Homer’s iconicity is argued on the basis of his recognizability as well as the diverse images that later reception has constructed. The paper first traces the image of the poet through the Western Middle Ages, when writers mostly had no direct knowledge of his texts but still considered him an important authority on the basis of his role in antiquity, focusing mainly on the subject matter of the Iliad. A discussion of the re-introduction of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to Western literature by way of Leonzio Pilato’s Latin translation (instigated by Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio) leads the way to a new reception of Homer in Western Europe. The paper also shows how the Renaissance image of the poet Homer slowly gives way to an interest in the genesis of his poems from the oral literary tradition, rather than the poet himself, up to the now current view that questions whether Homer has in fact ever existed as a historical figure at all—a development that may well be considered an iconoclastic impulse.