Iconoclasm’s Evil War Against The Sacred . . . The Beeldenstorm Of 1566 And How Catholic Artists Fought Back

By JAMES MONTI

Part 2

In early September of 1566, the Catholic parishioners of St. Ursula’s Church in the northern Dutch village of Warmenhuizen had reason to worry for their future. Just a month earlier, Calvinist militants had begun their Beeldenstorm of ruthless iconoclasm in Belgium that had quickly advanced north, spreading into Holland and reaching Amsterdam on August 23, leaving in its wake a trail of desecrated and decimated churches and shrines.
On September 2, the Franciscans’ church in Alkmaar, just seven miles to the south of Warmenhuizen, was attacked by local evangelical fanatics, who destroyed the church’s religious imagery. Radical Catholic priests and religious who dissented from the Church’s teachings were “networking” in this region and were beginning to preach and practice openly their heretical “reformed theology.”
On the evening of St. Michael’s Day, September 29, the sexton betrayed the people by letting into the church “certain evil persons” who smashed the church’s religious images of Christ and the Blessed Virgin. There was among these images a large altar painting of the Crucifixion, the work of the Dutch artist Pieter Aertsen (1508-1575), that a noblewoman named Dame Sonneveldt attempted to rescue by offering one hundred pounds for it. Her offer had apparently been accepted and the picture was being carried out of the church to safety when the iconoclastic mob, enraged upon seeing it, hacked it to pieces with their hatchets.
Word of this incident reached the ears of Pieter Aertsen, as well as news of other church art of his being similarly destroyed. As Aertsen’s near contemporary and fellow countryman Karel van Mander (1548-1606) related, “Pieter was often in an incensed state of mind, because the works which he once hoped to leave to the world were destroyed in this tragic way; and many times he had such bitter arguments with the enemies of art that he almost brought himself into danger” (Dutch and Flemish Painters, New York, McFarlane, Warde, McFarlane, 1936, p. 206).
The Beeldenstorm of 1566 proved to be a turning point in Aertsen’s life. For most of his artistic career, Aertsen had exhibited a conspicuously secular preoccupation in his paintings. Unlike the artistic output of many of his contemporaries and predecessors in his field, much of his work was purely secular in subject matter, and even in his ostensibly religious paintings from this period in his life, the sacred seems to have been upstaged by secular subject matter.
In his depiction of the Gospel event of the woman caught in adultery who was brought to Jesus (1559), this biblical scene occupies one small part of the canvas, seen from afar, while an opulent depiction of peasants feasting upon a cornucopia of tasty treats fills the foreground. In a painting of the Magi worshipping the Christ Child (1554), the Holy Family and their visitors are pushed to the left side of the picture while a gigantic and fastidiously detailed rendering of the face of the Manger’s ox dominates the center-stage of the work. As one art critic has observed, Aertsen’s earlier work lacked “spiritual depth.”
But when Aersten resumed his labors following the Beeldenstorm, a whole new spirit emerged, with an output that bears the hallmarks of a fully conscious and decided response to the theological and artistic priorities annunciated by the Council of Trent. It was at this time that he produced his painting Seven Works of Charity (1573), an unabashed depiction of the corporal works of mercy that artistically refuted the Protestant theology of “faith alone” which dismissed good works as worthless to God.
Two years later, shortly before his death, Aertsen painted his works Christ Healing the Paralytic and Saints Peter and Paul Healing the Sick, in both of which his focus is unambiguously spiritual. The catastrophe of the Beeldenstorm had awakened Aertsen to what his artistic talent was really meant for.
The Dutch city of Utrecht had been the scene of much of the artistic carnage of the 1566 Beeldenstorm. It was into a large Catholic family of Utrecht that Gerrit van Honthorst was born in 1592. Following in his father’s footsteps as an artist, Gerrit journeyed to Rome in his early twenties, where he studied and learned to imitate the distinctive realism and “chiaroscuro” lighting effects of the painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) before returning to his native city in 1620.
Gerrit married and in 1627 purchased a house next to the cathedral that had belonged to his uncles Robert and Henrick, both of whom had been canons of the cathedral. In acquiring this home Gerrit would have also come into possession of a “refugee” from the 1566 Beeldenstorm that had found shelter under this roof decades earlier, an altar triptych of the Assumption by the artist Anton Blocklandt that had been rescued from the fury of the iconoclasts. The lives of the van Honthorsts were centered upon their Catholic faith, with four priests in the family: in addition to the two uncles, Gerrit’s brother Herman and one son were also priests.
The sufferings of Dutch Catholics since the Beeldenstorm were a palpable reality for Gerrit, who more than once had to intervene to save his priest-brother from banishment until in 1641 his brother was caught exercising his priestly ministry and was exiled.
Even though outright violence against Catholics had long ceased in the Netherlands, anti-Catholic laws forced Catholics to worship in secret, with Calvinists viewing the Catholic priests quietly present in the country as “locusts” exercising “their Roman idolatry” (Reformed Synod of Utrecht, 1555-1656, quoted in Genji Yasuhira, “A Swarm of ‘Locusts’: Pro/Persecution and Toleration of Catholic Priests in Utrecht, 1620-1672,” Church History and Religious Culture, volume 99, 2019, p. 184).
It was shortly after his return from Rome that Gerrit van Honthorst painted a portrayal of Christ being crowned with thorns for the Dominicans’ chapel in Amsterdam (c. 1622 — at present, in the city’s Rijksmuseum).
What is most striking and unusual about this work is that three of the six persecutors of our Lord depicted in this scene are children, one in a mock genuflection gesturing contemptuously as a second blows a ram’s horn directly into the Savior’s left ear and a third, holding a torch, grins with delight. The head of Christ is thrown back, His lips parted and His eyes gazing upward as two soldiers tighten the crown of thorns. In this painting van Honthorst has captured the dimension of psychological torture, the mental anguish of Christ in being pelted with hatred and mockery.
But why does van Honthorst present children as the key agents of this attack upon Christ? There is nothing in the Gospel accounts to suggest this. It is, I believe, an allusion to the 1566 Beeldenstorm, in the course of which children repeatedly joined adults in venting contempt upon religious images of Christ and the saints. It evokes the truth that every act of sacrilege, every act of iconoclasm directed against Christian sacred imagery, is an assault upon Christ Himself. It likewise suggests that in suffering for their faith, the persecuted Catholics of Holland were suffering in union with our Lord.
Another distinctive characteristic of this painting is van Honthorst’s striking depiction of the cruel pleasure that Christ’s tormenters are taking in His suffering, something also captured by the artist quite powerfully in his earlier work The Mocking of Christ (ca. 1617), wherein a torch illuminates the gleeful face of a young man taunting the Savior. This too would have evoked memories of the Beeldenstorm, for much of the iconoclasm was carried out with riotous celebratory looting, feasting, and heavy drinking.

How God Sanctified The World

The destruction and loss of precious religious art in the Low Countries did not end in 1566. In 1581, a second wave of denuding churches, albeit in a more “orderly” manner, began in Antwerp, instigated by the Calvinist town council. Quietly, surreptitiously, more sacred images were pulled out of the city’s churches.
But there was in Antwerp at this time a man who turned his home into a safe house for whatever sacred objects and religious art he was able to rescue from this “silent iconoclasm,” Frans Francken I (1542-1616), an artist in his own right, who together with his brothers Ambrose and Hieronymus and their sons were to become a painters’ dynasty that over the decades produced an entire school of distinctively Catholic art.
Among the Franckens it was one of Frans’ sons in particular, Frans Francken II (1581-1642), who excelled in developing a new genre of implicitly religious art, what is referred to as the “collector’s cabinet.” The practice of assembling a personal collection of art and objects from nature and science, whether housed in a display case or filling an entire room, flourished at this time. The younger Francken undertook to paint depictions of such “cabinets” of assembled objects in a manner that served as an articulate rebuttal to iconoclasm and the anti-Incarnational mentality it represented.
Thus, in one of Frans Francken II’s earlier paintings of this nature, simply titled A Collection, from about 1618, we see in the foreground a table covered with an assortment of seashells and coins, but taking center stage amid these, standing erect atop the table, are two religious paintings, an Annunciation and the Visit of the Magi. On the wall behind, amid beautiful paintings of landscapes, hangs a garland-wreathed depiction of the Madonna and Child.
What is being expressed here is a celebration of how Almighty God has sanctified the visible and material world by becoming man, assuming a human face and a human body and communicating His sacraments and His graces to us through our senses, while likewise manifesting Himself in the wonders of His creation. The Catholic vision of life and of the world embraces the totality of what God has given us, which includes the employment of material, corporeal objects and substances to create beautiful art in the service of God.
By contrast, Calvinist iconoclasm stood as a repudiation of matter as hopelessly “ungodly,” denigrating the employment of matter in God’s service as an insult to His infinite transcendence, ignoring the fact that God in His infinite transcendence did nonetheless take a human, material body in the Incarnation. In fact, in its most radical form, iconoclasm contradicted even the pursuit of the natural sciences.
In several of his “collector’s cabinet” paintings, Francken directly references the irrationality of iconoclasm and the cultural barbarity of the 1566 Beeldenstorm, adding in these pictures a painting or scene of men with donkey-heads destroying artworks and even musical instruments.
The response of Dutch Catholic artists to the evil of iconoclasm was to reach its zenith in a masterpiece of mysterious symbolism that likewise bears a timeless witness to the countless Catholics who over the centuries have been willing to suffer for their Catholic faith. It will be to this masterpiece that we will turn in our next essay.