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- Title
CATHEDRALS AND CASTLES OF THE SEA: SHIPS, ALLEGORY AND TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IN PRE-REFORMATION NORTHERN EUROPE.
- Authors
Timmermann, Achim
- Abstract
Revolving around the image of the Ship of the Church (navis ecclesiae), this article explores the making of visual allegory in the century between the end of the Great Schism (1378-1417) and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation (1517 ff.). Of particular interest here are those images in which the crucifix has been grafted onto the mast and sail-yard of a ship (antenna crucifixi). The material is placed in conversation with contemporary trends in the crafting of complex allegories and new developments in both ship design (most notably the introduction of the carrack into northern European waters) and the visual representation of ships. The focus is mostly on the German-speaking sphere, though select images originating in the Italian peninsula are also taken into consideration. One of the very first ships bearing the antenna crucifixi is described in both text and image in Winand Ort von Steeg's mystical-allegorical treatise Adamas colluctancium aquilarum (1419). However, it was not until the last decades before the Protestant Reformation that the imagery was introduced to a much wider audience, particularly in the context of the iconography of another vessel, the Ship of Saint Ursula, with which it was amalgamated to produce compound allegories of the ritual celebration and visualtheological staging of the eucharist. Though it could be argued that these visual allegories were never especially stable, as they shifted their shape and specific meaning from context to context, it is also true that the ships at the centre of these complex configurations ultimately all undertake the same voyage across the tempestuous and dangerous waters of the Ocean of Life: centred as they are by the victorious crucifix mast, these vessels sail straight through the whirlpools of moral contamination to eventually arrive at the Port of Salvation, where they can safely dock and unload their cargo of human souls. It could be contended that this particular fifteenthand early sixteenth-century iteration of the navis ecclesiae was one of cautious optimism, which gave visual expression to the belief that the post-schismatic Roman Church had victoriously prevailed over its enemies and was once more on course' to fulfil its salvific destiny. However, this belief was not universally shared, so much so that just as the Ship of the Church was gaining iconographical momentum in the decades around 1500, sceptics, pessimists, and realists - often fuelled by anticlerical sentiment - began busying themselves with the construction of a new flotilla of allegorical ships specifically designed to reflect more accurately the actual religious and political situation or else put a satirical spin on new insights into the anthropology of the human condition. Chief among these new allegorical vessels is Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff or Ship of Fools (1494), which takes its human cargo not to the Port of Salvation, but to Narragonia, the Land of Fools. In another bleak antithesis to the triumphalism of the nautical allegories at the heart of this article, encountered in two treatises of astrological prognostication, the Ship of the Church is either on the verge of sinking amidst huge waves or foundering on a rocky shore, throwing its passengers - all high-ranking members of Church and State - overboard. Visually striking and semantically malleable, the ships explored in this contribution anticipate the next class of allegorical ships developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and expressing the hopes and aspirations of a new generation of viewers, now looking on from both sides of the confessional divide.
- Subjects
NAVAL architecture; TECHNOLOGICAL innovations; REFORMATION; SAILING ships; ALLEGORY; SHIPS
- Publication
Baltic Journal of Art History, 2019, Vol 18, p7
- ISSN
1736-8812
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.12697/BJAH.2019.18.01