The way to correct an "art" (as oppose to icon) centered account of the history of images is not to denigrate the Renaissance, but to show how the icon pervaded it. To give one of many examples of this scholarly strategy, here's Christian Kleinbub on Raphael:
Raphael's Transfiguration... does lead the viewer on a spiritual journey. The painting explicitly addresses the three varieties of vision that arise repeatedly in discussions of the contemplation of God. The lower zone of the composition shows the struggle of external (corporeal) and internal (imaginary) vision in the confrontation of the apostles and the possessed boy's party, while the Tabor scene above shows the historical and imaginary vision of Christ himself, who satisfied the internal vision of the apostles below and also points beyond it.... Light falls on Christ's face from beyond the frame: it is the divine light of intellectual vision, the luce etterna of the Godhead...That from Kleinbub's book Vision and the Visionary. The upshot is that the very thing the Pre-Raphaelites were looking for could be found... in Raphael.
Raphael's Transfiguration... in its sense of stillness, symmetrical setting, and iconic aspect, may well refer to traditional iconic images. The Renaissance viewer might even have assumed that the prominence of Christ's face carried a meaning like those more traditional works, referring like a symbol to the vision of the invisible God...
This devotional aspiration of Raphael's Transfiguration is remarkable in an age in which altarpieces were shedding some of the outward trappings of their more contemplative functions. Iconic altarpieces - where devotion of the kind described by [Nicholas of] Cusa might be centered and anticipated by static hierarchical forms - were being replaced by altarpieces that mainly depicted istoria comprising energetic narrative scenes. Raphael, in fact, was one of the leaders of this movement, creating one of the first fully historiated altarpieces of the Renaissance in his Entombment...
But between Raphael's Transfiguration and almost all other Renaissance religious images lies an important difference, for Raphael's altarpiece does not simply invite but also describes the process by which the mind is turned to internal vision of God. Directly engaging the problem of how the icon can be used spiritually, it deploys its actors so that they do not merely play out their narrational roles but also enact or figure the very activity of contemplation in gestural terms... The Transfiguration harmonized both narrative and iconic aspects of contemporary altarpieces, offering the marriage of the istoria, and all that the istoria stood for, to the spiritual function of the altarpiece through an unprecedented thematization of the stages of contemplative seeing.