Pictures, books, and the illiterate: Pope Gregory I's letters to Serenus of Marseilles

Abstract Abstract Analyses of medieval art-theory often assert, correctly, that one of the preeminent doctrines of the artistic image's role in western Christendom during the Middle Ages was the notion that pictures are valuable since they function as do books, and thereby help to teach the illiterate.1 The first decisive, western statements to this effect are found in two letters sent by Pope Gregory the Great to Bishop Serenus of Marseilles at the end of the sixth century,2 while variations on the concept appear in a multitude of Latin writings throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, including in the decrees of the sixteenth-century Council of Trent which responded to the Protestant Reformation. Pope Gregory's remarks to Serenus of Marseilles were originally identified as the "classic" expressions of medieval western image-doctrine by Ernst Kitzinger, in a 1954 article concerning the origins of the Byzantine controversy over icons, and several scholars have indicated their agreement.3