When Jacob van Ruisdael painted this landscape, placing a large
windmill on a hill, was his intent to represent the cross of Christ
and call to mind to the presence of sin in the world, as a certain number of
art historians have argued, or was he trying, more straightforwardly, to glorify
the national territory by representing one of its most powerful symbols?
In fact, there is a widespread tendency to over-interpret the paintings of this time and to see any representation of nature as a representation of God himself.
When you look more closely at how artists viewed the relationship between their faith and their profession, it is clear that there is no such mechanistic connection.
Sébastien Bourdon was a Protestant,
but that didn't stop him from making his career in Rome or Paris -- he even painted St Peter the Martyr for Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.
On the other hand, the painter Jacob Jordaens, who was born and lived in Antwerp, a Catholic area,
converted late in life to Protestantism, thus opening up a new market for himself: the wealthy United Provinces, where artwork was in high demand.
Finally, it is important to highlight that Calvin was not the spiritual mentor of 17th century Dutch painting.
Very often, these artists contravened his guidelines.
I'll give two examples. Calvin said that no representations should be made of
the sacred mysteries of religion, yet some Protestants artists did it anyway.
The most significant example is the pilgrims of Emmaus -- a subject presumably impossible to represent, since Christ disappeared from sight
as soon as the disciples recognized him -- a miraculous event.
Yet some artists tried to represent this scene, like Rembrandt, whose Pilgrims of Emmaus
represents Christ as a shadow, as if to place him somehow between the visible and the invisible;
or Jan Steen, whose Christ is depicted as a sort of mist or vapor rising from the table at which he was sitting.
Calvin also called on painters not to glorify or idolize pastors and theologians themselves.
Yet there is an abundance of 17th Dutch paintings portraying preachers and pastors.
One famous example is Rembrandt's depiction of Cornelis Anslo interpreting a biblical passage for his wife and moving
her to tears. In many Protestant churches, you'll also see
paintings of ministers surrounded by their flock,
which always seems, it must be said,
more engrossed in the pastor's words than
in the image he procures and produces of the Reformed church.
André Gide, a Protestant writer, once said that art is born of constraint, thrives on struggle, and dies from freedom.
The Calvinist tradition could very well be viewed as one of the constraints imposed on 17th century artists --
a constraint that proved difficult to bear, that limited the scope of their work and subjects, but that also led to reflection on the limits artists might place on their representations.
In a way, then, it encouraged them to develop new formal and iconographic solutions.
From this standpoint, Calvinism, rather than an absolute prohibition,
can be seen as a new form of freedom for artists, allowing them to develop art in new directions.
We've reached the end of today's sequence. Thank you.