Fear of Images

How far the history runs back

The history runs from ancient Greece and Rome through the violent iconoclasms in the Eastern Orthodox Church within the Byzantine Empire between 726 and 842. But the period most associated with it is the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther's initiation of it in 1517 brought iconophobia into the front line of contemporary politics, and John Calvin's teaching pushed it to its extreme. The effect on aesthetics and the history of art was enormous and not exclusively negative, and it permanently changed how images were made, exhibited and judged.

What Collinson's distinction changed

The historian who did most with the word was Patrick Collinson, foremost among scholars of English Protestantism. He fixed it to one stretch of post-Reformation England in the Stenton Lecture he gave in 1985, titled From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia, and three years later the same argument became the fourth chapter of The Birthpangs of Protestant England. His work has shaped a generation of scholarship on how religion and culture acted on each other in that period, and scholars have accepted, rejected and modified it without escaping its influence.

The argument turns on a redefinition. Ordinarily iconoclasm means smashing religious images for religious or political reasons; Collinson made it mean what the earliest Protestant propagandists, the Edwardian ones, were actually doing. What they did instead:

• put plays on stage
• set godly ballads to whatever tunes people already sang in the street
• worked the printed picture hard, using it against Catholicism and for their own convictions in the same breath Under that usage the word can mean putting an acceptable image in place of an unacceptable one, or taking an existing image and repurposing it. What their spiritual children and grandchildren did later was throw the whole method out.

Against that he set iconophobia, which for him meant refusing every image without exception. He put the turn at about 1580 and described what happened then as sudden and drastic. This later push of reform very nearly abolished images, and the mimetic along with them, while treating the taste and the capacity of people who could not read, which meant most people, with open contempt.

How long it lasted

By Collinson's own reckoning the extreme age of it was brief, no longer than a generation or thereabouts. Later scholars have generally stretched it, arguing that from 1580 onward it is a defining feature of post-Reformation Protestantism rather than an episode within it. How long the thing he named actually lasted is therefore still open, in a field he largely defined.

The catalogue's other image fears, Fear of Mirrors and Fear of Dolls, concern what one person sees. This one concerns what a society allows to be seen.