Review: "Uncertain Times: Martin Luther's Remedies for the Soul"

From the October 20 Sounds of St. Francis

Designing an exhibition to commemorate the Reformation’s 500^th anniversary is a fairly heroic task for any gallery.  Far more art was destroyed than created in the sixteenth century in those European lands that embraced the teachings of Luther, Calvin and Cranmer.  But the Walters Art Gallery has made a humble but probing attempt in its single-room exhibition, “Uncertain Times: Martin Luther’s Remedies for the Soul,” on display until October 29 at the museum in downtown Baltimore.

Fittingly, many of the most significant pieces on display are not paintings, but books.  The personal prayer book of Luther’s close associate Philip Melanchthon is there, worn from heavy use, annotated in the margins.  There’s a handsome early edition of Luther’s Tabletalk, the collection of theological rejoinders and moral advice dispensed by the aged master in his later years over the daily bread and beer, carefully recorded by his students.

Words are also the medium of a mesmerizing eighteenth century German folk art piece featured centrally in the exhibition.  The anonymous artist has scripted the many lines of Luther’s Small Catechism as a globe around the rose and cross of Luther’s coat of arms, a loyal tribute to the way in which the theologian has most often been encountered across the centuries—in this careful summary of Reformation teaching, written to be memorized by children as they prepared for their confirmations.

Della Robbia at the National Gallery: Tender, Humble, and Devout

From the Sounds of St. Francis, 4 June, 2017

The terracotta statuary created by the Della Robbia family of Florence is instantly recognizable: white figures surrounded by vivid blue backgrounds, often wreathed by bright green leaves and fruit. But these statues don’t always get so much respect. Modern connoisseurs of high Renaissance art usually swoon over the Leonardos, Raphaels, and Michelangelos instead and galleries sometimes consign Della Robbia statues to the hallways or overstuffed “ojects d’arte” rooms.

In their own time, though, the Della Robbias (an uncle, a nephew and a grand-nephew) were highly regarded and received enormous numbers of commissions. In some ways, victims of their own success, the family developed a unique process for glazing terracotta, leaving behind vivid colors and a glassy sheen. Their impressive workshop method allowed extensive production for over a century. We tend to overlook their statues because there are so many of them, not just at world-class museums like the National Gallery, but in all sorts of private collections (including an impressive Madonna and Child that hung in the library of my former parish in Cooperstown). If you’ve been to Tuscany or Umbria you will know how cheap knock-offs of Della Robbia work abound in souvenir shops, cheapening one’s experience of beholding the real thing.