Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians

In the year 726 CE, the Byzantine emperor Leo III issued an edict declaring images to be idols, forbidden by Exodus, and ordering all such images in churches to be destroyed. Thus was set off the first wave of Byzantine iconoclasm, which ran its violent course until 787, when the underlying issues were temporarily resolved at the Second Council on Nicaea. In 815, a second great wave of iconoclasm was set off, to end only in 842 when the icons were restored to the churches of the East, and the Iconoclasts excommunicated. The iconoclast controversies have long been understood as marking major fissures between the Western and Eastern churches. InImages, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians, Thomas F. X. Noble reveals that the lines of division were not so clear. It is traditionally maintained that the Carolingians in the 790s did not understand the basic issues involved in the Byzantine dispute. Noble contends that there was, in fact, a significant Carolingian controversy about visual art and if its ties to Byzantine iconoclasm were tenuous, they were also complex and deeply rooted in central concerns of the Carolingian court. Furthermore, he asserts that the Carolingians made distinctive and original contributions to the whole debate over religious art. Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingiansis the first book to provide a comprehensive study of the Western response to Byzantine iconoclasm. By comparing art-texts with laws, letters, poems, and other sources, Noble reveals the power and magnitude of the key discourses of the Carolingian world during its most dynamic and creative decades.

Thomas F. X. Noble is Professor and Chair of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of several books, including The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680-825, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.