Iconoclasm, Renaissance

Abstract

Iconoclasm, literally “image breaking,” can be defined as the calculated destruction of imagery most commonly associated with religious belief (Boldrick et al. 2014). All religions show visible manifestations of belief; each is a part of a social system enabling adherents to recognize their coreligionists by dress, action, or physical location. Most religions have produced artifacts, frequently images, for use in ritual or in instruction. In paganism, gods were often anthropomorphized and manifested in human form. Christianity, a religion the core belief of which is the incarnation of god in flesh, views its founder as both fully human and fully divine. Christ’s image eventually dominated worship. The beginnings of the religion, however, favored the monogram and the symbol as an antithesis to the Roman reliance on images in imperial propaganda as well as worship. By the fourth century, with toleration of the religion under Constantine, Christian imagery greatly developed (St. John Damascene). By the eighth century, the practice was questioned, especially in the Byzantine Empire (Bryer and Herrin 1977; Brubaker and Haldon 2001). Despite varying positions on the value of imagery, such as the twelfth-century repudiation of monastic use of the image by Bernard of Clairvaux, the employment of sculpture and painting in the service of faith was only seriously challenged in the West during the Reformation. Calvinists in Switzerland and the Low Countries and Lutherans in Germany and Sweden adopted a purged religious service accompanied by an absence of imagery. England, while retaining at first a worship structure close to Catholicism, radically changed the appearance of the Protestant religion, marginalizing imagery. Frequently violent campaigns of destruction accompanied these changes.