PROTESTANT HIEROTOPY IN DUTCH GOLDEN AGE PAINTING
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2017-3-10-32
This paper employs the concept of Protestant Hierotopy to explore the spiritual roots of Dutch Golden Age Painting. Hierotopic methodology, as developed by Alexei Lidov, focuses on the creation of sacred spaces as a form of human creativity. Though the Reformation may have done away with the sacred spaces of churches and sanctuaries, it introduced in their place a new kind of hierotopy: a sacralization of the whole of Creation, with a particular focus on human environments. The admiration for nature was imbued with religious feelings, while cleanliness and domesticity came to be seen as closely akin to holiness. In this paper I interpret Dutch Golden Age Painting as an iconography of this new sacrality. I argue that what we find in this art ought to be understood, not as a purely descriptive objective ‘realism’ conceived for its own sake, but rather as a ‘fervent’ or even ‘sacred’ naturalism motivated by admiration for God’s creation and enhanced by a Protestant sense of cooperating with the Creator. Such motives can be found at work in all genres of Dutch fine art. Still lifes, especially bunches of flowers, extremely lifelike and physically impossible at the same time, can be seen as icons of God’s Creation. Modest bourgeois dwellings, embellished by palace-grade Oriental carpets and marble flooring, are elevated in painted interiors to the level of veritable temples of domesticity. Early modern admiration for God’s Creation was inspired by Calvinistic teachings with regards to Nature as God’s manifestation, as well as by neostoic pantheism and by the contemporary scientific passion for the visible world and its study by observation. All these diverse influences worked together to inform a whole new worldview of Protestant Hierotopy in which the natural and the domestic acquired an aura of sacrality, while their representation in art took on an iconic dimension.
Keywords: Dutch painting, Dutch Golden Age, hierotopy, Protestantism, Calvinism, Baroque, Neostoicism, Natural Theology, art theory, iconography, iconology, realism, still life, landscape, domesticity
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Issue: 3, 2017
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 10 — 32
Downloads: 1781