Utrecht, Netherlands
A good writer knows what to leave out of a sentence. A great photographer knows what to exclude from the frame. Sculptors chip away what they don’t need on a slab of marble. Composition invariably involves acts of subtraction. This I had known.
But it wasn’t until earlier this month that I learned that realism–or at least Dutch realism–was also born of a type of subtraction, the destruction and subsequent banning of religious imagery.
I was in Utrecht trying to catch the last rays of summer. On my first day, I walked 8 miles along canals, under sunny skies, stopping only twice to visit the Centraal Museum and then the Museum Catharijneconvent, which has a wonderful collection of religious art. Among the highlights of each were stark 17th century paintings of the interior of Dutch churches that had been stripped of devotional art by pious Calvinists in what the Dutch call the Beeldenstorm, the “attack on images.” English-speaking historians refer to this spasm of violence with more euphemistic terms like the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566 or just the Great Iconoclasm.
Initially instigated by the rantings of a zealous Reformed preacher in Flanders, the violence spread throughout much of Habsburg Low Countries. Under the guidance of Calvinist pastors, wandering rioters plundered sanctuaries, shattered altarpieces, defaced tombstones, and mutilated sculptures. The outbreak emboldened Reformed Protestants and led to their decision to use military tactics to fight their Spanish Catholic rulers. The Attack on Images was the start of the 80-years-long Dutch Revolt during which seven northern provinces united, declared their independence, and founded the Dutch Republic, a state often credited for giving birth to the Enlightenment.
The Reformed Church was central to the Dutch Republic’s identity. While it did not require that all citizens be members of the church, secular authorities nonetheless acknowledged it as the “only church that was allowed to publicly perform religious functions and to intervene publicly in moral affairs.”1 Government positions were reserved exclusively for Calvinists, and all forms of Catholic public expression were outlawed. In 1578/79, the Calvinists confiscated Catholic Churches, and “in accordance with Calvinist proscriptions on religious imagery,” further “denuded them of all religious objects—paintings, sculpture, stained glass, and alters”—that had survived the Fury of 1566.2
The justification for destroying and banning religious imagery was found in Calvin’s insistence that God could not be captured in art because He was transcendent and immaterial. Any attempt to do so, Calvin argued, simply degraded the glory of God. “We believe it wrong that God should be represented by a visible appearance,” he wrote, “because he himself has forbidden it and it cannot be done without some defacing of his glory.” Therefore, he concluded, “it remains that only those things are to be sculptured or painted which the eyes are capable of seeing: let not God’s majesty, which is far above the perception of the eyes, be debased through unseemly representations.”3
Art historians generally agree that the destruction and discouragement of sacred imagery had three unintended consequences. The decline in ecclesiastical commissions meant that art largely migrated from churches to the open market place, that art became increasingly valued for its aesthetic rather than spiritual qualities, and, lastly, that the suppression of religious themes encouraged artists to turn to varying genres of realism. “Whereas before 1566,” historian Angela Vanhaelen wrote, “the majority of artistic commissions were for churches and devotional purposes, after 1600 there was a significant rise in the development of specializations.”4 Painters focused on new genres like still life, household scenes, portraits, or landscapes. Once considered marginal at best, images of the mundane and the quotidian now became common—if not primary—themes in Dutch painting.
Realism as an artistic style arose in tandem with what historians call religious liberty. Religious liberty is associated with the the Enlightenment. But as the story of the Beeldenstorm suggests, it really flourished under a mandate from the Reformed Church. Artists were careful not to produce any works that could be considered idolatrous. Scholars disagree as to whether painters were merely avoiding sacred themes or had found the sacred in the mundane. I assume both can be true.
I’ve always been drawn to realism, both in art and ideas. To my cluttered head, simplicity and clarity can come across as sublime, even liberating. But it’s important to remember that there’s also a proscription involved, a self-limiting aspect, a refusal to perceive beyond what the eye can see. Realism can both reveal and obscure.
I enjoyed my few days in Utrecht. But then I took a train to Cologne to marvel at the sight of its magnificent Catholic Gothic cathedral that inspired my eyes and spirit to look toward the heavens.
- Willem Frijhoff, “Was the Dutch Republic a Calvinist Community? The State, the Confessions, and Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands,” in The Republican Alternative: The Netherlands and Switzerland Compared ed. André Holenstein, Thomas Maissen and Maarten Prak (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 105. ↩︎
- Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age, (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 17. ↩︎
- Angela Vanhaelen, “Calvinism and Visual Culture: The Art of Evasion,” in Cultures of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Crawford Gribben and Graeme Murdock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 141. ↩︎
- Vanhaelen, “Calvinism and Visual Culture,” 141. ↩︎
