Did the early moderns believe in their art?

A searing description of how a work of art might function in the early fifteenth century has come down to us from the Ricordi of Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli of Florence, who describes his dying ten-year-old son Alberto embracing and pleading to an image of the Virgin with such fervidness that onlookers winced. Slightly over a century later, in 1522, and north of the Alps, in Wittenberg, Andreas Karlstadt would decry a similar practice: “I absolutely cannot advise the mortally ill to cling to carved or painted crucifixes.” Alberto Morelli believed implicitly in the image; Andreas Karlstadt was equally assured that images threatened the primacy of sacred text. This challenge by a radical Reformation thinker to the traditional role of religious images is stated in particularly arresting language: “Scripture clearly states that God hates the pictures which the papists call books and is jealous of them.” Do these contrasting sentiments primarily reflect the difference between a young boy, dying and fearful, and a crusty, combative man resisting the sway of Italian hegemony in Germany? Or was some erosion in the faith directed at images the sine qua non for the enhanced role they played in intellectual life by the sixteenth century? The idea that Karlstadt so objects to—that images are like books—was a familiar one for Christians. Yet texts themselves were less reliable authorities than once they had been. In a landmark triumph of humanist philology, Lorenzo Valla’s debunking of the Donation of Constantine in 1440 proclaimed the potential fragility of long-accepted tenets. New philological sophistication began to chip away even at Jerome’s Vulgate. The