Collage, Architectural Inscription, and the Aesthetics of Iconoclasm in Jacques Perret's Des fortifications et artifices (1601)

Abstract

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.

Framing the Enemy

“…For example, there are Huguenot prints designed explicitly on collage principles and there is also the famous cutting and recombining of printed imagery and texts into Biblical 'harmonies' practiced by the Ferrar family at Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire in the 1620s and 1630s. 29 That is hardly surprising. Moderate Protestants like the Ferrars did not want to dispense fully with imagery because of its didactic and devotional potential yet were deeply conscious of the injunction to avoid idolatry.…”