Icons of Sacred Matter: the Interpretation of Dutch Golden Age Painting in the Light of Protestant Hierotopy

DOI

10.2991/icassee-18.2018.65How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Protestantism; Dutch Reformation; Calvinism; Dutch Golden Age Painting; hierotopy; sacred space; pantheism; iconology; Baconian philosophy; Spinozist philosophy; neo-stoicism

Abstract

This paper employs the concept of Protestant Hierotopy to explore the spiritual roots of Dutch Golden Age Painting. Hierotopic methodology focuses on the creation of sacred spaces as a form of human creativity. Though the Reformation may have done away with ecclesiastical sacred spaces, it introduced a new kind of hierotopy in their place: a sacralization of the whole of Creation, with a focus on human environments. Protestant admiration for nature was imbued with religious feelings, while cleanliness and domesticity came to be seen as closely akin to holiness. In this paper I interpret Dutch Golden Age Painting as an iconography of this new form of sacrality. I argue that what we find in this art ought to be understood, not as a purely descriptive, objective realism conceived for its own sake, but rather as a passionate or even sacred naturalism motivated by admiration for God’s marvelous creation and enhanced by a Protestant sense of co-working with the Creator.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Andrew Simsky
PY  - 2018/12
DA  - 2018/12
TI  - Icons of Sacred Matter: the Interpretation of Dutch Golden Age Painting in the Light of Protestant Hierotopy
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Art Studies: Science, Experience, Education (ICASSEE 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 307
EP  - 314
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icassee-18.2018.65
DO  - 10.2991/icassee-18.2018.65
ID  - Simsky2018/12
ER  -