ABSTRACT
Iconoclasm and iconodulia may be regarded as opposite ends on a spectrum of reactions to art. They have in common that they are perhaps the most extreme kinds of reactions and that they can be expressed by either individuals or groups. They differ in three respects. First, obviously, they are polar opposites, one representing utter rejection and the other reverent embrace. Second, iconoclasm may pertain to art of almost any kind and may have many motivations whereas iconodulia pertains only to sacred art and is characterised by particularly intense habits of worship. Third, iconoclasm is demonstrative and visible while iconodulia may be public or private. While iconoclasm’s motivations might be economic, political, ideological, aesthetic or religious – to offer just a few possibilities – it can be differentiated from vandalism which is no less destructive but which may lack purposeful extrinsic motivations in that acts of vandalism may celebrate the vandal as much or more than reference the art.1 Moreover, art is no stable signifier and seems to have shifted in both meaning and understanding from ancient times to the present. Iconodulia has appeared rather rarely in the Western tradition. Indispensable to it is a conviction that any image might be ontologically more than the materials of which it has been made. An image may somehow share in the way-of-being of the person whom it represents. Such an image is itself holy and, thus, is a proper site for authentic worship. Warnings were sometimes sounded to the effect that the adoration owed to God alone, called by the Byzantines latreia, was to be distinguished from the veneration, called proskynesis, that might be paid images. One suspects that ordinary believers sometimes tripped over that academic-looking line.
