Leo III's order to remove figural images was followed by his son's official declaration of Iconoclasm in 754. The purification of prayer, accompanied by attacks on monks, who were also the chief icon painters, prefigures the Reformation in its stress on worship in spirit and in truth. In many churches figural representations of the Virgin were replaced by a monumental cross, and in Thessa­lonica, a mosaic in the apse of the church of Holy David was whitewashed over. Monks were forced to marry nuns in a typical assault on celibacy. Of course, many people refused to comply with the order to remove their icons because they found the veneration of religious images very important to their faith. Women in particular were excluded from serious roles in the church hierarchy of priests and so may have directed their prayers to holy figures portrayed on icons in private acts of worship.

Whether or not there is a more general association between female worship and icon veneration, it is striking that two widowed empresses were in control of the empire when the order of 730 was reversed. In 787 Empress Irene with her young son Constantine presided over the Council of Nicaea which restored the icons; and again in 843 Theodora, widow of Emperor Theophilos, repeated the process through the creation of a new liturgy which condemned iconoclasm and brought back the veneration of icons. As her son Michael was only three years old at the time, it seems fairly clear that she took the initiative and followed the example of her predecessor Irene. These "women in purple" wore the costume of the emperor and ruled almost as if they were men to ensure that Byzantine religious art could return to the patterns established before 730. Their "Triumph of Orthodoxy" was also a triumph of pagan figural art in portraits painted on wood and of traditional pagan styles of expressing veneration.

The style that was re-established in 843 undoubtedly influenced all later Byzantine art. And it is through the exquisite icons, enamels, jewellery, silks and silver objects that Byzantium is generally known, at least to museum visitors. Such objects are found in collections throughout the Balkans, in central Europe and across Russia, since they accompanied the missionaries who converted the Slavs and then the Russians to Orthodox Christianity. Although Patriarch Photios believed in the superiority of Greek, in the late 9th century he approved the translation of the Bible, liturgical texts and law books into the languages devised by SS Cyril and Methodios to render spoken Slavic and Russian. This too was to prove an important link for Protestant Reformers, who believed that reading Scripture in the vernacular was critical.