“Doing Away with Darkness”: A Review of Victoria George’s Whitewash and the New Aesthetic of the Protestant Reformation

Walking into First Presbyterian Church in downtown Tallahassee, Florida, one is struck by the beauty of the emptiness of the place—the walls are completely bare, the glass unstained, not a crucifix in sight.¹ Here is the telos of Reformed iconoclasm. But it isn’t only the lack of painted icons, of crucifixes, or of painted glass that’s so striking.² It isn’t, in other words, merely the absence of something that one finds to be aesthetically moving at First Pres., Tallahassee. The interior of the church is positively beautiful. It’s beautiful despite the lack of any art form or the presence of any color altogether. The gleaming brightness of the whitewashed walls is made brighter by the abundant sunshine that pours in through clear-glass windows, with contrast provided by the black-painted trim on the pews and railing. The grayish-blue, carpeted interiors of the churches of this reviewer’s youth did not conjure any such aesthetic response, or really any response whatsoever.³ Theological proclivities aside, Zwingli’s 1524 proclamation after the interior walls of the churches in Zurich had been stripped of icons and whitewashed (“The walls are beautifully white!”) becomes understandable here. And it is the response evoked by the sheer whiteness of the Reformed church interior—the fact that it is aesthetically and, perhaps, emotionally affective—that Victoria George is attempting to explain in her book Whitewash and the New Aesthetic of the Protestant Reformation. The purpose of the book is to add a new chapter to the long-standing narrative of sixteenth-century (particularly Reformed)⁴ iconoclasm, which narrative tends to reduce the movement to just that: iconoclasm—namely, that the Huldrych Zwinglis and John Calvins of the Reformed movement argued only that the adoration of icons in worship is deleterious to Christian piety and that the subsequent whitewashing of walls (a primary mode of covering over painted images) served as a way of simply “painting out,” of image obliteration. George, however, argues that the use of whitewash “is a representation in its own right” (xx), a “painting in” as well as a painting out, and that to understand it only as a cost-effective way of hiding a high-liturgical past is to leave out a significant aspect of the story.

Because there is basically no direct evidence that the major thinkers of Reformed iconoclasm imagined whitewash to be a theologically loaded, symbolic expression of various things the color white might be associated with theologically,⁵ the author employs a sort of kitchen sink approach⁶ in an attempt to provide sufficient cumulative evidence to convince the reader that there are decent reasons to think that the use of whitewash was a virtually inevitable consequence that followed from the “color-thinking” of Protestant theologians like Zwingli and Calvin, whose respective cities (Zurich and Geneva) carried out the earliest and most thoroughgoing iconoclastic raids. But, as is often the feeling of those on the receiving end of the kitchen sink approach, this reviewer has come away somewhat uncertain about the ultimate success of the venture. The book certainly has its virtues: the primary question itself, that is, whether we might imagine Protestant whitewash as its own form of iconography⁷—despite its obviousness to anyone acculturated with the common inversion tactics of postmodern critique—is an interesting question, and one that has apparently hardly been asked before, much less received book-length, scholarly attention. There are good and detailed descriptions of the decision-making processes (including documentary evidence of memoranda from various “councils” and “disputations”) revolving around the question of images in the major centers of Reformed Protestantism (especially Switzerland, the Netherlands, and England).⁸ By the end, the reader has a pretty good hold on the sixteenth-century iconoclastic controversies continent-wide, including all major events and figures. Chapter 3, “An Historical Overview of Whitewashing,” provides a broad and informative history of the process...