ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with events occurring between the 680s–720s which appear relevant to the developments of the image controversy. It examines well-known as well as overlooked evidence to analyse when and how the West perceived the rising controversy over sacred images. The Byzantine controversy over sacred images – known at the time as ‘iconomachy’, that in Greek is ‘image struggle’ – has been the object of unparalleled scholarly attention that has itself produced ‘a crisis of over-explanation’. Under the successor of Pope Constantine I, Gregory II, the Liber Pontificalis makes a reference to the iconoclastic controversy for the first time. The chapter looks at the place of the ‘visual’ in the seventh century through the lens of Church councils and their papal reception and concluded that pictorial images were solidly understood as ‘transparent windows’ to facilitate contact with the divine and the holy.
