Review
"[An] extraordinary study . . . It is a stupendous and persuasive piece of schollarship . . .Nearly every page has some fresh insight, some novel information, some striking argument or surprising formulation."--Arthur C. Danto, ARTFORUM


Book Description
With his 95 Theses, Martin Luther advanced the radical notion that all Christians could enjoy a direct, personal relationship with God--shattering years of Catholic tradition and obviating the need for intermediaries like priests and saints between the individual believer and God. The text of the Bible, the Word of God itself, Luther argued, revealed the only true path to salvation--not priestly ritual and saintly iconography.

But if words--not iconic images--showed the way to salvation, why didn't religious imagery during the Reformation disappear along with indulgences? The answer, according to Joseph Leo Koerner, lies in the paradoxical nature of Protestant religious imagery itself, which is at once both iconic and iconoclastic. Koerner masterfully demonstrates this point not only with a multitude of Lutheran images, many never before published, but also with a close reading of a single pivotal work--Lucas Cranach the Elder's altarpiece for the City Church in Wittenberg (Luther's parish). As Koerner shows, Cranach, breaking all the conventions of traditional Catholic iconography, created an entirely new aesthetic for the new Protestant ethos.

In the Crucifixion scene of the altarpiece, for instance, Christ is alone and stripped of all his usual attendants--no Virgin Mary, no John the Baptist, no Mary Magdalene--with nothing separating him from Luther (preaching the Word) and his parishioners. And while the Holy Spirit is nowhere to be seen--representation of the divine being impossible--it is nonetheless dramatically present as the force animating Christ's drapery. According to Koerner, it is this "iconoclash" that animates the best Reformation art.

Insightful and breathtakingly original, The Reformation of the Image compellingly shows how visual art became indispensable to a religious movement built on words.




From the Inside Flap
With his 95 Theses, Martin Luther advanced the radical notion that all Christians could enjoy a direct, personal relationship with God--shattering years of Catholic tradition and obviating the need for intermediaries like priests and saints between the individual believer and God. The text of the Bible, the Word of God itself, Luther argued, revealed the only true path to salvation--not priestly ritual and saintly iconography.

But if words--not iconic images--showed the way to salvation, why didn't religious imagery during the Reformation disappear along with indulgences? The answer, according to Joseph Leo Koerner, lies in the paradoxical nature of Protestant religious imagery itself, which is at once both iconic and iconoclastic. Koerner masterfully demonstrates this point not only with a multitude of Lutheran images, many never before published, but also with a close reading of a single pivotal work--Lucas Cranach the Elder's altarpiece for the City Church in Wittenberg (Luther's parish). As Koerner shows, Cranach, breaking all the conventions of traditional Catholic iconography, created an entirely new aesthetic for the new Protestant ethos.

In the Crucifixion scene of the altarpiece, for instance, Christ is alone and stripped of all his usual attendants--no Virgin Mary, no John the Baptist, no Mary Magdalene--with nothing separating him from Luther (preaching the Word) and his parishioners. And while the Holy Spirit is nowhere to be seen--representation of the divine being impossible--it is nonetheless dramatically present as the force animating Christ's drapery. According to Koerner, it is this "iconoclash" that animates the best Reformation art.

Insightful and breathtakingly original, The Reformation of the Image compellingly shows how visual art became indispensable to a religious movement built on words.



About the Author
Joseph Leo Koerner is a professor of art history at University College London. He is the author of Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape and The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, the latter copublished by the University of Chicago Press.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The story begins in Wittenberg, Saxony, in the throes of religious change. In 1522, while Martin Luther was in hiding from Catholic forces, parishioners destroyed the images in the church of his ministry. On his return, the Reformer, instead of lauding their evangelical zeal, repudiated the image-breakers. Arresting the first iconoclasm of the modern era, Luther paved the way for a new type of church art, one modelled on the communicative reliability of words.

The Reformation of the Image studies visual representation after its wilful destruction. Focused on an altarpiece of 1547 by Lucas Cranach the Elder that was set up on the spot of Wittenberg's iconoclasm, it explores how images redescribe the arguments that eradicated them. In a bold historical revision, Joseph Leo Koerner concludes that idolatry is the image-breakers' core belief, that the putative idols had iconoclasm built into them, and that iconoclasm's aftermath is our perennial condition.

Koerner illuminates one century of Protestant art and architecture. Instead of promising a means of salvation or imaginative transport, Lutheran images show only what a word-based religion looks like: such images are redundant, exhibiting what a church ordinarily performs. Koerner argues that such portrayals invent an image of society. They are not merely amenable to, but form part of, the pre-history of modern social analysis. By way of this little-known material, Koerner re-evaluates the analytic routines of his own discipline of art history.