The Reformation of the Image by Joseph L Koerner

CITATION: Koerner, Joseph L. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2008. Print.

Understanding

• Question: What did Protestant iconoclasts do with art?
• Answer: Protestants interject texts into visual representation, distancing the representation from its represented, just as they struggled with the paradox in Christ's broken-iconicity.
  "... I shift the focus from the iconoclasts' complaints to the images the iconoclasts themselves produce... I discern an iconoclasm in the Christian image itself." (80)
• Method: Koerner evaluates the underpinnings of German Protestant visual arts, especially those by Cranach the elder, through a litany of paintings, pamphlets, altarpieces and architecture.
  Koerner also briefly mentions a collaboration with Bruno Latour, invoking Latour's translational semiotics to highlight a paradox central to iconoclasm: the iconoclast believes in the fundamental connection between represented and representation, yet the representation never gets to the represented directly.
  In each chapter, Koerner moves from an ecumenical and established, but ultimately empty, site of iconoclasm outward to new sites of signification in society.
• Assumptions: Koerner responds to a view of the Reformation as antithetical to art, a view that is apparently a well-established as trope in art history. 
• Sententiae:
• Indeed the whole picture with its pairing of image and text, object and word, act and exegesis, reads like the key to such an exam [as the catechism]. here stand distinguished and explain the legal, social and doctrinal bases of the evangelical church. (21-22)
• In its profusion in Lutheran pictures, language itself reveals an opacity at odds with a hermeneutics of inner sense. Like the crosswords of letters common in early Lutheran school primers, the inscriptions in Reformation art, often illegible or abbreviated, recall that, for a culture of limited literacy, writing functioned as a token, rather than as a vehicle of sense. (36)
• [Franz von Sickingen] affirms an exclusive space where images can be appreciated for their 'art and beauty' alone. Church is for everyone but its seductive pictures belong in 'beautiful chambers' of nobles like himself. This has been a dominant story of the origin of the category 'art.' Transferred from church to collection, images become neutral objects of aesthetic experience. (59)
• People had long believed that harm or help could come from seeing a thing, that the eye either touched the object's surface through extramission or was intromissively touched by the eidola emitted by the object, and that the eye was itself the soul's window... Seeing the host achieved a Communion as effective as eating it. (71)
• Basil's formula, invoked by Christian iconophiles since the Byzantine image controversy, does not merely tell people how they ought to pray. It describes what prayers to images of Christ, the Virgin and the saints will always automatically do. Add to this the diagram of the semiotic circuitry of pictures, Emser and Eck add variations on the doctrine--as canonical as the image-prototype distinction itself--of the threefold function of church pictures, as Bibles for the illiterate, memory aids and incitements to devotion. This is what images do for Christians. Not the abomination of those perennial Others, the idolaters; the use of images is rule-bound and reasonable. Unfortunately, this rationality-conviction is challenged on two fronts. On the one hand, the abominable idolaters would surely also reply that they can distinguish between the gods and their statues. On the other hand, the iconoclast will know all these alibis and more, but not believe them. (97)
• Images are tautological. They show what they show--that a wound is there, not what the wound means. (139)
• The word 'mysticism' comes from myo, meaning 'to close the eyes.' ... In the language of Meister Eckhart, image 'de-image' [sic] (entbilden). They allow the mystic to encounter Christ negatively, in the blackness of death, and in the uncanny darkness of Christ's empty grave. (140)
• The premier image-maker of northern European culture in 1500, Durer recognized that pictures are, at best, mediators, affectincg without determining what their viewers see in them. Or as Bruno Latour puts it, 'Images count... because they allow one to move to another image, exactly as frail and modest as the former one--but different.' 
• The notion that thoughts are pictures is powerful and old. It stands suspended in the word 'idea,' which, deriving from the Greek 'to see,' is etymologically linked to eidolon or 'visible image.' Plato and Aristotle famously compared the mind to a wax tablet into which sensible objects impress their form; the Church Fathers used the word eikon to denote paintings and sculptures as well as thoughts, concepts, and analogies; and even the young Wittgenstein espoused a picture theory of meaning (which he later worked hard to dismantle). Pushed to an extreme, the theory that words make mental pictures suggests that pictures are the better medium. The eighth-century patriarch Nicephoros, writing against iconoclasts, argued that words and pictures were equally images of reality. But since words, to be understood, had to be translated into images (through a thought-process Nicephoros called analogismos), they were less direct and comprehensible than graphic representations which were images already. More so than sermons or writ, icons could offer unmediated knowledge of God. (162-3)
• When, in his 1525 treatise on measurement, Albrecht Durer showed how to make high-up inscriptions legible from the ground, the text he used for his illustration was the VDMIE motto in German... each element of which is sized relative to a positioned beholder. Words cannot 'remain eternal' if they are to stay readable from different points of view. Northern European art's first writer on perspective therefore teaches a method for writing in perspective. Erasmus evoked a similar condition of language as surface or inscription when he cited two types of illegibility: one where the alphabet is foreign and the letters do not 'look back at us'; the other, where the words are far off and eyeglasses are necessary. Although the text on Durer's monument affirms the absolute reference of the words--'the word [that] is Christ'--his perspectivist scenography, treating words as things, reveals the contingency of their inscription. (284-5)
• The founder of modern hermeneutics and the renewer of Luther's faith, Friedrich Schleiermacher, banned from poetry all verses 'that look like an axe or bottle.' In his view, picture poems conveyed messages through their external form; they therefore violated the primacy of inner sense that hermeneutics assumed--religiously--for language. (295)
• [Reactionary legal theorist Carl] Schmitt attributed to Protestantism the replacement of this realist politics [that the Church solely represents Christ] by a fiction of personal responsibility and impersonal representation. Displaced to the abstract principle of 'the people,' representation became empty: 'a plurality of copies' substituted for 'a unique existence,' as Walter Benjamin wrote from quite the opposite politics. (364)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Like Duffy's, this is a book so large I couldn't do it justice. Nevertheless, I can attest to Koerner's exhaustive research and effective inversion of "iconoclasm" as a trope among art historians.
• Synthesis: In my notes for O'Connelll, I had over-read a claim that the sight of Christ's suffering implicated the viewer: Koerner's introduction to the eidolon provides the means of visual empathy; the eidolon provides the limit. It seems that sacramental sight was in decline in the late middle ages, and it's highly doubtful that the same ideology could be transferred by early modern audiences to the play-house.
• Application: Koerner's treatment of the intra-Reformation feuds, especially between the Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Calvinists provides a provocative jumping-off point for analyzing and distinguishing the  Dutch refugee printers in early modern London. Did the Calvinists flee Geneva to maintain their craft of engraved printing? Did the Lutherans continue to proselytize with illustrated pamphlet covers?