Religion barely figures in any of the histories of British art from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. If it is mentioned it is usually in a wider context to make the point that, because both church and court patronage were largely denied to them, artists in Britain had almost no opportunities to develop the grand manner of intellectually elevating ‘high art’ that characterised the superior achievements of particularly Italy and France. Such religious works as were produced consequently fall outside the canon and have been marginalised, and the politics of religion between 1660 and George iii are ignored. This book persuasively argues that there is a much more subtle and finely nuanced engagement between the experience of art and doctrinal ideas at work which can be recovered by analysing contemporary receptions of religious art by critics, collectors and churchmen. How could a member of the Protestant cultured élite negotiate a way through Catholic content as an art critic or collector? How might a Protestant clergyman overcome notions of superstition and idolatry in an image in an Anglican church? The answers to questions like these are far more mediated than might be supposed. One might, for example, deploy Jonathan Richardson's argument that the Reformation had freed the mind to judge by reason, and hence a Catholic altarpiece can safely be classified a masterpiece on aesthetic criteria; or follow Horace Walpole's precept that ‘Painting, in itself, is innocent … ‘tis the misapplication that must constitute the sin.’ Thus, the educated Protestant gaze that an English traveller refined in Italy on the Grand Tour can see through Catholic subjects and judge their formal excellence by applying the same standards of sound connoisseurship that classical antiquity exemplified. Claire Haynes perceptively addresses the issues that lay behind the paradox Edward Gibbon articulated when he commented on London's inferiority compared to Paris (‘the opulence of the French capital arises from the defects of its government and religion’) and noted that ‘Catholic superstition, which is always the enemy of reason, is often the parent of taste.’ Hostility to Catholic practices and beliefs was deeply ingrained in the English national identity, but arguments were found to accommodate the achievements of the likes of Raphael (whose papally commissioned Tapestry Cartoons for the Sistine Chapel were the most admired Renaissance masterpieces in England) and Poussin, as well as of scores of others whose evidently Catholic religious pictures were as avidly collected as their other histories. Protestant reason was a powerful aesthetic argument: as Horace Walpole put it, ‘Pictures … are only an appendix to idolatry; for the people must be taught to believe in false gods and in the power of saints, before they will learn to worship their images.’ This book richly illuminates a largely neglected area of British art history, and convincingly shows how the politics of religion contributed to shaping eighteenth-century discourses of taste and cultural identity.