[ICONOGRAPHY AND POPULAR PIETY OF THE "MARIAN ERA" – EXTENSIVE COLLECTION OF DEVOTIONAL IMAGES FROM THE AGE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION DOGMA] Two private collector's albums containing engravings, lithographs, chromolithographs, woodcuts, photographs, embossed images, and other devotional images, printed in other techniques. Titled by hand: "Sammlung von Bildern aus Marianischen Gnadenorten" [Collection of images from Marian places of grace], vol. 2 and Supplement.
Various places and publishers, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Folios (34.5 × 22.5 cm). Two contemporary leather bindings with gold and blind embossing; approximately 700 prints in various printing techniques and sizes ranging from 4 × 3 to 33 × 20 cm, most of which are mounted on sturdy album leaves; as well as 4 medals housed in a paper pocket attached to the inside rear cover, including a memento from Pontifex Maximus Pope Leo XII commemorating the Jubilee of 1826, and a Milanese medal inscribed with the words “Sancta Maria, sine labe originali concepta, ora pro nobis”. Bindings with significant signs of wear; front boards with old inventory labels; binding broken in two places; a few loose leaves; one leaf with an illustration cut out; as a private devotional album, taken on journeys to various “places of grace” or at least in continuous use over decades, very good. Item #54826
Two volumes from what was once a seven-volume collection of devotional images, which, as our research has established, was dispersed into individual volumes in recent years. The whereabouts of the remaining five volumes are unfortunately not known to us. The two volumes in our possession nevertheless convey something of the culturally and historically significant, singular archive this collection must once have constituted. That such a unique ensemble should have been dissolved into separate volumes is all the more regrettable given that its importance resides not only in the individual devotional images themselves, but in what the collection as a whole must have represented: an exceptionally illuminating testament to the Romantic era. Even now, the two volumes afford a profound insight into the visual culture associated with Pius IX's dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in 1854 – a culture that may be understood as a response to the period of "Catholic Enlightenment", in the course of which numerous expressions of popular piety were suppressed and the Society of Jesus dissolved. This intra-Catholic movement against the practices and artistic legacy of the Counter-Reformation was particularly pronounced in Austria – where the Dominican Hyacinth Maria Schönberger was active – through the influence of Josephinism in the late eighteenth century. Under Joseph II, numerous feast days were abolished, monasteries and entire religious orders suppressed, church property transferred to state administration, and the conduct of masses, processions, devotions, pilgrimages, funerals, and the design of altars subjected to far-reaching restrictions. Several of these stringent decrees against Baroque devotional practice survived only briefly, in the face of widespread popular resistance. Marian veneration was subject to particular censure under Joseph II: with two exceptions, multi-day pilgrimages were prohibited, votive tablets were required to be removed from Marian pilgrimage sites, and the distribution of scapulars and medals was banned by the state. In Vienna, Joseph II ordered the demolition of a Loreto Chapel, and the crowning of Marian icons and statuary was explicitly forbidden. (R. Bäumer, in: Marienlexikon, vol. III, p. 440)
Against this historical backdrop, the partial collection presented here stands as a remarkable testament to a counter-movement that both revived Baroque iconography and devotional practice and gave rise to new, intensified forms of Marian veneration. Both tendencies can be traced with particular clarity in the volumes at hand. Indeed, the collection contains not only devotional images from the nineteenth century but also etchings and copper engravings from the seventeenth and eighteenth. One notable example is a depiction of a Marian apparition at Savona, where the "Mater Misericordiae" is said to have appeared to the peasant Antonio Botta in 1536, calling upon the people to do penance. Another striking copper engraving portrays the miraculous icon known as "La Miracolosa Imagine" in the Franciscan church of Maria Materdomini in Nocera Pagani, crowned by Pope Benedict XIV. Among the earlier images, sculptural works are also represented – among them a depiction from the side chapel of the Sicilian church of San Sebastiano in Palazzolo, in which a sculptural Madonna dell'Odigitria (Hodegetria) is carried by the monks Santu Va and Santu Veni. According to popular legend, the Madonna grew so heavy that she could no longer be transported out of Sicily. The Roman icon of Luke in Santa Maria Maggiore appears in several prints, as do classical Marian subjects such as "Mater Dolorosa" with the seven swords (sorrows), "Immaculata", "Virgin of Carmel", "Madonna della Cintura", Mary presenting the Rosary, and others – represented here in earlier prints alongside numerous Baroque engravings after various miraculous images. To name but a few of the sites whose devotional images are included: Bologna, Brescia, Einsiedeln, Florence, Jerusalem, La Salette-Fallavaux, Lourdes, Luxembourg, Montserrat, Naples, Padua, Quito, Rome, Strasbourg, Venice.
Yet alongside this revival of traditional Marian veneration, the volumes also document several of the significant new forms that earned the period the designation "Marian Age." The greater part of the collection was assembled by the Austrian Dominican Schönberger during the pontificate of Pius IX (1846–1878) – a reign defined not only by the dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception, but also by the conflicts with Bismarck and the Italian king Vittorio Emanuele, who denied the Holy See its territorial sovereignty in the course of Rome's annexation. In the German-speaking lands, Marian devotion was particularly widespread among the poor – peasants and the steadily growing proletariat. The social dimension emerged with still greater clarity in Prussia, where the steelworks and industrial plants were staffed largely by workers from Catholic Silesia, while the administrative and industrial classes were drawn predominantly from Protestant Brandenburg. Against this backdrop, Marian processions and pilgrimages carried an undertow of political demonstration. For the Protestant upper classes, Marian veneration served as evidence of a feminized, irrational, and inferior faith. At the same time, the nineteenth century saw by far the greatest number of Marian apparitions in recorded history – the most celebrated of which, and those that retain their prominence to this day, occurred in France. (Cf. Bernhard Schneider: Marienerscheinungen im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Hubert Wolf, "Wahre" und "falsche" Heiligkeit: Mystik, Macht und Geschlechterrollen im Katholizismus des 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2013, pp. 87-110.)
The collection accordingly includes depictions of new Marian apparitions and devotional images from the newly established pilgrimage sites. Among the most consequential apparitions of the period was that of 1830, before the Vincentian sister Catherine Labouré in the chapel of the order in the Rue du Bac (now Notre Dame de la Médaille Miraculeuse). It was important above all because the Virgin here referred to herself as the "Immaculately Conceived" – twenty-four years before the dogmatization of a doctrine contested for centuries. It was mainly the Dominicans, among them Thomas Aquinas, who argued against the assumption advanced primarily by the Franciscans: that while the Mother of God was naturally begotten by Anna and Joachim, her soul had been conceived untainted by original sin. Against the Franciscan Johannes Duns Scotus, the Dominicans maintained until well into the nineteenth century that Mary, too, stood in need of redemption. All the more remarkable, then, that the iconography of the Immaculate Conception is so extensively represented in the album of the Dominican Schönberger. The apparition in the Rue du Bac was persuasive not least because it was accompanied by a materialization that retains its popularity in popular devotion to this day. The Virgin is said to have charged the young nun with striking a medal on which the "Immaculately Conceived" is invoked as intercessor: "All who wear it will receive great graces." A large etching in the collection depicts the event in the chapel. The miraculous medal spread rapidly throughout Europe. Pope Pius IX himself was among those who wore one.
Alongside devotional images from Lourdes, the collection includes, for instance, an early depiction of the apparition near the village of La Salette, where the "beautiful lady" is said to have appeared to the two shepherd children Maximin Giraud and Mélanie Calvat. The apparition is of particular interest in that it did not conform to the iconographic types then current in art history. The figure of the woman, dissolving in light, wears on her breast both a crucifix and a hammer and pincers. A heavy chain hangs over her shoulders, and she is adorned with an abundance of rose blossoms. Within just two months of the apparition in 1846, more than a thousand pilgrims had already made their way to the village near Grenoble, and only a few years later, in 1852, the foundation stone of the pilgrimage church was laid. Today, La Salette is the second most important pilgrimage site in France after Lourdes.
The collection, however, encompasses devotional images not only from Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Austria, Holland, and Belgium, but also from Jerusalem, Turkey, Russia, and even Latin America — offering, in this way, a broad survey of the diverse regional forms and reproductive techniques of devotional image-making. Schönberger places mass-produced steel engravings and embossed devotional prints alongside rarer etchings from the seventeenth century without so much as registering a distinction. The devotional image became an object of art-historical inquiry at the latest with the publication of Erwin Panofsky's 1927 essay "Imago Pietatis," and soon the question of how to define the genre arose. While Panofsky held that a strict distinction could be drawn between devotional images and narrative representations, later scholarship emphasized that any image may, in practice, function as a devotional one. Since then, debate has continued as to whether the devotional image as a type can be defined by its use or equally by its form, and whether Panofsky's boundary between the "cultic image of representation" and the "scenic history painting" can be meaningfully sustained at all. According to the Brothers Grimm, the German term "Andachtsbild" (devotional image) is of relatively recent coinage, appearing for the first time in a stage direction by Goethe, who in his "Faust" has a devotional image – an "Andachtsbild" – of the "Mater Dolorosa" placed in a niche in a wall, before which flower jugs are to be set. That the term should emerge precisely at a moment when images were being removed from churches and monasteries and transferred to museums would appear to be no coincidence. It marks, in a sense, the attempt to establish a conceptual boundary within the act of reception – one that would henceforth have to choose between devout contemplation and art-historical observation. It is this very distinction, then still novel, that Schönberger consistently subverts throughout his collection. (Cf. Thomas Noll, Zu Begriff, Gestalt und Funktion des Andachtsbildes im späten Mittelalter, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 2004, vol. 67, no. 3, pp. 297–328.)
Hyacinth Maria Schönberger (1818–1887) was ordained to the priesthood in 1841 and entered the Dominican Order of Preachers in Graz in 1859. In the order's church he established the Confraternity of the Heart of Mary, and in the parishes the Confraternity of the Rosary. From 1871 he held the office of Praedicator Generalis of his convent, and was counted in his day among the most celebrated popular preachers and most zealous confessors; his 3,000 sermons and diaries are today lost. He is known above all for his widely disseminated "Katholisches Volks-Gesangbuch" (Catholic Popular Hymnal), which went through seven editions between 1856 and 1920.He is now known above all for his widely disseminated "Katholisches Volks-Gesangbuch" (Catholic Popular Hymnal), which went through seven editions between 1856 and 1920. (Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon, vol. 11, p. 52f.).
Price: €4,500.00