Epitaph, 1647, from Vilstrup Church in Southern Jutland. Jerusalem Is Represented Separated from the Deceased by a Wall

Fig. 17.1: Epitaph, 1647, from Vilstrup Church in southern Jutland. Jerusalem is represented separated from the deceased by a wall. Open Access. © 2021 Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639452-018 Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen Chapter 17 Jerusalem and the Lutheran Church Interior This chapter deals with the ways in which Jerusalem, both the earthly city and the no- tional promised future home, was present in the early modern Lutheran church interior. Whereas the examples on which the following builds are culled from the churches of Denmark, the conclusions drawn would certainly fit developments in churches across Scandinavia. Written sources from Germany are thus also quoted to show how the trends discussed here were a part of a larger, shared tradition. The Lutheran tradition, as it developed through the early modern period, inherited a rich fund of thinking and imagery from a medieval church transformed according to the theological con- cepts that came out of the confessional upheavals of the sixteenth century. It should accordingly be stressed from the outset that Jerusalem had not disappeared from church interiors by the onset of the Reformation. Jerusalem was as much present in the new Lutheran churches as it had been before, only it was now found in other pla- ces and in other forms.1 How the celestial city was envisioned and interpreted has var- ied over time, but the basic idea of it being the true heavenly home for mankind can hardly be described as anything but a significant, continuous trope in Christian thinking across all confessional divides. The question, when entering a church from a given period, is therefore not whether the complex of ideas around Jerusalem is represented or not, but more specifically in what form they occur. However, before we turn to the Lutheran church interior, it would be well to address a number of issues pertaining to the Middle Ages in order to clarify developments that followed the Reformation. A Few Words About the Medieval Legacy There can hardly be any doubt that it was in Romanesque art of the twelfth century – and, in Scandinavia, the early thirteenth – that the Augustinian dichotomy between the heavenly and earthly Jerusalem, between this life and a celestial afterlife, was developed visually to a striking high-point. A rich and multifaceted iconography of Jerusalem grew out of this period, which blended into the imagery of the 1 An impression of the number of preserved medieval wall-paintings and furnishings can be gained from Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, Ritual and Art across the Danish Reformation: Changing Interiors of Village Churches, 1450–1600, Ritus et Artes 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, Editor, Danmarks kirker, National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark 318 Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen late Middle Ages, survived into the early modern period and, as we shall see later, can be found even in modern art. These visual components introduced into Romanesque imagery have accordingly remained a voice within the vocabulary of religious imagery ever since its heyday in the twelfth century. It is also well known that one of the firm and constant assumptions in these Romanesque portrayals of Jerusalem was what we can call a belief in the allegorical potential of the visible and tangible.2 By showing or reflecting Jerusalem, they could give the churchgoer a sense, if only a sense, of the greatness to which these representations referred. A popular metaphor in the 1100s was, for instance, the distinction between gold and the gilded appearance of it. Man, in other words, saw only a fraction of the heavenly splendour when seeing the gold and riches used to adorn the interior of the church, but neverthe- less these things hinted at the nature of the divine – something which more than anything seems to be encapsulated by the late Romanesque, so-called golden al- tars from medieval Denmark.3 The terrestrial versus the heavenly is the decisive axis here, but the axis between the present, earthly city of Jerusalem in Palestine and the future celestial Heavenly Jerusalem is also crucial because precisely that axis points to significant theological, if not intellectual, challenges in the later part of the Middle Ages. There was a gap or split through the medieval devotional culture which, on the one hand, invested enormous significance in what was specific, tangible or factual, but on the other hand, all of this could be rejected as irrelevant because it was only signs of the holy, not the thing itself.4 One characteristic feature of the representation of the Heavenly Jerusalem by the late Middle Ages was a growing emphasis on the portrayal, not of the celestial city as such, but of the individual inside the city and thus in a state of promised bliss.5 The danger here was, of course, of showing too much about the afterlife, and different abstractions were therefore employed within the images, which dissolved the firm iconographic focus on architecture when depicting the celestial home. 2 The seminal study on this topic is Joseph Sauer, “Symbolik des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Auffassung des Mittelalters,” (Freiburg im Breisgau: Mehren und Hobbeling, 1924). See also the well-regarded reinterpretation of the same topic by Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011). 3 Find different aspects of these altar pieces and retables presented in Søren Kaspersen and Erik Thunø, Decorating the Lord’s Table: On the Dynamics between Image and Altar in the Middle Ages (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006). See also Poul Grinder-Hansen et al., Image and Altar 800–1300: Papers from an International Conference in Copenhagen 24 October–27 October 2007, Publications from the National Museum, Studies in Archaeology & History 23 (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, University Press of Southern Denmark, 2014). For Jerusalem representations in medieval Scandianvia, see Chapter 14 (Øystein Ekroll) vol 1, 270–98; Chapter 15 (Line M. Bonde) vol 1, 299–323; and Chapter 16 (Kersti Markus) vol 1, 324–39; in vol 1. of this book series. 4 See for instance the discussions in Bynum, Christian Materiality. 5 This and the following points are expounded in my contribution to vol 1, Chapter 19 (Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen), 394–421. Chapter 17 Jerusalem and the Lutheran Church Interior 319 Rather than showing architecture, a shift took place, which portrayed the heavenly sphere as a paradisiacal, lush garden with blooming flowers and vines. Churches could accordingly, through sculptural modelling of the architecture itself or through wall-paintings, be transformed from the insistent, dressed materiality of the Romanesque and early Gothic architecture into shapes mimicking or alluding to living, organic structures. Jerusalem in Lutheran Churches The reformers of the sixteenth century were cautious, and reluctant to make abso- lute or too firm statements concerning what the afterlife looked like or what shape it took. Visualizations especially of the Heavenly Jerusalem, along with a whole series of other pictorial conventions, disappeared or almost disappeared in the deca- des following the Reformation.6 The late medieval fascination with paradise motifs and garden imagery as references to Jerusalem prevailed throughout the sixteenth century, and then slowly lost popularity. Rather than allowing the individual to peep inside the celestial sphere, as did the late medieval, lush garden iconography, they pulled the viewer back to see Jerusalem from the outside, looking at the open door without revealing what was inside. By this the Lutheran tradition, in a sense, returned to the way of showing Jerusalem that had dominated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, where what lay inside the city wall was also mostly left unrevealed. In fact, if we look for actual depictions or visual imaginings of Jerusalem in the years after the Reformation, the motif is almost solely present as a backdrop to scenes showing the crucifixion; a motif repeated again and again on altarpieces and funeral monuments like the popular epitaphs. A typical example might be an epitaph in Kerteminde Church on the island of Funen, from around 1603, donated by the anony- mous “C.P.” and “K.D.” (Fig. 17.0). We here see the deceased man and wife with their children, flanking Christ on the cross.7 Just above the right shoulder of the man the city of Jerusalem is discernible. In scenes such as this the aim is not to give the beholder a glimpse of things to come, but instead to use Jerusalem as an anchoring or underlining of the fact that the crucifixion really happened in this world. The 6 An impression of the survival of old motifs and the emergence of new ones after the Lutheran Reformation can be gained from works such as Werner Hofmann, Luther und die Folgen für die Kunst (Hamburg: Prestel-Verlag, 1983); Peter Poscharsky, Die Bilder in den lutherischen Kirchen (München: Scaneg Verlag, 1998); and Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, “The Arts and Lutheran Church Decoration: The Myth of Lutheran Images and Iconography,” in The Myth of the Reformation, ed. Peter Opitz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 356–80. See also Sigrid Christie and Riksantikvaren, Norges Kirker: B. 2: Den lutherske ikonografi i Norge inntil 1800 (Oslo: Land og kirke, 1973). 7 For further description of the epitaph see Danmark Nationalmuseum, Danmarks Kirker: Odense Amt, Danmarks Kirker (Copenhagen: Danmark Nationalmuseum, 1990), 2015–16. 320 Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen visual and iconographic focus on Jerusalem was often significantly reduced from the complex allegorical representations of the Middle Ages, as the city first and foremost came to be depicted as a specific place in which the biblical events had unfolded.

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