Status Updates From The Forbidden Image: An Int...

I’m starting to get confused on what the point of this study is. I get that it’s an “intellectual history” and not just a collection of events throughout history but 1) why did he slowly switch from what iconoclasm is to what the sacred image is and 2) why did he write a manual on iconoclasm but only touched upon internal conflicts within the church and not on the wider phenomenon of political conflicts?

This compendium of Imperial assertion, Christian councils and philosophical discourse on the availability of icons is so well informed and informing. Outspenky defends Russian icons against Christian Italian Renaissance representations by saying that in Raphael “the sacred subject is only a pretext for the expression of the painter’s ideas”. Taking away from the universality of a Michelangelo is a bold move

I’m sorry but is this whole 450 page essay going to try to explain iconoclasm WITHOUT ever referring to actual icons being destroyed and with no image to get a sense of that specific representation of divineness? How did we get from a mythical orphic representation to a natural representation of Zeus as the one and only I NEED TO SEE