Statuary at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and a community with a mission

This thesis investigates the role of four statues of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as part of the larger eighteenth-century Pennsylvania German worship experience. Why did this congregation choose to display such a significant program of ornament? To try and answer this question, this paper begins with an assessment of the four evangelical figures, investigating iconographic significance and issues of authorship. Next, it assesses how these statues might have been experienced by the particular body of viewers for which they were created. Finally, the paper concludes by asking how the statues met and fulfilled various social, cultural, and ideological functions of the congregation and the surrounding Lancaster community.; In order to unpack these themes, this investigation traverses a cross-disciplinary space, plotting a course through the bounds of cultural, social, and art history. This study joins the recent work of individuals including Gretchen Buggeln and Sally Promey, whose scholarship fleshes out basic ideas of the American worship experience. Additionally, it builds upon the work of Scott T. Swank and Aaron Spencer Fogleman regarding the role of the immense German population who lived, worked, and shaped the province of Pennsylvania both before and immediately following the Revolution. Furthermore, trends identified by Louis Nelson appear in this conversation as keys that will allow us to investigate the interrelations that these monuments implied.; In an effort to formulate ideas concerning the broader role of public sculpture within the Pennsylvania German worship experience, this paper adopts a methodology that relies heavily on the tenets of material culture theory. As Jules Prown has proposed, if "objects made or modified by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged," then the four statues at Trinity Lutheran Church contain the latent potential for a world of information that is only beginning to be investigated. By unpacking these truly unique objects first as material things and then as cultural signs and expressions of their time and place, this essay attempts to answer the following question: What did the sculptures of the evangelists do for the church that could not have been accomplished through some other visual or material means?...