Art, Piety and Destruction in the Christian West, 1500–1700

Spanning two centuries and two continents, Art, Piety and Destruction in the Christian West, 1500-1700 addresses the impact of religious tensions on art, design, and architecture in the early modern world. Beyond famous works of art such as Kraft's Eucharistic Tabernacle, the volume examines less-studied objects, including church plate and vestments, stained glass, graffiti, and Mexican images of St. Anne, created throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The collection's contributors present religious artworks from Germany, England, Italy, France, Spain, and Mexico; the media include sculpture, oil painting, fresco, metalwork, dress, and architecture. Questions of art's destruction, preservation, and censorship are discussed against the ever-present backdrop of religious conflict and varying degrees of tolerance. New information and original perspectives demonstrate the ways in which art illuminates history, and the close links between the changing values of a society and the images it displays to represent itself.

Contents: Introduction: art and religion: then and now, Virginia Chieffo Raguin; Salvaging saints: the rescue and display of relics in Munich during the early Catholic-Reformation, Jeffrey Chipps Smith; Does religion matter? Adam Kraft's eucharistic tabernacle and Eobanus Hessus, Corine Schleif; You are what you wear (and use, and see): the form of the reform in England, Virginia Chieffo Raguin; Repackaging the past: the survival, preservation and reinterpretation of the windows in St Mary's, Fairford, Gloucestershire, Sarah Brown; Preserving antiquity in a Protestant city: the Maison Carrée in 16th-century Nîmes, David Karmon; Destruction or preservation?; the meaning of graffiti on paintings in religious sites, Véronique Plesch; Inquisitorial practices past and present: artistic censorship, the Virgin Mary, and St Anne, Charlene Villaseñor Black; Index.

Virginia Chieffo Raguin is professor of Art History at the College of the Holy Cross. Her exhibitions and publications include stained glass, architecture, and the social/religious context of art.