The sermon most consistently cited in discussions of Donne and iconoclasm was one preached at Paul’s Cross in 1627 in which he addresses the iconoclastic controversy directly. As Patterson points out, this is Donne’s “only definitive statement” on the subject. As a public sermon, it cannot be interpreted as offering any insight into Donne’s private, personal views on the matter, and indeed, as Patterson demonstrates, it has to be read in the context of the shifting political climate of 1626–1627.
1 Patterson, “Donne in Shadows”, p. 20; pp. 22–26. Making direct reference to Calvin’s
Institutes and the Elizabethan
Injunctions of 1559, Donne outlines the objections to holy images but turns the arguments against images around to make the case that they are “indifferent” objects. This sermon echoes what we have already observed, that Donne seems much more interested in the frames and functions of images – both their material composition and the use that is made of them – than their actual content:
since, by being taught the right use of these pictures, in our preaching, no man amongst us, is any more enclined, or endangered to worship a picture in a Wall or Window of the Church, then if he saw it in a Gallery, were it onely for a reverent adorning of the place, they may be retained here, as they are in the greatest part of the Reformed Church, and in all that, that is properly Protestant. (7: 432)
As a marginal note, “1 Eliz. 1599”, indicates, here Donne is picking up on the language of the 1559
Injunctions which dictates the removal of “pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition, so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glass windows, or elsewhere within their churches and houses”.
2 “The Injunctions of 1559”, Henry Gee and W. H. Hardy, eds., Documents Illustrative of English Church History (New York, 1896), pp. 417–442. But as both Patterson and Gilman point out, Donne “inverts” the position taken by the Elizabethan
Injunctions on religious images in the home. Where the injunction states that religious images should not be moved from church to the home, Donne represents this as stating that anything acceptable in a home is also acceptable in a church: “that Injunction … forbids nothing in the Church, that might be retained in the home” (432). He also takes “astonishing liberties” with Calvin in citing him as an authority for his statement that “where there is a frequent preaching, there is
no necessity of pictures”, which he immediately follows up with his own observation that “if the true use of Pictures be preached unto them, there is
no danger of an abuse” (432).
3 Patterson, “Donne in Shadows”, p. 24.Donne’s balanced defence of images in the sermon concludes with this often-quoted, apparently even-handed take on the matter:
Væ Idolalatris, woe to such advancers of Images, as would throw down Christ, rather then his Image: But Væ Iconoclastis too, woe to such peremptory abhorrers of Pictures, and to such uncharitable condemners of all those who admit any use of them, as had rather throw down a Church, than let a Picture stand. (7: 433)
The rhetorical balance between idolaters and iconoclasts here leaves the sermon passage open to a variety of interpretations. For Evelyn Simpson, Donne here “springs eagerly to the defence of pictures in church, whether in glass or on a wall, as aids to devotion or instructors of the ignorant”, commenting also that Donne “never at any time showed any sympathy with the Puritan attack on ceremonies, pictures and ‘masses.’”
4 Evelyn M. Simpson, “The Biographical Value of Donne’s Sermons”, The Review of English Studies, 2.8 (1951): 339–357 (p. 347). Her quotation though, starting only with “
Væ Iconoclastis… ” somewhat misrepresents Donne’s position. Jeffrey Johnson observes that “strictly speaking, Donne relegates the use of external pictures and images as a formal element of worship to the category of ‘things indifferent.’”
5 Jeffrey Johnson, The Theology of John Donne (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), p. 64; p. 66. But rather than placing him definitively on the spectrum of opinion on the iconoclastic controversy, the sermon passage is perhaps revealing for our understanding of Donne’s attitude to images because it is poised between image and iconoclasm. Both Gilman and Patterson highlight the ways in which Donne undoes iconoclastic pronouncements in this sermon. But through its juxtaposition and balancing of the “advancers” and the “abhorrers” of images, rhetorically this passage both “throws down” images and “lets them stand”. In doing so it reproduces the inherent contradiction of many iconoclastic acts. As Alexandra Walsham has observed, in many of the “acts of ritual destruction” undertaken by the iconoclasts, there is a marked tension between the desire to “extinguish sacred sites and structures…completely” and the “instinct to preserve mutilated residues of the vanquished past as enduring evidence of Protestantism’s glorious triumph”.
6 Alexandra Walsham, “Sacred Topography and Social Memory: Religious Change and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain and Ireland”, Journal of Religious History 36.1 (2012): 31–51 (p. 41). See also Margaret Aston, “Public Worship and Iconoclasm”, in The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580, ed. by D. Gaimster and R. Gilchrist (Leeds: Maney, 2003), pp. 9–28 (pp. 16–17). The “broken idols” themselves, she argues, also have a memorialising function.
In his
The Reformation of the Image, Joseph Leo Koerner addresses such contradictions and tensions in iconoclasm through a study of Lutheran art of the early Reformation, in particular Lucas Cranach’s altarpiece in Wittenberg. Much of his detailed analysis of Cranach’s art, and the dynamics of Reformation images more generally, resonates with the doubleness we observe in Donne’s references to visual art. Koerner makes the point that not only is there a contradictory impulse towards preservation inherent in iconoclasm, there is also a sense in which “the Christian image was iconoclastic from the start … meant to train our eyes to see beyond the image, to cross it out without having to do something so undialectic as actually destroying it”.
7 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (London: Reaktion, 2004), p. 12. The dialectics of Luther’s own stance on visual art is an important context for Donne’s approach to the image question, and Luther’s anti-iconoclastic treatise
Wider die himmlischen Propheten, von den Bildern und Sakrament (1525)
8 D. Martin Luther’s Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by J. F. K. Knake (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1883–1997), 18: 37–214. is a likely source for one of Donne’s most striking religious “pictures”: the picture of Christ crucified “marked in the heart” in his Holy Sonnet “What if this present were the world’s last night.”
It is this dialectic around images, explored so delicately by Koerner in
The Reformation of the Image, that Gilman picks up on in his work on the image question in Donne’s writing. His claim that “the making and breaking of images becomes Donne’s figure for registering the deepest conflicts of his imagination”
9 Gilman, Iconoclasm, p. 135. with which I began the chapter is epitomised by the quotations he chooses for his titles: “Donne’s ‘Pictures Made and Mard’”, from “Witchcraft by a Picture”, is the title of the chapter on Donne in his
Iconoclasm and Poetry, and “To adore, or scorne an image…” serves as the title for an earlier version of the chapter, published in the
John Donne Journal in 1986.
10 Ernest Gilman, “‘To adore, or scorne an image’: Donne and the Iconoclast Controversy”, John Donne Journal 5 (1986): 63–100. Gilman’s selection of these two quotations as titles sum up the tension between “form” and “deformity” that he identifies as fundamental to Donne’s engagement with images: “one hand forming sacred images that the other hand deforms as profane”, as he concludes his chapter.
11 Gilman, Iconoclasm, p. 148. The chapter opens, however, with Donne’s image of the “huge hill” of Truth that immediately follows the “adore, or scorne an image” line in Satyre 3:
On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so. (Satyre 3, ll. 79–82)
12 Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 3: Satyres, p. 92.Gilman acknowledges the possible iconographic sources of the allegorical representation of Truth and the “huge hill”, proposing the allegorical female personifications of Ripa’s
Iconologia or the
Tabula Cebetis. He does so, however, in order to argue that “the iconographic potential of Donne’s ‘Truth’ fades as he urges us on to the rigors of the climb itself”. For Gilman this is a prime example of the gap between Donne’s evident interest in visual art and his apparent avoidance of images. Strangely, he makes his point most clearly in a footnote. Countering Paul Sellin’s claim that Satyre 3’s hill is an ekphrasis of Donne’s medallion commemorating the Synod of Dort with “Jehovah hover[ing] … invisible behind a cloud” at the top of the hill, Gilman insists that his point is, rather, that “in his poetic ascent Donne approaches, but then swerves away from, [the] idolatrous prospect, evoking but then effacing the picture behind his text”.
13 Gilman, Iconoclasm, p. 117; p. 213n.2. Cf. Paul R. Sellin, “The Proper Dating of John Donne’s ‘Satyre III’” Huntington Library Quarterly 43:4 (Autumn, 1980): 275–312 (p. 282 ff.).Gilman’s description here of the speaker of Satyre 3 approaching yet “swerving away from” the image, the “picture behind the text” both evoked and erased, puts into words the way my own interest in this topic began: the double process that I noticed in one poem that sparked off the whole project. While teaching a class on “At the round earth’s imagined corners” it suddenly occurred to me that the Holy Sonnet could be formally and structurally illuminated by comparison with the spatial construction of sixteenth-century paintings of the Last Judgement. The comparison was not sparked by any “pictorial” description, in Hagstrum’s terms, although the angels blowing their trumpets and the souls arising from death may invite parallels with the iconographic tradition of painted representations of Judgement. Rather, what caught my attention was that Donne evokes these details in the context of a spatial mapping that achieves effects similar to the painted tradition of the scene, by way of a management of space, and the evocation of a tension between order and chaos. In the sonnet the list of all those who have died – “All whome Warre, death, age, agues, Tyrannies, / Despaire, Lawe, Chaunce, hath slayne” (6–7) – crowds the end of the second quatrain with far too many stresses, and expands the lines almost beyond the possibilities of the iambic pentameter.
14 Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, p. 8. This seemed to me to parallel the way the “numberles Infinities / Of soules” (3) crowd the space of paintings of the Last Judgement, sometimes threatening to spill over the edges of the frame. It is not only the “imagined corners” of the first line that conjure up the scene of Judgement in Donne’s sonnet, but the play with the pattern of the metre that creates a spatial effect.
Although this means that the lines are, arguably, “capable of translation into painting” the process is quite different from the descriptive “pictorial” quality that Hagstrum describes.
15 Hagstrum, Sister Arts, pp. xxi–xxii. Most importantly, though, if a “visual analogue” is generated by the words of this sonnet, it is incomplete. The angels with their trumpets, the bodies of the resurrected, the spatial logic of Judgement are all there in the octave, but the centre of the “image”, the figure of the Judge, is notably missing. With the lines “
you whose eyes /
Shall behold God and neuer tast Deaths woe” (7–8, my emphasis) the sonnet opens up to include the people alive at the moment of the Last Judgement, and promises the sight of God’s face. But this vision is withheld, and the abrupt turn to the horizontal in the sestet with “But let them sleepe, Lord…” removes this prospect, not only postponing the moment of Judgement for another season but also effectively cancelling the picture that the octave of the sonnet had promised.
The volta of the sonnet enacts the “swerving away” that Gilman remarks on, the “evoking but then effacing the picture behind the text”. The image is simultaneously made present and cancelled, at once “made and marred”. If this, according to Gilman, is the dynamic that defines Donne’s poetic imagination, what exactly is going on here? In this sonnet, what seems to be at stake is the representation of the divine. The moment where the spatial and pictorial potential of the sonnet collapses is when the octave fails to represent the face of God in the scene of Judgement. In this sense the resistance could be interpreted as being in line with the concerns of the reformers, and it is certainly in Donne’s religious poems that we find the most compelling examples of “turning away” from visual images: most notably perhaps in “Goodfriday 1613, Riding Westward”, where the speaker does not see the “spectacle” of the Crucifixion and “turns [his] back” on God.
It would be too simple, though, to state that Donne’s apparent anxiety regarding visual art simply reflects the reformers’ fear of idolatry; he seems to swerve away not only from the vision of the divine but from the image itself; the same pattern can be identified in his secular poetry too. He addresses the limits of representation most directly in some of his elegies, epigrams and songs and sonnets, and these are discussed in Chapter 1. His elegy “His Picture” is one of the few poems that undeniably stages a painting, and here we witness Donne’s characteristic fascination with the mechanics of painting and seeing, and in visual art as a metaphor. But we also see the same swerving away from the potentially pictorial that Gilman has described. Repeatedly, in poems such as “Phrine” and “Sappho to Philaenis”, Donne questions to what extent art can create a “likeness” of reality. All representational art, not just religious art, is called into question.
Contemplation of the divine, though, adds another layer to his problematisation of the visual, and Donne often uses the idea of the “picture” to approach the ineffable in his divine poems and in his
Sermons. Hurley has commented on Donne’s interest in the craft of the artist and the material properties of paintings, but she also observes that in the sermons and the letters the reference Donne makes to visual art “is not an end in itself … it is largely incidental, mentioned through analogy or in passing”.
16 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 163. She claims that “it is in the poems, rather, particularly in the verse letters where [Donne’s aesthetic response] receives its full development”. It is perhaps not surprising that in a sermon Donne would refer to visual artworks not as objects in themselves but as metaphors or analogies to illustrate his theological or pastoral points, and visual art is just one small part of the repertoire of metaphors and illustrations he draws on. Yet the sermons provide valuable clues as to Donne’s sources for some of his most compelling visual art metaphors which help to illuminate the ways he uses visual art to give shape to theological mysteries. Semler and Hurley, most notably, have argued that Donne’s evident knowledge regarding painterly practice in the sermons may come from contemporary treatises on visual art such as Lomazzo or Hilliard.
17 Semler, English Mannerist Poets, pp. 48–49; Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, pp. 174–176. While Donne is a magpie in his acquisition of images and metaphors from a wide range of sources, it appears, as I discuss in Chapter 2, that some of his most sustained visual art metaphors can be traced, instead, to theological treatises – specifically Nicholas of Cusa’s
De Visione Dei and the
Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. These seem to be sources not only of the metaphors but of Donne’s overall method of using the material image to illuminate the immaterial. This locates Donne’s thinking about images in a long tradition of using visual art metaphorically to approach the ineffable, which helps in the interpretation of the visual and spatial logic of his visual references in many of his divine poems.
The interlinked sonnet sequence “La Corona” provides a good example of his spatial metaphors. Often considered as evidence of Donne’s lingering Catholic devotional practices because of the emphasised presence of the Virgin Mary, the sequence both invites and frustrates visualisation of these scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ. For George Klawitter, “La Corona”’s Annunciation and Nativity sonnets, along with Donne’s occasional poem “On the Annunciation and the Passion falling upon one day. 1608”, are “conventional in their Marian images”.
18 George Klawitter, “John Donne’s Attitude toward the Virgin Mary: The Public versus the Private Voice”, in John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway AR: UCA Press, 1995), 122–140 (p. 126). I argue in Chapter 3, however, that Donne’s evocations of the Annunciation are far from the pictorial visualisation of the scene that this would seem to imply. Rather, we witness once again a “swerve away from” these conventional images towards a set of spatial and conceptual paradoxes that highlight the representational conundrum of the incarnation. If a “visual analogue” is sparked by these meditations on Annunciation, it is more formal than pictorial. Parallels can be drawn between Donne’s spatial paradoxes and the methods of fifteenth-century Italian painters who played with the newly developed technique of linear perspective in order to demonstrate how the divine always escapes from human comprehension and human reality.
Donne uses similar formal strategies when he directly addresses the paradox of Christ’s Crucifixion. In his long poem “The Crosse” he asks, “who from the Picture would avert his Eie?” (7),
19 Johnson et al., eds., Variorum 7.2: Divine Poems, p. 147. and in the Holy Sonnet “What if this present were the world’s last night”, the speaker conjures up “the Picture of Christ crucified” (3).
20 Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 7.1: Holy Sonnets, p. 25. But none of these pictures proves to be simple. The depiction of Christ’s Crucifixion and the simple representation of his cross were contested images in Reformation England, and in different ways, all of Donne’s poems dealing with the cross considered in Chapter 4 address the difficulty of seeing the Crucifixion. The sonnet’s “Picture of Christ crucified” is projected into the heart; the speaker of “Goodfriday 1613” insists on looking in the opposite direction from the Crucifixion; and “The Crosse”, often read as a simple anti-iconoclastic defence of the devotional object, multiplies cross images that overlap and contradict each other until the symbol becomes unreadable. In all of these poems Donne addresses the destruction already written into the iconography of the crucifix, and finds that the image of the cross cancels itself out.
As mentioned, Donne’s recurrent meditation on the Last Judgement was the starting point for my investigation, the Holy Sonnet “At the round earth’s imagined corners” being the source of my intuition that the mapping out of the sinner’s salvation has a spatial logic that bears comparison with painted representations of the scene. The deferring of the sight of the face of Christ in that sonnet is echoed in other Holy Sonnets, highlighting a new problem contained within the larger issue of the representation of the divine: how to make present the figure of the glorified Christ. Donne’s Last Judgement poems, considered in the final chapter alongside his treatment of the Resurrection and the Transfiguration, all dramatise the relationship between man and God as the end approaches. The moment of encounter with God that is both willed and deferred in these sonnets can be said, paradoxically, to both magnify and condense Donne’s anxieties about religious iconography, as the poems reproduce the representational problems encountered in visual art in verbal terms.
In all of these cases, the conventional image we might expect is circumvented – recast as a meditation on spatial paradox, cancelled out or deferred. All “visual analogues” that can be established between Donne’s poetry and visual art seem to be subject to this kind of reorientation. Certainly, visual art is evoked. But the uneasiness identified by Sypher and Praz in Donne’s poetry does not lead to an easily definable analogy with the art of the period. Rather, we seem to be invited to compare visual art and verbal art for the problems they face in the service of representation.
W. J. T. Mitchell observes in
Picture Theory that unmotivated word-image comparisons often lead nowhere: “the historicist course in ‘comparative arts’ that compares (say) cubist paintings with the poems of Ezra Pound, or the poems of Donne with the painting of Rembrandt, is exactly the sort of thing that seems unnecessary…”. Where the subject becomes “necessary and unavoidable”, he claims, is when the subject is “the problem of the image/text”, Mitchell’s term for “a problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation”.
21 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 88, p. 89, n. 9. Alongside image/text, indicated with a slash, Mitchell also coins the terms “imagetext and “image-text”: “The term ‘imagetext’ designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. ‘Image-text’ with a hyphen, designates relations of the visual and verbal”. Donne’s recurrent recourse to the frames, materials and genres of visual art to highlight ruptures in representation seems to fit Mitchell’s category of the image/text. The imperfect or cancelled images suggested by Donne’s texts reflect back on the possibility of representation in words. He suggests the word-image comparison explicitly in “The Storme”, where he compares his own “lines” to “a hand, or eye / By
Hilliard drawne” (3–4) and invites Christopher Brooke’s “judgment” on them. But each swerve away from the “pictorial” reproduction of a scene calls into question the possibility of verbal representation. Donne’s insistence on painterly craft, both in the sense of material techniques and of the effects achieved, point up this comparison, and the lines and angles, perspectives and proportions of visual art provide him with a vocabulary to describe the limitations of representation more generally. Finally, perhaps, this is the way in which Donne’s “visual analogues” work: by establishing visual art as an analogue for the practice of verbal art.