Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper examines the changing political, theological, and ideological crises of eighteenth-century Puritan cleric Ezra Stiles in the visual language of his three portraits painted over the course of his forty-year career as a lawyer, theologian, and Yale University president. Stiles lived throughout a rapid period of religious revivalism and enthusiasm in ways that contrasted with the tenets of Congregationalism, Arminianism, and Deism. While it might seem unusual to use images to understand Puritan theology, a tradition associated with iconoclasm, this study challenges previous notions of Protestantism and the arts and the belief that images were forbidden, by means of an interdisciplinary methodology of formal art historical criticism, material culture studies, biblical typology, and religious historiography. Portraits hung in colleges, homes, or public buildings, as symbols of power fulfilling their purpose by providing examples of virtue and the authority of leaders. Stiles’ likenesses are spiritual autobiographies that are social in nature, steeped in irony and are heavily laden with classical and mythological motifs, as well as scriptural text, and are rich in dress choices and theological associations. His biographical distinctions become obscured as his pictorial choices extend his visual compositions beyond the doctrine of predestined election-embodying rather an egalitarian evangelism. Thus, the diverse portraits of Ezra Stiles express the tensions between a powerful church polity and a diminished ecclesiastical authority and are potent beacons of societal transformation in eighteenth century New England. Self- fashioning through art “making” continues to have far reaching effects in contemporary political and religious societies.