The council's reception in the West is one of the clearest cases in church history of a division manufactured by a translator. The acts reached Charlemagne's court in a Latin version that rendered the Greek terms for worship and veneration with the same word. What the Frankish theologians read, therefore, was a council decreeing that images should be worshipped, which they rejected with some vigour.
The response drawn up at the court, the work usually called the Opus Caroli regis and long known as the Libri Carolini, attacks the council at length, and a synod at Frankfurt in 794 condemned the position it thought Nicaea had taken. Rome had approved the council and did not join the condemnation, leaving the awkward situation of a Frankish church rejecting a council its pope accepted, on the basis of a text neither had in the original.
The episode is worth holding onto for two reasons. It is a caution about how much of doctrinal history runs through the quality of translations, in a period when few in the West read Greek and few in the East read Latin. And it shows that the Western reservation about images was real and not merely a misunderstanding: even after the terminology was clarified, the Carolingian position remained that images are useful for teaching and memory rather than objects of honour, and the difference of instinct between Eastern and Western piety about images has never entirely closed.