Taking the case of a late Renaissance treatise on Huguenot architecture, this essay explores the potentials of collage as an expression of confessional contestation in the wake of the French Wars of Religion. The book's hybrid imagery bears a formal language of cutting, removal, and addition, which evokes the confessional violence that precipitated in this period at the scale of the built environment. Illustrated plates depict open-plan temples with their ceilings and floors cut away, as if to reenact pictorially the dismantling of rood screens and liturgical furnishings in Catholic churches during episodes of iconoclastic purification. The same pages feature Calvinist Psalms and pious sayings that were once chanted and sung by French Protestants, as well as inscribed and layered in abundance on the walls of their churches and homes. In this mixed verbal-visual form, the medium of early modern collage was operative in a plurality of sensory registers and at disparate physical scales.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.