Imago Dei

A sweeping account of the controversies surrounding the worship of images in the early Byzantine church In 726, the Byzantine emperor, Leo III, issued an edict that all religious images in the empire were to be destroyed, a directive that was later endorsed by a synod of the church in 753 under his son, Constantine V. If the policy of Iconoclasm had succeeded, the entire history of Christian art—and of the Christian church, at least in the East—would have been altered. Iconoclasm was defeated by