The visual culture of Roman Catholicism haunted eighteenth-century English Protestantism. Gentlemen heralded their nation's commitment to the Reformation and, at the same time, exalted Roman Catholic art and artists. The Church of England strongly denounced idolatry in doctrinal statements, pamphlets, and sermons while its members ornamented their homes with modern art and churches displayed paintings of the Last Supper, portraits of Moses and Aaron, and other religious imagery and artifacts. Clare Haynes addresses these paradoxes in her book Pictures and Popery. By calling attention to the prominence and pervasiveness of Roman Catholic art in England, Haynes demonstrates how its reception shaped English art criticism and the visual practices it sponsored, as well as the Church's ongoing attempts to negotiate a via media between “popery” and dissent.

English gentlemen considered art appreciation a duty of national consequence. They believed that fine art belonged at the heart of public life because it cultivated discernment and morality and, consequently, that a nation's strength could be gauged by the quality of its fine art. Since English elites shared the western world's conviction that the best art was produced in France and Italy, they lamented the state of the nation's art, expressed concern for its international stature, and wondered why Catholic “superstition,” rather than Protestant “reason,” produced such fine art and aesthetic judgment. Haynes seeks to untangle this complex blend of art, religion, and nationalism by concentrating on four areas in which English gentlemen confronted Catholic art: Rome, one of the most important stops on the European Grand Tour; Hampton Court Palace, home of the Raphael's much-admired Cartoons; individual collections in private homes; and English churches. By calling on a host of archival sources, including guidebooks, art treatises, diaries, newspaper accounts, catalogues, and court cases, Haynes illustrates how Protestant spectators engaged Catholic art and made it safe for English consumption and appropriation.

Haynes begins her narrative with the Grand Tour because of its centrality to the education of English gentlemen. In addition to reinforcing the traveler's earlier study of ancient civilizations, his encounters with the original sites of antiquity and experiences in foreign cultures provided him with new artistic references and refined skills of sociability. Just as important, it taught him how to look at art with a Protestant, rather than a Catholic, gaze. Haynes shows that Englishmen negotiated the Roman Catholic content and context of Italian Renaissance art by employing aesthetic criteria to discuss well-established masterpieces and denouncing popish superstition in their evaluations of second-tier works. In doing so, they established a form of English spectatorship that avoided a work's religious function and, therefore, the danger of idolatry.

Although establishing aesthetic hierarchies worked well for select images on the Grand Tour, Englishmen faced a more difficult task when they returned home. In the opening decades of the eighteenth century, Raphael's Cartoons—originally created for the Sistine Chapel to illustrate the legitimacy of the Roman Church and papal succession—became iconic images in England. Reproduced in textiles, paintings, engravings, and woodcuts circulated throughout the country, their content presented an obvious challenge to English viewers. Haynes illustrates how a variety of Englishmen—including Jonathan Richardson, who produced one of the first substantial and successful treatises on painting in English—modified European art theory to “Protestantize” Raphael and reaffirm the Cartoons' status as a national treasure.

After illustrating how English art critics and enthusiasts developed rhetorical strategies and visual practices to safely encounter Catholic art, Haynes considers how a work's location and audience shaped its reception. In chapter 3, she discusses the pervasiveness of Catholic art in English country houses and private collections. Since anti-Catholicism continued to exert its influence on cultural affairs throughout the eighteenth century, collectors proved to be just as creative as art theorists in justifying their ownership of Catholic art. More generally, they asserted that viewers of private collections were endowed with judgment and, therefore, had the experience and education necessary to be transformed by pictures rather than converted or polluted by them. Regular believers who encountered art in churches lacked the same discernment, however, and remained susceptible to religious imagery. Haynes's final chapter examines public disputes over church imagery to demonstrate that charges of idolatry carried theological, political, and cultural implications and served as tools of social control. She highlights, too, the ways in which writers distinguished between “ornament” and “image,” the former a legitimate use of art to educate those of poor rank and the latter a reference to Catholic superstition and papal excess.

Haynes's thoughtful attention to the reception of Catholic art in England, as well as the tensions that fashioned it, constitutes the core of Pictures and Popery. While her illustration and evocation of these debates is strong, her close analysis of particular writers and texts tends to overshadow the underlying issues that prompted them, namely, the philosophical and institutional conflicts between fear of deception and faith in vision; cultural authority and individual judgment; and Roman Catholic unity and Protestant dissent. Nevertheless, Pictures and Popery is an important contribution to a growing body of work that scrutinizes the intersection of art and religion. By stressing the use and reception of objects more than artistic style and intention, scholars from a variety of disciples have addressed how art functions in particular religious communities at specific historical movements. In this way, Haynes's book belongs alongside Hans Belting's magisterial work on icons, Jeffrey R. Hamburger's investigations of medieval visual culture, Paul Driskel's study of art and religion in nineteenth-century France, and David Morgan's and Sally Promey's examinations of American mass culture and fine art. It serves, too, as a call to historians of British art and culture to examine more closely the role of Catholic art in the formation of English art production and interpretation.