The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age (review)

This important book provides an extended analysis—pictorial, functional, contextual, and theological—of the six scriptural tekstborden (text panels) installed in the Great Church of Haarlem between 1580 and 1585, where they served as confessional statements avowing the conversion of this formerly Roman Catholic cathedral into a purified Temple of the Word. Painted onto columns, hung from piers, elevated above the choir screen, and inserted into the stone armature that once supported the high altarpiece, these panels, also known as tekstschilderijen (text paintings), consist of biblical citations and paraphrases that substitute divinely sanctioned litterae for the Catholic figural images recently despoiled by iconoclasts and then systematically (and carefully) removed by civic authorities. The subjects—the Last Supper, Ten Commandments, Passages from Matthew and from John, supplemented by the biblical compendia assembled in the Greengrocers’ and Linen Weavers’ Paintings, as well as by the commemorative Siege of Haarlem on the reverse of the Last Supper—constitute a programmatic statement of Reformed religious identity, as Mochizuki amply demonstrates.

The author invokes the reform theology of Erasmus, as set forth by scholars such as Carlos Eire, to explain how these text panels materialize a new kind of image-theory, at once verbal and visual, that substitutes textual simulacra for pictorial eikones, the written for the enfleshed Word, as representational indices of the transcendent and therefore incommensurable presence of God within the communal fabric of the Church. Mochizuki construes the tekstborden as specimens of what she calls Reformed aesthetics: The posticonoclastic image, she argues, swaps verisimilar imitation for indexical portrayal as the key principle of sacred image-making. The text panels respond to John Calvin’s prohibition against the corporeal representation of God, an interdict enshrined in Question 97 of the Heidelberg Catechism, by emphasizing that he has been portrayed in an emphatically mediated and referential fashion. Instead of a lifelike effigy, the worshiper is given an image composed of words, either gilt or painted in oil on stone or panel, that renders doctrinal truths beyond the scope of any conventional picture. Mochizuki insists on the artifice of these indices of the Word: Composed of depicted words, they enshrine the knowledge of God to be found in Scripture, which is transmitted visually and yet verbally; at the same time, these painted texts implicitly allude to the Catholic imagery they supplant, that falsely purveyed the illusion of unmediated access to embodied divinity. Having displaced mimesis as the principle of sacred image-making, they call attention to their novel status as examples of a “symbolic or metonymic system of representation [that] changed the very idea of what decoration in churches should be” (p. 140).

The question arises: Why was it so imperative to retain the vestiges of the image? Mochizuki would seem to provide several answers. First, Calvin and his Dutch adherents, well aware of the human need for outward signs of devotion, provided tangible indicators through which churchgoers could convey, or better, represent their relation to God. These expressions of congregational piety were devised to underscore the differences between Catholic and Reformed modes of worship. Second, the text image provided a “visual locus of meeting” (p. 261), differing in this respect from book texts; through engagement with the tekstborden, the community represents to itself the hermeneutic work of scriptural reading and the institutional project of fashioning the new Church of Christ. Third, text images like the Last Supper refer specifically to the Reformed understanding of the Eucharist as a sacramental commemoration (ghedachtenisse) of the memorial meal instituted by Christ to recall his redemptive sacrifice. Whereas figural altarpieces body forth the doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the species of bread and wine are sacramentally transformed into the body and blood of Christ, the indexical tekstborden emphatically signify that the sacrament is referential and metaphorical. The calligraphic pointing of doctrinally resonant words such as bread, body, and testament, drives home this point...