The distinction the seventh ecumenical council drew in 787 is the whole of the case: veneration passes through the image to the person depicted, worship belongs to God alone, and Greek has separate words for the two where English does not. Iconoclast emperors had spent decades destroying images and the artists who made them, and the restoration is still commemorated annually as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Icons are not paintings in the tradition's own account — they are written, to a canon, by someone fasting, and a new icon is blessed before use. The domestic form is the icon corner, on the east wall, with a hanging lamp, and it is where the family prays. Most Protestant traditions rejected the practice as idolatry at the Reformation and stripped or whitewashed their churches, which is why so many northern European interiors are bare.