Renaissance und Religion: Die Kunst des Glaubens im Zeitalter Raphaels. - Review - book review

JORG TRAEGER

Munich: Beck, 1997. 552 pp.; 17 color ills., 241 b/w. DM178.00; DM78.00 paper

Richard Trexler said it three decades ago: "The pagan Renaissance is no more." One hundred years of scholarship since Burckhardt had made it clear, Trexler declared, that "Renaissance man remained a Christian, even a pious one." [1] Since then sociohistorical and anthropological approaches to the Renaissance have only confirmed the pervasive presence of religious traditions and institutions in the life of the period. Historians have argued that traditional piety was vital and functional right up until the Reformation, revising the traditional view of a corrupt and disintegrating Christian culture begging to be cleared away. [2] Even historians of humanism, traditionally most inclined to celebrate the Renaissance as the cradle of modern secular values, have--especially since Charles Trinkaus's landmark In Our Image and Likeness of 1970--made it redundant to speak of a Christian humanism. [3] Accordingly, historians of Renaissance art no longer chronicle the progress of art away from religion. Instead they show , over and over again--in studies of family chapels and confraternities, of political self-representation and civic ritual--the various ways in which art was embedded in the elaborate structures that joined religious, social, and political life. Those aspects of Renaissance culture thought to be the most proto-modern--the engagement in worldly politics, the emphasis on the body and sexuality, the celebration of the individual--all turn out to have been not only tolerated, but actively cultivated within a flexible and dynamic late medieval Christian culture. The result has been to confirm Lucien Febvre's sense of the "prises de la religion sur la vie," and to lend resounding authority to Jacques le Goff's proclamation of a "long Middle Ages." [4]

All of this gives an untimely ring to Jorg Traeger's impassioned apology for Renaissance art as a religious art. It is as if one were to issue an urgent call for research into the patronage of Renaissance art. A resume of some of the achievements of the last thirty years would have served his purpose well enough, but Traeger has instead chosen to come out in full battle gear. The book, a heavily illustrated and handsome volume put out by the same publisher that produced Hans Belting's Bild und Kult, has all the heft of an epoch-making statement. The breathtaking introduction mounts a counterattack against the secularizing and paganizing interpretations of the Renaissance, which Traeger attributes to the overweening influence of Protestant and Jewish scholars in Renaissance studies. Thus Michelet and Burckhardt, influenced by the Protestant Hegel and followed by Nietzsche, chronicled the Renaissance liberation of mankind from the shackles of Christian culture. As for the "Judische Beitrag," the Romantic poet Heinrich Heine sounded the trumpet when he declared that the flanks of a Titian Venus were a more powerful anti-Catholic declaration than Luther's ninety-five theses. Later, the Jew Warburg made the revival of pagan antiquity the central question of Renaissance studies, and Panofsky's highly influential development of this tradition in turn revealed a markedly Jewish tendency to privilege word over image. The latter-day application of the Mosaic law, the reader is amazed to learn, paradoxically underwrote the paganization of the Renaissance. According to Traeger, all of this has wildly distorted the interpretation of Renaissance art, and he is here to set the record straight: "The Renaissance was Catholic" (p. 37).

It is hard to know where to start in responding to these claims, but a good place is to point out that Traeger's enemies are windmills. An obvious obstacle in Traeger's depiction of an aestheticizing and secularizing Burckbardt is Burckardt's essay on the altarpiece, a typological study of sacred art in its functional context that was extraordinary for its time and, as the recent tide of scholarly literature indicates, has found a lively readership amid the recent interest in the modes and functions of religious art. Traeger briefly acknowledges the essay, only to maintain that Burkhardt's true aim was to celebrate artistic achievements (p. 34). The real Burckhardt, according to Traeger, is the writer of the Cicerone, the very popular 1855 work subtitled Introduction to the Enjoyment of the Artworks of Italy. This is the Burckhardt, Traeger asserts, who kept art largely out of the Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) and in his art historical studies remained committed to the idea of artistic autonomy, k eeping it "notably independent from its cultural-historical connection" (p. 13).

In fact, Burckhardt had from the start intended to "fill up the greatest gap" in the Kultur der Renaissance in Italien by producing a companion volume on the art of the Renaissance, which would have offered a very different approach from that offered in the Cicerone. He drew up detailed plans for it in 1862-64 and wrote notes for the various essays, hut the project never came to fruition. The altarpiece essay, though in its final form written in the 1890s, was from the beginning planned as part of this project, whose great innovation was to provide a history of Italian Renaissance art presented not as a chronological narrative but, like the Kultur, through a series of analytical/synchronic categories. The topics were to include "techniques and media," "types of composition," "methods of animation and dramatization," and a large section on "painting according to genres and tasks (Aufgaben)" that was subdivided into sections on "private devotional pictures for the home," "allegorical paintings," "cyclical pain tings," "pictures for confraternities," "pictures for hospitals," "secular history painting," and so on, as well as "the Sacra Conversazione" and the "narrative altarpiece." [5]

Does this sound like the project of a historian bent on divorcing art from its social and religious context? It goes without saying that Burckhardt's writings betray a host of nineteenth-century values, but the fact remains that in the 1860s he envisioned a revolutionary cultural history of art that took into account clients and institutions as well as artists, ideology as well as style, functional competences as well as aesthetic imperatives. "Protestant" or not, Burckhardt paved the way for the kind of art history Traeger now advocates and practices.

As for Warburg, it is a gross simplification to describe him as a partisan of pagan revival as a path to Enlightenment. [6] Warburg's main concern was the dialectic between the unmediated engagements with images that he associated with paganism and the reflective distance offered by more rational and abstract forms of symbolic activity. "Paganism" was, for Warburg, not limited to the expressions of pre-Christian ancient culture, but was a sensibility that arises periodically throughout history and is never far from the surface even of modern civilizations, an impulse that is continually countered by efforts to reclaim distance, to effect what he called aesthetic detoxification (aesthetische Entgiftung). (In contrast to the recent enthusiasm over the power of images, Warburg was quite suspicious of irrational impulses and superstitious image cults. He was too close to the power of images to be nostalgic about it, and too sensitive to the tensions within Renaissance culture to see it as the foundation for the comfortable triumph of rationalism.) "The antique," in turn, was for him not a monolithic cultural entity to be condemned or celebrated, but was itself locked in a struggle between "Athens" and "Alexandria." For this reason he had little time for the standard nineteenth-century view that saw Renaissance art simply as the overthrow of Christian culture by "pagan revival," and was not interested in rehearsing the secularizing Victorian reading of the frescoes of Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Instead, Warburg took seriously the devotional purposes of chapel-founding Christians like Francesco Sassetti and Giovanni Tornabuoni, an approach that allowed him to see the portraits of donors in these chapels not simply as intrusions of secular individuality but as, among other things, adaptations of the cultic tradition of life-size wax votive effigies then in use in Florence. At the same time, he appreciated the fact that these chapels incorporated a new range of artistic expression, including motifs and images from pagan antiquity, and he believed that this situation provoked a new order of cultural tensions and conflicts--as well as epochal efforts of integration--that caused "an entirely new cultural persona to emerge." Well before it became common to do so, Warburg transformed archive work into microhistory, questioned the exclusion of "low" art by what he called art history's "border guards," and studied works of art in the context both of social and religious ritual and of arcane wisdom traditions . Once again, Traeger is an heir to the precursor he pretends to overturn.

The point is not just that Traeger disfigures these historians beyond recognition, nor is it that they are hardly representative Protestant and Jewish thinkers. The main problem is that the secularizing and paganizing view of the Renaissance had little to do with Protestant and Jewish scholarship per seand everything to do with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which any student knows originated within and against the Catholic ancien regime. The myth of Renaissance atheism was, in fact, first promoted by seventeenth-century Catholics waging battles against their libertine contemporaries. [7] By the middle of the nineteenth century the secularizing view of Renaissance art was espoused by virtually everyone, and not least of all by Catholic historians. In 1858 Ernest Renan, for example, observed that the works of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian "offer a positive assessment of human nature, give man his proper due, and inspire a sort of liberal pride that is not exactly Christian piety." [8] Hippol yte Tame gave the secularizing account full-dress treatment in his Burck-hardt-inspired Philosophie de l'art en Italie of 1866. Their positive assessments were hardly shared by dogmatic Catholic thinkers, but their basic diagnosis of Renaissance art was. In his De l'art chritien of 1861 the Catholic art historian Alex-Francois Rio presented the Renaissance as the triumph of paganism, naturalism, and sensuality in art, an overwhelming trend that was only partially resisted by Savonarola and his followers. [9]

In comparison to this, even Nietzsche can on occasion sound positively sympathetic to the religious aspirations of Renaissance artists, admitting, for example, the degree to which the "cosmic, metaphysical significance" that Christianity gave to art, misguided though it may be, inspired some of the greatest works ever made, such as the Gothic cathedrals and the paintings of Raphael. "A touching tale will come of this," he wrote, "that there was once such an art, such belief by artists" [10]--a statement that sounds, if anything, like a blueprint for Traeger's project, with the advantage, perhaps, that it is not envisioned as an apology for Catholic art.

Traeger's polemic bears the imprint of recent debates, mostly in German-language scholarship, on the formation of Protestant and Catholic "confessions" in early modern Europe. In response to the influential work of Ernst Walther Zeeden, who spoke of a Konfessionsbildung, primarily a religious and theological concern over establishing doctrine in the wake of the Reformation, more recent scholarship has adopted the term Konfessionalisierung, promoted especially by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, which refers to a full-scale social and political process whereby states and churches imposed doctrinal uniformity, consolidated institutional authority, and put into place disciplinary structures designed to reinforce political and religious identities--a process that, Reinhard and Schilling claim, should replace absolutism as the determining feature of early modern societies. [11]

The problem comes when the post-Reformation preoccupation with confessional identity is projected back onto the array of pre-Reformation practices that make up what John Bossy has called "traditional" Christianity. [12] Indeed, the most recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the limited success of the confessionalizing campaigns and the persistence of precoafessional hybridity well into and even beyond the sixteenth century, and has encouraged a healthy skepticism with regard to identity-promoting clerical propaganda. [13]

In that case, Traeger is unrepentantly on the side of the confessionalizing clerics. His polemical use of the word Catholic in a study focused on Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin of 1504, that is, before the Reformation, could well be taken as an infelicitous application of terminology, but in fact it betrays a strongly Counter-Reformation viewpoint, committed to imposing confessional unity where, properly speaking, there was none. Traeger presents an integrated "Catholic" world where patrons and artists listen to preachers, where traditions are preserved even as they provoke competition, and where popular devotion and theological sophistication join seamlessly in great works of art. The picture is remarkably devoid of tensions and fissures, except those between the Christian community and its others, above all the Jews, and these of course only serve as a spur for Christians to rally around their cults and traditions.

Traeger makes no bones about his unifying intentions, claiming as his emblem the figure of the ring that is at the focus of the cult and iconography studied in the book. Not only does the circular form aptly symbolize continuity and unbroken tradition, but the ring is itself an instrument of coupling and integration: "[T]he idea of betrothal between Joseph and Mary, man and woman, humankind and God," he says, guides the book's path, and the "spiritual provisions" needed on the journey will be furnished above all by Franciscan piety (pp. 47-48). Burckhardt, trained for the ministry, rebelled and became a historian. Traeger, despite his considerable historical training, appears unable to resist a powerful vocation as a preacher.

The premise of socioreligious integrity leads Traeger to take a very generous view of relevant context. His strategy is to move from well outside in, with the result that he does not reach the declared focus of the book, Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin, until page 263. Chapter 1 reviews the apocryphal legends of the marriage of the Virgin and surveys the development of the cults of the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph through the Middle Ages, and is followed by a chapter on the cult of the relic of the holy ring, which was stolen in 1473 from Chiusi by a German Franciscan and brought to Perugia, where it quickly became the city's prize possession. The story of the ring is well and clearly told, with a strong sense of concrete detail. Traeger offers an excellent discussion of the ring's somewhat mysterious material composition, and explains its many symbolic associations. He also shows that Renaissance painters such as Ghirlandaio were very attentive to its peculiar physical attributes, and thus were very likely aware of the virtues associated with those material properties. Traeger offers an illuminating account of the political maneuvrings that surrounded the relocation of the cult to Perugia, and clearly explains the economic, social, and political considerations that went into the all-important question of the ostentationes, or schedule of feasts on which the relic was made visually available to the faithful. The chapter is required reading for those interested in the cult of the holy ring, and will prove useful to anyone interested in relics generally.

Traeger embarks on many tangents, and at times the ring's function as emblem and all-purpose link is strained. For example, a long discussion of Raphael's Entombment, commissioned by Atalanta Baglioni for San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, is introduced on the supposition that the famous "bloody" Baglioni wedding of 1500, which has some bearing on the commissioning of the painting, very likely involved some form of veneration before the holy ring. The painting is religious, it is by Raphael, and it was made for a Perugian client; one can understand that Traeger felt it necessary to include the work in this study, but in fact his discussion of it has little new to say and does not shed light on the ostensible focus of the book, Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin. The same can be said of chapter 3 on the formation of the Mons pietatis, a charitable money-lending institution set up as an alternative to Jewish usury, and the anti-Semitic rhetoric that surrounded it. (Anti-Semitic is my term; according to Traeger th e term "is inaccurate [trifft ungenau]," as it was not a racist polemic but a religious one: "Since the campaign of the Observant Franciscans in favor of the Mons pietatis was intended to put an end to usury, it inevitably had to be directed against the Jews" [p. 175]. This seems like unnecessary wordmincing when dealing with a campaign that routinely used words such as "depraved" and "perfidious" when referring to Jews and "Jewish usury.") The chapter is a reasonably clear discussion of the foundation of this institution, but it is very difficult to see what it is doing in this book, apart from the circumstantial facts that it was founded in Perugia in 1462 and was especially promoted by the Observant Franciscans, in particular Bernardino da Feltre, who also promoted the cult of the holy ring. Certainly the vignettes of almsgiving in the background of Perugino's painting, which Traeger sees as a reference to the Mons pietatis, are not enough to make the connection: they are scenes of Christian charity, and t he Mons pietatis was an institution that precisely did not give alms but low-interest loans.

The goal of the entire discussion of the holy ring is a study of the chapel dedicated to Saint Joseph in which it was placed in the Cathedral of Perugia in 1484 (chapter 4). This is the chapel for which Perugino made his Marriage of the Virgin now in Caen, which in turn served as a model for Raphael's painting. The chapel also housed the sacrament, making this a particularly complex combination of reliquary, sacrament tabernacle, and altarpiece, an assemblage that was broken apart during the Counter Reformation when the sacrament was moved to its own chapel. Traeger proposes that the reliquary was placed up above and the sacrament tabernacle below in a free-standing tempietto-like ciborium (p. 236). Trager does not directly address the placement of the altarpiece, which we are left to imagine stood directly behind the tabernacle, and concentrates instead on the theological and iconographic associations of the chapel's various competences. He plausibly finds the connection between Saint Joseph and the sacramen t, if one is indeed necessary, in the tradition clearly proclaimed by Fra Bernardino da Feltre that Joseph was the nourisher and protector of the infant Christ. The connections to the altarpiece, however, are more strained. Hunting for a Eucharistic presence in the painting to connect it to the sacrament tabernacle, Traeger argues that the Virgin, whose left hand rests on her belly, is shown already pregnant with Christ (pp. 238-45), theological considerations evidently preempting details of narrative and chronology.

While it is certainly thought-provoking to imagine the Virgin and Joseph at a shotgun wedding, the idea is just unsustainable. The placement of the hand over a swaying belly is a signature feature of Perugino's figures, even of the male ones. Apart from the merits of this specific proposal, the problem lies in the methodological assumption that works of art must reflect their context, and the corollary that meaning lies in content. An alternative approach, arguably truer to the relevant exegetical strategies, is a structuralist one that puts the various elements of the chapel into a dynamic and complementary relationship to one another. The painting does not have to contain a Eucharistic reference if it has a tabernacle standing in front of it. Instead, it can be meaningful precisely in its "external" relation to it. If Traeger's reconstruction is right, the hands of Mary and Joseph joining in matrimony would have formed an archway over the "cupola" of the sacrament tabernacle. Would not that arrangement sugg est eloquently enough that this sacred event provides the historical framework for the Incarnation of Christ? The temple in the background of the painting, likewise, would mirror the sacrament tabernacle standing before the painting in an appropriately typological way: this structure, this ceremony, this high priest all belong to the old covenant, which is succeeded by the new tabernacle standing on the altar in front and by the Christian priest celebrating the Mass--the "new covenant"--before it.

A more sustained exploration of these relationships might have helped to develop and shade several interesting observations Traeger makes on Perugino's painting. Traeger rightly stresses the fact that this is an altarpiece without a predella; it is as if one of the istorie often found in predella sequences has become the exclusive focus of the altarpiece. The contract of 1489 seems to register this novelty: somewhat unusually it demands that the panel depict an "istoriam," rather than an aggregate of sacred personages. As a singlefield narrative panel the altarpiece acquires a greater unity than traditional altarpieces, but this is not simply a step toward a "modern" pictorial autonomy. Traeger instead rightly associates the painting's unified picture field with the isolated presentation of cult images; he sees its hieratic qualities and its "aura of archaic solemnity" (p. 245) as the result of its having become a principal focus of cultic attention. [14] In semiotic terms, the scene is no longer presented sy ntagmatically, as part of a cycle or sequence, but paradigmatically, as type and symbol, thus facilitating "vertical" symbolic associations with the other elements in the ritual context.

Having set out this array of preconditions, Traeger finally turns in chapters 5 and 6 to Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin for the church of San Francesco in Citta di Castello. The comparison between Perugino's and Raphael's paintings is a chestnut encountered in most Renaissance art courses. Traeger's reading is well rendered, eloquently describing the greater organic unity of Raphael's picture, embodied above all in the space-articulating, fluidly architectural function served by the figures themselves. He also offers an excellent discussion of the tradition of conformitas and variatio in works of religious art, which were often commissioned on the model of preexisting works. This discussion leads to the insight--probably the best point in the book--that the difference between the two pictures is not only a question of artistic rivalry but is also the result of differing structural and functional circumstances. Raphael's altarpiece was also for a St. Joseph chapel, and was commissioned in distinct emulation of the one in Perugia, but in Citta di Castello there was no relic of the holy ring, and that meant that a greater rhetorical onus was placed on the altarpiece as a virtual substitute for the complex, multimedia Perugian arrangement. Where Perugino reins in and complements, Raphael integrates and subsumes. Distance produces a more sustained act of projection and thus a more resolved whole. For example, unlike Perugino Raphael shows the ring perfectly flat to the picture plane and exactly on the picture's central axis, an arrangement that Traeger links to the display of the relic in Perugia, where it was shown hanging above an urn. This also helps to explain why the temple in Raphael's painting becomes more articulated and more eloquent, offering among other things a series of fluent variations on the theme of the ring.

This observation changes the appearance of the painting and invests it, as a whole, with new meaning. Most of the time, however, Traeger proceeds part by part, finding specific social and symbolic references in individual details of the painting. Thus, in an effort to affirm the Franciscan connection he proposes (unconvincingly) that the painting shows the beata Ortolana on the left, pregnant with Saint Clare of Assisi, and (more plausibly) connects the positive image of Jews giving alms in the background to the more tolerant atmosphere prevalent in Citta di Castello, which did not have a Mons pietatis. Not content to see the circular temple as a complex echo of the unifying figure of the ring, Traeger instead insists on content, asserting that the temple is actually made of onyx, and thus participates in the ring's qualities. This prepares Traeger's proposal that Raphael's signature, shown as an inscription on the temple facade, translates the ancient tradition of putting inscriptions on wedding rings, and thus figures Raphael as the groom in his own personal betrothal to the Virgin. In his pursuit of these speculative references and allusions Traeger leaves aside matters of the first importance, such as providing more information on the altarpiece's little-known patron, Filippo di Lodovico Albizzini.

The tendency to make connections at all costs runs through the entire book. In discussing Raphael's Entombment, Traeger presents the story of the 1500 "blood wedding" told by the chronicler Matarazzo as if it were true (p. 137). He sees a British Museum drawing by Raphael of three corpses as a document of the bodies of Astorre, Guido, and Gismondo Baglioni, who were murdered in the plot (fig. 61), and he thus asserts that Raphael was "eyewitness" to these events (p. 155). The enmeshing in history goes hand in hand with an immersion in Franciscan spirituality. Thus, Traeger sees similarities between the Virgin's clothing in the Entombment and the Clarissan habit, and believes that the loose criss cross of the bodies of Christ and the Virgin "suggests (klingt...an) the Franciscan coats of arms," which shows Christ's wounded hand crossed by Francis's stigmatized one. The discernibility of the Virgin's nipple through her tunic, in turn, provokes a long disquisition on the role of breasts and motherhood in Christ ian piety.

If this is all in the paintings, then Raphael becomes the historian's ideal precursor, a point that Traeger makes explicitly. When he finally turns to Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin in chapter 5, he offers a precis of the topics discussed in the previous four chapters--i.e., the iconography of Saint Joseph, the Eucharistic pregnancy of the Virgin, the connections to the Mons pietatis, the Eucharistic associations of Joseph in the exegetical parallel with his Old Testament namesake--but now these are presented as moments in Raphael's own formation. Having taken all this in, Raphael was "fundamentally prepared" (p. 263) to undertake the commission at Citta di Castello. Luckily, though, lest he forget anything, he had tutors on site, since, according to Traeger, Raphael must have painted the altarpiece right in the sacristy of San Francesco. His basis for believing this is a painting of 1878 by the local painter Elia Volpi, where we see Raphael before his easel in the sacristy surrounded by Franciscans. Traeg er assures us that Volpi was very scrupulous about matters of historical accuracy and suggests that he may have been privy to local traditions. This is a crucial finding for Traeger, since it establishes that Raphael "breathed the Franciscan spirit from the beginning to the end of his work [on the picture]."

There are moments when this mystical language seems more than casual, where it becomes clear that Raphael has not just learned, but has been imbued, becoming a kind of privileged conduit for Christian theology and tradition, and thus in fact the Virgin's worthy spouse. When Traeger, for example, proposes that the sunlit vale behind the temple is a "chiara valle," that is a "clairvaux," and so "becomes an allusion to the name of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and thus to the mystery of the Virgo mater he expounded" (p. 338), we have moved beyond the realm of pedestrian historical argument. Traeger does not claim that this was actually part of an iconographic program. Instead, he appears to be doing something closer to exegesis: like the Bible, the painting enfolds this meaning in a way that awaits the interpreter's unfolding. This perhaps explains why one gets the strange feeling that there is nothing incidental in this history. The painting is not just the result of circumstances; it designates them and reveals them to be part of a meaningful whole.

In focusing on a work by the young Raphael, Traeger follows in the footsteps of the Nazarenes, who found in Raphael's early works the perfect embodiment of the unity of art and religion. According to this legend, this unity was soon broken apart, and already the later works of Raphael show a greater emphasis on fleshly sensuality. The following centuries brought about a separation of art and religion, a belief in art replacing an art of belief. Completing the story, Traeger argues that the later development of the academic disciplines brought about the full "decatholicization of the Renaissance by Protestant and Jewish scholars" (p. 389). Traeger's effort to expose and overturn this history, however, is itself one of this history's outgrowths, a historiographic addendum to the Nazarene enterprise. The illusion of a foregoing unity before the onset of alienation, the vision of an earlier time when art was a pure vehicle of communication--these are the most modern myths of all, and an unhelpful guide to a worl d that had religion without confessions and art without academies.

Notes

(1.) Richard Trexler, "Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image," Studies in the Renaissance 19 (1972): 7.

(2.) See, for example, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

(3.) On the hunt for pagan humanists, see John Monfasani, "Platonic Paganism in the Fifteenth Century," in Reconsidering the Renaissance (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 93), ad. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1992).

(4.) Lucien Febvre, Le Probleme de l'incroyance au XVIe siecle: La Religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942), esp. ch. 9; Jacques le Goff, L'Imaginaire medieval: essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), esp. 7-11.

(5.) See Peter Humfrey, "Editor's Introduction," in Jacob Burckhardt, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Italy, ed. and trans. Peter Humphrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 9-13.

(6.) "Mit der Entschlusselung der astrologischen Bilder im Palazzo Schifanoia zu Ferrara (1912) zielte Warburg auf den italienischen 'Willen zur Entschalung griechischer Humanitat' und zur 'Restitution der Antike'. Mit diesem Willen habe der--in Ausfuhrungszeichen gesetzte--'gute Europaer' seinen Kampf um Aufklarung begonnen" (p. 20).

(7.) See, for example, Francois Garasse, La Doctrine curieus des beaux esprits de ce temps ou pretendus tels: Contenant Plusieurs maximes pernicieuses a l'estat, a la religion, & aux bonnes moeurs (Paris: Chappelet, 1624). It is discussed by Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The Myth of Renaissance Atheism and the French Tradition of Free Thought," Journal of the History of Philosophy 6 (1968): 233-43.

(8.) Ernest Renan, "L'art religieux," in (Euvres completes, ed. Henriette Psichari, vol. 7 (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1955), 968-69.

(9.) See Ernst Gombrich, "Aby Warburg and A.-F. Rio," Studi in onore di Giulio Carlo Argan (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1994), 48-52.

(10.) Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), no. 220, 147.

(11.) See Ernst Walter Zeeden, Konfessionsbildung: Studien zur Reformation, Gegenreformation und katholischen Reform (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985). On the "confessionalization thesis," see, most recently, Die katholische Konfessionalisierung: Wissenschaftliches Symposion der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum und des Vereins fur Reformationsgeschichte 1993, eds. Wolfgang Reinhard und Heinz Schilling (Muster: Aschendorff, 1995), which includes assessments of the two previous conferences on "Reformed confessionalization" and "Lutheran confessionalization."

(12.) John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

(13.) See, for example, Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Konfessionalisierung in 16. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992).

(14.) The issues are discussed in more theoretical terms by Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter: Form und Funktion fruher Bildtafeln der Passion (Berlin: Mann, 1981), 28-30, and, "Vom Altarbild zur autonomen Tafelmalerei," in Kunst: Die Geschichte ihrer Funktionen, eds. Werner Busch and Peter Schmock (Weinheim/Berlin: Quadriga, 1987), 128ff.

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