During a Rhine River cruise I took a shore excursion in Germany that included a guided tour of the Gutenberg Museum. Its primary focus is how Johannes Gutenberg printed Bibles. One neat lesson is Gutenberg's Bibles had a lot of color images. In fact there may have been pictures on the majority of its pages.
Of course, that was centuries ago, long before technology existed to make coloring pages easy with inkjet and laser printers. Now we have much better ways to print color images on papers. So why aren't Bible publishers taking advantage of that ability to include illustrations in current Bibles? (Children's Bibles don't count because they are incomplete.)
I don't have a definitive answer, but my hypotheses would be:
Illuminated manuscripts were common in the middle ages, but Bibles were costly treasures that were hand copied and painted and so they were rare and treasured tomes that were only ever found in churches and monasteries. Though it's possible that some of the wealthiest monarchs or lords in Europe possibly owned their own copy of the Bible.
With the advent of modern printing, came also a desire to bring the written word into the hands of many, including the Bible. Picture printing would have been costly, so it shouldn't be surprising that Bibles intended for mass production would find cost-saving measures. This is in part also how the English language lost a few characters from our alphabet, Britain imported German printing presses and these lacked the unique letters such as thorn (Þ, þ), eth (Ð, ð), and yogh (Ȝ, ȝ); these being replaced, for example thorn was initially replaced with a "y" as it kind of looked like a handwritten þ at the time (hence the "Ye" in "Ye Olde Shop", it's actually not "Ye" but "Þe" i.e. "The"), and later both thorn and eth with "th" and yogh with "gh" (hence "night" rather than "ni
ȝt").
Illuminated Bibles never vanished obviously, but as printing became more refined, books became more common, and need for more and more Bibles it would simply make sense to make Bibles as cheaply and simply as possible. These cost-saving measures continued even until fairly recent, as American Bible publishers stopped printing Bibles with the Deuterocanonicals in them only as recently as the 1870's and 80's; between 1611 and the last quarter of the 19th century the KJV had been printed with "the Apocrypha" between the Old and New Testaments. The reason why you don't find English-language [Protestant] Bibles with the Deuterocanonicals today is because of those cost-saving measures from the century before last. Though anti-Catholic bias may have also played a role in that move.
Another possible reason could be Protestant Iconoclasm. While not all Protestants are Iconoclasts, there has been an Iconoclastic stream within some forms of Protestantism; as such images might have been seen by them as inherently wrong.
-CryptoLutheran
