I think there's a lot of validity to your hypotheses, but I think there's something far more basic at work as well: literacy.
Prior to Gutenberg, and really, for some time after, reading and writing were esoteric skills reserved for clerics and nobles. The vast majority of Christian laity was instructed through the visual representations of sculpture, fresco, icons, stained glass, etc.
I don't think there's any accident the Reformation took place within the wake of the printing press and the widespread dissemination of religious treatises to an increasingly literate laity.
What I find curious is that many of the iconoclasts who preach Sola Scriptura fail to recognize that every letter in virtually every alphabet had its origin as some type of pictographic represention. They are perfectly content with a few million ink molecules on a written page that pictographically represent the concept, "GOD," but they become highly uncomfortable, if not downright hostile to a few million paint molecules on a poplar panel that pictographically represent the identical concept.
Note that this is a caucus thread, not a polemical thread attacking other confessions.
The printing press was available at roughly the same time to all of Europe; certainly it alone cannot account for the difference between an Italian’s immediate immersion in the image and the Englishman’s detachment from it.