In Golden Age Spain, religious art functioned within the boundaries of a time-honoured corpus of ecclesiastical and rhetorical theory on the image, which attempted to prevent immoderate iconic veneration aided by metaphors taken from the well-known world of portraiture, themost imitative of pictorial genres. Counter-Reformation theologians and preachers also sought to reduce the artwork's impact on irrational sensibility by urging artists to avoid the undesirable effects of awkward or lascivious images. This article will explore howthe laws of decorumequipped Post-Tridentine Spanish imagery with aesthetic values meant to reconcile delectare with docere and movere, and how this finally resulted in a dispute between high culture and popular taste, between an art favored by royal collectors (painting) and another much more generalized as a result of ecclesiastical patronage (sculpture).

In Golden Age Spain, religious art functioned within the boundaries of a time-honoured corpus of ecclesiastical and rhetorical theory on the image, which attempted to prevent immoderate iconic veneration aided by metaphors taken from the well-known world of portraiture, the most imitative of pictorial genres. Counter-Reformation theologians and preachers also sought to reduce the artwork’s impact on irrational sensibility by urging artists to avoid the undesirable effects of awkward or lascivious images. This article will explore how the laws of decorum equipped Post-Tridentine Spanish imagery with aesthetic values meant to reconcile delectare with docere and movere, and how this finally resulted in a dispute between high culture and popular taste, between an art favored by royal collectors (painting) and another much more generalized as a result of ecclesiastical patronage (sculpture).