Posted on 10/08/2013 5:24:17 PM PDT by marshmallow
A new exhibition at Tate Britain highlights the scale of destruction to artworks in the Tudor period – a staggering amount of books and music were also destroyed
The slashed and broken medieval images displayed in the new Art Under Attack exhibition at the Tate are a reminder of what we lost in the hundred and fifty years after the Reformation. Even now there is denial about the scale of the erasing of our medieval past. The Tate estimates we lost 90% of our religious art. It was probably even more than that. The destruction was on a scale that far outstrips the modern efforts of Islamist extremists. And it was not only art we lost, but also books and music.
We think of Henry VIII and the destruction of the monasteries, but that was not the end of the destruction, it marked the beginning. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, hailed the reign of his son, the boy king Edward VI, as that of a new Josiah, destroyer of idols. After his coronation an orgy of iconoclasm was launched. In churches rood screens, tombs with their prayers for the dead, and stain glass windows, were smashed. The Elizabethan antiquarian John Stow complained, some of this Christian Taliban “judged every image to be an idol”, so that not only religious art, but even the secular thirteenth century carvings of kings in Ludgate were broken.
Books too were burned on a vast scale. Earlier this year Melvyn Bragg was on TV telling us about William Tyndale during the reign of Henry VIII, and the forces of Catholic conservatism blocking publication of his English bible with its attached Lutheran commentaries. But conservatives were not alone in wishing to suppress books that contained ideas they did not agree with. When the monasteries were suppressed.....
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicherald.co.uk ...
Catholics used to burn people st the stake for “heresy”. There’s a beam in your eye that needs attending to.
Sad. There’s an English seminary in Spain that does reparations for this. the Spanish bishops set up seminaries for the Irish and the English during the repression of Catholics in those countries.
The English and Protestant French attacked villages on the coasts of Spain and would attack, plunder and destroy the church - sometimes locking the priest and people inside before setting fire to it - and the sail away.
The Protestants often hacked off the faces and arms of the statues, and this monastery in Valladolid does reparation for them, praying for the souls of the Protestants who committed these acts.
lol, right. Better than Florentite I guess... I shoulda remembered the spinach !
“No, but this is quite in the past. It was not right to destroy privately owned art, but many terrible things have happened down through history.”
So...we shouldn’t discuss them or have opinions about them?
“I just can’t get too worked up about it, any more than I can get worked up about Julius Caesar double-crossing Crassus and Pompey.”
But why would you since you’re not a Roman? If you’re a Catholic or a Protestant, and actually care about your faith, you would probably have an opinion “worked up about it”. If you’re a Catholic or Protestant and it matters nothing to you, then why bother being either Catholic or Protestant if good or evil don’t matter?
“Catholics used to burn people st the stake for “heresy”. There’s a beam in your eye that needs attending to.”
No, there isn’t. Protestants executed people for heresy or witchcraft or petty crimes - because that was the practice of the times. There’s no beam in my eye at all.
. . . the spiritual tenure of the ecclesiastical benefice was a contractual obligation carrying the weight of inviolability, land held in benefit permanently from the king and enjoying his protection with associated reciprocal obligation. The English monarchs of the 15th century had maintained that obligation, founding new monastic institutions and encouraging reform within old ones. Such care and patronage was readily apparent in the separate reigns of Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV, and even in that of Henry VII.
It is actually pretty accurate.
Henry took over the Church, and as head of both church and state, did what he wanted with church property.
The Act of Supremacy didn’t give him power as head of the church, it rather recognized that he was already head of the church.
The conflating of church and state before 1584 is shown by Henry’s application for dispensations.
Your problem is, that Henry’s established church and state with state at the top. You perhaps preferred established church and state with church at the top.
As an American, I prefer no established church, but the past is a different country. They do things differently there.
““Then the politics changed. The government, of which the Church was part...”
That’s a complete falsehood. That is proved to be a falsehood by the Act of Supremacy in 1534. If the Church was part of the state then no such Act would have been necessary. Learn some history before you post about it.”
>> You are absolutely right in your response. The Church was not a part of the government in England, cf. Thomas a Becket and the Constitutions of Clarendon. Indeed some argue that the healthy tension between Church and royal authority in England directly led to the Magna Carta and the idea that individuals have rights in law against the sovereign.
Why buy back what is properly yours to begin with? They will wait until the thieves become contrite, confess their sins, and return the property.
Catholics and others were burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva too. And the Protestants put to death far, far more witches than did Catholics.
Of course there were alternative churches.
For example the Jews were emphatically not part of the established church. Their synagogues were built by them, and their property was not dependent on land held in benefit permanently from the king and enjoying his protection.
Perhaps Henry didn’t think that the Established Church had kept their reciprocal obligation. He wanted a son, and the Spanish Catholic princess to whom he was married was unable to give him one. In return for his benefits, he perhaps expected a certain flexibility, and when he didn’t get it, he felt his need to keep the reciprocal obligations somewhat lessened.
Protestants burned confused old women they called witches. The Dutch freebooters strapped Jesuits to the sides of their ships as living fenders. German Lutheran troops looted the Vatican and staged orgies in Rome’s basilicas.
There’s no monopoly on atrocity.
‘....antiquarian John Stow complained, some of this Christian Taliban’
Please this type of hyperbole and over dramatic explication tends to make the author’s point less valuable. The author acts as if the roman church never destroyed any art work at all ever. To suggest that only the ‘evil’ protestants destroyed artwork is nonsense and defies history.
If you actually want to make a point try to find something less hysterically presented
The property of the Church did not belong to Henry. The land and buildings belonged to the Church and, simultaneously . to her people. Henry was just a pig.
Edward VI was out for a ride in the countryside when he saw a completely destroyed building. He asked about how it had come to such a condition. He was told that it was once a great monastery and was destroyed during the reign of his father. Edward answered sadly that it was a shame that such a beautiful building should have had such a terrible end.
You left out the plight of the Church and it’s priests in the hands of Robespierre. :-<
“There was no sin in producing beautiful religious art that raised people’s spirits. Catholics were right to produce the art. Protestants were wrong to destroy it.”
In a church that had so many problems, including idolatry, the reaction in the Reformation swung too far to the other side. This was an example.
I don’t support either side. If you do, fine. Makes for a more interesting discussion.
The cathedral was built by the people for their own use. When the RC church wasn’t holding services, another provider was found.
There is a wondeful old church building in Cashel Ireland. It was sold to a restauranteur in 1968. Chez Hans gets great reviews. I have eaten there several times and it is very good indeed.
http://chezhans.net/
And he could have taken the same ride in any direction and come upon the same sad view anywhere in England . . . although some of the buildings were razed to the ground completely and left no trace of their former beauty.
“Sorry but you need to be more specific. Beauty is not sinful. “
As I specified just upthread, the reaction was not against beauty or art. It was a reaction to the Roman church that had spawned all kinds of abuses. When the church refused to even discuss its abuses, the reformation movement was spawned. It too had abuses that swung in the opposite extreme.
I support neither the original idolatry and failures of the first, nor the overreach of the reactionary movement which were failures.
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