In Reformation debates about the role of images, order was everything. Arguments for the preservation, steady removal, or total eradication of church art were constructed around the careful arrangement of nouns: God, material thing, and the person paying devotion could be related to one another in different permutations. Polemics of the period often construed one of these three nouns as the subject of the sentence, under threat by the other two. The selection of scriptural passages by preachers and pamphleteers required consideration of whether to establish fi rst the Hebraic command, Judaic example, Messianic pronouncement, Incarnational theology, or a portion of the Epistles' socially constructive advice. The exchanges between Martin Luther and Andreas Karlstadt scrutinized biblical syntax and dissected sentences in efforts to describe the possible relationships between tangible matter and divine presence. Proximity to God, as mediated through devices such as a sculpture, a wafer, or the human body itself, was measured across the separation of phrases found in different biblical books or clauses adjacent to one another within a given Gospel. Grammar was the battleground on which the two Wittenberg preachers fought.Luther and Karlstadt deliberated about the revised role of long-utilized devices of Christian worship through an analytics of prose. As a literary format, continuous prose -written communication as opposed to orally delivered speech -employs capital letters, conjoining words, and punctuation marks. 1 The ancient versions of the Bible's source languages, Hebrew and Greek, did not separate sentences with spaces nor distinguish between upper and lower case. Their praxis utilizes linking terms rather than semicolons or full stops, such as the repetition in the Old Testament of the Hebrew letter vav, which attaches to the beginning of a word to mean 'and'. In translation, biblical text conforms to vernacular convention. Annotations are an exercise in human freedom, Luther averred, 'but faith should and must rest on certainty, not on punctuation marks'. 2 Yet it was upon these inserted pauses, periods, and small linking words that his arguments hinged.In his analysis of the literary impact of the Bible, Northrop Frye observes that the structure of continuous prose lends itself well to the sequencing of cause and effect. Whereas in inner thought, the mind apprehends what has happened and then seeks explanation -processing effects before determining cause -in the composing of text authors tend to reverse the order, establishing fi rst the reasons for what will happen, then describing the events. 3 Frye's connecting of continuous prose with causality and his contrasting of this mode of writing with thought serves as a useful paradigm for Detail from Giacomo Rocca, Study for a Deposition, c. 1575 (plate 8). 314The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform establishing the terms of the argument that will follow, which is concerned with the communicative potential of a particular form of artistic re...
The extant works of Hugo van der Goes frustrated attempts among early historians of Netherlandish painting to organize the artist's career according to a chronology. The survival of a biographical document attesting to his madness additionally troubled the expectation of artistic progression. Goes earned the reputation of the first modern artist whose genius was connected to his aberrant psychology. This essay critically examines the impulse in art history toward temporal sequencing, arguing that such a practice is most profitably applied in the case of Goes not to his oeuvre as a whole but to a study of his process within an individual work. The alterations over time to the surface of The Fall of Man, which has often (but not unanimously) been deemed the artist's “first work,” afford consideration of how Goes thought about revision and how historians of early Netherlandish painting might engage disciplinary change by rethinking the impulse toward prioritization.
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