#iconophobia

Promey’s essay is a plea for the historical particular. “Relationships between religion and pictures,” she counsels, “happen in specific and not in general… the most illuminating questions and answers on this subject will invariably be the most densely particular and thoughtfully historical” (194). Protestant practices are and have always been multiple and they are not easily generalized. Pilgrim origin myths notwithstanding, America religion has been comprised of many constituencies since the beginning. In early America, we are better off talking about Protestantisms than Protestantism; today, the need to look beyond any single historical frame or interpretative lens is even more apparent. (It is evident that Promey continues to pursue in this essay her interest in pluralism that she began to probe in her 1999 book Painting Religion in Public.)

Promey shows the range of the Protestant pictorial practices by discussing, at a brisk pace, several historical “snapshots.” She begins, naturally, with the Reformation. Martin Luther and Andreas von Karlstadt split famously on the image issue in 1521; being the hotter sort of reformer, Karlstadt sought to purge all pictures from churches while the moderate Luther acknowledged their function as pedagogical and devotional aids while opposing their idolatrous use. Reformers like Calvin, Zwingli, and the early puritan William Perkins rejected religious images in churches but tolerated them in domestic settings. In fact, seventeenth-century English puritans enjoyed a rich domestic religious visual culture, including portraits, emblem books, prints, pamphlets, and embroidery. Indeed, it is already apparent that the assumption that the continental and English reformers “categorized all pictures as alternatively dangerous or useless has been grossly overstated” (197).

Protestant pictorial practices thrived on the other side of the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though the fine arts did not immediately develop in the early American wilderness, the visual and sensual universe of its inhabitants was robust. Puritans were not nearly as grimly austere as we assume them to be. Their most famous theologian, Jonathan Edwards, embraced the sensory experience of the natural world, in which he thought God revealed divine grace. Other puritans proved themselves to be capable limners (portrait painters), and intricate gravestone carvers of skeletons and skulls, soul effigies, and even portraits. Promey also points out that the seventeenth and eighteenth century colonial meetinghouses of various Protestant groups were not the stark white boxes commonly presumed. She cites archival evidence of exteriors and interiors painted in raucously polychromatic yellows, blues, greens, reds, oranges, grays, whites, browns, and pinks.

Religious visual culture saturated the nineteenth century. The religious art of the middle third of the century, of course, was essentially landscape art. Influenced by the Emerson and Ruskin, landscape painters such as the Episcopalian Thomas Cole and the Swedenborgian George Inness regarded nature as “God’s second book.” Cole meant for his paintings to evoke divine communion; Inness sought to reveal "spiritual correspondences” between this world and the next. Promey also discusses the very influential Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell, associated with the Christian Nuture movement, who insisted that household visual culture has a moral effect on children. A household’s art and decoration, he insisted, must show elevated taste, beauty, and republican virtue. (This was no minor matter, for salvation of children could be at stake.) Shakers, too, were prolific image-makers in the mid-nineteenth century; they focused on visionary, even esoteric, themes and “the objects of spiritual sight ” (210).  (Promey’s first book, from 1993, is on the visual culture of Shakers, called Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism.)

New relations between art and religion arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a segment of cultural literati (influenced by eighteenth-century philosophy and nineteenth-century evolutionary theory), comprising the likes of Matthew Arnold, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and George Santayana, “art ‘became’ religion, with art’s visual forms constituting a kind of transcendent and even redemptive ‘soul language’” (211-12). In addition, some Protestant artists made free use of religious iconography, such as John Singer Sargent in his Triumph of Religion mural cycle at the Boston Public Library. Still other Protestant educators, such as those in the Protestant Religious Education Association, embraced mass reproduction of fine arts images in the picture study movement, intended as a “ministry of pictures” to educate the heart (214).

In the middle of the twentieth century, liberal Protestants of the National Council of Churches launched a class-conscious campaign to align liberal religion with high culture. They sought to distinguish themselves from the mass culture of evangelicals, defined in its most lowbrow form by Walter Sallman’s omnipresent Head of Christ. Leading the effort was the Presbyterian Alfred Barr, Jr., who not only served as the chief officer of the National Council of Church’s Art Commission, but was the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art. Images like Sallman’s, Barr insisted, must be squashed. They “corrupt the religious feeling of children and nourish the complacency and sentimentality of their elders” (219). Liberal Protestants found Abstract Expressionism to be much more amenable to their interests (though by the 1950s, they were coming a bit late to the party, as it were).

Promey’s whirlwind historical tour—from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries—very convincingly disabuses the hackneyed historical tropes of Protestant iconoclasm. Given Promey’s interest in multiplicity and inclusivity, however, I wondered why she tended to draw exclusively from imagistic examples that could be classified as fine art—or at least those things that might be shown in a museum or could be described as “serious.” The explosion of visual print culture in the nineteenth century, meticulously documented by David Morgan in his 1999 book Protestants and Pictures, is never discussed. She mentions twentieth-century mass materials only in the context of Alfred Barr’s crusade against them. Is this a concession to art historical clubbishness or respectability?