Saw this post. https://www.reddit.com/r/Anglicanism/comments/bexfku/why_does_high_church_and_preprotestant/ Indeed compared to most other Protestant Churches including those with rich art traditions like Lutheranism and Methodism, I notice Anglicanism is probably the one that puts the most priority in art. With some churchgoers even putting them on the same level of sacredness Roman Catholics do. Considering for a long time statues were banned from most churches in the communion and even crosses were a very grey spot (with many American episcopal churches preferring to avoid using them at the altar and even in personal use at home), why does modern Anglicanism tend to lean towards he High Church regarding the value of sacred art?
God is not on a budget. He rolled out a skyful of angels to tell a few shepherds, that's my boy! We are not given to the incoclams of the reformed world, because art and expression are all part of our total offering to God. Art is part of how we tell the story of God and his love for us.
Artwork in Christianity is pretty common from the start, then there's the early medieval dispute about images, in particular images of Christ in churches. Early on Anglicanism, like most Reformed churches, takes its cue from the Latin critique of the eastern theology of images, which the Calvinist Reformers take up. The Homily on Idolatry is indicative of this Carolingian-Reformed thesis. However by the early 17th century, images started making a comeback as Lutheran devotional art had become quite popular. Charles I and Archbishop Laud both promote a beauty and artistic aesthetic to churches. Even then in most of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, images in churches were still quite muted. The Anglo-Catholic movement really looks to Rome/the East 0n this, hence the explosion of images and the use of Eastern style icons.
The term high church is wrongly applied here, and not to blame the authors because Anglican categories are in flux these days. Just as in all the rest of Christendom. For example it is wrong to say that "the" Roman Catholics place a lot of emphasis on art, because modern Roman Catholics place almost no emphasis on art. Here is what their sanctuaries look like: http://www.liturgicaldesignconsultant.com/projects/addproj/addprojimg/img/addproj8.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/94/99/24/...church-architecture-interior-architecture.jpg https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/dfa32e53110971.56090282b41bd.jpg So what counts as "Roman Catholic"? It's up for grabs. That is the curse and the evil of modernism infecting Christianity. Anglicanism is suffering from the same curse. Traditionally, Anglicanism has always been high church by today's standards, in terms of exclusive episcopacy, ceremony, liturgy, sacramental efficacy, etc. However the 19th century "old" Roman Catholicism was so infectious for some parts of the Anglican world, that the so called Anglo-Catholic movement tried to import their traditions into Anglicanism. And that's where you see this odd Roman Catholic-tinted set of traditions and beliefs, icons, praying to Mary, among some of us. Today that old Roman Catholic world is almost dead and disappeared, through successive actions of almost a century of modernist RC popes who have worked hard to stamp it out (for their own reasons). But this old "RC world" strangely survives among the aforementioned Anglo-Catholics, who were not under the thumb of the modernist RC popes. But let's be clear, these people are not "high church" and they're definitely not "traditional".
I would say traditionally Anglicanism is a lot barer of images than Roman Catholicism used to be though not as bare as the post V2 RCC. Paul Zahl of the Protestant Face of Anglicanism highlights a lot of the pre-Oxford Anglican aesthetic. https://protestantfaceofanglicanism.tumblr.com/