New times arrived. But alongside the flowering of humanism and the Renaissance, a grave moral and spiritual crisis shook the Church. Alas, the changes were accompanied by violence and destruction of extreme brutality, owing to the iconoclastic fury of the Protestants.
Indeed, the adherents of Church reform condemned holy images, basing themselves on Biblical prohibitions:
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them”
In its materiality the image is deceiving; the danger exists that the true believer may venerate the image itself more than what it represents. The image, by its power of seduction, may lead the senses astray instead of inciting to prayer. By its excessive cost, the image encourages the egoistic pride of rich donors and not their charitable duty towards the most deprived; God must be served through his poor rather than by vain expenditure on sculptures and paintings of excessive proliferation. Those were some of the arguments set forth, with variations, by all the leaders of the Reformation in their works, their sermons or their pamphlets. Luther was relatively moderate, insisting on the educative role of narrative subjects while denouncing temptations to idolatry and the squandering of money. Thus he blamed Carlstadt’s iconoclastic zeal at Wittenberg in 1522 and condemned the violence of “criminals and pillaging hordes of peasants” at the time of the peasant revolts of 1524—1525 in South Germany. In Switzerland, first Zwingli, then Calvin, criticized sacred images more radically, urging their suppression or destruction.
As the ideas of the Reformation, mingled with material and social demands, made headway in Europe, the manifestations of iconoclasm multiplied in diverse forms: sporadic outbreaks or intense explosions like that in the Netherlands during the year s66; spontaneous acts of handfuls of individuals driven by poverty and religious fanaticism, or movements orchestrated by civic authorities won over to the new doctrines. Thus at Strasbourg beginning in 1524, under the auspices of the town council, paintings, crucifixes, altarpieces and other images began to be removed from religious buildings and systematically destroyed or sometimes carefully dismantled. Inevitably, in many towns, sculptors in want of commissions were reduced to expatriating themselves or to begging for living allowances, and often ended up in poverty. The printing press played a considerable role in the spread of the Reformers’ doctrines, in particular those of Luther and Calvin. And preachers everywhere carried on the most active propaganda, for example thundering against the scandalous figures of female saints adorned more luxuriously than prostitutes, a veritable incitement to voluptuousness and not to pious thoughts.
At Steenvoorde in Flanders, on so August 1566, following a sermon by Sebastian Matte, some twenty members of the audience stormed the monastery and laid waste all the images. The destructive rage reached its height during the Beggars’ Revolt; the inhabitants of Tournai sacked the churches of their town, looted the treasuries, profaned the relics and smashed the statues. In France the Huguenots also engaged in blasphemous demonstrations and wholly devastated many religions edifices, in the south and southwest especially. In England, under the auspices of the monarchy, the Anghcan Reformation entailed, over and above the suppression of the monasteries and the sale of their goods, the systematic destruction of monumental figures decorating the church choirs and chapels.
Thousands of sculptures accordingly perished in the agonies of the Bildersturm, annihilated in the flames of pyres and beneath the blows of pickaxes or irreparably mutilated. Works fallen forever into oblivion or illustrious works of which surviving records preserve the memory, sharpening our regret at their loss, such as the altarpiece by Nicholas of Leyden on the high altar of the cathedral of Constance destroyed during the Zwinglian iconoclasm, or the altarpiece by Michael Erhart and Jorg Syrlin the Elder in the cathedral of Ulm, torn down by the Lutherans.
Other agonies, military or revolutionary, later contributed, it is true, to the disappearance of many medieval images. And this is not to forget changes in taste and the desire to renovate or purify church decoration, largely responsible for multiple destructions of Gothic altarpieces, stalls, rood screens and choir screens. If the reforming iconoclasm banned religions art, the Church of the Counter-Reformation, which defended it, wanted itto be above reprdach and called for austerity and decency.
“The Middle Ages ended on the day the Church itself condemned them,” wrote Emile Male, deploring the death of medieval iconographic traditions after the Council of Trent (1545—i563). But we also know that in spite of everything the Middle Ages remained strongly present, as Henri Focillon affirms: “They have not disappeared, they have not been wiped out. It would seem the West is nostalgic for them. The nostalgia became a conscious longing in England in the eighteenth century, with the neo-Gothic style dear to Horace Walpole. It gathered strength with the progress of Romanticism, and the nineteenth century finally gave it the tone and power of an historic force... This marks the beginning of a vast inquiry which, starting from a reaction of taste and ever sustained by more intense forces, ends in a wider knowledge of the past, in a more complete possession of mankind.” Read More
If the taste of late Gothic artists for ornamental luxuriance became more pronounced in architectural decoration, as in Picardy or the Iberian peninsula, without any genuine renewal of plastic language, in the Germanic lands on the contrary sculpture moved into a strange and violent world reshaped now by the social and religious upheavals of the age. The afterglow of a style, this “baroque Gothic” is fascinating to an eye and mind willing to accept its excesses and vagaries. Within a broad movement essentially affecting the southern part of the Empire and involving a new generation of sculptors active from about 1510 on, the tendency described as “Danubian” asserted itself with force and originality.
Over and above controversies concerning the notion of a “Danube school” in painting (Doriaustil), there is general agreement on a close community in spirit and forms between the works of the main representanves of the Danubian style and the sculptures produced concurrently in the same Austro-Bavarian region. The genesis of the new plastic style occurred within the late Gothic tradition, taking .the old methods a step further while developing new rhetoric in perfect osmosis with the contemporary graphic and pictorial language, as shown by the sculptures of Hans Leinberger, mentioned at Landihut from iio to 1530. If, for example, the tumultuous draperies clothing his figures and soaring far out from the body in arbitrary folds spring from the previous Gothic conception, their treatment avoids angles and breaks in favour of floating undulations at the edges and large inflated folds, tracing long diagonals interrupted here and there by little stiff crinkles on the surface of the fabric: a treatment closely corresponding to the manner of Albrccht Altdorfer (Re— gensburg, c. 1480*1538), as seen in his pen and ink drawings on a dark ground where white highlights bring out the forms and billowing folds with festooned curves and parallel bands.
Leinberger, who, moreover, worked in 1518-1519 at the same rime as the painter for the new Sehiine Maria pilgrimage church in Regensburg, appears to have transformed Altdorfer’s graphic inventions into volumes. At the very least he exploited plastically the new formal pos— sibilities offered by the Danubian style, as also initiated by other artists inch ai Lucas Granach the Elder (Gronach 1472-Weimar 13) and Jhrg Breu (Augsburg, c. 1475- 1537). The pictorial component is even more present in Leinberger’s bmewood or boxwood reliefs without poly chromy (some bearing the sculptor’s monogram), which reflect the strange atmosphere of Danubian works and a characteristic taste for the vegetable kingdom. In the moving scenes of martyrdom or the Passion, the natural elements, like the falling branches of the grear sprnces on rhe banks of the Danube, seem quickened by the same inner movement as the figures, their hair, their clothing and even some accessories. The lines play freely and mingle in an apparent but skilfully controlled confusion. Both in works of very small format and in monumental figures, the poses and drapery, far more than the faces, render the emotions with a power of expression and a capacity ofinvennon that puts Leinberger in the front rank of the sculptors of his time and makes him the equal of the great Danubian painters. His influence pervades a large number of anonymous Bavarian sculptures of varying qualities, often hard to classify into distinct groups, like the one formed by the works of the Master of the Altotting Doors, a personality more independent than the mere imitators of the master.
Leinberger also exerted a certain influence on the Salz— burg and Passau workshops, connected by their common links with the Danube school. The Master of lrrsdorf, Andreas Laekner, or the sculptors who worked with the painter Wolf Huber (c. 1485 — Passau 1553), notably on the Peldkirch altarpiece (1515—1521), borrowed extensively from engraved or painted models for the compositional designs and formal types of their carvings in relief or inthe round.
The mysterious Master l.P., maker of several small panels in pearwood without polychromy carved with a subtle virtuosity, was active during the I520s, perhaps at Pasiau or Salzburg, and more doubtfully in Prague, where sculptures attributed to his workshop are preserved (altar— pieces of Zlichov and the Tyn church). The Mourning over the Dead Christ in Leningrad, signed with the monogram I.P., shows how the master absorbed and transformed Leinberger’s vision, amplifying the pathos and sense of space, which he developed further in depth and suggested by foreshortened bodies, delicate shadings and increased emphasis on natural setting. In the Original Sin reliefs at Gotha and Vienna (the latter dated 152i), inspired by a Drer engraving of 1504, the accent is placed on the fabulous landscape, the fantastic rocks and tall trees with rough and knotty trunks, made in the image of the Danubian painters. The free attitude of the two nude figures, Adam turning seen from behind, and Eve animated by a slight contrapposto, shows a concern for the representation of the body marked by the humanism of cultivated circles, for whom, moreover, these small cabinet pieces highly prized by collectors were intended. Master I.P. thereby links up with the new art of the Renaissance, although his tall slim figures with their rngged features remain alien to antique balance and regularity, and later seemed to evolve towards a mannerist formulation.
On the edge of the Danube region and outside it, countless works of traditional use, altarpieces and devotional images, were made in ateliers that followed the general trend of style in the iins and I520s and seem more resistant to the Renaissance spirit even when they resort abundantly to an antique repertory of ornament, with garlands, pilasrers and putti. Regional or individual nuances shift the common tendencies towards an overwrought accentuation of forms, lines and expression:
the leering and gesturing figures in the altarpiece of Mauer near Melk (Lower Austria); the giddy swirling movement that galvanizes the Zwettl sculptures (Lower Austria); the monsfrously overblown tulip of Hans Witten’s pulpit in the cathedral of Preiberg (Saxnny); the brutal dynamism of Claus Berg’s apostles in the cathedral of Cstrow (Meeklenbnrg); or the rentacular sprouting of the Tree of Jesse in Douvermann’s alrarpiece at Kalkar (Rhineland).
In addition to the garments buffeted by a violent wind, as in Claus Berg, or blistered and quivering as in the sculptures nfLeinberger and Master I.P., a type of drapery with parallel folds had a widespread success in quite different regions such as Carinthia, Tyrol and Swabia, where the ourpn,t of the Memmingen workshops was characteristic of this Parallelfaltenstil. Thus the Master of Ottobeuren (possibly Hans Thoman, active at Memmingen from 1514 to 1525), named after the Annunciation and Nativity reliefs preserved in the great Benedictine abbey of Ottobeuren, patterns the limewood surface with a strange network of curved and regular lines which is carefully organized and sets up a play of light and shadow. At the same time the forms of his figures, whose quiet self— possession is very much in the Swabian tradition, acquire a genuine plasticity which seems to echo the new humanism; it recurs in most contemporary works, beginning with those of Leinberger and the Danubian sculptors. On the other hand, the reliefs place the figures in tiers on ascending levels in almost complete contempt of the representation of space.
Master H.L. carried the tension and instability of lines to their peak. His monogram appears on several prints dated from 1511 to 1522 as well as on the Breisach altar— piece, completed in 1526, without our being able to ascertain whether this engraver was also the sculptor or merely the designer of the carvings. And his training remains equally obscure, since the manner of this sculptor, who has affinities with Danubian art, is strikingly original. The swirling eddies of the clothing, hair, vegetation and clouds tend to submerge the figures in the Breisach Coronation of the Virgin and completely fill the area of the shrine. But extravagance here is restrained with supreme mastery. The intricacy of the forms does not weaken the expressive force, and the overall view of the work is never blurred by excessive ornament. The monumental effects peculiar to late Gothic German altarpieces full of large figure carvings are enhanced here by the power and plastic authority of the divine personages. A sublime work, this Breisach altarpiece, which, as against the serene assurance of the Renaissance, opens up a magic world and points the way to Baroque.
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New times arrived. But alongside the flowering of humanism and the Renaissance, a grave moral and spiritual crisis shook the Church. Alas, the changes were accompanied by violence and destruction of extreme brutality, owing to the iconoclastic fury of the Protestants. 