Professor Nina Rowe will deliver the third lecture in the 2013-2014 At-Large Lectures on Religion series. She is Associate Professor of Art History at Fordham University. Her lecture, like all others in the Center for the Study of Religion-sponsored series, is free and open to all. There will be a brief question-and-answer session and a reception following the lecture.
Abstract: It is a challenge for art historians to find visual evidence of discomfort with dominant devotional practices in the late Middle Ages. The Church was a key institution with the wealth to commission sculpted and painted images by leading artists, and ecclesiastical works tended to be the ones protected over the centuries and now installed in museum collections. Scholars celebrate the late medieval period as one in which sculptors in particular experimented with daring new formulations that cast Jesus and Mary as emphatically human figures with which one could empathize. But the compassionate veneration such images were intended to inspire veered toward idolatrous practice officially rejected (but often promoted) by the Church. If inquisitorial records and first person testimony of so-called heretics tell us that there were laypeople who sought to distance themselves from devotional engagement with images, can we find art historical evidence of similar dissent?
In this paper I argue that illuminated Weltchroniken of the decades around 1400 exhibit unease over contemporary Christian practices of image veneration. In these German vernacular, versified world chronicles, stories from the biblical past were retold to address contemporary concerns of lay city dwellers. I examine passages presenting the story of Daniel at the court of Nebuchadnezzar in three early fifteenth-centuryWeltchronik manuscripts (New York: NYPL Ms. Spencer 38; Los Angeles: Getty Ms. 33, and Munich: BSB Cgm 250). Analyzing images and texts of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream sculpture and subsequent idolatry, I argue that these manuscripts disclose an urban population skeptical about dominant Christian modes of worship.
