The enclosing of him “which fills all Place” (3, 10) within the human measure of the sonnet sequence not only mimics the “cloistering” of Christ in Mary’s body but also reflects on the debates surrounding the appropriateness of representing the divine in visual art at all. In its uniting of human and divine, the Annunciation is a painterly and representational riddle, and also a theological touchstone in arguments about the validity of religious art that go back at least as far as the iconoclastic controversy in the eighth-century Byzantine Church. Although far removed in time, the ideas of the Byzantine controversy circulated in theological and scholarly debates about images in the Reformation.
During the debates of the earlier controversy, the iconoclasts had maintained, particularly in the iconoclastic Council of Constantinople held in 754, that since Christ was both wholly God and wholly man, of human and divine nature at the same time, any attempt to represent Christ in material form was an attempt to represent the Godhead which could not be depicted, and therefore both blasphemy and a belittling of Christ.
1 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2 (New York: Scribners, 1900), vol. xiv, p. 544, cited by William A. Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 22. The supporters of images claimed, on the contrary, that the Incarnation itself justified the production of religious iconography since Christ chose to represent himself physically, and that this very process was part of the mystery of Christ’s kenosis, his self-imposed humiliation in taking human form. Visual reproductions of scenes from the gospels do more than simply portray Christ’s actions: by capturing Christ’s image, they echo and honour the circumscription of the divine inherent in the mystery of the Incarnation. John of Damascus wrote that:
if we were to make an image of the invisible God, we would really sin; for it is impossible to depict one who is incorporeal and formless, invisible and uncircumscribable [
aperigraptos]. And again: if we were to make images of human beings and regard them and venerate them as gods, we would be truly sacrilegious. But we do none of these things. For if we make an image of God who in his ineffable goodness became incarnate and was seen upon earth in the flesh, and lived among humans, and assumed the nature and density and form and color of flesh, we do not go astray.
2 St John of Damascus, Oratio apologetica III, 2 (and II, 5), PG 94: 1320. Translation in St John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, ed. by Andrew Louth (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), p. 82.The anti-iconoclastic Second Council of Nicaea (787
ce) concluded by affirming the traditions of the church including “the making of iconographic representations – being in accordance with the narrative of the proclamation of the gospel – for the purpose of ascertaining the incarnation of God the Word …”
3 Definition of the Holy Great and Ecumenical Council, the Second in Nicaea, 377C. Translation in Daniel J. Sahas, Icon and Logos: Sources in Eighth-Century Iconoclasm (University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 178. While the Reformation iconoclasts strongly rejected these conclusions and the veneration of images they endorsed, their references to the earlier controversy made the ideas of the Byzantine period very present in the Reformation iconoclastic debate.
4 For the reformers, the Second Nicene Council’s endorsement of the veneration of images were a prime example of false argument and false worship. “Lectures on Deuteronomy”, in in Martin Luther Werke 14: pp. 613–614; Calvin referred to the “childish arguments for images at the Council of Nicaea (787)”, in a section added to the Institutes in 1550, in order to “inform [his] readers how far the madness went of those who were more attached to images than was becoming to Christians”, John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. by John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), pp. 114–116. See also Anthony Ugolnik, “The Libri Carolini: Antecedents of Reformation Iconoclasm”, in Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama, ed. by Clifford Davidson and Ann Eljenholm Nichols (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1989), pp. 1–32, who argues that Byzantine iconoclasm prefigures Reformation iconoclasm in many ways.John of Damascus’s theorising of the “circumscription” of Christ in visual art provides a useful context for examining Donne’s Christology throughout “La Corona”. The opening sonnet of the sequence invokes the invisible and unrepresentable God in its address to the “Ancient of Days”: “Thou which of Good hast, yea, art Treasurye, / All-changing vnchangd Antient of Dayes” (1, 4). By referencing the passage from the book of Daniel, one of the very few detailed bodily manifestations of God in the Old Testament, the speaker of “La Corona” thus invokes one of the few biblically sanctioned images available to the artist before the line “Salvation to all that will is nighe” (1, 14; 2, 1), ushers in the Incarnation and the possibility of representing the divine.
5 “I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire” (Dan. 7:9). On the illustration of God the Father as the Ancient of Days see Aston, Broken Idols, pp. 570–575.