The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in
the Era of Reform
Shira Brisman
Detail from Giacomo Rocca,
Study for a Deposition, c. 1575
(plate 8).
DOI:
10.1111/1467-8365.12308
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790
40 | 2 | April 2017 | pages 312-335
Association of Art Historians 2017
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 first
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 Bibles 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 first the reasons for what will happen,
then describing the events.3 Fryes connecting of continuous prose with causality and
his contrasting of this mode of writing with thought serves as a useful paradigm for
313
The 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 representation the graphic
study defined here as a subcategory of the drawing that assembles parts whose
relationships to one another have not been worked out with the full confidence or
clarity of a finalized composition. The aim of this essay is to call attention to the extent
to which such studies that were made around the time of the Reformation look like
prophetic pronouncements of the destruction that images faced during the most
violent episodes of iconoclasm, and then to call for a resistance to seeing them as such.4
Corporeal fragments have the capacity to haunt the viewer. Never-executed
extensions might appear as obliterations rather than as abandoned opportunities
for fleshing out. This is particularly the effect of seeing such studies from a position
of knowledge about the images fall that is, its decline from a place of security
about the access to holy figures that it had to offer, to a condition that called for
clarifying statements or carefully positioned meta-commentaries about what it
could do. If the transgression of Eden could be imagined to represent a change in
viewing experience, one that engaged thoughts of mortality along with a guilt about
the ease of submitting to ocular arousal, then the iconoclasms that resulted from
the Protestant Reformation could be imagined to represent a new postlapsarian
perspective.5 Modern beholders may be able to recognize the effects of image
destruction or violent modification in works of art conceived before the most
uproarious episodes of Protestant cleansing.6 Of course, iconoclasm is more than a
set of distinctive affairs such as those of the 1520s and 1566. Physical attacks were
launched before, in between, and after the riots that decimated the churches of
Wittenberg, Zrich, and Antwerp. Verbal assailments upset the status of the image,
demanding that an artwork be crafted with attention to a self-defence.
Knowledge of this history might encourage a simile whereby the unarranged
parts found in graphic studies resemble the rubble of idols destroyed. But they are,
in fact, not yet that. Graphic sketches instead present the components of a visual
language designed to describe the divine through a form of expression that is, as it
were, pre-linguistic in state. To recognize their capacity as such is to suspend the
observation that artists, in the practice of limning broken parts, had prior access to
visions of what might become of their art in its opponents hands. To assert the place
of the study in the process of making, when considering drawings made in the era
of Reform, is to do more than put forth the truism that artistic trials precede final
products. Rather, such a call to order requires something of a de-spectacularization
of iconoclasm from the place it has held in the vantage point of historical hindsight.
The reward of this proposed adjustment is to see how the sixteenth-century drawing
gained and still maintains communicative efficacy, even if it was not initially
construed for such a purpose or intended as an object to be collected and interpreted
by those outside of the artistic trade. In the space of the preparatory sheet, artists
inevitably implied but did not draw out connections between the divine body and
the accessories cloth, crown, cross with which it came into contact. The rhetoric
and writing of reformers articulated relationships with great precision. Karlstadt
and Luther launched public debates about grammar, sorting out the connectivities
between the divine body and its surrogates of made things. Graphic studies arrange
different elements upon a single sheet without connective infrastructure, allowing
their beholders to work them out, or not. Evidence of bodies unformed rather than
disassembled, the pages that circulated around and eventually outside of the
artists studio provide the most expansive possibilities for imagining how the figure
of God might take on a new life.

Association of Art Historians 2017 314

Shira Brisman

Parataxis
A partial body. The suggestion of a cloth. In a drawing by Albrecht Drer, these
two subjects are hierarchically ordered, though they remain unattached (plate 1).
By nature vertical in orientation, the human form determines the direction of the
page, establishing the figures head at the top and subordinating the cloth to the

1 Albrecht Drer, Man of

Sorrows and Drapery Study, c.
1511. Pen and black ink, 23.1
14.4 cm. London: The British
Museum. Photo: The Trustees
of the British Museum.

Association of Art Historians 2017 315

The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform

lower region of the pictorial field. Christs body is made remarkably present through
the hand that fingers the wound in his side and the eyes that transmit a sorrowful
longing even beneath the rapid hatchmarks of a suggested shadow. Curls tumble
over collarbone. From the crown of thorns, Drer streaks lines of ink. The graphic
looseness of his pen presents the man and the mood. But the artists hand stops short
of fully fleshing the figure out. Christs left arm dissolves into nothingness. He has
no hips or legs. Ungrounded, the figure cannot stand. This sketch of Christ seems to
nominate the indeterminacy native to drawing as the representational mode best
suited to capturing the paradoxes involved in figuring the divine.7
The fabric below Christs abdomen is a scrappy sample that belongs to a tradition
of trials that test mastery of the fold.8 Swatches were frequently employed in training
exercises for the development of graphic style because they pose the challenge of
suggesting a three-dimensional presence beneath the rumpled bolt. Because the
inchoately rendered cloth in Drers drawing is adjacent rather than attached to the
body, the relationship of the pages two parts remains open. The cloak may pose a
taunt to the half-figure, threatening to mask it completely, like the slips hung over
sculptures in times of anxiety about idols or during ritual disuse.9 In this case, the verb
that connects the drawings disparate elements is the near future tense. Yet it is also
possible to understand the fabric as abandoned, because it has nothing to hide. The
body here is only a fragment, divested of its engendering parts. A cloth is ordinarily
summoned in the service of decorum, to protect the most obstinate member of the
Incarnates form the organ that exists to prove his humanity, yet bears no shame
because he, uniquely, was born without sin.10 In this scenario, the verb of the drawing
is in the conditional tense; it speaks to what the cloth could do if the body were whole.
The possible associations between the half-formed figure and the sketchily
rendered cloth draw upon a long visual tradition in which the woven material
clads the living body, honours the dead corpse, or covers an offending substitute.
But the two components of this drawing are also afforded a variety of connections
due to the many ways in which biblical language employs the metaphor of the
cloak.11 Adam and Eve conceal their shame with an apron of fig leaves (Genesis 3:7),
but fine linens also adorn the Bride of the Lamb, that is, the people whom Christ
redeems through his love (Revelation 19:8). In one of Jesus parables (Matthew
22:12), clothing represents the preparedness of the soul: dress well, for the Messiah
may come at any time. In the Old Testaments figurative speech, God articulates his
selection of the chosen people through a sartorial metaphor for sex: I spread my
skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness . . . and entered into a covenant with
thee, and thou becamest mine (Ezekiel 16:8). But the nubile girl, his chosen nation,
is quickly compared to a profligate whore who tosses away divinely bestowed
endowments by regifting them to alien gods (Ezekiel 16:18).12 The language of
the Old Testament, for Luther, as for Paul, was covered with a veil, which the New
Testament removes for those who turn their hearts toward God (2 Corinthians
3:1516).13 These scriptural passages perform two functions that Drers drawing
does not. They introduce the fate of the human individual as a third factor in the
relationship of God to cloth. And they articulate the specific manner in which the
cloth is to be worn or has been shed. The graphic study is suggestive of all these
possibilities of connectivity, and more, but it resists showing favour.
Reformation debaters revisited the question of whether images of Christ ought
to be made through a discussion over how two adjacent biblical phrases connect
to one another. Karlstadt takes a paratactic approach to reading the Decalogue. No
decree is subordinate to another. In his treatise, On the Removal of Images, Karlstadt

Association of Art Historians 2017 316

Shira Brisman

demonstrates that the clarity of the command thou shalt make no carved or graven
image (Exodus 20: 4) can be gleaned even when the phrase is considered in isolation
from its surrounding context. Make no images means make no images.14 This reading
of the decree as a mandate for total aniconism is characteristic of Karlstadts anti-
supercessionary approach to the Old Testament.15 For him, no commandment is
cancelled by the New Order. Sentences stand alone.
Luthers image theory, however, recognizes the grammatical possibility of the
modifying clause. In his tract, Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images
and Sacraments, Luther asserts the primacy of Exodus 20:3: Thou shalt have no
other gods before me. He sets this edict as the central thought, the standard, and
the end in accordance with which all the words which follow are to be interpreted,
connected, and judged.16 The dominance of this statement renders the contingency
of its following phrase: You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness
(Exodus 20:4).17 For Luther, the prohibition is against making images of the other
gods whose worship has been dismissed in the previous clause. The interdiction
against images only applies where worship is involved. As Hieronymous Emser put
it, the second command is nothing more than an elaboration and explanation of the
first.18 The arguments over the figurability of God and the saints hinged on whether
one perceived the separation or interdependence of neighbouring lines of biblical text.
With the scripture before them, Karlstadt and Luther controlled interpretation
through the manipulation of conjunctions and full stops. One might think of the two
preachers as conductors of different orchestras who had been given the same score. It
was theirs to decide when to elide sounds and when to let certain phrases soar. Karlstadt
favoured clean breaks. Luther, master of the modifier, encouraged the sustaining sound
of a dominant chord to flow into the next. Karlstadt rejects the doctrine of corporeal
presence by insisting on the autonomy of a single phrase: Hoc est corpus meum, quod
pro vobis traditur is a complete verse, he writes.19 The sentence begins with a capital
H, indicating its independence from the clause that precedes it. In the Greek version,
according to Karlstadt, the demonstrative pronoun Touto is neuter, proving that Christ
is speaking of his own form, not of the bread when he proclaims, This is my body.
Therefore, Luke 22:19 is not linked to the previous words, but rather is a saying in
itself.20 Karlstadt concludes that Christs sacrifice is not contained in the bread, but in
the future. During the Last Supper, Christ predicts the fulfilment of his sacrifice on the
cross and instantiates the commemorative function of eating.21
Luther denounced Karlstadts grammatical rift. Karlstadt has torn one sentence
out of context as though it has a special meaning which has been added and patched
on the whole text in the manner of a sea shell fastened to a pilgrims cape.22 For
Luther, continuity of subject matter (bread) reveals sacramental meaning. The noun
referred to with Christs demonstrative Hoc is found in the flanking phrase: And
he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them (Luke 22:19).
Hushing Karlstadts emphasis on punctuation and majuscules, Luther turns to sound:
no one hearing [the words] in succession would get the idea that they are a new
sentence.23 This argument is not the only time that Luther invokes oral transmission.
His explanation for how the body of Christ can be present at each, geographically
dispersed instantiation of the Mass draws upon an analogy to auditory flow: My
small voice can go into a hundred or a thousand ears, and yet each one grasps the
whole or full voice; the voice is in no wise broken up.24 For Luther, Karlstadts
interpretive methods are too choppy. He segregates passages that ought to be linked.
Where prose does not permit the condition of overlap, the visual field makes
explicit where things reside contiguously, and where they intersect. The informal

Association of Art Historians 2017 317

The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform

2 Albrecht Drer, Christ on

the Cross and Portrait Head in
Profi le, c. 1511. Pen and brown
ink and black chalk, 28 20.5
cm. London: The British
Museum. Photo: The Trustees
of the British Museum.

space of the graphic sheet permits consideration of the casual uniting of two elements
that might not otherwise find common ground in a more determined composition.
The sketch permits the artist to associate formal relationships in a relaxed way. In
another drawing by Drer (plate 2), the backsides of two figures abut at the lower
portion of the page. The rear neck and head of a profile shares similarities in contour
with the underside of Christs calf and thigh. The two elements are distinct, perhaps
drawn during different temporal campaigns. On the left is a portrait of a man whose
features the artist observes.25 On the right is a figure study of Christ on the cross.26
But this is not the overlapping of the plight of one man with the emotional state of
another, a convergence Drer contrived in a charcoal drawing of 1503, where, from
the condition of illness, he imagined the visage of the tormented Christ to assume
the features of his own face.27 Instead, here the two forms serve as different kinds

Association of Art Historians 2017 318

Shira Brisman

of studies and exemplify different spatial principles. The profile outline of the bust
flattens the form into a silhouette. Christ is glimpsed at an oblique angle. The body
implies the cross that supports it, but in the absence of this stabilizing device, it is
suspended, free-floating in mid-air. The juxtaposition of the two is likely a space-
saving device of an artist comfortable with papers reuse. Without overdetermining
a reading of this sheet, suffice it here to say, that whereas the Reformations authors
would wrest and reset text and context, Drer, in a non-committal manner, pictures
what it might look like to have Christ on the mind.

Preposition
A sheet attributed to the Master of the Coburg roundels supports the study of two
bodies and two books (plate 3).28 The codices are fastened shut. The loins are also
bound up. The chassis around which the flapping fabrics are tied remain incomplete,

3 Master of the Coburg

Roundels, Studies of
Bookbindings and of Christs
Loincloth, c. 1490. Pen and
brown and black ink, brown
and grey wash, heightened
with white gouache, 27.9
20.6 cm. Los Angeles: J.
Paul Getty Museum. Photo:
Courtesy of the Gettys Open
Content Program.

Association of Art Historians 2017 319

The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform

but these synecdochal references are enough to indicate the identity of the individual
unnamed. The drawing submits for consideration two elements whose relationship
to each other was vigorously reformulated during the era of Reform: the reproducible
image of Christs body, and the Word of God. These different means of accessing
the divine were construed as complementary or as contradictory. (Karlstadt, for
one, rejected the Gregorian notion that icons could substitute for the illiterates lack
of access to books.)29 For the artist, the page undoubtedly served as a trial space for
working out form. The beholders mind seeks to connect body and book, spurred
by the associations between fragmentary and full, and by the implication of the
repeatability of the shapes. Yet an additional rendering startles the mind from such
play. In the upper right, touches of gouache simulate a brass corner fitting. The effect
teases the viewer out of the immersive experience of looking. To behold a drawing
is to become caught up with what is inside.30 It is to accept an invitation for deep
cognitive engagement. But here, the suggestion of a books binding declares that the
inside is out. The page is reset. Now a cover, it promises an opening into a further
inside a promise that the single sheet cannot deliver.
Writers during the period of Reform engaged the question of the role of
representation through descriptions of the relationships of inside to out. The body
or rather, the individual self became a boundary, on the interior of which resided
faith. On the exterior lay the influences of language and material things. Luther and
Karlstadt both argued through an imagery of crossing over, a movement from outside
to in, and vice versa. Their discourse coincided with a project that visual artists
had been working up to for some time: the rendering of the body inside out. The
Reformation pamphlets opened to the public sphere the mechanisms of the interior
processes of religious experience. Meanwhile, artists were gathering up what had
been relatively protected by the workspace of the studio, preparing these interior
views for transmission to the outside.31
Explanations for the role of images in devotion and for the meaning of the
sacrament were both phrased in terms of the heart and its external stimuli. On the
matter of art, Karlstadt first looked to patterns of behaviour, and found in improper
worship evidence of the waywardness of mans heart.32 His call for the removal
of images was argued from the outside in that is from actions to belief (or lack
thereof). Luther defends images through a syntactical reversal of Karlstadts position:

I approached the task of destroying images by first tearing them out of the heart
through Gods word and making them worthless and despised. This indeed
took place before Dr. Karlstadt ever dreamed of destroying images. For when
they are no longer in the heart, they can do no harm when seen with the eyes.
But Dr. Karlstadt, who pays no attention to matters of the heart, has reversed the
order by removing them from sight and leaving them in the heart.33

Luthers prose begins inside the human body to appease concern about the
manufactured forms that lie outside of it.
Luther also critiqued Karlstadts revision of the Mass as an inverted bungle.
Karlstadt occupies much of his treatise of 1524, Concerning the Anti-Christian
Misuse of the Lords Bread and Cup, with a discussion of the pronouncement of faith
in Christ. His emphasis on speech seems driven by the fear he harbours of the mind
as a forge for false notions.34 Therefore, Karlstadt begins with the proclamation of the
Lords death, which he describes as the fruit of a tree: For everything that happens
through the external words or things must flow out of the ground of the heart.35

Association of Art Historians 2017 320

Shira Brisman

Luther registers Karlstadts radicalism as a failure in proper arrangement: Karlstadt

describes first Gods outward dealing with man (through the gospel, and through
material signs), and then his inward interactions (through the Holy Spirit and faith).
Observe carefully, my brother, this order, Luther cautions, for everything depends
on it.36 For Luther, to begin a discussion of faith outside of the human heart was to be
like the devil a jumbler who renders the syntax wrong.
Prose demands that its imagery proceeds in an orderly arrangement. Karlstadt and
Luther scrutinized one anothers writing on the basis of whether the other author set
the heart first or knew at all how to fit things together.37 In addition to the space of
the printed text, the artists studio was another setting for the development of a sense
of how to progress from inside to out. Drer writes of the mind as a kind of container,
inwardly full of figures that are drawn out selectively (and refined based on the
study of external models) as he draws.38 Italian artistic theory used the term disegno to
describe composition as an externalization of the internal; as Vasari would have it,
disegno is nothing else but an apparent expression and declaration of the concept that is
held in the mind.39 Another kind of artistic process that advanced from inside to out
concerned not the makers mind but his approach to rendering the body. Italian praxis
articulated the importance of beginning with the underlying structure in order to
build up form. Even before the Florentine Accademia would instil, on 1 July 1563, the
requirement that all of its members attend an annual dissection, Alberti had already
described osteological study as the root of figural drawing:

First . . . sketch in the bones . . . Then add the sinews and muscles, and finally
clothe the bones and the muscles with the flesh and skin . . . Just as for a clothed
figure we first have to draw a naked body beneath and then cover it with
clothes, so in painting a nude, the bones and muscles must be arranged first.40

These two approaches to describing artistic process one concerned with the artists
thought, the other with the corporeal sample he observes are represented by the
different kinds of drawings that Drer and Raphael exchanged in 1515.41 The Italian
artist sent red chalk studies of nude male figures. These sketches seem to be early
considerations of bodily positions for figures later to be inserted into a composition
and clothed. What Vasari describes of the German artists token, a head executed in
gouache on transparent cambric, so that the design appeared the same on both sides,
jokes with the notion of the inward fullness of the creative intellect.42 The transparent
support, so thin that the applied colour bleeds through to produce an exact likeness
on recto and reverse, mocks the suggestion of depth that a self-portrait implies.
On other occasions, Drers achievement in figuring his own image was to hint
through a mastery of surface marks at the mind and spirit that lies behind. Even
when incomplete, his depictions of himself are intimations of what he possesses,
as though his possibilities for invention have been stored up within his body. Like
elegantly designed lockwork, the outer appearance that the image affords advertises
what it withholds.43 The viewer may possess the key. In his nude self-portrait in
Weimar, the erotic charge of his leaning, gleaming torso presses forward, indicating
a creative potential, though his arms agents of artistic production dissolve
into unfinish, and his sexual organ agent of procreative generation dangles
unaroused.44 Drer delivers the exterior to stimulate in his viewer imaginings of
what lies within. The gift that he gave to Raphael, a painting of himself the same
on both sides, must have invited, as all of his surviving self-portraits do, a sense of
penetration into his character, while denying in this unique case, through attention

Association of Art Historians 2017 321

The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform

to the two-dimensionality of the cloth, that an image has anything of an inside.

Raphaels return sketch by contrast, was, as Christopher Wood has suggested, a
stockpile example of what his studio made available samples of nudes who could be
given a fresh setting or clothed in new garb.45
Some of Raphaels drawings manifest an even deeper underlayer than his models
with bare skin. In another figural study (plate 4), Raphael lays forth an inner anatomy
as the first step in a phased process of building up the bodys outward form.46 This
compositional trial for the Borghese Entombment focuses on the moment when the
Virgin faints. The woman who supports the holy Mother is something between frame
and flesh. The body she holds is a skeleton in collapse. Working from the inside out,
Raphael contemplates the slump of skull over shoulder and the effects of the torsos
twist on the hips. In the final version, Marys skin will be heavily draped and her
figure partially concealed. But Raphael needs first to see her and to see through her.
The drawing is evidence of an approach to the study of the figure that by the
mid-sixteenth century the Florentine Accademia would embrace through its policy
on anatomical instruction.47 Vasari would promote this agenda by augmenting his
second edition of the Vite with details about the methods of the early Cinquecento
masters. In Florence, the biographer recalled, Raphael had systematically compared
the inner mechanisms of flayed corpses to the movements of living beings.48 Yet
Raphaels drawing offers its beholder a kind of restricted-access view not only in the
sense that it serves as an exemplum of an artistic method of investigating the bodys
interior, but also in that it permits consideration of how well engineered, through
commentary and apocrypha, was the theological defence of the particularity of the
Virgins body. The sketch bears evidence of the consequences of considering the
interior design of this unique individual. The uncommon history of Marys flesh is an
essential component of Incarnational theology.49 Herself not born of sin, her form is
pure. But Mary is also exceptional in that she leaves no corporeal remains. Assumed
into heaven to be with her son, her skeleton does not dry out on the land. Penetrating
inside to reveal the deep structure of the Virgins corporeal being, the draughtsman
perhaps not fully intentionally offers an occasion to contemplate an evasion
exclusive to her. No one will ponder her bones.
Beginning on the inside and moving out became part of the artistic process
of formulating the human body. The drawing records this movement. It maps the
artists travel to the core. Concurrent with this evolution that took place within the
studio, there developed, through the iconography of St Luke, the tendency to bring
the beholder inside, to register, through spatial signification, the rewards of turning
in. Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Virgins portraitist
moved into a space newly dedicated to detailing the workshops atmosphere. Maarten
van Heemskercks rendition (plate 5), made after his return from Rome, reveals what
lies beneath, before, and around the depiction of the Virgin.50 Under the auspices of
lending to Luke (the patron saint of medicine, as well as the pictorial arts) an attribute
that speaks to the physicians trade, van Heemskerck places in the foreground an
open book. The left folio text offers Galen as author.51 The right-hand side displays
four figures that alternate: skeleton, flesh, skeleton, flesh. The codex serves as both
scientific reference and as a kind of primer. The book embedded in the painting
alludes to the printed manuals that guide an understanding of the body through
skeletons theatrically arranged.52
The allusion to anatomy, placed in the foreground of the pictorial field, attests
that the painter within fully understands the human body down to its very inside.
It places on view and in the guise of the medical profession the modes of relating

Association of Art Historians 2017 322

Shira Brisman

4 Raphael, Study for the

Borghese Entombment, c. 1507.
Pen and brown ink and black
chalk, 30.5 20.2 cm. London:
The British Museum. Photo:
The Trustees of the British
Museum.

structure to exterior that were the tricks of the artistic trade. The background of the
painting suggests another source. A classical goddess on a pedestal and in a ruddy
hue lends the Virgin in the anterior her pose.53 The antique is situated as an origin
though here one among many. The statues status belongs to the temporal order it
comes before the Virgin, just as the book reveals a spatial priority the bones within.
In between the two, in the middle ground, van Heemskerck choreographs an
arrangement of manifestations of work in progress. A statue of a loin-clothed man
lies supine on the floor, while an assistant chisels away, perfecting the form. In front

Association of Art Historians 2017 323

The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform

5 Maarten van Heemskerck,

St Luke Painting the Virgin,
1545. Oil on wood, 24.8
31.5 cm. Rennes: Muse des
Beaux-Arts (inv. 1801-1-6).
Photo: Adeleaide Beaudouin/
RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY.

of this scene of making is the painters palette, with its array of colourful blotches. On
Lukes knee rests the primed board on which he builds up the flesh tones of the Virgin
and her Child. In the centre of van Heemskercks painting is a pastiche of materials
and processes, evidence of matter becoming form. It is also possible to describe
these centralized elements as the paintings centrifugal force, one that unravels and
separates out the components of making. The studio, the interior, is a busy and messy
place. It is where the ingredients of the holy image are spread out, tearing to pieces
the claims made by Zwingli and Oecolampadius radical reformers of the Eucharists
meaning that Christs body, like any human form can only be in one location,
bounded [umgrenzt].54 The sense that the act of composition is not restricted to a single

Association of Art Historians 2017 324

Shira Brisman

moment or locale within the picture reaches fulfilment in another glimpse at St Luke,
which would arrive one hundred years later (plate 6). The Luke of Karel Slabbaerts
view, pushed deep into the interior space, is more of a St Jerome than a painter in the
act; he is absorbed in the activities of his mind. His finished work, a Rest on the Flight to
Egypt, stands on the easel for show. In the lower left and on a barrel rests a grinding
stone in a swirl of coral paint. It is evidence of decomposition, of the process of
breaking down in order to build up the resemblance of flesh. One could position it
as an indicator of a before or an underneath this pigment is what is laid down first when
a body is made.55 But the better preposition might be the less localized all around. In
Slabbaerts interior view, Lukes pink paint is all around: on the tail tip of the bird on the
windowsill, on the hat in the opened trunk, and in smeared splotches on the studio
walls. It was the legacy of drawing to make available for the painted scene the habit
of allowing haphazard marks. Indeterminacy and the possibilities for further making
release the dialectical tug between before and after, inside and out.

6 Karel Slabbaert, The

Workshop of St Luke the
Evangelist, 1648. Oil on
canvas, 64.5 50.1 cm. Berlin:
Gemldegalerie, Staatliche
Museen (inv. 770 A). Photo:
bpk Berlin/Jrg P. Anders/Art
Resource, NY.

Association of Art Historians 2017 325

The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform
7 Detail of Pieter Bruegel
the Elder, The Harvesters,
1565. Oil on wood, 119 162
cm. New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Photo: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art/
Art Resource, NY.
Association of Art Historians 2017
The tradition of painting the interior studio, while expanding from St Luke
to show other artists at work, would open for a viewing public the interior space,
where the not-yet-assembled components of images peacefully reside. It might be
mentioned, within the context of describing the momentum of turning the inside
out, that another sixteenth-century artist was thinking of a corollary process of
spatial inversion. What Pieter Bruegel opened for his viewer was another space of
labour, not the studio, but the land. In his countryscapes, work is something that
happens not inside but out. If the artists workshop gives scattered indicators of
bodies about to be built up, potential figures who could be crafted, then Bruegels
landscapes also dispel the components of figural representation, spreading them
further afield. He sunders specimens of the materials from which images of Christ
were made. In A Gloomy Day, a peasant bends at the waist to pile sticks for a fire. Body
low, torso forward, and head down, he is a half man, amassing the very material that
iconoclasts take down.56 Karlstadts condemnation of images included their makers,
echoing Isaiahs denouncement of the carver who crafts the image of a man, uses
his remainder for a roast, then works the residue into a graven image of a god that he
bows to worship (Isaiah 44:1317).57 Some destroyers would redistribute planks from
dismantled crucifixions out of distaste for the misuse, citing the ever-present need
for kindling.58 Redistribution and reassembly might best describe where the image
of Christ may be found in Bruegels pictures, even when they seem to be emptied of
this imagery. When Robert Frost describes a forgotten yard, the footpath down to
the well is healed, the ghostly auditory presence of the homophonous word heeled
evokes, in the description of abandon, the imprint of
human form.59 In Bruegel, the absence caused by the
evacuation of one Man from the subject matter of the
painting bears the remembrance of his being. In the
right middleground of the Harvesters (plate 7), a woman
slings herself forward in an alignment of rump,
back and head. She pulls in golden stalks, causing a
continuum from her body to what she assembles.
Worker and wheat elide. Here a painterly trope
that operates with the economy of poetry, with its
condensations and puns, is embedded within the most
seemingly prosaic of imagery.
Karlstadt and Luther had laid forth for examination
the connection between Christs body and
Eucharistic bread, linking the two in alternate ways.
Karlstadt isolated the phrase this is my body as an
announcement made in the past of something that was
going to happen in the near future, and that should
be commemorated in the rituals repetitions. Luther,
uniting body and bread on the basis of the proximity
of the demonstrative this is to the jussive take, eat,
believed that the Eucharist could enact a now.60 The
reappearance of Christ during Mass is experienced
differently depending on whether adjacent lines of text
are split apart or interwoven. Painting had long been
experimenting with means of analogizing body and
bread and demonstrating how partaking of one could
bring about the presence of the other. In the Portinari
326
Shira Brisman

Altarpiece, Hugo van der Goes had placed a bundle of wheat in the foreground of the
plane, more accessible to the viewer than the Infant behind. In Bruegels land, the
once centralized body is nowhere and everywhere to be found. Woodsman and
wood, woman and wheat flow into each other. Ordinary bodies gather the makings
for reappearances of the divine.

Anastrophe
Images have their own grammar. The Christian visual tradition organizes space
around what David Summers has called the cardinal structure of the human body: its
normative uprightness, symmetry . . . and facing.61 The orienting coordinates of up
and down, left and right, lend themselves well to a world view that begins with a fall,
ends with an ascent, and involves a judgment indicated by the raising and lowering
of hands. Bipedalism is associated with rectitude. To topple is to lose moral ground.
In Paradise Lost, John Milton describes Lucifers fall by launching his meter into a
convoluted syntax, which begins with the direct object of Gods active verb:

Him the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from th ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th Omnipotent to arms.62

The sentence separates him from his modifying action, who durst defy th
Omnipotent to arms, extending the long moment of the fall to sever the actor
from his act. As God hurls his opponent, the iambic lines operate in his favour.
Enjambments allow statements to linger. Satan is there to dwell at the end of a
line. Each verse leads to a precipice, but the idea is always recovered by the one
that follows. The poem itself is structured on a succession of falls and saves. In
visual language, the X- and Y-axes structure space. This grid serves to explain the
theological message of Christs sacrifice.63 On the cross, his open arms stretch with
breadth and outreach. His feet, often overlapping, and often pegged with a single
nail, are pathetic reminders that he has surrendered his standing on earth. The piet
scene accents the gravity of his death by supporting the son in the wide weft of the
mothers skirt: her lap redeems mans lapse.64
Deviations from the expected order explore the tumultuous nature of the plunge.
In the marginal space external to text, devils spin downward headlong; creatures
twist, slither and play.65 By the end of the fifteenth century, the drawing could offer a
space to centralize the ludic renderings once pushed to the side. The drawing permits a
figural study without the delineation of a figural ground. The liberation of body from
environment creates a spatial vacuum, an opportunity to consider freefall. Giacomo
Roccas red chalk study (plate 8) isolates the protagonist of a Deposition scene.66 In
the final composition, a fresco for the Oratorio del Gonfalone in Rome, Christ will
be lowered by a belted cloth and the support of strong-armed soldiers. But in the
drawing, there is no cross, land, sky, or crowd. The body seems to float or drift (in
the fresco, adjustments to its extreme elegance will be made). It should be mentioned,
with requisite caution, that any such surviving study demands a second look. One
must proceed carefully in the determination of temporal order. What may appear
preparatory might in fact be a copy executed as an admiring study after the finished
work. But another kind of reordering on the part of the viewer is also possible.

Association of Art Historians 2017 327

The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform
8 Giacomo Rocca, Study for
a Deposition, c. 1575. Pen
and brown ink with brown
wash, 21.2 28.1 cm. London:
British Museum. Photo:
The Trustees of the British
Museum.
Association of Art Historians 2017
One might see the drawing not as a stage of making, but as an arrested moment of
something that is being unmade. This occurs if one acknowledges the fictive frame
and registers the sheet not as depicting Christs descent, but as an autocritique of
representation that allegorizes the decline of the image of Christ.67 To see it as such
requires taking a step back from the experience of being inside the drawing, a
condition of viewing that permits the conceit that any representation of Christ depicts
something that is happening to his body, rather than to his bodys surrogate.
Understanding the sketch as a sign of the threat to the stability of the image
requires knowledge of how the status of representations of the divine would lose
ground. During episodes of iconoclasm, various methods of attack demanded
different degrees of bodily contact with the despised object. Some wreckers
approached the anathemas face-to-face, hammering or hugging to tug the idols
down.68 Others organized more distant means of dismantling, slinging ropes around
remotely mounted statues. Jan Luykens engraving of the interior of a Flemish church
(plate 9) shows many forms of smashing and pulling. In the left foreground a clustered
team yanks with a long pulley at the central altars crucifix. Behind this scene of
successful dismount, another attempt has gone awry. In an apparent effort to lasso a
wall-mounted statue, a rope has snapped. It flails in the air, producing the stunning
anomaly of two wildly waving tendrils in the midst of a medium whose technique is
built up with the careful control of lines. The thwarted destroyers fall back, crashing
to the ground under the velocity of their failed essay. They tumble, perhaps, from
their pride. Backs on the ground, they receive reproof.
328
Shira Brisman
9 Jan Luyken, Iconoclastic
Destruction in the Southern
Netherlands in 1568,
illustration to Pieter Bor,
Nederlandsche Oorlogen,
Amsterdam: Abraham
Wolfgangh & Hendrick
en Dirck Boom, 167984.
Etching, 27.1 34.5 cm.
London: The British Museum.
Photo: The Trustees of the
British Museum.
Association of Art Historians 2017
Christian spatial dynamics provide different ways for effigies to fall. In the
description of the collapse of images, distinctions are made by the reflexivity of
verbs: iconoclasts take down, or an idol can launch itself to the ground.69 Those who
wanted to prove the incapacity of manmade items to elicit response attacked statues
with verbal taunts to prove or save themselves.70 Some iconophilic defences record
the successful animation of the object, which immediately dispels disbelief. But
the most useful account of self-hurl, from the perspective of Christian priority, was
enacted by the pagan idols who pitch themselves from their pedestals at the sight of
Christ. The apocryphal embellishments to Marys life recount the recognition on the
part of the false gods of the true one in terms of spatial inversion. Visual images of the
Flight into Egypt portray a statue falling to the ground (plate 10).71 This image of the
Holy Familys journey and the toppling idol was often employed to illustrate a psalm
that is a curse: Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul / Let
them be turned backward and put to confusion that wish me evil (Psalm 70:23).72
The second verb wishing ill is revereantur (in Hebrew yisogu), which commands a
revolution. Both the false gods that react to the Messiah and the enemies conjured by
the psalm experience disorientation as a turn.
Christian visual tradition tends to minimize semicircular motion.73 Rotations
are used more sparingly than inversions within the vertical plane. In the Old
Testament, however, God relates to his people through pivots.74 He offers Moses his
backside instead of his face (Exodus 33:22). He commands a righting of his peoples
329
The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform

Association of Art Historians 2017 330

Shira Brisman
10 French artist, Rest on the
Flight into Egypt, miniature
on parchment, from a
Book of Hours, c. 147599.
Princeton: Garrett Medieval
and Renaissance Manuscripts
Collection, Princeton
University (Garrett MS. 51,
fol. 50v). Photo: Department
of Rare Books and Special
Collections, Princeton
University Library.
Association of Art Historians 2017
wayward heart thorough one of his favourite imperative verbs turn (shuv). He
entreats the Israelites to deviate from the idols they have made (Ezekiel 14:6). He
pleads for renewed intimacy by imploring them to turn back (Isaiah 44:22, echoed
in Acts 3:19). In Exodus, Moses adopts Gods language and borrows his verb, asking
him to turn from his wrath (Exodus 32:12).75 The concept of Jewish repentance is
encapsulated by the rotational term tshuva. The people implore: Turn us to you and
we will return (Lamentations 5:21). The phrase indicates both the need for assistance
(turn us to you) and the willingness to do the work of coming closer to God (and
we will return). Judaic redemption relies on the proximity of two kinds of verbs: an
imperative request for external propulsion followed by self-directed motion.
The pictorial tradition of the New Order de-emphasizes the turn in favour of
the fall. The privileging of gravitational rather than rotational physics connects the
transgression of Genesis with a salvation conceived in terms of vertical movement,
from down to up. Christ descends to earth and returns to his Father in heaven. His
dismount from the cross happens with help. Whereas on his way to his death, Christ
carried the sins of the world in the form of the cross, after his sacrifice an attending
few feel his weight, the burden of his death. Cared for from the instant hands and
feet are freed from nails to the moment he is entombed, the corpse of Christ never
experiences freefall. He does not drop. Roccas study, therefore, in positioning the
figure alone, and in an effort to perceive with accuracy how a descending body might
surrender to the earths pull, inadvertently creates a scene of an event that never was.
As with Raphaels sketch of the skeletal Virgin, which required going inside for an
anatomical view, here the drawing process, in allowing the isolation of the figure,
grants the body the space to do something that, historically, it did not do. And yet,
visual language must admit that self-reflexive motion is impossible to depict, or
rather, impossible to accent in the manner that the conjugation of verbs affords. The
inverted idols, shattered on the ground or captured in mid-air in Rest on the Flight
scenes, can only do so much to show that they themselves generate their hurl. If the
pictorial tradition is suggestive of the notion that figures in freefall are forms that
have catapulted themselves, then, in the case of Roccas sheet, the workshop praxis
may have unintentionally found in the space of the drawing a means of making a
theological point about the reflexive action of divine sacrifice. The unconstructed,
compositionless space calls attention to the alienation of one who has emptied
himself to become a body (Philippians 2:7).76 Not born of sin, his flesh untainted by
the breech of Edenic law, Christ, on the behalf of man, willingly takes the fall.
Inflection
For the artist making it, a sketch is written in the conditional tense: this could be, this
might be, this would be, etc. Once released from his hand, the drawing circulates and
gains communicative momentum. Its tense changes to the (gentle) imperative: take.
Artists who copied or borrowed motifs from one anothers work often corrected or
filled in the grammar by adding a new contextual frame. The recipient of the graphic
study is given the message assembly required along with unattached and incomplete
parts. The sketch omits syntax and may even fail to distinguish a part of speech.
Prose, therefore, cannot accurately describe this genre of artwork because by its very
nature it selects verbs, demands order, implies cause and effect. The sketchs only
suitable descriptive format might be the postmodern poem, with its morphological
laxity and its permissiveness of the list.
A drawings refusal to make distinctions may not be recognized until it is ruined
by expository efforts. What is happening in Drers Blue Roller (plate 11) may best be
331
The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform
11 Albrecht Drer, Blue
Roller, 1512. Watercolour
and gouache on parchment
heightened with gold, 27.4
19.8 cm. Vienna: Albertina.
Photo: Graphische Sammlung
Albertina, Vienna.
12 Hans Hoffmann, Blue
Roller with a Nail, 1583. Brush
drawing in bodycolour on
vellum, 38 18.1 cm. London:
The British Museum. Photo:
The Trustees of the British
Museum.
Association of Art Historians 2017
defined by what is not.77 The artist does not disclose whether the bird is subject
or object. He declines to give it ground or name whether the scene is set indoors
or out. These uncertainties are made all the more apparent when Drers drawing
is compared with its improvisational variant by Hans Hoffmann (plate 12).78 By
hanging the bird (or rather a bird the copy dispenses with fidelity to the precise
appearance of the original) from a nail by a thread laced through its nose, the latter
artist lends justification to the orientation of the sheet and names the drawings
ground as a background wall. These details suddenly provide a grammar to the
earlier composition. One must have been looking down at Drers bird.79 In doing so,
Hoffmanns picture establishes superiority through its certainty about place. It is not a
handheld sheet. It belongs on a wall.80
These transformations are accomplished with just a few additions: a nail and a
rope. As Bruegels wood-gatherer and harvester found, the instruments of the passion
are all around. Nail and string recall, respectively, Christs unique suffering, and the
more conventional manner by which criminals were tied. The thieves neighbouring
Christ were roped to the crosses on which they died.81 To gaze upon a dangling bird is
to confront a long memory of having been trained to look at art by looking at death
at repetitions of a death that spoke to the universality of the condition and to the utter
uniqueness of the one example. Hoffmanns action may be understood as pinning the
bird up only to take it down, that is, asserting that the specimen is, indeed, no longer
332
Shira Brisman

alive. In proposing, through the effects of trompe loeil, that the proper placement for
the object is on a wall, the drawing elevates the death by pronouncing the corpses
vertical position. Hoffmanns augmentations dress the drawing in the garments of
the Christian tradition.
Hoffmann was not saying that Drers drawing was dead; he was activating its
potential for use. He was recognizing what a drawing had become: an injunction
for assembly that did not come with instructions. To see the relationship of the two
blue rollers as such is to suggest that the dominant sound that resonated throughout
and beyond the volatile years of the Reformation was not the clatter of idols falling
to the ground but rather the inchoate chatter of many voices whose opinions could
be sorted, arranged, and fit together. Readers of the Gospels had long known of the
process of coordinating different bits and pieces that did not sound the same into a
coherent narrative line. Artists knew it well too. They also knew how to let things lie.

Notes Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum, Cambridge, MA, 1992,

An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the conference, 10, 17. For some of the ways in which these sexual metaphors were
Speech Unbound / Ungebundene Rede: On Prose and the reworked to describe the Christian dispensation, see Frye, The Great
Prosaic, organized by Christopher Wood and held at the Code, 8687, 129.
Deutsches Haus at New York University in October 2015. In 13 Mention of the Old Testament as a veiled language appears throughout
addition to the host and other participants at that event, I Luthers writings, as in, for example, Select Works of Martin Luther: An
would also like to thank Christopher Heuer, Aaron Hyman, and Offering to the Church of God, trans. Henry Cole, vol. 2, London, 1824, 214.
Stephanie Porras readers, improvers, friends. 14 Andreas Karlstadt, On the Removal of Images, in Karlstadt, Emser and
Eck on Sacred Images: A Reformation Debate, trans. Bryan D. Mangrum and
Giuseppe Scavizzi, Toronto, 1998, 25.
1 Northrop Frye, Rencontre: The General Editors Introduction, in
15 Karlstadt, On the Removal of Images, 42. On supercessionary
Northrop Frye on Literature and Society 19361989, ed. Robert D. Denham,
approaches to reading the Old Testament, see Kathleen Biddick, The
Toronto, 2002, 45.
Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History, Philadelphia, PA, 2003.
2 Martin Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images
16 Martin Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets, 86.
and Sacraments, in Luthers Works, vol. 40: Church and Ministry, II, ed.
17 On the imbrication of the first and second commandments, see
Conrad Bergendoff, Philadelphia, PA, 1958, 15960.
Matthias Kckert, Die Entsteheung des Bilderverbots, in Brigitte
3 Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, New York, 1982, 81.
Groneberg and Hermann Spieckermann, eds, Die Welt der Gtterbilder,
4 The most compelling case supporting the impulse resisted here,
Berlin, 2007, 2768.
and one that has greatly informed the argument proposed here, is
18 Hieronymus Emser, That One Should Not Remove Images of the
Alexander Nagels linking of a modulated and highly refined form of
Saints from the Churches Nor Dishonour them and that they are Not
image breaking with a new appreciation of the indeterminacy native
Forbidden in Scripture, in A Reformation Debate, 66.
to drawing. Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art, Chicago,
19 Andreas Karlstadt, Dialogue, in Amy Nelson Burnett, ed., The Eucharistic
IL, 2011, 10.
Pamphlets of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlsdtadt, Kirksville, MO, 2011, 172.
5 Joseph Leo Koerner, The mortification of the image: Death as
20 Karlstadt, Dialogue, 178.
hermeneutic in Hans Baldung Grien, Representations, 10, Spring
21 Karlstadt, Dialogue, 1736. He also argues this point in his tract
1985, 52101. On the link between the genitalias propensity for
Exegesis, 151.
disobedient erections and the fallen state of man, see Leo Steinberg,
22 Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets, 1567.
The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed.,
23 Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets, 155. For more of Luthers
Chicago, IL, 1996, 31823. For the development of a new kind of
examples of the destructive cutting and dividing of the Bible, see 157.
hermeneutic in response to the Reformations demands upon the
24 Martin Luther, Sermon von dem Sacrament des Leibes und Bluts
interpretive process, see Alexander Nagel, Gifts for Michelangelo and
Christi wider die Schwarmgesiter, quoted by Lee Palmer Wandel,
Vittoria Colonna, Art Bulletin, 79: 4, 1997, 64768.
The body of Christ at Marburg, 1529, in Walter Melion and Reindert
6 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, London, 2004, 127; Amy
Falkenburg, eds, Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and
Knight Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern
Early Modern Europe, Brussels, 2006, 199.
Museum, New York, 2012, 235.
25 The inscription identifies him as her Jorg von[n] ebling[e]n.
7 Nagel, Controversy of Renaissance Art, 10.
26 Rowlands connects the study to the 1511 Crucifixion of the Engraved
8 Christopher P. Heuer, Drers Folds, RES, 59/60, 2011, 24965.
Passion in John Rowlands and Giulia Bartrum, Drawings by German
9 Powell, Depositions.
Artists, vol. 1, London, 1993, no. 178, 84.
10 Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ. See also the influential response by
27 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art,
Caroline Walker Bynum, The body of Christ in the later Middle Ages:
Chicago, Il, 1993, 2202.
A reply to Leo Steinberg, in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender
28 From a Mighty Fortress: Prints, Drawings, and Books in the Age of Luther, 14831546,
and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York, 79117, and Steinbergs
ed. Christiane Andersson and Charles Talbot, Detroit, MI, 1983, no. 29.
counter-response, 36489.
29 Karlstadt, On the Removal of Images, 27.
11 The matter of sartorial excess versus plainness was also as alluded to,
30 Christopher S. Wood, Eine Nachricht von Raffael, in Friedrich Teja
for example, in Karlstadts Review of Some of the Chief Articles of
Bach and Wolfram Pichler, eds, ffnungen: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der
Christian Doctrine, in Kartlstadts Battle with Luther: Documents in a Liberal-
Zeichnung, Munich, 2009, 132.
Radical Debate, ed. Ronald J. Sider, Philadelphia, PA, 1978, 134.
31 Christopher S. Wood, IndoorOutdoor: The Studio around 1500,
12 For the connubial metaphors that describe the Judaic Gods
in Michael Cole and Mary Pardo, eds, Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance
relationship to his people, see Moshe Halbertal and Avishai

Association of Art Historians 2017 333

The Unassembled Grammar of the Drawing in the Era of Reform
to Romanticism, Chapel Hill, NC, 2005, 44. These two impulses,
the Protestant emphasis on the heart, and the artistic interest
in portraying the inside of the body, might be said to reach full
convergence in the Jesuit images of the anatomically accurate hearts
of holy figures. J. Michelle Molina, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and
Spirit of Global Expansion, 15201767, Berkeley, CA, 2013, 1857.
32 Thomas Aquinas analogously considered idolatry a profession of
unbelief by outward forms of worship. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Theologica, vol. 40, ed. Thomas Franklin OMeara and Michael John
Duffy, Cambridge, 2006, 23.
33 Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets, 84.
34 Andreas Karlstadt, Concerning the Anti-Christian Misuse of the
Lords Bread and Cup, in Karlstadts Battle with Luther: Documents in a Liberal-
Radical Debate, ed. Ronald J. Sider, Philadelphia, PA 1978, 76.
35 Karlstadt, Concerning the Anti-Christian Misuse, 767.
36 Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets, 146.
37 Karlstadt, Review of Some of the Chief Articles of Christian Doctrine,
in Karlstadts Battle with Luther, 132.
38 Hans Rupprich, Drers Schriftlicher Nachlass, vol. 3, Berlin, 1969,
283. Peter Parshall, Graphic knowledge: Albrecht Drer and the
imagination, Art Bulletin, 95: 3, September 2013, 3989.
39 Giorgio Vasari, Della pittura, in Le opere, vol. 1, ed. Gaetano Milanesi,
Florence, 1906, 1689.
40 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, ed. Martin
Kemp, London, 1991, 72.
41 Wood, Eine Nachricht von Raffael, 109.
42 Vasari, Le vite de pi eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori, in Le
opere, vol. 4, 3534.
43 Shira Brisman, The image that wants to be read: An invitation for
interpretation in a drawing by Albrecht Drer, Word & Image, 29: 3,
2013, 273303.
44 Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 23946.
45 Wood, Eine Nachricht von Raffael, 114. See also Erwin Panofsky,
Albrecht Drer, vol, 1, 3rd ed., Princeton, NJ, 1948, 284.
46 Eun-Sung Kang and Martin Kemp, Costruire la composizione, in
Raffaello da Firenze a Roma, ed. Anna Coliva, Milan, 2006, 7585. For
another example of Raphaels interest in the skeletal form, see the
versos of the Ashmolean Museums drawing, inventory number
WA1855.91 and the Metropolitan Museum of Arts drawing, inventory
number 64.97.
47 Fredrika Jacobs, (Dis)assembling: Marsyas, Michelangelo, and the
Accademia del Disegno, Art Bulletin, 84: 3, 2002, 435.
48 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, vol. 1, trans.
Gaston du C. de Vere, New York, 1996, 7412; Jacobs, (Dis)
assembling Marsyas, 4345, 440.
49 Marina Warner, Alone of all her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary,
New York, 1983.
50 The painting was transferred to Nuremberg where it was displayed in
the Rathaus throughout the eighteenth century. Rainald Grosshans,
Maerten van Heemskerck: Die Gemlde, Berlin, 1980, 195201.
51 Christoph Gottlieb von Murr, Beschreibung des Nrnbergischen Rathauses,
1790, 312.
52 Veldman identifies the sources for these images in the woodcuts
designed by Jan Stefan van Kalkar for the publications by Andreas
Vesalius and in an engraving by Domenico del Barbiere after Rosso
Fiorentino. Ilja M. Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck and St Lukes
medical books, Simiolus, 7: 2, 1974, 96.
53 Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck, 198.
54 Walther Khler, Das Marburger Religionsgesprch 1529. Versuch einer
Rekonstruktion, Leipzig, 1929, 26.
55 For descriptions of devotioners who scratch the surface of painted
sculpture to reveal the blood-like, red underground beneath, see
Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant lImage: question pose aux fi ns dune histoire de
lart, Paris, 1990, 242.
56 For an iconoclasts report of the sudden decomposition of a wooden
retable, see Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm
in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel, Cambridge, 1994, 65, and for
the reuse of wood as kindling, 79. Koerner describes the emphasis on
the material of wood as the disenchantment of iconoclasm. Koerner,
Reformation of the Image, 104.
57 Karlstadt, On the Removal of Images, 31.
Association of Art Historians 2017
58 Wandel, Voracious Idols, 79.
59 Robert Frost, Ghost House, in The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward
Connery Lathem, New York, 1969, 6.
60 Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets, 15470.
61 David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western
Modernism, London; New York, 2003, 37.
62 The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan,
John Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon, New York, 2007, I.4449.
63 Nagel, Controversy of Renaissance Art, 126.
64 For deviations from the well-established, infancy-recalling schema
of Christ in his mothers lap, see Alexander Nagel, Michelangelos
late piet drawings and sculptures, Zeitschrift fr Kunstgeschichte, 59: 4,
1996, 54872. But for the associations of the lap arrangement as a
life-affirming allusion to birth, see Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of
Art, Cambridge, 2000, 185. For an interpretation of the drawing for
Vittoria Colonna as expressing a pre-Oedipal relationship in which
the mother displaces the position of God the Father, see Allison Levy,
Re-membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence: Widowed Bodies, Mourning, and
Portrait, Burlington, VT, 2006, 108.
65 Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art,
Cambridge, 1989, 5, and Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art,
Cambridge, MA, 1992; Keith Moxey, Hieronymus Bosch and the
world upside down: The case of the garden of earthly delights,
in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds, Visual
Culture: Images and Interpretation, Middletown, CT, 1994, 10440.
66 Nicholas Turner, A drawing attributed to Giacomo Rocca, Master
Drawings, 28, Autumn 1990, 26874.
67 Camille, Gothic Idol, xxviii; Powell, Depositions, 10.
68 Erhard Schns woodcut illustrating Hans Sachss broadsheet
Klagerede der armen verfolgten Gtzen und Temple Bilder ber so
ungleich urtayl und strafe, shows a figure on the left reaching up to
grab a Virgin and Child that he must hold close to bring down, and,
on the right, other destroyers cradling the crucifixes they carry to the
fire.
69 For an example of the representation of images throwing themselves
to the ground, see Die Neue Ehe und das Passiona von Jesu, published
on 7 October 1476, fol. 30r. The Illustrated Bartsch, ed. Walter Straus, vol.
81, German Book Illustration before 1500: Anonymous Artists, 14761477, New
York, 1981.
70 Koerner, Reformation of the Image, 129. For the responsiveness of demon-
possessed idols, see Camille, Gothic Idol, 120.
71 Camille, Gothic Idol, 124.
72 For illustrations of Psalm 70 with an image of the Rest on the Flight to Egypt
that includes a falling idol, see, for example, the following folios from
Book of Hours from the third quarter of the fifteenth century from
the Princeton University Library: Garrett 51, fol. 50v; Princeton 111,
fol. 60r.
73 One exception to this general tendency is the iconography of the
Prince of the World. Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg 13001550,
Munich and New York, 1986, 11618.
74 In the Sistine ceiling, Michelangelo recognizes rotation as the source
of the old Gods creative power, and offers his sweeping summoning
of the sun and the planets as both a frontal and dorsal view. David
Summers, Figure come fratelli: A transformation of symmetry in
Renaissance painting, in Michael Cole, ed., Sixteenth-Century Italian Art,
Oxford, 2006, 4978.
75 Moses also speaks to God in Psalm 90:3 with a double use of the verb
tshuv: first to describe how God has turned man to destruction (or
returned him to the earth, as Luther would translate the phrase), and
then to paraphrase Gods call, return ye children of men. See Luthers
commentary on 90:30 in Luthers Works, vol. 13, Selected Psalms, II.
76 For Luthers development of the theology of kenosis, see Donald
G. Dawe, The Form of a Servant: A Historical Analysis of the Kenotic Motif,
Philadelphia, PA, 1964. For the emptiness of kenosis as roominess,
see Robert Jensen, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The True God, Oxford, 1997,
226.
77 Fritz Koreny, Albrecht Drer und die Tier- und Pflanzenstudien der Renaissance,
Munich, 1985, 54. Note that this exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna
included a taxidermied blue roller alongside Drers depiction.
78 Fritz Koreny and Konrad Oberhuber, Albrecht Drer und Hans
Hoffmann, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, 1982
334
Shira Brisman

1983/19861987, 1721; Koreny, Tier- und Pflanzenstudien, no. 13; Colin

T. Eisler, Drers Animals, Washington, DC, 1991, 3312; Rowlands,
Drawings by German Artists, no. 268; Giulia Bartrum, Joseph Leo Koerner
and Ute Kuhlemann, Albrecht Drer and his Legacy: The Graphic Work of a
Renaissance Artist, London, 2002, no. 228; Von Schnheit und Tod: Tierstillleben
von der Renaissance bis zur Moderne, ed. Holger Jacob-Freisen, exh. cat.
Karlsruhe and Heidelberg, 2001, no. 3.
79 For consideration of the distinction between the vertical format of a
formal picture, which seems representational, and the horizontal
format of a drawing which seems symbolic; it contains signs, see
Walter Benjamin, Painting and the Graphic Arts, trans. Rodney
Livingston in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA, 1996, 82.
80 One of the earliest examples of the exhibition of a drawing as though
it had the status of a painting is recounted in Vasaris report of the
two-day event in which crowds flocked as though to a solemn
festival to view Leonardo da Vincis charcoal and chalk cartoon, The
Virgin and Child with St Anna and St John the Baptist. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite dei pi
eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, Forli, 1991, 563.
81 Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle
of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Chicago, IL, 1999, 7783;
Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle
Ages, New York, 2009, 196, fn. 21. For the iconoclastic treatment of
images as criminals, see Koerner, Reformation of the Image, 1089.

Association of Art Historians 2017 335