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In the practice of religion, a cult image is a man-made object that is venerated for the deity, spirit or daemon that it embodies. Cultus, the outward religious formulas of "cult", often centers upon the treatment of cult images, which may be dressed, fed or paraded, etc. Christians identify non-Christian cult images as "idols" and their veneration as "idolatry", the worship of hollow forms. The word idol entered Middle English in the 13th century from Old French idole adapted in Church Latin from the Greek eidolon ("appearance" extended in later usage to "mental image, apparition, phantom"). Greek eidos means "form" * as used by Plato.
Christian images that are venerated are called icons. Christians who venerate icons make an emphatic distinction between Veneration and Worship, though the proliferation of wonder-working images since at least the 4th century shows that the distinction is blurred in ordinary practice: see Image of Edessa, Veronica etc.
The introduction of venerable images in Christianity was highly controversial for centuries, especially in Eastern Orthodoxy: see the Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversies of the 8th and 9th centuries. In the West, resistance to idolatry delayed the introduction of sculpted images for centuries until the rise of Romanesque art and the use of the crucifix. The intensified pathos that informs the poem Stabat Mater takes corporeal form in the realism and sympathy-inducing sense of pain in the typical Western European corpus (the representation of Jesus' crucified body) from the mid-13th century onwards. "The theme of Christ's suffering on the cross was so important in Gothic art that the mid-thirteenth-century statute of the corporations of Paris provided for a guild dedicated to the carving of such images, including ones in ivory" *.
The 16th-century Reformation engendered spates of cult-image smashing, notably in England and Scotland, the Low Countries and France. The corpus was removed from the crucifix in many Protestant churches. Often the damage was concentrated on three-dimensional cult images, but more extreme iconoclasts ("image-breakers") even smashed the representations of holy figures in stained glass windows. Further destruction of cult images, anathema to Puritans, occurred during the English Civil War.
See also
"Cult image"