ABSTRACT
The attitudes to art that we have been exploring in this book were informed by two key ideas held in tandem: a vision of Catholicism as superstitious and idolatrous and an uncomfortable sense that Catholicism had been, as Gibbon put it, ‘the parent of taste’. I suggested earlier that a considerable part of the uncertainty towards art was probably due to the rather unstable position of the Church of England towards religious imagery. This chapter aims to show how ambiguous the role of the image was in the Church of England. This is essential in order to understand more fully the central concern of this book, which is to show how art was, as a category, associated with Catholicism in England. The role of images in the Church of England is such an underexplored area of eighteenth-century studies that I hope that this chapter will also serve to suggest ways in which further work on the production and reception of art for churches in England might contribute to our understanding of the religious history of the period. 1
