| Religion Matters: Art, Piety, Destruction and the Politics of Display
Presentation Abstracts
Salvaging Saints: Bavarian Rescue and Display of Relics from Protestant Lands
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, University of Texas at Austin
As the Protestant Reformation swept across northern Germany , the relics of many saints were destroyed. Others were sold to Catholic buyers. Cardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz , was able to acquire a vast treasury of relics during the 1520s and 1530s; however, politic upheavals forced even this powerful cleric into dispersing his collection and melting down some of his finest reliquaries. The buying and selling of relics would continue well into the seventeenth century.
Wilhelm V (r. 1579-97) and Maximilian I (r. 1597-1651), dukes of Bavaria , sought relics for the Jesuit church of St. Michael ’s and the Frauenkirche, the main parish church, in Munich . Wilhelm was particularly active in acquiring relics for the new Jesuit church where they were displayed embedded yet always visible in the walls of his private oratory and, more publicly, in the numerous newly commissioned busts and reliquaries that adorned the altars. Two case studies demonstrate this pattern: the relics of St. Benno in the Frauenkirche and those of Cosmas and Damian, the patron saints of physicians, in St. Michael’s. Wilhelm purchased the remains of St. Benno from the cathedral of Meissen in Saxony . Besides commissioning a new reliquary bust for Benno, Wilhelm erected a great triumphal arch, the so-called Bennobogen, in the choir of the Frauenkirche and a new high altarpiece. The arch dominated the sanctuary until it was dismantled in the nineteenth century. The reliquary and the altarpiece, now scattered in pieces around the church, survive. In 1648, Maximilian, now elector, and one of his brothers bought at great cost the skulls of Sts. Cosmas and Damian from Bremen cathedral. These remains and a c. 1400 painted reliquary were given to the Jesuit church amid great ceremony.
Iconoclasm and History: Survival of the Fairford Windows
Sarah Brown, English Heritage, London
The Gloucestershire parish church of St. Mary , Fairford, was reconstructed and provided with new windows between ca. 1500 and 1515. Its windows, made by a group of extraordinarily talented designers and glass-painters, celebrate the early life of the Virgin Mary, the Infancy and Passion of Christ and as series of themes that together provide a summation of sacred history on a grand scale. Barely twenty five years later the Reformation of Henry VIII’s reign swept away the certainties of England ’s Catholic past and heralded a period of iconoclasm and the decline of the traditional glaziers’ craft. In the reign of Edward VI, stained glass windows were singled out in the Royal Injunctions against superstitious images for the first time, and Bishop John Hooper of Gloucester was a committed Protestant Reformer. And yet Fairford has preserved its twenty-eight magnificent windows, attracting the admiration of two early 17th-century poets and the attention of the celebrated artist Sir Anthony van Dyke, who is said to have told King Charles I that the windows were ‘so exquisitely done that they cannot be exceeded by the best pencil’. Their careless restoration in the 19th century caused a national scandal. This contribution will consider the circumstances in which this extraordinary glazing scheme, conceived in the Catholic devotional world of the late Middle Ages, could be appropriated by a Post-Reformation Protestant world, becoming one of the nation’s most celebrated artistic treasures.
Performing Recusancy: The Towneleys, The Towneley Plays, and the Preservation of Medieval English Drama
Gail McMurray Gibson, Davidson College For historians of medieval theater, English medieval drama is a kind of lost corpus, a once-teeming theater that we know to have existed in complicated and shifting relationship to the facts and customs of local history as well as to Reformation politics. Only a few manuscripts of English religious dramatic texts managed to survive, more or less intact, the ravages of iconoclasm and time. This paper focuses on the motives for preservation of pre-Reformation religious drama in English recusant households like Towneley Hall, near Burnley, Lancashire, and argues that the famous Towneley Plays manuscript (a.k.a. Wakefield Plays, now Huntingdon Library MS HM 1) was less an antiquarian curiosity compiled and saved by bookish collectors than, much like the Towneley family's medieval liturgical vestments from Whalley Abbey that show signs of being used, repaired, and re-lined at least into the 17 th century, continually re-imagined performances in which the lost body of the Catholic faithful was re-membered and invoked.
Whatever the original provenance of the plays in the Towneley manuscript (the best evidence suggests that they came not only from Wakefield and its environs where the Towneley family had lands and Nowel and Pilkington cousins, but that the manuscript also contains versions of plays from York as well as plays originally performed in outlying Lancashire parishes, probably those with a connection of some kind with Whalley Abbey), their performance history surely did not stop with the Reformation. This is especially true if we think of performance including devotional reading or active meditation by a Catholic family whose illicit religion was increasingly centered on a household chapel and on domestic religious practice. Recusancy itself became a kind of performance in which family history and presence was linked with the power of both biblical and English Catholic past.
A. W. N. Pugin and the Reanimation of an English Catholicism.
Roderick O’Donnell, English Heritage, London
When the Gothic Revival champion A. W. N. Pugin (1812-1852) became a Catholic in 1835 he was quite unfamiliar with English Roman Catholics or their clergy, as he “indulged in a sort of Catholic Utopia.” In his churches, it was to be as if Reformation iconoclasm had never happened, and the Church was still the arbiter of the arts. Beginning in Birmingham he was able to furnish St. Mary’s College, Oscott (1838) with salvaged works of church art, and later at St. Chad’s Cathedral (1839-41) he was able to re-house the relics of St. Chad, the seventh-century bishop founder of the diocese, which local Catholics had tended since the Reformation. For Southwark Cathedral Pugin designed a reliquary for relics of St. Thomas Becket. The influential Jesuit order, which embodied the traditions of post-Reformation English Catholicism and its martyrs, however, gave him no commissions. Here Pugin was to be strongly revisionist, lampooning the strategies of Catholic survival, such as the Recusant families and their country-house chapels, and even more the fittings and liturgy of the town chapels which he described as ‘inferior to many Wesleyan meeting-houses’. Instead he hoped to re-animate the Catholic Middle Ages by reviving its piety and patronage through the architecture and liturgical ritualism, which was to be his achievement with his Midlands-based collaborators in the decorative arts. Following the writer’s The Pugins and the Catholic Midlands, (Gracewing, Leominster , 2002) and republication of many of Pugin’s key texts, this paper will look at examples of his liturgical arts in their architectural settings, and lament the iconoclasm mindlessly unleashed on much of them since the Second Vatican Council.
Inquisitorial Practices Past and Present: Artistic Censorship and the Virgin Mary
Charlene Villaseñor Black, University of California , Los Angeles
Several recent exhibitions have provoked intense controversy over artistic renderings of the Virgin Mary, and even calls for censorship. In 2003 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, outraged protesters attempted to shut down an exhibition of contemporary Chicana/o art at the Museum of International Folk Art because it featured a photograph by queer Chicana artist Alma López of a woman posing in a bikini of roses as the Virgin of Guadalupe. Similar anger was unleashed at the 2001 opening of the exhibition The Road to Aztlán at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. There, Catholic protesters assembled in front of the museum to decry an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe cast as the Pre-Columbian goddess Coatlicue, a work by pioneering Chicana Feminist artist Yolanda López in the 1970s. While both protests seem symptomatic of the so-called “Culture Wars” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such disputes over the depiction of the Virgin Mary have a long history in the Spanish-speaking world. My paper investigates this topic, by examining these recent controversies in dialogue with historical precedents in Spain and Mexico dating to the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries. Indeed, these recent protests highlight two major issues that have traditionally provoked dispute over and censorship of Mary’s image in the Hispanic world: 1) the representation of her body, and 2) the question of indigenous influences in her cult. My investigation demonstrates the significance of these issues as I focus on two particular image types produced in Spain and Mexico, both of which came under intense Inquisition scrutiny in the early modern period: representations of the lactating Virgin and depictions of Mary’s nativity, the latter featuring her mother, St. Anne. By comparing Inquisition guidelines for religious imagery to actual art works produced in Spain and Mexico I document artistic responses to censorship’s chilling effects. Simultaneously, my research reveals popular responses to and indigenous influences in such important devotional cults.
Dueling Designs: Catholics, Presbyterians, and the Visual Culture of the Kuba Kingdom ( Democratic Republic of the Congo )
Elisabeth L. Cameron, University of California, Santa Cruz
The Kuba Kingdom, located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has ancient traditions of spectacular visual culture centered on a complex and dense patterning on works. Stories of this kingdom drew attention of the art world, colonizers, and mission organizations. Realizing that to control the area would take the support of the king, both American Protestant and Catholics sought to convert him. Although the Presbyterians arrived first, the Kuba king formally converted to Catholicism in the 1930s. By comparing the Catholic chapel built beside the king’s palace with the nearby Presbyterian church, this paper will explore the movement of Kuba art forms to royal chapel and commoner church. Following the Kuba tradition, Catholics and Protestants have both claimed superiority through creating a visually dense church environment. The Order of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart sent artists-priests to the royal court who, in the 1950s and with royal sponsorship, founded an art school that taught Kuba artists to make Kuba art. The art school became instrumental in the creation and decoration of the royal chapel. Presbyterians, without royal sponsorship, drew from the visual vocabulary of the commoners.
The Challenge of Jewish Context within the Object-Oriented Museum
Tom L. Freudenheim, former Deputy Director, Jewish Museum, Berlin The dilemma facing most museums displaying art with religious or sectarian origins is nowhere more evident than in Jewish museums. The conventional art museum generally supplies a more or less easily-readable art historical context, so that even medieval devotional Christian images can be understood in relation to a visual tradition that goes back at least as far as Greek antiquity. And those many fields which fall outside the western tradition (e.g., Asian art, tribal art) self-evidently speak a different language and create a different context – even as the art museum, a western construct, works hard at supplying a single uniform matrix with which everything can be explained. Jewish museums, with their collections of ceremonial art and related artifacts, most of it post-Renaissance, are held hostage to a different series of challenges. Because they are 'Jewish museums' they feel themselves obliged to explain the religion and the traditions reflected in the artifacts they display. In contrast, we don't expect to “learn about' Christianity in art museums. Jewish objects do not generally derive from an indigenous Jewish visual tradition, which suggests an even greater obligation to confront them as works of art, or in any case in relation to related decorative arts objects. Because Judaism does not essentially involve object-based observances (i.e., mitzvot, or commandments), the museum, as an object-oriented institution, tends to respond by distorting or misrepresenting both the religious practices and the people who observe them. I propose to discuss how this has come about, and suggest alternative strategies for using Jewish museum displays as a means of expressing religious concepts and art historically related ideas.
A Delicate Balance: Modernism and Religion in Museums Today
Ena Heller, Museum of Biblical Art , New York Both places of worship and museums share art objects with an audience, and both elevate them to a higher status. Ritual as well as exhibition transforms objects into “extraordinary” symbols – be it of the power of faith or that of human artistic achievement. If the object is, for instance, a medieval altarpiece, the difference is in the way we view it: as an integral part of the liturgy (the focal point of a particular devotion, meant to inspire and teach), or as an object of aesthetic appreciation (accompanied by information referring to style, iconography, the artist’s career, etc.). If, however, the object is a modern work that interprets religious messages and symbols, we are in murkier waters as perspectives and definitions become more ambiguous. Is it religious art, or art about religion? In either case, how should we interpret it within (or without) the canon of modernism, and most importantly, how should we present it to our publics without offending, creating controversy, or appearing to promote the religion in question? From a research standpoint, what happens when religious art created in the 20 th century (the secular century par excellence, the century when, according to some, God and/or institutional religion died) is made visible and analyzed critically? Is the canon of modernism shaken, or should these efforts simply be dismissed by the art historical community at large? This essay will argue in favor of the former possibility. A comprehensive and critical interpretation of the religion behind the art, and the intricate relationship between the two (be it approval, support, denial, refusal, interpretation or a combination thereof) in modern and postmodern society would enrich our experience, and create a framework for frank, open dialogue about the role of religion in a pluralistic society.
Pleasures of Viewing: Agency, Power, and the Politics of Display in Buddhist Art
Dina Bangdel, Virginia Commonwealth University
In 2004, two exhibitions treated Buddhist art of the Himalayas in diametrically opposing styles of presentation. Tibet : Treasures from the Roof of the World included 200 works of Tibetan Buddhist art, many exclusively drawn from the collection of the Potala Palace , once home to the exiled Dalai Lama. These works, exhibited for the first time outside of its Chinese-occupied territory, arrived under the sponsorship of the Chinese government. For the Tibetan diaspora, the exhibition generated intense outrage and controversy because it was seen as consciously discounting the historical and religious contexts of these appropriated works. The second exhibition, Circle of Bliss: Buddhist Meditational Art relied heavily on the contextual approach: the art’s primary functionality as religious/ritual object. The didactic-laden displays and the experiential movement through the exhibition space were both lauded and criticized. Like the Tibet show, this exhibition highlighted esoteric works of Buddhist art, in this case from Nepal , which in their original context would never have been in public display, but viewed only by select practitioners. The difference here, however, was the approval given by the Buddhist teachers of Nepal to appropriately contextualize and display these works of art. As a result, the leading Nepalese teachers gave the first public ritual performance outside their homeland. Within these two exhibition frameworks, I will explore the dialectics of museum displays and their audiences, specifically analyzing the impact that certain modes of presentation may have in engendering religious and cultural self-consciousness in the contemporary context—both in the outsider/insider cultures. In other words, who is empowered and disempowered by these visual displays? Addressing the issues of agency and subjectivity, I will specifically focus on the impact that the Circle of Bliss exhibition may have had in the “insider” culture, in this case the living Buddhist traditions of Nepal . Indeed, a year after the exhibition, the Buddhist community of Nepal has witnessed an unprecedented public access and openness in the ritual traditions, resulting in a revitalization and renaissance of the artistic and religious spheres—which the teachers freely acknowledge as a resulting response.
From the Profane to the Sacred: The Rise of Reverence in Secular Institutions
Tiffany Jenkins, Director of the Arts and Society Programme, Institute of Ideas, London . A new phenomenon has infiltrated the museum world: rather than the meaning of an object presented to a broad public, museums are endorsing a ritualistic role for objects, even when this means closing down access to viewers who are not “ritualistic users.” The new Museum of the American Indian in Washington is an example. The NMAI is at the forefront of institutions that are elevating the sacred and religious significance of material in the collection over the secular approach of studying the objects. Many objects are hidden from public access, or access by designated gender, or tribal affiliation, and rituals take place behind closed doors. Certain categories of objects are not conserved for longevity, but left to deteriorate as this is considered to be the “natural life of the object.” The much older institution of the British Museum is not untouched by this trend. Ethiopian tablets were hidden in the museum’s basement in November 2004 with great ceremony; at present even the director is unable to look at them. The museum is also accommodating many faith-based communities in institutional decisions. Their specific beliefs will be a part of the policies of how the objects are displayed and housed. There is also a new development in the United Kingdom to formalize policies on sacred objects and collections with religious significance.
It is important to place this developing practice in a wide literature of museums and their authority. One may argue that museums have developed a crisis of purpose and meaning over the last thirty years and are searching for new directions. By accommodating a belief impetus and prioritizing sacred material in the collection they may see themselves as preserving relevance. This is a moment to reflect on this process lest important secular principles essential to research institutions be compromised. We may end up with institutions more akin to churches than museums.
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