Byzantine iconoclasm in all its facets remains an unresolved subject. Key sources are still to be published in modern editions, and interpretation of those that have been published have not yet achieved a consensus. Nonetheless the lengthy bibliography on this topic not only marks its significance but also the breadth of interests potentially, if not necessarily, encompassed by the somewhat misleadingly titled "era of iconoclasm" (literally, the destruction of images) in the eighth and ninth centuries and the iconomachy (contest over the images) that preoccupied the minds of theologians at that time.

The precise dates given by historians to the iconoclastic crisis are not fixed. Modern scholarship has dismissed the historical reality of the traditional opening moment, the destruction in 726 CE of Christ's icon on the Chalke Gate of the Great Palace in Constantinople. Instead, 730 CE, when Emperor Leo III...