Pictures and Popery by Clare Haynes

Author:Clare Haynes [Haynes, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351911269
Google: HgskDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-05-15T03:38:44+00:00

Chapter 5

Ornamenting Anglicanism: Images and Idols

The attitudes to art that we have been exploring in this book were informed by two key ideas held in tandem: a vision of Catholicism as superstitious and idolatrous and an uncomfortable sense that Catholicism had been, as Gibbon put it, ‘the parent of taste’. I suggested earlier that a considerable part of the uncertainty towards art was probably due to the rather unstable position of the Church of England towards religious imagery. This chapter aims to show how ambiguous the role of the image was in the Church of England. This is essential in order to understand more fully the central concern of this book, which is to show how art was, as a category, associated with Catholicism in England. The role of images in the Church of England is such an underexplored area of eighteenth-century studies that I hope that this chapter will also serve to suggest ways in which further work on the production and reception of art for churches in England might contribute to our understanding of the religious history of the period.1

Among the paintings made for churches and chapels that are still extant, there are a few works by well-known artists such as Copley, Hayman, Hogarth, Kent, Streeter, Thornhill, and West. A host of foreign artists found work in this field including Andrea Casali, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, James Parmentier and Sebastiano Ricci.2 In addition, many now little-known or completely unknown artists fulfilled commissions for their local parish church. Most of this work is unrecognized for its own sake, nor is it recognized as a significant part of eighteenth-century English art production. It has not been ignored completely: for example, Addleshaw and Etchells’s The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (1948), Clarke’s The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church (1963), Croft-Murray’s Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837 (1962–70) and Friedman’s The Georgian Parish Church (2004) each discussed it to a limited extent, describing a wide range of church decoration. More recently, the historians Jeremy Gregory and Jonathan Barry have both used some of the evidence of church decoration to argue a broader point about the use of all forms of culture in the competitive experience of parishes in urban communities.3 However, the idea that the Church of England found roles for religious art has yet to have an impact in art history, and much more work is needed to reveal its wider religious and socio-political significance. In the context of this present study, it must be sufficient to survey some of the art that was to be found in churches in the period and consider some of the debates about religious art that took place within the Church of England. This will enable us to understand more clearly the challenges that the English Protestant spectator encountered in looking at religious art, and those that the English artist faced in making art of a kind that was so intimately associated with Catholicism.

There are perhaps two hundred ecclesiastical paintings left to us from this period, using

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