DŰRER AND RELIGION: FROM CATHOLIC SPLENDOR TO PROTESTANT SIMPLICITY
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
(This essay was written in the late 1980s and has been revised periodically. In April, 2011, I
added a mostly new section on the Four Apostles entitled, “The Origins of the Image and the New Spiritual Authority of the Modern Individual”. In April 2013, I polished the text further, rearranged a few paragraphs, added a “Summary of the Reformation” and the first paragraph after the heading, “Protestant Style and Aesthetics: Simplicity, Clarity, Humility”.
Students in AHI 122 can download the slide show for this lecture on the password-protected website at tregware.
Dürer, All Saints-Holy Trinity Altarpiece, 1511
The Holy Trinity was a common subject in late Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Christian art, in part because it underscored universal hierarchies extending even into heaven. In the Holy Trinity, hierarchy was established and sanctified in the heavens and extended down as a universal organizing principle throughout the political, social, and institutional sphere.
All Saints was also a typically Catholic theme, seen, for example, in Van Eyck’s celebrated Ghent Altar which Dürer made a special trip to see later in his career.In a religious system which prized individual saints for their miraculous assistance to those in need, which multiplied saints to provide reassuring protection for every human vocation, profession, and activity, and which fostered the cult of saints in general as reassuring intermediaries capable of hearing prayers and interceding for the faithful in winning divine mercy and salvation, All Saints was the important Catholic holiday celebrating the collective impact of all the saints. Indeed, the thronging of so many saints around a celestial Christ was itself a reassuring preview of the salvation awaiting all those who prayed through the proper channels of the church.
All Saints also expressed the universalizing, corporate piety of the Catholic church which was particularly strong in the Middle Ages and which continued, reinforced by Counter-Reformation values, after 1550. (The word “catholic” means universal.)
Also typical of Catholic thinking was the splendid colorism and eye-catching visual spectacle of this crowded composition packed with things to see and admire. In a religious culture geared increasingly to externalized, material displays of piety in ceremonies, architecture, decoration, music, incense, and above all richly decorated images, Catholic piety increasingly defined itself as visual piety from the 12th century on (and continuing into the eighteenth). All this is crucial for an understanding of the Reformation which developed after 1518, especially since Protestant piety turned radically away from images and visual piety and in the most extreme forms of Calvinism, stripped churches of all images and ornament.
Sporting a modern, Renaissance-style architectural frame (which Dürer designed at a time when classicism was new to Northern art), Dürer’s large altarpiece included a Last Judgment carved in the top of the frame enclosed in an arch symbolic of the dome of heaven. Flanked by the most important intercessors, Mary and John the Baptist, Christ appears in a heavenly mandorla raising his right hand to save the righteous (who move toward the sun) and using his left to send the damned into the jaws of Hell. Although carved by a sculptor, this image is crucial for All Saints with its collective hope for salvation through the combined efforts of the major saints.
In Dürer’s painting, Mary and John the Baptist appear a second time, flanking the Holy Trinity which is arrayed in a vertical axis, linking the painted figures visually to the Last Judgment above and setting up a rather severe symmetry. In this compositional order, Dürer made visible a sacred authority flowing down into the lower world of the earthly sphere and the church in particular. Below the Holy Trinity yet still in the celestial sphere, Dürer painted famous saints chastely divided by gender in the asexual world of Paradise. On the left, he grouped early Christian virgin martyr saints with their palm branches (signs of martyrdom), giving attributes to the women in the front row to identify them: St. Barbara with her chalice, St. Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel (famous for her mystical marriage to Christ), St. Dorothy with her basket and St. Agnes holding a lamb. On the right, he painted male saints and Old Testament patriarchs including Moses with the Ten Commandments and King David with his lyre – saints known for their power and wisdom, not their “feminine” chastity, mystical marriage, or martyrdom.
Divine authority flowers further down in this cosmic, ecclesiastical hierarchy to an earthly throng representing contemporary Christians including popes, cardinals, kings and emperors but also ordinary folk including a peasant with his flail. The universalizing rhetoric of all saints above is matched by the visual throng of humanity below.Once again, we see the corporate piety of the Roman Church often described in theological terms as Christ’s mystical body, with Christ acting as the head and the Christian faithful as the members of his body.
Further down below appears Dürer himself, splendid dressed in a fur-trimmed coat, red hat, and red stockings, holding a very large tablet inscribed in Latin, “Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg painted this in the year of the virgin birth, 1511”. Dürer stands alone in a splendidly painted landscape glowing with the salvational promise of a radiant sunrise which translated Christian ideas of Paradise into a persuasive landscape rhetoric carefully studied and honed in Dürer’s ground-breaking watercolor landscapes. In his small scale and insignificance relative to the larger forms above him, Dürer’s figure evokes the small portraits of patrons often seen with their patron saints in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance and which continued in German art well into the early sixteenth century including earlier altarpieces by Dürer himself. But this is no pious portrait of the patron shown humbly kneeling in worship. Instead Dürer stands erect, with no patron saint by his side, proudly advertising his skill as an artist.
Here is a remarkable intrusion of the new worldly artistic self-consciousness of the High Renaissance into a traditional religious altarpiece. Here a traditional collective piety yields in one small but telling section of the painting to the new individualism of the Renaissance. Here the hierarchical authority of the impersonal church makes a small space for a different kind of authority tied to the individual voice. Here is the new, Renaissance authority of multiple voices growing and taking shape in an age of printing and expanding urban populations of literate burghers. As with the woodcut Apocalypse, a book “authored” by Dürer, the insertion of this worldly self-portrait in an All-Saints altarpiece invites us to compare the artist to the author, and especially to the new idea of the author unfolding in a era of printed books on the one hand and wider educational opportunities on the other. The altarpiece becomes a kind of publication through which the individual artist begins to speak to the larger public. While the dominant messages of the altarpiece remains traditional and conservative, the overall tone of the work is nonetheless subtly altered by the self-consciousness and proud assertion of the individual Christian, and here, the individual artist.
It is easy to overestimate this unexpected moment of worldly pride in an otherwise fairly traditional Catholic altarpiece. Most worshippers were probably too busy saying prayers to the saints and the Holy Trinity to take much notice of the little figure of the artist posing “humbly” in the lower right corner (on the male side of the painting). More aesthetically educated viewers conversant with new trends in Italian art, and more recently in German art since the late 1490s, would have taken greater notice of the master painter and printmaker who made this beautifully painted altarpiece. While some of these viewers might have been surprised at the boldness of Dürer’s self-promotion, anyone who knew the artist, who read his letters from Italy or the rough drafts for his projected book of art theory, the first of its kind in Northern Europe, might have credited Dürer with single-handedly pioneering the new Renaissance approach to art in Northern Europe. As the lone Renaissance voice in the late Gothic “wilderness” of German art for about ten years, Dürer developed an acute self-consciousness of his unique originality and talent. As seen here, and in his numerous self-portraits, he did not shy away from proclaiming that talent.
Summary of the Reformation
The Reformation demolished Catholicism in parts of Northern Europe by ending papal authority, the monastic orders and holy poverty, clerical celibacy, the cult of the saints and the Virgin Mary, the miracle of the Mass and Eucharistic piety, the use of Latin in church services, the cult of images and all outward ceremonies, the world of miracles, and the idea of working your way toward heaven through good works and free will. All human and material intermediaries between mankind and God were removed to create a new stress on the distance between the wretched, helpless sinner and the unfathomable mercy of a remote and mysterious yet loving God. To bridge this gap, Protestants translated and printed the Bible, making Scripture directly available to ordinary, individual Christians for the first time and without any overt, controlling, interpretive framework. At a time when literacy rates were low and much reading was done out loud, even illiterate people could now know Scripture directly. For more on the Reformation as a spiritual revolution geared primarily to urban burgher elites and nobles, see my essay, “The Reformation and Art.”
The Importance of Protestant Visual Propaganda
The Reformation unleashed a flood of anti-Catholic books and propaganda prints, as well as Catholic books and prints attacking the new “heresy” spreading in Northern Europe. In 1520, Cranach produced a Protestant illustrated book entitled, Passional Christi und Anti-Christi. The book offered twenty-five pairs of images violently contrasting the “true” Christ of Protestant faith with the pope, represented here and elsewhere in Protestant piety as the anti-Christ, the false prophet mentioned in the Book of Revelations who leads all of his followers to hell.
In one pair of prints, the humble Christ rides his simple donkey into Jerusalem while the pope appears in triumphal procession high on a stallion and surrounded by soldiers, all heading to hell. Another pair of woodcuts evoked the radical simplification of church ritual and decoration by contrasting a Christ driving the money-lenders from the temple with a pope and other church officials selling pardons, indulgences, and religious offices to wealthy bidders.
DURER AND THE REFORMATON: "Four Apostles" (Four Authors of the Gospel), 1523-6, originally Nuremberg town hall
The Reformation also generated more subtle artistic responses such as that seen in Dürer’s “Four Apostles”. In its subject matter, style, inscriptions,origins, physical location, and secular, instructional and political purposes, Dürer’s Four Apostles was Protestant.
Protestant Subject Matter
The painting’s title is traditional but somewhat misleading since only three of the four men are apostles: John, Peter, and Paul. The fourth, Mark, is an Evangelist. It is their status as authors of the Word which explains their presence in this Protestant image. Two of them – Peter and Paul - appear on the frontispiece of Luther’s German Bible printed in 1522.
In contrast to the hierarchical structures, richly colored visual spectacle and collective piety of Dürer's earlier, pre-Reformation Adoration of the Trinity, Dürer's “apostles” are highly individualized figures who embody Luther's focus on the authentic faith of the individual believer enlightened by the vernacular Word, translated, printed, read, and preached. If Catholic worship focused on the miraculous, outward spectacle of the Mass, Protestants denied all such outward ceremonies and images as a false theater. They also rejected the power of priests to perform any miracles and especially the central miracle of the Mass.
Though the forms of Dürer's “apostles” are grand, the simplicity of their bodies and the neutral color of the background focus attention on the fiercely spiritual heads and their common if intense humanity. This too reflected a Protestant inwardness, a new indifference to body and bodily values. The ordinary humanity of these authors also reflected a Lutheran faith in the power of “ordinary,” educated Christians (i.e. noble and burger elites) to read and comprehend translated Bibles. The focus on human mind also reflected Dürer's more humanistic understanding of Lutheran doctrine and his greater willingness to extoll human reason and understanding. (At one point, Dürer mistakenly imagined that the humanist Erasmus and the Protestant theologian, Luther were in the same camp. Erasmus set things straight when he rejected Protestantism and Luther’s denial of free will. For at least one influential humanist, the affirmation of human reason and spiritual freedom was more compatible with Catholicism.)
Dürer underscored the Protestant significance of these four authors by adding below each figure inscriptions taken from their Scriptural writings using Luther's German New Testament printed a few years earlier. In this way, he literally spelled out the Protestant Word for all to see and read.
Protestant Style and Aesthetics: Simplicity, Clarity, Humility
The Reformation restored to a wide array of Christian arenas what it claimed was an original, true Christian simplicity, clarity, and down to earth humanity. Church spaces were no longer decorated with ornate, “worldly” images, elaborate music, theatrical ceremonies, miraculous events and shrines, flowery speech, complicated allegorizing, and obscure, Latin pronouncements. The service was now conducted in the vernacular with a focus on preaching the Word (reading and commenting on passages from the Bible). The sacraments were greatly reduced in number and secularized, especially the Mass which purged of anything miraculous and became a simple reminder. A much simpler music of hymns was introduced allowing ordinary worshippers to participate (just as they now read the Bible). So too, Protestant preaching and religious writing called for simple, clear rhetoric and language, following the example of Christ’s humble, everyday language and stories (parables). The Bible itself was cleansed of the excessive allegorizing which had increased over the centuries and was now treated as a more down to earth encyclopedia of simple moral and spiritual lessons in daily living and personal faith. These Protestant liturgical, rhetorical, literary, and hermeneutic reforms all promoted a new aesthetic of simplicity, clarity, humility. So did the simple Protestant style which Dürer developed late in life for paintings and prints. Instead of visual spectacle, Dürer’s art pursued simplicity, purity, seriousness, and inwardness. All of these qualities are present in the Four Apostles.
In its stylistic features, Dürer’s painting displayedthe new simplicityseen everywhere in his art after 1520. In so far as it transcended subject matter, Dürer’s new simplicity, monumentality, and inward gravitas can be seen in part as a late, “classicizing” manner independent of new religious values. Indeed, the principal source for the grand composition of the Four Apostles lay with a Catholic altarpiece on Venice which Dürer knew well. As scholars have long noted, Dürer took hisfull-length pairs of saints from the side wings of Bellini’s Madonna Enthroned in the Frari (1488). Despite its visual debt to a Catholic altarpiece, Dürer’s Four Apostles took what Lutherans would have understood as a new Protestant simplicity, plainness, and inwardness informed by the Protestant attack on the worldly spectacle of Catholic religious art and the corresponding search for a simple style in religious rhetoric and language. [i]After 1520, Dürer retained those aspects of Italian Renaissance art which could be harmonized with his new Protestant outlook: massive powerful volumes and simplicity of composition and color. It was the final stage in his constantly evolving synthesis of North and South.
Printing, Translated Bibles, and the New Spiritual Authority of the Modern Individual
A strong follower of Luther from the beginning, Dürer’s Protestant convictions found larger civic support when the magistrates of his home town, Nuremberg, declared that city Protestant in 1524. Seen from an official Christian (Catholic) perspective, the secular authorities of Nuremberg had no business making fundamental decisions about religion. Though church and state were closely connected well into the nineteenth century with religious images commonly included in town halls, the two realms were also separate with church councils and ecclesiastical courts presiding over religious disputes and secular officials handling civil law.