The Idol in the Age of Art. Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World (review)

Much has been said about the extraordinary growth—after 1970—of art historical and theological studies concerned with the Reformation image question and iconoclasm. They have now become a separate field of research, where the faultlines that after 1500 ripped apart the religious and visual civilization of Europe are studied in ever greater detail. However, Michael Camille's seminal book on The Gothic Idol (New York, 1989) did transcend the limitations of a mere debate between iconoclasts and iconodules by introducing the category of a pagan "idol" and its rebirth in the Italian Renaissance. Camille showed that medieval beliefs about Bildmagie persisted well into the beginnings of the baroque, when they were assimilated into the general framework of the "theatrum sacrum."

The book reviewed here, a collection of thirteen scholarly articles, intends to offer a broad perspective on the concept of the idol both as a category of theological strife and as a supplementary category codetermining the status of many an artwork between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century. Although idol was a somewhat vague designation and the charge of idolatry was often applied in a haphazard way, the European debate had fascinating cultural ramifications, including in its attitudes toward non-European societies. The book's essays are thus keyed specifically to the production and reception of objects from different parts of the world. Indeed, the idols of non-European cultures, be they African, Mexican, or Chinese in origin, play an important role in the thematic complex of the book, although as such they are defined not by an indigenous tradition or categorization but mostly by the then European points of view. This attention to the specific idolatrous object distinguishes the book from the more historical approaches to the question of images. Last but not least, it concerns itself also with internal idols in the shape of mental images (Rebecca Zorach).

The collection of essays is opened by a somewhat diffuse paper (Suzanne Preston Blier) on the fate of West African salt cellars that became often part of a European Kunstkammer-ambiente. In a similar thematic context, a paper by Clare Farago and Carol Parenteau explores the Spanish attitude toward Mexican painted manuscripts and their "grotesque idols. "Thomas Cummins discusses in a perspicacious contribution the perceptions of pre-Columbian indigenous American idolatry in the sixteenth century, both by the Spaniards and their reformed enemies (Theodore de Bry, 1598). Two further contributions concern Japan (Mia Mochizuki) and China (Dawn Odell). Whereas Mochizuki tries to apply—not always with success—the category of idol to Western art imports in Japan, Odell, on the other hand, analyzes the attitude of the famous Jesuit Athanasius Kircher toward Chinese religious figures.

The remaining contributions are devoted either to Renaissance adaptations of antique pagan idols or to the Protestant image question. Michael Cole offers a fascinating analysis of the deeper implications—subsumed by him under the term perpetual exorcism—of the "Christianization" of the ancient columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. Although the problem seems pretty straightforward at first glance, Cole manages to show how Pope Sixtus V intended a translation as much as a conversion of the images's power. Gerhard Wolf and Philine Helas's analysis of Filippino Lippi's Strozzi chapel frescoes is—maybe also due to a less than satisfactory translation—obviously carried away by its somewhat paradoxical rhetoric. More useful is Megan Holmes's presentation of Florentine ex votos, although the material is in its main parts rather well known.

Four papers are devoted to the Protestant-Catholic conflicts around the question of images and selected iconographical problems. Larry Silver offers an excellent overview of the post-Reformation Marian cult. Walter Melion analyzes the overlay of Catholic and Lutheran tropes in religious prints around 1600—a phenomenon investigated at great length by German...