The idea that Protestantism in post-Reformation England was inherently hostile to the visual arts has a long history and has become embedded across an interdisciplinary scholarship and within popular consciousness. While more recent historiography addresses numerous exceptions to this prevailing trend, this article provides a new assessment of how English Protestantism in a more positive mood not only came to terms with the image but actively embraced it. In identifying patterns of thinking within a wide body of contemporary comment, we offer a chart in the mode of early modern figurative diagrams to emphasize the diverse criteria that Protestants weighed when considering whether an image was suitable for its intended purpose, from the circumstances of its making and using through audience response to location, medium, subject matter, and patron. In doing so, we stress the importance of historicizing the sense of the terms civil and religious use, which do not map neatly onto a modern reading of secular and sacred spaces. We further illustrate how the criteria of the model operated in practice, through detailed analysis of two extant artworks commissioned by committed Protestants, highlighting keen engagement with pictorial art in theory and in practice. The shift in emphasis from rejection to reconciliation captures the spirit of English Protestantism's negotiation and rapprochement with the image over the period ca. 1560–ca. 1640.

后宗教改革时期的英国新教本质上对视觉艺术怀有敌意的观点由来已久，并且已经渗透到跨学科学术和大众意识中。虽然最近的史学对这一流行趋势提出了许多例外，但本文对英国新教如何以更积极的情绪不仅接受了这一形象，而且积极拥抱了它，提供了新的评估。在识别广泛的当代评论中的思维模式时，我们提供了一个早期现代比喻图模式的图表，以强调新教徒在考虑图像是否适合其预期目的时，从其所处的环境出发，权衡的不同标准。通过观众对地点、媒介、主题和赞助人的反应来制作和使用。在此过程中，我们强调将公民和宗教使用术语的含义历史化的重要性，这些术语并不能完全映射到对世俗和神圣空间的现代解读。我们通过对虔诚的新教徒委托创作的两件现存艺术品进行详细分析，进一步说明该模型的标准如何在实践中运作，强调在理论和实践中对绘画艺术的热衷参与。重点从拒绝到和解的转变抓住了大约这段时期英国新教与形象的谈判和和解的精神。1560–约 1640.