The article provides a comparative analysis of the similarities of arguments put forward by discourses on mass imagery in the Renaissance and modernity. In particular, emblem theories are quite striking in the way they advanced similar arguments to theories about television. In both cases we find iconoclast and iconodule arguments, and in both cases we find an implicit, holy or unholy theological connection being made between mass medium, the image, and technology. The article will argue that the condemnation of or (...) fascination with images in mass media is a form of discursive, i.e. textual, self-protection. (shrink)