This idea that material representation involves a profanation of divine personages, while disallowing all religious art which goes beyond scroll-work, spirals, flourishes and geometrical designs, yet admits to the full of secular art; and accordingly the iconoclastic emperors replaced the holy pictures in churches with frescoes of hunting scenes, and covered their palaces with garden scenes where men were plucking fruit and birds singing amid the foliage.
The victory of Christianity - iconoclastic in its primitive spirit - was but a single chapter in the story of decline.
The iconoclastic movement is perhaps the most dramatic episode in Byzantine history, and the above outline of its external events must be completed by an appreciation of its deeper historical and religious significance and results.
In October 1530 he broke into the church of Neuchatel with an iconoclastic mob, thus planting the Reformation in that city.
This work is full of such iconoclastic approaches, which the author presents in a captivating, entertaining and yet scholarly manner.