On Austerity and Art in the Reformation
January 19, 2005
In “Brush for Hire” (The London Review of Books), Eamon Duffy reviews The Reformation of the Image by Joseph Leo Koerner. Koerner (and Duffy) discuss the causes and significance of the austerity that appeared in Lutheran (as opposed to Catholic) art. (Much else comes up, such as Lucas Cranach the “spiritual whore.”) Not a new idea, Duffy appears to agree with Koerner that Protestantism, when it was not against images and visual art entirely, promoted an aesthetic austerity, a ‘mortification of painting through text’ so that sacred imagery would not evoke “idolatrous” awe and veneration: “Art was no longer sacred, immediate, an encounter with the ultimate: instead, it offered an alternative form of textuality, mere food for thought.”This desacralization of art, Duffy writes, “helped ensure Protestant art’s survival and continuing use as a didactic and propagandist tool, but at the price of the aesthetic collapse for which traditional art historians have berated it.” Duffy suggests that rather than springing “from a ‘new aesthetic,’” the ‘emotional blankness’ Koerner finds in “so much of Cranach’s religious painting” actually comes from “imaginative exhaustion, or from the routinisation and decline of quality inevitable given the use of assistants and of mass-production methods in [Cranach’s] money-spinning studio…”
Such a negative austerity reminds me of Ivan Illich’s efforts to rehabilitate a postive, medieval and classical austerity. As he wrote in Tools for Conviviality:
‘Austerity,’ which says something about people, has also been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle and Aquinas, it marked the foundation of friendship. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia [graceful playfulness] in personal relations.
I wonder what accounts for the fact that the austere Protestant reforming movements, themselves informed by the long history of monastic reform movements, yielded a profound disinterest in not only art but also friendship and conviviality, as tNP contributing editor Thomas Heilke has put it in “Friendship in the Civic Order: A Reformation Absence.” (Some version of this paper appears to be forthcoming in a book entitled Friendship, Justice, and Political Life: Perspectives in the History of Political Thought from Georgetown University Press.) Perhaps someone should undertake a historical study of “austerity.”
This is On Austerity and Art in the Reformation in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Jesuit Refugee Service Calls for Aid | Next: Christine Rosen on “The Age of Egocasting” | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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