ABSTRACTSPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN PURITAN PORTRAITUREByLinda JohnsonPuritan portraits provide historical evidence about Puritan spirituality in American Studies scholarship. By means of an interdisciplinary methodology of formal art historical criticism, material culture studies, biblical typology, and religious historiography, this study shows a correlation between the documented textual evidence of a select group of Puritan spiritual autobiographies and the portraits of ten notable men who represent themselves as visible saints. Ideas about visible sainthood and Puritan election related to the scholarship of Janice Knight's Intellectual Fathers and Spiritual Brethren, John Calvin's theory of predestination and election, Reformation typology, Christian mysticism, and millennialism, as well as the implicit and explicit ideas of Neo-Medieval painterly ideals are utilized in this study.Each man's biographical distinctions become obscured as their pictorial choices in the portraits extended their visual compositions beyond mere exhortative devices or autobiographical treatises into transcendent mystical expressions of an elected High Priesthood. In that transcendence, they strove to embody Christ's life from vocation to service in the prospect of sharing in his glory. Human consciousness is affected by underlying motivations that may be represented in painting as repressed thoughts. Despite the Puritans familiarity with expression through language, the sheer variety of the iconography such as narrative biblical tiles, engraved silver, patterned textiles, picture Bibles, and the sophisticated imagery carved into gravestones, belies the charge that they were iconophobic and of mindless uniformity. The selections of Puritan clerical portraits for this study are steeped in irony, heavily laden with classical and mythological motifs, as well as scriptural text, and are rich in dress choices and theological associations. Since portraits are images of contemplation, subliminal beliefs regarding visible sainthood are portrayed on the men's facades which are hidden metonymically in the style of dress, objects, emblematic conventions, posture, and gestures, embodying the different inner workings of their minds.
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