Pictures and Popery

Art and Religion in England, 1660–1760

Clare Haynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351911269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The part religion played in questions of national identity in early modern England is a familiar historical theme, yet little work has been done on how this worked culturally. Nowhere is this more visible than in the seeming contradiction of a militantly Protestant nation such as England, that had a high regard for Catholic art. It is this dichotomy, the tensions between art and anti-Catholicism, that forms the central investigation of this book. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, religious art was closely identified with idolatry, and the use of images was one of the most obvious markers of the boundary between Protestantism and Catholicism. This manifested itself in an unease about the status of the religious image in English society, which was articulated in religious tracts, anti-Catholic propaganda, polemical debate, court cases and numerous other places. In light of these attacks upon 'idolatry', the fact that a great deal of Catholic art was so highly regarded and sought after seems puzzling. By discussing English attitudes towards the works of Italian painters (including Raphael, Michelangelo and Domenichino) and the ways in which native artists sought appropriately Protestant ways of emulating them, this volume offers a fascinating perspective on the dichotomy that existed between English appreciation and disapproval of Catholic culture. By taking this cultural and artistic approach and applying it to the broader historical themes, a new and invigorating way of understanding religion and national identity is offered.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Art and Anti-Catholicism

Sad to consider that the occasional rise of painting, being chiefly from the popish priesthood, the improvement and culture of it (except the vicious part for the cabinets of the grandees etc.) has turned wholly on the nourishment and support of superstition (chiefly too in ugly forms), and exaltation of that vile shrivelling passion of beggarly modern devotion ... Witness the best picture in the world, Domenichino’s St Jerome. [Plate 1]¹

In eighteenth-century England, at a time when the nation prided itself on its stalwart defence of the Reformation, the works of art that were most prized were Roman Catholic in subject matter and provenance. Raphael’s Cartoons [Plates 12–14], whilst they were recognized as works of Catholic apologetics, were considered the foremost works of art existing in England and Domenichino’s Last Communion of St Jerome [Plate 1] was widely accepted by the English as one of the greatest works of art in the world, and simultaneously, as a work of ‘beggarly modern devotion’. This is the first of two apparent paradoxes addressed in this book. The second relates to the Church of England. Despite having strongly worded doctrinal statements against the use of images and a long history of periodic iconoclasm, paintings of the Last Supper, paired ‘portraits’ of Moses and Aaron, sculpted doves, pelicans and angels and a host of other imagery were to be found in churches during the period. These two paradoxes are not distinct because both result from the same historical phenomenon: the nature of English Protestantism. This book attempts to describe and explain how these paradoxes were dealt with, and contends that religious concerns were very important to how art was viewed and made in England. In addition, it shows how these concerns were mobilized in ongoing debates within the Church of England over the proper forms for the worship of God. Thus, it aims to contribute to two still largely distinct strands of the historiography of the period: the history of art and the history of religion.

Religion mattered in eighteenth-century England. Even for those few with no religious faith, it still mattered a great deal. The country had been through a bitter civil war, and was to depose another Stuart king, over questions of religion. Religious beliefs, ideas and prejudices (most notably, but not exclusively, anti-Catholicism) were discussed in public, frequently and with vigour. It was the stuff of politics in ways that it is perhaps hard for us to grasp. It also shaped people’s lives in more intimate ways. Most believed they would one day have to face judgement, and most understood the natural world as working according to God’s design. Providence still had a prominent role in explaining events. Even for those few who had set aside conventional religion, religion still shaped the questions they asked of the world, determined the focus of their interests and frequently fired the arguments they had.²

The experience of the historian Edward Gibbon (1737–94) illustrates this well. As a young man Gibbon had an eclectic religious life: brought up in a nonjuring family, he converted to Catholicism while he was at Oxford, causing his father to send him to Lausanne to have good Protestant principles instilled in him.³ Ten years later, on an autumn day in 1764, when he sat listening to vespers being sung in Santa Maria d’Aracoeli on the Capitol, in Rome, and apparently decided on the work that would occupy almost all of the rest of his life, Gibbon may not have believed in God at all. Nevertheless, the book he determined to write that day was formed by Christianity. I am not arguing merely that Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a book about religion, which it certainly is, but more than that it is a book that was written from a religious viewpoint, however sceptical a one it was.⁴ Gibbon engaged with theology and religious history all his life: it mattered to him and his contemporaries.⁵ To ignore religion was hardly possible, either for the intellectual or the uneducated.⁶

Art could hardly matter to the same degree, but it still mattered more than we might imagine. This was for two principal reasons. Firstly art, as a signal of cultural and social superiority, took on new import in what was a period of tremendous social and economic change. As Iain Pears has shown, the number of pictures imported and bought and sold in England increased dramatically after the Restoration in 1660, and art was enmeshed in prominent debates about taste, education and morality.⁷ Secondly, the arts were called upon to support the developing sense of England as the great nation of Europe. However, it was troublingly clear that English art did not reign supreme in Europe. When Edward Gibbon acknowledged this ironically in his account of Paris in his Memoirs, he observed that:

an Englishman may hear without reluctance that ... Paris is superior to London, since the opulence of the French capital arises from the defects of its government and religion ... All superfluous ornament is rejected by the cold frugality of the Protestants; but the Catholic superstition, which is always the enemy of reason, is often the parent of taste.⁸

Gibbon was not the first to observe that Catholicism seemed more fertile ground for art than Protestantism, nor would he be the last. However, his tone of blithe detachment was rarely matched elsewhere, and much effort, both intellectual and practical, was put into encouraging the arts as a patriotic endeavour. Accompanying these efforts was the anxiety as to whether England was actually capable of producing great art at all. If England was a great nation, as most believed it to be, it should be capable of producing great art that would in turn demonstrate its success, as had the great nations of the past.

In terms of the contemporary discourses of art, great art meant only one thing – history painting.⁹ Raphael’s Cartoons and Domenichino’s Last Communion of St Jerome are history paintings, large-scale narrative paintings of authoritative, and morally or religiously edifying, subject matter. The European canon of art, which the English assented to, was dominated by works, such as those by Raphael and Domenichino, which drew on the Bible, the history and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church and the lives of the saints. History painting was seen as the summit of artistic achievement, the genre through which artists displayed supreme creative and intellectual skills. It demanded learning, intellectual discernment, as well as masterly skills and a considerable amount of an artist’s time. It thus demanded a special kind of attention from the spectator. Often discussed as having a public purpose of moral improvement, history painting was frequently compared to portraiture, which could be perceived as a more private art with the essentially private purpose of remembrance. Thus history painting was the genre in which public virtues were advocated and in which a suitably public system of virtue and excellence was felt to reside and be demonstrated.

However, English patrons were conspicuously unwilling to commission history paintings from English artists; instead, portraiture dominated the market. Ambitious artists had almost insuperable difficulties in earning a living from history painting in England during the eighteenth century, and, perhaps with the exceptions of John Singleton copley (1738–1815) and Benjamin West (1738–1820), none did.¹⁰ How could an English school of art, worthy of the name, ever develop in these circumstances? The lack of encouragement for home-produced history painting during the eighteenth century has been felt so strongly that subsequently it has been described as the ‘tragedy’ of British painting. Historians have diagnosed three main causes for it: lack of court patronage, the impracticality of large pictures in contemporary interiors and the antipathy of the church of England to religious art.¹¹ The lack of court patronage is well attested, especially in the period after William III and before George Ill’s patronage of Benjamin West. The question of interiors is slightly less clear-cut, as we will see -foreign history paintings were collected and displayed, sometimes even in decorative schemes designed around them. As for the church of England, it is certain that there were not the extensive opportunities Roman catholic churches could provide, with an intact tradition of church decoration and the extensive use of side altars.

This latter reason was the one stressed most frequently by contemporaries. For example, it is the only specific reason given by Richard Steele for the lack of history painting in England, in an essay on the English School of painting that appeared in The Spectator in 1712. Steele suggested provocatively that rather than founding the English School on history painting, it should be based on portraiture, arguing that England’s greatness at portraiture was a national achievement and the result of the nation’s particular character and ‘climate’. The Italians could not fail to be the best at history painting, he argued, with their store of antique statues and bas-reliefs as ‘helps’, while England was supreme in portraiture because the country abounded with ‘beautiful and noble faces’. In addition, ‘no nation in the world delights so much in having their own, or friends’ or relations’ pictures; whether from their national good-nature, or having a love to painting’ [my emphasis]. This meant that:

instead of going to Italy, or elsewhere, one that designs for portrait painting ought to study in England. Hither such should come from Holland, France, Italy, Germany &c. as he that intends to practise any other kinds of painting, should go to those parts where ’tis in greatest perfection. ‘Tis said that the Blessed Virgin descended from heaven to sit to St. Luke; I dare venture to affirm, that if she should desire another Madonna to be painted by the life, she would come to England.¹²

This playful argument, while it deploys the stuff of anti-Catholic rhetoric, suggests too how profoundly entangled art was with Popery in the English imagination. We will see how this influenced the ways in which the English engaged with art, affecting not just their reception of foreign Catholic art, but the expectations for art as a whole. Steele was quite clear that the popularity of portraiture was due to the fact that patrons were:

not ... encouraged in that great article of religious pictures which the purity of our worship refuses the free use of, or from whatever other cause (my emphasis).¹³

His phrase ‘free use’ is a telling one. Steele does not suggest that the Church of England had a complete antipathy to art, which is now a popular perception of the period. His comment also shows how the identity of history painting was bound up with religious subjects. Portraiture was simply safer.

Similar comments about the lack of encouragement from the Church of England made by William Hogarth (1697–1764), Benjamin Ralph and André Rouquet have been interpreted as suggesting that there were no opportunities for such work. Hogarth, for example, noted rather cryptically in his Apology for Painters that ‘our religion forbids nay doth not require Images for worship or pictures to work up enthusiasm’. It is undoubtedly significant that, in each case, the context for the remarks was a plea for more patronage of history painting by individual patrons.¹⁴ Artists could not rely on the institutions of church and state for a regular flow of commissions as Catholic painters might be able to. So, if English painters were going to become great artists, the only way this could happen would be through English collectors commissioning history paintings from English artists, rather than buying foreign works. This work of encouraging patrons to commission history paintings appeared urgent to many contemporaries exercised by England’s apparent failure to develop a great school of art, and these men deployed a rather emphatic rhetoric, which should not be read too literally.

Hogarth repeatedly argued for the elevation of subjects more apt to the current English moment, suggesting that ‘modern moral subjects’ should take the place of outdated and alien subject matter. In a letter published in the St James Evening Post in 1737, he criticized the ‘shiploads of dead Christs, Holy Families and Madonnas, and other dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining or ornamental’, which dealers were importing (and what is more, Hogarth argued, they were frequently copies passed off on an uneducated public as original works).¹⁵ Pictures like these can be seen to be attacking his own works in his Battle of the Pictures [Plate 2], which Hogarth made as an advertisement, in the form of a bidder’s ticket, for the auction of his paintings that he organized in 1745. Hogarth’s war with what he saw as the twinned corruptions of the subject matter of much European art and the operations of the market was a theme of his life, played out in his writings and his art.¹⁶ Hogarth painted only one work for a church – the large and highly unusual triptych for St Mary’s Redcliffe, Bristol, of The Ascension of Christ with The Sealing of the Sepulchre and The Three Marys Visiting the Sepulchre. However, there were other opportunities for religious painting in England. Hogarth, for example, painted a staircase at St Bartholomew’s hospital based on the parable of the Good Samaritan; the subject of Moses before Pharaoh’s Daughter for the Foundling Hospital and Paul before Felix for Lincoln’s Inn. In addition, and contrary to common perception, there was actually a good deal of figurative and narrative art deployed in many churches in this period. Once we begin to take this body of material into account, our understanding of the possibilities for art in eighteenth-century England will be refined. This will be discussed in Chapter 5.

Chapters 2, 3 and 4 deal with the reception of art in England. Chapter 2 is set in Italy, though. A visit to Rome was considered highly desirable for the education of elite young men as part of a European grand tour. Besides treading in the footsteps of the heroes of the classical literature they had been taught to model themselves on, they also went to see and learn to appreciate all the best of ancient and modern art. This was, as we shall see, considered an imp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Art and Anti-Catholicism
• 2 The Grand Tour: Art in the Maintenance of the Cultural Hegemony of the Gentleman
• 3 Raphael’s Religion: The Interpretation of Catholic Pictures in England
• 4 Collecting Catholic Pictures
• 5 Ornamenting Anglicanism: Images and Idols
• 6 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index