The Authority of the Word

Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400-1700
Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-90-04-21515-3
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 20, 710 Seiten, Format (B × H): 166 mm x 246 mm, Gewicht: 1410 g

Reihe: Intersections

Scripture, authority, word and image, hermeneutics, visual exegesis

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brusati, Celeste

Enenkel, Karl A E

Melion, Walter

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Notes on the Editors
Notes on the Contributors
List of Illustrations

Introduction: Scriptural Authority in Word and Image
WALTER S. MELION, CELESTE BRUSATI AND KARL ENENKEL

I. VERBUM VISIBLE: THE AUTHORITY OF THE VISIBLE WORD

The Dominican, the Duke and the Book.
The Authority of the Written Word in Dirc van Delft’s Tafel vanden kersten gelove
GEERT WARNAR

Producing Texts for Prints: Artists, Poets and Publishers
PETER VAN DER COELEN

Embodying Hermeneutics: Rabelais and the Pythagorean Symbola
ANITA TRANINGER

Nature Discerned: Providence and Perspective in Gilles van Coninxloo’s Sylva
CATHERINE LEVESQUE

II. THE AUTHORITY OF VISUAL PARATEXTS

The Author’s Portrait as Reader’s Guidance:

The Case of Francis Petrarch
KARL A.E. ENENKEL

Solomon Writing and Resting: Tradition, Words and Images in the 1548 Dutch
“Louvain Bible”
WIM FRANÇOIS

III. READING SCRIPTURE THROUGH IMAGES

Eloquent Presence: Verbal and Visual Discourse in the Ghent Plays of 1539
BART RAMAKERS

The Earthly Paradise: Herri met de Bles’s Visual Exegesis of Genesis 1-3
MICHEL WEEMANS

Representations of Adam and Eve in Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English
Embroidery
ANDREW MORRALL

IV. VERBAL AND VISUAL INSTRUMENTS OF DEVOTIONAL AUTHORITY

“Practical Devotion”: Apotropaism and the Protection of the Soul
JOHN R. DECKER

Highways to Heaven (and Hell): Wayside Crosses and the Making of Late Medieval
Landscape
ACHIM TIMMERMANN

Images, Rubrics and Indulgences on the Eve of the Reformation
KATHRYN M. RUDY

The Stigmata Debate in Theology and Art in the Late Middle Ages
CAROLYN MUESSIG

Towards a Transconfessional Dialogue on Pre-Modern Theological Texts and Images:

Some Adnotationes on Nadal, Lipsius and Rubens
BIRGIT ULRIKE MÜNCH

Responding to Tomb Monuments: Meditations and Irritations of Aernout van Buchel in
Rome (1587 – 1588)
JAN L. DE JONG

Miracle Books and Religious Architecture in the Southern Netherlands.
The Case of Our Lady of Hanswijk in Mechelen
MAARTEN DELBEKE

V. PICTORIAL ARTIFICE AND THE WORD

Prayerful Artifice: The Fine Style as Marian Devotion in Hieronymus Wierix’s
Maria of ca. 1611
WALTER S. MELION

Secret Wisdom: Antoon Wierix’s Engravings of a Carmelite Mystic
JAMES CLIFTON

Working the Senses with Words: The Act of Religious Reading in the Dutch Republic
ELS STRONKS

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION: SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY IN WORD AND IMAGE

The third Lovis Corinth Colloquium, convened at Emory University in October 2009, provided the initial forum within which the historians of art, literature, and religion, whose revised papers make up this book, were invited to consider the mutual form and function, manner and meaning of texts and images, as these were conceived and deployed in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700. Implicit in the titular epigraph, ‘Authority of the Word’, is a reference to scriptural authority and to the textual instruments–the Bible and its commentaries–that mediated access to the divine word, making it discernible and apprehensible. In early modern Europe, visual images served likewise as enabling instruments that fostered colloquy between God and men, making divine providence intelligible to human knowledge. Like texts, images partook of rhetorical forms and hermeneutic functions–typological, paraphrastic, parabolic, among others–based largely in illustrative traditions of biblical commentary. In the sixteenth century, the introduction of the emblem and its text-image apparatus further complicated the theory and practice of scriptural image-making. If the specific relation between biblical texts and images exemplified the range of possible relations between texts and images more generally, it also operated in tandem with other discursive paradigms–scribal, humanistic, antiquarian, historical, and literary, to name but a few–for the connection, complementary or otherwise, between verbal and visual media. These alternative discourses provided further lenses through which textual and pictorial practices of invention and interpretation were viewed. In this volume of Intersections, the dynamic interaction between scriptural image and scriptural text also supplies the secundum comparatum, to which other kinds of relation between image and text are implicitly compared. The authors consider various types of text-image apparatus, asking how they were employed to represent, and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular.
By way of introduction, we want here to examine three pictures that incorporate sacred texts, composing words and images into templates for the possible relations between visual and verbal methods of scriptural interpretation. All three case-studies comment reflexively upon the nature of this relationship, which they also serve to exemplify. Printed images function as agents of the soul’s conformation to Christ in Willem van Branteghem’s celebrated Gospel harmony, the Iesu Christi vita, iuxta quatuor Evangelistarum narrationes of 1537 [Fig. 1]. The full title highlights the importance of pictorial images to the book’s form and function: The Life of Jesus Christ Skillfully Portrayed in Most Elegant Pictures Drawn from the Narratives of the Four Evangelists. Lieven de Witte of Ghent designed and perhaps also executed the 186 oblong woodcuts that punctuate the Iesu Christi vita, generally as head-pieces taking up a third of the page. Many of these prints are self-referential, in that they call attention to the use of visual images by Christ himself, who is seen to wield them as didactic tools for instilling evangelical doctrine. Plate 25, for example, illustrates John 3: 1-21, Jesus’s nighttime conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus, whom He teaches about the kingdom of God, soon to be made visible to the eyes of faith: just as the brazen serpent was lifted up by Moses, that the Israelites might look at it and be healed, so the Son of Man, the only begotten Son of God, shall be lifted up, that they who see Him and believe may not perish but have life everlasting [Fig. 2]. De Witte ingeniously illustrates this visual analogy, showing how Jesus relies upon a pictorial image to analogize Himself, as living antitype, to the brazen serpent, a merely graven image. Nicodemus sits with Christ, who gestures toward the painting, displayed on the house altar at the

Über Autor(innen)

Celeste Brusati is Professor of the History of Art and Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has published on the relations between visual and literary discourses on art in the early modern Netherlands, particularly in still life, self-imagery, perspective, and trompe l’oeil, and on the artists Samuel van Hoogstraten, Pieter Saenredam, and Johannes Vermeer.

Karl Enenkel is Professor of Medieval and Neo-Latin Literature at the University of Münster, Germany, and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). He has published on international Humanism, the reception of Classical Antiquity, the history of ideas, literary genres and emblem studies.

Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has taught since 2004. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artists Otto van Veen and Hendrick Goltzius.