The Reception of Christian Devotional Art: The Renaissance to the PresentAuthor(s): Pamela M. JonesSource: Art Journal, Vol. 57, No. 1, The Reception of Christian Devotional Art (Spring, 1998),pp. 2-4Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777986 .

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editors sttem n

The Reception of

Christian Devotional Art The Renaissance to the Present

Pamela M. Jones

2 his issue developed out of a session held at the College Art Association's 1995 annual meeting in San Antonio.

Like many art historians, by 1995 I had long been inter-

ested in reception. My concern with the reception of Christian

devotional art was initially stimulated in the early 1980s by read-

ing Roman Catholic art theory of the late sixteenth and seven-

teenth centuries, which, in response to Protestant aniconism,

provided a compelling defense of the usefulness of religious art. At

the heart of Roman Catholic apologies for sacred art was a belief

in the indelible power of visual imagery and a concomitant con-

cern with channeling and exploiting viewer responses in the ser-

vice of the "true" faith.1 Together with post-Tridentine art theory, the work of such postmodern theorists as Wolfgang Iser and Hans

Robert Jauss heightened my concern with reception as a corrective

to an undue stress on production and intentionality.2 Thus, given the theoretical framework within which Christian art was justified in the early modern era-my own period of specialization--a methodological shift in favor of the audience's role seemed partic- ularly warranted and beneficial. It has also been fruitful for the

study of modern art-as, for example, Michael Fried and Wolf-

gang Kemp have demonstrated in a secular context. Several arti-

cles in this issue, however, treat the reception of modern art in a

religious context.3 Crucial to reception theory is a concern with the multiplicity

of ways in which viewers with different "horizons of expectation" concretize works of art. These multiple viewers may be either the artist's own contemporaries or beholders from later eras. Contrib- utors to this issue explore multiple viewing perspectives by

emphasizing cross-sectarian, cross-cultural, and multicultural issues that have created special problems for the reception of

Christian art from the fifteenth century to the present. Four of the six articles-those by Roger Crum, Mitchell

Merback, Gauvin Bailey, and David Morgan-are revised versions of papers originally delivered at the 1995 CAA session.4 Sally

Promey's and Annette Stott's articles were solicited for this issue to

strengthen coverage of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and

to complement and expand upon methodological problems intro- duced in the essays on earlier eras. There is no way, of course, that six articles can cover all important reception problems, let alone all

regions and historical periods. Yet these articles do address a range of major issues, showcasing ways in which art historical and liter-

ary models can be usefully adapted and critiqued. They are informed to varying extents by classic and recent scholarship by art historians and by reader-response criticism and reception aes-

thetics. They also incorporate models from social history, semi-

otics, and anthropology. Collectively, the authors debate the diverse ways in which works of art might be read as signs coex- tensive with social and political power. Individually, they examine how beholders' expectations have helped shape Christian imagery, and how their completions of devotional images can promote a

sense of community or division. To turn to the individual articles, the issue begins with a

European paradigm of cross-cultural viewing during the fifteenth

century, an exchange between the Low Countries and Italy, as

represented by Roger Crum's study of Hugo van der Goes's Porti-

nari Altarpiece. Crum faces a typical methodological problem: a

lack of documented responses to a Renaissance devotional paint- ing. Discussion of such works usually hinges on the assumption that they succeeded in their original devotional contexts. Crum

challenges this assumption, noting that our contemporary experi- ence of the negative reception of art incorporating Christian

iconography-such as the notorious 1980s case of Andres Ser- rano's Piss Christ-indicates that we should admit the possibility of failed reception in past eras. Through an examination of liturgi- cal difference in northern versus southern Europe of the late fif- teenth century, Crum helps us consider a famous case of cross-cultural response in a new light. He shows how devotional

practice probably rendered Hugo's Flemish altarpiece an initial fail-

SPRING 1998

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ure in its Italian context until its eventual internalization resulted in

a compromise between the alterity of its northern form-a trip- tych with movable wings-and the horizons of expectation of its

Florentine audience.

Mitchell Merback's essay on Lucas Cranach the Elder's

Martyrdom of the Twelve Apostles concerns the cross-sectarian

afterlife of the print series. The vexing issue of the use and abuse of images pitted Protestants against Catholics, but despite the

aniconism generally espoused by Protestant sects, many Protes-

tants continued to tap art's persuasive power. Cranach's series of

woodcuts is a compelling case study both of the changing charac-

ter of Christian devotional art before the Reformation and, as

Merback emphasizes here, of the reuse of Catholic imagery and its

reception in the Protestant era. Merback finds the meaning of

Cranach's woodcuts in the historical coherence that, according to

Jauss, connects author and viewers, production and reception through time. During religious struggles for authority among various Christian sects in the sixteenth century, Cranach's series

was harnessed to the Lutheran catechism and received commen-

tary by Luther himself. Merback explores how the woodcuts aided

religious instruction of German children in the interdependent

spheres of school, home, and civic life with the aim of creating a

community of true Christian believers. The next study, by Gauvin Bailey, treats the consequences

for Christian art of European colonization and missionary activity in

a non-Western region. Bailey analyzes this cross-cultural phenome- non in an Indian context. He overturns the traditional view that the

appearance of Catholic devotional art in India during the seven- teenth century represents Mughal capitulation to Western superi- ority in the face of Jesuit proselytizing. Instead, he contends that like early colonial art produced in Latin America, imperial Mughal mural painting was the creative product of a partnership between

indigenous and conquest civilizations. In such contexts, Catholic devotional art was produced and received in radically different

ways than in Europe. As patrons, the Mughal princes deliberately appropriated and reinvented Euro-Catholic art because they found useful its pictorial realism, which they regarded as a universal style. The princes used this type of art to provide visual expression of their new syncretic ideology of kingship, which promoted religious tolerance to enhance the Mughals' authority as recently established Muslim rulers in a predominantly Hindu continent.

In the following three articles, related themes and method-

ological problems are brought to bear on nineteenth- and twentieth-

century art. Sally Promey, like Merback, is concerned with the

changing conditions of reception and the reuse of Christian imagery well after its creation. Promey's study of John Singer Sargent's Frieze of Prophets from the Triumph of Religion program at the Boston Public Library (1887-95) focuses on the murals' afterlives between 1895 and 1965, when they received wide popular acclaim among multiple publics, including Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish organi- zations. Sargent himself regarded the murals' subject matter as an intellectual analogue for enlightened and progressive human achievement. But from 1895 onward the murals-above all Frieze of Prophets-began to take on many new identities and meanings with a distinctly "religious" and often sectarian accent. They were

repeatedly experienced in a variety of formats in mass-mediated

reproduction, such as photographic murals and illustrations in

books, calendars, church bulletins, and encyclopedias-and even as public pageants. In her study of the afterlives of Sargent's Prophets, Promey shows how the murals have served the educa- tional and inspirational goals of diverse religious and secular com- munities.

David Morgan focuses on the use of sacred images in the

privacy of the American home by twentieth-century Protestants and Catholics. Like Promey, he discusses mass-produced art, but rather than reproductions of works by famous artists such as Sargent, Morgan treats popular devotional images by Warner

Sallman and others whom art historians generally marginalize as

ART JOURNAL

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4 mere illustrators. Morgan analyzes the devotional power of such

images by drawing from responses to a query placed in religious magazines of various Christian sects. His respondents are repre- sentatives of the American middle class and espouse mainstream values unlike those of the religious right, whose views have received so much recent media coverage. In analyzing the psycho- social event of ritual and the ontology it implies, Morgan shows how popular images are received in the middle-class Christian home as the primary site for shaping youth, conducting ritual, and

defining the feminine domain of religious life.

Finally, Annette Stott's paper on triptychs by contemporary women brings us up to the moment in examining the production and reception of Christian-inspired imagery in the context of the

current debate over multiculturalism in the United States. Stott

examines the ways in which several women artists have recently

appropriated the triptych, a symbolic form of Western Christianity, to challenge patriarchal culture and simultaneously explore their own female identities. She interprets these triptychs in experiential terms as "transformative," taking into consideration both the artists' responses to traditional Christian ideology and its iconogra-

phy and their deepening understanding of what it means to be a woman in the United States in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, and class.

In focusing on reception, these essays on Christian devo- tional art underscore the theological, social, and ideological func-

tionalism of Christian imagery-the very qualities that have made its effect on viewers of utmost importance throughout history. Yet neither the individual contributors nor I would argue that audience issues should be uniformly privileged over other art historical con-

cerns, thereby resulting in the disappearance of the works, their

makers, and/or the cultures in which they were produced. Indeed, the essays in this issue accent to differing degrees the image, artist,

patron, and audience, resulting in a stimulating, nondoctrinaire series of case studies. It is hoped, therefore, that even readers not

particularly interested in religious art will be stimulated by these studies of highly complex viewing problems to think differently about topical issues affecting all of us in the art world.

Notes

1. For an overview of post-Tridentine tracts defending the use of religious art, see Pamela

M. Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seven-

teenth-Century Milan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 31-33, 100-102; also bibliography therein. Among Protestant leaders, John Calvin was particularly opposed to

sacred art. See C. M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Eras-

mus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 2. Reception theory is sufficiently well known by now that no synopsis is needed here. A

useful overview is provided by Terry Eagleton, "2. Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception

Theory," in Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1983), 53-90. See also Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Hans Robert Jauss, "Literary History as a

Challenge to Literary Theory," in Ralph Cohen, ed., New Directions in Literary History (Balti- more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 11-41. Of course, art historians were concerned

with reception well before the formulation of German reception aesthetics in the 1970s, as

John Shearman noted in the introduction to his Only Connect ... Art and the Spectator in the

Italian Renaissance, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3-9.

3. For example, see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder

in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Wolfgang Kemp, "Death

at Work: A Case Study on Constitutive Blanks in Nineteenth-Century Painting," Representa- tions, no. 10 (Spring 1985): 103-23.

4. See the abstracts in John R. Clarke and Man Carmen Ramirez, eds., Abstracts and Pro-

gram Statements: 83rd Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, Inc. (New York: Col-

lege Art Association, 1995), 138-41.

PAMELA M. JONES, associate professor at the University of

Massachusetts-Boston, wrote Federico Borromeo and the

Ambrosiana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Milan: UniversitM Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Vita e Pensiero

Series, 1997) and is working on the subject of genre and audience in Italian Baroque religious art.

SPRING 1998

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