served to superimpose rituals of artistic and religious veneration

Does the highlighted sentence mean "to prefer and present the rituals of artistic and religious veneration" or "to overcome the rituals of artistic and religious veneration"? I think the latter is intended. Am I right? I think it means to provide a viewpoint against the rituals of artistic and religious veneration.

Context:

He actually ended up embracing the use of replicas since he found out that the religious icons paraded in the popular Latin American street processions, on which his conceit was based, were in any case customarily idolatory ‘substitutes’: referred to, in fact, as ‘little brothers’ or ‘ambassadors’. In a sense, then, using ‘versions’ – which is what these were in actual fact, since they were deliberately not ‘the real thing’ in size, for instance, or in the materials of which they were made – served to superimpose rituals of artistic and religious veneration, questioning, for example, the place of the ‘sacrosanct’ in modern art as well as what distinctions between ‘idols’ and ‘icons’ might be