Spiritual spectacles : vision and image in mid-nineteenth-century Shakerism / Sally M. Promey.
1993
N6510 .P76 1993 (Mapit)
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Details
Title
Spiritual spectacles : vision and image in mid-nineteenth-century Shakerism / Sally M. Promey.
Author
Promey, Sally M., 1953-
ISBN
0253346142 (hard ; alk. paper)
9780253346148 (hard ; alk. paper)
9780253346148 (hard ; alk. paper)
Imprint
Bloomington : Indiana University Press, ©1993.
Language
English
Description
xxiv, 292 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm.
Call Number
N6510 .P76 1993
Summary
Among the lesser known artifacts of Shakerism are many elaborate drawings and paintings produced under inspiration between 1839 and 1859. In a community which generally prohibited images, believers intended these exceptional religious pictures to enhance spiritual vision; the images thus functioned as "spiritual spectacles." In depictions of celestial places, objects, and people, viewers could see spiritual things as though possessing "corrected" spiritual sight. Spiritual Spectacles explores this neglected but illuminating aspect of Shaker visual culture. By 1837, an increasingly troublesome sense of distance from charismatic founder Ann Lee (1736-84) and her immediate converts permeated Shaker experience. In format, conception, and composition, Shaker images addressed this situation, restoring relationships by providing visual access to the Shaker "heavenly sphere" and its inhabitants. Artfully navigating the official proscription of images, visionary paintings and drawings became powerful religious resources. Sally M. Promey submits these remarkable products of Shaker revival to careful and sustained visual analysis and locates them firmly in the appropriate religious and cultural contexts. She traces the movement from vision to image within Shaker spirituality and demonstrates the essential connection between visionary experience and visual image. She explains how Shaker image-makers attempted to reconnect the earthly community with heaven and its inhabitants and to restore the zeal and personalities of earlier times. Furthermore, she suggests that Shaker reservations about pictures intensified and made explicit the usually veiled but nonetheless consistent anti-iconic impulses that punctuate American cultural history. Within communal borders and on their own terms, Shakers participated in an ongoing national debate about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, morality and beauty, religion and art. A significant contribution to the study of Shaker images and the culture(s) which produced them, Spiritual Spectacles adds an important voice to the interdisciplinary dialogue between the history of art and the history of religion.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 278-283) and index.
Series
Religion in North America.
Record Appears in
On-Campus Resources > Books
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Table of Contents
Foreword / Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein
Introduction: A Sense of Crisis
pt. I. Vision and Image. 1. From Vision to Image: Continuity in Shaker Experience. 2. Image and Iconoclasm: Discontinuity in Shaker Experience. 3. Production and Regulation of Images: The Instruments and the Ministry
pt. II. Vision, Image, and Space. 4. Ethics and Aesthetics: In Heaven's Likeness. 5. Image as Threshold of Heaven: Passing through Pictures
pt. III. Vision, Image, and Time. 6. [Re]collecting History: A Visible Genealogy of "Gospel Relations" 7. Restoring Relationship: Image as "Visible Presence"
Epilogue: The Power of Ambiguity.
Introduction: A Sense of Crisis
pt. I. Vision and Image. 1. From Vision to Image: Continuity in Shaker Experience. 2. Image and Iconoclasm: Discontinuity in Shaker Experience. 3. Production and Regulation of Images: The Instruments and the Ministry
pt. II. Vision, Image, and Space. 4. Ethics and Aesthetics: In Heaven's Likeness. 5. Image as Threshold of Heaven: Passing through Pictures
pt. III. Vision, Image, and Time. 6. [Re]collecting History: A Visible Genealogy of "Gospel Relations" 7. Restoring Relationship: Image as "Visible Presence"
Epilogue: The Power of Ambiguity.