This book demonstrates how Calvin's uncompromising stance on sacred images gained favor throughout Europe and was increasingly seen in the years between 1550 and 1600 as the unavoidable culmination of the Sola Scriptura principle. It also documents in detail how Catholic doctrine evolved to counteract the radical positions of Calvinism and how this doctrine translated through pastoral action into the new artistic trends - in both architecture and painting - which dominated the Seventeenth century.

Debunking the myth of the stark white Protestant church interior, this study explores the very objects and architectural additions that were in fact added to Netherlandish church interiors in the first century after iconoclasm. In charting these additions, Mia Mochizuki helps explain the impact of iconoclasm on the cultural topography of the Dutch Golden Age, and by extension, permits careful scrutiny of a decisive moment in the history of the image. Focusing on the Great or St. Bavo Church in Haarlem, this interdisciplinary book draws on art history, history and theology to look at the impact of iconoclasm and reformation on the process of image-making in the early modern Netherlands. The new objects that began to appear in the early Dutch Reformed Church signaled a dramatic change in the form, function and patronage of church art and testified to new roles for church, government, guild and resident. Each chapter in the book introduces a major theme of the nascent Protestant church interior - the Word made material, the Word made memorial and the Word made manifest - which is then explored through the painting, sculpture and architecture of the early Dutch Reformed Church. The text is heavily illustrated with images of the objects under discussion, many of them never before published. A large number of these images are from the camera of prize-winning photographer Tjeerd Frederikse, with additional photography courtesy of E.A. van Voorden. This book unveils, defines and reproduces a host of images previously unaddressed by scholarship and links them to more familiar and long studied Dutch paintings. It provides a religious art companion to general studies of Dutch Golden Age art and lends greater depth to our understanding of iconoclasm, as well as the way in which cultural artifacts and religious material culture reflect and help to shape the values of a community. Taking up the challenge of an unusual category of objects for visual analysis, this

The Jesuit investment in images, whether verbal or visual, virtual or actual, pictorial or poetic, rhetorical or exegetical, was strong and sustained, and may even be identified as one of the order’s defining characteristics. Although this interest in images has been richly documented by art historians, theatre historians, and scholars of the emblem, the question of Jesuit image theory has yet to be approached from a multi-disciplinary perspective that examines how the image was defined, conceived, produced, and interpreted within the various fields of learning cultivated by the Society: sacred oratory, pastoral instruction, scriptural exegesis, theology, collegiate pedagogy, poetry and poetics, etc. The papers published in this volume investigate the ways in which Jesuits reflected visually and verbally on the status and functions of the imago, between the foundation of the order in 1540 and its suppression in 1773. Part I examines texts that purport explicitly to theorize about the imago and to analyze its various forms and functions. Part II examines what one might call expressions of embedded image theory, that is, various instances where Jesuit authors and artists use images implicitly to explore the status and functions of such images as indices of image-making. Contributors include Wietse de Boer, James Clifton, Ralph Dekoninck, Karl Enenkel, Pierre Antoine Fabre, David Graham, Agnès Guiderdoni, Anna Knaap, Walter Melion, Jeffrey Muller, Hilmar Pabel, Aline Smeesters, Andrea Torre, and Steffen Zierholz

In the wake of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, the archbishop of Bologna, wrote a remarkable treatise on art during a time when the Church feared rampant abuse in the arts. Paleotti's 'Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images' argues that art should address a broad audience and explains the painter's responsibility to his spectators.

This book focuses on the techniques and materials of polychromy used in early modern Europe and the Americas from 1200 to 1800. Taking a trans-cultural approach, the book studies the production of polychrome sculptures, panels, and altarpieces, as well as colored terracotta. The book includes chapters on treatises and contracts that reveal specific use of pigments, distribution of workshops, collaborations between specialized artists, and artistic programs centered on the use of color as an agent. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art conservation, early modern history, sculpture, colonialism, material culture, and European studies.

Bringing to bear her extensive knowledge of the cultures of Renaissance Europe and sixteenth-century Mexico, M?a Dom?uez Torres here investigates the significance of military images and symbols in post-Conquest Mexico. She shows how the 'conquest' in fact involved dynamic exchanges between cultures; and that certain interconnections between martial, social and religious elements resonated with similar intensity among Mesoamericans and Europeans, creating indeed cultural bridges between these diverse communities. Multidisciplinary in approach, this study builds on scholarship in the fields of visual, literary and cultural studies to analyse the European and Mesoamerican content of the martial imagery fostered within the indigenous settlements of central Mexico, as well as the ways in which local communities and leaders appropriated, manipulated, modified and reinterpreted foreign visual codes. Military Ethos and Visual Culture in Post-Conquest Mexico draws on post-structuralist and post-colonial approaches to analyse the complex dynamics of identity formation in colonial communities.

Vanities of the Eye investigates the cultural history of the senses in early modern Europe, a time in which the nature and reliability of human vision was the focus of much debate. In medicine, art theory, science, religion, and philosophy, sight came to be characterised as uncertain or paradoxical - mental images no longer resembled the external world. Was seeing really believing? Stuart Clark explores the controversial debates of the time - from the fantasies and hallucinations of melancholia, to the illusions of magic, art, demonic deceptions, and witchcraft. The truth and function of religious images and the authenticity of miracles and visions were also questioned with new vigour, affecting such contemporary works as Macbeth - a play deeply concerned with the dangers of visual illusion. Clark also contends that there was a close connection between these debates and the ways in which philosophers such as Descartes and Hobbes developed new theories on the relationship between the real and virtual. Original, highly accessible, and a major contribution to our understanding of European culture, Vanities of the Eye will be of great interest to a wide range of historians and anyone interested in the true nature of seeing.