The Affordances of Images: Religious Imagery and Iconoclasm from a Cognitive Perspective

The Protestant reformers’ iconoclasm was not only a theoretical objection to what they considered the idolatry of religious images, but was, as well, a campaign for the removal (more or less violent in different places) and destruction of church art of all kinds. In sixteenthcentury England there was less rioting and smashing than in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, but the end result was the same. The first sets of Royal Injunctions issued during the reign of Henry VIII required the removal first of ‘abused’ images and statues – those that had become subject to superstitious ritual behavior – and shortly after, the removal of all the images furnishing all churches, painted on church walls, or in the stained glass of the windows. The reformers’ concomitant interest in replacing traditional image worship by Biblereading, and their aim of providing universal access to the Scriptures in the vernaculars, however, was not easily accomplished. The issue is this: the reformers were undoubtedly correct to surmise that the statues and images at the center of religious life for many Christians were, from the point of view of Church doctrine, fundamentally and grotesquely misleading, primarily by virtue of their materiality itself. Aiming at purging what they considered the accumulated error of the ages, the reformers’ proposed to replace the illegitimate veneration of images with the study of the Bible in the vernacular languages. Few, however, were aware of how difficult this project would be. The reformers themselves, literate in four or five languages, were apparently unaware of the enormous cognitive disaster