The topic of the Reformation and art can claim a long history. The Protestant movement had scarcely got under way before observers noted implications for painting and sculpture. The Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer in 1525 uttered warnings concerning the futility of image destruction and the difficulty of reviving the arts once they were lost. The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus also alluded to some of these problems. In a 1526 letter of introduction provided for Hans Holbein the Younger to take with him to the Netherlands, Erasmus explained the painter’s departure from Reformation Basel by stating that “here the arts are cold.” The Wittenberg reformer Martin Luther seems to have felt sensitive to accusations of responsibility for causing this frigid atmosphere. He once protested that he was not “of the opinion that the gospel should destroy and blight all the arts.”
Archive for May, 2010
Pamphlets
In the eighteenth century, the pamphlet was ubiquitous in western Europe and in the British colonies of North America. As brief, topical publications, pamphlets ranged in length from a few pages to well over one hundred; their print runs were as low as a few hundred copies or as high as several thousand. Once printed and published, they were sold at modest prices or distributed free (gratis). This favored form of publication offered authors a means of expressing themselves openly, anonymously, and relatively inexpensively. In countries with severe publication restrictions, individuals were able to produce illegal brochures and usually avoided detection or arrest because neither the authors nor the printers were readily identifiable. Even in locales like England, with no overt government censorship, the anonymous pamphlet allowed its author to speak boldly, with little fear of running afoul of the libel laws.
Vikings
The historical phe
nomenon that began on 8 June 793 with the sack of Lindisfarne abbey in Northumberland and ended around 1050 left a lasting trace in the memory of the frightened West. The Viking myth of the barbarian brute, standing in horned helmet at the prow of his drakkar, is still vivid today. And yet its causes are known: the Scandinavian pirates attacked rich and defenceless places, abbeys, collegiate churches, cathedrals and so on because they were not numerous enough to form true armies or fleets capable of confronting an enemy face to face. Their chosen victims, the clerics, were also the only ones capable of writing, particularly of writing down the chronicles or annals that are our usual starting-point for grasping the phenomenon. It is they who made the Viking an instrument of Satan or the arm of God come to chastise the West for its sins. Later on, the Viking became the model of the cavalier (18th c.), then of the Nietzschean Uebermensch.
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