Synergistic Relations Between Theories of Visual Perception and Iconoclasm

Northern Illinois University, Dekalb IL

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports history of science research at the interface of science and religion. The research explores the relationships between the science of vision, images, and the optical-psychological practices with images at a critical juncture of western civilization. Specifically, it focuses on relationships between understandings of optics and violent European religious iconoclasms that occurred during the early modern period. The researcher will show that common beliefs about the ways vision and visual psychology worked, and the different uses of that knowledge by artists on the one hand and theologians on the other, set religious art on a collision course with the Reformation understandings of the image. The connections between science, religion, and society that are to be revealed in this study will serve to create scholarly exchanges among those in the natural sciences, social sciences, visual arts, and several fields within the humanities. The results of this study will be integrated into curricular development at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and they will be disseminated in professional journals and conferences. Finally, there will be a conference to extend the trajectories of the main lines of inquiry of this research. The overarching research question of this study addresses what the science of vision can teach us about iconoclastic violence. The researcher will engage in this study first setting out the understandings of optics in this period among different levels of society, then comparing textual evidence in Latin and vernacular religious texts alongside visual and text evidence from the artists. Scientific understandings today recognize vision, perception, and memory storage as physical processes that create both temporary and long-term changes to the brain. Early scientists also recognized the power of vision, especially when focused on images, to alter the mind physically. Those who urgently called for immediate destruction of religious images repeatedly point to the fact that the devout had confused the material image with the holy figure portrayed, and were treating the material object as though it were alive. As the Reformers point out, the optical habits of daily meditation on images, especially on images that appeared alive, caused the images to become physically part of the person's memory, and shaped the person's identity. The iconoclasts understood their image destruction to be destroying a deeply ingrained psychological part of the individual that was considered religiously pernicious. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.