Description:
Between the late-seventh and mid-ninth centuries, a debate about sacred images engaged monks, emperors, and popes throughout Europe. Drawing on evidence from texts and material culture, Iconophilia assesses the impact of this debate and of coeval theological controversies in Rome and central Italy.
Review Quotes:
'This is an enormously wide-ranging study. The author has deep knowledge of the theological debates, their various protagonists, and the surviving written texts, and this extends impressively to both Latin and Greek authors. In juxtaposing the two categories of document - writing and monument - Dell'Acqua offers an insightful view into early medieval Italian thinking about the orthodoxy of images and their role in contemporary religious practice' - Early Medieval Europe, 30 (2), 2022.
'This is an ambitious book on an important topic, in which the principal arguments are laid out with laudable clarity - no mean feat given the ever-expanding thicket of scholarship on Byzantine iconoclasm and reactions to the controversy in the medieval West ... Dell'Acqua's research makes a major contribution to the study of the rise of the cult of the Virgin in the medieval West, underscoring the role of images in its formulation and promulgation ... All in all, Dell'Acqua's study serves as a reminder and reinforcement of the extent to which the period in question established the foundations for habits of figuration that collectively served as the cornerstone of western religious art - and hence of western art as a whole - for much of the following millennium' - The Burlington Magazine, January 2022.