Gilded religion in the age of Tiffany, 1877-1932
Date
2014
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
From the 1870s to the 1930s, Americans constructed and renovated thousands of churches that were larger and more ornately furnished than they had been before or since. The architects and interior designers who created these buildings introduced a new aesthetic I call "gilded religion." Adopted primarily by liberal, mainline Protestants, gilded religion was characterized by largeness in scale, intricacy in design, the use of saturated color, and a sense of permanence and interiority. The churches' thick walls, opaque windows, and massive wooden doors created sanctuaries of beauty wherein American urbanites found respite from the modern industrial city. The atmospherics of these churches created a new modality through which worshippers experienced the sacred. ☐ The Ecclesiastical Department of Tiffany Studios, the primary case study of this dissertation, was an especially powerful arbiter of a nationwide demand for elaborate church architecture and decor and the creative energies of architects and designers who responded to it. The firm's stained glass windows, mosaics, furniture, crosses, and surface treatments exemplify gilded religion at its most lavish and most expensive. An outgrowth of the Manhattan bourgeoisie, Tiffany Studios was a repository of taste to which provincial elites looked for cues in church decorating, just as they looked to New York for trends in other types of fashionable consumption. The objects vicariously performed the taste, piety, and sentimentality of their donors while at the same time exerting their own type of agency. ☐ This dissertation is concerned with the way that culture structured how Americans thought about religious aesthetics at the turn of the twentieth century, the way power was distributed within these cultural structures, and how the décor of Tiffany and similar firms was in continuity with the past and the ways in which it was a break from it. The project documents the ways that religionists strategically adopted Tiffany furnishings and the aesthetic of gilded religion altogether to construct insider-outsider boundaries of race, class, and denominational affiliation, to express pride in their regional heritage, and to express a heady confidence in the economic power of the United States and in God's favor upon it.
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Keywords
Aesthetics, Gilded Age, Protestantism, Religion, Taste, Tiffany