Why, while Greek art is at its peak, do philosophers give reasons to despise it? Why has the biblical prohibition of the image been interpreted so differently by Jews, Muslims and Christians? Why has the quarrel of images taken such gravity in the West, while the West is ignoring and multiplying the sacred and profane images? This book answers these questions and raises others: on a new iconoclasm that develops in the West - Calvin who drives out the image of the temple, the Jansenists who despise it, Kant who considers it useless, and Hegel out of date; on the transformation that these currents cause to European painting; and in France, which is keeping its way aloof. Alain Besançon reads in this story the development of a spiritual logic that is an enemy of the image, and which bounces from century to century until ours. He identifies the key moments. He follows the thread that runs through the aesthetic reflection, from Plato to Malevich. And he hears in the explosion of abstract art the echo of the old breakages of images. A whole section of art, its anxiety, its prestige, its disarray is thus enlightened by this long investigation of the divine image, even if, in the new iconoclasm, the arguments of the old are the most often forgotten.