For an interesting history of the back-and-forth of Christian iconography in the...

For an interesting history of the back-and-forth of Christian iconography in the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Iconoclasm

I studied this in a college - very fascinating all the fighting and back and forth over simple images. Leave it to Wikipedia to offer up something I never read about: 'According to Arnold Toynbee, it is the prestige of Islamic military successes in the 7-8th centuries that motivated Byzantine Christians into evaluating and adopting the Islamic precept of the destruction of idolatric images.'