Smashing and framing

From an interview with James Simpson regarding his Under The Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2011) -

Enlightenment reception of the image is iconoclastic in two ways.

In the first place, the Enlightenment museum neutralizes and commodifies images so as to render them safe. The Enlightenment theory of aesthetics permitted Northern Europeans to look at religious images without having to break them: admire the beauty of form, aesthetics tells us; ignore the religious content.

A second form of metaphorical Enlightenment iconoclasm applies to the much larger field of the human sciences. Different Enlightenment traditions exercise a philosophical iconoclasm, by describing ideology as false consciousness, an idol that enthralls the naive and that must be broken.

Even as the Enlightenment attempted to master Reformation religion, it borrowed the methods of Calvinist religion. Even as it protected the image itself, that is, it drew on the structure of evangelical critique of idolatry. It then applied that critique to a vast field of knowledge. It practiced historiography by detecting enthrallment, superstition and error; the entire past became a museum of error, a museum of artifacts now observed with cool condescension.

Therefore, Under the Hammer also embraces the genesis of the picture gallery in Northern Europe, born as it was out of fierce iconoclasm. The neutralization of the sacred image in the museum is, of course, only the beginning of other stories, and in particular the resacralization of the image in the museum.