Sculpted Signs and Shattered Idols in Illuminated Weltchroniken of the Early Fifteenth Century
Nina Rowe, Fordham University
April 5
7:30
CUNY Graduate Center, English Department Lounge
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 4406
Nina Rowe, Fordham University
April 5
7:30
CUNY Graduate Center, English Department Lounge
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 4406
It is a challenge for art historians to find visual evidence
of discomfort with dominant devotional practices in the late Middle Ages. The Church
was a key institution with the wealth to commission sculpted and painted images
by leading artists, and ecclesiastical works tended to be the ones protected
over the centuries and now installed in museum collections. Scholars celebrate
the late medieval period as one in which sculptors in particular experimented
with daring new formulations that cast Jesus and Mary as emphatically human
figures with which one could empathize. But the compassionate veneration such
images were intended to inspire veered toward idolatrous practice officially
rejected (but often promoted) by the Church. If inquisitorial records of
so-called heretics tell us that there were laypeople who sought to distance
themselves from devotional engagement with images, can we find art historical
evidence of similar dissent? In this paper I argue that illuminated Weltchroniken of the decades around 1400
exhibit unease over contemporary Christian practices of image veneration. In
these German vernacular, versified world chronicles, stories from the biblical
past were retold to address contemporary concerns of lay city dwellers. I examine
passages presenting the story of Daniel at the court of Nebuchadnezzar in two
early fifteenth-century Weltchronik
manuscripts (New York: NYPL Spencer 38 and Munich: BSB Cgm 250). Analyzing images
and texts of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream sculpture and subsequent idolatry, I argue
that these manuscripts disclose an urban population scornful of dominant
Christian modes of worship.