The Fruits of Reformation

This arts of the West post considers the implications of the Reformation on the arts & the larger cultural descent into the ontological cesspool of materialism & collapse.

If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction to the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and other topics have menu pages above. 

Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check regularly and it will be up there.

The arts of the West posts do two things at once. They explore the path to the inversion of modern art and culture and open a window on the societal degradation that made it possible. This post looks at the Reformation as beginning the replacement of a rational balance between secular and sacred authority in the West with the fallacious conflation of the two. The functional redefinition of the metaphysical as an extension of the material and ultimately subordinate to the political. This accelerates the collapse into the secular transcendence of modern Flatland that doomed the post-Enlightenment West. Click for the first look at the Reformation,

Start with the salient fact. The Reformation splits Western Christendom

Gillis Mostaert, Scene of War and Fire, 1569, oil on panel, Louvre Museum 

Flemish painter reflects on the carnage and cruelty of the European Wars of Religion.

This changes the basic nature of what it means to be a Christian in the West. What had been a yes/no question – are you a Christian? – becomes what kind of Christian are you? The Band is disinterested in refereeing conflicting claims. What matters is both Catholic and the Protestants believed theirs was the true faith. So what had been a self-definition as “Christian” now came with new adjectives. 

This also meant that specific ritual details took on more definitional importance. Because differentiating different Christian flavors required attention to how observance was carried out. We mentioned the irony in the last post that the supposed greater freedom meant more restrictive worship. Until the secular transcendence, auto-idolatry, and cultural degeneracy of the post-Enlightenment era increasingly removed worship altogether.

Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, Interior of St. Bavo Church in Haarlem, 1635, oil on panel, National Museum in Warsaw

What and how ritual was performed took on unprecedented importance in a world of multiple official Christianities. Unfortunately including bursts of mindless atavism iconoclasm associated with some branches of Protestantism - crimes against culture that would have done ISIS proud.

Harsh? There's nothing in a preference for imageless worship that mandates the destruction of a millennium of visualized Western cultural history. Not harsh enough for filth like that.

Egid Quirin Asam and painter Cosmas Damian Asam, St. Johann Nepomuk, better known as the Asam Church, 1733-1746, Munich

The Catholics double down on visual rhetoric, reaching a peak in the later Baroque. The Asam Brothers had studied in Rome before bringing a maxed-out version of the opulence of that city's churches to their native Bavaria.

The Band despises cultural destruction, but this may be a bit heavy the other way. Great comparison though. 

The end result is that the Reformation transforms the material associations of the word "Christian" across Europe. And, building off the logic in the last post, the material is all we can really comment on without wandering into realms of faith. 

The last post got a little lost between the axioms of the House of Lies and the introduction to the Christopher Langan project. Fair enough - those are obviously more generally interesting. But it's also a little unfortunate because we've come to realize that keeping track of how we can know - of epistemological modes - is really important when trying to discuss Christianity in a neutral manner. We are limited to assessing the observational and the logical, and things known only on faith are outside that. Things like the knowledge that the Bible is divinely true, or that a specific church structure is likewise.  It’s important to recognize how knowledge claims are founded to avoid pointless category errors. 

Like professing materialism while ignoring material causality. Which is up there with Poststructuralists determining linguistic indeterminacy linguistically on the retardery scale.

Abstract logic tells us the material needs extra-material causation. But beyond conforming to what we can observe and reason, the specific details of that causation's plans for us is known by faith. That is, outside the tools of the Band.

Returning to the last post, we are dealing with material manifestations based on abstract reasoning about things known by faith. What religions and churches are. So we are limiting commentary to what is logically necessary about those material manifestations. 

a) Material manifestations are subject to material conditions. 

Axiom #8 from the recent 12 Axioms post points out that abstract entities have no material existence in and of themselves. It’s fundamental to the nature of abstraction. If they existed materially, they wouldn't be abstract. If they have material form they become material - meaning subject to entropic forces in an temporal Fallen material world. That is ontologically different from a pure unchanging abstraction. TL,DR material realizations have to be different from abstract concepts. 

Miniature representing the three Estates of medieval society (the clergy, the nobility and everyone else) in The Tree of Battles of Honorat Bovet, Paris, BnF, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ms. 2695 folio 6v., 15th century

Nothing in the Bible said the medieval church had to look like the top row. That's a materialization of abstract principles derived from the Bible and early Church, as we saw in the previous reformation post. Abstract principles don't look like anything until they're realized socio-materially.

The salient question is whether the material form is consistent with it’s foundational parameters.

b) Material manifestations are assessed on their consistency with the determinative parameters implicit in their founding authority. 

The materialization  is necessarily  different from an abstract qua abstract but it will or won’t express the principles in a material way. The Bible doesn’t describe the unified medieval Church. But the idea is that whatever historical form the Church developed into would be consistent with the scriptural parameters that pertain to Christian authority and organization.

Having laid this out, we can define the Reformation as radical transformation of the nature of the materialization. It is true that the form of the Church changed and evolved over the Middle Ages, but it did so gradually and without major disruption of certain conventions. Protestantism was a total rupture with this gradual evolution and replacement with a new way of conceptualizing the relationship between the human and divine. 

Heinrich Füllmaurer and workshop, Gotha winged panel altarpiece, fully opened, 1539-1541, mixed technique on fir wood, paper mache, restored above, unrestored below, Gotha, Ducal Museum

Not all Protestants were barbarous cretins. Some - like the Lutherans - even used their own images. But they were much more restrained than the effusive Catholics, and obviously reflected their own interpretation of Christianity.

The Gotha altarpiece is winged, meaning it had multiple shutter-like doors that could be opened or closed to give different views. This was an older Netherlandish format, but without trappings of medieval Christianity. No lives of saints, halos, or other signs. The amount of text draws from and celebrates Luther's translation of the Bible. 

The prominence of text in the Gotha altarpiece is typical of the Protestant emphasis on the word. And the Word. From the translation and dissemination of the Bible in vernacular languages to the use of the printing press to spread the message, the importance of the word is preeminent. Even when images are used.

Heinrich Füllmaurer and workshop, Jesus teaches and heals the sick in Galilea, detail from the Gotha panel altarpiece, 1539-1541, mixed technique on fir wood, paper mache, Gotha, Ducal Museum

Close-up of a Gotha altarpiece panel. The amount of space given over to the text is what we were talking about. Note how the scenes are set in Netherlandish landscapes. Like the absorption of words, the images are supposed to help people personalize the message. Associate it with their own lives.

The Catholic reaction accentuated the synesthetic aspects of worship that developed over the Middle Ages. The differences are theological, but we're looking at how it manifests. How we can see it. The two overlap - the extensive use of art depicts the connections between the human and divine that Protestantism ruled out. Saints and relics, visions and transports, the real presence in the Host, the divine sanction for the institutions of the Church...

Peter Paul Rubens, The Triumph of the Church, around 1625, oil on panel, Museo del Prado

Rubens shows the personification of the Church riding a triumphal chariot crushing heresy while carrying a monstrance with the Eucharist and being crowned with a papal tiara. The horses are led by symbols of Faith, Hope, and Charity - the Theological Virtues - and the angel riding carries the keys of St. Peter. Rubens’ mastery of Baroque rhetoric and counter-Reformation symbolism is in full effect. 

It was one of a series of designs for tapestries celebrating the Triumph of the Eucharist. The enemies of the Church beneath the wheels include the snake-haired personification of Envy. Ass-eared Ignorance and Blindness - representing Protestantism - are thrashed in the foreground. The twisting columns refer to the Temple of Solomon via Old St. Peter's and are symbols of continuity from Old Testament to New to Church.

Incompatibly different impressions of what Christianity looks like come out of the Reformation. The Rubens is about 85 years newer - when the Gotha altarpiece was painted the Reformation was still coalescing and the Wars of Religion hadn't really ramped up. The Triumph of the Eucharist appeared when the climactic Thirty Years War was already underway and the religious divide had long hardened beyond repair. All historically interesting. But the issue for the empirical-rational observer is limited to whether the materializations that shook out were scripturally consistent. Both obviously claimed to be...

From a historical perspective, the medieval Church that preceded the Reformation largely wasn't. Not on the level of official hierarchy, anyhow. We've posted on the developing imperial papacy. It wasn't getting better.

Matthias Gerung, Satire on the Sale of Indulgences, before 1536, woodcut, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

The power of printing has led to the Reformation has been called the first media event in the West. In this woodcut print monks and nuns dine in the hellmouth on a feast cooked up by demons as the pope flies in by demonic transport to join them.

Obviously polemical and indicative of the viciousness of Protestant rhetorical propaganda. But peddling salvation really crystalizes the problem with corruption in the Church.

Not to say that the medieval Christianity was evil. Binary thinking is a plague and we'd like to think our readers are astute enough to avoid that idiot flypaper. The Church produced phenomenal holiness. Holiness that blows the doors of the modern version. We've looked at the monuments to the divine beauty of faith that were the Gothic cathedrals. But consider the endless procession of spiritual heroes - preachers, reformers, mystics and visionaries - that populate medieval Christendom.

Bonaventura Berlinghieri, Saint Francis of Assisi and scenes of his life, 1235, tempera on wood, Pescia, San Francesco

Take St. Francis for one example - the first purported stigmatic and a man with such a reputation for holiness that he was called another Christ. Traditionally, individuals like this emerged in times of crisis - Dominic and Catherine of Siena, the counter-Reformation saints, and countless others. If today's cesspool on the Tiber is to be rejuvenated, something similar has to happen. What's different today is that the hierarchy has put aside the hypocrisy to openly preach public immorality.

The problem wasn't medieval Christianity as much as the upper echelons. Overall religiosity ebbed and flowed and figures of Christ-like piety and apostolic zeal emerged, but the hierarchy largely blew. 

And that leads to the crux of the difference between materializations of abstract divine principles gradually changing within a structure and the radical replacement of the structure. Between the historical evolution of the medieval Church and the Reformation, regardless of the degree of corruption festering in the former. By any logically and empirically discernable socio-cultural or metaphysical measure...

[Christendom in need of a flushing] 

!=

[multiple Christendoms]

The fragmentation of Christendom on a religious - rather than implicit socio-cultural - level fundamentally changes the history and identity of the West. Permanently. Religion becomes implicated in material cultural identity in new and devastating ways. Devastating because this shatters the delicate ontological balance between the foundational pillars of the West and what we can know and how we can know it. An abandonment of alignment with onto-epistemological reality that made the West unique among historical world cultures. Without which, it's just another imperator, now in the death-throes of its own materialist greed.

What seems like a peak is often already the start of a ghost run...

This may sound dramatic, but consider the following - both for the broad historical and artistic implications.

The culture of the West rests on three interrelated pillars with their relative health reflected in the health of the culture as a whole. We've posted on this at length over the last few years. The three are Christianity, the legacy of classical thought - mainly Greco-Roman speculative thought and jurisprudence. and the historical nations of Europe. What is especially interesting is how neatly the three fit with the interlocking ontology, epistemology, and deontology of the Ontological Hierarchy. It looks like this...

Christianity is faith-based knowledge of ultimate reality that provides a moral foundation. The classical heritage is the foundation of the abstract logic that define Western law, justice, philosophy, etc. And national cultures give material form that developed organically in the interaction of land and people over time.

It's astounding how well this fits. It's one of the Band's most important observations. Click for a summary post that is more or less right, though some refinements are needed.

What happens with the Reformation is that Christianity becomes folded into material culture. This was always true to an extent - it's inevitable given that we are material beings that live and communicate through material representations. But the conceptual assumption was that Christianity as representation of ultimate reality was external to the realities of material culture. When the Reformation fractures Christendom along national cultural lines, the [what type of Christian] divisions correspond to the [what nation] ones.

It doesn't take long to reach the point where nation becomes the index of the relevant church rather than incidental to it. This is cemented at the Peace of Westphalia at the end of the Wars of Religion, where religious identity is implicit in national - or more accurately - nationally-labeled state character. And the emergence of the intrinsic category error called the “national church”. And yes, that greasy, slurping, pig-like noise is Fat Blasphemer’s music, but England proves to be such an important tool of satanic inversion it needs the attention of its own future post.

Jacob Jordaens, Allegory of the Peace of Westphalia, 1654, oil on canvas, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo

The modern beast narrative that the current international order is the "Westphalian System" misrepresents the Peace of Westphalia. As this good overview points out, the Thirty Years War was a ridiculous tangle of political and religious issues around the great power machinations of the Hapsburgs and others. The Dutch-Spanish war is only part of this mess.

Tl,dr - it wasn't anachronistic Hapsburg/papal totalitarianism against plucky independence-minded free nations. In fact, Dutch independence from Spain was affirmed in the Treaty of Munster earlier in 1648. What it did was freeze the official religion of each part of the Holy Roman Empire. This binds religion to state.

The Band refers to the false pretense that fundamental ontological distinctions can collapse into single material structures as secular transcendence. The condition is called Flatland. The misappropriation of "nation" and "religion" in political entities called "states" is one of the preeminent instances of this. And a preeminent category error in the founding of the failing modern West.

Obviously secular transcendence has no power to stop self-fluffing auto-idolators from blowtorching civilization with magical thinking. There may even be short-lived material benefit. Progress! But in the end, a house built on false foundations collapses. Just look at "the West" today...

The division of material and spiritual authority - at least in theory - was a unique strength of the Christian West.

Hans Bornemann, Christ in a Mandorla gives the swords of spiritual and temporal power to Pope and Emperor, illustration of the doctrine of the two swords in the Sachsenspiegel, 1442, Lüneburg Council Library Ms. Jurid. 1, f. 2v. 

The medieval doctrine of the Two Swords was derived from a letter written by Pope Gelasius in 494 laying out the relations of secular and spiritual power. The idea ultimately derives from the Gospel of Luke, but was developed into a political philosophy that ordered European life to some degree or another for a thousand years.

The premise is that the material and spiritual realms are different and each has a rightful divinely sanctioned ruler. Note that all three levels of the Ontological Hierarchy are reflected - reality's gonna reality.

It's easy to overlook how unique a socio-political structure that reflected real ontological difference actually was. Consider medieval Europe's geographical and historical neighborbood. The Imperial Cult of the Roman emperor had combined spiritual and secular power in a single figure akin to the older God-Emperors of the ancient Middle East. A Christianized version carried into the figure of the Byzantine Emperor - as seen towards the end of the Ravenna mosaic post. The Muslim Caliph who emerged shortly after also combined religious and political power in one figure - in this case based on the idealized image of Mohammed.

Christ gives the swords of secular and spiritual power to the emperor and pope, Saxon and Swabian mirrors from the Schwabenspiegel, early 14th century, Heidelberg University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 167, Bl. 18r 

So conceptually, this divided arrangement was a singular acknowledgment of reality. It's also totally consistent with the Biblical charge to rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and God what is God's that we posted on earlier.

The balanced powers of the Two Swords was an ideal but it was already under assault before the end of the Middle Ages. The Imperial Papacy that we've discussed in earlier posts claimed secular authority that was neither part of the spiritual sword nor consistent with the founding Biblical parameters of the office discussed in the last post. 

The Medieval papacy politicized Western Christianity with creeping secular claims within the old universal structure of the Church. But what Reformation politicization does is fragment that old universal Christendom into something akin to the developing patchwork of states. From folding the secular into the sacred order to reconfiguring the sacred after the emerging secular order.

Max Andersen, Danish reformed church service led by Peder Palladius, Danish Reformation Monument, 1943, bronze, in front of Copenhagen Cathedral

According to the link, Palladius was one of the first Danish bishops and a theology who prepared a liturgy in Danish language.

The “what kind of Christian” distinction that the Reformation introduces overlays differences in material national culture. Not perfectly, but somewhat in alignment. This means we we have to think of metaphysical and cultural difference as not interchangeable but interacting. Synergistic. And the last remaining binary thinkers have left the building. Which is good, because this is bringing us around to art - how culture expresses itself - and that's no country for binary thought.

Remember the basic formula for the art of the West - itself a correspondence with the relations of the Ontological Hierarchy.

Art is hard to define concisely because it crosses levels of reality. The Logos + Techne - L+T - definition we use combines some aspect of abstract truth with material skill. 

Beauty has a relationship to Truth in an abstract way, though art doesn't have to be beautiful to convey truth.

In the art of Christendom, the logos was Christianity and the techne whatever the local material culture. We saw in our medieval art posts that not all art from that period was explicitly religious - especially in the courtly refinements of the International Gothic. Religious themes are also packaged with other ideological shadings. But when talking about the Reformation and counter-Reformation and art, the subject is inherently Christian. And the ideological framing lets us see how this explicit politicization of Christianity plays out.

Harmen Steenwyck, Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life, about 1640, oil on oak, National Gallery, London

The vanitas type takes the Dutch interest in realistic observation and turns it into a metaphor for the transience of life and futility of worldly values. One that doesn't violate proscriptions on overt religious art.

This double nature – art expresses absolute values, but filtered through material subjective lenses - makes it rhetorically potent. What is considered Truth is supplemented with contextual modifiers. As the culture and its values change, so does the art. This can be deliberate propaganda, and/or more general cultural perspective, but in any case it does two things.

1. Historically, art lets us see the values of past elites.

First, consider who is calling the shots. Art reflects culture, but it is paid for by individuals in that culture. A better way to put it might be art reflects the cultural vision of the elites. Art takes resources and public art requires control over public space. The Church and aristocracy were the traditional donor classes who put up the money and chose the artists. So we see the vision that they wanted to promulgate. Sometimes the primary motivation is pure aestheticism. But there is always messaging.

Heinrich Aldegrever after Hans Holbein the Younger, Death and the Bishop, from The Power of Death (Allegory of Original Sin and Death), 1541, engraving

A print based on Protestant convert Holbein's take on the Dance of Death. The main subject is the same as the vanitas still-life above - momento mori or remember death.Worldly titles, positions, and achievements are futile since we all die, so focus on the fate of the soul.

But the choice of a bishop directs the warning to the hierarchy of the Church - the gradations of priesthood that were considered sacramental by Catholics and useless idolatry by the Protestants. Note how the skeleton's hourglass resembles the contentious Host of the Eucharist. The real presence was a massive debate between the two sides, and here it is subtly positioned as a worldly trapping and not a theophany necessary to salvation.

So basic truth about the mortality of the body and immortality of the soul supplemented with a polemical Protestant contextual frame.

Then there is the issue of the artists. A logos-facing artistic culture is competitive on quality grounds. The most celebrated artists command the highest prices and usually work for the richest clients on the most prestigious projects. Since the best artists are the most influential, the development of technique and style is linked through them to the ideology of the elites. To the point where the most esteemed artists often have access to elite culture and adopt its values themselves.

Take someone like Rubens - the preeminent painter of the Flemish counter-Reformation and one of the pioneers of the Baroque style. HIs influence on other artists came from his paintings and drawings, but the content of those also convey the values of the elites who commissioned them. 

Peter Paul Rubens, The Raising of the Cross, 1610, oil on canvas, Antwerp Cathedral

Rubens' central panel from his magisterial altarpiece was a synthesis of his study of Italian art from Michelangelo's heroic anatomy to Caravaggio's light and shadow, with Venetian color and dynamism and his native Netherlandish naturalism. 

The triumphalism and pathos reflects the resurgent spirit of the Church in the early 17th century, including the reaffirmation of grand Passion imagery over altars for devotional purposes.

2. Art projects elite cultural values onto the visual imagination of the time.

That's the role of the art within its own context. Art gives visual form to ideas, sometimes totally novel forms that are powerfully rhetorically compelling. A new way of visualizing something teaches people to see it in those terms. The old once seen, can't be unseen. If Raphael paints a celebrated papal miracle with the appearance of Leo X Medici, he combines a historical reference to the divine sanction of the Church hierarchy with the current pope in a single image.

Raphael, The Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila, 1513-1514, fresco, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City

Technically, the date of Raphael's grand papal apartment slightly predates the onset of the Reformation, but it captures the ideology that the counter-Reformation will reaffirm. It's an early Christian miracle story that presents the meeting between the Pope Leo I and Attila the Hun in 452 as a miraculous repulsion of the invader. According to the story, Saints Peter and Paul appeared in the sky and drove off Attila's army. This brings together ideas of the divine legitimation of the papacy, the cult of the saints as intercessors, the continuity of the current Church with its early Christian origins - all ideas that will be cornerstones of counter-Reformation thought. 

Now look at the 5th-century pontiff...

That's the current pope and Raphael's friend and client Pope Leo X Medici. With the contemporary papal court. The miraculous historical encounter isn't just affirmed in a papal-friendly way, it connects that long-ago event with the current pope. You are to understand Leo X as essentially the same as the sainted namesake, Leo I.

That Raphael was a close friend of Leo is indicative of the status artists could obtain and their adoption of the elite world view.

The idea that popular visual media projects elite world views onto the public hasn't really changed. 

Other than the quality.

The Reformation registers artistically on a couple of levels. The  traditional structures and venues of art production and display transform and elite messaging changes. The nature of the material sign and the content of those signs.

The best way to put it is that the technical execution - techne - in Christian L+T changed with circumstances, but the logos was more or less consistent. With the Reformation, the nature of the logos changes as well. Meaning that understanding art means multiple moving pieces - different national cultures and types of Christianity working together in a shifting political landscape. As art expresses culture, this is the perfect expression of the ontological Frankenstein's Monster that is the early modern nation-state.

Gerard ter Borch, The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 1648, oil on copper, Rijksmuseum  

The Spanish-Dutch peace treaty that ended their 80 years of war and recognized the political independence and religious identity of the Dutch United Provinces.

Politics, ethnos, and religion all smashed into one entity is a perfect prelude to the Flatland mythologies that will shepherd in the inversions of the modern world. All that's missing are the retarderies of Enlightenment "rationalism", but that's the thing about slippery slopes into the Abyss - they're incremental until they aren't.

The confounder to taking art as cultural evidence is the rising concept of "Art" as a thing in itself - with it's own distinct theoretical identity. This is something we saw emerge in our Renaissance Italy posts that came out of humanist culture. Similar ideas begin to creep into Northern European art around 1500, starting with German polymath Albrecht Dürer. It starts with theoretical attitudes - unsurprisingly artist Dürer was attracted to the greater prestige of artists in Italian culture than his own - but spreads into formal influence too.

Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe, 1500, oil on panel, Alte Pinakothek

The style isn't Italianate - the detail is pure Northern empirical realism. But by patterning himself after the Holy Face, Dürer makes a not-so-subtle connection between the divine Logos and the artist as creators. Likening artistic creation to Creation claims a status for artists far above the old craftsman. This elevated status is a humanistic Italian idea

Dürer actually spent time in Venice where he absorbed humanist ideas and artistic techniques. His work there included an altarpiece that combines the Venetian sacre conversazione format of Madonna and Child surrounded with saints in a landscape with northern colors and setting. 

Albrecht Dürer, Feast of the Rosary, 1506, oil on panel, National Gallery, Prague

We can't go into him in more detail, but Dürer is an important figure in the development of Northern art. Not only for the transmission of Italian ideas, but his interest in empirical observation - including naturalism and perspective study - that has drawn comparisons with Leonardo.

The influence of Italian art and ideas will eventually lead into Northern "Romanism" - a movement based on incorporating these into a Northern framework. We'll touch on it a bit more at the end, but here's a good example of a French-speaking painter active in Antwerp who was an early adopter of Italian influences. 

Jan Gossaert, Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, 1520, oil on panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Clearly not a Protestant theme - the legend that Luke was an artist legitimized the use of religious art and the cult of the saints as transmitted through medieval sources. The figure types and bright colors are right out of Netherlandish art, but the classical architecture is an Italian humanist import. 

The decision to embrace or ignore Italian Renaissance concepts of art complicates the clear reflection of national culture and religion. A lot of overlapping factors - Northern/Protestant and Southern/Catholic art. Reformation and counter-Reformation. National subdivisions occur within that - Italian art differs from Spanish and Central European Catholic art. Dutch, German, and English all have differences. Even in the prosperous Netherlands, there’s a religious split between Protestant Dutch and Catholic Flemish art. Then the reactions to Italy. 

There's no way to cover all that in a post or two, and we don't want to lose the Reformation thread that we've been talking about. So the rest of this post will look at the Netherlandish artists who follow what we looked at in the last art post. The art scene that divides into the Dutch and Flemings. 

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, oil on oak, National Gallery, London

Late medieval Flanders is similar to Italy at the same time - rich cities and erudite culture. This famous painting was commissioned from Van Eyck from a wealthy Lucchese merchant in Bruges. Arnolfini's presence in Flanders is typical of the links between it and Tuscany.

The art, as we saw was very different - an art of careful observation and symbolic content in oil.

One place where Tuscany wasn't like Flanders was in art. The interlocking development of theory and virtuosity over the 15th and into the 16th century in Italy doesn't really take off in the north. There is a developing humanistic culture, but it doesn't turn to art in the same way. There's no equivalent to the systematic linear perspective that idealizes the representation of the real world. And without the proximity to Rome, there isn't the same consuming interest in antiquity that is so influential on Italian art and theory.

Quinten Metsys, The Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Four Angels, between 1493-1497, oil on oak wood, National Gallery

Flemish painter Metsys is still operating in that International Gothic favored idiom that we saw goes back to Van Eyck at the turn of the 16th century. The angels, figure types, Gothic throne are all examples of this. 

The lack of early classical influence is most clear in sculpture. There is little development of marble and bronze sculpture – relief or in the round - in the Netherlands, or northern Europe in general. There's plenty of carving through the Middle Ages, just not the Italian concept of sculpture built on ancient premises and models. Overall, Northern Renaissance sculpture was a less significant and innovative medium than painting.

The Flight into Egypt, around 1515, oak, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The Germans are more celebrated for their wood carving but the Flemings produced similar. This is typical of the many sculptures that resemble figures from paintings. 

Element of a wall tabernacle, around 1520, limestone with polychrome decorations, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Netherlandish stone carving obviously existed on tombs and in churches like this one. But the willingness to paint figures and the International Gothic stylings of the figures and setting differentiate it from its Italian Renaissance counterparts. 

The Madonna is a common type often called the schone or beautiful Madonna.

Northern Renaissance painting was where the main innovations took place. This was an art of oil paint – bright colors and fine detail in a mode established by Van Eyck and Van der Weyden in the previous century. If we want a general comparison with 15th-century Italy, intensely empirical vs. more theoretical works. The big distinction is idealized Italian perspective vs. Northern observation of anecdotal detail. The oil paint adds bright, jewel-like color that can be almost lurid in religious art.

The interest in observed detail - and comparable disinterest in classical idealism - means certain things appear in Netherlandish art first – genre scenes or scenes of everyday life, landscape, and still-life painting. These can have Christian content but are easily adapted to Protestant attitudes towards overt religious subject matter by shifting to allegory. These will become the types of art favored by affluent Dutch Protestants in what is known as the Golden Age of Dutch Realism (c.1600-80).

Lucas van Leyden, The Card Players, between 1494–1533, oil on panel, Mellerstain House

Genre scenes depict "everyday life" - not religious, historic, or literary subjects. They often look at lower class or dodgy behavior, sometimes for comic or voyeuristic reasons. 

There is often a moralizing aspect to genre painting.

Genre scenes raise the issue of the difference between the buyers and the people depicted. This sort of non-religious, non-aristocratic art is the result of a developing new clientele in the Netherlandish cities. These are the affluent urbanites arising from the burgeoning economy who didn't have palaces or lavish chapels to decorate, but could afford paintings. The sort of people who might not be tavern gamblers but could enjoy such a scene for any number of reasons - either moral messaging and/or entertainment.

Sometimes the moralizing is overt...

Quinten Metsys, The Moneylender and his Wife, 1514, oil on panel, Louvre Museum

This genre scene delivers a direct moral message to a deeply religious society dealing with the materialist consequences of rising wealth. Note how the wife ignores her prayer book to focus on the money. Symbolic items in the background - like the apple of the Fall - clarify the message.

Marinus van Reymerswaele, The Moneychanger and His Wife, 1539, oil on panel, Museo del Prado

The Durch van Reymerswaele painted several variations on this subject of the evils of worldly obsession.

The extinguished candle in the background add a direct momenti mori message like a vanitas  painting.

 

Peasant behavior was popular among the urban art market. The Netherlands were the most urbanized part of Europe in the 16th century, making the rural unfamiliar and interesting. There's a familiar tendency to present country people as goofy and/or immoral - either for amusement, moral instruction, feelings of smug superiority, or all of the above.

Pieter Aertsen, The Egg Dance, 1552, oil on panel, Rijksmuseum

Festive preparations for carnival and a comic look at the assumed disorderly nature of country life.

The Dutch Aertsen introduced a weird composite art type that combined elements of still-life and genre painting to moralize on prosperity. This tension between increasing material wealth and Christian values will become a recurring theme through the 17th century - at least until materialist inversion becomes the ethos of the West. There is an irony in commenting on the moral danger of wealth in painting - itself a pure luxury object that had only recently fallen into the reach of a significant percentage of the public.

The abundance of the butcher's stall is viscerally striking. But in the background, the Holy Family gives alms on their way to Egypt. The contrast between contemporary materialism and Biblical values is clear. Note how the overflowing meat overshadows Jesus and his parents.

Pieter Aertsen, A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms, 1551, oil on panel, North Carolina Museum of Art

The independent landscape is another type of painting that emerges in the 16th century before really taking off in the 17th. Landscape scenes had been primarily backgrounds prior, but in the work of the Flemish Joachim Patinir and the German Albrecht Altdorfer start to becomes their own subjects. Why isn't 100 percent certain, but it's likely another reaction to urbanization, at least in part. Early 16th-century landscapes tend to still have some ostensive mythic or religious subject matter, but overshadowed by the sweeping view that is the real subject. 

Here's an early example from Patinir with a few standard features. The high foreground allows for a view of tremendous depth with a bluish hue to suggest the effects of distance on sight. It is an early form of atmospheric perspective. The vast panorama is called a "world landscape".

Joachim Patinir, Landscape with Saint Jerome, from 1516 until 1517, oil on panel, Museo del Prado  

Here, the titular story is St. Jerome, but apart from the odd rocks, there's not much to suggest his desert setting. The scene is more suggestive of a fantastical Netherlandish context - presumably to appeal to and connect the story with the purchasing public. The landscape works a bit differently in this next one...

Joachim Patinir, Crossing the River Styx, between 1520 and 1524, oil on panel, Museo del Prado  Blue 

This subject here is drawn from classical myth - a sign of the humanistic interests in the North as well as the South. But it is Christianized to an extent - sort of like the use of Charon of Dante but configured differently. The two sides of the river correspond to the moral balance of a Last Judgment, with one side a heavenly place full of angels and the other a fiery hellscape. This turns the landscape into a momento mori by presenting the viewer with the posthumous choice that matters. 

It's the ability to add a Christian, moralizing message that makes the new forms like still life and landscape appealing to Protestants opposed to religious art.

Messaging in a Northern landscape can also be more overtly political. Take a look at the most spectacular of Renaissance world landscapes by the German Altdorfer. Here, the battle between Alexander the Great and Darius is used as a metaphor for a Christian Europe under threat from the Ottoman Turks.

Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander at Issus, 1529, oil on lime, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

There's nothing else quite like this. The incredible detail of the armies in the foreground through the German Renaissance town behind to the cosmic landscape in the background. The armies are outfitted in 16th-century armor and kit to make the connection between the Greek-Persian and European-Ottoman conflict obvious.

Detail continues into the misty blue atmospheric perspective of the world landscape. Like these ships and harbor by a mountainous delta.

Altdorfer included this amazing floating plaque against the turbulent sky to announce the subject matter.

The artist who stands out as the pivotal creator of the Netherlandish Renaissance would have to be Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569). Nominally a Catholic, his work is unorthodox and seems more reflective of the religious turbulence of Reformation-era Netherlands. Scholars have struggled to pin down what he actually believed, and his sophisticatedly-rendered peasant scenes don't seem to correspond to any one position. Natural rhythms of life coexist with folk wisdom and demonic threat in a body of work that defies simple classification.

Take a look at the apocalyptic horror of the Triumph of Death. A momento mori without hope of salvation where skeletal armies slaughter man and vegetation alike without quarter or check.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562, oil on panel, Museo del Prado

There are elements of genre and landscape - mashing up categories is typical of Bruegel - but the skeletal depravity and massacre are the preeminent theme. There are different theories for this - some link the carnage to the wars of religion that had begun to ravage the countryside. Others see it as God's vengeance on the worldly fixations of unrecondite sinners whose actions have chosen the path of destruction. The masses being herded into the giant coffin-abattoir on the right support this reading. But ultimately, the meaning - if there is one meaning - is a mystery.

It's worth noting that Hieronymus Bosch - the earlier Flemish Renaissance master who influenced Bruegel - took pessimistic views of human prospects. His Haywain triptych uses the metaphor of the cart for the human path from a Fallen Creation through worldly sin and debauchery to fiery damnation. Demons pour into the world in the Creation scene on the left even before humanity appears. Note the tiny figure of Jesus ignored at the top of the center panel and the lone angel on the wagon in prayer...

Hieronymus Bosch, The Haywain Triptych, around 1516, oil on panels, Museo del Prado, Madrid 

Whether this is a direct influence on Bruegel is hard to say. But there is definitely a strain of furious eschatological pessimism visible to us through Netherlandish Renaissance art. It's inconceivable that this doesn't relate somehow to the tensions and impulses leading to and driving the Reformation.

Bruegel's main contributions to Northern art fall in several areas. Not surprising given the hybrid nature of his subjects. He is the central figure in transforming the landscape innovations of Patinir and Altdorfer into something approaching modern landscape painting. And his careful observations of everyday life treat genre subjects with the skilled seriousness of traditional high culture subjects. These set the stage for Dutch art in the 17th century. Look at The Harvesters, one of several of a group of paintings reflecting on times of year. 

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565, oil on wood

Peasants cut hay and break for a meal while the Dutch landscape stretches into the distance. There is nothing, comic, condescending, or moralizing - other than perhaps valuing work and community in harmony with the rhythms of the natural world. Bruegel uses what will be a standard landscape painting technique of creating the impression of a vista by combining distanced views that drop off from a high foreground. The harvesters are up front, then back and below is a middle ground with a roadway, wagon, fields, and town, then a distant view behind that. Together, these make it seem like the picture stretches back into real distance.

The same technique and mix of painting types occurs in Bruegel's most famous painting - another in the times of year group.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow, 1565, oil on oak wood, Kunsthistorisches Museum

In this winter scene, Bruegel again combines everyday life with landscape and even captures the feeling of frozen air. It's packs anecdotal details from genre scenes in a sweeping view into far distance. Compare it to The Harvesters and you can see the same basic approach to structure. High foreground with the main figures dropping down and back into further views. And in both we have pretty much straight landscape and genre - no religious or mythic story like in the Patinirs.

A glimpse at that detail with people playing winter sports and games on the frozen water.

This is that interest in observation and anecdotal detail that distinguished the Netherlandish Renaissance from the Italisn.

Here's one more Bruegel to get away from landscape and look at the serious technical treatment of what would not traditionally be considered a serious subject.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Peasant Wedding, 1566-69, oil on panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum

A humble scene with a complex perspective that carries attention around and back. The bride is in the middle in front of the green cloth.

Bruegel's impact is felt all over Northern Renaissance art. Here are a couple of obvious examples.

Gillis Mostaert, Village Feast, 1590, Gemäldegalerie

Mostaert combines the diagonally aligned feasting table from The Peasant Wedding with a deep landscape filled with anecdotal genre details.

And Gillis van Conixloo's stages his early Baroque drama with Bruegel's high foreground and staged views curving into distance. He adds a mythic story and creates a more fantastical landscape, but look past the details at the basic structure and Bruegel is easy to see.

Gillis van Coninxloo, Landscape with the Judgement of Paris, end of 16th century, oil on panel, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo

Even the more realistic, if poetically expressive - landacapes of the Protestant Dutch Golden Age derive from this. But that's a story for a later arts of the West post.

Jan van Goyen, Sandy Road with a Farmhouse, 1627, oil on wood

As for the Reformation itself...

Religious differences enhance the political divide of the Netherlands into Flemish and Dutch art. The Catholic Flemings continue with the traditional Catholic religious subjects.

Joos van Cleve, The Annunciation, 1525, oil on panel, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The homey interior and figure styles reflect back on the early Netherlandish Renaissance of a century earlier. It's not that Protestants rejected the concept of the Annunciation, but religious art emphasizing Marian subjects wit traditional miraculous trappings were too close to the cult of the Virgin Mary.

Obviously ornate altars were not popular with the Protestants - even those not outright opposed to art in general. The bright colors and figure types carry older conventions over, but the classical details in the architecture show the influence of Renaissance humanism.

Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Adoration of the Magi triptych, 1520-1525, oil on panel, private

Pieter Pourbus was a leading mid-16th-century Flemish artist who continued painting traditional religious subjects. 

Pieter Pourbus,  The van Belle Tryptich (Our Lady of Sorrows) (central panel), 1556, oil on panel, St. James Church, Bruges

The focus on the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin is a Catholic devotional subject with medieval roots. There wasn't anything like this being produced for Protestant clients.

Before the Reformation, Antwerp had relpaced Bruges as the commercial and artistic center of the Netherlands. After the Reformation, the Protestant Holland will surpass Catholic Flanders economically, and the city goes into eclipse. But the last great artistic flowering of Catholic Antwerp was still to come in the person of the Flemish Rubens - the great painter of the counter-Reformation and the early Baroque courts of Europe.

Peter Paul Rubens and workshop, The Assumption of the Virgin, around 1616, oil on canvas, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium  

Traditional Marian subject matter in Rubens' dynamic style. Among other things, he revolutionized art production with a huge workshop that produced paintings in an almost assembly line style.

But that's for a future post...

On the Protestant side, art is curtailed overall, but more specific responses vary. We've seen how the outright rejection of religious art would spur the growth of new genres into new directions. But some Protestants - the later Luther in particular - were not completely averse to religious images. The art doesn't fill the Churches as it will in Catholic contexts, and the subjects reflect Protestant dogmas and more direct and personal relationships with Jesus. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) who knew and painted Luther and other important figures in the early Reformation is a good example of a Protestant artist.

Here's a didactic allegory that emphasizes the importance of grave through faith in salvation - and not the Law of the Jews or good works of the Catholics.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Allegory of Law and Grace, after 1529, painting on beech wood, Germanisches Nationalmuseum 

On the left, the Fall. Adam and Eve eat of the Tree of Knowledge releasing sin and death to prey on mankind while God is remote in heaven. The elders with their book of Law are unable to help. On the right, the Crucifixion opens the way to salvation while the Risen Christ slays the symbolic dragon representing evil. In the background, the Annunciation to Mary indicates the Incarnation without emphasizing Marian devotion and the Paschal Lamb stands at the foot of the Cross.

Cranach was inexplicably popular in the court of Saxony court and environs, producing more humanistic themed works as well. Like this mythic scene with a lovely setting but filled with the weird lumpy ugly people that were typical in his work.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Golden Age, around 1530, oil on panel, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design

Imagine paying for this when Italy existed...

Cranach's son Lucas the Younger followed in his father's footsteps producing art for Protestant patrons, including versions of the Elder's inexplicably popular designs. This piece is an original with a lot of Protestant features - the connection between the individual and Christ's sacrifice and the setting in a contemporary context.

Lucas Cranach the Younger, Portrait of Georg Cracow and Family, 1563, Stadtkirche Wittenberg

We suppose it's more commemorative than devotional. A family portrait that captures their faith, affluence, and likenesses.

On the topic of inexplicable popularity, we should at least mention Hans Baldung - a student of Altdorfer who became a Protestant and moved from traditional into bizarre subjects. There are numerous pictures of witches in his work that we won't bother with. Here's a momento mori that reminds us life is fleeting and youthful beauty ephemeral.

Hans Baldung Grien, The Three Ages of Man and Death, between 1541 and 1544, oil on panel, Museo del Prado 

 The child, young woman, crone, and death are easy to interpret. Note the hourglass death holds with the circular top that resembles the Eucharist. A possible anti-Catholic slant? Can't say for sure. The owl is a strange touch with its traditional associations with the occult. Is he suggesting this also leads to death?

One thing we can say is that the German psycho-sexual fetishization of grotesque oddities isn't strictly a 20th-century thing...

The final thing that we mentioned at the beginning is the continuing influence of Italian art - either acceptance or rejection. Bruegel had been to Italy and was aware of their advanced technique, but clearly rejected Renaissance classical idealism in his works. Whether this was for personal or political reasons is impossible for us to say, but it speaks to consciousness of cultural difference.

Other artists attempted to fold Italianate influence into their work in different ways. There were some possibilities for direct exposure at home. The first Michelangelo to leave Italy was acquired by a wealthy cloth merchant from Bruges in 1504. It's a simplified version of the classicism of his famous Pieta and totally different from anything Netherlandish.

Michelangelo, Bruges Madonna, 1501–1504, marble, Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk, Bruges

Prints circulated widely. And more artists made the same sort of trip Dürer did as the fame of the High Renaissance achievements spread.

Jan van Scorel was an early example of the so-called Romanists. These artists either studied in Italy or at least brought Italian motifs and techniques to their work. Here's a three-quarter posed figure against a landscape that is based on the new arrangements of Leonardo and Raphael. The rocky setting is northern - reminiscent of Patinir. Italian influence isn't painting in an imitative style as much as degrees of influence on an existing one.

Jan van Scorel, Mary Magdalene, around 1530, oil on oak wood, Rijksmuseum

The figure type and pose looks more Italianate classical than the weird ugly Northern Renaissance version. There's no organic connection to the setting - it has the look of someone against a green screen.

Maerten van Heemskerck actually spent quite a bit of time in Rome where he fell under the spell of classical antiquity and Michelangelo. As a Dutch Catholic he had no religious objections to the artistic culture of Italy and absorbed a mix of humanistic ideas and the imaginative hypertrophic anatomy that Michelangelo introduced. These powerful figures in elaborate and creative poses were a big component of the movement known as Mannerism that we will consider in the next arts of the West post. For now, here's one example of Heemskerck's mix of Netherlandish color and observation with a classical subject and Michelangelo's posed nudes.

Maerten van Heemskerck,  The Triumphal Procession of Bacchus, between circa 1536 and circa 1537, oil on oak wood, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Italian Mannerism was a reaction to the accomplishments of the High Renaissance covered in earlier posts. It took the idealized forms and turned them into self-conscious displays of design that exaggerated Michelangelo and Raphael into "mannered" artistic creations. As we'll see, this can become overly stylized, detached from clear meaning, even ugly. The reaction against Mannerism in Italy corresponds to the efforts to reform religious art in the counter-Reformation and leads into the wonders of the Baroque. But that's for next time.

Here's a look at some late Dutch Mannerism. Note the lack of coherent setting, complex figural poses, irrational lighting and arrangement and overall sense of contrivance.

Abraham Bloemaert, Apollo and Diana Punishing Niobe by Killing her Children, 1591, Statens Museum for Kunst

That's enough for the convoluted cultural landscape in the age of Reformation. We could go on with more examples, but the point of a post like this is to trace out the big issues. What we wanted to do was think about the relationship between art and the overlapping spheres that come into play with the fragmentation of Christendom without getting sucked into theological digressions. And they do overlap.

1. Fragmented Christianity becomes connected to cultural identity and it all gets subordinated to the Flatland political structure of the emerging nation-state. This is a fundamental category error that advances down the path towards the self-immolating materialist fantasies - and rejection of metaphysics - that doomed the modern world. 

2. The interplay of politicizing religion and nationality plays out in the shape of the contemporary arts. Art visualizes culture, and as culture sinks into the flux of collapsing ontology, the art echoes that.

3. Art itself also layers on its own developing theoretical self-consciousness. This independence is what will eventually lead to modern retardery like "autonomy" and other rejections of higher purpose that cuts it off from first logos and then techne. Without that, there is no slide into the atavistic abyss of cultural destruction. 

The next two posts will deal with two other ongoing themes - implications of the House of Lies and the initial dive into Christopher Langan's CTMU. Then we'll be back to the arts of the West to look at the counter-Reformation and the transformation of Italian culture.

Caravaggio, The Entombment of Christ, between 1602-1604, Vatican Museums