One person’s icon is another’s piece of art.

We recently wrote an informative article about Statues and Monuments as Seen from a Christian Perspective, suggest you to read it
https://catalog.obitel-minsk.com/blog/2022/03/statues-and-monuments-as-seen-from-a-christian-perspective

Mariam Visagio, the holy Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council explicitly defended effigies. In popular memory, the Seventh Ecumenical Council is known as the “defense of Icons”, because (I’d wager) Icons were all that were left after the iconoclasts.

From H.R. Percival’s book, “The Seven Ecumenical Councils” (1899), pp. 540-541:

“At the close of the [IV] Session [of the Seventh Ecumenical Council], after a number of anathematisms had been pronounced the following was read, to which all bishops subscribed”:
” . . . These honourable images and venerable images, as has been said, we honour and salute and reverently venerate: to wit, the image of the incarnation of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, and that of our spotless Lady the all-holy Mother of God, from whom he pleased to take flesh, and to save and deliver us from all impious idolatry; also the images of the holy incorporeal Angels, who as men appeared to the just.
***Likewise also the figures and effigies of the God-speaking Prophets, and of the struggling Martyrs and of holy men.***
So that through their representations we may be able to be led back in memory and recollection to the prototype, and have a share in the holiness of some of them.”