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Representations of Christ: Reforming the Imitatio Christi

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Representations of Christ: Reforming the Imitatio Christi CHAPTER FOUR REPRESENTATIONS OF CHRIST: REFORMING THE IMITATIO CHRISTI The most prominent religious images in Reformation England were of Christ. Both late-medieval and early modern patterns of English piety set the second person of the Trinity at the centre of devotion. Since Catholics and Protestants represented Christ for very different reasons, such images offer fertile terrain in which to explore religious identity, including the continuities and conflicts between various religious beliefs. This chapter will map out how Protestants intended to represent Christ and how such images of Christ were employed. While images of Christ were often considered susceptible to idolatrous abuse, Christ, the most important figure in the Christian religion, was essential to many New Testament pictures. Images of Christ became fewer in number and a less frequent presence in devotional iconography in the sixteenth century, but Christ continued to be the most widely visualized Biblical figure, and new images appeared regularly until the end of the century. The devo- tional Christ of the late-medieval period was no longer present to the same degree, but Christ’s picture was employed for other equally valu- able purposes. Images of a more didactic and pragmatic intent appeared.1 Christ could be seen in both devotional and non-devotional contexts. He was a symbol of both salvation and moral instruction, and his image could be found in polemical cheap print and large humanist tomes. Many of the traditional motifs like the imitatio Christi and the Agnus Dei were used with new and invigorated meaning, suggesting that Protestants could not or would not wholly divorce themselves from traditional visual culture. Protestants and the God-Man Reformation images of Christ evidence a Protestant effort to refashion the Saviour. In 1524, Martin Luther wrote to the church in Strasbourg to 1 Richard Williams, “The Reformation of an Icon: Portraits of Christ in Protestant England,” in Art Re-formed: Re-assessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts, eds. Tara Hamling and Richard Williams (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 71–86. 104 chapter four correct radical views—like those of Andreas Karlstadt—that deempha- sized Christ’s humanity. Luther advocated following Christ, “but not, as Karlstadt does, only to the work of Christ, wherein Christ is held up as an example, which is the least important aspect of Christ, and which makes him comparable to other saints.”2 Some of these radicals went so far as to deny Christ’s humanity, saying that he brought his own body with him from heaven, and other reformers like the Silesian Caspar Schwenckfeld taught that Christ’s flesh was a celestial or recreated flesh.3 Certain Catholic teachings about Christ were considered equally mis- leading. Late-medieval mystics and devotional writers were identified as having over-emphasized the humanity and death of Jesus to the detriment of his divinity.4 He was the ultimate sacrifice, as the lamb of God (Agnus Dei), the bread and the wine in the Eucharist, the Man of Sorrows, and the suffering Saviour depicted in the pieta. As a result, the Incarnation and Passion took precedence over other images of Christ. The impetus behind these devotional works and images was “to bring that great story as close and as vividly to the mind of the reader as possible.”5 The large body of surviving Christological icons produced in the fifteenth century speak to the increasing preoccupation with and need for this sort of direct access to the suffering Saviour. As mentioned in chapter three, devotion to Christ became highly centralized in his body and suffering.6 The highly popular fifteen Oes brought prayerful devotees into a place of intimacy with Christ, 2 Martin Luther, “Letter to the Christians at Strasbourg in Opposition to the Fanatic Spirit, 1524,” in Luther’s Works, vol. XL, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1975), 70. 3 R. Emmet McLaughlin, “The Radical Reformation,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6: Reform and Expansion, 1500–1660, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 37–55; Michael G. Baylor, ed. and trans., The Radical Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Steven Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 223–30. 4 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 91–130; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 302–18. 5 Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 62–74. The quota- tion is from Helen White, The Tudor Books of Private Devotion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 144. 6 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 45, 236, 281; Robert Lutton, “Geographies and Materialities of Piety: Reconciling Competing Narratives of Religious Change in Pre- Reformation and Reformation England,” in Pieties in Transition: Religious Practices and Experiences, c.1400–1640, eds. Robert Lutton and Elisabeth Salter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 11–40; David Mateer and Elizabeth New, “ ‘In Nomine Jesu’: Robert Fayrfax and the Guild of the Holy Name in St Paul’s Cathedral,” Music & Letters 81 (2000): 507–19..
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