2
THE VISIBLE WORD
It is often said that Protestantism has no place for images. In fact, Protestants have virtually always made use of images in one way or another. Yet the view persists that Protestantism is aniconic. This probably depends on several things. One may be the tendency among many Protestant groups to avoid imagery in worship settings, though rarely in the home, school, or everyday life. Another reason is likely the episodes of iconoclastic riots in the 1520s in Germany and Switzerland, and in the Netherlands and England a few decades later. Historians have often treated these ritualized forms of violence as convenient events to locate the birth of the Reformation, a decisive break with the Catholic past symbolized in a dramatic gesture of communal defiance. And a third reason for the myth of Protestant aniconism is surely the theology of reformers such as Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin, who insisted that images were incapable of teaching Christian truth, for which the Bible was the only reliable source. Zwingli taught that images could not serve in worship and must be removed from churches. Even images that were not being worshipped ought to be removed. In his Commentary on True and False Religion (1525), Zwingli argued that “since sure danger of a decrease of faith threatens wherever images stand in the churches, and imminent risk of their adoration and worship, they ought to be abolished in the churches and wherever risk of their worship threatens.”1 “Do you not see,” he asked his interlocutor in another treatise, “that the highest, purest worship is to follow the will of God? Images do not teach us this, or move us to do it; for they have never done anything, nor are they doing anything now to move us to godly works. Listen to what they move us: to a blind, lazy devotion.”2 True faith was free of images. Calvin (inaccurately) limned a nonvisual first five centuries of the Christian church as the basis for rejecting images in Christian worship: “If we attach any weight to the authority of the ancient Church, let us remember, that for five hundred years, during which religion was in a more prosperous condition, and a purer doctrine flourished, Christian churches were completely free from visible representations.”3 In fact, the recovery of an age of prepapal Christianity, free from the corruptions of superstition, clerical intrigue, idols, and relics—the professed ideal that some Protestants still imagine to be their aim—would not be a recovery of an aniconic church, but one populated by catacombs, shrines, pilgrimage churches, and sanctuaries replete with frescos, mosaics, and sculptured figures.4
It is certainly true that there were notable episodes of destruction and organized removal of images from formerly Catholic churches in cities that served as the hotbed for the earliest years of the Reformation, and they have been well documented and carefully studied by historians.5 The Protestant anxiety about images is clearly registered in the cover illustration to a widely circulating pamphlet that calls for the end of images in churches in 1522 (figure 8). The tract was published by a former colleague of Martin Luther at Wittenberg University, Andreas Bodenstein, called Karlstadt, who argued that images in churches were a violation of the first commandment. He insisted that his contemporaries loved images more than one another, showing them honors that betray affection. Images, in Karlstadt’s formulation, are “stuffed dummies” or fake human beings, and those who love them become as abominable as the idols they love.6 People treat them as living beings, even as God, whom Karlstadt heard asking image-adorers: “You light candles before them, which you should do for me, if you wish to burn a light at all. You bring waxen offerings to them in the shape of your diseased legs, arms, eyes, head, feet, hands, cows, calves, oxen, sheep, house, property, fields, meadows, and the like, as if such images would give you healthy legs, arms, eyes, head, etc. or would provide you with fields, meadows, houses, honor, goods, and possessions.”7 The rejection of images marked a fundamental shift for Protestants from what they considered a commerce of purchasing divine favor to an evangelical conception of free grace. In the passage above, Karlstadt alludes to the material economy that pilgrimage to shrines entailed in the offering of ex-voto effigies for the favor of divine healing. What he proposed in the removal of images was the termination of one sacred economy and the installation of another. Zwingli said the same in 1525.8 In 1520 Luther called on German nobility to support a broad plan of reforms that would enact his sharp critique of the avarice of pilgrimage churches, the sale of ecclesial office, the payment of annual dues to Rome, the sale of indulgences to support crusades against the Turks, payment for private masses, and a host of other financial arrangements.9 The alternative sacred economy consisted of the circulation of wealth in the form of sacred information: the good news of salvation by grace. This liberated people of their dependence on the intermediary device of images as a way of currying favor among the saints.
But the new sacred economy did not eliminate images. It repurposed them as forms of rhetoric, as visualized speech, as sacred information in order to serve several purposes that were important to Protestants: propaganda, pedagogy, advertisement, evangelism, and public discourse. In fact, Karlstadt’s essay did not advocate or urge destruction of imagery, only removal. Figure 8 envisions not what Karlstadt proposed, but rather what others had done and continued occasionally to incite and perform. Yet even if Karlstadt did not call for the demolition of images, the act of chopping up images of saints was a powerful symbolic expression of his own desire to break a persistent habit. He conceded at the end of his essay that he found it very difficult to put images out of his own heart:
I ought not fear any images just as I ought not honor any. But (heaven help me!), my heart has been trained since my youth to give honor and respect to images and such a dreadful fear has been instilled in me of which I would gladly rid myself, but cannot. Thus I am afraid to burn a single idol . . . . Though . . . I know that images are incapable of anything and that they lack life, blood, or spirit, fear holds me back and causes me to fear a painted devil, a shadow, and the slightest noise of a rustling leaf, and to flee that which I should seek out bravely.10
FIGURE 8
Cover of Andreas Bodenstein Karlstadt, Von der Abthung der Bilder, engraving, circa 1600. Courtesy of Snark / Art Resource, NY.
It is a telling confession because it suggests the value of symbolic violence as a kind of aversion therapy: in destroying or at least summarily removing images in a grand purgative act, Karlstadt may have believed that he would master his iconophobia by banishing the mechanism of desire that had organized his imagination for so long. Whatever the case, because images never actually vanished from Lutheran practice it seems compelling to conclude that the episodes of their removal and destruction, known as the Bildersturm (literally, “storm on images”), did not determine the Reformation as aniconic, but rather helped to inaugurate a new mission for images in a new economy of the sacred. Protestantism—and not just Lutheranism—by no means ended the visual culture of Catholicism; rather, it reappointed it. Protestants developed new uses for images that yielded productive visual legacies that remain in place today.
The Reformation was not a return to year zero, as many of its proponents have never tired of insisting. The ritualized violence of the Bilderstürmer, those who actually entered churches and smashed images, performed such an end for advocates by destroying the symbols of the old regime. With endings came new beginnings in the magic of ritual. Yet rather than the recovery of a pure, previsual early Christianity, the Reformation as a religious event is more accurately framed as the beginning of a shift from an older conception of Christendom to one that conceived of authority in different terms. Some historical background is necessary to frame the shift undertaken by Reformers.
Since the sixth and seventh centuries, the bishop of the see of Rome aspired to preeminence in Western or Latin Christianity, seeking to assert the symbolic capital of the Christian empire founded by Constantine in the fourth century. The West enjoyed less power after the empire’s center shifted officially to the imperial capital of Constantinople in the eastern domain of the Roman Empire. The bishop of Rome entered into greater dependence on princes and regional leaders in Western Europe and by the eighth century anointed Charles the Great as the Holy Roman emperor to champion the continental conception of the Western church, which became synonymous in the European mind with Christendom proper, as the Iberian peninsula gave way to the steady advance of Islam. As Fortress Europe—from Sicily to Sweden and from Portugal to Lithuania—Latin Christendom anchored itself to its geographical boundaries as they took shape, to create an enduring sense of place. Though the Holy Roman Empire never counted for much in the way of actual military might in a Europe of warring duchies, kingdoms, and ambitious popes, as an ideal it corresponded to an imagined expression of shared identity that played out politically in the dynamics of elective monarchy. And though the Crusades—late medieval Europe’s attempt to “recover” the Holy Land, vindicate the honor of Latin Christendom, and establish the primacy of the Roman pontiff—accomplished less to that end than the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, they served to bolster Europe’s abiding imagination of itself as opposed to the Muslim infidel, an idea that persists to this day.
Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, as well as Henry VIII, James VI, Elizabeth I, and others changed the older imagination of Christendom by augmenting the de facto sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire’s patchwork of duchies, principalities, and kingdoms. Most radical, in the long term, for political economy and religion in the modern era was the idea of the sovereignty of the nation-state. It took time for this idea to emerge. The Peace of Westphalia, ending long wars between Catholics and Protestants, occurred in 1648. Before that, the sovereignty of kings as protectors of true religion was the focal point of ongoing crisis and bloodshed.
The affirmation of the Protestant king was taken up in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, better known as The Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563, but issued in new editions for many years after that. The visual scheme that opens book 9 of the 1570 edition juxtaposes an illustration of the removal of images above with the enthroned monarch and proper image of Protestant worship below (figure 9). As one kind of imagery is eliminated, per Karlstadt’s suggestion, another is installed. The image portrays the ideal relation of monarch and pure religion, pictured beneath the expulsion of Catholics and the destruction of idols during the reign of Edward VI (1537–53), the teenage king whose short reign Protestantized the Church of England by purging the lingering Catholic framework of his father, Henry VIII.
The illustration appeared at the beginning of the ninth book in order to mark the turbulence of a very difficult period in English history, initiated by Henry VIII and extending to the reign of his daughter, Elizabeth I, who came to the throne in 1558. The image was intended to mark the end of the “popish” regime invested in the sacred economy of images, or “idols,” and the dawn of what John Foxe hailed “the mild and halcyon days” of the reign of Edward VI, who reconfigured the relationship of church and state.11 Located between Edward and Elizabeth, the few years of Mary’s tempestuous and bloody rule saw the brief return of Catholicism, but Elizabeth’s long tenure stabilized the political landscape by establishing an English Protestant church in a Religious Settlement (1558–59) that became the basis of the modern Church of England. Henry VIII had rejected the supremacy of the pope in matters of state and the king’s conduct, but had not altered much else. Edward pushed toward a Protestant establishment with the counsel of his principal advisor and tutor, Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury. Foxe compared Edward to Josiah, a biblical King of Judah.12 The parallels were enumerated by Foxe: like Edward, Josiah came to the throne as a boy, and reformed the temple in Jerusalem when the book of the law, thought to be Deuteronomy, was discovered there (2 Kings 23). Josiah ordered all items used in the worship of Baal and other deities be removed from the temple and destroyed, and “deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places” (2 Kings 23: 5). The sacred economy of polytheistic worship was expunged by ritual violence to make room for the new order, the return of the old covenant.
FIGURE 9
“Actes and thynges done in the reigne of kyng Edvard the 6,” in John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London: Printed by John Daye, 1570), book 9. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The comparison justified Protestant reforms, casting England as the latter-day Judah and Edward as divinely appointed for the special task of reforming church and throne: as the biblical king had purged the temple and destroyed pagan altars,
the like corruptions, dross, and deformities of popish idolatry (crept into the church of Christ of long time), this evangelical Josias king Edward, removed and purged out of the true temple of the Lord. Josias restored the true worship and service of God in Jerusalem, and destroyed the idolatrous priests! King Edward likewise, in England, abolishing idolatrous masses and false invocation, reduced again religion to a right sincerity . . . . Moreover, in king Josias’s days the holy Scripture and book of God’s Word was utterly neglected and cast aside, which he most graciously repaired and restored again. And did not king Edward the like, with the selfsame book of God’s blessed word, and with other wholesome books of Christian doctrine, which before were decayed and extinguished in his father’s days, by sharp laws and severe punishments, here in England?13
The illustration used by John Foxe (figure 9) presents Edward as the latter-day Josiah, purifier of the Church, champion of Scripture, and kingly reformer of laws to support religious reformation.14 We see the candelabra, vestments, paten, censors, and chalice being carried from the church entrance, a blazing fire consuming images, and “papists” boarding a ship to take them back to Rome. The engraving presents an English reformation patterned after Josiah’s. With the removal of the items associated with Catholic liturgy and mass, the purged temple is restored to its proper use as the place for preaching the word of God, which we see in the scene in the lower right.
Josiah had ordered the temple to be renovated, which resulted in the discovery of the Deuteronomic scroll and the reforms that followed. Likewise, the young, unbearded Edward seated on his throne receives a large codex labeled “Biblia” with one hand and holds an upright sword with the other. He balances in his person the emblems of church and state as “supreme head” of the Church of England and sovereign monarch of the realm. As restorer of the true Church, Edward is shown enthroned in a chamber that sits beside the sanctuary, Josiah’s repristinated temple, where someone, possibly Cranmer, preaches to an attentive, well-dressed audience in the foreground. Behind them are staged the symbols of the two sacraments that remained after the purge of Catholicism, which recognized seven sacraments. The two are baptism and communion, labeled in the print very noticeably as “The Common Table.” The nomination was meant to distinguish very sharply the Protestant sacrament of Holy Communion from the Catholic Mass. Cranmer had labored to abolish the Catholic concept of real presence, the idea that the bread and wine of the Eucharistic meal were really the body and blood of Jesus and that the ritual consecration of the elements repeated the sacrifice of Jesus and enacted their transubstantiation into his body and blood.
Foxe’s Acts and Monuments was an enormously successful publication, remaining a steady seller among Anglo-American Protestants for several centuries. The book passed through four editions in English during Foxe’s own lifetime (d. 1587), and dozens more thereafter. From the first English edition, issued in 1563, the Acts and Monuments was illustrated with half and full-page engravings.15 In sixteenth-century Germany the production of illustrated tracts, sermons, and broadsides promoting one issue of reform or another was even more robust. The setting for a great deal of Protestant imagery was illustrated print. This is because Protestants in England, Germany, and elsewhere were convinced of the power of information to shape public opinion. Images could enhance text in compelling ways, building on its emotional impact, sharpening its value as propaganda, adding humor or bite to satire, illustrating abstract ideas, or enriching textual descriptions of spectacles, regal scenes, or individuals. And, as we have seen in each of the illustrations discussed here, images offer another powerful psychological opportunity: one can be razed and replaced by another.
Further, these images, as I’ve noted, each capture the shift from one economy to another. According to the Protestants, the Catholic side negotiated quid pro quo with saints and God, offering pledges or thanks in the form of the devotional veneration of images, lighting candles, offering incense, purchasing indulgences, or pilgrimage. Protestants replaced this economy with an ambitious traffic in sacred information. It was no longer what you offered or gave up that secured divine favor, but what you knew that counted. One did not buy God’s attention, but learned to recognize one’s place on the social map of the new Christendom. The vital importance of print derived from its role in disseminating knowledge of the social terrain, allowing readers or hearers or viewers to locate themselves. The sacrament of Communion was no longer an ontological exchange between the communicant and God, but a social exchange among the community of believers. The host was not a concretization of divine mystery, not a chance to adore divine substance and implore it for favors. Protestants continued to debate what it meant, but many were coming to see it as no more than a ritual of commemoration that strengthened the community of those gathered around the table. Access to the common table meant membership in the church, which meant social visibility and recognition.16 But information was most essential for the salvation of the soul. Without it, individuals were uninformed of the law of God that condemned them and of the grace offered for their redemption. Preaching replaced the practices of confession, clerical office, indulgence, intercession, and penance as chief means of compensating the debt that transgression or sin accrued. Preaching the word meant hearing what God had to say. And in the Protestant sacred economy, only God dispensed goods in response to human need. Human beings were unable to purchase divine favor. Grace came at no price; it arrived only at God’s instigation. But knowing this was the key to availing oneself of the gift.
For Lutherans this idea was set forth very clearly in an altarpiece painted by Lukas Cranach the Elder, the predella, or base image, of which shows Luther preaching to a congregation in Wittenberg (figure 10). Preacher and people occupy either side of a barren space—at least the viewer registers that it should be barren, all the while seeing, at the center, an image that makes visible the sound of the preacher’s voice. We might call it a sonic emblem, a visual index of sound. This term signals an innovation, recognizing the way in which voice, text, and image join in Protestant sensory culture. The flattened, highly symmetrical character of the crucified figure in the center of the image recalls the tradition of emblem books, which gathered allegorical images or ideograms that represented abstract ideas. We could understand Cranach’s figure as an emblem in that lineage. But his use of perspective to delineate the church interior, a kind of resonance chamber for Luther’s voice, may have encouraged him to give the emblem more solidity: we see that the cross casts a shadow over the smooth flagstones. Yet we remain aware that the figure’s presence is not literal, but discursive. The scene shows us what is happening, which is a sermon. Luther is preaching “Christ crucified,” that is, he is announcing the gospel of salvation, achieved through the sacrificial work of Jesus on the cross. Luther’s left hand rests on the open Bible, while his other hand points to the figure of Jesus. Text, gesture, speech, image, and listeners operate together in a single loop of communication. The people see what they hear and Luther speaks what they see. He touches what he reads and points to what he says. This imbrication of the senses is captured in the frame of a single image. The image seems to work against itself in order to achieve a new level of signification. The emptiness of the church interior is striking because it concentrates our attention on the space between speaker and hearers. Arcing across this stone-lined vault of air is the sound of the preacher’s voice, whose airy reverberation animates the ruffled drapery afloat about Christ’s waist. The new economy of the sacred could not find a better representation: Luther speaks God’s word and in it brings his audience into direct contact with the deity’s gift of salvation. The gaze they fix on the crucified figure indicates they have left behind the intercessory mechanism of devotion to the (now absent) saints, with its economy of exchange, for the new economy of the divine gift. There is only the deity himself to make intercession possible. The preacher’s words reveal the very thing to which they refer, and the people hear the event of their salvation.17 We might say that the image affirms the iconicity of scripture and preaching as the media of revelation and salvation. The new icons are words, but to see them at work, images become the new acolytes.
FIGURE 10
Lukas Cranach the Elder, Luther Preaching, predella of Wittenberg Altar, 1547. Courtesy of Foto Marburg / Art Resource, NY.
As a panel in an altarpiece, Cranach’s image of Luther preaching the news of redemption is a fundamental rejection of the claim made by Karlstadt, Calvin, and Zwingli that images could teach nothing about religious truth. In this and many other works, many made for use within the sanctuaries of Lutheran churches, Cranach and other artists developed a Protestant pedagogy of visual teaching.18 Karlstadt had explicitly rejected the idea that images were the books of the illiterate, an idea famously proposed by Pope Gregory in an oft-cited letter of the sixth century. Ulrich Zwingli made the same point in 1525 and a decade later John Calvin followed him, as in many points, rejecting a long Catholic tradition that justified the use of images in the Church.19 Luther, by contrast, had defended the idea, noting the irony that the iconoclasts quoted from his German translation of the Bible, which carried many woodcut illustrations. He then went on to wish that such imagery might be painted on walls “for the sake of memory and better understanding,” even hoping that “the lords and the rich might let the entire Bible be painted on the inside and outside of their houses before everyone’s eyes.”20 Cranach and his son, also an artist, devoted their active studio to the steady production of altarpiece commissions and broadside prints that took a strongly didactic approach to presenting a Lutheran conception of key biblical teachings such as condemnation and redemption. If one notes the rapt contemplation of Luther’s audience in figure 10, it is clear that Cranach’s image is redirecting the transfixed gaze with which late medieval people adored the Host to the new object of the spoken word, whose concreteness was anchored to the event of the Crucifixion as the basis of salvation.
THE LOCATION OF IMAGES IN PROTESTANT LIFE
Although there are many Protestant groups for whom imagery in the sanctuary and as part of formal worship is rare if not unheard of, there are virtually no Protestants who have not made some use of images. We simply need to look in the right place to find them. The terrain of religious life is larger than the sanctuary of a church. While this is often the zone most highly charged and publicly scrutinized among Protestants, it is not necessarily the most important space. Home, tavern, municipal building, and schoolroom are often no less important for the practice and publication of the faith. For the practice of inculcating and socializing children, the home was arguably the most powerful site in Protestant life before the nineteenth century and the rise of public schools, because parents taught their children to pray, study scripture, and read and write. It is important to map the Protestant life-world in order to understand better what role visuality plays in it. I propose to do that in the remainder of this chapter. The process will be impressionistic, but the result will demonstrate that images pervaded Protestant life and offer rich ways of understanding a culture that is very fond of ignoring its visual culture.
We may find images and visual practices at work in several forms and places that collectively map out the Protestant life-world. First, I will use the term textuality to designate the various textual practices that deploy images among Protestants. These activities comprise virtually everything Protestants do as religious practice, such as teaching, preaching, proselytism, disputation, and devotional study. Textuality also relates directly to other uses of images among Protestants such as advertising and propaganda: all of these rely on texts, and the Bible is never far from any of them. Second, as much as many Protestant groups are bothered by the idea of images in the worship setting, in fact they often find a place there. Third, if some Protestants have confessed anxiety about images in their worship spaces, few have ever objected to portraiture honoring those who voiced such concerns. Portraits exist of Calvin, Zwingli, and Karlstadt as well as a host of English and North American Puritans. Fourth, where textuality concentrates as a category on the role of images in discourse, teaching and learning form the dialectic of education, which turns on the teacher and student’s engagement with one another in the medium of text and image. Images perform a powerful emotional function in education that deserves our attention.
Another indispensable domain of imagery in Protestantism is the domestic setting, where images assert themselves much more openly than in churches, assuming a fundamental role in moral formation, instruction, memorialization, decoration, and maintaining a mood or atmosphere of piety. Finally, Protestantism is often a highly proselytic religion, so when we look to the history of its missionary activities we find images applied to the problem of proselytism and, as a category of it, intercultural communication.
TEXTUALITY
Let us begin with textuality, or the discursive character of many Protestant activities such as preaching, proselytism, propaganda, disputation, and devotional study.21 Imagery has long served each of these since it fits so effectively into the texts that Protestants have widely deployed. Theologians and preachers since the sixteenth century have engaged in a passionate discursivity that organized reflection on human experience in terms of a framework of ideas extending from the purpose of history, the providential interpretation of events, the beauty of nature, the interrogation of one’s feelings and emotions, and reflection on one’s duties as child, spouse, parent, congregant, subject, and citizen. In every case, scripture was the principal resource for introspection and analysis, but Protestants have made assiduous use of devotional texts, biblical commentaries, catechisms, prayer books, published sermons, tracts, and such classic texts as Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. What is striking about Protestant discourse, though hardly unique to it, is the intensive intertextuality at work in weaving a host of texts into a single, continuous fabric of discourse. Scripture was learned by heart and recited endlessly beginning in childhood, and was quoted and cited in texts of many different devotional and theological genres. This indefatigable intertextuality bolstered a relentless discourse that kept the “Word of God” in constant circulation. The print medium did not tarnish or dilute scriptural truth, but was held to deliver it in purity and potency. Historian David Hall has aptly described how this operated for sixteenth and seventeenth-century Anglo-Americans: “Elizabethans perceived Scripture as untouched and uncorrupted by the medium of print. To read or hear the Bible was to come directly into contact with the Holy Spirit. Scripture had no history, its pages knew no taint of time. Its message was as new, its power as immediate, as when Christ had preached in Galilee.”22
Inasmuch as images served this sense of immediacy in print, they avoided the disapprobation of the same Protestants who raged against idolatry. Even if a period of Calvinist iconophobia in the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century constrained the flourishing of illustrated books in Britain, illustrated editions of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments remained popular and in the last decades of the seventeenth century the arch Puritan text, Pilgrim’s Progress, was illustrated and avidly consumed by conservative Protestant readers.23 The illustration of Edward VI’s reforms in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (see figure 9) championed the removal of images from churches and made a point of displaying their destruction, but that it could do so owed to the fact that its own image was ensconced within a polemical text studded with scripture citations and charged with the reformation of Christianity. Iconoclasm is almost never a repudiation of imagery per se, but rather a removal in order to make way for a new counterimage. Moreover, Protestants integrated image into text such that each might work in a variety of ways to secure the interpretation of the other. Sometimes images acquired a highly textual quality, as in the case of emblems.24 On other occasions, texts assume an imagistic quality, as in the use of diagrams to summarize doctrine or theological teaching, which were employed in a major work by Puritan theologian William Perkins in 1600, or in the instance of acrostic poems, where text is graphically displayed on the page to create an image, such as the Gospel’s account of the crucifixion of Jesus portrayed in the shape of crosses.25 Textuality was the context for images, anchoring them to words not only to constrain their capacity to signify, but also to strengthen the capacity of text to attract readers and to enhance the assumption that text itself is iconic, or transparent to its spiritual content.26
WORSHIP SETTING
The career of Lucas Cranach the Elder was fueled by the Reformation. He made altars for Lutheran congregations to the end of his life in 1547, and his son continued to make images thereafter. Painters in Northern Europe produced altar paintings over the next two hundred years, especially in Denmark and Sweden, where wealthy, state-sponsored churches in capitals and commercially important cities provided the funding and the prominent altars for doing so. It is quite true that altar paintings in Lutheran churches did not operate in the same way as their counterparts in Catholic worship settings. Prayer and liturgical action were not directed to the images of saints for the purpose of intercession. Instead, Protestant images in the sanctuary were more likely to consist of iconographical programs that made use of biblical figures to explicate central theological interpretations of scripture such as the fall of humankind, the Last Supper, the Ten Commandments, the prefiguration of Christ’s sacrifice in such Old Testament events as the sacrifice of Isaac or the brass serpent, the Nativity of Jesus, or the Resurrection of Jesus.27 In other words, the premium spaces within Protestant sanctuaries—the altar, but also and eventually more importantly, the pulpit—were devoted to visual proclamation of the definitive doctrines of Protestantism. Another space for programmatic images dedicated to teaching doctrine in Protestant churches well into the seventeenth century were epitaphs, erected in honor of a deceased community member.28 Funerary imagery, both inside the church and adorning grave markers outside of it, became an enduring form of commemorative pictorial oratory, admonishing and teaching the viewer as memento mori.
Whatever its exact location, Protestant sanctuary imagery typically showed what the preacher proclaimed, so the images generally provoked little or no resistance to being interpreted. They were there to reinforce the discourse and teaching of the clergy and the state-supported church. Cranach’s predella showing Luther in the pulpit (see figure 10) is a striking case in point. The image performs what Lutheran preachers did and it endorses the heart of Protestant worship—hearing the Word of God. Cranach’s picture is a direct assertion of the value of images in worship: they envision what the pastor says and the congregants hear.
PORTRAITURE
Altar paintings did not thrive in Protestant church art after the sixteenth century in most cases, in part because church design shifted over time to accommodate the greater importance accorded to sound—the preacher’s voice, the organist’s performance, the choir’s liturgical chant, the congregation’s hymn singing. But as I’ve said, images remained very much a part of the Protestant landscape. One genre of imagery that was important from the very beginning and never diminished in prevalence was portraiture. Portraits hang in libraries, seminaries, private homes, university halls, and in the narthex or nave of churches. But they circulate far more widely in books as author portraits and frontispiece, on pamphlet covers (as figure 8 did), as broadsides, and as folios pasted to walls and doors. Why have portraits been so popular among Protestants? The answer begins with an indication of who is portrayed. The leading reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, William Tyndale, John Knox, and important precursors such as Jan Hus and John Wycliffe) dominate the pictorial record, although there are many images of famous preachers and theologians, such as Philipp Melanchthon and Heinrich Bullinger, who carried on the work of the charismatic fountainheads.29
The most common use of portraits is to revere great men. We might call their purpose totemic since an honorific portrait of its key reformer could represent an entire branch of Protestantism. In effect, these images specify the intellectual and ecclesiastic genealogies whereby Protestants tended to distinguish themselves from one another. The totemic portrait operates as a prototype from which sects, church bodies, and denominations ultimately issued. As totems, they were not intercessory saints, nor were their images icons. A totem in this case presents the venerable ancestor who founded the clan’s lineage and whose image helps distinguish the group from other clans. And yet, totems can become something more. Because they are dear to followers of the reformers, these images are powerful objects to manipulate among opponents. When we see portraits of Luther marred by detractors, stained with paint or poked with a stylus, his features redrawn or caricatured, the insult to his person is also one to his tribe, to his theological descendants. To deface the totem is to dishonor the clan.30
Portraits also celebrated heroes of the faith for their spiritual virtues, their memorable character, and their decisive actions. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments limned many such portraits in literary form and inserted in successive editions a large number of engravings that portrayed the sufferings but also the nobility of Protestant martyrs (the edition of 1570 included 149 engravings).31 The demise of Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury and privy counselor to Edward VI, at the hand of Queen Mary is a fascinating example of Foxe’s use of a boldly visualist rhetoric. His text refers to the humiliated Cranmer under arrest, presented in St. Mary’s Church, Oxford, to hear a funeral sermon on the day of his execution by flames as a heretic. Foxe invokes the medieval practice of portraying Jesus as the Man of Sorrows, beaten and scourged before being taken to the cross for execution. “The lamentable case and sight of that man gave a sorrowful spectacle to all Christian eyes that beheld him,” wrote Foxe. “A man might have seen the living image of perfect sorrow in him expressed.”32 Yet Foxe records Cranmer’s resolution in this moment of high pathos not to recant before he was taken to burn. We read that he calmly prepared himself to die. Once again, the scene is vividly imagistic in Foxe’s prose. He limns a grave and moving portrait of the condemned man:
His feet were bare; likewise his head . . . . His beard was long and thick, covering his face with marvelous gravity. Such a countenance of gravity moved the hearts both of his friends and of his enemies . . . . And when the wood was kindled, and the fire began to burn near him, stretching out his arm, he put his right hand into the flame, which he held so steadfast and immovable (saving that once with the same hand he wiped his face), that all men might see his hand burned before his body was touched. His body did abide the burning with such steadfastness, that he seemed to move no more than the stake to which he was bound; his eyes were lifted up to heaven . . . and using often the words of Stephen, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” in the greatness of the flame, he gave up the ghost.33
Foxe literally references the death of Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian movement recorded in the Book of Acts (6:8–7:60), who, like Cranmer, was arrested, engaged in a long disputation with learned religious figures, tried before an antagonistic counsel of religious authorities, and condemned to death. Like Stephen, but also like Jesus on the cross, Cranmer died with a calm spirit and offered up his soul peacefully to God. But Foxe fixed on the pathos of Cranmer’s brave taunting of the flame in which he held his hand. The image is so compelling that it was a scene repeatedly selected for illustration (figure 11). We see the Spanish friar John in the foreground, who had vainly attempted to coerce Cranmer into rehearsing profession of faith in Rome and to bend him to the purpose of Queen Mary’s project of reversing the Reformation in England. Cranmer himself stands calmly among the thick piles of kindling as the crowd watches, transfixed and troubled.
FIGURE 11
“Death of Thomas Cranmer,” in John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London: Printed by John Daye, 1570), book 8. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Depictions like this were less likely to arouse the suspicion of even the most iconoclastic Protestants because they attended to historical fact presented as an action, and to an account that served the Protestant interest (indeed the book’s illustrations inspired intense resentment from an English Jesuit34). In fact, Evenden and Freeman point out that “Elizabethan authorities expressly ordered that [Foxe’s] book be displayed so that it could be consulted by the servants of the senior clergy,” and that the book was placed in numerous parish churches.35
Strictly speaking, of course, the image of Cranmer is not a portrait per se, but a historical scene. Even Calvin made a point of affirming the place of historical images as “of some use for instruction and admonition,” as long as they do not envision the invisible and are not worshipped, clarifying that “the only things . . . which ought to be painted or sculptured, are things which can be presented to the eye.” This excluded the majesty of God, “which is far beyond the reach of any eye.” Calvin distinguished two classes of visual representation, “the historical, which give a representation to events, and pictorial, which merely exhibit bodily shapes and figures.”36 The latter were those that had in his view been inappropriately exhibited in churches. Calvin concluded that neither form of image belongs in a church since “the moment images appear in churches, idolatry has as it were raised its banner.”37 But if the portrayal of human forms led easily to idolatry, events, by contrast, narrate time and consist of moments of great significance. Still, not all images in Foxe’s book are narrative. Ruth Samson Luborsky has used the term “icon-like” to characterize smaller images in the Book of Martyrs that focus closely on the burning bodies of individual martyrs.38 To use this term risks confusion when applied to an author who endorsed iconoclasm. But she is surely correct to note the difference between close-up depictions of individuals and large, narrative scenes. Foxe and his publisher, John Day, applied the devotional image of Catholic piety, made widely known in illustrated devotional books on the Passion of Christ, to a Protestant portrait-totem achieved by combining prose description of the person with visual narration of action. The point of passion images was not intercessional prayer, for which icons would have served the direct purpose, but rather empathic identification with the suffering of Jesus. The rhetorical structuring of the images invited a deeply felt response, a projection or absorption of the viewer’s imaginative faculties in order to be moved by the portrayal of suffering. They sought the same result as the narrative images in the book: the subjects of the smaller images, like the events in the larger ones, acted as models of virtue whose cause was just and whose work helped found the church. The difference was the emotional appeal of a close-up, which removes distance and detailed reading in favor of graphic impact.
Perhaps because of Calvin’s anxiety about the readiness of the pictorial figure to be abused in churches as idols, Foxe never employs a portrait in the fully conventional sense to portray any of the martyrs or heroes of the faith. What the book’s illustrations do display is the destruction of living icons by Catholics, the inverse of Protestant iconoclasm. Acts and Monuments is a Protestant celebration of the personal iconicity of the martyrs. The illustration program shows the deeds that made martyrs, whether close up or more panoramically. Foxe conjures close-up portraits in textual form, carefully describing the facial expressions and demeanor of Cranmer, as we’ve seen, but these are momentary snapshots in words rather than obdurate visual icons. His literary portraits supplement the images of historical events to hail the totemic authority of Protestant martyrs as the true icons of faith. Rather than invoke their intercession, the composite portraiture renders visible the personal actions of sacred exemplars, moving the viewer to horror, sorrow, and indignation.
This affective form of portraiture was useful for describing the tribulations of Protestant England’s martyrs, which served to confirm the authority of the Church of England. Foxe drew a parallel between early church martyrs and those of the latter-day English Reformation in order to convey the legitimacy of the Reformation project as a recovery of the apostolic age. As a contemporary analogue of Saint Stephen, a heroic martyr like Cranmer helped the Church of England argue the claim for its apostolicity. Catholics disputed this vigorously and would continue to do so for centuries. Presenting portraits of the venerable new martyrs in action, especially in the action of being destroyed, was Foxe’s idea for inaugurating the Reformation. It made visible another version of the ritualized violence of iconoclasm, in this instance one practiced by Rome, which was put to the service of forming a visual sensibility among Protestants.
EDUCATION
Protestants knew that the generation of emotion was an effective rhetorical device, and that images were good at eliciting feelings and associating them with texts and memories. Images therefore had a noteworthy contribution to make to education and moral formation. Protestant educators produced the first illustrated schoolbooks for children, such as the Orbis Sensualisum Pictus (The Visible World in Pictures) by the Moravian educator and author Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670), the first edition of which appeared in Latin in 1658. The New England Primer appeared in 1699 and served generations of North American Protestants as an explicitly Protestant illustrated text. In the early national period in the United States, several publishers applied themselves to producing illustrated devotional and educational materials for children. The American Tract Society (ATS), founded in 1825, was one of the most productive benevolent societies in America. Modeling themselves after the Religious Tract Society founded in London in 1799, the ATS widely reproduced British material. One of the most popular authors of evangelical tracts among British and American readers was the Anglican pastor Legh Richmond, whose several tracts were repeatedly put into circulation by the ATS. His work, often focusing on children, is among the best examples of popular Protestant writing that relied upon the emotional connections it cultivated with readers.
In 1797 the young Reverend Richmond (1772–1827), freshly graduated from Cambridge with a master’s degree in divinity, arrived in Brading, a village on the Isle of Wight, some twenty miles off the southern coast of England, where he took up duties as a pastor. Before long, he convened a class in religious instruction for local children, where he met Jane Squibb, a twelve-year-old girl. Just over a year later, Jane developed tuberculosis and died from the disease in 1799. A few years later, Richmond left Brading for a parish near London and in 1809 wrote what became one of the most widely read Protestant tracts of the nineteenth century, The Young Cottager, which was about little Jane. Richmond’s narrative portrays the girl as innocent, humble, and meek, calmly suffering the abuse of neighbors for her piety, and declining peacefully in Christian confidence of the afterlife. Remarkably sensitive, articulate, and devout, young Jane confirmed to the pastor her evangelical faith when he first went to see her and pleaded for his help in encouraging her family not to drink, swear, and quarrel.39 Richmond’s account urged sympathetic readers to imagine a poor girl who deserved their pity.
As Richmond related it, on summer evenings in Brading, children from around the village gathered at his home for religious instruction. In addition to catechisms, hymns, and scripture passages, the pastor was fond of using the material texts of the local world to exercise the children’s skill at recitation. Beside his yard was the church graveyard, which bore inscriptions more affecting than those written on pages. “I had not far to look,” he recalled, “for subjects of warning and exhortation suitable to my little flock of lambs that I was feeding.”40 As a way of sparking evangelical awakening in the children, Richmond resorted to the emotional technology of contemplating death, which had been made fashionable in pastoral verse by Thomas Gray’s “An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Richmond deployed the children to ponder for themselves how, in Gray’s verse, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” He wanted the children to find an image of themselves in what they saw: “I could point to the heaving sods that marked the different graves and separated them from each other and tell my pupils that, young as they were, none of them were too young to die; and that probably more than half of the bodies which were buried there were those of little children. I hence took occasion to speak of the nature and value of a soul, and to ask them where they expected their souls to go when they departed hence and were no more seen upon earth.”41 Richmond asked the children to examine the gravestones and commit to memory the words inscribed on them. Alexander Anderson, wood engraver and graphics producer for the American Tract Society, selected this scene for an illustration to adorn the Society’s first edition of Richmond’s tract (figure 12). We see two girls in the foreground, one of whom may be Jane, engaged in memorizing the epitaph inscribed on the elaborate tombstone, which, the narrative tells us, she duly recited for the clergyman. The motif of children at gravestones became a trope in illustrated evangelical literature. Images like this served as part of a moral technology to elicit feelings of dread and fear in the sobering reflection of one’s mortality. But fear and dread were not the only emotional sensations that evangelical visual piety generated. Sorrow, pity, sympathy, longing, and tenderness were also keyed to a range of images that appeared in devotional literature and instructional materials, in which learning and feeling were intimately intertwined, seeding memory with faith in the form of emotionally charged imagery.42
DOMESTIC SETTING
Historically, a great deal of instruction among Protestants has occurred in the home.43 Luther and other reformers stressed the importance of domestic religious life and it is arguable that the home exceeds the church sanctuary as, practically speaking, the most important religious space in Protestant life. Although he opposed the presence of religious images in churches, Zwingli came to allow depictions of Jesus in the home.44 Learning in the home has always been about more than memorizing scripture passages and reciting catechisms, though this performance of knowledge has been a foundation of transmitting literacy in Protestant faith from one generation to the next. Protestants widely have understood “belief” to consist of such propositional knowledge and assent. But that is not all that belief is. It is also the material, embodied practices of memory, of learning, of social formation, of family membership, and of the habitus of domestic life that shape a person’s awareness of self and household as a foundation of communal life beyond the home. Learning to believe is learning to feel, to manage the body, to present the self in various social theatres, to behave as part of the social body to which individuals belong—white, black, male, female, young, old, working class, professional. The home is a matrix in which people are first and most enduringly formed as members of a religious community.
FIGURE 12
Alexander Anderson, engraver, cover of Reverend Legh Richmond, The Young Cottager, no. 79 (American Tract Society, New York, circa 1826). Photo by author.
The organic, shaping character of domestic piety is immediately clear in a hand-tinted lithograph issued by Nathaniel Currier sometime between 1838 and 1856 (plate 3). A mother tenderly teaches her young child how to pray. The caption conveys the imperative tone of the instruction: “Pray ‘God Bless Papa and Mama.’” But the instruction is not left disembodied and verbal. The mother embraces the child and with each hand directs its arms inward so that the child’s hands may join in the gesture of prayer. She gazes steadily and affectionately into the child’s eyes, whose gaze returns hers in an intimate bodily discourse that frames prayer as a affective state. The image was rendered as an engraving for use in 1859 in Rev. Samuel Phillips’s advice book, The Christian Home, where the image was retitled “Maternal Influence” and located at the beginning of a chapter called “Home Influence.” According to Phillips, the Christian home exerted an influence “stronger than death.” It was “a law to our hearts, and binds us with a spell which neither time nor change can break.”45 Phillips attributed the spellbinding power of home influence to the character-molding effect of parenting: “The parents assimilate their children to themselves to such an extent that we can judge the former by the latter.” What’s more, he considered the effect of the mother to be paramount.46 The imaging or mimetic effect of maternal influence is shown in the illustration as a somatic effect: the mother’s arms encircle the child to configure prayer as a bodily deportment. The force cohering the home was what Phillips called “home-sympathy” and he meant by it the “primary power of the heart by which all the affections of one member are extended to all the other members.”47 It is “the law of oneness in the family, weaving together, like warp and woof, the existence of the members, and locking each heart into one great home-heart . . . . By it we are not only bound to our kindred, but to our friends, our nation, our race.”48 The home was therefore the springboard to the larger world, and the principal source of this binding power within the family was mother, wife, and sister. The enclosed, almost womb-like space that contains the maternal affection in Currier’s image and in the illustration in Phillips’s book presents the tender embrace of mother and child not as the denial of the larger world, but as the origin of its moral operation. Phillips warmly endorsed the Protestant cult of motherhood that emerged in antebellum America as the home became less and less the site of livelihood and more and more the private domain of family life and child-rearing, the domain of the Christian mother.49
PROSELYTISM AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION
Yet another prominent site in which images find a place in Protestant life is proselytism, the act of presenting the religion to potential converts with the intention to persuade them. Since at least the seventeenth century, Protestant evangelism has been both domestic and international, unfolding in everyday life at home and at the intercultural seam of missionary work. One of the most widely used visual manuals for missionary communication in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Johannes Gossner’s Das Herz des Menschen (The Heart of Man), first published in 1812 in Berlin, and thereafter in the United States (1822) and around the world in far-flung mission settings (figure 13). In fact, Gossner, said to be a convert to Lutheranism from Catholicism, repurposed a much older text, a Catholic emblem book first published in French and issued in German translation in Wurzburg in 1732, entitled Geistlicher Sittenspiegel (Spiritual Mirror of Morality), and reproduced the engravings.50 The French source emerged from a long tradition of Jesuit emblem books of the sort we examined in the previous chapter. One of the most reproduced illustrated texts in this tradition, Cor Jesu amanti sacrum, was produced by the Flemish illustrator Antoine Wierix around 1595. In about 1628, Alberto Ronco derived nearly all of his illustrations for his Italian text, Fortezza reale del curore humano (Royal Fortress of the Human Heart) from Wierix’s imagery; in Ronco’s work we find a plate (figure 14), which clearly resides in the genealogy of images leading to Gossner’s book.
FIGURE 13
Anonymous, The Image of the Inside of a Sinner who is contrite, and sin begins to flee, in Johannes Gossner, Das Herz des Menschen: Ein Tempel Gottes, oder die Werkstätte des Teufels (Harrisburg, PA: Theo. F. Scheffer, ca. 1870), 14. Photo by author.
Ronco’s booklet provided a dozen images and brief meditations as directions to his soul to contemplate images of the path of the boy Christ’s action on the soul, from awakening (which Wierix portrayed as the boy knocking on the closed door of the heart) to a meditation on the piercing of the child Jesus and the believer’s heart by the arrow of his love. In Ronco’s image here (figure 14) we see the young Christ sweeping out the heart, purging it of vices symbolized as vipers and small beasts, in order to make room for himself to dwell there. In the dense, layered metaphors of Baroque emblems, the petals of the heart droop from the indwelling evil, but will revive once Jesus is enthroned within. In the Gossner image, rather than the sweetness of the infant Jesus we see an armed angel and the radiant dove entering the heart to expel not only the vices, but Satan himself. Satan makes no appearance in the Catholic imagery by Wierix or its appropriation by Ronco. The visual program focuses on the sweetness of the loving Christ child, whereas the visual discourse in Gossner’s Lutheran imagery is of exorcism and sanctification. Where Ronco and Wierix treat divine testing of the soul’s dedication to God, Gossner traces backsliding, the return of Satan to the soul, and the psychomachia that culminates in the death of the godless man whose soul is awaited by fiery demons, in contrast to the scene of the pious man, whose infant soul is welcomed by God to heaven. The Baroque conceit of Ronco’s child Jesus as a young Eros (shown in the last plate holding a Valentine’s heart pierced by an arrow) offered nothing useful to the sober Protestant mapping of conversion and the course of piety toward death. Yet both authors sought to envision the imagined life of the interior, using images to understand the soul as a dynamic path to be charted. For Gossner, the human situation was best characterized as a moral theatre of good versus evil, played out within the interior of the soul. The face atop each heart in his booklet, he pointed out, “is at the same time a sign-board that displays the inner man, in which one may recognize whose spiritual child he is.” And then he instructed the reader to look at each image and “ponder inside of yourself to learn in which circumstance you are: whether Christ or Satan rules in you, whether you are of the kingdom of God or the Devil.”51
FIGURE 14
Third meditation, “Sweep the Heart,” in Alberto Ronco, Fortezza reale del cuore humano (Modena: Cassian, 1628), 28. Based on Antoine Wierix, Cor Jesu amanti sacrum, circa 1595. Photo by author.
The arch trope of interiority prevailed in the Protestant Gossner, though it owed a great deal to the Jesuit tradition. Yet there is something this-worldly and practical in Gossner’s visual trajectory, where relapse, final judgment, and the agency of evil framed the life of the soul. This quality was preserved when his booklet traveled to India, Africa, and East Asia with European missionaries. Wherever missionaries set to work, Gossner’s booklet was quickly translated into indigenous languages as an aid to evangelism. The images were altered in their details to accommodate local knowledge. The bestiary shifted to indigenous symbols of vices and virtues, and the image of Satan derived from the Greco-Roman Pan was modified in order to undertake the demonization of the local non-Christian religion.
Images serve as forms of communication by mapping one culture over another, often by dressing the proselytized people in the costume, gesture, and iconographic scenery of the proselytizing culture. The process is a negotiation of sorts, or better, an accommodation that intermingles elements of each culture. A painting of the nativity of Jesus by an unnamed Chinese artist was published in the Anglican mission’s organization, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in 1938, and portrays the event unmistakably in the traditional manner of European painting since the Renaissance (figure 15). Three magi present their gifts to the infant enthroned on his mother’s lap while Joseph stands quietly to the side and Mary is flanked on the other side by an angel. A shepherd stands reverently to the right and two camels and their attendants wait behind the central group. Mary is seated on the manger and straw is spread beneath her. This scene and set of characters is very familiar from Western devotional painting since the fifteenth century. But the Chinese artist has situated the event in a composition that draws not only from Renaissance art but also from Chinese screen painting. The scene floats on a flat ground and is starkly vertical, which the artist stresses by an elaborate, wafting cloud of incense that appears to rise from the censer that the angel at Mary’s side holds in the child’s honor. The meandering cloud of incense might have morphed into dragons in traditional Chinese painting, as occurs in paintings of the Nine Dragons, a famous thirteenth-century hand scroll from the Song Dynasty.52 The dragon was a traditional symbol of the Chinese emperor, the Son of Heaven. So the suggestion of the curving, dragon-like forms rising above the infant Jesus, incarnate Christian deity, also a “son of heaven,” may represent an appropriation of Chinese iconography to the Christian context of this picture. And yet the artist was restrained from showing a dragon too literally, since doing so would risk both confusing Jesus with the Emperor, and invoking the Western Christian lexicon of the dragon as feature of the Anti-Christ in Protestant imagery since the Reformation, in the apocalyptic scenario that had long dominated Protestant eschatology. Other features of the image, however, safely anchor the image to Chinese referents. The magi, for example, wear traditional Chinese robes and headgear to signal their status. The race of each of the figures is clearly Chinese, not European. And the landscape is also native to Chinese viewers of the image. The negotiation of European Christianity and Chinese culture yields an integration of artistic traditions, traditional symbols, racial identity, and biblical narrative.
FIGURE 15
Tsui Hung-I, The Nativity, from The Life of Christ by Chinese Artists (London: The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1938), 17. Photo by author.
FIGURE 16
Ernest Forster, Children’s Christmas Pageant at St. Paul’s Church, Nanjing, China, 1938, photograph. Courtesy of Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library.
We can see the way in which a painting like this reaches into the lives of a proselytized community in a photograph (figure 16) by Ernest Forster, an American Episcopal missionary, taken in December 1938 when he was visiting St. Paul’s Anglican Church, which was founded in 1913 and built in 1922–23, and was the first church in Nanjing, China. The children strike a familiar pose about the wooden manger in which the Christ child lays. The Three Wise Men form one side, while three shepherds form the other. A winged angel and a towering Joseph stand to either side of the seated Mary. The scene is a kind of tableau vivant created on a shallow proscenium stage before rows of seating in the church. The arrangement is similar to the contemporary painting, although the costuming is less grandiose. Nevertheless, the children and their audience were engaged in an embodied internalization of cultural motifs. These motifs—today called “memes”—are structures, often conveyed by visual media, that inform body deportment, dress, gesture, and expression in the process of embedding a new religion in a cultural milieu in which it remains novel and alien until it takes root, that is, until it finds an indigenous set of circumstances that look, sound, and taste Chinese (in this case). Europeans and North Americans have been apt to forget how deeply racialized and historicized Christianity is in their world because they have thoroughly indigenized it within the circumstances of race, gender, authority, class, and ethnicity that organize the history of European civilization. Missionaries encounter this in a visceral way when they are surrounded by a culture that is not their own and struggle to find points of access or connection where the process of communication can find purchase. Images mediate this process, though any evaluation of their role, success, or failure will necessarily depend on the position of those conducting the evaluation. The history of visual culture in intercultural contact is fraught with disagreements over the complexities and risks of translation. But whatever misgivings Protestants may have had about images since the Reformation, they have commonly made use of visual media in missionary work around the world.
What does this survey of Protestant visual imagery and visual practice suggest? First, as different as Protestants like to think they are from Catholics, the evidence shows they have made careful use of Catholic imagery again and again. Second, Protestants have used images principally far beyond the worship setting. So have Catholics, but as we shall see in the next chapter, in very different ways. It is also clear from the overview provided here that images operate for Protestants in tandem with texts, charged with the dissemination of information. Whereas Catholics, as noted in the last chapter, have intertwined seeing with uttered prayer, Protestants commonly embed images in texts. In the Protestant forge of vision, seeing images has also meant seeing words, or perhaps the better word is code. As coded devices, images convey messages. This has allowed images to perform in the currents of everyday Protestant life. We might say that images form a kind of currency in the double sense of the word: conveying news and acting as the medium for the traffic of such goods as information and social relations. Images work within what I will call the Protestant economy of the sacred, which needs to be placed within the larger history of rival economies in order to be properly understood. That is the task to which we now turn.