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What Was The Impact Of The Catholic Counter Reformation

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The Protestant Reformation, which started in 1517 when Martin Luther incited huge debates with his Ninety-Five Theses, challenged the High Renaissance. Specifically, Luther panned the authority of the pope and indulgence about the purgatory, questioning the traditions and doctrines of Catholic practices. This aroused the Protestant movement, where the Protestants rejected to worship in fancily decorated churches that were covered with seemingly exaggerated bodily sculptures and statues of saints, Virgin Mary, the Christ, and God the Father. To counter this, the Catholic Church instigated the Catholic Counter Reformation, which sought to attract people back in the Church and embrace those who were in the Church. The Catholic Counter Reformation …show more content…

Protestant mobs, which were created in stimulus to Luther’s action, destroyed many Catholic Church artworks, negatively affecting many artists’ earnings and living standards not only in the southern Europe, but also in northern Europe. Very few artists were little or unaffected by this catastrophe, such as Albrecht Durer, a German painter and illustrator. Perhaps the reason for Durer’s luck was the fact that he respected Luther and altered his artwork style to less embellished that Luther wanted. Other artists, such as Hans Holbein the Younger who painted mostly Virgin Mary before the Reformation, had to move from Germany to the Low Countries like England to find work and paint something out of his main subject. (Appendix …show more content…

This Revival was a “comprehensive effort composed of four major elements: 1. Ecclesiastical or structural reconfiguration. 2. Religious orders. 3. Spiritual movements. 4. Political dimensions.” (Laberge) One of the most passionate Catholic who took part in Counter Reformation is Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a sculptor, architect and a painter. Bernini’s best stone art work, called Ecstasy of Santa Theresa, (Appendix 2) is a marble sculpture of a Catholic Saint who at the time of the sense was actually in her 50s. However, Bernini portrays her as a young woman in her 20s. Santa Theresa had a vision of the love of God appearing to her as a gorgeous young man, an angel, who pierced her body, with the golden arrow of divine love. She wrote about this vision and responded to it spiritually and physically. It is important to point out that Bernini’s intention was the reference to sexual pleasure as a religious experience. He meant to draw people back in to the Church with such alluring art works.
In Northern Europe, however, Protestant artists created simple images of people, places, and things. Architecture was not disregarded – when many medieval churches in London was burned down in 1666, Sir Christopher Wren, an English artist in the 17th century, was asked by the Protestants to rebuild them. Because he had to build the churches in between crowded commercial sites, he built the churches tall with

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