permission of The Image Works, Inc, Woodstock, NY.

The second, much later glimpse evokes the difficulty of stabilizing representation after a revolution. The rhythm of iconoclasm and its answering call of museums was rapid after the Revolution: The Louvre, although planned before 1789, was officially opened to the public in August 1793 (during the Terror), just as the Museum of French Monuments—created for the express purpose

Under the Hammer

153

of preserving monuments otherwise threatened by the iconoclasts—was opened in 1795.50 Museums, however, were by no means sufficient to stabilize the war of representation. Only an obelisk could do that. I refer to the obelisk that continues to stand in what is now called Place de la Concorde. Looking back, many decades after the Revolution, on this Parisian space, where the statue of Louis XV had been demolished by Revolutionary decree, and where, along with thousands of other victims of the Revolution, Louis XVI had been beheaded, Victor Hugo ruefully observes the near-impossibility of stabilizing the space with a plausible representation. His reflections exemplify the symbolic instability of the Revolutionary order, or what I have in this book called the kinesis of iconoclasm. Only an obelisk, imported from Napoleonic colonial adventure in Egypt, finally did the job. Or did it? The space had seen la statue de Louis XV qui a disparu; on a projete´ une fontaine expiatoire qui devait laver le centre ensanglante´ de la place et dont la premie`re pierre n’a meˆme pas e´te´ pose´e; on y avait e´bauche´ un monument a` la Charte; nous n’avons jamais vu que le socle de ce monument. Au moment ou` l’on allait y e´riger une figure de bronze repre´sentant la Charte de 1814, la Re´volution de Juillet est arrive´ avec la Charte de 1830 . . . Maintentant a` ce meˆme lieu nous avons mis l’obe´lisque de Se´ostris. Il avait fallu trente sie`cles au grand desert pour engloutir a` moitie´; combien faudra-t-il d’anne´es a` la place de la Re´volution pour engloutir tout a` fait?51 [the statue of Louis XV, which has disappeared; an expiatory fountain had been planned, designed to cleanse the bloody centre of the square, of which not even the first stone had been laid; a monument to the Charter was outlined, but we never saw anything more than the plinth of that monument. At the very moment when a bronze representing the Charter of 1814 was to be erected, the July Revolution occurred, with the Charter of 1830. Now in that very place we have set the obelisk of Seostris. Thirty centuries in the desert devoured only half of it; how long will it take in the Place de la Re´volution to swallow it whole?]

154

Under the Hammer

However appalled they would have been by Chateaubriand’s glimpse of Liberty at work, English poets were nonetheless participants in the Revolutionary iconoclasm. Just as the tireless Spenserian iconoclast is evoked by Bacon in 1620, by Milton in 1643, and by Owen in 1709, so too in 1793, the year the Terror began, Wordsworth was evoking Spenser’s mighty mace as he exhorts the heroes of Truth to iconoclasm on Salisbury Plain: Heroes of Truth pursue your march, uptear Th’Oppressor’s dungeon from its deepest base; High o’er the towers of Pride undaunted rear Resistless in your might the herculean mace Of Reason; let foul Error’s monster race Dragged from their dens start at the light with pain And die; pursue your toils, till not a trace Be left on earth of Superstition’s reign, Save that eternal pile which frowns on Sarum’s plain.52

As we leave Wordsworth’s heroes marching across Salisbury Plain, imagined maces in hand, we can return to our starting point: iconoclasm is not somewhere else. It’s a dynamic part of our own traditions of both literature and the visual arts. Even as English and American images of superstition seek asylum from the iconoclast’s mace in the silent, newly sacralized space of the museum, they continue to rehearse the noisy traumas of England’s century of early modern image-breaking between 1538 and 1643.

Conclusion

N

O sensitive person failed to experience a sense of horror as the Taliban deliberately destroyed the magnificent Bamiyan statues of Buddha in February 2001. The purpose of this book has been to understand the precise nature of that horror within the Anglo-American tradition. The horror is layered deeply in Anglo-American cultural history, not least because we have ourselves been iconoclasts. We are ourselves revolutionary creatures, or at least the children of the revolution. The history of Liberty turns out, in part, to involve histories of ‘idol’ destruction. For a century between 1538 and 1643, England was subject, with differing intensities, to legislated iconoclasm designed to break all religious imagery. At different moments in that long period of iconophobia, religious images were felt to enervate the impulse to liberty. History itself was described as a life-and-death battle against the idolatrous image; national resurgence and liberty demanded as a prime task the destruction of images. Iconoclasm is by no means only somewhere else. The learned, evangelical early modern Christian iconoclasts understood very clearly that the image, in revealed religions, was always on the defensive. Christian iconoclasts knew that

156

Conclusion

revealed religions (both Judaism and Islam, for example) were aniconic. In the Christian tradition the existence of the image was grounded on vulnerable theological presuppositions. Doctrinal resolution of the incarnate nature of Christ, both God and man, in the fourth and fifth centuries allowed space for the material image. Even so, the Christian image had nonetheless to face the further theological challenge in Constantinople as it confronted an utterly transcendent, Platonic God. Evangelical early modern iconoclasts knew that history. They also understood that the image was at the centre of a power nexus, always on the boundary line between matter and spirit, past and present, literate and illiterate; above all, it was the material point through which transcendent power and its subjects communicated, potentially in both directions. The image was, in short, not an image but a representation, a making present again. Not only did the preReformation religious image often represent intercession, but it made such intercession, to God via the saints, for example, more imaginable. As early modern iconoclasts wished to destroy that mediated religion, in the name of Liberty, they had, then, to destroy the religious images as a primary task. Theirs was a clerical programme that targeted popular and, in their view, idolatrous reception of images. As we look to those clerical voices, we can perhaps feel their own horror, as they contemplate the unlettered engaged in seductive, addictive whoring with ‘foreign’ gods. The key difficulty with that massive, century-long effort was that images were themselves, inevitably, resurgent. The ‘endless work’ was never done, since, in the adventure of the revolutionary cultures, dealing with history means dealing with images, and the work of dealing with history is always unfinished. As we have seen in this short book, iconoclasm comes habitually in waves, and the waves have their definable sequences. The initial legislation targets only those images subject to idolatrous worship; that gives way to a broader programme devoted to wholesale destruction of religious images, since it is impossible empirically to discern which images are treated idolatrously and

Conclusion

157

which not. The next sequence is more exacting and much less enjoyable than breaking the material images, since it involves breaking the inevitably disobedient mental idols. The whole process is by no means over, though, since proponents of the image will, in the lulls between iconoclastic waves, resurrect the image. The resurgent images demand even more brutal treatment than the original set, since this time, after so much evident failure, the job must be definitively completed. Iconoclasm is patently, then, hard and exhausting work. The initial stage might be liberating, but one pays dearly for the pleasure of destruction. Any tradition needs to monumentalize itself. For the iconoclast, however, monumentalization is also demanding work, since the monument must be capable of disowning its status as enthralling monument. It must not itself become, in Milton’s words, an ‘unactive, and livelesse Colossus, that like a carved Gyant [is] terribly menacing to children and weaklings’. So the iconoclast’s monument must be a statue of Liberty, abstractly claiming its liberating message so as to repudiate any possibility that it might itself enthrall. In what we might now call the century of iconoclasm, that living, acting monument became, in English culture, verbal. Animation was successfully transferred from images to books. The existence of a statue of Liberty necessarily implies, however, many broken statues behind it. In a further stage of the religious image’s destiny, it moves to the museum. The museum abstracted images originally designed for other places, and offered them silent protection from the noisy violence of the iconoclast’s hammer. As the religious image takes up residence in the protective museum, so too, however, do philosophers apply the iconoclastic model to a much wider disciplinary field. For both scientific empiricism and philosophical ideology critique will describe themselves as iconoclastic, breaking the enthralling idols of the tribe. The Enlightenment is, then, less a repudiation than a reflex of the iconoclast. The museum is not in every way a wholly distinct

158

Conclusion

alternative to the iconoclast. Not only does the museum’s existence imply the iconoclast’s hammer, but the museum is incapable of successfully exorcising that hammer. If the museum protects the image, it also neutralizes it, in what may be called an unceasing work of euhemerism, a work of historicizing whose principal job is to deny the sacrality of the image. The image, now safely ensconced in the museum and observed by the cultivated and the wealthy, enables the cultivation of taste, rather than salvation. Taste, we can see from the perspective of these chapters, is the product of a theologically fractured Europe. The aesthetic permits unrestricted beholding of the religious image, but is itself a product of iconoclasm. In what might look like a final stage of the image, the sacral silence of the museum now welcomes images designed specifically for the museum itself. Whereas the museum had done the abstracting, now, however, the paintings themselves are abstract. Of course the appearance of finality is deceptive, since the image is always resurgent, even if it must contend with ever diminishing legitimacy. And even as the museum must persuade us that the image will not enthrall us, it cannot help but replicate the sacral conditions it was designed to repress. As the museum manages the idols, so too does it, of necessity, nourish them in a new twilight zone. The history of Anglo-American liberty is driven by dynamic paradoxes; the museum plays out those paradoxes by replaying the traumas of the religious image as it passed from church to gallery. Even as it presents unremittingly flat, abstract, colourless planes, even as it unremittingly attempts to deny the intercessory power of the image, the museum ceaselessly replicates the sacred space. Once images become truly autonomous, they cease to speak. But the image in the museum does not cease to speak, even if it should, even if the last four hundred and seventy years demand, in their various ways, that it stop speaking.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1

2 3 4

5

6

7

AFP Feb 27 2001, at http://www.rawa.org/statues.htm, reconsulted (as all URLs cited in this book) on 23 October 2009. See also New York Times, 27 February, 2001, A4, which reported on the legislated demolition of the statues. Official Afghan radio was quoted thus: ‘All the statues in the country should be destroyed because these statues have been used as idols and deities by the nonbelievers before . . . They. . . may be turned into idols in future too.’ AFP, Feb 26, 2001, read at http://www.rawa.org/statues.htm. New York Times, March 19, 2001, A9. ‘Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, speaking before parliament adopted a joint resolution condemning the destruction, said the Taliban regime’s campaign marked a ‘regression into medieval barbarism’ (AFP, March 2, 2001, read at http://www.rawa.org/statues.htm). For the strategic use of the word ‘medieval’ to describe the Taliban, see Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007). For the frequency with which iconoclasm is attributed to the backward and regressive, see Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 107. For which, see ibid. 36. I note that the word ‘Vandal’ was also used of the English Revolutionary iconoclasts; see Keith Thomas, ‘Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2006), 16–40 (esp. 25). For the iconoclasm of the French Revolutionary mob more generally, and its production of museums, see Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Chapter 5. See also Chapter 4 of the present volume. I leave out of account early medieval destruction of pagan temples and idolatry. The very Gregory the Great, who is attributed with the legitimation of Christian images, is also the author of a letter to Ethelbert,

160

8

9

10 11

12

13

14

Notes

King of Kent, in 601, which orders the persecution of the cult of idols and the destruction of pagan temples: ‘idolorum cultus insequere, fanorum aedificia everte’. Cited from Georges Demacopoulos, ‘Gregory the Great and the Pagan Shrines of Kent’, Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008): 353–69 (esp. 365). Gregory also wrote another letter, a few weeks after this, encouraging the transformation, rather than destruction of pagan shrines. For the larger tradition of Gregory as iconoclast, see Tilmann Buddensieg, ‘Gregory the Great, Destroyer of Pagan Idols. The History of a Medieval Legend Concerning the Decline of Ancient Art and Literature’, JWCI 28 (1965): 44–65. For the broader European picture of early modern Protestant iconoclasm, see Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. 279–81. We misunderstand our own modernities if we relegate fundamentalism and iconoclasm to the ‘conservative’ and regressive. The word ‘conservative’ is probably the most frequently misused word in the United States, where the movements daily described as ‘conservative’ are in most respects those who promote radical and destructive change. For an argument that sixteenth-century biblical literalism, the ancestor of fundamentalism, is inherently ‘modern’, see James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007). American poetry is potentially within the pale of the subject, but outside the pale of my competence. By far the best narrative and intellectual history of early modern English iconoclasm, which gives rich, detailed, and exhaustive accounts of the theory of the image by defenders and attackers, within their own terms, is Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts; Laws against Images, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). This magisterial work stands at the fountainhead of all serious study of the subject. When Max Weber discusses the ‘rationalization’ of Protestant society, he designates the application of single protocols to previously heterogeneous jurisdictions; he does not mean to suggest, as he is often erroneously understood to suggest, a more ‘rational’ system. See Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1958; first published in German, 1904), 25. For a discussion of Byzantine iconoclasm in the broader set of senses of the word ‘representation’, see Leslie Brubaker and John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), Conclusion. I thank the authors for permitting me to see this material pre-publication. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) provides the most striking example of the change. In Leviathan (1651), he repudiates Catholic image worship as an

Notes

161

idolatrous relic of paganism and argues for the impossibility of representing God as ‘a thing infinite’ (see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Chapter 45, 356–66 (448 for citation). At the same time, Hobbes relies on a tightly governed visual regime himself, and produces the most striking visual representation of the monarch as himself a vast, not to say monstrous, representative of every one of his subjects in the frontispiece to Leviathan. For Hobbes’ use of the emblem tradition, see Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), passim. The Leviathan frontispiece is reproduced on p. 186. 15 For the deep logic of sexual and marital metaphors of idolatry, see Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), Chapter 1. To this hugely generous book, the indispensable philosophical study of idolatry (always the correlative of iconoclasm), I am deeply indebted. 16 Herewith a much extendable list of some especially forceful and influential loci: • Exodus 20:4 (Decalogue); • Exodus 23:24 (first divine exhortation to destroy the foreign idols); • Exodus 32 (casting the Golden Calf; Moses demands the expiation of the Levites, who must kill their brothers, friends, neighbors, to the number of 3000); • Exodus 34: 12–14 (prohibition on both worship of foreign idols and intermarriage); • Leviticus 26:1–4 (promise of territorial possession and fertility in return for repudiation of idol worship and observance of the law); • Deuteronomy 4:15–18 (make no likenesses of anything whatsoever); • Deuteronomy 5:8: (ditto); • Deuteronomy 4:23–28 (threat of punishment for idolatry of fathers on third and fourth generations); • Deuteronomy 7 (divine command to kill all inhabitants of land of Canaan; to avoid intermarriage; and to destroy images of previous inhabitants); • Deuteronomy 27:15 (Mosaic curse on anyone who, once entered into the Promised Land, makes an image, and puts it in a secret place; the first curse on the artist); • Judges 10 (God temporarily abandons the Israelites for their idolatry to Baal and Astartes); • Judges 16:23–30 (Samson’s destruction of the Philistine temple of Dagon and its worshippers); • The fundamental narrative of the books of Kings is of a pattern of Israel backsliding into idolatry, followed by iconoclastic kings; the

Notes

162

• • •

•

• • • • • •

•

fundamental theme of the books is the identity of national strength and the repudiation of idolatry; 1 Kings 11:1–5 (Solomon’s foreign wives and consequent idolatries); 1 Kings 11:9 (God’s promised division of kingdom of Israel as a result of Solomon’s foreign marriages and idolatry); Psalm 115, probably the most widely cited text by early modern evangelicals (the insensate materiality of the idols of foreigners; the fact that worshippers become like the idols they worship); Isaiah 2:8 (God has abandoned the house of Jacob because the land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made); Isaiah 40:18–21 (The impossibility of representing God, and the absurdity of the artistic pretension to do so); Isaiah 44:9–20 (Elaborate account of the absurdity of making, and falling down before, material idols); Isaiah 46:1–7 (The idol does not answer or save anyone from trouble); Jeremiah: 3:1–9 (Israel committing adultery with ‘stones and stocks’); Jeremiah: 17:1 (Judah’s sin of idolatry engraved on the heart of sinners with ‘a pen of iron and with the point of a diamond’); Ezechiel 6:1–6 (God’s promise, in his own words, to destroy the Israelites’ places of idol worship, and his promise to kill the children of Israel before the idols); Wisdom 13 (extended account of the process of making a god from material for the artisan who prays to dead wood).

17 BBC World Service News, March 5, 2001, read at http://news.bbc.co. uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/1202432.stm. 18 Jang, April 2, 2001, read at http://www.rawa.org/statues2.htm. 19 In this argument I develop a deeply suggestive remark by Margaret Aston, as she discusses twentieth-century deliberate destructions of cultural monuments: ‘Most of us have not reached the point of making an ideology of destruction, for we (unlike the most zealous of our reforming forebears) are too hampered by a deep sense of historical inheritance, which has come to weigh on us so heavily since the sixteenth century, in part as a direct result of the reforming destroyers’ achievements’. See Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 3. Our anger and desolating sadness at the destruction of ‘art’ may itself be a reflex of sixteenth-century iconoclasm and its ongoing aftermath. I am very conscious of this possibility as I write this book: after a lecture at Yale University on the subject of sixteenth-century Protestant iconoclasm, my friend Lee Patterson asked this frank question: ‘Why the anger?’ The answer to this question is complex; it is deeply informed by the fate of the image as it passed into what Hans Belting calls ‘the age of art’.

Notes

163

20 For the Enlightenment pursuit of error, see Milad Doueihi, Le Paradis Terrestre: Mythes et Philosophies (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 65. For its sixteenthcentury evangelical form, see Simpson, Burning to Read, chapter 6. For the way in which forms of Enlightenment pursuit of error is the descendant of religious pursuit of idolatry, see Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, chapter 4. On p. 109 we read, with regard to the Maimonidean rationalism: ‘The focus on the concept of idolatry was thus transferred from the performance of alien rituals to the harboring of alien beliefs.’ See also Chapter 4 of the present volume. 21 The self-description of the eighteenth century could have been drawn from any number of eighteenth-century sources. This quotation comes from Thomas Warton’s brilliant History of English Poetry. It should be noted, however, that no sooner has Warton made this confident assertion than, unlike his more complacent contemporaries, he expresses melancholy dissatisfaction with such perfection. By the revolution of the Renaissance, England has gained good sense, taste and criticism, he says, but in the mean time we have lost a set of manners and a system of machinery more suitable to the purposes of poetry. . . We have parted with extravagancies that are above propriety, with incredibilities that are more acceptable than truth, and with fictions that are more valuable than reality. See Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Centuries, 3 vols (London: Dodsley et. al., 1774–81), 2.463. 22 I have of course benefited from histories of iconoclasm focused on specific areas outside the scope of this book. See Marie-France Auze´py, L’Iconoclasme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006) for a succinct narration of the Byzantine controversies between 726 and 843. Alain Besanc¸on, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; first published in French in 1994), covers a huge field from late antiquity until the twentieth century, from both intellectual and art historical perspectives. By far the most conceptually ambitious of these is the exceptionally rich book by Horst Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium Sozialer Konflikte: Bilderka¨mpfe von der Spa¨tantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), which focuses on the fate of the image caught between political, artistic, and economic pressures at crucial junctures (late antiquity; eighth- and ninth-century Constantinople; late medieval Bohemia). For historically free-wheeling art historical meditations on the possible motives of iconoclasts and the effect of images (including the effect of provoking iconoclasm), see, respectively, David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen, Netherlands/Montclair, NJ: G. Schwartz, 1985), and, by the same author, The Power of Images: Studies

164

23 24

25 26

27

28 29 30

Notes

in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), especially chapter 14. Thomas F. X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) came to my notice too late to be absorbed here. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 371–92. Ibid. 361–8 (referring to Elizabethan orders for the Commandments to be set up ‘in the east end of the chancel’ (362) ): ‘The tables of the law were deliberately placed on the exact site of the most offensive of all the displaced objects of idolatry: where the holy altar and worshipped host had been’ (367). All biblical citations are drawn from the King James Bible (1611) unless otherwise stated. See [The Holy Bible] conteyning the Old Testament, and the New (London: Robert Barker, 1611); RSTC 2217. For Bacon’s account of idolatry, see Francis Bacon, Novum Organum: English and Latin; the Instauratio Magna: Part 2, Novum Organum and Associated Texts, ed. Graham Rees and Maria Wakely (Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 2004), sections 38–62, pp. 79–99. The Novum Organon was originally published in Latin as the incomplete second part of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna. See Francis Bacon, Instauratio Magna Francisci de Verulamio, Summi Angliae Cancellarii, Instauratio magna (London, 1620), RSTC 1162, beginning at image 23. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1:5, p. 65. This is an edition of the 1536 edition of Calvin’s Institutio Christianae Religionis. See further Chapter 4 of the present book. For goods as idols, see David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). For acts of iconoclasm within the twentieth-century museum, see Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, chapter 10, and, for many examples, Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives. For the issue of pure, imageless origins, see Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 120–3.

CHAPTER 1 1 Two Decades of American Painting: An Exhibition Organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, under the Auspices of the International Council of the Museum for Showings in Japan, India and Australia, 1966–67, ed. and preface by Waldo Rasmussen (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967). The exhibition was shown in Melbourne at the National Gallery of Victoria, June 6–July 9, 1967. For a complete catalogue of Reinhardt’s black paintings, see Ad Reinhardt: Black Paintings, 1951–1967; Catalog of the Exhibition Held March 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery (New York: Marlborough Gallery, 1970).

Notes 2

165

For Reinhardt’s own statement about the desirability of non-personality in painting, see Ad Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 82– 3. For the notion of divinely produced paintings ‘made without hands’ (‘acheiropoetic’), see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; first published in German 1990), 49–57. For comparisons of Reinhardt’s black paintings with Byzantine icons, straining towards transcendence, see Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting; a History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Praeger, 1970), 232. 3 For Tom Roberts, see the entry in the Australian Dictionary of National Biography, read at http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A110419b.htm. See also Virginia Spate, Tom Roberts (Melbourne: Lansdowne, 1972). 4 For the Church’s use of images in the sixth century, see Belting, Likeness and Presence, chapter 8 (esp. 145). For Gregory’s defence of the image, see Celia M. Chazelle, ‘Pictures, Books and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s letters to Serenus of Marseilles’, Word and Image 6 (1990), 138– 53. 5 Crisply stated by Gerhart Ladner: ‘The central tenet of Christian theology was also the greatest justification of Christian art. It was the Incarnation which made religious art legitimate.’ See Gerhart B. Ladner, ‘Ad Imaginem Dei: The Image of Man in Medieval Art’, in W. Eugene Kleinbauer (ed.), Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971), 442–61 (esp. 433). See also Gerhart B. Ladner, ‘The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 7 (1953), 3–34: ‘The Greek Christian concept of the image was elaborated, not in the sphere of art, but in close contact with the development of the most fundamental dogmas about God and man’ (4–5). 6 The full text of both letters is provided in Chazelle, ‘Pictures, Books and the Illiterate’. The precise wording regarding the way in which pictures can serve as books runs as follows in the first letter of 599: ‘Idcirco enim pictura in ecclesiis adhibetur, ut hi qui litteras nesciunt saltem in parietibus videndo legant, quae legere in codicibus non valent’ [‘Therefore the image is used in churches, in order that the illiterate may at least read by looking to the walls what they are unable to read in books’] (139). The second letter, which emphasizes the kind of picture Gregory has in mind (spiritually edifying narrative painting), has much the same formulation. Both letters insist that no one is to worship (adorare) the image itself: ‘Aliud est enim picturam adorare, aliud per picturae historiam quid sit adorandum addiscere’ [‘For it is one thing to adore the image, but another to learn, by the image’s story, what is worthy of adoration’] (letter of 600, p. 140). The text of Gregory’s second letter is also available in Daniele Menozzi (ed.), Les Images: L’Eglise et les Arts Visuels (Paris: e´ditions du Cerf, 1991), 75–7.

166 7

8

Notes

In arguing against iconoclasts, Byzantine iconodules, according to Hans Belting, were obliged to evoke ‘the old Platonic doctrine and to assert that the painter’s image also had its place in the cosmic sequence of images. Every image, no matter of what kind, originated in a prototype, in which it was contained in essence (by dynamis) from the outset . . . The image was thereby taken away from the caprice of the painter and related to its archetype, which it mirrored in form according to the cosmic principle of similitude. Seen in this way, the image was not the mere invention of a painter but was more or less the property—indeed the product—of its model’ (Belting, Likeness and Presence, 153). Popular, cultic persuasion of the divine origin of icons (including all the copies made from those divine originals), and of the images copied from the painting of the Virgin by Saint Luke, also offer powerful, non-theoretical examples of a ‘vertical’ account of a painting’s significance. In these cases, the painting itself has extremely high ontological status. See Belting, Likeness and Presence, 49–57. See also Ladner, ‘The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy’, especially 7–10. See also Marie-France Auze´py, L’iconoclasme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), 88–90. The question of icons in Constantinople was not, of course, only theological. For a sociological account, sensitive to the larger meanings of the word ‘representation’, and also sensitive to the impact of facing seventhcentury challenges to the Eastern Empire, see Leslie Brubaker and John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). They nonetheless confirm that the issue was differently posed than in the West: ‘On one level, iconoclasm was about positioning images within the cult of saints: of allowing images of the holy to perform like relics of the holy’ (cited from ‘Conclusion’). I am grateful to the authors for permission to read this work pre-publication. See, for example, the ways in which two influential Catholic defences of the image distinguish between the image and the proper direction for the veneration provoked by the image. Aquinas distinguished between three things: the reverence given to the image as thing; to the image as image; and to what the image represents. No reverence is to be paid to the image as thing; reverence should be paid to the image as image, on account of (and therefore also to) what it represents: ‘Sic igitur dicendum est quod imagini Christi inquantum est res quaedam, puta lignum sculptum vel pictum, nulla reverentia exhibetur . . . ; relinquitur ergo quod exhibeatur ei reverentia solum inquantum est imago. Et sic sequitur quod eadem reverentia exhibeatur imagini Christi et ipsi Christo. Cum igitur Christus adoretur adoratione latriae, consequens est quod eius imago sit adoratione latriae adoranda’ [‘Thus it should be said that no reverence is to be shown the image of Christ insofar as it is a material object, such as sculpted or painted wood; . . . it remains therefore that reverence is to

Notes

167

be paid to the image only insofar as it is an image. And thus it follows that the same reverence should be paid to the image and to Christ himself. Since therefore Christ is adored by the adoration of worship, it follows that his image should be adored with the adoration of worship.’] See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Peter Caramellus, 3 vols. (Turin: Marietti, 1956), III.25.3, 3:146. The final session of the Council of Trent (3–4 December 1563) omitted mention of reverence to the image as image (perhaps fearing the charge of idolatry). It declared that ‘ . . . non credatur inesse aliqua in iis divinitas vel virtus, propter quam sint colendae, vel quod ab eis sit aliquid petendum, vel quod fiducia in imaginibus sit figenda, veluti olim fiebat a genitibus, quae in idolis spem suam collocabant: sed quoniam honos, qui eis exhibetur, refertur ad prototypa, quae illae repraesentant.’ [‘ . . . it is not to be believed that any divinity or power should be present in them [images], on account of which they should be worshipped, or that anything should be sought from them, or that faith is to be reposed in images, as once was the case among the pagans, who reposed their hope in idols; but that the honour, which is shown to them, is transferred to the prototype that they represent’]. See Joseph Alberigo, ed., Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta (Bologna: Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, 1973), Session 25 of the Council of Trent, 3–4 December 1563, p. 775. 9 Cited from Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, ed. Thom Gunn, with a new afterword by Bradin Cormack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), no. 100, p. 129. This astonishing sonnet (to which I am so grateful to Bradin Cormack for having introduced me), continues thus: Where fear stirr’d up with witty tyranny, Confounds all powers, and through self-offence, Doth forge and raise impossibility: Such as in thick depriving darknesses, Proper reflections of the error be, And images of self-confusednesses, Which hurt imaginations only see; And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils, Which but expressions be of inward evils. 10 The most articulate defender of the exhibition was the art critic Patrick McCaughey, who published two articles in the Melbourne Age about the exhibition. The first appeared on June 10, 1967. The second, which appeared on Tuesday June 20, 1967, was entitled ‘Yanks Go Home? In Defence of Modern Art’; it was a spirited defence of Abstract Expressionism against ‘hostile, even contemptuous reactions’. I thank my nephew Will Simpson for scanning these articles. 11 See E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Dream of Reason: Symbolism in the French Revolution’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2:3 (1979),

168

12

13

14 15

Notes

187–205, figures 19, 22, and 24 especially. For the (Mosaic) revolutionary theory that promoted abstract iconography, see Robespierre’s attack on representational religious art, made at the height of the Terror in April 1794: ‘How different is the God of nature from the God of priests! He knows nothing so resembling atheism as the religions they have made. By disfiguring the Supreme Being, they have destroyed Him to the best of their abilities; they have made Him into a ball of fire, an ox, a tree, sometimes a man, sometimes a king. The priests have created God in their own image.’ Cited from Marie-He`le´ne Huet, Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 67. For the profound sociological pressure in American history towards abstraction, see Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), chapter 1. I am grateful to Larry Buell for directing me to this excellent book. It may be relevant that many Abstract Expressionist painters were themselves immigrants (e.g. Rothko, Hofmann, de Kooning, Gorky) or the children of immigrants (e.g. Newman, Reinhardt) to the United States. See Marcelin Pleynet, ‘For An Approach to Abstract Expressionism’, in Michael Auping (ed.), Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 34–48, esp. 37, for all but Reinhardt, for whom see Lucy R. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1981), 9. Reinhardt was the son of a Lithuanian father of German extraction and a German mother, both of whom were immigrants to the United States. Reinhardt was raised as a Lutheran. See also the manifesto published in 1950 by the Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘We recognize the humanistic value of abstract art, as an expression of thought and emotion and the basic human aspirations toward freedom and order.’ Cited in Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 168. Cited in Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, 221. See, for example, the statement by Clement Greenberg, in his essay ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, written in 1940: ‘It was to be the task of the avant-garde to perform in opposition to bourgeois society the function of finding new and adequate cultural forms for the expression of that same society, without at the same time succumbing to its ideological divisions and its refusal to permit the arts to be their own justification. The avant-garde . . . becomes the embodiment of art’s instinct of self-preservation. It is interested in, and feels itself responsible to, only the values of art.’ Greenberg is discussing Romantic art, but clearly pointing also to the principal subject of his essay, American avantgarde painters. See Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, in

Notes

16

17

18 19 20

21

169

Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism; Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, 4 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1:23–38 (esp. 28). The essay was originally published in the Partisan Review, 1940. For Reinhardt’s biography, see Lippard, Ad Reinhardt. For his refusal to promote himself, and criticism of former friends who did promote themselves, see Annette Cox, Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist AvantGarde and Society (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), 106–18. For the CIA’s cultural Cold War policies, I am principally reliant on Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999). For her treatment of the art policy, see chapter 16. The first article to make a connection between Abstract Expressionism and the CIA was Eva Cockcroft, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, Artforum 12 (1974): 39–41. For an unconvincing repudiation (written before Saunders) of the case made by Cockroft and her followers, and a convenient history of the scholarship up to 1994, see Michael Kimmelman, ‘Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War’, in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century At Home and Abroad (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 39–55. For a more nuanced statement of the case that the State Department, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, and the CIA promoted Abstract Art from the later 1950s, see Jachec, Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, chapter 4: ‘given the I[international] C[ouncil of the Museum of Modern Art]’s contact with the State Department and the CIA, it can be said that in 1956 the search was on for a modernism that could both unite European practices with those of the United States and appeal to Europe’s non-aligned left’ (190); ‘What this first round of assessments confirmed was that it was clearly the European non-aligned left to which American modernism needed to appeal, and that it was Abstract Expressionism which was best suited to the task’ (191). Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, makes the case that many American art forms, including music, literature, and painting, as well as literary criticism, were deployed in the Cold War. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 271–2. The most vocal of American political critics of Abstract Expressionism was George A. Dondero of Michigan; see his speech ‘Modern Art Shackled to Communism’, delivered on August 16, 1949; Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 81st Congress, First Session. See also Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 253. For which, see Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, chapter 1. For the political pressures on the painters who came to be known as the Abstract Expressionists, and their determination to resist those pressures, see Cox, Art-as-Politics.

170

Notes

22 Read at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-ofintelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/95unclass/index.html. 23 Read at http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/braden_ 20may1967.html. 24 For detailed accounts of the exhibitions, starting in 1953, see Jachec, Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 183–7, and 193–205: ‘the social ideals entrenched in American Abstract Expressionism since its beginnings had not been emphasized in the catalogues of the early 1950s exhibitions. This would change dramatically after 1956’ (193). 25 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 257. 26 Ibid. 413. 27 See in particular Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Despite the absurdity and meanness of Guilbaut’s title, the book is serious: it argues that Abstract Expressionism emerges from a complex dialectic of the following: the failure of the collectivist Left from the 1930s; the new imperialism of the USA from 1945; the cultural inferiority complex of the USA up to 1945 (especially with regard to Paris); the abundance of money in post-war America; and the need to produce an art that was expressive of Freedom without being specific about anything (it had to avoid any subject matter). 28 The Jewish Museum show ran from November 23, 1966 to January 15, 1967; Reinhardt died on August 31, 1967. See Yves-Alain Bois, ‘The Limit of Almost’, in Yves-Alain Bois et al., Ad Reinhardt (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1991), 11–33 (esp. 12). 29 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 1995; first published 1899), 80. 30 The classic essay is Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1982; first published in German, 1947). 31 For the recent receptivity of scholarship to resonance between abstraction and the Holocaust, see Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 55–6. 32 National Gallery, Washington. 33 Anthony Julius, Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Jewish Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 34 For Reinhardt’s long-standing friendship with Thomas Merton, see Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, 9–10. 35 For the ease with which apparently messageless abstract art could be co-opted, see Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 143. 36 For resonances between Abstract Expressionist painting and the nuclear bomb, see ibid. 97. 37 Julius, Idolizing Pictures, 70. For the exclusivist sociology of sixteenthcentury evangelical culture, see Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the

Notes

38 39

40 41

42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49

171

Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Barnett B. Newman, ‘The Sublime is Now’, in David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (eds), Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 325–9 (esp. 328). See the letter of 1953 to the Museum of Modern Art, co-signed by Edward Hopper, protesting at the Museum’s exclusion of figurative art and its promotion of ‘abstract and non-objective art’; the text is available in Shapiro and Shapiro (eds), Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, 86–8. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757), 64. For the vast artistic and theological tradition of the veil, see the essays in Johannes Endres, Barbara Wittmann, and Gerhard Wolf (eds), Ikonologie des Zwischenraums: der Schleier als Medium und Metapher (Munich: Fink, 2005). See also Herbert L. Kessler, ‘Turning a Blind Eye: Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation’, in Jeffrey F. Hamburger and AnneMarie Bouche´ (eds), The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 413–39, and further references, especially n. 48. Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, 35. Ibid. See frontispiece. For Newman’s understanding of the ‘primitive’, see Lawrence Alloway, ‘Residual Signs Systems in Abstract Expressionism’, in Shapiro and Shapiro (eds), Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, 157–68. Joshua 24:2: ‘Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor: and they served other gods.’ For Newman’s familiarity with Jewish textual traditions, see Matthew Baigell, American Artists, Jewish Images (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 78–93. For this tradition in medieval art, see Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 167–8. See James L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1997), 136–40. 2 Kings 18–20 and 2 Kings 21–3. See Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art (London: BBC Books, 1996), who also makes connections between Puritanism and abstraction (39–45). Although his account differs from mine as to causes, Graham-Dixon makes the same connections I do between puritan and American painting: ‘In the art of the New York School and their followers, between the end of the Second World War and the early 1970s, we see the final destination of an aesthetic first pioneered by radical clerics working in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England’ (42).

172

Notes

50 For the punishing disciplines of the prohibition on accretion, see James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), chapter 6. This and the following three paragraphs are drawn from James Simpson, ‘Place’, in Brian Cummings and James Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Twenty-First Century Approaches, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 51 Thomas More understood the utopian implications of the Lutheran church: In the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, which More himself might have ghost written, we read that Luther’s rejection of all the national Churches must lead Luther to one of two consequences: ‘he must either confess Christ’s Church to be in no place at all, or else, like the Donatists, he must reduce the Catholic Church to two or three heretics whispering in a corner.’ See Henry VIII, Assertio septem sacramentorum (London, 1687; first published 1522), Wing 565: 11, image 66. 52 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography, rev edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 161. 53 John H. Leith (ed.), ‘The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646)’, in The Creeds of the Churches, A Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present, rev. edn (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1973), chapter 21.6, at p. 217. 54 See Chapter 3 of the present volume for further discussion. 55 Thomas Shepard, Theses Sabbaticae (London, 1649). Cited in J. P. Walsh, ‘Holy Time and Sacred Space in Puritan New England’, American Quarterly 32 (1980), 79–95, at 84, though Shepard’s statement is from Thesis 70, not Thesis 69 as stated by Walsh. 56 Walsh, ‘Holy Time and Sacred Space’, 85. 57 Ibid. 79. See also James F. White, ‘From Protestant to Catholic Plain Style’, in Paul Corby Finney (ed.), Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition; Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 457–77. 58 Joshua Scottow, A Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony Anno 1628 (Boston: Harris, 1694), image 39. The text is discussed by Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 140. Kemp’s brilliant book elucidates the logic of historical supercession in Christian, especially evangelical thought; everything he says about historical supercession has implications for the supercession of place. 59 For the term ‘basilica’ as applied to New England church architecture, see Donald Drew Egbert, ‘Religious Expression in American Architecture’, in W. Eugene Kleinbauer (ed.), Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971), 312–38. 60 See Chapter 3 for scholarship on changes to church interiors in Tudor and Stuart England.

Notes

173

61 Cited in Michael Gaudio, ‘The Space of Idolatry: Reformation, Incarnation, and the Ethnographic Image’, Res 41 (2002), 72–91 (esp. 87). 62 For discussion of the architecture of the Old South Church on Boston (1730), see Egbert, ‘Religious Expression in American Architecture’, 322. It should be noted that the elongated, ‘Anglican’, basilica ground plan had effectively become routine throughout the eighteenth century (ibid. 324). 63 For discussion of how the puritan conception of placelessness informed Puritan architecture, see Peter W. Williams, ‘Metamorphoses of the Meetinghouse: Three Case Studies’, in Finney (ed.), Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, 479–505. 64 Reproduced in David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 123. It should be said that this image is an evocation of a verbal description of the eye painted on a pulpit; the description was made in the middle of the nineteenth century, describing the eye as much older. I am grateful to Stuart McIntyre for this reference. 65 Alexis de Tocqueville, De la De´mocratie en Ame´rique (Paris: Flammarion, 1981; first published in 1835), 122. 66 Ibid. 389. 67 For the museum as silencer and melancholy repository of the abstract, see the profound meditation of Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. 19–22, but Part I (‘The Work of Art, Museum Culture, and the Future’s Past’) more generally. On p. 53 Fisher explains how abstraction and the museum belong to each other: ‘since the act by which a work of the past has become a part of the world of art is an act of effacing rather than an act of making, then this act of effacing might be done by the painter himself so as to present his own work as pre-effaced.’ For the museum as itself an abstractor, see Chapter 4 of the present volume.

C HA PT ER 2 1 For a translation of Guido de Columnis, see Historia destructionis Troiae, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974). 2 John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 Parts, EETS, es 97, 103, 106, and 126 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Tru¨bner, 1906, 1908, 1910, and 1935), 2.5469–80. See also 4.6930–7108. All future references to this text will be made in the body of the text by book and line number. 3 Cited from John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 3 vols, EETS, 77, 83, and 92 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner, 1904), lines 20,876–8.

174

Notes

4 For the locus classicus of euhemerism in the (hellenized) Hebrew Scriptures, see Wisdom 13. For discussion of euhemerism, see Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 50–7, and Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972; first published in French in 1940), chapter 1. 5 For which see Chapter 4. 6 For discussion of this topos, and its origin in the Apochryphal Gospel of the Pseudo-Matthew, see Camille, The Gothic Idol, 1–9. 7 For discussion of this topos, see ibid. 28–30. 8 For discussion of this image, see ibid. 106–7. 9 For long-lived memories of the iconoclasm of pagan statues by Pope Gregory (the very pope who legitimated the Christian image), see Tilmann Buddensieg, ‘Gregory the Great, Destroyer of Pagan Idols. The History of a Medieval Legend Concerning the Decline of Ancient Art and Literature’, JWCI 28 (1965), 44–65. This is a fascinating account of the way in which the legend of Gregory the Great’s iconoclasm of pagan statuary in Rome was successively admired and deplored from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Buddensieg cites a fifteenth-century English memory of early Christian iconoclasm (45): see John Capgrave, The Solace of Pilgrimes, ed. C. A. Mills (London: Oxford University Press, 1911). Capgrave is describing the Capitoline Hill: ‘But this werk of this place and many moo is destroyed eythir be conqwest of the cite or ellis be change on to bettir use’ (chapter 11, p. 27). For violent, though metaphorical late imperial, Christian iconoclasm, in a text still readily available to late medieval English writers, see Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984), Book 4. 10 For discussion of this image, see Camille, The Gothic Idol, 158–60. 11 For an influential example of the larger tradition of demons inhabiting pagan statues, see Augustine, Concerning the City of God, 8:23. See also Tertullian, De idolatria, ed. J. H. Waszink and J. C. M. van Winden (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 1:4, p. 25. 12 See John Wycliffe, Tractatus de mandatis divinis, ed. Johann Loserth and F. D. Matthew (London: C. K. Paul, 1922), chapter 15, pp. 152–62 especially. For a detailed account of Wyclif’s position, see Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts; Laws against Images, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 98–104. 13 For excellent summaries of the Lollard positions on images, see the following: W. R. Jones, ‘Lollards and Images: The Defence of Religious Art in Later Medieval England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973), 27–50; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, chapter 4; Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Anne Hudson (Toronto: University of Toronto

Notes

14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21

22

23

175

Press, 1997; first published 1978), 179–81 (for a brief but compact bibliographical history of the images debate); Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 301–9; and Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 19–27. See Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. G. H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 297. I have altered the translation. For which see Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Vivacity of Images: St Katherine, Knighton’s Lollards and the Breaking of Idols’, in Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 131–50, and the same author’s book The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), chapter 2. Cited from Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Hudson, 27. For which see Stanbury, ‘The Vivacity of Images’, 144–50. Cited in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 119. See William Thorpe, The Testimony of William Thorpe 1407, in Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. Anne Hudson, EETS, 301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 60. She is reported to have said that ‘devils, when falling to earth, entered images standing in churches, and lived in these continuously and still reside there lurking, so that the people adoring the same [images] thus commit idolatry’. See Norman P. Tanner (ed.), Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31 (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1977), 49. See Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art, 14 for discussion. For the text of the Constitutions regarding images, see Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, ed. David Wilkins, 4 vols (London, 1737), article 9, 3:317–18. The translation is by Sarah James, to whom I am grateful. I here follow, and attempt to extend, the fine perception of the late Michael Camille that the orthodox early fifteenth-century English images he discussed in his 2002 article are ‘a premonition of the crisis that would convulse England for centuries to come—not so much the ends of the idolater’s deludedness, as the very beginnings of the iconoclast’s desire’ (Camille, ‘The Iconoclast’s Desire: Deguileville’s Idolatry in France and England’, in Dimmick, Simpson, and Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, 151–71 (at 171). For a detailed narrative, see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, chapter 6, and Nicholas Tyacke and Kenneth Fincham, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547-c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapters 1 and 2.

176

Notes

24 Walter Howard Frere and William McClure Kennedy (eds), Visitation Articles and Injunctions, Alcuin Club Collections, 15, 3 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 5. 25 Ibid. 38. 26 Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John E. Cox, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), pp. 509–11 (esp. 510). For discussion of this injunction, see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 254–66. 27 SR, 3 and 4 Edward VI, c. 10, 4: 110–11. Archbishop Cranmer had already in February 1547 required the destruction of all images in churches; see Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, 509–11. 28 Cited from Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 300. Fincham and Tyacke point out that while historians are generally agreed that ‘the teaching of the latter [the 1559 Elizabethan injunctions] was more moderate than the Edwardian injunctions of 1547’, they go on to say this: ‘Yet we are confronted with the paradox here that the accompanying articles are more radical than their 1547 equivalent’ (Tyacke and Fincham, Altars Restored, 37). 29 For the proliferation of the private image in the late Middle Ages, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; first published in German 1990), chapter 19. See also Camille, The Gothic Idol, 219, where Camille discusses the effect of what he calls the ‘image explosion’ of the later Middle Ages: ‘Through sheer overproduction and . . . increasing lay participation and artistic experimentation, the semiotic strategies by which the holy had been mediated to Christians were overridden.’ 30 The term is Belting’s, from the title of Likeness and Presence. Belting dates the ‘Age of Art’ variously, but most clearly to the sixteenth century. With Reformation iconoclasm, the key distinction is not between the religious and the secular image; it is instead between the image and art: ‘a unified concept of the image was given up, but the loss was obscured by the label ‘‘art’’, which was now generally applied’ (458). I find this distinction useful conceptually. I hesitate to apply this stricture with insistence historically: a museum culture of Art and a defence of beauty will always emerge out of the interaction of revolutionary iconoclasm and lovers of the past and/or of beautiful objects. We find the same thing in late Antiquity, in the passage from pagan to Christian culture. See Lea Stirling, The Learned Collector: Mythological Statuettes and Classical Taste in Late Antique Gaul (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). I am very grateful to Noel Lenski for this reference. See also Helen SaradiMendelovici, ‘Christian Attitudes toward Pagan Monuments in Late Antiquity’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 44 (1990), 47–61. 31 John Bale, God’s Promises, in The Complete Plays of John Bale, ed. Peter Happe´, 2 vols, Tudor Interludes, 5 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), Act 5, l. 585, 1:21.

Notes

177

32 Bale, God’s Promises, Act 6, ll. 693–5, 1:25. 33 William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London: Penguin, 2000), 179. The Obedience was published in 1528. 34 For the cardinal role of images in medieval mnemonics, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For the larger point, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, ‘Visible, Yet Secret: Images as Signs of Friendship in Seuse’, Oxford German Studies 36 (2007), 141– 62, esp. 151 and further references. For the aniconic, Ramist Protestant mnemonics, see Victor Ieronim Stoichita, L’Instauration du Tableau: Me´tapeinture a` l’Aube des Temps Modernes (Paris: Me´ridiens Klincksieck, 1993), 115. 35 ‘[L]eeful and expedient for to have seable ymagis graved, corvun, and yet of Cristis persoon, figurid liik to his person, with purtenauncis of his passioun and deeth, forto make us remembre upon him and his passion and deeth’; see Reginald Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. Churchill Babington, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), Part 2, chapter 5, 1:164. 36 Ibid. 1:165. 37 Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), ll. 4997–8. 38 See Certain Sermons Or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (1547); and A Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570), ed. Ronald B. Bond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). 39 Articles. wherevpon it was agreed by the archbysshops and bisshops of both the prouinces, and the whole clergye (London, 1563), RSTC 10038.3, image 17. 40 See Church of England, Certain sermons or homilies (London, 1563), RSTC, 13663, images 14–89. It did not appear in the 1547 volume (see Certain Sermons Or Homilies, ed. Bond), though that volume has a section on idolatry in the sermon on good works (Certain Sermons Or Homilies, 105–9). This was removed in the 1563 edition. 41 Certain Sermons or Homilies, images 15–16. All further reference to this text will be made by image number in the body of the text. 42 For the recurrent issue in iconoclastic discourse as to whether originary states were imageless, see Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 120–3. For one significant instance from the Christian traditions, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.11.13, pp. 112–13. 43 The phrase is cited from the moment in Spenser’s Faerie Queene when Guyon demolishes the Bower of Bliss: ‘But all those pleasant bowers and Pallace brave, j Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse’; see Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, 1987), Book II, Canto 83, ll. 1–2.

178

Notes

44 Martin Bucer, A treatise declaring and showing . . . that pictures and other images . . . are in no wise to be suffered in the temples or churches (London, 1535) RSTC, 24239, image 49. 45 John Jewel, The Works of John Jewel, ed. John Ayre, 4 vols, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845–50), 2:665. Jewel is evoking Calvin, and Augustine behind Calvin: ‘Augustine even states this in clear words: ‘‘When they [images] are established in these seats,’’ he says, ‘‘in honorable loftiness . . . by the very likeness of living members and senses—although they lack both sense and life—they affect infirm minds, so that they seem to live and breathe’’.’ See Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.11.13, p. 113. 46 If Gregory the Great is credited with legitimating the Christian image, he was also remembered as the iconoclast of pagan images in Rome; see Buddensieg, ‘Gregory the Great, Destroyer of Pagan Idols’. Even as the Catholic Church defended images in the sixteenth century at the Council of Trent, we should not forget Spanish destruction of images in South America in the same century. For the theory and massive scale of this destruction, see Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966; first published in French in 1933), 36–7; a letter of 12 June 1532 reports, for example, that the author had destroyed more than 500 temples and 20,000 idols. 47 See Camille, The Gothic Idol, 203–8; Herbert L. Kessler, ‘Turning a Blind Eye: Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation’, in Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouche´ (eds), The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 413–39. For the heightened tension between the material seen and the invisible unseen in late medieval art, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, ‘Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion’, in Klaus Kruger and Alessandro Nova (eds), Imagination und Wirklichkeit: zum Verha¨ltnis von Mentalen und Realen Bildern in der Kunst der Fru¨hen Neuzeit (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 2001), 46–69. 48 Discussed in Camille, The Gothic Idol, 191–3. 49 I am here influenced by this remark of Jeffrey Hamburger: ‘If anything, the expressions of skepticism regarding images, let alone outright hostility, running right through the fifteenth century, even within the religious mainstream, have been underplayed, as if the period were one of unabashed and unopposed iconophilia’ (‘Seeing and Believing’, 48). See also Horst Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium Sozialer Konflikte: Bilderka¨mpfe von der Spa¨tantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), Part 3, devoted to late medieval Bohemia. 50 Deonise Hid Divinite, ed. Phyllis Hodgson, EETS 231 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 6.

Notes

179

51 For late medieval Carthusian visual culture, see Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 52 See, for example, Denise Despres, Ghostly Sights: Visual Meditation in Late-Medieval Literature (Pilgrim Books, 1989). The tradition’s most widely disseminated text, the Meditationes vitae Christi (composed between 1336 and 1364), is described as ‘the single most influential devotional text written in the later Middle Ages’. See Sarah McNamer, ‘The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi’, Speculum 84 (2009), 905–55 (esp. 905). Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ is a translation of this text. 53 Nicholas Love, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. Michael G. Sargent, Garland Medieval Texts, 18 (New York: Garland, 1992), 10. All further references to this text will be made by page number of this edition in the body of the text. 54 Belting, Likeness and Presence: ‘The image’s speech either was delivered to the beholder, or it occurred within the image between the figures, which were talking about the beholder. In this way the image forsook its traditional aloofness and was ready to address the beholder in a way that produced a private dialogue as it happens between living persons’ (410). 55 These were Roger Dymmok and Thomas Netter, writing soon after 1395 and 1415–28, respectively. See Roger Dymmok, Liber Contra XII Errores et Hereses Lollardorum, ed. H. S. Cronin (London: K. Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner, 1922), and Thomas Netter, Thomæ Waldensis Carmelitæ Anglici Doctrinale Antiquitatum Fidei Catholicæ Ecclesiæ, ed. F. Bonaventura Blanciotti, 3 vols (Venice, 1759), 3: 902–52. See also Joy M. Russell-Smith, ‘Walter Hilton and a Tract in Defence of the Veneration of Images’, Dominican Studies 7 (1954), 180–214; and Nicholas Watson, ‘ ‘‘Et que est huius ydoli materia? Tuipse’’: Idols and Images in Walter Hilton’, in Dimmick, Simpson, and Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, 95–111. 56 See Karen A Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 57 John Capgrave, The Life of Saint Katherine, ed. Karen A. Winstead (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 1999), 4.589–95. All future citations of this work will be made by book and line number in the body of the text. 58 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (London: Penguin, 2005), VIII.501–4. 59 See Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS, 206 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938). For another spectacular virgin saint’s life in which statutes of the pagan gods are aggressively attacked by the virgin martyr, see William Parys, ‘Life of Saint Cristina’, in Carl Horstmann (ed.), Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden (Hildesheim: Henniger, 1875), 183–90. This text was written 1397–9;

180

60 61

62 63 64 65

66 67

68

69

Notes

for discussion, see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 406–7. See Wendy Scase, Reginald Pecock, Authors of the Middle Ages, 8 (Aldershot, Hants.: Variorum, 1996). The other great vernacular defence of the image is by Thomas More in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529). The second edition, published in 1532, included a rebuttal of The Ymage of Love, by John Rickes (London, 1525), RSTC 21471.5. See Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. T. M. C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour, and Richard Marius, 2 Parts, in The Complete Works of St Thomas More, 6 (Yale University Press, 1981), Book 1, Chapter 2 (1:40–51); Book 1, Chapter 19 (1:110–13), and Book 4, Chapter 2 (1:356–9). For discussion, see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 174–94. Pecock, Repressor, 2:2, p. 137. Ibid. 2:3, p. 156. Ibid. 2:3, p. 159. ‘It is not improper that God should make that image of stone or wood to sweat, and that the image should move from one place to another without human intervention, and . . . that the eyes of the image should be turned here and there truly, or apparently, as though the image should see, and that the image should speak, just as God made Balaam’s ass speak’ (Pecock, Repressor, 2:8, p. 186). For the widest survey, see Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages. See also Camille, ‘The Iconoclast’s Desire’; and Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, chapter 8. It is also true that the entire world of female visionary experience fell under the surveillance of a discretio spiritum. For this, see Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), and James Simpson, ‘Visionary Writing in England, 1530–1550’, in Vincent Gillespie and Samuel Fanous (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). For a persuasive argument that Lerne to Dye stands at the formal and thematic center of the Series, see Christina von Nolcken, ‘ ‘‘O, Why Ne had I Lerned for to Die’’: Lerne for to Dye and the Author’s Death in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series’, Essays in Medieval Studies 10 (1993), 27–51. Citation from Barbara Newman, ‘Henry Suso and the Medieval Devotion to Christ the Goddess’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.1 (2002), 1–14 (esp. 9). She cites ‘233 extant manuscripts, 88 lost ones, and innumerable excerpts’ from across all Europe, plus 10 printed editions between 1480 and 1540. For the specifics of Hoccleve’s source text, see Roger Lovatt, ‘Henry Suso and the Medieval Mystical Tradition in England’, in Marion Glasscoe (ed.), The Medieval Mystical Tradition in

Notes

70

71 72

73

74

181

England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1982 (Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter, 1982), 47–62. Hoccleve was translating not from the Horologium directly, but from a Latin extract. The chapter on death from the Horlogium circulated widely as a separate text. For the medieval scholastic theory of the imagination, see Alastair Minnis, ‘Medieval Imagination and Memory’, in Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 239–74. For the function of images in the writings of Seuse more generally, see Hamburger, ‘Visible, Yet Secret’. Even Seuse’s defence has an iconoclastic element: he says he uses one image to drive out another (‘bild mit bild us triben’, cited in Hamburger, ‘Visible, Yet Secret’, 152). For Seuse’s ultimate reliance on pseudoDionysian aniconism, see Hamburger, ‘Seeing and Believing’, 56. For systematic treatment of Hoccleve’s complex and dynamic treatment of vision, see Shannon Gayk, Reformations of the Image in FifteenthCentury Religious Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), chapter 2. The Horologium did have a later chapter (2.4) about the Eucharist. Whether or not Hoccleve knew this and omitted it is unknown. It is probable that he did not know it. See Heinrich Seuse, Horologium Sapientiae. Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, trans. Edmund Colledge (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994).

CHAPTER 3 1 For Dowsing’s iconoclasm generally, see his edited journal, and the detailed studies in The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War, ed. Trevor Cooper (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001). See also Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts; Laws against Images, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 74–84. For the possibility of this portrait being of Dowsing, see Journal of William Dowsing, 324–6. For the broader picture of seventeenth-century English Puritan iconoclasm, see John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Margaret Aston, ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560–1660’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560– 1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 92–122; and Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003). 2 John Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the Administration of Iconoclasm in the Puritan Revolution’, in Cooper (ed.), Journal of William Dowsing, 1–28.

182

Notes

3 Ibid. 12. For the texts of Parliamentary iconoclastic legislation in the 1640s, see also Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War, Appendix I. For the larger picture of Puritan iconoclasm and internal restructuring of churches in the 1640s, see Nicholas Tyacke and Kenneth Fincham, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 7. I thank Keith Thomas for this reference. 4 Journal of William Dowsing, 161. For historical contextualization of the Pembroke encounter, see S. L. Sadler, ‘Dowsing’s Arguments with the Fellows of Pembroke’, in Cooper (ed.), Journal of William Dowsing, 56–66. 5 Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the Administration of Iconoclasm in the Puritan Revolution’, 27. 6 ‘The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646)’, in John H. Leith (ed.), The Creeds of the Churches: A Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present, rev. edn (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1973), chapter 21.6, p. 217. For discussion of how this conception of placelessness informed Puritan architecture, see Peter W. Williams, ‘Metamorphoses of the Meetinghouse: Three Case Studies’, in Paul Corby Finney (ed.), Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 479–505. See also James Simpson, ‘Place’, in Brian Cummings and James Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Twenty-First Century Approaches, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 7 For the precise targets of iconoclasts in the 1640s, see Tyacke and Fincham, Altars Restored, 274–9. 8 The dates, respectively, of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (whose subsequent Act of Settlement of 1701, still in force, forbad any Catholic or anyone who marries a Catholic from succeeding to the throne); the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which allowed Catholics to own property, inherit land, and join the army; and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1832, which permitted almost equal civil rights. For the vibrancy of eighteenth-century English anti-Catholicism, see Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 9 See Church of England, ‘An Homily against Peril of Idolatry’, in Certain Sermons or Homilies (London, 1563), RSTC, 13663, image 68. All further citation from this text will be made by image number in the body of the text. 10 For Ainsworth, see ODNB. 11 Henry Ainsworth, An arrow against Idolatrie (Amsterdam, 1611), RSTC 221, images 5–6. All further citation from this text will be made by image number in the body of the text. I thank Richard Strier for forthright sharpening of my reading of this passage. 12 I am thinking of Kafka’s In der Strafkolonie.

Notes

183

13 For Ainsworth’s cultural context, see Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), esp. 115–21 for iconoclasm and iconophobia. Collinson’s thesis is crisply stated on 117: ‘By this time [1610] Protestant England had moved from a cultural phase which may be described as iconoclastic, characterized by the attack on unacceptable images but consistent with the enjoyment of good images, to an episode lasting some few decades around 1600 which Karl-Josef Ho¨ltgen has called iconophobic, rejecting all material images and implying an advanced and radical application of the Second Commandment of the Decalogue.’ In an earlier, published lecture version of the same book, Collinson says that the first thrust of English Protestantism devised its own mimetic programme and its own iconography; ‘the secondary thrust, gathering momentum c. 1580, came close to dispensing with the mimetic altogether, while disparaging the tastes and capacities of the illiterate, the mass of the people’. He calls this second movement ‘creeping aesthetic totalitarianism’. See Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading: University of Reading, 1986), 25. 14 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 61. 15 Tertullian, De Idolatria, ed. J. H. Waszink and J. C. M. Van Winden (Leiden: Brill, 1987), respectively 22–3 and 24–5. 16 See Journal of William Dowsing, 162. For the Laudian reforms and the response to them, see Tyacke and Fincham, Altars Restored, chapters 5 and 6. 17 Dowsing was exceptional for his meticulousness and comprehensiveness; his iconoclasm was nevertheless part of a widespread iconoclastic campaign; see esp. Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War. 18 The portrait was engraved, possibly from life, by William Faithorne for the frontispiece to the 1670 edition of Milton’s History of Britain. For the circumstances of this portrait, see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 495–6. 19 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Complete Poems of William Blake, ed. Alicia Ostriker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 180–94 (esp. 182). 20 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 1.400. All further citation from Paradise Lost will be from this edition, cited by book and line number in the body of the text. 21 For Milton’s biography, see Lewalski’s magisterial Life of John Milton. 22 See ibid. 442. 23 For an expert survey of the subject of Milton and idolatry, from which I have derived great benefit, see Barbara Lewalski, ‘Milton and Idolatry’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 43 (2003), 213–32. 24 Letter to Diodati, cited in Lewalski, Life of John Milton, 37.

184

Notes

25 John Milton, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, in The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 9, ll. 205–7. All further citation from this poem will be made by line number from this edition, in the body of the text. 26 For the grand tradition of genius as the source of poetry, see Jane Chance Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). 27 For which see Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), chapter 1. It is by no means incidental to Milton’s representation of iconoclast Sampson that he should also be married to a Philistine woman. In his divorce tracts, indeed, Milton defends divorce as an alternative to idolatry. He draws a parallel argument ‘from the ground of divorcing an idolatress’, which is that the wife should alienate the husband’s ‘heart from the true worship of God’. See his The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in The Major Works, 182–226 (esp. 193). Elsewhere in the same tract (200) he warns against making ‘an idol of marriage’. 28 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 73. 29 Ibid. 94. 30 Take, for example, the 1538 legislation concerning erasure of the name of Thomas Beckett from the national memory. A royal proclamation of 1538 declared that Becket’s name was to be ‘erased and put out of all the [liturgical] books’, with the ‘intent that his grace’s loving subjects shall be no longer blindly led and abused to commit idolatry as they have done in times past’ (Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 1: The Early Tudors (1485– 1553), ed. P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin, 3 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 1.276). This was certainly enacted; Wriothesley’s Chronicle, written during the relevant years, tells us that the bones of Becket were burnt by Cromwell, at St Thomas of Acres church in London; furthermore, Becket’s image, along with all the glass that depicted him, and the image of his martyrdom at the altar, were taken down, ‘so that there shall no more mention be made of him never’ (Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, 2 vols, Camden Society, ns 11, 20 (London: Camden Society, 1875 and 1877), 1.87). 31 See Chapter 2. 32 See Jason Rosenblatt, ‘ ‘‘Audacious Neighborhood’’: Idolatry in Paradise Lost, Book I’, Philological Quarterly 54 (1975), 553–68. 33 John Milton, Of Reformation in England, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 1.519–617 (esp. 520). 34 For a revaluation of Samson Agonistes in the light of early twenty-firstcentury terrorism (especially suicide terrorism), see John Carey, ‘A Work in Praise of Terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes’, Times Literary Supplement (6 September 2002), 15–16: ‘September 11 has changed

Notes

35

36 37

38 39

40 41

42 43

44 45 46

185

Samson Agonistes, because it has changed the readings we can derive from it’ (16). Carey argues succinctly, against Stanley Fish, that Milton himself does not support Samson’s terrorism. For the profound dynamic of Milton’s historiographical iconoclasm, see David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chapter 3. John Milton, Animadversions Against the Remonstrants Defence, in Complete Prose, 1.662–735 (esp. 699–700). Eikonoklastes in answer to a book intitl’d Eikon basilike, the portrature of his Sacred Majesty in his solitudes and sufferings (London, 1649), Wing M2112, image 5. For the modern edition, see Milton, Complete Prose, 3.337–601. This citation is at 3:343. All further citation of this text will be made from this edition, by volume and page number in the body of the text. For cathedral organ breaking by revolutionary English iconoclasts, see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 69–70, and Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War, chapter 6 (esp. 186–7). Joseph Hall, The shaking of the Olive-tree . . . Together with his Hard Measure (London, 1660), image 40. For discussion, see Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, chapter 6 (esp. 186–8). For the iconoclast’s report on the same event, see Richard Culmer, Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury (London, 1644), Wing C7478. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, 1987), 1.12.35. All further citation of this work will be made from this edition by book, canto, and stanza, in the body of the text. For a subtle account both of Milton as poetic iconoclast and of the iconoclastic filiations with Spenser, see Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chapter 6. See chapter 3 for an excellent discussion of Spenser and iconoclasm. John Milton, A Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in The Major Works, 330–53 (esp. 348). For a vigorously argued opposing view, that Milton exposes but does not break idols, see Daniel Shore, ‘Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast’ (forthcoming). I am extremely grateful to Daniel Shore for his penetrating discussion of my chapter and for allowing me to see his article. For Milton’s biblical hermeneutics in Paradise Lost, see Barbara Lewalski, ‘Interpreting God’s Word: Paradise Lost’, forthcoming from Duquesne University Press. Milton, Of Reformation in England, 524. There is, of course, a tradition of ‘legitimate’ appropriation of the spoils of the Egyptians, for which see Henri de Lubac, Exe´ge`se me´die´vale: les quatres sens de l’E´criture, vols 41, 42, and 59 of The´ologie, 2 vols in 4 (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64), 1.290–304.

186

Notes

47 John Milton, Samson Agonistes, in The Major Works, p. 713, ll. 1650–4. All further citation from this text will be cited by line number from this edition, in the body of the text. 48 For the history of response to Samson Agonistes, see Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting ‘Samson Agonistes’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), chapter 1. For all the relentless insistence of Wittreich’s own case that Milton intends to present Samson in a wholly negative light, I remain unpersuaded. There are few dramas in which a writer invests the hero more intensely with such grandeur, self-identification, and, possibly, appalled self-recognition than Samson Agonistes. For a much more subtle case, focused on Milton and Samson as iconoclasts, see Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation, chapter 6. See also, more recently, the excellent discussion of Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, chapter 6, which underlines Milton’s deeply unresolved response to Samson’s single, violent, transformative, and iconoclastic act. 49 For an argument that the monument is presented ironically, see Victoria Kahn, ‘Aesthetics as Critique: Tragedy and Trauerspiel in Samson Agonsites’, in Marshall Grossman (ed.), Reading Renaissance Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2007), 104–27 (esp. 119). I am much indebted to the generosity of Victoria Kahn for her kind guidance within the scholarship of Samson Agonistes. 50 For which argument, see Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation, chapter 6. 51 John Milton, Aereopagitica, in Complete Prose, 2.486–570 (esp. 549). All further citation from this text will be cited by page number from this edition, in the body of the text. 52 My use of the word ‘monument’ is designed to evoke the title of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. For description of that work as ‘a symbolic reliquary’, see John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8: ‘In manuscript or print, martyrological testimonials function in the manner of verbal, as opposed to corporeal, relics of the saints . . . The book as a whole therefore functions in the manner of a symbolic reliquary that preserves . . . the essence of the saintly sacrifice.’ King also points to the strategic use of ‘monument’ in Foxe’s title: ‘Both the title and construction of Foxe’s book involve wordplay on the multiple senses of monument as a term for written document, sepulcher, funerary memorial, or enduring marker’ (7). The tradition that writing lives whereas reliquaries and relics are dead (an example of what I call transfer of animation) begins with sixteenth-century philologists, as we would expect. See, for example, Erasmus, writing to William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1516: For my part, far as I am from despising the simple piety of common folk, I cannot but wonder at the absurd judgment of the multitude.

Notes

187

The slippers of the saints and their drivel-stained napkins we put to our lips, and the books they wrote, the most sacred and most powerful relics of those holy men, we leave to lie neglected. A scrap of a saint’s tunic or shirt we place in a gilded and bejeweled reliquary, and the books into which they put so much work, and in which we have the best part of them still living and breathing, we abandon to be gnawed at will by bug, worm, and cockroach. See Desiderius Erasmus, Letter 396, in Collected Works of Erasmus, 86 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), 3.252–96 (esp. 257). For fuller discussion, see James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 59. Kearney also discusses the views of the same Henry Ainsworth discussed above, concerning the vivacity of breathing books: An image when it is looked upon, affoardeth a man no edification (no not if it were sent from heaven, unless it had a voice withal) but a book when it is read, informeth the mind, and feedeth not the eye onley, as doth a picture. An image and picture . . . speaks not; no spirit or breath of life is in them: but the book of God is . . . inspired of God, his life is in it; it is not a dumb teacher. See Henry Ainsworth, Defence of Holy Scriptures (Amsterdam, 1609), RSTC, 235, C4r, image 15); see Kearney, Incarnate Text, 31. 53 See John Milton, Sonnet 15, written in response to the massacre of Waldensians in Piedmont, 1655: Avenge, O Lord thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold, Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones, Forget not: in thy book record their groans Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans The vales redoubled to the hills, and they To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway The triple tyrant: that from these may grow A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way, Early may fly the Babylonian woe. See Milton, The Major Works, 80. 54 King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture, 7, also refers to Francis Bacon’s revealing description, in his Advancement of

188

Notes

Learning (1605), of libraries as ‘Shrynes where all the Reliques of the ancient Saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserued and reposed’ (Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 56). For fuller discussion, see Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 197–8. 55 According to Daniel Defoe, writing in 1726, writing itself did away with idols: Since the use of letters, since Writing came into the world, and since History has preserv’d the true Account of the Actions of Men, we have had no new Gods set up; no Statues have been nick-nam’d, nor infamous men exalted after their Death to the Rank of Deities. See Daniel Defoe, Essay upon Literature (London, 1726), 21, C3r. Defoe’s especial point is that writing unmasked the impostures of the pagan gods (in fact wicked humans) previously exalted as idols. For discussion, see Kearney, The Incarnate Text, 196. 56 The reference is to Horace, Odes, 3.30, l. 1, which reveals that the competition between text and monuments is certainly older than Milton. My argument in this book is that the contest gains especial edge in the context of iconoclasm of material monuments.

CHAPTER 4 1 AFP, 27 February 2001, read at http://www.rawa.org/statues.htm. 2 John Milton, Eikonoklastes in answer to a book intitl’d Eikon basilike, the portrature of his Sacred Majesty in his solitudes and sufferings (London, 1649), Wing M2112, image 5. For the modern edition, see John Milton, Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 3.337–601 (esp. 343), from which this passage is cited. 3 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event. In a letter intended to have been sent to a gentleman in Paris (London, 1791). For a modern edition, see Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). All citations will be cited by page number from this edition, in the body of the text. Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace, in The Works of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, ed. Edward John Payne, 12 vols (London: Nimmo, 1887). References to this text will be cited in the text by letter, volume, and page number.

Notes

189

4 ‘The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction of poems, is equally true as to states: Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto [It’s not enough for poems to be beautiful; let them also be delectable]. There ought to be a system of manners in every nation, which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.’ Cited from Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 66–7 (translation mine). The citation is Horace, Ars poetica, l. 99. 5 Discussed in Joel Weinsheimer, Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 201. For Burke’s notion of the French Revolution as an offense against taste, see Weinsheimer’s chapter on Burke. 6 I refer to Milton’s desire for one such as Spenser’s flail-wielding Talus: a ‘man of Iron, such as Talus, by our poet Spencer’, who was ‘fained to be the page of Justice, who with his flaile could do all this, and expeditiously, without all those deceitfull formes and circumstances of Law, worse than ceremonies in Religion’ (Eikonoklastes, 3.390). 7 That the destruction of Laudian ornaments provoked protest couched in ‘semi-aesthetic’ terms is suggested by Keith Thomas, ‘Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 16–40 (esp. 25). 8 For eighteenth-century British anti-Catholicism, see Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 9 James Owen, The history of images, and of image-worship. Shewing, the original and progress of idolatry among pagans, Jews, and Christians: with a refutation (London, 1709). Further citations of this text will be made by page number in the body of the text. For Owen’s biography, see ODNB. For discussion of this text, see Clare Haynes, Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660–1760 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 70. 10 I cite from the English translation of 1765. See Voltaire, ‘Idol–Idolater– Idolatry’, in The philosophical dictionary for the pocket. Written in French by a society of men of letters, and translated into English from the last Geneva (London, 1765; first published in French in 1764), 183–200 (esp. 184). Further citations of this text will be made from this edition by page number in the body of the text. 11 For which see the penetrating discussion of Milad Doueihi, Le Paradis Terrestre: Mythes et Philosophies (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 65. The reference to Cassirer points to Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951; first published in German 1932), 205–6. 12 For Voltaire’s admiration for Bacon, see Voltaire, Letters concerning the English nation (London, 1778; first published in French in 1733), 72–80.

190

13

14

15 16

Notes

Voltaire describes the Novum Organon as ‘the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised’ (75). For Bacon’s account of idolatry, see Francis Bacon, The Instauratio Magna. Part 2, Novum Organum and Associated Texts, ed. and trans. Graham Rees and Maria Wakely (Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 2004), sects. 38– 62, pp. 79–99. All further citation from this work will be from this edition, cited by section and page number in the body of the text. ‘Visum est ei, theorias et opiniones et notiones communes, quantum rigore mentis et constantia obtineri potest, penitus aboleri; et intellectum planum et aequum ad particularia de integro accedere.’ For the Latin text (with French translation) see Francis Bacon, Redargutio Philosophiarum, ed. and trans. Georges Rombi and Didier Deleule (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987) (this passage on p. 209). The Latin text is also available in Francis Bacon, Cogitata et Visa, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, 7 vols (London: Longmans, 1857–70), 3.587–620, esp. 617. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, 1987), 2.12.83. See also Chapter 2 for Martin Bucer’s call to iconoclastic pitilessness, still earlier than Spenser. For a nineteenth-century example of the long tradition of euhemerism, see Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957; first published 1854; first published in German in 1841): The historical progress of religion consists in this: that what by an earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now regarded as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceived to be something human. What was at first religion becomes at a later period idolatry; man is seen to have adored his own nature. (242)

For a lucid account of the secular Enlightenment’s dependence on religious iconoclasm to attack religion itself, see Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), chapter 4. 17 For the iconography of the veil of the mysteries, see Chapter 1, fn 41. 18 Martin Luther, Ninety-five Theses, in Luther’s Works, 31, Career of the Reformer, 1, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957), 30. 19 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, rev. Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; first published in German, 1790), Section 5, p. 41. All further citations of this work will be from this translation, cited by section and page number in the body of the text. For Kant’s severance of taste from truth, see Weinsheimer, Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics, 199. The emphasis on aesthetic disinterestedness can of course be found much earlier than Kant. For an early eighteenth-century example, see Addison’s comments cited in Jerome

Notes

20 21

22 23

24

25 26 27

191

Stolnitz, ‘ ‘‘Beauty’’: Some Stages in the History of an Idea’, Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961), 185–204 (esp. 188–9). For a survey of eighteenth-century conceptions of taste, see Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Harper, 1961). One of Kant’s very rare references to painting in the Critique of Judgment insists that the form or design is essential, dismissing even colour (let alone content, or the painting’s designs upon us) as contributing to the aesthetic effect. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, Section 14, p. 56. SR, 3 and 4 Edward VI, c. 10; 4:110–11 (esp. 111). See, for example, the ordinance of May 1644. After having ordered the ‘utter demoli[tion]’ of various kinds of religious image, it goes on: ‘Provided, That this ordinance . . . shall not extend to any Image, Picture, or Coat of Arms . . . graven onley for a Monument of any King, Prince or Nobleman, or other dead person which hath not been commonly reputed or taken for a Saint’. Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, 3 vols (London: HMSO, 1911), 1.425–6; see also 1.265–6. The second of these ordinances is cited in Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 261. Victor Ieronim Stoichita, L’Instauration du Tableau: Me´tapeinture a` l’Aube des Temps Modernes (Paris: Me´ridiens Klincksieck, 1993). Stoichita puts the matter crisply. Having argued that Luther does not want to destroy, but only to neutralize the image, he goes on: ‘On a releve´ a` juste titre, dans la neutralisation ope´re´e par Luther, l’un des points les plus saillants et riches en repercussions de l’imaginaire moderne. Cette neutralisation se traduit dans les faits par un processus de de´-contextualisation des anciennes images. En d’autre termes: ce qui fonctionnait comme une ‘‘idole’’ dans une e´gilse sera contemple´ comme une ‘‘oeuvre d’art’’ dans un milieu se´culier’ (105). For the Lutheran culture of the image, see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See also Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; first published in German 1990), Appendix, Sect. 40. Cited in Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws against Images, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 317. For expert detective work on this painting, see Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See, for example, Andrew Wilton, Five Centuries of British Painting: From Holbein to Hodgkin (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001) (whose title declares its start date, without a single mention of any pre-sixteenth-century tradition beyond one reference to ‘Popish images’ on p. 9), or Richard Humphreys, The Tate Britain Companion to British Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), which discusses one pre-Reformation artefact.

192

28 29

30 31 32

33 34 35

36

Notes

An honorable exception, among the popular histories, is Andrew GrahamDixon, A History of British Art (London: BBC Books, 1996). For Zwingli’s comment on the beauty of the whitewashed church wall (‘die Wa¨nd sind hu¨psch wyss’), see Stoichita, L’Instauration du Tableau, 105. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), p. 108, 1.11.8. I have altered the translation of ‘fabricam’ to ‘workshop.’ This is a reprinting of the 1536 edition of Calvin’s Institutio Christianae Religionis. The Latin reads: ‘Unde colligere licet, hominis ingenium perpetuam, ut ita loquar, esse idolorum fabricam’ (cited from Institutio Christianae religionis (London, 1576), 1:11.8 (RSTC 4414, image 34). The 1551 French edition of the Institutes for this passage reads as follows: ‘Dont on peut voir que l’esprit de l’homme est une boutique perpe´tuelle et de tout temps pour forger idoles’ (cited from Jean Calvin, Institution de la Religion Chrestienne, ed. JeanDaniel Benoit, 5 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1957), 1:11.8, 1:129). Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, pp. 107–8, 1:11.8. Ibid., p. 112, 1:11.12. The Latin text, from which the phrase is drawn, reads as follows: ‘In eo genere partim sunt historiae ac res gestae, partim imagines ac formae corporum, sine ulla rerum gestarum notatione. Priores, usum in docendo vel admonendo aliquem habent; secundae, quid praeter oblectationem afferre prosint non video’. Cited from the 1576 edition of Institutio Christianae religionis, 1:11.12, image 36. The translation of the Latin is mine, not McNeill’s, who offers this: ‘some are histories and events, some are images and forms of bodies without any depicting of past events’ (Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 112, 1:11.12). For discussion, see Stoichita, L’Instauration du Tableau, 107. ‘With regard to that which is licitly painted or engraved, there are histories as a memorial, or figures, engraved animals, towns, and villages’ (Calvin, Institution de la Religion Chrestienne, p. 135, 1:11.12). ‘[I]n the second [category], trees, mountains, rivers, and people who are painted without any meaning [attributed to them]’ (ibid.). Richard Strier supplied the plausible suggestion ‘non-allegorical’ in a private communication. While he disagrees with my account, Professor Strier was exceptionally generous and tenacious in holding me to precise account in this passage. I thank him. For a more relaxed account of Calvinists and art, see Thomas, ‘Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England’. The essential point of Thomas’ richly sourced essay is that although Calvinists were hostile to the religious image, they were not hostile to art. I think that relaxed position is untenable, for the following reasons: (i) an attack on such a large tranche of the image cannot be without powerful consequence for the entire category of the image; (ii) the rhizome-like way in which the word

Notes

37

38 39 40

41

42

43 44

193

‘idolatry’ spreads across a very large field of practices, many not specifically visual, will also powerfully inflect reception of the image tout court; and (iii) that many examples of post-Calvinist art, both painting and poetry, exemplify profound problems with image making, whether or not the image be religious. ‘quod non credatur inesse aliqua in iis divinitas vel virtus, propter quam sint colendae, vel quod ab eis sit aliquid petendum, vel quod fiducia in imaginibus sit figenda, veluti olim fiebat a genitibus, quae in idolis spem suam collocabant.’ See Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, ed. Joseph Alberigo (Bologna: Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, 1973), Session 25 of the Council of Trent, 3–4 December 1563, p. 775. For discussion of which, see Belting, Likeness and Presence, 554–5. ‘omnis denique lascivia vitetur, ita ut procaci venustate imagines non pingantur nec ornentur’ (Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, ed. Alberigo, 775–6). For discussion of these paintings, to which I am indebted, see Stoichita, L’Instauration du Tableau, 126–43. For a brief narrative of the iconoclasm in the Netherlands in August 1566, and its larger European context, see Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 280. For the museum culture of late Antiquity in fourth- and fifth-century Gaul especially, see Lea Stirling, The Learned Collector: Mythological Statuettes and Classical Taste in Late Antique Gaul (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), chapters 5–7. For the fifth-century Christian legislation about the destruction of pagan statuary (directed only to statues to which worship was being paid), see 158–63. For other, documented examples of a late Antique, Christian collecting culture, using the language of art with regard to statues of pagan deities, see Helen Saradi-Mendelovici, ‘Christian Attitudes toward Pagan Monuments in Late Antiquity’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 44 (1990), 47–61. For the eighteenth-century European art market and, especially for English consumption of Italian Catholic images, see Haynes, Pictures and Popery, chapters 2 and 4. I am much indebted to this excellent book. See also David Ormrod, ‘The Origins of the London Art Market, 1660– 1730’, in Michael North and David Ormrod (eds), Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 167–86. Cited in Haynes, Pictures and Popery, 6. Horace Walpole, Aedes Walpolianae, Or, A Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton-Hall in Norfolk, the Seat of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, 2nd edn (London, 1752). Further citation of this work will be by page number from this edition, in the body of the text. For excellent discussion of this text, see Haynes, Pictures and Popery, 84–90.

194

Notes

45 As in his discussion of the copy by Guido Reni’s painting, The Doctors of the Church, where the doctors discuss whether Mary had more than one child, a ‘most controverted point in the Romish church’ (Walpole, Aedes Walpolianae, 77). Walpole briefly describes the controversy, and insists that Raphael divagated from the Catholic line on this point, since he paints St James as ‘extremely like Jesus Christ’ (Walpole, Aedes Walpolianae, 78). 46 A revealing if touching aspect of the economic value of the collection is that the price of each painting is handwritten into the catalogue in the facsimile of the British Library volume used for the digital edition available on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. The entire collection was sold to the Empress of Russia for 45,500 pounds in 1779. Walpole conceived of the forced sale, by Walpole’s improvident nephew, as an act of iconoclasm: ‘It is the most signal mortification to my idolatry for my father’s memory, that it could receive.’ ‘It is stripping the temple of his glory and of his affection . . . I must never cast a thought toward Norfolk more—nor will hear my nephew’s name if I can avoid it’ (cited in ODNB, under Horace Walpole, ‘Family and friends, 1768–1790’). 47 Cited in ODNB, under Horace Walpole, ‘Gothic Extravagances 1750–68’. 48 For French revolutionary iconoclasm, see Stanley J. Idzerda, ‘Iconoclasm during the French Revolution’, American Historical Review 60 (1954), 13–26; Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), passim; and Richard Clay, ‘Bouchardon’s Statue of Louis XV; Iconoclasm and the Transformation of Signs’, in Stacey Boldrick and Richard Clay (eds), Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 93–122. 49 Franc¸ois-Rene´ Chateaubriand, Me´moires d’outre-tombe, ed. Pierre Clarac (Paris : Le Livre de Poche, 1999), 272. I thank Luisella Simpson for drawing my attention to this passage. 50 For the foundation of museums in the context of the Revolution, see the fascinating study of Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 51 Victor Hugo, Choses Vues: nouvelle se´rie (Paris: Le´vy, 1900), 20. 52 William Wordsworth, The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Charles Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 38. For a discussion of Wordsworth and iconoclasm, see James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 91–107. Heffernan cites this sonnet from 1846: Discourse was deemed Man’s noblest attribute, And written words the glory of his hand; Then followed Printing with enlarged command For thought—dominion vast and absolute

Notes

195

For spreading truth, and making love expand. Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit The taste of this once-intellectual Land. A backward movement surely have we here, From manhood—back to childhood; for the age— Back towards caverned life’s first rude career. Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page! Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear Nothing? Heaven keep us from a lower stage! Cited from Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), 3.75. However much Wordsworth’s target is specific (i.e. illustrated books and newspapers), the sentiments are a pure expression of a long Protestant tradition. For a profound meditation on Wordsworth’s iconoclasm and its nineteenth-century context, see Simon Jarvis, ‘Wordsworth and Idolatry’, Studies in Romanticism 38 (1999), 3–28.

Bibliography Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, 3 vols (London: HMSO, 1911). Ainsworth, Henry. Defence of Holy Scriptures (Amsterdam, 1609). ——. An arrow against Idolatrie (Amsterdam, 1611). Alberigo, Joseph (ed.). Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta (Bologna: Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, 1973). Alloway, Lawrence. ‘Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism’, in David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (eds), Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 157–68. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, ed. Peter Caramellus, 3 vols (Turin: Marietti, 1956). Articles. wherevpon it was agreed by the archbysshops and bisshops of both the prouinces, and the whole clergye (London, 1563). Aston, Margaret. England’s Iconoclasts; Laws against Images, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). ——. The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). ——. ‘Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560–1660’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 92–122. Augustine, of Hippo. Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans Augustine, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984). Auping, Michael (ed.). Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987). Auze´py, Marie-France. L’Iconoclasme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006). Bacon, Francis. Instauratio Magna Francisci de Verulamio, Summi Angliae Cancellarii, Instauratio magna (London, 1620). ——. The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, 7 vols (London: Longmans, 1857–70; facsimile, Stuttgart: Frommann, 1963). ——. Redargutio Philosophiarum, ed. and trans. Georges Rombi and Didier Deleule (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987). ——. The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

Bibliography

197

——. The Instauratio Magna. Part 2, Novum Organum and Associated Texts, ed. and trans. Graham Rees and Maria Wakely (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). Baigell, Matthew. American Artists, Jewish Images (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006). Bale, John. God’s Promises, in The Complete Plays of John Bale, ed. Peter Happe´, 2 vols, Tudor Interludes, 5 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985). Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; first published in German 1990). Besanc¸on, Alain. The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; first published in French in 1994). The Holy Bible conteyning the Old Testament, and the New (London, 1611). Blake, William. The Complete Poems of William Blake, ed. Alicia Ostriker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Bois, Yves-Alain. ‘The Limit of Almost’, in Yves-Alain Bois et al., Ad Reinhardt (New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 1991), 11–33. Bokenham, Osbern. Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS, 206 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). Bond, Ronald B. (ed.). Certain Sermons Or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (1547); and, A Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). Brantley, Jessica. Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Bredekamp, Horst. Kunst Als Medium Sozialer Konflikte: Bilderka¨mpfe von der Spa¨tantike bis zum Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975). Brubaker, Leslie, and John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Bucer, Martin. A treatise declaring and showing . . . that pictures and other images . . . are in no wise to be suffered in the temples or churches (London, 1535). Buddensieg, Tilmann. ‘Gregory the Great, Destroyer of Pagan Idols. The History of a Medieval Legend Concerning the Decline of Ancient Art and Literature’, JWCI 28 (1965), 44–65. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757). ——. Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event. In a letter intended to have been sent to a gentleman in Paris (London, 1791). ——. Letters on a Regicide Peace, in The Works of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, ed. Edward John Payne, 12 vols (London: Nimmo, 1887; facsimile Hildesheim: Olms, 1975), vol. 5. ——. Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

198

Bibliography

Calvin, John. Institutio Christianae religionis (London, 1576). ——. Institution de la Religion Chrestienne, ed. Jean-Daniel Benoit, 5 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1957). ——. Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960). Camille, Michael. The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ——. ‘The Iconoclast’s Desire: Deguileville’s Idolatry in France and England’, in Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 151–71. Capgrave, John. The Solace of Pilgrimes, ed. C. A. Mills (Oxford: University Press, 1911). ——. The Life of Saint Katherine, ed. Karen A. Winstead (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 1999). Carey, John. ‘A Work in Praise of Terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes’, Times Literary Supplement (6 September 2002), 15–16. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951; first published in German 1932). Chateaubriand, Franc¸ois-Rene´. Me´moires d’outre-tombe, ed. Pierre Clarac (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1999). Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (London: Penguin, 2005). Chazelle, Celia M. ‘Pictures, Books and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s letters to Serenus of Marseilles’, Word and Image 6 (1990), 138–53. Church of England. ‘An Homily Against Peril of Idolatry’, in Certain Sermons Or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (London, 1563). Clay, Richard. ‘Bouchardon’s Statue of Louis XV; Iconoclasm and the Transformation of Signs’, in Stacey Boldrick and Richard Clay (eds), Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 93–122. Cockcroft, Eva. ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, Artforum 12 (1974), 39–41. Collinson, Patrick. The Birthpangs of Protestant England. Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). ——. From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading: University of Reading, 1986). Guido de Columnis. Historia destructionis Troiae, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1974).

Bibliography

199

Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 81st Congress, First Session. Accessed at http://web.lexis-nexis.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/ congcomp Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 1995; first published 1899). Cooper, Trevor (ed.). The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001). Cox, Annette. Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982). Cranmer, Thomas. Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John E. Cox, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846). Culmer, Richard. Cathedrall Newes from Canterbury (London, 1644). Defoe, Daniel. Essay upon Literature (London, 1726). Demacopoulos, Georges. ‘Gregory the Great and the Pagan Shrines of Kent’, Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008), 353–6. Deonise Hid Divinite, ed. Phyllis Hodgson, EETS 231 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). Despres, Denise. Ghostly Sights: Visual Meditation in Late-Medieval Literature (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1989). Doueihi, Milad. Le Paradis Terrestre: Mythes et Philosophies (Paris: Seuil, 2006). Dymmok, Roger. Liber Contra XII Errores et Hereses Lollardorum, ed. H. S. Cronin (London: K. Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner, 1922). Egbert, Donald Drew. ‘Religious Expression in American Architecture’, in W. Eugene Kleinbauer (ed.), Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971), 312–38. Eire, Carlos M. N. War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Elliott, Dyan. Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Endres, Johannes, Barbara Wittmann, and Gerhard Wolf (eds). Ikonologie des Zwischenraums: der Schleier als Medium Und Metapher (Munich: Fink, 2005). Erasmus, Desiderius. Collected Works of Erasmus, 86 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957; first published 1854; first published in German in 1841). Fincham, Kenneth, Peter Lake, and Nicholas Tyacke (eds). Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006). Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

200

Bibliography

Fisher, Philip. Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). ——. Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Freedberg, David. Iconoclasts and their Motives (Montclair, NJ: G. Schwartz, 1985). ——. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Frere, Walter Howard, and William McClure Kennedy (eds). Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, Alcuin Club Collections 15, 3 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1910). Gamboni, Dario. The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). Gaudio, Michael. ‘The Space of Idolatry: Reformation, Incarnation, and the Ethnographic Image’, Res 41 (2002), 72–91. Gayk, Shannon. Reformations of the Image in Fifteenth-Century Religious Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Gilman, Ernest B. Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Glasscoe, Marion (ed.). The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1982 (Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter, 1982). Godfrey, Mark. Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Gombrich, E. H. ‘The Dream of Reason: Symbolism in the French Revolution’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2:3 (1979), 187–205. Graham-Dixon, Andrew. A History of British Art (London: BBC Books, 1996). Greenberg, Clement. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, 4 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Greville, Fulke. Poems of Fulke Greville, ed. Thom Gunn, with a new afterword by Bradin Cormack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Guilbaut, Serge. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Halbertal, Moshe, and Avishai Margalit. Idolatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Hall, Joseph. The shaking of the Olive-tree . . . Together with his Hard Measure (London, 1660). Hamburger, Jeffrey F. ‘Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion’, in Klaus Kruger and Alessandro Nova (eds), Imagination und Wirklichkeit: zum Verha¨ltnis von Mentalen und Realen Bildern in der Kunst der Fru¨hen Neuzeit (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 2001), 46–69.

Bibliography

201

——.‘Visible, Yet Secret: Images as Signs of Friendship in Seuse’, Oxford German Studies 36 (2007), 141–62. Hawkes, David. Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Haydon, Colin. Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–80: A Political and Social Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). Haynes, Clare. Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660–1760 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Henry VIII, Assertio septem sacramentorum (London, 1687; first published 1522). Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Hoccleve, Thomas. The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999). Holsinger, Bruce. Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007). Horkheimer, Max, and Theodore Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1982; first published in German, 1947). Hudson, Anne (ed.). Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997; first published 1978). ——. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Huet, Marie-He`le´ne. Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Hughes, P. L., and J. F. Larkin (eds). Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols, vol. 1: The Early Tudors (1485–1553) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964). Hugo, Victor. Choses Vues: nouvelle se´rie (Paris: Le´vy, 1900). Humphreys, Richard. The Tate Britain Companion to British Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2001). Idzerda, Stanley J. ‘Iconoclasm During the French Revolution’, American Historical Review 60 (1954), 13–26. Jachec, Nancy. The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Jarvis, Simon. ‘Wordsworth and Idolatry’, Studies in Romanticism 38 (1999), 3–27. Jewel, John. The Works of John Jewel, ed. John Ayre, 4 vols, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845–50). Jones, W. R. ‘Lollards and Images: The Defence of Religious Art in Later Medieval England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973), 27–50.

202

Bibliography

Julius, Anthony. Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Jewish Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Kahn, Victoria. ‘Aesthetics as Critique: Tragedy and Trauerspiel in Samson Agonsites’, in Marshall Grossman (ed.), Reading Renaissance Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2007), 104–27. Kamerick, Kathleen. Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002). Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, rev. Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; first published in German, 1790). Kearney, James. The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Kemp, Anthony. The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Kessler, Herbert L. ‘Turning a Blind Eye: Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation’, in Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouche´ (eds), The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 413–39. Kimmelman, Michael. ‘Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War’, in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century At Home and Abroad (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 39–55. King, John N. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Knighton, Henry. Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Kugel, James L. The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1997). Ladner, Gerhart B. ‘The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 7 (1953), 3–34. ——. ‘Ad Imaginem Dei: The Image of Man in Medieval Art’, in Modern Perspectives in Western Art History, ed. W. Eugene Kleinbauer (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971), 442–61. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). ——. ‘Milton and Idolatry’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43 (2003), 213–32. ——. ‘Interpreting God’s Word: Paradise Lost’ (Duquesne University Press, forthcoming). Lippard, Lucy R. Ad Reinhardt (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1981). Loewenstein, David. Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Bibliography

203

Lovatt, Roger. ‘Henry Suso and the Medieval Mystical Tradition in England’, in Marion Glasscoe (ed.), The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England (Exeter, Devon: University of Exeter, 1982), 47–62. Love, Nicholas. Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. Michael G. Sargent, Garland Medieval Texts, 18 (New York: Garland, 1992). Lubac, Henri de. Exe´ge`se me´die´vale: les quatres sens de l’E´criture, vols 41, 42, and 59 of The´ologie, 2 vols in 4 (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64). Luther, Martin. Ninety-five Theses in Luther’s Works, 31, Career of the Reformer, 1, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957). Lydgate, John. The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 3 vols, EETS, 77, 83, and 92 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner, 1904). ——. Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 Parts, EETS, es 97, 103, 106, and 126 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Tru¨bner, 1906, 1908, 1910, and 1935). McClellan, Andrew. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). McNamer, Sarah. ‘The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi’, Speculum 84 (2009), 905–55. Menozzi, Daniele (ed.). Les Images: L’Eglise et les Arts Visuels (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1991). Milton, John. Eikonoklastes in answer to a book intitl’d Eikon basilike, the portrature of his Sacred Majesty in his solitudes and sufferings (London, 1649). ——. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82). ——. Aereopagitica, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2.486–570. ——. Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence, Against Smectymnuus, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1.662–735. ——. Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 3.337–601. ——. Of Reformation in England, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1.519–617. ——. The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). ——. Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007). Minnis, Alastair J. ‘Medieval Imagination and Memory’, in Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2: The Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 239–74.

204

Bibliography

More, Thomas. A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. T. M. C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour, and Richard Marius, 2 Parts, in The Complete Works of St Thomas More, 6 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). Morrill, John. ‘William Dowsing and the Administration of Iconoclasm in the Puritan Revolution’, in Trevor Cooper (ed.), The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), 1–28. Netter, Thomas. Thomæ Waldensis Carmelitæ Anglici Doctrinale Antiquitatum Fidei Catholicæ Ecclesiæ, ed. F. Bonaventura Blanciotti, 3 vols (Venice, 1759). Newman, Barbara. ‘Henry Suso and the Medieval Devotion to Christ the Goddess’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2 (2002), 1–14. Newman, Barnett B. ‘The Sublime is Now’, in David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (eds), Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 325–9. Nitzsche, Jane Chance. The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). Noble, Thomas F. X. Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Ormrod, David. ‘The Origins of the London Art Market, 1660–1730’, in Michael North and David Ormrod (eds), Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 167–86. Owen, James. The history of images, and of image-worship. Shewing, the original and progress of idolatry among pagans, Jews, and Christians: with a refutation (London, 1709). Parys, William. ‘Life of Saint Cristina’, in Carl Horstmann (ed.), Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden (Hildesheim: Henniger, 1875), 183–90. Pecock, Reginald. The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. Churchill Babington (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1860). Phillips, John. The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Pleynet, Marcelin. ‘For An Approach to Abstract Expressionism’, in Michael Auping (ed.), Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 34–47. Reinhardt, Ad. Ad Reinhardt: Black Paintings, 1951–1967; Catalog of the Exhibition Held March 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery (New York: Marlborough Gallery, 1970). ——. Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Ricard, Robert. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966; first published in French in 1933). Rosenblatt, Jason. ‘ ‘‘Audacious Neighborhood’’: Idolatry in Paradise Lost, Book I’, Philological Quarterly 54 (1975), 553–68.

Bibliography

205

Russell-Smith, Joy M. ‘Walter Hilton and a Tract in Defence of the Veneration of Images’, Dominican Studies 7 (1954), 180–214. Sadler, S. L. ‘Dowsing’s Arguments with the Fellows of Pembroke’, in Trevor Cooper (ed.), The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), 56–66. Sandler, Irving. The Triumph of American Painting; a History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Praeger, 1970). Saradi-Mendelovici, Helen. ‘Christian Attitudes toward Pagan Monuments in Late Antiquity’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 44 (1990), 47–61. Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999). Scase, Wendy. Reginald Pecock, Authors of the Middle Ages, 8 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996). Scottow, Joshua. A Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony Anno 1628 (Boston, 1694). Seuse, Heinrich. Horologium Sapientiae. Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, trans. Edmund Colledge (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994). Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953; first published in French in 1940). Shapiro, David, and Cecile Shapiro (eds). Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Shepard, Thomas. Theses Sabbaticae (London, 1649). Shore, Daniel. ‘Why Milton Is Not an Iconoclast’ (forthcoming). Simpson, James. Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547, Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). ——. Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007). ——. ‘Visionary Writing in England, 1530–1550’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Mysticism, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Samuel Fanous (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). ——. ‘Place’, in Brian Cummings and James Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Twenty-First Century Approaches, 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Skinner, Quentin. Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Spate, Virginia. Tom Roberts (Melbourne: Lansdowne, 1972). Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, 1987). Spraggon, Julie. Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003).

206

Bibliography

Stanbury, Sarah. ‘The Vivacity of Images: St Katherine, Knighton’s Lollards and the Breaking of Idols’, in Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 131–50. ——. The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). ‘Statement and Letter to the Directors of the Museum of Modern Art’, in David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (eds), Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 86–89. Stirling, Lea. The Learned Collector: Mythological Statuettes and Classical Taste in Late Antique Gaul (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). Stoichita, Victor Ieronim. L’Instauration du Tableau: Me´tapeinture a` l’Aube des Temps Modernes (Paris: Me´ridiens Klincksieck, 1993). Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘ ‘‘Beauty’’: Some Stages in the History of an Idea’, Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961), 185–204. Summit, Jennifer. Memory’s Library. Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Tanner, Norman P. (ed.). Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). Tertullian, De Idolatria, ed. J. H. Waszink and J. C. M. Van Winden (Leiden: Brill, 1987). Thomas, Keith. ‘Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 16–40. Thorpe, William. The Testimony of William Thorpe 1407, in Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. Anne Hudson, EETS, 301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Tocqueville, Alexis de. De la De´mocratie en Ame´rique, 2 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 1981; first published in 1835 and 1840). Two Decades of American Painting; an Exhibition Organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Under the Auspices of the International Council of the Museum for Showings in Japan, India and Australia, 1966–67 . . . National Gallery of Victoria, June 6–July 9; Art Gallery of New South Wales, July 26–August 20, 1967, ed. Waldo Rasmussen (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967). Tyacke, Nicholas, and Kenneth Fincham. Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Tyndale, William. The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London: Penguin, 2000).

Bibliography

207

Voltaire. The philosophical dictionary for the pocket. Written in French by a society of men of letters, and translated into English from the last Geneva (London, 1765; first published in French in 1764). ——. Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1778; first published in French, 1733). von Nolcken, Christina. ‘ ‘‘O, Why Ne had I Lerned for to Die’’: Lerne for to Dye and the Author’s Death in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series’, Essays in Medieval Studies 10 (1993), 27–51. Walpole, Horace. Aedes Walpolianae, Or, A Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton-Hall in Norfolk, the Seat of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, 2nd edn (London, 1752). Walsh, James P. ‘Holy Time and Sacred Space in Puritan New England’. American Quarterly 32.1 (1980), 79–95. Walzer, Michael. The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). Warton, Thomas. The History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Centuries, 3 vols (London: Dodsley et. al., 1774–81). Watson, Nicholas. ‘ ‘‘Et que est huius ydoli materia? Tuipse’’: Idols and Images in Walter Hilton’, in Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 95–111. Weber, Max. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1958; first published in German, 1904). Weinsheimer, Joel. Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). ‘The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646)’, in John H. Leith (ed.), The Creeds of the Churches, A Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present, rev. edn (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1973). White, James F. ‘From Protestant to Catholic Plain Style’, in Paul Corby Finney (ed.), Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 457–75. Wilkins, David (ed.). Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, 4 vols (London, 1737). Williams, Peter W. ‘Metamorphoses of the Meetinghouse: Three Case Studies’, in Paul Corby Finney (ed.), Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1999), 479–505. Wilton, Andrew. Five Centuries of British Painting: From Holbein to Hodgkin (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001). Winstead, Karen A. John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

208

Bibliography

Wittreich, Joseph. Interpreting ‘Samson Agonistes’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). ——. The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). Wriothesley, Charles. A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, 2 vols, Camden Society, ns 11, 20 (London: Camden Society, 1875 and 1877). Wycliffe, John. Johannis Wyclif Tractatus de mandatis divinis, ed. Johann Loserth and F. D. Matthew (London: pub. for the Wyclif Society by C. K. Paul & Co., 1922).

Index Note: Numbers in italics denote illustrations. abstract art 15, 18–25 and Cold War 28–30 and exclusivism 22, 25, 33 and Jewish tradition 32 and history 40, 132 and liberty 26–7, 28 and manners 20–21 and modernity 34 and non-representation 34, 47–8 and Protestantism 33 and revolution 26 and surveillance 22, 24–5, 46 and terrible sublime 30–1 and the absolute 40, 47 and the Enlightenment 25–7 and universality 24 abstraction 132 and museum 48, 173n and United States 26 and via negativa 27 as world historical phenomenon 26 accretion 172n Act of Settlement 182n Act of Supremacy 89, 120 Addison, Joseph 190n Adorno, Theodore 170n

Aesthetics 131–3 Afghanistan 1, 14, 116 Age, Melbourne 167n Ainsworth, Henry 92, 93, 95, 182n, 187n An arrow against Idolatrie 92, 182n Defence of Holy Scriptures 187n Alberigo, Joseph 167n, 193n Albert, Archduke 138 Alloway, Lawrence 171n Amsterdam 92 animation 9, 54–5, 58–9, 157–8 Apollo 49, 50, 54, 128 Aquinas, Thomas 166n, 167n ars moriendi 79 Art 9, 117 autonomy (or lack of autonomy) of 9, 11, 130–44 market 11, 30, 140–3, 170n Art History 8 Arundel, Thomas 59, 77, 175n ascesis 19, 36 Asia, Central 1 Astarte 104 Aston, Margaret 160n, 162n, 164n, 174n, 175n, 176n, 180n, 181n, 183n, 184n, 185n, 191n

210

Index

Astoreth 104 Augustine, St 72, 73, 174n, 178n Auping, Michael 168n Auze´py, Marie-France 163n Aylesbury 101 Ayre, John 178n Baal 103, 104 Babington, Churchill 177n Babylon 107 Bacon, Francis 14, 124, 125, 154, 164n, 187n, 189n, 190n Instauratio Magna 164n, 190n Advancement of Learning 188n Novum Organon 124, 125, 164n, 190n Cogitata et Visa 125, 190n Redargutio Philosophiarum 190n Baigell, Matthew 171n Balaam 78, 180n Bale, John 64, 176n, 177n Bamiyan, Central Afghanistan 1, 2, 3, 11, 58, 116, 121 Bate, Walter Jackson 191n Battles, Ford Lewis 164n, 177n, 192n Baxter, Margery 59 Bayle, Pierre 124 Becket, Thomas 184n Bedlam 93 Belting, Hans 162n, 165n, 166n, 176n, 179n, 191n, 193n Belus 49, 55, 69, 107 Benoit, Jean-Daniel 192n Bergen, Henry 173n Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 128

Apollo and Daphne 128 David 128 Berry, Duc de 52 Besanc¸on, Alain 163n Bettenson, Henry 174n Bible 5, 6, 77, 121 Exodus 7, 12, 161n, 183n Leviticus 161n Deuteronomy 7, 8, 67, 68, 69, 99, 132, 161n Joshua 171n Judges 161n Kings 8, 39, 68, 92, 100, 103, 161n, 162n, 171n Psalms 58, 76, 141, 147, 162n Isaiah 162n Jeremiah 162n Ezechiel 68, 162n Wisdom 162n, 174n Acts 88 Pseudo-Matthew 174n Bill of Rights 97 Blake, William 95, 97, 183n Blyth, Charles R. 177n, 178n Bohemia 163n, 178n Bois, Yves-Alain 170n Bokenham, Osbern 77, 179n Boldrick, Stacey 194n Bond, Ronald B. 177n Book of Common Prayer 101 Book of Homilies 67, 88, 90, 121, 122, 182n, 177n Boston, MA 42, 45, 168n, 173n Bouchardon, Edme´ 194n Bouche´, Anne-Marie 171n, 178n Braden, Tom 29 Brantley, Jessica 179n

Index Bredekamp, Horst 163n, 178n Britain 120, 121, 134 British Library 194n Brubaker, Leslie 160n, 166n Brueghel, Jan (the Elder) 138, 139, 140, 141, 142 Bucer, Martin 70, 178n, 190n Buddensieg, Tilmann 160n, 174n, 178n Buddha 1, 2, 3, 10, 14, 155 Buell, Larry 168n Burke, Edmund 36, 117, 119, 120, 126, 131, 144, 171n, 188n, 189n A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 171n Reflections on the Revolution in France 117, 188n–9n Letters on a Regicide Peace 117, 118, 188n Byzantium 94, 166n Cabinets d’Amateurs 138 Calvin, John 14, 88, 91, 135, 136, 137, 164n, 177n, 178n, 192n Cambridge 86 Camille, Michael 171n, 174n, 175n, 176n, 178n, 180n Canaan 7, 99, 101, 102, 103 Canterbury Cathedral 101, 108 Capgrave, John 75–7, 174n, 179n Capitoline Hill 174n Caramellus, Peter 167n Carey, John 184n Carruthers, Mary 177n

211

Cassirer, Ernst 124, 189n Catholic Relief Act of 1778 182n Chaloner, Sir Thomas 145 Chapon, Jean Claude 2 Charles I 106, 109, 110, 117, 119, 146 Chateaubriand, Franc¸ois-Rene´ 151, 154, 194n Chaucer, Geoffrey 63, 64, 76, 179n Chazelle, Celia M. 165n Chemosh 104 Choiseul, Duc de 126 Christ, Jesus 22, 51, 65, 72, 74, 84, 98, 99, 114, 156, 166n, 167n, 172n, 177n, 194n Christopher, St 123 church interiors 41–3 CIA 47, 169n Clay, Richard 194n Cockcroft, Eva 169n Collinson, Patrick 182n, 183n Colossus 105, 157 Connoisseur admiring Painting of a Dark Night 23 Conrad, Joseph 30, 170n conservatism 160n Constantinople 68, 85, 156, 163n, 166n Cooper, Trevor 181n Cordeliers 151 Cormack, Bradin 167n Correggio, Antonio da 147 Council of Trent 167n, 178n Cox, Annette 169n, 176n Cranmer, Thomas 61, 176n Cromwell, Thomas 184n Cronin, H. S. 179n Culmer, Richard 185n

212

Index

cultural etymology 32, 49 Cumming, John 170n Cummings, Brian 172n, 182n Daniell, David 177n Darbishire, Helen 195n Davis, Gene 18 de Kooning, Willem 18, 168n De Selincourt, Ernest 195n Decalogue 12, 161n, 164n, 183n decorum 119 Defoe, Daniel 188n Deguileville, Guillaume 175n Dehio, Georg 43 Del Sarto, Andrea 147 Deleule, Didier 190n Delos 49 Demacopoulos, Georges 160n Deonise Hid Divinite 178n Despres, Denise 179n devotional piety 74–5 Diana (Agrotera, Coriphea, Ephesia) 69 Dimmick, Jeremy 175n, 179n Dondero, George A. 169n Doueihi, Milad 163, 189n Dowsing, William 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 95, 101, 135, 181n, 182n, 183n Durston, Christopher 181n Duxbury (MA) 45 Dymmok, Roger 179n Eales, Jacqueline 181n East Anglia 93 Edinburgh 131 Edward VI 61, 101, 134, 135, 176n, 176n, 191n Egbert, Donald Drew 172n, 173n

Egypt 51, 110, 112, 153 Eire, Carlos M. N. 160n, 193n Eisenhower, Dwight D., President 28 Elliott, Dyan 180n emblem 160n Endres, Johannes 171n England 4, 5, 6, 8, 41, 49, 51, 57, 61, 64, 65, 70, 72, 75, 84, 88, 101, 102, 105, 106, 116, 120, 126, 134, 135, 144, 151, 154, 155, 163n, 171n, 172n, 175n, 183n Enlightenment 9–10 and abstraction 26–7 and Art 11, 116, 144 and iconoclasm 11, 122 and liberty 26–7 and progress of Art 25 and Reformation 10, 157–8 celebration of image 126–8, 145–7 fear of the image 147–50 neutralization of image 128–30, 133–44, 145–50 scientific 117, 124–5 equality 46–7 Erasmus, Desiderius 145, 186n Esculapius 123 Ethelbert, King of Kent 159–60n euhemerism 50–1, 103, 190n Europe 5, 26, 84, 133, 138, 158, 180n Fairthorne, William 96, 183n Fanous, Samuel 180n Feuerbach, Ludwig 190n Fincham, Kenneth 159n, 175n, 176n, 182n, 183n, 189n

Index Finney, Paul Corby 172n, 173n, 182n Firth, C. H. 191n Fischer, David Hackett 46, 173n Fish, Stanley 185n Fisher, Philip 168n, 173n flatness 15 as cardinal sign of modernity 32–47 Foxe, John 61, 62, 90, 186n framing 128, 130 France 175n Francken II, Hieronymus 138, 139, 140, 141, 142 Freedberg, David 163n–4n Frere, Walter Howard 176n fundamentalism 160n as modern 160n Furnivall, F. J. 173n Gamboni, Dario 159n, 164n, 194n Gaudio, Michael 173n Gayk, Shannon 181n Gaza 113 Gill, Stephen 194n Gillespie, Vincent 180n Gilman, Ernest B. 185n, 186n Glasscoe, Marion 180n Godfrey, Mark 170n Goldberg, Jonathan 184n Golden Calf, the 51, 109, 110, 112, 121 Gombrich, E. H. 167n Gorky, Arshile 168n Graham-Dixon, Andrew 171n, 192n Greece 110 Greenberg, Clement 37, 38, 39, 168n, 169n, 171n

213

Gregory the Great, Pope 22, 57, 159n, 165n, 174n, 178n Greville, Fulke 24, 167n Grossman, Marshall 186n Guido de Columnis 49 Guilbaut, Serge 169n, 170n Gunn, Thom 167n Halbertal, Moshe 161n, 163n, 164n, 177n, 184n, 190n Haldon, John F. 160n, 166n Hall, Joseph 108, 185n Hamburger, Jeffrey F. 171n, 177n, 178n, 181n Hamilton, William Douglas 184n Hampson, Robert 170n Happe´, Peter 176n Hawkes, David 164n Haydon, Colin 182n, 189n Haynes, Clare 189n, 193n Heffernan, James 194n Henry VIII 61, 172n Injunctions to Bishops 61 Assertio Septem Sacramentorum 172n Hercules 123 heritage 116 Hezekiah 39, 92 Hiroshima 32, 33 history painting 136 Hobbes, Thomas 160n, 161n Hoccleve, Thomas 65, 66, 79, 82, 84, 177n, 180n, 181n Lerne to Dye 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 180n Regement of Princes 65, 177n Hodgson, Phyllis 178n Hofmann, Hans 18, 168n

214

Index

Hogarth, William 144 Holbein, Hans 135 Holocaust 30–1, 170n Holsinger, Bruce 159n Ho¨ltgen, Karl-Josef 182n Homer 102, 103, 112 Hopper, Edward 36, 37, 171n Horace 188n, 189n Horkheimer, Max 170n Horstmann, Carl 179n Houghton Hall, Norfolk 145, 146, 149, 194n Hudson, Anne 174n, 175n Huet, Marie-He`le´ne 168n Hughes, P. L. 184n Hugo, Victor 153 Hume, David 131 Humphreys, Richard 191n Hurlimann, Martin 91 icon 20 acheiropoetic 20 iconoclasm passim and elites 4, 13 and Enlightenment 9–11, 151–4, 167n and exhaustion 89–93, 157 and flatness 15, 43 and geography 6, 103–4 and historiography 15–16, 51, 65–71, 156 and ideology 11, 14 and jurisdiction 5, 88–9, 103–4 and liberty 81–2 and market 11 and modernity 4, 32

and monumentalization 85–6, 112–15 and originality 109–10 and pitilessness 70, 125, 190n and poetic tradition 109 and revolution 85–115, 119, 120, 151–4, 167n and taste 138–44 and tradition 15, 64, 111 and violence 38, 70 and x-ray vision 57 as medieval 3 as nourishing idolatry 94–5, 97, 101 as systematic 89 dependent on idols 110, 112 early Christian 94 in Netherlands 138 kinesis of 13–15, 85, 93, 97, 156–7 legislated 60–1 mental 13–14 not somewhere else 3–11, 155 of pagan statuary 143, 159n, 178n of royal image 106, 109 unfinished 12–13, 15, 90, 93, 108, 109, 121, 56–7 verbal 98–9, 111 Western 4 iconophobia 183n ideology critique 11, 14, 123–4, 126, 157, 163n, 190n and hypocrisy 93 idolatry, passim and addiction 92–3 and backsliding and/or resurgent 69, 92, 156, 158 and children 1, 5, 13, 68

Index and enthrallment 27, 50, 68 and extermination 99–100 and ideology 11, 117 and marriage 7, 184n and poles 36, 39, 40 and revealed religions 72, 156 and sexual deviancy 85, 101 and the mind 135 as invasive 104 as key to understand history 68 as part of a wide cultural system 63–4 Catholic 98, 101, 105, 106, 111 Catholic as pagan 69–70, 93–4, 123 Enlightenment fear of 147–50 forbidden by Scripture 5, 8, 12, 68, 88, 92, 99, 161n histories of 49–50, 92–3, 94 in eye of the beholder 13 inflicting suffering 4–5, 58 pagan 49–50, 51, 69, 76 Philistine 113 pre-Reformation Christian 59, 63–4, 67–71, 69, 76 Protestant 101 somewhere else 50, 54 idols 124–5 as vigorous 103–5 disguised 86 Idzerda, Stanley J. 194n image (see also representation) passim absence of 69 always under potential threat 72 and ‘representation’ 5–6, 156 and Council of Trent 137–8

215 and devotional piety 74–5 and Enlightenment 145–50 and imagination 65, 81, 108 and intercession 89 and loss of territory 67–8 and nineteenth-century England 16, 151 and paganism 65 and prophetic 60, 71, 79, 175n as alive 58–60, 70–1, 75, 78, 158, 179n as books for the unlearned 22, 58, 74–5 as dead 57–60, 70–1, 76, 77 as dying 79–84 as hungry 58 as means of preserving the past 65 as part of wider cultural system 63 as responsive to iconoclasm 15 as sole source of salvation 82 Byzantine defence of religious images 22, 166n farewell to 20 in books 121 knowing more than viewers 81 legislative attacks on religious image 61–1 legislative defence of 59 mise-en-abyme of 83 neutralization 120, 139–41, 191n of nobles 133–4 personal 79 Platonic or neo-Platonic defences of the image 22

216

Index

image (see also representation) passim (cont.) Platonic or neo-Platonic rejection of image 72–3 private 176n rhetorical 20–2 theological attacks on religious image 63–4, 65–71, 121–2 theological defence of religious images 22, 58, 63, 77–8, 79–82, 165n, 166n theological, anti-rhetorical 24 under challenge by preReformation orthodoxy 74–8 India 29 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA) 168n intercession 5–6, 69, 156, 158 lack of intercession 47 hostility to intercession 69, 89 Ipswich 69 Isabella, Archduchess 138 Israel 7, 64, 68, 92, 93, 100, 101, 105, 106, 161n, 162n Italy 144, 145 Jachec, Nancy 168n, 169n, 170n Jacob (house of) 162n James, Sarah 175n James, St 194n Japan 10, 29 Jarvis, Simon 195n Jephcott, Edmund 165n, 176n, 191n Jeroboam 93 Jewel, John 71, 178n, 187n Jewish Museum, the 30, 170n

Johnson, Ian 181n Jones, Inigo 106, 107 Jones, W. R. 174n Joshua 103 Josiah 39, 61, 103, 104 Judah 68, 162n Julius, Anthony 32, 170n jurisdiction 5 Kafka, Franz 93, 182n Kahn, Victoria 186n Kamerick, Kathleen 175n, 180n Kant, Immanuel 131, 132, 133, 190n, 191n Critique of Judgement 131, 132, 133, 190n, 191n and form 131 taste and truth 131 beauty 131 Katharine, St 57, 75, 76 Kearney, James 187n Kemp, Anthony 172n Kempis, Thomas a` 74 Kennedy, William McClure 176n Kessler, Herbert L. 171n, 178n Kimmelman, Michael 169n King Edward VI and the Pope 134, 135 King, John N. 186n Kleinbauer, W. Eugene 165n, 172n Knighton, Henry 175n Knighton, Henry 57 Koelln, Fritz C. A. 189n Koerner, Joseph Leo 191n Ko¨ningsberg 131 Kruger, Klaus 178n Kugel, James L. 171n

Index Ladner, Gerhart B. 165n Lady Chapel, Ely 90, 91 Lafontaine, Pierre Joseph 152 Lake, Peter 159n, 189n landscape painting 137 Larkin, J. F. 184n Laud, William 95, 98, 101, 106, 108, 110, 146, 183n, 189n Leicester 57 Leith, John H. 172n, 182n Lemnos 110 Lenski, Noel 176n Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer 172n, 183n Liberty 26–8, 30, 50, 97, 98, 114, 155, 156, 157–8 Limbourg Brothers 52 Lippard, Lucy R. 168n, 169n, 170n Livres des Merveilles du Monde 55 Locke, John 145 Loewenstein, David 185n, 186n London 106, 107 Loserth, Johann 174n Louis XV, of France 153 Louis XVI, of France 153 Louvre, the 152 Lovatt, Roger 180n Love, Nicholas 74, 179n Lubac, Henri de 185n Luke, St 166n Luther, Martin 88, 128, 134, 172n, 190n, 191n Lydgate, John 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 65, 173n Troy Book 49, 50, 56, 173n Pilgrimage of the Life of Man 173n

217

Madonna (and child) 140, 147 Maimonides 163n Malevich, Kazimir 26 Manasseh 92 Manchester, Earl of 86 Mann, Jill 179n Margalit, Avishai 161n, 163n, 164n, 177n, 184n, 190n Marseilles 22, 165n Martin, G. H. 175n Mary Magdalene 77 Mary, Virgin 86, 166n, 194n Massachusetts 40 Matthew Paris 54 Matthew, F. D. 174n Maxentius, Marcus Aurelius 75, 76 McCarthy, Joseph 28 McCaughey, Patrick 167n McClellan, Andrew 159n, 194n McIntyre, Stuart 173n McNeill, John T. 164n, 177n, 192n Meditationes vitae Christi 179n Meek, Mary Elizabeth 173n Melbourne 18, 20, 21, 25, 27, 29, 30, 40, 164n, 167n Menozzi, Daniele 165n Meredith, James Creed 190n Merton, Thomas 170n Michelangelo 128 Michigan 169n Milcom 104 Mills, C. A. 174n Milton, John 9, 84, 86, 89, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 135, 154, 157,

218

Index

Milton, John (cont.) 183n, 184n, 185n, 186n, 187n, 188n, 189n Aereopagitica 114, 115, 186n ‘Letter to Diodati’ 183n Animadversions 105 Eikon Basilike 106, 117 Eikonoklastes 106, 117, 118, 185n, 188n, 189n Of Reformation in England 185n ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ 98, 105, 184n Paradise Lost 98, 99, 102, 103, 107, 109, 110, 112, 182n, 184n, 185n Ready and Easy Way, The 109 Samson Agonistes 105, 112, 113, 184n, 185n, 186n Sonnet 15 187n Minnis, Alastair 181n modernity 5 Protestant 5, 40–7, 110 and paradox 97 Moloch 5, 104 More, Thomas 63, 172n, 178n, 180n Morrill, John 181n, 182n Moses 51 Motherwell, Robert 18 Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) 19, 40, 29, 48, 164n, 168n, 169n, 171n museum, 138–44, 157 and abstraction 48, 173n and late Antiquity 193n and neutralisation of the image 10, 121, 126, 130

as sacral space 48, 154 157 born of iconoclasm, 138–44, 176n idea of 10 music 106 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 31, 164n, 170n National Gallery of Victoria, Australia 16, 18, 164n Nebuchadnezzar 106 Netherlands 138, 193n Netter, Thomas 179n New England 40, 42, 43, 172n New York 16, 18, 19, 30, 144 New York School 171n Newman, Barnett ii, 18, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 47, 48, 168n, 171n, 180n Abraham 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39 Broken Obelisk ii, 39, 48, 171n Covenant 32 Joshua 32, 171n Stations of the Cross 31 ‘The Sublime is now’ 171n Ninus 49 Nitzsche, Jane Chance 184n Noble, Thomas F. X. 164n Norfolk 194n North, Michael 193n Norwich Cathedral 101 Nova, Alessandro 178n O’Brian, John 168n Old South Church, Boston 45, 173n Omar, Mullah 1, 9, 116 Orgel, Stephen 184n

Index

219

Ormrod, David 193n Ostriker, Alicia 183n Owen, James 121, 122, 154, 189n Pannini, Giovanni 126, 127, 129, 130, 131 Paris 4, 29, 30, 144, 170n Parliament 88 Parsons, Talcott 160n Partisan Review 169n Parys, William 179n Patterson, Lee 162n Payne, Edward John 188n Pecock, Reginald 63, 65, 77, 78, 177n, 180n Pembroke College Cambridge 87, 90, 94, 95, 182n Peor 99 Peterborough Cathedral 43 Pettegrove, James P. 189n Phillips, John 181n Piazza Navona 128 Piedmont (Italy) 187n pilgrimage sites 40 place 88–9 Place de la Concorde 153 Place de la Re´volution 153 placelessness 40–3, 89 Pleynet, Marcelin 168n poles 36, 39, 40 Pollock, Jackson 18 portraiture 134–5, 137 Poussin, Nicholas 100 Purgatory 81, 82

Rasmussen, Waldo 164n rationalization 5, 160n 2 Rees, Graham 164n, 190n Reformation 10, and Enlightenment 10 Reinhardt, Ad 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 32, 34, 40, 43, 48, 164n, 165n, 168n, 169n, 170n Abstract Painting (1960–1) 18, 19, 26, 30, 32 Abstract Painting (1962) 20, 30 Black Paintings (Installation) 31, 164n Rembrandt (van Rijn) 145 Reni, Guido 194n representation (see also image) 5–6, 8, 156 revolutionary instability of 152–4 Ricard, Robert 178n Rickes, John 180n Roberts, Tom 20, 21, 165n Robespierre, Maximilien 167n Roch, St 123 Roche, Thomas P. 177n, 185n, 190n Rombi, Georges 190n Rome 16, 126, 128, 130, 133, 138, 148, 174n, 178n Rosa, Salvatore 149 Rose, Barbara 165n Rosenblatt, Jason 184n Rothko, Mark 18, 32, 39, 168n Rubens, Peter Paul 145

Rabba 104 Rait, R. S. 191n Raphael 145, 147, 148, 194n

Sacred Heart 83 Sadler, S. L. 182n Saenredam, Pieter 136, 138

220

Index

saints 6, 69, 114, 156, Sandler, Irving 165n, 168n, 169n Saradi-Mendelovici, Helen 176n, 193 Sargent, Michael G. 179n Saunders, Frances Stonor 169n, 170n Scase, Wendy 180n Scotland 126 Scottow, Joshua 42, 172n Seostris 153 Se´rapis 107 Serenus 22, 165n Serjeantson, Mary S. 179n Sessions, Barbara F. 174n Seuse (Suso), Heinrich (Henry) 79, 84, 177n, 180n, 181 Seznec, Jean 174n Shapiro, Cecile 171n Shapiro, David 171n Shepard, Thomas 172n Shore, Daniel 185n Sidney, Philip 109 Simpson, James 160n, 163n, 172n, 175n, 178n, 179n, 180n, 182n Simpson, Will 167n Singh, Jaswant 159n Sion 104 Skinner, Quentin 161n Solomon 104, 162n Somme le Roi 53 soteriology 89 South America 178n South Canaan (Connecticut) 44 Soviet Union, the 28 Spate, Virginia 165n

Spedding, James 190n Spenser, Edmund 9, 70, 108, 109, 154, 177n, 185n, 189n, 190n Spraggon, Julie 181n, 182n, 183n, 185n, 191n St Pauls, Covent Garden 107 St Thomas of Acres, London 184n St. Peter’s, Rome 128, 130 Stanbury, Sarah 175n Statue of Liberty, the 27, 151, 157 statues, of Liberty 86, speaking and living 54–5, 103, 115 still life 137 Stirling, Lea 176n, 193n Stoichita, Victor Ieronim 177n, 191n, 192n, 193n Stolnitz, Jerome 191n Strasbourg 70 Strier, Richard 182n, 192n subtraction 20 Summit, Jennifer 188n superstition 10, 65, 138 Supreme Being, the 167n Taliban, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 58, 116, 155, 159n Tanner, Norman P. 175n taste 120 and idolatry 120, 126, 131–3 indebted to iconoclastic theory 133 and violence 143, 145–50 Tate Gallery, the (London) 134 Tenison, Thomas 43 Terah, father of Abraham 39, 171n Tertullian 94, 174n, 183n

Index texts as living 86, 114–15, 157, 186n as opposed to images 115, 194n Thomas, Keith 159n, 182n, 189n, 192n Thorpe, William 59, 175n Titian (Vercelli) 147 Tocqueville, Alexis de 47, 173n Todd, Jane Marie 163n Trent, Council of 137, 193n Trinity 86 Troy 49 Tuck, Richard 161n Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards 57 Twomby, Cy 48 Tyacke, Nicholas 175n, 176n, 182n, 183n, 189n Tyndale, William 64, 177n UNESCO 1, 10 United States, the 14, 26, 30, 33, 49, 160, 168n, 169n, 170n van Dyck, Anthony 145 van Haecht, Willem 140 van Heemskerck, Egbert 143 van Winden, J. C. M. 174n, 183n Vatican 126 veil of the mysteries 36, 171n Venus 55, 140 Voltaire 122, 123, 124, 130, 189n, 190n Dictionnaire Philosophique 122, 123, 189n

221

Letters concerning the English nation 189n von Nolcken, Christina 180n Wakely, Maria 164n, 190n Walker, Nicholas 190n Walpole, Horace 145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 193n, 194n Sermon on Painting 145, 147, 148 Aedes Walpolianae 145, 146, 150, 193n, 194n Castle of Otranto 151 Walpole, Robert (First Earl of Orford) 145 Walsh, J. P. 172n Walsingham 69 Walzer, Michael 170n Warham, William 186n Warton, Thomas 163n Waszink, J. H. 174n, 183n Watson, Nicholas 179n Weber, Max 5, 160n Weinsheimer, Joel 188n, 189n, 190n West, the 3, 104, 166n Westminster Assembly 41 Westminster Confession 41, 89 White, James F. 172n Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) 168n Wilkins, David 175n Williams, Peter W. 173n, 182n Wilton, Andrew 191n Winstead, Karen A. 179n

222 Wittmann, Barbara 171n Wittreich, Joseph 186n Wolf, Gerhard 171n Wolfe, Don M. 184n, 188n Word, Biblical 5, 63, 88 Wordsworth, William 9, 154, 194n, 195n

Index work of art 130 Wriothesley, Charles 184n Wycliffe, John 57, 174n Wylsdon 69 Zeeman, Nicolette 175n, 179n Zwingli, Ulrich 135, 192n