The 20th century’s greatest Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, was of the view that no human art should attempt to portray the person of Jesus Christ. Endeavours to do so constituted a ‘sorry story’, and he urged Christian artists, however talented, to ‘give up this unholy undertaking’. Barth stood at the end of a long line in Protestant, specifically Calvinist, thinking which held that art and religion, like oil and water, couldn’t and shouldn’t mix. Attempts to represent the divine, to capture anything of the ultimate majesty of God in merely human creativity, were at best pointless, at worst profoundly dangerous. The Protestant Reformation is widely credited with having ‘secularized’ art; if true, an impressive but ambiguous achievement. In some people’s opinions, this served to rob art of its transcendent power, its ability to say anything ultimately meaningful about the universe, reducing it to mere aestheticism. Others suppose that it liberated art from dogmatic shackles, enabling it to explore all facets of human experience more fully and creatively. Protestantism’s relationship with the arts, ‘culture’ in our modern sense, was by no means a straightforward one: the Reformation was never simply an anti-cultural force. Protestants understood the power of visual imagery. Paradoxically, Barth kept above his desk, and often meditated upon, a copy of one of the most emotive of 15th-century crucifixion scenes, the Isenheim altarpiece of Matthias Grünewald. And the Reformation’s appreciation for cultural media beyond painting and sculpture is constitutive of its identity and achievement. The other painting hanging in Barth’s study (apart from one of Calvin) was a portrait of Mozart.
Pre-Reformation religion was intensely sensual, engaging the full range of worshippers’ senses, but its visual aspects stand out. From great cathedrals to humble chapels, churches were filled with imagery: painted altarpieces, frescoed walls, elaborate statues of the Virgin and other saints. Great carvings of Christ upon the cross (in England called ‘roods’) dominated the sight-lines of churches from their position atop the roodscreen dividing the altar space from main congregational area. The classic defence of religious images was that they were didactic aids for the illiterate, ‘laymen’s books’. But the lovingly carved, painted, and gilded images of saints, which lay people paid for and then venerated with offerings and lighted candles, were more than just pictorial text. Images were prisms of sacral power, sites where the attentive presence of the saint was most likely to be focused and prayers most likely to be answered. Nor were images purely passive objects of perception: under the ‘intromission’ theory of vision prevalent in the late medieval and early modern periods, objects emitted ray-like descriptions of themselves for the eyes to receive and the faculties to reconstitute. Images acted upon the percipient, and were thus immensely potent.
Many images and paintings were no doubt aesthetically crude, but the century preceding Luther’s protest witnessed an unprecedented outpouring of exquisite artistic expression in Europe. Catholic religious images of immense beauty and affective power were produced by painters like van Eyck and van der Weyden in the Netherlands, Lochner and Grünewald in Germany, and outstanding talents too numerous to begin listing in quattrocento Italy. Such painters and their workshops undertook ‘secular’ commissions, portraits of aristocrats and wealthy burghers, but their greatest works were devotional ones, and the Church was the pre-eminent patron of artistic production. The Reformation of the 16th century repudiated this extraordinary inheritance, and destroyed much of it, not out of philistinism or lack of appreciation for the power of art, but out of a heightened sensitivity to it, and an intense fear of the dangers of idolatry. ‘Iconoclasm’ – the destruction of religious images for overtly ideological reasons – may be the Reformation’s most tangible bequest to the variegated cultural environments of modern Europe. Some areas – the Iberian peninsula, Italy – were relatively untouched; others experienced an artistic holocaust. Very little remains, for example, of the religious art of late medieval Scotland, and the tally for England is scarcely better: from around 9,000 medieval parish churches that possessed one, not a single undamaged rood remains today.
Attitudes varied among leading reformers to the risks and potential of religious imagery. A decisive moment for the cultural development of Lutheran Reform was Luther’s decision, on his return to Wittenberg in 1522, to halt the iconoclasm initiated by his headstrong colleague Karlstadt. Luther, perhaps because he himself was not particularly moved by the power of painting or sculpture, considered images ‘neither good nor bad’ – they were in themselves, in a theological category developed by Melanchthon, examples of ‘adiaphora’, indifferent things which the Church could retain or abandon without moral hazard. What mattered was how they were used: worshipping of images, or constructing them in the hope of acquiring merit in God’s eyes, was an abomination, but as means of instruction for the ‘weak’ they were acceptable. Thus precious Gothic art works survived in the churches of Lutheran Nuremberg, as more humble altarpieces and crucifixes have done in the parish churches of Lutheran Scandinavia. Lutheranism also generated its own religious artworks, through winning the allegiance of significant artists. Albrecht Dürer became Luther’s disciple too late in life to produce recognizably ‘Reformation’ art, but the movement acquired a prize cultural asset in Lucas Cranach the elder (1472–1553), already in situ in Witttenberg as court painter to Frederick the Wise. In addition to a series of iconic portraits of Luther himself, Cranach provided illustrations for Luther’s New Testament, as well as vivid sets of paired images to accompany the Passional Christi und Antichristi – a text contrasting the worldly and anti-Christian pope with the humble devotion of Christ to the poor. Cranach’s paintings and altarpieces for Lutheran churches were heavily didactic allegorizations of key salvation themes: the dialectic of Law and Gospel, the redemptive blood of Jesus flowing without any earthly mediator.
Lutheranism’s openness, within limits, to the religious utility of visual imagery was not shared by leaders of the Reformed tradition. Zwingli was a self-confessed connoisseur – ‘pretty pictures and statues as such give me much pleasure’ – but he was emphatic they had no place in churches or part to play in worship. Allowing them such a role was to usurp and misdirect honour due to God alone, and to insult God’s invisible majesty by putting trust in created things. The divergent paths followed by Luther and Zwingli reflected different readings of the scriptural signposts. The fundamental and normative basis of divine law was the Ten Commandments, revealed by God to Moses, and recorded in the Old Testament books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. These began by instructing people to ‘have no other Gods before me’ and went on to prohibit the making of ‘graven images’ and bowing down to or serving them. But was this one commandment or two? The texts supplied more than ten injunctions, and gave no explicit guidance on how they were to be grouped. Jewish tradition held that the prohibition on graven imagery was a separate second commandment, while St Augustine’s interpretation that it was simply a gloss on the first was authoritative for the medieval Catholic West. If that was so, then the ban logically applied to idols of false gods, not to all religious imagery. Luther stuck with Augustine, with the result that to this day Lutherans, along with Catholics, number the commandments differently from other Protestants, including Anglicans. (Orthodox Christianity had never adopted the Augustinian numbering, which is why the abundant religious imagery of Eastern churches solely comprises two-dimensional icons, i.e. not ‘graven’.) For Zwingli, as for Calvin, however, there was an explicit scriptural proscription against attempts to represent the divine. According to Calvin, ‘since God has no similarity to those shapes by means of which people attempt to represent him, then all attempts to depict him are an impudent affront … to his majesty and glory’. Images were by definition idols, props of false worship, and a contagion and pollution to be eliminated from any Christian commonwealth.
Ideally, this was a tidy and state-sanctioned process. In Zürich, workmen and officials went into all the churches at midsummer 1524, locked the doors, and spent nearly two weeks dismantling the accumulated material piety of generations of townsfolk. The churches became white-washed halls for the hearing of sermons. In Tudor England successive waves of iconoclasm were carried out in orderly fashion by parish churchwardens, responding, perhaps grudgingly, to government orders. But in other places iconoclasm was the radical and democratic face of Protestant activism, unofficial, and designed to force the pace of magisterial change. Popular iconoclasm could also take highly ritualized forms, becoming a specialized rite of violence designed to demonstrate the ‘powerlessness’ of the image and of the belief system it represented. (One of Luther’s objections was that he worried the destruction of images might itself take on the character of a ritual ‘good work’.) Iconoclasts in Basel shouted out ‘if you are God defend yourself, if you are human bleed!’, as they threw onto the fire the crucifix from the city’s Great Minster in 1529. Elsewhere images of saints were humiliated by being smeared with blood or filth, thrown into rivers or down latrines, or undergoing ‘capital punishment’ in staged mock executions. In Dundee in 1537, two men were wanted by the authorities for showing what they thought of the friars by ‘hanging of the image of St Francis’. The largest waves of popular iconoclasm accompanied Calvinist revolt against established Catholic authority at the turn of the 1560s. A fiery sermon by John Knox stirred zealots in the university and cathedral town of St Andrews to descend on the churches so that, in a chronicler’s words, ‘before the sun was down, there was never inch standing but bare walls’. French cities saw bouts of violent and destructive iconoclasm in 1559–62, a major factor in the polarization preceding religious civil war. And at the start of the Dutch Revolt, an ‘iconoclastic fury’ swept across the Netherlands, with over 400 churches sacked in 1566 in Flanders alone. The destruction of images was an uncompromising statement which widened existing divisions, and not just between Catholic and Protestant. Iconoclastic incidents during the Calvinist ‘Second Reformation’ in Germany provoked reactive riots by Lutheran mobs, while Protestant image-breaking in the Baltic region deeply antagonized the neighbouring Eastern Orthodox, a group with whom reformers might have hoped to make common cause. The status of ‘idols’ was a neuralgic point in the divisions among English Protestants in the 1630s, and the outbreak of Civil War was the signal for a renewed campaign to ‘purify’ parish churches.
It seems unlikely that either destroyers or defenders of images were much motivated by what we might consider aesthetic considerations – few in the period would have understood what John Keats was on about in proposing that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’. The truth, not the beauty, of religious art was precisely the point at issue. Ironically, it is likely that the largest-scale Christian iconoclasm of the mid-16th century was carried out not by Calvinists, but by Catholics, purging the newly acquired territories of Mexico and Peru of the symbols of pagan religion. The Franciscan archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, boasted in 1531 that he had presided over the destruction of 500 temples and 26,000 idols.
But the threat to old images in Europe may have prompted some to reflect on their artistic worth. Probably the most important rescue of an artwork in this period was the action of the town authorities of Ghent in spiriting away from iconoclasts in 1566 Van Eyck’s extraordinary altarpiece, ‘the adoration of the mystic lamb’. Whether the magistrates were motivated by civic pride, or by a sense of cultural value, art-lovers owe them a debt.
14. Franciscan friars put pagan ‘idols’ to the flames in 16th-century Mexico, a reminder that not all iconoclasts were Protestants
Protestantism’s rejection of the salvific value of religious imagery prompted the Catholic Reformation to reassert it, and to explore new ways for art to connect worshippers to the divine. The Council of Trent, in a decree on the veneration of saints and the role of images, confirmed that ‘great profit is derived from all sacred images’, which taught lay people about the benefits of Christ and the miracles of the saints. But it injected a strong note of restraint, insisting on decorousness, pictorial clarity, doctrinal relevance, and the avoidance of figure painting ‘with a beauty exciting to lust’. Painters rose to the challenge, representing core doctrines of the faith – transubstantiation, purgatory, the unique status of the Virgin – in cogent painterly form. The period of the Catholic Reformation also saw important changes in artistic manner and technique, the so-called Baroque style of intense emotionalism, employing light and shadow, gesture and movement, to invite the spectator into affective and spiritual identification with the agonies and ecstasies of the lives of Christ and the saints. Bernini’s sculpture of ‘The Ecstasy of St Teresa’ in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome (into which modern critics invariably read an implied eroticism), exemplifies the Baroque’s concern to accentuate the physicality of the human body as a site for the presence of the Holy Spirit. The austerity of reformed Catholicism was well represented in art, for example in the gaunt saints and friars painted by the Spaniards Jusepe Ribera and Francisco de Zurbarán. But increasingly, 17th-century Catholic artists turned to tender and hopeful scenes – the Nativity, the Annunciation, Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Assumption – rather than the tortured ‘man of sorrows’, whose frequent depiction in 15th-century art perhaps reflects the ‘salvation anxiety’ of late medieval society.
Catholic use of art had its militant, confessional side, an ‘up yours’ to the iconoclasts. Images of the Virgin decorated military standards, and as ‘Our Lady of Victory’ she was credited with causing the defeat of the heretics at White Mountain in 1620, and of the Muslims at the crucial naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. Heresy, either a personification, or in the recognizable likeness of Luther or Calvin, was regularly trampled underfoot in triumphant Catholic allegories. Iconoclasm itself could set the terms of new devotional relationships with images; there were many tales, particularly in the Spanish Netherlands, of supposedly miraculous statues resisting the attempts of heretics to destroy them. When Francis Drake’s sailors desecrated an image of the Virgin Mary during the great raid on Cadiz in 1596, the exiled English priests at Valladolid requested permission as an act of reparation to venerate the statue. The ‘Vulnerata’ was installed with solemnity in their chapel and became (and remains) the focus of prayers for the conversion of England. In territories undergoing ‘re-Catholicization’, images were tokens of victory and tools of proselytization. Barren churches were re-equipped with statues, altarpieces, and stained-glass windows, paid for as an act of devotion by those eager to prove their Catholic credentials. Further afield, religious art was central to campaigns of conversion in the New World and Asia, areas where the old adage about the didactic role of images in imparting the truths of the faith really applied. The Jesuits in particular had confidence in the ability of art to cross cultural boundaries, though various missionized societies did not merely absorb European Christian models but adapted them to reflect indigenous traditions and circumstances. In Mexico, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in which a distinctly Indian Mary supplanted an original Spanish prototype, became the focus of a thriving cult, and, eventually, a symbol of national identity.
15. The resplendent 16th-century interior of the church of the Gesú in Rome suggests the Catholic Reformation’s confidence in the power of the visual arts to glorify God
Only an extreme Protestant fringe regarded the second commandment as a blanket ban on all plastic and visual art; English Quakers were unusual in refusing point-blank to have pictures on their walls. The restrictions on religious imagery in Protestant societies did not shut off artistic production, but re-channelled it in other directions. The career of Hans Holbein the Younger (1498–1543) illustrates the theme. When the work for a skilled painter of altarpieces dried up in Basel, Holbein came to England, where his paintings of Tudor courtiers and his iconic full-length portrait of Henry VIII established new standards of realism and characterization. England’s native artistic tradition was paltry compared with that of the Netherlands, where the triumph of Calvinism compelled artists to seek secular patrons and new subjects. Alongside the established field of portraiture, Dutch painters pioneered the art of landscape painting, as well as meticulously observed ‘still lifes’, and the truthful scenes of everyday life known as genre painting. Artists could not produce paintings for churches, but there was a lively trade in pictures of churches, cool and austere architectural studies of ecclesiastical interiors. Religious subject matter was not banished from 17th-century Dutch art, but had to take the form of ‘history painting’, scenes from the Old Testament which forestalled any temptation to devotional use by focusing on the narration of events with ‘genuine’ biblical settings and use of costume. Rembrandt van Ryn (1606–69) was the undisputed master of these, giving the lie to any suggestion there is no such thing as Calvinist art. Nonetheless, there is no question that Protestantism accelerated a separation of art from religion, removing it from an overt role in worship and desacralizing much of its subject matter. The notion of the autonomy of art – a separate sphere of the aesthetic, serving chiefly to inspire admiration and delight – was no concern of the Protestant reformers. But their conviction that artistic representation could in no way express the essence of the divine, or serve as a vehicle for grace, pointed in this direction.
16. Rembrandt’s painting of Belshazar’s Feast (c. 1636–8) represents a departure in religious painting: biblical scenes as history rather than sacred icons
Did art benefit from the development? Perhaps. New vistas opened for the eye, but at the price of accepting that there is no ultimate truth in art. It is by no means evident that Rembrandt was a greater and more original painter than, say, Caravaggio.
‘Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise.’ Martin Luther was a lover of music, a skilled lutenist, and he saw in song a tool for the breaking down of barriers between clergy and laity and the direct involvement of congregations in worship. Pre-Reformation musical culture was vigorous and varied. There were thriving popular customs of vernacular carol-singing, and, within churches, a rich diet of Latin polyphony (multi-voiced singing in overlapping parts), which for centuries had been edging out the older tradition of monophonic plainsong. Liturgical performance, however, was restricted to clergy and professional or semi-professional choirs. In this context, Luther pioneered a new musical form: the chorale (by permissible anachronism we can call these ‘hymns’). Chorales were original verse compositions, set to tunes resembling popular secular songs, and designed to be sung by the entire congregation during services. Luther’s Geistliche Gesangbuchlein (‘little book of spiritual song’), compiled with Johann Walther in 1524, was the first Protestant ‘hymn book’, a collection of music, in parts, for congregational singing. A later composition of Luther’s, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (‘A mighty fortress is our God’), was to be a Protestant favourite for centuries to come. By the end of the 16th century, around 4,000 Lutheran hymns had been published. The Jesuit confessor to Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, Adam Contzen, wrote exasperatedly in 1620 that ‘the hymns of Luther have killed more souls than his writings or declamations’. Hymns were eventually to become the common currency of all Christian denominations (Ein feste Burg is today even found in Catholic hymnals), but they were a distinctly Lutheran contribution to Christian culture, later exported to other parts of the Protestant world, such as 18th-century England, where aficionados such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley perfected the art.
Luther’s approach to religious music was permissive. He allowed Latin texts, and admired polyphony. In this respect, he was more cultured than the humanist Erasmus, who had no time for ‘thunderous noise and ridiculous confusion of voices’, and pedantically thought music should be no more than a vehicle for the clear reception of scriptural text. Subsequent Lutheran music took new and adventurous paths. The addition of solo and instrumental passages to the chorale form contributed to the development of the Oratorio. In the 17th century, the Lutheran composers Heinrich Schütz and Dietrich Buxtehude experimented with a variety of virtuoso forms, including large-scale choral settings of scriptural texts. There is a direct line from Luther’s first experiments with chorale to the corpus of their immediate successor, the greatest creative genius of all time, J. S. Bach.
Zwingli can claim no such artistic progeny. Although like Luther a talented musician, he placed music in much the same category as painting: a seductive distraction from unadulterated worship of God. Organs were thrown out of the Zürich churches, and all forms of singing and chant were removed from services. Calvin too rejected organs and instruments, but he and his followers were more responsive to the fact that scripture itself contained injunctions to praise the Lord in song, and provided texts for the purpose: the Psalms of David. The setting of metricized psalms to music became a cultural speciality of the Reformed churches, and their performance a crucial mark of religious identity. There were strict rules: the comprehensibility of the text was paramount, so there was to be no polyphony. Ideally, there should be only one note per syllable (think, if you know it, of the familiar setting of the ‘Old Hundredth’: All-people-that-on-earth-do-dwell). The result threatened to be dreary, but as habitués of football terraces know, massed unison singing of simple melodies and familiar words can have an inspiring and uplifting effect. The ‘Genevan Psalter’ compiled under Calvin’s and Beza’s supervision went through numerous editions and tens of thousands of copies. A key contributor was a French refugee composer, Clement Marot (1497–1544), who had already begun metrical psalm settings in French. Marot’s psalms became the battle songs of the Huguenot movement. The fact that psalm texts often express a sense of embattled certitude, and a desire for just retribution against the ungodly, made them a suitable accompaniment to militant resistance on the battlefield. Psalm 68 – ‘Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered’ – was a favourite of Huguenot armies, as it was later to be of the English parliamentary general Oliver Cromwell. The psalms were also sung congregationally in Reformed worship, often ‘lined out’ by a precentor, who would suggest the tune and pitch of each line, for the congregation to roar back in response: a practice that can still be heard, in ethereal Gaelic, in the Western Isles of Scotland. In 16th-century England, too, psalm-singing was adopted with alacrity by Protestant congregations, the metrical versions of Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins being the most frequently published text of the early modern period. That religious conservative and cultural snob Elizabeth I was not, however, a fan, and was reported to have disdained them as ‘Geneva jigs’.
Trent’s prescriptions for liturgical music resembled its directions about visual art. Church music was to avoid any ‘lascivious or impure’ associations, and melodies of secular songs were no longer to be used as the basis for liturgical compositions (so-called ‘parody masses’). The words should be clear and comprehensible. Yet, paradoxically, the constraints seem to have liberated polyphonic composers of the later 16th century – Lassus, Palestrina, Byrd, Vittoria – to produce some of the most beautiful masses and motets ever written. Sacred music expressed the triumphant and confident face of the Catholic Reformation, and also served as a soundtrack to the aspirations of Catholic secular rulers. St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, for example, became an auditorium for the sonic glorification of the republic, where the polychoral (multiple choirs) compositions of Giovanni Gabrieli and Claudio Monteverdi made the most of an extraordinary acoustic. As with the visual image, music played its part in bringing Catholicism to a world stage, and rooting it in home-grown cultures. In both North and South America, hymns were written in native languages, drawing on local melodic traditions. Indigenous singers and instrumentalists were recruited into polyphonic and polychoral performances in Goa and the Philippines, and into the 18th century the New World gave birth to a multitude of locally flavoured baroque compositions, the full scale of which intrepid musicologists are only now uncovering in libraries and diocesan archives across Latin America.
The Reformation was thus itself a polyphonic performance, spawning a variety of musical forms which helped give distinct cultural shape to the emergence and consolidation of rival confessions. There were a few surprising codas. The English Reformation somehow forgot to dismantle the elaborate clerical cohorts staffing the cathedral churches. These continued to stage elaborate sung versions of the various Protestant services, and in due course laid the foundations for a venerable tradition of ‘Anglican’ choral music. Across the Protestant world, and to a more limited extent the Catholic one, religious music shaped popular culture and was shaped by it. People internalized religious messages as they learned the tunes that carried them, and music was a key expression of social solidarity and communal devotional sentiment. A sad by-product of the decline of church-going in modern Britain is that relatively few people now sing on a regular basis.
Any proper assessment of the impact of the Reformation on the development of European literature would require a library of books in itself. There are some ‘canonical’ works on which the immediate imprint of Reformation theology is deep and obvious: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, or Milton’s Paradise Lost. Yet George Orwell’s assertion that ‘the novel is practically a Protestant form of art … the product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual’ is difficult to endorse historically, partly because the Reformation was not noticeably in favour of free minds or autonomous individuals, and partly because some of the best early examples of what we now think of as novels – Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) or Hans von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (1668) – were the work of Catholic authors. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the ubiquity of Protestant vernacular bible translations supplied a major spur to the spread of literacy, and thus to the eventual development of a reading public. Though the picture is mixed, literacy rates in Catholic states generally lagged behind those in Protestant ones into modern times.
One literary form – the theatre – did not require literacy for participation or appreciation. Later medieval Europe had a sturdy tradition of religious drama: morality plays, with symbolic characters representing vices and virtues; and mystery plays, staging events from the Old Testament and from the life and passion of Christ. Play cycles were deeply entwined with public life and civic identity in the towns of 15th-century France, Germany, and England. It is thus unsurprising that early urban reformers used the genre to spread the Protestant message. The Bernese artist Niklaus Manuel wrote several satirical and anticlerical plays, as did the English evangelical John Bale, adapting the morality format to produce pieces sporting Catholic characters called ‘Sedition’ and ‘Dissimulation’. In Nuremberg, the reformer Hans Sachs (one of Wagner’s Meistersinger) penned over 200 Protestant plays. In the second half of the 16th century, particularly in England, Protestantism suffered something of a failure of nerve about the theatre, fearing its potential for disorder and depravity. Puritans worried there might be something intrinsically idolatrous about the very act of simulating reality. The disapproval of moralists could not, however, prevent in Elizabethan London a flowering of commercial playhouses, serviced by professional actor-playwrights. As with painting, Protestant unease about the co-mingling of the sacred and the profane freed an art form from the primary function of expressing religious truth and allowed it to mature. This is not, however, to claim that the concerns of the London theatre were ‘secular’ or unconnected to the cultural formation of a Protestant society. Strongly anti-Catholic themes resonate through works like Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, or Middleton’s A Game at Chess. Religious themes permeate the dramatic works of Shakespeare, though deciding whether Shakespeare’s world-view was that of a Protestant, a Catholic, or even an atheist, has become an industry in itself.
The Reformation was, for good or ill, a critical agent of artistic change, a profound determinant of the imaginative possibilities open to the peoples of early modern Europe, and the primary explanation for why the cultural trajectories of modern European countries have developed in such different ways. The extent to which Protestantism represented a paradigmatic shift from the visual to the aural, from the image to the received and spoken Word, can no doubt be exaggerated. But unable to agree on the relationship between methods of representation and the presence of the divine, Catholics and Protestants were left to perceive reality in radically different ways.