Iconoclasm 9780226445502

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ICONOCLASM

David Freedberg

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in Canada 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­44533-­5 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­44550-­2 (e-­book) DOI: https://​doi​.org​/10​.7208​/chicago ​/9780226445502​.001​.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Freedberg, David, author. Title: Iconoclasm / David Freedberg. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020037022 | ISBN 9780226445335 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226445502 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Iconoclasm. | Iconoclasm—Political aspects. | Arts—Censorship. | Art and religion. Classification: LCC N8740 .F74 2020 | DDC 201/.67—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037022

  ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Anna

Contents

Preface  ix

I Antwerp, Mosul, and Palmyra: Theology and the Production of Violence  1

II Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body  17 III Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–­1580: The Case of the Northern Netherlands  51 IV The Representation of Martyrdom during the Early Counter-­Reformation in Antwerp  95 V The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm  113 VI Iconoclasts and Their Motives  133 VII Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable  151 VIII From Defamation to Mutilation: Reason of State and Gender Politics in South Africa  179 IX Charlottesville 203 X The Wag in the Tail: Image, Iconoclasm, Art  221 Appendix 1: Damnatio Memoriae: Why Mobs Pull Down Statues  239 Appendix 2: The Power of Wood and Stone  243 Notes  247 Bibliography  301 Index  321

Preface

We live in an age of iconoclasm. From the gates of Nineveh to Banksy’s Girl with Balloon, the fate of the work of art in the age of its digital reproducibility is its destruction. Whether defined by its aesthetic standing, its historical status, or its investment value, the work is blown up, cut up, or taken down—­sometimes spontaneously and out of anger, sometimes calmly and by design. We cannot avoid the questions that iconoclasm, the destruction of images, imposes upon us. The final editing of this book took place against the backdrop of the greatest campaign against monuments and statues in American history. Already at the end of the summer of 2017, a wave of monument removal took place. Images of Confederate leaders and generals, of slave traders and slave owners, of major figures in traditional American history from Columbus on were taken down. Now, at the beginning of the summer of 2020, at the time of a pandemic that exposed still further rifts in racial justice in this country, after months in which the president of the United States exacerbated racial tensions in his homeland, and as a result of the political and moral pressures brought to the center of public attention by the Black Lives Matter movement, this insurrection against images arose anew. It spread to many other countries as well, from Britain to Italy and on to India and South Africa. Monuments to slave owners, fascist politicians, and racist and colonialist figures were overturned, removed, and in some cases drowned, as if a bronze statue could still have its breath taken away. Like all historians I hope that my examination of the past casts light on the present, illuminating phenomena that may seem different but arise from the common impulses and emotions that, for better or for worse, join us as human beings. Why do people destroy and remove images? What motivates individual and collective acts of violence against what are, after all, mere representations on wood, stone, canvas, and paper? How can we understand

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iconoclasm in the contemporary world? Such questions persist even though circumstances, conditions, and people change. Why are pictures and sculptures destroyed even when they become boring, when they are barely noticed in the course of daily life, when they become objects of indifference—­adiaphora as the ancients would have said, things that don’t matter? For many commentators, the extraordinary ubiquity and repetitiveness of images detract from their aura—­and yet the attacks continue. Indeed, contemporary media make these attacks all the more visible—­ and the images still more vulnerable.1 When I began investigating iconoclasm in 1970 (concentrating on iconoclasm during the Protestant Reformation in the Netherlands), my colleagues, my friends, practically everyone asked me what iconoclasm had to do with art history. Art, they said, was about the higher reaches of the human spirit, not about its baser qualities. It was about creativity, not destruction. The task of the historian of art was to record or describe what has survived, not what was lost. How could an art historian be conducting research into the history of the destruction of images? Art historians were supposed to deal with form in history and with what art means to people. I restrained myself from suggesting that the will to destroy works of art often provides precise testimony to what art actually means to people, from love and desire to hate, anger, and resentment. For the most part, art historians preferred to talk about images that exist rather than images that no longer exist, to show images being made rather than unmade. The notion that anyone should do research on the history of image destruction—­or the history of images that no longer exist, that are so gone that you can no longer study them visually—was regarded as anathema, testimony to what was wild and barbaric in the human spirit, outside civilization and culture, and had nothing to do with the realm of academic inquiry or art. This seems absurd now. The history of art contains countless episodes of iconoclasm. More often than not iconoclasm shows why images—­and art—­matter to people. Otherwise why bother to attack images, why smash them as if to demonstrate one’s power over them, one’s power over things that are after all only dead pieces of wood and stone—­as so many cultures continue to assert, both against and in favor of images? All this is what I thought until August 12, 2017, when I changed my mind. In the proposals to remove statues that preceded the violent protests at Charlottesville on that day, and in the subsequent actual removals of disreputable figures and symbols of the American past, it seemed to me, as I shall argue in the eighth essay in this volume, that the status and meaning of images had fundamentally changed—­or so I began to think. When I set out to write about iconoclasm as essential to the study of art and its history, there was only one general book on the subject—­ Julius von Végh’s Die Bilderstürmer of 1915.2 At my first public lecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1974, the audience was shocked. Their

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consternation was almost palpable. I had practically no images to show at all, and those that I did were damaged or were significant survivals. No one in that audience—­academics and an art-­loving public—­wanted to hear about the destruction of images. But I was haunted by what seemed to me a fundamental question: what is it about works of art that arouse such fierce responses that people want to destroy, damage, or mutilate them? It seemed clear to me that we would never understand the depths of feeling that art can arouse until we understand what it is about images—­paintings or sculptures or any other visual form—­that arouses such hostility. Things have radically changed since then, and the study of iconoclasm has become one of the great growth areas in the discipline—­ not without justification, after all, given the tragedy of image and monument destruction at the hands of the armies of ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS or Daesh) between 2014 and 2016. Aside from offering ever more evidence of the meaning, use, and exploitation of visual imagery, from high to low, the issue has become one of crucial concern to the question of cultural heritage across the globe. How can we come to terms with it, both as students and as participants in the cultural struggles it entails, involving us all? At the beginning of my research first on censorship and only afterward on iconoclasm, both were neglected subjects.3 Yet they are two of the most powerful expressions of contempt for images. They testify—­ graphically and eloquently—­to the power of the very effects they seek to annul. Throughout history people have sought to suppress, mutilate, or destroy images. In some cases the assaults have been political, in others pathological. Often a current of concern about the sensual and sexual power of images underlies the efforts at elimination or suppression of an image. Art historians rarely considered these issues (though, admittedly, more attention had been paid to censorship than to image destruction itself). Things have changed, of course, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, after the American culture wars of the 1990s, the attacks on images in Afghanistan in 2001, the ravaging and looting of Iraq in 2003, and the depredations of ISIL, especially in 2014–­15—­to say nothing of the removal of public monuments in the United States in 2017. In 1969, however, art historians were perplexed by the very idea of trying to understand such forms of hostility. They were concerned about the conditions of production, not destruction, about the mechanics of exchange, not elimination. They thought that one should be concerned with the beauty of objects and the will to create them more than with the motivations to destroy them; with the principles that underlie our more or less admiring responses to them rather than our repugnant feelings toward them. But could we ever fully understand the power of images without also trying to understand why they provoke such opposition, antipathy, and fear? It seemed unlikely. So I decided to try to unravel some of the complex reasons that motivate both individual and collective acts of icono-

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clasm, and to articulate the implications of the will to destroy, remove, alter, and excise them. In The Power of Images I discussed some of the most telling episodes and approaches to the subject of iconoclasm until 1989, the year the book appeared.4 In the prefaces to the subsequent French, Polish, and Italian editions, I updated the rapidly expanding material on these topics.5 But even in 1970, it was not as if the subject of iconoclasm had been completely neglected. The study of eighth-­ and ninth-­century iconoclasm remained one of the cornerstones of Byzantine studies. Scholars had long commented on the resistances to images—­and the practical forms of such resistance—­in Judaism and Islam. The classical damnatio memoriae was frequently cited in relation to the ways in which ancient sculpture, coins, and even paintings were defaced in order to disgrace and defame those whom they represented. Byzantine iconoclasm was studied above all for the ways in which it encapsulated a long strand of theological arguments that became political ones. From André Grabar through Cyril Mango, from Ernst Kitzinger through Gerard Ladner, Hans-­Georg Beck, Peter Brown, and many others, the connection between theological discussions on the christocentric justifications of images and political motivations was rarely scanted.6 Since then, the number of iconoclastic episodes seems to have increased exponentially. So too has the writing on the subject.7 When I started writing about iconoclasm as essential to the understanding of art and its history,8 all but the Byzantinists felt that art history had other tasks and that its essence, in fact, had nothing to do with the destruction of images. Art history, on this account, had to do with the great achievements of the human spirit and not with its destructive or psychopathological components. Judgments on art were disinterested, as Kant—­the great godfather of the entire disciplines of art history and aesthetics—­held, and therefore (supposedly) uninvolved in bodily responses of hate and desire. When I became involved in what seemed to me the instructive arguments in Byzantium—­which also seemed to recur in other cultures as well—­people were skeptical. But it was arguments such as those about the uncircumscribability of the divine, the fact that the honor paid to an image went straight to its prototype, that images were living but dead material, that the god was not his image, that the emperor or leader was somehow present in his image, that visual images appealed to the all too sensual side of their spectators, and so on, that were repeated over and over again and form the core of almost all theologies of images. When I first went to discuss these matters with Michael Baxandall, he said to me—­bluntly as ever—­“What has theology to do with iconoclasm?” Well: as we now know from his opus magnum The Limewood Sculptures of Renaissance Germany, he obviously changed his mind between 1969 and 1984.9 Whether he came to believe, as I did, that for understanding images and art, theology was exemplary for ontology, I never learned.

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At the very end of the 1960s, the only other people working on the subject seemed to belong to a small group led by Martin Warnke and Horst Bredekamp in Hamburg. Their pathfinding anthology Bildersturm: Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks was published in 1973,10 the year in which I defended my dissertation on iconoclasm in the Netherlands,11 while Bredekamp’s Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte of 1975 paved the way for establishing the theoretical and aesthetic implications of the relationship between iconoclasm and social conflict.12 In our analyses of the embattled social status of art during times of political and theological crisis, both their work and mine grew out of the climate of the political activism of the late 1960s. What joined us was a common commitment to the notion that study of iconoclasm and the status of images was an integral part of the history of art.13 The difference, however, was that while the Hamburg group concentrated almost entirely on the political dimensions of these issues, I took these as just the starting point for my subsequent researches into the psychological dimensions of iconoclastic and censorial responses. This was not to scant the political factors; I clearly acknowledged their status as an essential element of iconoclasm. But they were not the only ones. They could never be divorced, it seemed to me, from the ontology of images and from the ways in which this ontology is embodied in response. Even the most abstract of images elicit responses that are fundamentally predicated not only on the bodies they represent but also on the phenomenological relationship between represented bodies and the bodies of their viewers. The questions, then, were as much about embodiment, desire, and the impetus to see images as substitutes for reality as they were about responses more abstracted from the body and from deeper and unexplored psychological motives. It is not surprising that the issue of embodiment should stand at the center of the theological problem of the circumscribability of the divine, for in it the very idea of an immaterial, uncircumscribable god yields inevitably to the irrepressible urge to represent the uncircumscribable in material or embodied forms—­and to feel it as such.14 Both the Hamburg group and I were specifically concerned about the relationship between iconoclasm and the history of art, but throughout this early period, scholars of Byzantium continued their meticulous and often questioning studies unabated. Their work in this domain, building on the work of the earlier scholars in the field, informed the collection of essays edited by Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin in 1977 and eventually generated the remarkable books by Hans Belting and Robin Cormack on early Byzantine art and destruction.15 At the same time, historians such as John Philips wrote about iconoclasm in Britain (followed by the outstanding work of Margaret Aston and Eamon Duffy),16 while Carl Christensen offered a useful survey of the phenomenon in Reformation Germany (followed by Bob Scribner, Norbert Schnitzler, through to

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J­ oseph Koerner).17 Already in 1986 Carlos Eire had analyzed the relationship between iconoclasm and idolatry in Switzerland and in the Reformation more generally, while a magnificent and complex exhibition on Swiss iconoclasm appropriately titled Bildersturm—­Wahnsinn oder Gottes Wille? appeared precisely at the turn of the century.18 Throughout the early phase of the 1970s and 1980s I continued to publish essays directly or indirectly related to iconoclasm and censorship.19 “The Hidden God: Image and Interdiction in the Sixteenth Century” took account of Lucien Goldmann’s work—­so critical for attitudes towards images—­on Jansenism,20 Iconoclasts and Their Motives raised questions regarding the psychopathological dimensions of contemporary iconoclastic acts as well as ancient ones,21 while other essays on the representation of martyrdom and on theological treatises on images updated my initial work on the Netherlandish iconoclasms of the late sixteenth century.22 One of these essays appeared in the catalogue for the first exhibition to contain iconoclasm in its title, namely Kunst voor de Beeldestorm, held at the Rijksmuseum in 1986.23 It was perhaps ironic that a few years previously members of the staff of the same museum had resisted my efforts to acquire photos of the damage wrought by one deranged attacker—­one among several in the last century—­on the grounds that publication of such photographs might encourage other such acts. Perhaps the earliest of the subsequent scholars of contemporary iconoclasm was Dario Gamboni, who in 1983 published a remarkable and wide-­ranging account of the context of both verbal and physical attacks on sculptures displayed at the Exposition suisse de sculpture in the small town of Bienne in 1980.24 In 1988 Peter Moritz Pickshaus produced his important yet unduly neglected work on both ancient and modern iconoclasm.25 Both writers significantly expanded the discussion of iconoclastic motivations to include the implications for contemporary art. Gamboni in particular dealt with the effects of verbal attacks from both above and below on the actual defacement, displacement, and destruction of the works on display. At the end of the decade, in The Power of Images, I surveyed the historical evidence for emotional and visceral responses to images and art across time, and discussed some of the most telling episodes of iconoclasm until the book appeared in 1989—­just six months before the Berlin Wall came down.26 Almost immediately, the statues of iconic figures of the communist regimes began tumbling down all over Eastern Europe (though many remained, some until as late as the removal of the statues of Lenin during the Ukrainian uprising of 2014). Following the collapse of Eastern European communism, the regimes changed elsewhere too, from China to South Africa, in each case accompanied by the removal, deliberate and spontaneous, of symbols and representations of the old orders. At the same time, attacks on modern and contemporary artworks multiplied as capitalist cultures of art and its display expanded globally. And the

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motivations ranged from more obviously psychopathological ones to apparently more reasoned ones, from efforts at publicizing a cause (whether personal or political—­or both, of course) to resentment and anger at public or market recognition of forms of art that previously would have escaped definition as such.27 It was not surprising, then, that in the same decade of the 1990s the subject itself should finally emerge as a legitimate field of scholarly attention, and ever more so by historians of art. Sergiusz Michalski had long been concerned with Protestant iconoclasm during the Reformation and its relationship with the writings of the early church, and his work on the Protestant image question appeared in 1993.28 Three years earlier he had already attempted a more general survey of the phenomenon in the important anthology edited by Robert Scribner, concentrating on German iconoclasm.29 The Byzantinists returned to their work with renewed vigor, with the first of Charles Barber’s articles appearing in 1993 and 1995.30 In France, Louis Réau’s fundamental Histoire du vandalisme—­a word that too often conflates motives and confuses issues—­was republished in an updated edition in 1994 (first edition 1958),31 while Daniele Menozzi in 1991 and Alain Besançon in 199432 made clear how the doctrinal issues already outlined in Byzantium and in the early church fathers reappeared in one form or another even in secular episodes of iconoclasm, as I had proposed in The Power of Images.33 So too—­at least by implication—­did Hans Belting in his Bild und Kult of 1990, which along with Gamboni’s The Destruction of Art of 1997 fittingly framed the discourses of the 1990s.34 In the same period, the study of Greco-­Roman iconoclasm received new impetus from the work of Robert Gordon, Jaś Elsner, and many others,35 while Zainab Bahrani updated earlier work on image destruction and mutilation—­often for clearly political reasons, but still underlain by the desire to punish the image as if living—­in the ancient Near East and in Egypt.36 While both Belting and Gamboni produced notable overviews, in each case attentively tracing the theoretical and phenomenological continuities, they insisted on the historical status of their respective anthropologies of images. Their works paved the way for the Iconoclash exhibition of 2002, in which Bruno Latour and his colleagues seemed to take the clash of images as ontologically exemplary for the understanding of images: a legitimate point of view vitiated by their failure to examine the full psychological and historical implications of the biological and theological substrates of the problem.37 The events in 2003 in Iraq and the accompanying removal of images (to say nothing of the crisis provoked by the images from the prison of Abu Ghraib—­which exemplified, among much else, the impossibility of controlling offensive or propagandistically counterproductive images) stimulated a new spate of writing on this subject, which has not ceased.38 Michael Cole and Rebecca Zorach’s 2009 anthology returned to the topic

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of the role of idols in what they and the authors in this volume—­following Hans Belting—­have called “the Age of Art”; and most of them made the centrality of iconoclasm to this apparent paradox clear.39 In his 2010 Under the Hammer, James Simpson reasserted what Warnke, Bredekamp, and I had been claiming from at least 1970 on, namely that “iconoclasm is not ‘somewhere else’; instead it lies buried deep within Western modernity and especially deep within Anglo-­American tradition.”40 The number of anthologies and dedicated research projects grows,41 and the subject, like the phenomenon itself, has become thoroughly globalized. Studies of iconoclasm extend far beyond the traditional purviews and generate new perspectives, whether in Barry Flood’s researches on Islamic attitudes to images or in Zoë Strother’s on African iconoclasm.42 Strother analyzed the role of iconoclasm in the processes of colonization and decolonization, as well as the ways in which acts of alteration, mutilation, and elimination acquired a positive dimension, thereby inserting them firmly into the history of modernism. Global approaches such as I once attempted are taken up again by writers like Simpson and Elsner. For the latter, it is now possible to claim that “what iconoclasm provokes—­and part of its perennial interestis an examination of what we think we are doing in writing history at all.”43 As the politically motivated attacks on art objects multiply, so do attacks motivated by aesthetic considerations. The very act of destruction becomes ever more a theme in discussions of the contemporary. The amount of writing on the creative aspects of destruction, even vandalism and iconoclasm, has also grown rapidly. Gamboni dealt fully with these issues in his important books on iconoclasm, and Boris Groys began working on the topic and wrote a key piece on it for the Iconoclash exhibition of 2002.44 A few years later Flood and Strother surveyed “the iconoclastic posture of modern art” in the context of what they saw in both Islamic and other cultures—­including our own—­as the contemporary problematization of permanence.45 By 2012 Simpson saw the relevance of the whole Anglo-­American history of iconoclasm to these issues,46 and a whole new spate of works on the subject, both in traditional areas like Byzantium47 and in new ones elsewhere, soon appeared on the scene—­ and will continue to do so.

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From the beginning of my researches, both anthropological and historical, I have set out to show why resistance and hostility to images are not to be seen as defining features, let alone innately characteristic, of one culture or another. They occur across all cultures, both Western and Eastern. Violence toward images, irrationality about them, blind faith in what are after all just objects and representations (dead pieces of wood and stone, as every culture in its moments of skepticism about images has

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claimed since time immemorial) occur across all peoples. Such attitudes cannot simply be relegated to the behaviors of others, to the barbaric or the exotic. Cultures, like people, vacillate between love of images and hostility toward them—­often two sides of the same coin. Neither the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan nor the latest assaults on images by ISIL can be regarded as typical of a violent and unchanging attitude toward images that is somehow essentially characteristic of Islam. In a series of important articles (as well as in his Slade lectures, “Islam and the Image,” delivered in Oxford in 2019), Barry Flood argued eloquently against the notions that Islam is monolithic in its resistance to images, that it has “an image problem,” that it is basically aniconic and “implacably hostile” to anthropomorphic imagery.48 Like all cultures, it has both iconoclastic episodes and periods in which images are used, needed, and loved. In my own efforts to argue against the kinds of errors and distortions so well articulated by Finbarr Barry Flood, it soon seemed as if I had set myself a trap. In suggesting that particular forms of behavior which we westerners sideline as superstitious, irrational, or gullible in our responses to images and that they occur at least as much in our own culture as in others, I was misprised. Over and over again I found the same broad phenomena in widely separated cultures across time and space. There were differences, of course, but to me the similarities seemed at least as striking and important—­if not more so. Structuralism was barely over when I was accused of being structuralist, or of having a kind of Platonic idea of iconoclasm, or of naturalizing or behavioralizing history. I was aware of the fact that the identities and similarities I found were often only apparent, superficial rather than deep, and inexact (seen as they were through the often blinding prism of one’s own culture). But at the same time it seemed to me that apparently similar phenomena and actions of the kinds discussed in this book offer striking illustrations of the folly and inaccuracy of regarding acts of hostility (or acts of thanksgiving or desire) as characteristic of one culture rather than other, or of believing one culture to be superior in its particular forms of rationality with regard to representation (or anything else for that matter). The kinds of repetition and similarities of behavior to be discerned in hostility to images across cultures offer useful templates—­at the very least—­for understanding how culture and context modify human behaviors. To seek identity and apparent similarity and then to discern and analyze the subtle or not-­so-­subtle differences is precisely the work of the historian. It is the opposite of lazily seeking “to substitute essentialist tropes for historical analysis,”49 or of what is often referred to as naturalizing history. To identify similarity or to set out what seems to be similarity is by no means to argue for timeless responses, whether positive or negative, across cultures and across history. It is a coarse heuristic tool that offers templates for modification in ways that illuminate the

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etiologies of difference. It is to seek algorithims capacious enough to accommodate the granularity and differences of context, circumstance, and culture. These were not popular positions, and they continue to be misconstrued. The whole point of this collection, as it was in The Power of Images, is to show that iconoclasm, aniconism, and censorship are not to be seen as innately characteristic of one culture or another. They are at least as characteristic of iconophilic cultures as they are of supposedly iconoclastic ones, because their roots are to be sought in that part of the human condition that tends toward suspicion of the senses, doubt about the verity of the messages they convey, and fear of the provocations of the body. Those suspicions, doubts, and fears are enhanced rather than mitigated by the ambiguity and equivocations that result from the vulnerability of the senses to mere representation.

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The essays in this volume were written over a period of almost fifty years. They reflect my sense of the continuing importance of iconoclasm for history, religion, and art. In the course of that time, iconoclasm has become more various, more frequent, more widespread, and almost certainly more devastating than ever before. It has accompanied the growth of the internet and the vast proliferation of images enabled by digitization and the expansion of social media to every corner of the globe. Much as the phenomenon itself has changed, I continue to believe that an understanding of the will to destroy or damage an image contributes to our understanding of the hold of images on the human imagination, of their powers, and, indeed, of the ways in which they contribute to our pleasure. These essays also convey how a subject once totally ignored by historians of art has grown exponentially in this century. Few could now doubt its sociological, political, and psychological significance. No one familiar with the current literature on iconoclasm could fail to be struck at how scanty the scholarly literature on the subject was at the time I wrote the earliest of these essays—­and at how much it has grown ever since. Although a few of us were studying the contemporary implications of the history of iconoclasm from the late 1960s on, the first revival of interest in iconoclasm—­phase 1—­occurred in the wake of the removal of images all across Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall in 1989. It happens that the penultimate and longest chapter of The Power of Images, which appeared in May of that year, was titled “Idolatry and Iconoclasm.” I would like to think that when I decided to write that chapter, I already had some inkling of the relationship between iconoclasm and regime change. How could anyone who had studied the histories I discuss in this book not have done so? The broader revival of scholarly interest—­phase 2—­seems to have taken off a few years later, however, in the wake of the Iconoclash exhibi-

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tion organized by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, and a distinguished group of authors (including those old hands on the subject of image power Belting, Gamboni, and Koerner), at the Zentrum für Kunst und Mediumtechnologie in Karlsruhe in 2002. Phase 3 may be said to have begun with the ill-­starred war that George Bush and his allies waged in Iraq from 2003 on. It was a war that unleashed both the destruction and looting of museums and monuments throughout Iraq, and the publication of terrible photographs of the tortures visited on the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. These were photos of scenes that were enabled and communicated by digital means that were still recent and newly available. They began their lives as snapshots to be sent home by the perpetrators of the cruel and degrading deeds they showed. For the first time, the multifold techniques of digitization, the internet, and the digital media ensured the widespread and never-­ending dissemination of images. No one could have been indifferent to these, however often they may have been repeated. The brutal tragedies and unspeakable acts they showed are ineliminable from memory and incapable of being whitewashed by boredom or habituation. It was no accident that renewed and ever more tragic outbreaks of iconoclasm should have occurred in the wake of Abu Ghraib. The assailants of images seemed to become more aware of the publicity and propagandistic potential of showing the destruction of idols and hated symbols. The power of images to disturb and thereby also to recruit followers, devotees, and proselytizers had become all too plain. The weapons of war now included the weaponry of image-­making. It took over both the brains and the bodies of all who viewed these instances of the awfulness of war, torture, physical humiliation, and defeat. Viewers could feel in their bodies both the pain of those assaulted by their enemies and the crash of broken treasures lost to civilization and culture—­and if not that, the crash of those treasures as if something were devastated within themselves—­and not only outside them, not only on screen. At the height of ISIL’s depredations, the ability of images to achieve this sort of effect was illustrated all too clearly in the pages of the official Islamic State magazine, Dabiq, and in the calculated performances and video productions of iconoclastic and murderous events. These included the extraordinarily compelling video of the breaking of images in the Museum of Mosul and in Nineveh in early 2016 and all the others made by the new impresarios of destruction and murder (for murders of the guardians of the monuments, like the eighty-­one­-year-old superintendent of the monuments of Palmyra, Khaled al-­Asaad, accompanied these productions of violence). By this time the necessity of studying iconoclasts and their motives was clearer than ever. One might have thought, perhaps, that there would be nothing more to say. But that would have been premature. One might have thought, or at least we members of the bien-­pensant liberal bourgeoisie might have thought, that iconoclasm—­at least in its most recent

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severe forms—­had become the almost exclusive domain of the obviously wicked and reactionary. But then something unexpected happened. Back in the United States, the statues of Confederate generals and slave owners started coming down. People—­progressives mostly—­had begun to discuss taking down the statues of protagonists of race wars and colonialism, and of all who oppressed slaves and races without power. Thus began phase 4 of the revival of studies of iconoclasm. Perhaps, given the political situation in the US and the growing perception of similarities between modern reactionary and colonialist positions there, this should not have come as too great a surprise. When right-­wing marchers protested the pulling down of statues of their old heroes, and a young counterprotestor was killed during a march in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, iconoclasm jumped to the forefront of public discussion. Statues of past bigots—­as well as of leaders who shared the prejudices of their time and their society and may not have thought of themselves as bigots at all—­were designated for removal or destruction. Some came down, others not. Some waited until unanimity could be found about what to do with them. Pull them down? Cover them? Send them to museums where they could be studied not so much for their art as for the historical lessons they might provide? Put them in cold storage or simply destroy them all? A fierce debate, fraught with both political and practical consequences, ensued. It was no longer the old case of reactionaries and puritans protesting works that seemed lascivious or incitements to desire, but rather progressives and radicals wishing to remove all traces of earlier oppression. In the domain of art, such positions reached a new pitch at the Whitney Biennial of 2017. Dana Schutz’s painting based on the notorious open-­ coffin photographs of the mutilated body of Emmett Till, the fourteen-­ year-­old boy lynched by white men in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly offending the owner of a store, was met with unexpected protests. A number of young artists insisted that that a white woman had no right to make a spectacle of the death of a black teenager—­even if the work was motivated by indignation at the injustice visited upon him. “White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go,” it was proclaimed.50 Statues of Columbus and of Mexican presidents had also begun to come down because of their persecution of native populations. In September 2018, Early Days, a bronze sculpture that formed part of the Pioneer Monument in San Francisco, showing a defeated Native American on his back while a vaquero stood above him in triumph and a Catholic priest pointed heavenward, was removed. The fact that the group was accompanied by a plaque explaining its historical significance made no difference to the decision to take it down (probably because the text was insufficiently condemnatory). In late June 2019, as I write this preface, the San Francisco School Board has decided not to cover but to destroy a 1600-­square-­foot thirteen-­

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panel mural painted by WPA artist Victor Arnautoff in 1936 in the George Washington High School there. The picture, painted by a committed communist who had worked with Diego Rivera, shows enslaved people picking cotton in the fields of Washington’s Mount Vernon, with armed white colonizers striding past the dead body of a Native American. A year earlier Arnautoff himself had written, “‘Art for art’s sake’ or art as perfume have never appealed to me. The artist is a critic of society.”51 There can be no doubt of Arnautoff’s sympathy for the fate of the colonized and of the fallen American Indian. Even so, the vice chair of the board now declared that “a grave mistake was made 80 years ago to paint a mural at a school without Native American or African-­American input. For impressionable young people who attend school to have any representation that diminishes people, specifically students from communities that have already been diminished, it’s an aggressive thing.”52 The picture had to be destroyed lest it be uncovered again; to do so would at least be a form of reparation. Another member of the board said his chief concern was to ensure that the children at the school feel “mentally and emotionally safe.” When polled, most of the students did not think the work should be erased; nevertheless, the members of the school board decided to proceed. They took into consideration the opinion of a working group put together by the district: a monument glorifying “slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, and oppression” was “unreflective of social justice” and was “not student-­centered [but] focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.”53 They insisted on the destruction of Arnautoff’s mural. The works of both Arnautoff and Schutz were painted as condemnations of the traditional prejudices and exploitativeness of particular episodes in the hegemonic white history of America. They were intended to be entirely sympathetic toward the victims of oppression. Yet they are now taken to be prejudicial to the very cause they support because they show the suffering of members of a group whose oppression, maltreatment, and travails the artists would be the very last to deny. So much for the lessons of history! The radicals tear down once radical—­indeed still radical—­works, and the retrospective readjustment of history reaches its apex. The truth cannot be shown in case it upsets those who still suffer from the heritage of domination and persecution or because it might give heart to those who would continue the oppression—­even if that truth needs never to be forgotten, even if that truth, appalling as it is, is shown in a context that makes clear exactly how appalling it was, even if the image is peculiarly effective in making its moral dimensions clear. Or are we simply to confess that we have lost the ability to judge history fairly, or that our fellow humans are incapable of judging it? The lessons of iconoclasm are clear, but we judge our histories wrongly if we eliminate all evidence of its disasters, even when that evidence is placed before us by those who stand on the side of the persecuted, or by

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those who try, however inadequately, to speak for them. Just as we cannot eliminate all sexual pornography, we will never be able to eliminate the evidence of moral pornography either. It happened, and it will happen again. And we must face up to the elements of immorality and susceptibility in ourselves and in our fellow human beings, in order to understand those aspects of weakness and susceptibility we share with others and to learn to protect ourselves against them. This might even allow us to act more directly, rather than simply (and often ineffectually) doing away with the mere symbols of injustice. In times in which negative images will recur over and over again, thanks to the new miracles of digitization that allow no image ever to disappear, we need to study and attend to the oppression of which the images speak, rather than to destroy them.

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In addition to this preface, this volume brings together ten essays on the history and implications of iconoclasm, both in the past and in the present. They are intended to illuminate—­through discussion of specific cases and identification of some of the general characteristics that link them—­the increasing frequency and gravity of a phenomenon that has occurred across history for as long as people have made images. In the second place they seek to understand the role of images in society, the beliefs people attach to them, and their social and psychological status in our lives and those of others—­whether political, theological, or aesthetic. This preface, the first two chapters, and the last two are entirely new. Along with chapter VIII, “Iconoclasts and Their Motives,” these are probably the essays with which the general reader will want to begin.54 The two appendices—­about the blowing up of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 and the pulling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003—­were written during or in the immediate aftermath of the events they describe. One of them I partially misjudged, in ways that are revealing of the new digital age in which we live. The first chapter, “Antwerp, Mosul, and Palmyra: Theology and the Production of Violence,” sets the scene by placing iconoclasm in the context of the depredations of ISIL in the Middle East, its violent assaults on both images and people. It suggests some of the continuities that appear to link the phenomenon of iconoclasm across different contexts and geographies through time and raises the question, further explored throughout this book, of the relationship between theology and violence. The second essay, “Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body,” reviews much of the recent literature on iconoclasm and expands on four topics that are closely related to iconoclasm and have occupied me throughout my concern with it: first, censorship; second, embodiment and gender; third, the implications of digital reproduction; and fourth,

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the ways in which contemporary aesthetics has taken a positive view of acts of destruction as facets of artistic creativity. Although my earliest work on the subject dealt with the outbreak of iconoclasm that marked the beginning of the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain in 1566 (and thus the beginning of the Eighty Years’ War), the third essay (“Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–­1580: The Case of the Northern Netherlands”) sets this episode in its broader context of attitudes toward images—­and religious images in particular—­during the Reformation in Europe. While the instances of iconoclasm in the Southern Netherlands, especially in Antwerp and Flanders, had already been studied (though never by art historians), even by 1987, when I wrote this essay, the North Netherlandish phenomena were much less known. The essay thus stands both as a synthetic historical account of the role of art and iconoclasm during the Reformation and specific concentration on a particularly critical region for these issues—­with, by any reckoning, a paradoxically positive outcome. At this point I revert—­in terms of the order in which these essays were written—­to my earliest researches on the Southern Netherlands, when the region was struggling to free itself from the yoke of Spain and the Hapsburg Empire. Chapter 4 (“The Representation of Martyrdom during the Early Counter-­Reformation in Antwerp”) was one of the first of my essays on the subject to be published (though here republished in the updated version, hitherto available only in German, of 2014).55 In some ways it is the most traditionally art historical of these essays; in other ways it is more attentive to the contested context of the works it describes than was usual at the time. Dealing with Netherlandish iconoclasm in the late sixteenth century, it describes the direct impact of iconoclasm on art (particularly painting) at the time, while also raising the question of the ways in which the theology of images was translated sometimes into violent action (and played out against a background of violent art and iconography).56 The fifth of these essays (“The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm”) came about as the result of an unusual invitation. When Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin organized the International Conference on Byzantine Studies at Birmingham University in England in 1976, they had the idea of inviting one of the few scholars they knew working on iconoclasm outside the field of Byzantine studies (or perhaps it was the only British scholar they knew then working on later European iconoclasm). Since it was by then very clear to me that one could not understand the European underpinnings of iconoclasm without also knowing those of Byzantine iconoclasm, I was more than happy to accept their invitation. I felt that I could only learn more at such an event—­which I did. At the same time, however, it gave me the opportunity to air an approach that I had begun to develop even as I was doing my specific

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archival and documentary research on the history of iconoclastic activity in the early Revolt of the Netherlands between 1566 and 1609. This was to try to make both historical and theoretical sense of what seemed to be recurrent phenomena in the long history of iconoclasm. Naturally I was aware that often what seem to be recurrent phenomena turn out to be rather different from each other once they are explored more closely. Notions of similarity are said to be products of wishful thinking or the desire to generalize, of too much attention to similarity and too little to difference, too Platonic in the search for basic forms, as the distinguished Russian Byzantinist Alexander Kazhdan wrote to me after the essay appeared. Since then, the approach I tried out here has become even more unpopular, especially in the present age of high contextualism and relativism and reluctance to engage in what one might then, I suppose, have called structural phenomenology. While this essay certainly shows signs of its youthfulness and scholarly inexperience, it represents a way of thinking about iconoclasm that I still think can tell us a great deal about human attitudes toward images and forms of representation, both mental and material. It recurs in many of the later pieces here (and in other aspects of my work as well). Both this and the more widely read sixth essay that follows (“Iconoclasts and Their Motives”) often provoked other readers also to ask whether I was paying too much attention to general issues at the expense of contextual ones. My response at the time was that one cannot understand the particularities of phenomena and contexts unless one first hypothesizes and then (at least preliminarily) acknowledges the commonalities that seem to underlie the phenomena, in order to assess the degree to which they are capable of modification by the specificities and idiosyncrasies of history. The seventh essay (“Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable”) was written at the invitation of the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth at the height of the culture wars in the US in the late 1980s and through the mid-­1990s.57 It offered a record of the show Kosuth organized at the Brooklyn Museum in 1992, particularly in the context of burgeoning efforts to censure allegedly pornographic imagery (and in a few cases clearly pornographic imagery); it demonstrated the clear link between iconoclasm and censorship. It anticipated the storm raised at the end of this era by the controversial 1999 exhibition at the same museum, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, when works by artists such as Tracy Emin and above all Chris Ofili (whose painting of the Virgin Mary partly made with cow dung raised storms of hostile protest—­including from the mayor of New York). The eighth essay (“From Defamation to Mutilation: Reason of State and Gender Politics in South Africa”) makes still clearer the often close relationship between censorship and iconoclasm, and shows how the former easily leads to and merges with the latter.58 Here I deal with a

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controversial South African episode of 2012 involving a lewd satirical portrait of President Jacob Zuma in the context of a difficult mixture of politics, gender, race, and the fear of images, in which it was impossible to separate one element, or even a single motive, from another. Precisely this mixture of issues has become critical in the new age of digital reproduction and dissemination, and I hope the present volume will at least partly illuminate it. The world had barely begun to come to terms with the implications of the iconoclasms of ISIL in places like Mosul and Palmyra when an apparently new version of the phenomenon took over the headlines. Although ISIL’s destruction of both monuments and people was fiercer and more pitiless than ever before, it could nevertheless be inserted with relative ease into the long history of images that had to be thrown down for theological or allegedly theological reasons, because they were idolatrous, because they seemed to come alive despite their dead materiality, because they were representatives of a hated religion or theodicy. I had thought that there really was nothing more to be said about iconoclasm. But I was wrong, of course. The taking down of the statues of Confederate generals and other heroes of the white South in the United States represented, at first sight, something new. What images looked like barely counted as motives for image destruction; their theological status was irrelevant; all that mattered was what they stood for. Even if they bore no resemblance to what they represented, their mere labeling sufficed to make them vulnerable. They might as well have been simple plaques or inscriptions. In these events the relationship between censorship and iconoclasm was never closer. The iconoclasm of the late twentieth century had largely been the work and thought of the Right; now it became a favored domain of the progressive Left. Political correctness and the need for trigger warnings invaded the terrain of visual representation in both art and the media, with unprecedented impact. This is the problem I address in chapter 9, “Charlottesville”—­along with a resolution of the apparent dichotomy between iconoclasms that have at least something to do with resemblance and those in which the relationship of resemblance is purely arbitrary, as in the semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers. The concluding essay, “The Wag in the Tail,” summarizes the importance of our understanding of iconoclasm for our conception not only of the history of images but of art itself. It begins with a series of vivid episodes of image removal and destruction that cast light on popular notions of what constitutes art now and raise questions about the status of images in our time. The history of iconoclasm is fraught with paradox and irony, in ways that sometimes obscure and sometimes lay bare a set of complex relationships between automaticity and reflection, ambivalence and pleasure, desire and hatred. The processes and possibilities of digitization and the advent and growth of digital media raise

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the question of whether we live in a world in which habituation leads to indifference. On the face of it, it may seem as if the answer must be in the affirmative: over-supply of images and over-exposure to them create audiences that become inured to effect, to feeling less and to seeing less (because we are increasingly obliged to look ever more swiftly). But the lessons of both iconoclasm and digital mediality teach us exactly the opposite. If anything, we have become less indifferent rather than more, more enslaved than ever before to images and to how they look. Once again the question of why people destroy images comes to the fore. Is it because they matter so little, or because they matter too much? The need for time to reflect on the images we see before us, and for self-awareness and judgment in doing so, becomes ever clearer. The abundance, manipulability, and speed of production of the images in our time make the need for clear judgment upon them more urgent than ever before. What I have tried to set out in this book are not only the moral dimensions of such judgment, but how it might allow us to arrive at the rewards, consolations, and productive tensions to be discovered in works of art that are the products of human genius.

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Very many people have helped me in my work on iconoclasm. To attempt to list all of those from whose knowledge and support I have benefited over almost a half century would only reveal the ungratefulness of memory. But at the very beginning I could not have done without the encouragement first of Gary Schwartz and then of Robin Cormack. Without their solidarity at a time when no one other than the Byzantinists was studying the subject, I would probably not have proceeded with it. Others whose encouragement meant much to me before iconoclasm became a fashionable subject were Judith Herrin and Margaret Aston. Horst Bredekamp has been working on iconoclasm for as long as I, and he has remained a constant source of inspiration in this and so many other projects about the status of images in historical and contemporary societies. Much later Koenraad Jonkheere returned to the subject of iconoclasm and painting in the Netherlands and enriched everything I had written about it. Had it not been for Marina de Angelis, who translated a selection of my essays into Spanish and then published them in the excellent Sans Soleil Ediciones series in 2017, I would not have been encouraged to complete the present selection. My assistants over the years have all had to suffer through various versions of these and other essays and lectures on iconoclasm, but Irina Oryshkevich, Carolyn Yerkes, Aimee Ng, and Margot Bernstein have been extraordinarily helpful, while the attentiveness and rigor of Matt Peebles were critical to the final stages of this project. Without them this volume could not have appeared. And then there are those no longer with us who for very diverse reasons, and often

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counterintuitively, somehow saw in the project of a very young scholar a topic that merited attention even from those who had devoted their lives to preserving what iconoclasts have so often sought to eliminate. When I gave my first lecture on iconoclasm—­necessarily unillustrated, because the images had all been destroyed—­the great collector Count Antoine Seilern chose to abandon his Rolls Royce for his Vespa and appeared in the audience carrying his crash helmet. Despite the apparent differences between our main art-­historical preoccupations, he remained a supportive friend until he died. Ernst Gombrich, Ben Nicholson, and Anthony Blunt seemed to recognize, from our very first conversations on, that iconoclasm had much to teach even those who were involved primarily with the psychology of perception, art theory, connoisseurship, and other more traditional areas of the history of art. Like each of them, but in a very different domain, Frances Yates must have seen in at least some of the iconoclasts the expression of a desire for social amelioration that would never have taken the forms I described but that were often motivated by some of the same aims and ideals. Memoriae maiorum DDD. January 2020

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I

1. Destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin at Palmyra by ISIL Forces in August 2015. Photograph: Dabiq. 2. Mass Executions by ISIL Forces at Palmyra in July 2015. Photograph: Dabiq.

Antwerp, Mosul, and Palmyra Theology and the Production of Violence*

If ever the iconoclastic impulse seemed to be out of control, it was in the course of ISIL’s campaign against images in Iraq and Syria between February and September 2015.1 Beginning with their destruction of the objects in the museum at Mosul and ending with the blowing up of the temples of Bel and Baalshamin in Palmyra (fig. 1), they laid waste to the art and architecture of the entire region. Using the very sites of violence against monuments as backdrops for violence against people, they held public hangings of the guardians of those monuments and staged executions such as that of twenty-­five captives who were neatly lined up, bound, and ordered to their knees before being shot in front of an invited audience in the amphitheater at Palmyra (fig. 2). The next day ISIL blew up the proscenium itself. Though I had long argued the need to understand not only why people make images but also why they break them, I had not imagined the scale of the calamities that began in late 2014, when the self-­proclaimed Islamic State started accompanying its murderous assaults on people with assaults on images. In the course of its conquests and attempted conquests, it conducted some of the most violent and extensive campaigns of image-­breaking ever known. The list of ISIL’s destructions filled one with despair. I had spent most of my adult life studying iconoclasm, but the scale of what ISIL wrought was unparalleled—­though not without precedent. The need to see if any lessons could be drawn from the past—­as well as from current science—­could not have been more urgent. I hope that the studies in these pages may illuminate some of the broader issues at stake in any study of image destruction—­if only because now, in the age of digitization, when one might have thought that images had become more innocuous (as implied by the many claims that * Partly based on a lecture given at the Getty Research Institute on March 1, 2015, and subsequently at the Asia Society, London, on December 16, 2015.

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reproduction and multiplication lead to habituation), they also seem to have become more effective than ever. On the one hand it could be claimed that we have access to more images than at any time in the past, that we see so many that we barely attend to them, that they have become banal, anodyne, objects of apathy rather than empathy; on the other that they are used to the most shocking, frightening, and arousing ends. And they have been used to accompany the destruction of people in ways that might have been foretold—­but were not. Empathy and compassion for what they show yield to apathy and violence—­the apathy that is constitutive of animal violence, as Georges Bataille would have pointed out.2 Is it because of his awareness of the ability of a mere image to arouse empathy that the iconoclast is driven to eradicate what he thinks is a capacity it should not possess? Or is it because its designation as representative of something else is entirely arbitrary and detached from representation itself? That is a question to which we will return at the end of this book; but first, some other questions.

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When the mob rushed in to destroy the images in Antwerp Cathedral on the night of August 21–­22, 1566 (the event that really marked the beginning of the revolt against Spain; fig. 3), and smashed everything within reach—­pictures, sculptures, stained glass, books, vestments, everything that pertained to the infidels of the Catholic Church—­and attacked the priests and other servants of that hated religion, did they do so spontaneously or were they organized?3 And if they were organized, to what degree and on what basis? Such questions recurred frequently in my research not only on iconoclasm in the Netherlands and Germany4 but also in the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine world, in the French Revolution, during the Russian Revolution, in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and then in our contemporary world, from the Middle East to South Africa and elsewhere.5 They occurred in ancient as well as modern Asia, from Mesopotamia to India, and still farther afield. As almost always, the evidence from the Reformation in Europe was not just political and psychological but also theologicaland the theological motivations had much in common with those in other cultures as well. Underlying these were two things—­not so much the many scriptural injunctions against images, the fear of idolatry, or the threat of polytheism (though this too of course, in abundance) as other, even more basic motivations: First is the fear of representing in material form what is essentially divine and uncircumscribable. Hence the endless Catholic justifications of images in terms of the incarnation of Christ; hence the Protestant response that only God can make living images and that these images, of course, are us, living humans made in God’s own image.6 Hence too the resistance in the Hadith to image making on the grounds that it is only Allah who

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can breathe life into material form, so that, for example, when the artist reaches heaven he will be instructed to breathe life into his creations and then, failing to do so, will be cast into hell.7 Second comes the related insistence that paintings, sculptures, mosaics, and all material representations are, in the end, nothing more than dead pieces of wood and stone and cannot possibly have the life or powers attributed to them. This remains one of the basic motivations of all iconoclastic action, to demonstrate that images are indeed dead, that they have no power, and that humans can destroy their vitality. But at the same time, the mere act of destruction testifies to their power and hold over us. Despite their dead matrices they are redemptive in one way or another, or can move us to paralyzing fear, tears of grief and sentiment, or to action. Life somehow inheres within them, and in the person, saint, or deity represented on them. They are able to save and convince the members of their publics and can even be felt to strike back at them (cf. fig. 4).8 No wonder they are often attacked, particularly when they are the representations or even the symbols of a hated leader or regime. Often, of course, the emperor or tyrant is believed—­as in the old Roman doctrine—­to be actually present in his image or to go where it goes.9

3. Frans Hogenberg, Iconoclasm in Antwerp Cathedral on August 20, 1566, etching, 20.8 × 27.8 cm. London, British Museum.

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4. Portrait of President Marcos Attacked in ­Manila in 1986. Photograph: AP / Wide World Press.

It is this sense of the living in the inert image that also lies at the basis of the powers attributed to images and the faith in them, of the Stendhal syndrome,10 of pornography, of empathy for the wounded, of the ways in which mere dead pieces of wood and stone can save lives and be worthy, as in the case of ex-­votos, of being thanked for saving one’s nearest and dearest. Love and hate of images are always two sides of the same coin. After all, the will to destroy betrays an acknowledgment of the power of images, their usefulness and potential for exploitation by those in power. Never has this seemed truer than now.

• In the well-­known video released by ISIL on February 26, 2015, showing supporters of the Islamic State destroying images under the apparent direction of a mullah in the Mosul museum (figs. 5–­7), the iconoclasts chant, as if to justify their actions, that 6

(1) the Prophet, peace be upon him, ordered us to remove and obliterate statues, (2) his companions did the same after him, when they conquered countries, (3) and the monuments that you see behind us are but statues and idols of the people from previous centuries which they used to worship instead of Allah.

5. ISIL mullah standing in front of a lamassu at the Mosul museum in February 2015, screenshot from an ISIL video: https://​ www​.nytimes​.com​/video​ /world​/middleeast​ /100000003537753​ /isis​-­­destroys​-­­mosul​ -­­museum​-­­artifacts​.html.

6. ISIL fighter pushes over a sculpture in the Mosul museum in Iraq in February 2015, screenshot from an ISIL video: https://​www​ .nytimes​.com​/video​ /world​/middleeast​ /100000003537753​ /isis​-­­destroys​-­­mosul​ -­­museum​-­­artifacts​.html.

7. Three ISIL fighters hammering a sculpture in the Mosul museum in Iraq in February 2015, screenshot from an ISIL video: https://​www​ .nytimes​.com​/video​ /world​/middleeast​ /100000003537753​ /isis​-­­destroys​-­­mosul​ -­­museum​-­­artifacts​.html.

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These hackneyed references to the Hadith and to traditional charges of idolatry are all too predictable—­but then the ISIL editor adds a further novel comment, as if in realization of the fact that not even a strict interpretation of the tradition can justify what they are doing: (4) these statues and idols were not here at the time of the Prophet or his companions; they have been excavated by Satanists.11

8. Buddha of Bamiyan in Afghanistan prior to destruction by bombing in March 2001. Photograph: Afghanistan Embassy.

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But these are not the sole reasons for these awful scenes—­if they are any reasons at all. How can theology account for such vandalism? This question runs through almost the entire history of iconoclasm. Like the Islamic State’s terrible executions, these actions are chosen for their shock effect, for publicity, to make people scared, to attract rebels, and so on and so forth. Playing into the hands of the very people who seem to know best how to use and abuse images in our time, the New York Times refers to them as “the latest eye-­catching destruction.”12 They are calculated, through their shock value, to elicit widespread attention. As in very many other attacks on images, theology is only a cover for the desire for publicity (in the case of movements and ideologies) or simply to draw

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9. Blowing up of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001. Photograph: Unknown origin, commonly attributed to CNN.com.

attention to oneself (in the case of disturbed individuals).13 It was the same at Bamiyan in 2001 (figs. 8–­9), for example, where the attacks were first “justified” in terms of breaking down the idols of a pagan religion. “All we are breaking are stones,” said Mullah Omar of the attack on the colossi. “It’s not a big deal. The statues are only objects made of mud and stone,” said his minister of culture. But then they admitted that they were doing this to draw attention to their cause.14 In all this, of course, canonicity counts. The higher the status of the work and the more canonical, the better it serves the purposes of drawing attention either to oneself or to a cause. Time and again even individual psychopaths admit that they choose to attack works such as the Night Watch in Amsterdam, or the Dürers and Rembrandts in Munich and Kassel, either because they were the most beautiful or because they were the best-­known works of art there.15 At Mosul ISIL purposefully selects its monumental targets on the same basis. Its soldiers drill and smash the lions and bulls of the gates of Nineveh (figs. 10–­11); they blast to smithereens the iconic tomb of Jonah, knowing full well the worldwide impact all this will have. And then, when they move farther east, they blow up one great monument after another, including the masterpiece of architecture that was the Temple of Baalshamin at Palmyra (fig. 1). “Objects seen as valuable by some but ‘idolatrous’ to others, for example, have sometimes been destroyed precisely because they were considered worthy of preservation by opposing parties. . . . Attacks on so-­called ‘shared’ heritage in the Middle East may be targeted subversions of the preservation paradigm,” as Mirjam Brusius has noted in her explorations of the many complexities of heritage issues in the contemporary world. As

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10. ISIL fighter destroying the gates of Nineveh, Iraq, in April 2015, screenshot from an ISIL video: https://​www​ .usatoday​.com​/story​ /news​/world​/2015​/04​ /12​/video​-­­islamic​-­­state​ -­­nimrud​/25667399/.

11. ISIL fighter destroying a relief of a horse in Nineveh, Iraq, in 2016, screenshot from an ISIL video: https://​www​ .iraqinews​.com​/iraq​-w ­­ ar​ /isis​-­­destroys​-­­steals​ -­­archaeological​-­­sites​ -­­near​-­­kirkuk/.

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we shall see throughout this book, among the many ironies of iconoclasm is the fact that preservation and destruction are often two sides of the same coin.16 But in the end it is the body itself that lies at the basis of all attacks on images, even on abstract ones (because abstract forms can often seem organic, natural, anthropomorphic, theriomorphic, or simply physiognomic, and contain and reveal the elements of emotion perceived through the body). As the sculptures plunge to the floor in the Mosul and Hatra videos, or are repeatedly smashed or drilled in the face and eyes, between the legs or in the armpits (e.g., figs. 10–­11), it’s hard not to feel a sense of physical shock and revulsion. One’s whole body shudders and recoils as another piece of stone plunges to the floor and smashes (figs. 12–­13), or as the flesh in the stone is pierced. Even though we know they are dead pieces of stone, we react as if they were somehow real bodies. This is not just an impression or imagining of response. We seem to have a sense in ourselves of violent assaults and piercings on the bodies of others, and even threats to them, as when a hammer is poised to smash down on someone or on a representation of someone, or even

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something (figs. 7, 13, 17, 23, and so on).17 The neural substrates of such physical reactions to insults to images have now been well studied.18 We feel these things in our own bodies through the activation of the somatosensory cortex, the insula, and several other cortical areas selective for sensory responses.19 Our reactions are not just imagined; they are physical and interoceptive. We have still not become habituated—­at least one would hope not—­to the depredations of Mosul, of Hatra, and of Nimrud, precisely because of this. We have engraved in our memory, our somato­ sensory as well as our narrative memory, the shock with which we respond to the hammers brought down upon those beautiful, seemingly living images of the past.20 Every crash of an image to the ground, every splitting open of its head (figs. 12–­13), produces a shudder in the beholder’s body; every use of a pneumatic drill to erase a face, or, worse, to put its thundering bit in the eyes of these victimized images, generates a visceral

12. ISIL fighter about to smash a sculpted head at Hatra in February 2015, screenshot from an ISIL video: https://​ www​.nytimes​.com​/video​ /world​/middleeast​ /100000003537753​ /isis​-­­destroys​-­­mosul​ -­­museum​-­­artifacts​.html.

13. ISIL fighter smashing a sculpted head at Hatra in Iraq in February 2015, screenshot from an ISIL video: https://​ www​.nytimes​.com​/video​ /world​/middleeast​ /100000003537753​ /isis​-­­destroys​-­­mosul​ -­­museum​-­­artifacts​.html.

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and interoceptive response.21 And such responses are not just intuitive or only describable in phenomenological terms; they are plottable in terms of the cortical correlates of bodily responses to images. The extrastriate body area (EBA) reacts immediately to sight of the body and body parts; insults to the body stimulate widely networked cortical responses, from emotional to somatosensory ones; the secondary somatosensory cortex is activated when the seen flesh of others is punctured.22 Though digitized and frequently reproduced, these images remain invested with corporeality. They testify not only to the ways in which the body is perceived in the image but also to the force with which they generate a bodily response, a violent elicitation of physical responses in viewers of these films. Is it only because of the art that we feel we are losing that we shudder when these people destroy the images? Or is it because of the way in which we, embodied living respondents, incarnate in our own bodies, respond to the assault on the bodies in those images as if they were somehow as incarnate as our own? Neither one nor the other—­we respond partly because of the skill of the artist, partly because of the history of the objects, and partly in sheer visceral reaction to the sight of what seems to be a body made of the same material as ourselves. Both the effectiveness and the persistence of certain forms of iconoclastic assault depend precisely on this elicitation of the body. If we did not think of those eyes, that mouth, and that face as having the same physiological and expressive functions as ours, indeed of being in some significant expressive and functional sense like our own, and of being capable of the same sensory capacities as ours, then our reactions would be much less directly referred to our bodily condition. Our sense of those wounds and those functional losses—­but above all of those wounds, those excisions from human wholeness—­would be far less acute, far less visceral, as we are almost tautologically inclined to say. But there is another critical aspect of this sense of the flesh of others as like our own, and of the organs of perception and mobility as functioning in the very ways we know from ordinary lived experience. One of the most striking aspects of the history of both iconoclasm and censorship is the persistence not only of the forms but also the physiognomic targets of iconoclastic assault—­from the poking out of the eyes to the sewing up of the mouth to the elimination of the face. The removal of the eyes in the German, Netherlandish, and British censorships and iconoclasms of the sixteenth century (e.g., figs. 14, 26–­28; cf. also fig. 36) and the almost identical way of eliminating the eyes and crossing out the face of the sultan of Bahrain in 2011 testify to the awareness that the eyes are the liveliest index of the vitality of an image (fig. 15);23 that the sewing up of the mouth shows the closure of the very organ that represents the ability of the image to be so lively that it seems to speak; and that the elimination of the face horrifically removes all possibility of expression (cf. figs. 16, 25, 38, and 44). These are forms of targeted mutilation that persist across history.24

14. Defaced Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus after Hans Holbein the Younger, woodcut, in Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia Universalis (Basel: Heinrich Petri, 1550). Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional.

15. Andrea Bruce, Posters of Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa as Defaced during a Demonstration in Manama, Bahrain, February 15, 2011. Photograph: New York Times.

16. Rubens, Portrait of Archduke Albrecht, as damaged by acid, 1982. Düsseldorf, Museum Kunstpalast.

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It has been widely hypothesized that the destruction of images and architecture in Mosul, in Hatra, in Nimrud, and elsewhere was also motivated by the profits to be gained from selling what remained. Of course there is some truth in this, but there were many other clear motives too. The constant proclamations that images are idolatrous were calculated to appeal to fundamentalists, but they also served, quite strategically, to fire up both supporters and enemies in the outside world. The shock value of these deliberately choreographed events depended above all on their association with the living and on the ease with which both could now be eliminated. From the beginnings of iconoclasm onward, those associated with images and who sought to preserve them were destroyed along with the very images and art they sought to protect. All too often the destruction of images has been accompanied by the murder of those associated with them—­in the past as well as in the present. In the Nether­ lands in 1566, the destruction of images was followed by murder, first of the guardians of images, then of all those perceived to be associated with them. There too, if you protected a picture you were aligned with the political and religious forces it betokened, just as in the awful case of the great Syrian inspector of art and architecture in Palmyra, whose name—­like the names of so many other victims—­deserves to be recalled, the eighty-­t wo-­year-­old Khaled al-Asaad. And then, in the sixteenth century, the killing spread to all those regarded as representatives of the old religion, of a religion that had become heathen again. The radical fundamentalists of the Reformation equated the pope with the Whore of Babylon, the font of all corruption, a leader dedicated not to the true God but to false and old ones, given over to sensuality and idolatry.25 Such fundamentalists regard their opponents, through and because of their images, as being too much of this world, too bonded to the materiality of culture, insufficiently dedicated to the pure spirituality of those who pretend to traffic only in the world of the word or the spirit. We know these charges, and hear them again and again. The ISIL videos are full of them. But they are pretexts for violence. In the end, these are not groups who dismiss images. They need them too much, whether in the sixteenth century or now. Even the most doctrinaire among the radical Protestant reformers also dealt in images as propaganda, often in the bluntest way possible, sometimes even more bluntly than Catholics, the great masters of affective and sensual images. Then and now, iconoclasts know that images are effective for precisely these reasons, for propaganda, for recruitment, or as demonstrations of a perverse theology in which people can be dispensed with as easily as images. And so, in the age of digital reproducibility, ISIL has made cruel and terrifying use of the effectiveness of images in conveying a sense of the

Antwerp, Mosul, and Palmyra

living body by multiplying images of its destruction and elimination. But it has not only been a matter of showing executions and other forms of elimination of the body, whether of victim or perpetrator. ISIL’s awful beheadings were disseminated via images at the same time as it began its assaults on images. The horrendous attacks on human beings at the Bataclan Theater in Paris in November 2015 were preceded by attacks on images, and the attacks on images were preceded by attacks on people. Images stood at the center of Islamic State propaganda and its recruitment of both people and souls. Life was believed to inhere in images—­and so they were destroyed, in order to show that they were merely dead, containing no vitality after all. It was as if, in the age of digitization, people were reduced to the status of mere images, perhaps even more easily destructible than they always had been. The old conflation of the image and the living lies at the basis of ISIL’s iconoclasm and its awful reduction of its opponents—­real or imagined—­to the status of mere images. They and their souls are as easily removed, in our age, as digitized images. Images and people can be destroyed with equal ease: we can both promote ourselves and remove others with the press of a trigger or a button on a camera, phone, or computer. Iconoclasm in our age goes together with murder. The conflation of representation and reality has finally been achieved, its path to pathos and death smoothed by the ease with which we digitize everything, by which images have been reduced to mere digits, mere unembodied ciphers. But of course they are not. They can be great works of art, testimony to our history and to our creative capacities. It is this that transcends our mortal lives, and this that ISIL is seeking to eliminate. ISIL’s depredations against art and architecture—­architecture that does not resemble humans for the most part, but that shelters and celebrates them—­exceed the iconoclasms of the past in scale and, above all, in ease of elimination. Today’s iconoclasms are more violent, more terrifying, and more indiscriminate than anything in the past. The destruction of people by remorseless savagery and the elimination of the great temples and colonnades at Palmyra by bombing occurred on a scale hitherto unknown and betokened a total refusal of our humanity. What the solution might be is difficult to tell, other than pushing ISIL back from the threatened areas it controls—­or by acknowledging that feigned indifference to these acts will eventually result in lower frenzies of destruction or other forms of spectacle. As in all fundamentalisms, however, the hard problem of how to make theology and theodicy irrelevant except as objects of study will remain. The great art historian Michael Baxandall once asked me—­sometime in the early 1970s—­what theology had to do with images; I looked at him in amazement and said, “Everything.” In the end he too, for all his skepticism, could not but acknowledge that.26

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II

Iconoclasm The Material and Virtual Body

Did the phenomenon grow, or just the amount of information about it? Was there really an increase in the number of iconoclastic events, especially large-­scale political ones, from 1989 on—­or is it simply that the amount of media attention paid to such events expanded at the time the digital revolution was just beginning? While it might be hard to determine whether the number of iconoclastic acts by individuals increased during the same time, there seemed to be some kind of connection between the growing number of attacks on contemporary art and the exponential growth of political iconoclasms. Might there be any connection between image proliferation and iconoclastic proliferation—­that is, between the forms of image proliferation that have resulted from the exponential growth of the internet and the ever-­widening range of social media enabled by digitization on the one hand, and the proliferation of iconoclastic outbreaks on the other? It might, of course, be possible to establish a statistical correlation, but could there be an ontological and phenomenological connection as well? These are just some of the questions that arise as one surveys the inexorable growth in the number and variety of studies of the problem between 1970 and 2019. 1. Censorship to Iconoclasm: The Netherlandish Case

By the time I began studying the outbreak of iconoclasm that unleashed the Revolt of the Netherlands against Spain in 1566, I had already started to assemble as many examples as I could find of the censorship of book illustrations from the middle of the fifteenth century on. The one phenomenon—­­­­­censorship—­­rapidly phased into the other: iconoclasm. The conjunction of the invention of printing with the early stirrings of the Protestant Reformation exacerbated an old problem. Just like paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts, images in books (e.g., fig. 14) were censored by being crossed out, canceled, adjusted, mutilated, or obliterated. As had

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been the case for millennia, public images of hated or superseded rulers and authorities were removed or suppressed. The faces and figures of those who promulgated unacceptable doctrines were similarly treated, whether in their writings or elsewhere. Images regarded as carnally provocative or libidinous had to disappear or be covered. Illustrations of stories or positions that did not pass theological muster resulted in rejection or modification.1 This, after all, was a period in which most Protestant creeds emphasized the word at the expense of the image. This period of censorship was swiftly followed by an age of iconoclasm. As the Spanish rulers in the Netherlands tightened their grip on an ever more restive region, and as the Reformation acquired more and more followers and sympathizers, thereby threatening the position of the Catholic Church in the Netherlands, the rebels recognized their opportunity. In the late spring of 1566, episodes of image breaking broke out in southwestern Flanders and spread like wildfire. Eventually it overwhelmed Antwerp, the chief city of the entire Netherlands, on the night of August 21–­22. There, images of every kind were assaulted with unparalleled ferocity (or what seemed to be unparalleled ferocity): not only paintings and sculptures but stained glass, wall paintings, embroidered vestments, illustrated liturgical books, and decorated ritual vessels of precious or semiprecious materials. After its assault on the dead images, the mob turned on the living representatives of the Catholic Church, its ministers and minions. Such scenes played out repeatedly, though mostly with less intensity, as iconoclasm spread to the northernmost provinces of the Netherlands before burning itself out by the end of September 1566. It might have seemed—­on the face of it—­that the Beeldenstorm of 1566 could be explained as a manifestation of popular resentment against an unpopular regime and its demonized rulers. But this would have been too simple. The evidence went in too many other directions. Theological reasons for the elimination and destruction of images were present from the outset. Both the iconoclasts and the theological polemicists declared that images and their current use were idolatrous (this was perhaps the commonest charge). They repeatedly claimed that if Christ was divine and uncircumscribable, he could not be represented in material and circumscribed form.2 They held, as Martin Luther and Saint Bernard and many others had before them, that money was better spent on the living images of God, such as the poor, than squandered on the adornment of churches and on dead images of Christ and his saints. Such arguments arose repeatedly. They were cited by theologians, the clergy, and laypeople alike, sometimes in garbled form but often enough with striking clarity. At the heart of many of these arguments lay deep reservations about images. However forced sometimes, they must still be taken seriously, for they provide insights into why images should have been attacked at all. To read the treatises on images and the reports of iconoclasts is to have a clearer sense of why images were so comprehen-

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body

sively and so intensely objects of hostility, why the old forms of respect that had hitherto been attached to them lapsed, and why they suddenly became so vulnerable.3 But why were the images attacked with such ferocity? After all, the images were not themselves the living tyrants they represented. To what extent did the image-­breakers act indiscriminately—­or were they sometimes selective? Did they attack acknowledged works of art with greater or lesser vehemence than other images—­or were the iconoclasts blindly indifferent to the aesthetic status of images? Were the attacks spontaneous or organized? At first the outbreaks seemed spontaneous, but enough evidence soon emerged to show that many if not all of the communal attacks were organized. Most of these questions—­and many others—­arose in the cases of other iconoclastic episodes as well. As in the Netherlands, apparently spontaneous attacks turned out to be organized and drew effectively on individual resentments and pathologies; particular works of art were singled out for destruction because of the enhanced opportunities they offered for gaining publicity for a cause; and the ferocity of the attacks was surely attributable, at least in part, to frustration and fury at the unavailability of the tyrant and directed instead at his representation. It was also easier to assault an image than its living prototype. In the case of religious images, indignation flared at the impossibility of showing the spiritual in the material. In all of this, historical, political, and theological factors merged with psychological ones. 2. Politics, Theology, and the Body

Just as in the great periods of Byzantine iconoclasm between 726 and 787 and then again between 814 and 842, politics and theology intersected in many and much-­discussed ways: the role played by the assertion of imperial power, the influence of Islamic strains of thought about images and their incorporation into political pressures from the East, and the long-­running battle about the true nature of Christ that often seemed to stand at odds with the possibility of his figuration in art and images. The christocentric debates immediately became political ones.4 Soon I began to realize that the ancient theological arguments about images were exemplary for more ordinary ones, including the political and the psychological.5 They were exemplary because of the centrality of notions of embodiment. In ancient Roman arguments, emperors and kings were there where their images were. The image of the emperor had to be treated as if it were the emperor himself. One paid homage to the person by paying homage to his image. And, mutatis mutandis, one could assail the emperor’s authority by attacking his image. It was as if the body of the emperor were in his image, just as the body of Christ and his saints were

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often supposed, if only in popular culture (but not really only), to be in their images. From the beginnings of Christianity the doctrine of the incarnation offered a fundamental justification for the Christian use of images.6 Images of Christ were permissible because Christ, though essentially divine, was made material as man. Nonetheless, the Decalogue’s insistence on monotheism was followed by a clear equation between idolatry and figuration. To make a graven image was to make a living thing, the prerogative of the unseen God alone. A similar fear underlay the Hadith’s proscription on images, partly based on the argument that only God was allowed to infuse life into created images—­the life believed to reside in all representations, especially of living beings. Fear of the flesh, of the lively movements of the body, suffused almost all resistance to art and to images. It subtended all attempts at censorship and elimination of images regarded as too sensual, whether in sexual or religious terms.7 It inspired the will to etiolate the sense of the living body in the dead material and to eradicate the vivid illusion of life from what is essentially inanimate, the “dead images of wood and stone,” as Martin Luther and his followers (and many others before and after him) so trenchantly called them. The old questions of the circumscribability of the divine, and of what seems to be the living reality of representation perceived as flesh or in movement, reappear in almost all episodes of iconoclasm and in all cultures. In Christendom the theological question of the incarnation of Christ is connected with the suspect carnality of images. The problem could be manifestly eradicated at a stroke by removing or destroying them. Concerns about the inherent licentiousness of images lie behind many an iconoclastic episode and are expressed in the Christian world by writers from Tertullian to Luther and onward. But the association of images with the joint failings of wantonness and idolatry occurs not only in Byzantium and in the Reformation8 but also in the earliest books of the Bible onward. At the very moment Moses comes down from the mountain with the tablets of the law, the Israelites are found dancing wantonly around the golden calf, made from their own jewelry. Once the idolatrous and licentious image is smashed, order returns. Iconoclasm is present from the beginnings of recorded history—­and presumably before. Evidence of image erasure, correction, and covering over is to be found in the palimpsests at Lascaux and Chauvet and in the erasures and blottings that go as far back as the engravings from Blombos Cave. Whether or not we allow that such early erasures are of images—­in other words, of what passes muster, in modern art-historical parlance, as images—­is another matter; but there can be no question that they represent willed cancellation of the efforts of human hands to represent in visual form.

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body 3. Modes, Motives, and Mutilation

The records—­both visual and written—­of such acts reveal modes and motivations that are found time and again in later histories. In ancient Mesopotamia and in ancient Egypt, faces and parts of faces are mutilated as if to drain the images of the life of their referents; the signs and symbols of their status are excised and removed. In both regions the erasure of names accompanies or follows the elimination and mutilation of images.9 The destruction of the herms of Athens on the eve of the Peloponnesian War serves as a constant reminder of the political dimensions of iconoclasm. Herostratos’s demolition of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus offers an ancient example of using the act of iconoclasm as a means of publicity, of drawing attention to oneself, and of ensuring one’s memory for posterity. Throughout the classical Roman world the practice of damnatio memoriae enabled people to sully the reputations of those whose images they attacked or effaced, or even to attempt to eliminate their memory from history altogether.10 As has been noted of the medieval defamatory images, such acts “strike the human subject in his individual dignity and honor, expose both his image and himself to the derision and disdain of the community, deprive him of the necessary attributes of his social status and sometimes, even more frequently, of those even more elementary attributes that are particular to every human being, like, say, the parts of his body.”11 And so on through later episodes. It would be otiose to attempt a complete listing of so inexhaustible a subject. The destructions of medieval sculpture are apparent throughout Europe and northern Europe in particular—­though it is by no means easy to discriminate between early instances of deliberate defacement and the wilder and more generic destruction of medieval monuments during the German and Swiss Reformation and Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Here, as is often the case, obvious political motivations could be expediently attached to the occasional theological arguments about the uncircumscribability of the divine as well as to any number of expressions of resentment about the wealth of the monasteries, a wealth that was no better evidenced than by the splendid buildings and artworks themselves. 4. Iconoclastic Selectivity and Its Consequences: Some Examples

The iconoclastic outbreaks that occurred with varying intensity in the more or less radical Reformation centers of Protestant Germany and Switzerland were inspired by positions that ranged from Luther’s relative tolerance of images to Zwingli’s and Calvin’s more stringent rules.12 For Luther and Zwingli, purely narrative historical images were tolerable; for the more radical reformers such as Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and

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Thomas Müntzer, they were not. Idolatry and expense had to be avoided at all cost. Luther was relatively indifferent to secular images that ­others regarded as pornographic and sought to eliminate. Calvin allowed for the depiction of whatever the eyes could see (in contradistinction to the un­ seeable divine), while Luther was still more relaxed.13 Most of the reformers sought to diminish the old reliance on visual images as means of edifying, instructing, and strengthening the memory of the faithful (especially the illiterate faithful). Theirs was a religious culture that emphasized the word at the expense of the visual, placing constraints on the visual arts that ranged from the relatively innocuous to the severe.14 All such constraints could be instrumentalized in favor of rebellion and icono­clasm. On the one hand, the Netherlands iconoclasm of 1566 was long and sometimes fiercely destructive; on the other, the constraints its ideologies placed on religious art played a critical role, even if ex negativo, in the development of the distinctive forms of secular painting that are the glory of seventeenth-­century Dutch art. When commissions for religious art began to dry up, and when one’s work was in any case at risk, painters sought commissions elsewhere, avoided painting contested subject matter, and developed new genres of art altogether.15 In Britain, the combination of the devastations of the mid-­sixteenth century and the Puritan iconoclasm of the 1640s stifled British painting in its cradle before it, too, could flourish again.16 Especially in Britain, extreme forms of Protestant iconoclasm were accompanied by strictures on dance and theater, justified in more or less hysterically anticorporeal treatises in which every fear of the sensual body was brought to the fore. To read them is to realize once more the centrality of the problem of embodiment to the iconoclastic will. The possibility of bodily effect underlies both the desire for representation in artistic form (whether in the visual or the performing arts) and feelings of shame and antipathy toward it. Theological motivations played a much lesser role in the next great iconoclastic episode in the West, that of the French Revolution.17 Although one of the major aims was to replace the images of religion with those of reason, the revolutionaries’ chief focus was the ancient and straightforward one of toppling and eliminating the images and symbols of the old regime. They concentrated as much on the symbols of authority as on actual portraits of the king and nobility and on the embodied reality of what was believed to reside in them. At the same time, the images of medieval religion (now superseded by a more modern one) were frequently, though not systematically, destroyed in the churches or collected and placed in the Musée des monuments français, opened by Alexandre Lenoir in 1795. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the motives for eliminating the symbols of the old order were accompanied by explicit moves to conserve them. The toppling of the statue of Napoléon I by the Paris communards in

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body

the Place Vendôme in 1871 (which had itself replaced Girardon’s 1699 statue of Louis XIV) was perhaps the first major act of public iconoclasm to have been graphically recorded by the still new technique of photography. In the many photographs of the occasion one can see the degrees of deliberation with which the statue was pulled down. It was an early precursor of the modern toppling of statues of discredited tyrants in times of revolution. The most spectacular cases include destruction and removal of the statues of the czars of Russia during the Russian Revolution, and of those of Lenin and Marx all over Eastern Europe after the overturning of the Soviet Union in 1989 (as in fig. 22). Before moving on to that year, however, it is important also to recall the very different yet still dramatic instances of image critique and elimination that constituted Hitler’s crusades and attacks on entartete Kunst from 1933 on. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that efforts at elimination of imagery associated with the objects of opprobrium (the Jews, in this case) were combined with an aesthetic pretext—­where the art produced by a political enemy is in fact effete or degenerate, a sign of an inferior race. And there too forms of musealization, ephemeral though they may have been, accompanied removal and destruction of art. The watershed year of 1989 pretty much restored Europe to its pre-­ 1914 boundaries, and regime changes followed across the globe. From then on, the pace of attacks and the concomitant pace of writing about iconoclasm picked up with extraordinary speed. The wars in the Balkans, the American intervention in Iraq, regime changes in South Africa and China, Iran and Afghanistan, Egypt and Ukraine—­all of these episodes were followed by massive image erasure, substitution, and change. With the turn of the century the Middle East entered the global iconoclastic field. From the blowing up of the Buddhas of Bamiyan to the toppling of the statues of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, from the elimination of the statues of political leaders in the course of the Arab Spring of 2011 to the violent image-­breaking campaigns of ISIL, clear political motivations were often buttressed by theological ones, whether real or faux. The usual removal of the images of the old leaders was not followed as swiftly as might have been expected by the erection of new ones, at least in part because of Islamic reservations about figuration and the potentially lively qualities of images. Indeed the forms of attack themselves, such as the beating of statues—­especially their faces—­with the soles of shoes, often represented particularly distinctive regional modes of disdain. It was around this time, too, that iconoclasm in Africa became better known (and more seriously studied). Here too the old motives for iconoclasm could be discerned in many of the efforts to replace the images of fallen or superseded authority. But at the same time, the desire to reformulate and sometimes appropriate the old colonial ways of figuring leadership both inserted African iconoclasm into the history of colonial-

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ism and clearly posed the question of the relationship between modernism and power.18 With this, yet another aspect of iconoclasm came to the fore—­the relationship between iconoclasm and creativity, between destruction and the nature of art itself. When the art historian and curator Werner Hoffman—­who would soon put on a now famous exhibition titled Luther and the Consequences for Art 19—­asked me about it after a lecture I gave on iconoclasm in 1984, it caught me by surprise. It was a paradox I had not adequately contemplated, even though Dario Gamboni had already written about it eloquently a year earlier.20 Soon it developed into one of the major questions in the field. 5. Uncanny Persistences

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The recurrences are striking. Even a cursory survey makes clear how often politics mixes with theology, and how personal pathologies can intersect with—­and often exacerbate—­the specific historical contexts of iconoclastic movements and moments. And both motives and means repeat themselves, even to the most specific degree. Take the cupid who pulls out his penis to piss into the mouth of an already destroyed ancient statue in Maarten van Heemskerck’s 1567 print of The Destruction of the Statue of Bel (fig. 17). His action is almost identical to that of a young man who pisses onto the face of a fallen statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003 (fig. 18). It makes plain that these are no longer gods (of the people or of art); they are merely collapsed, false idols to be insulted in ways that could not happen if they were either living or divine. Yet acts like these suggest that such insults are felt (and seen) to be even greater because of the sense they convey of physical assaults on a living prototype. It is in the combination of religion, politics, and the perceived sensuality of images that the uncanny persistence of apparently similar forms of defilement and destruction becomes more comprehensible. Iconoclastic and censorial acts take stereotypical forms. This stereotypicality results from a common etiology: the drive to eliminate what is most lively in an image, or to defile it bodily in such a way that its thus-­proven materiality disqualifies it from sacred or superior status (whether aesthetically or politically). Apparently similar acts are evident across centuries. It is almost as if Heemskerck’s series of prints alluding to the iconoclasm of his own time continued to provide a basic repertoire of motifs of destruction. The use of ropes to pull down the statue in Josiah’s Destruction of the Temples of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom (fig. 19) provides a striking visual anticipation not only of Jan Luyken’s representation of the scene of iconoclasm in Antwerp Cathedral (fig. 20)21 but also, even more remarkably, of the pulling down of the equestrian statue of the first shah of Persia in 1953

17. Philip Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, The Destruction of the Statue of Bel, from The History of Bel and the Dragon, 1564, no. 6, published in 1565 by Theodoor Galle, engraving, 20.5 × 24.6 cm. London, British Museum. 18. Thorne Anderson, A Man Urinates on the Head of a Destroyed Statue of Saddam Hussein on Al-­Rashid Street in Baghdad on April 14, 2003. Photograph: Getty Images / Corbis.

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(fig. 21), of Lenin in Vilnius in December 2013 (fig. 22), and of the larger-­ than-­life ones of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003 (e.g., figs. 45–­48). The hammers used to chip away at Saddam’s plinth (fig. 23) are raised in ways that are remarkably like—­some might say uncannily akin to—­those in Heemskerck’s print (fig. 17; cf. also figs. 7 and 12). None of the photographers are likely to have had access to Heemskerck’s work (though of course they might have seen images influenced

19. Philip Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, Destruction of the Temples of Ashtoreth, ­Chemosh, and Milcom, from The History of King Josiah, engraving after drawing dated 1569, 20.5 × 25.2 cm. London, British Museum.

20. Jan Luyken, Iconoclasm in Flanders and Brabant in 1568 [sic], 1679–­84, etching, 27.1 × 34.5 cm. London, British Museum.

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body

21. Removal of the statue of the shah’s father, Reza Khan, in Teheran in 1979. Photograph: UPI-­Bettman Newsphoto. 22. Wojtek Druszcz, ­Removal of a Statue of Lenin in Vilnius, Lithuania, August 23, 1991. Photograph: Getty Images.

23. Jerome Delay, Man Hammering the Base of a Statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, April 9, 2003. Photograph: ­Associated Press.

by them). But these images reveal the limited ways in which real iconoclastic actions actually manifest themselves across time. All the visual evidence testifies to the comparatively small repertoire of muscular action involved in image-­breaking acts (most clearly evident in the images of hammer-­wielding iconoclasts, which necessarily are constrained by the relationship between the muscles of the upper body involved in the action

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and the focusing of action with the aim to break).22 They remind us that some of the basic forms of iconoclastic behavior are conditioned by the limits of biological action, and that the most effective artists are often those who can isolate and convey the most physically and emotionally evocative forms of action with which to endow a particular representation. The validity of such choices and skills is evidenced by the persistence until the present time of these apparently similar actions in both photography and life itself. They are the Pathosformeln (as Aby Warburg would have called them) of violence, predicated less on actual borrowings than on biological necessity and constraint. Their power derives precisely from their ability to elicit immediate recognition of the physical and emotional force of the action portrayed. And so by the time we arrive at a painting like Dirck van Delen’s 1630 Iconoclasts in a Church (fig. 24), these pathos formulas of violence are easily identifiable. Whether they are derived from earlier representations of iconoclasm or not is irrelevant. The fact is that the statue in van Delen’s picture is assaulted and pulled down in almost exactly the same way as statues are in Heemskerck’s prints and in Firdos Square in Baghdad in April 2003 (figs. 19 and 45, but cf. also figs. 19–­21), while the fallen statue in the background of the painting is beaten with a sledgehammer just as the ISIL warrior smashes a statue already on the ground in Mosul in 2014. The basic irony here, of course, lies in the making of a work of art that shows the destruction of works of art. But this is another story—­though one that is not entirely without relevance to the creative and aesthetic role often assigned to destruction and mutilation (including autodestruction and self-­mutilation) in works of art of our own time.23 I had already pointed to many of these recurrences of action and gesture in my 1977 essay “The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm,”24 as well as in the small book of 1985 titled Iconoclasts and Their Motives.25 The reaction was predictable. The 1980s were the Foucauldian heyday of high contextualism and social constructionism. I was accused of simplistic reductionism, of failing to see difference, of not recognizing that the identification of structures and patterns was too Platonic,26 that context defined psychology, that I elided difference in favor of similarity (as I was also alleged to have done in The Power of Images). But the similarities and persistence of both pattern and behavior were undeniable and revealing. The commonest form of iconoclastic mutilation of an image is the elimination or poking out of the eyes, the clearest signs of the liveliness inherent in an image. To take out the eyes is to deprive the person depicted of the most critical index of vitality and of the capacity for expressing the emotions associated with living beings. The eyes are often the first—­and sometimes the only and sufficient—­element of the iconoclastic act. You take out the eyes of those who are regarded as malefactors (such as the soldiers who massacre the innocents), or as benefactors in scenes in which

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you do not believe, whether of the religious or the political kind (such as givers of Christian charity, or sovereigns and judges).27 You take out the all-­seeing eye so it cannot see what you don’t want it to see. The second most common form of mutilation is that of the mouth, not only because it is one of the prime sites of liveliness and emotional expression on the face but because too often the portrait itself seems to speak—­the very criterion of its excellence. No wonder that from ancient times on one of the most clichéd metaphors for the seeming liveliness of an image, and thus for the skill of the artist who made it, is that of the eyes that follow one round the room (even though they are merely pieces of painted wood or of stone) and statues that seem to speak. It is to be remembered, too, that already in ancient Babylonia and Egypt images of gods and kings were activated, were endowed with their full powers, only once the artist or priest had ritually opened their mouth or their eyes (usually by some realistic or symbolic act of completion). Then comes the mutilation of whole faces, thus damaging the implied body, insulting the figure portrayed, and effectively depriving the spectator of the possibility of correctly judging any form of animated expression (if the remains of any such are left at all). The obliterations of the

24. Dirck van Delen, Iconoclasts in a Church, 1630, oil on panel, 50 × 67 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

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25. E. J. Bellocq, Untitled, from Storyville Portraits, plate 29, ca. 1912, photograph printed 1966–­69 by Lee Friedlander. Photograph: Lee Friedlander.

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faces of E. J. Bellocq’s models in the brothels of New Orleans not only achieve this but also take away the individuality that may have seemed to make the sitters seductive, stripping them of the most obvious bodily guarantors of their personhood (e.g., fig. 25). It is always a shock to see these forms of mutilation, certainly in reality but also in representation (though the shock may of course be of different degree).28 Viewers feel as if such assaults are not only on the bodies they see but also, somehow, troublingly, on their own. This sense of empathy with the objects of sight is what guarantees their effectiveness.29 The same is true, of course, for targeted attacks on other parts of the body, as in the case of the removal of the limbs of judges (as if to indicate the deprivation of the most literal instruments of exercising justice or injustice) or of gestures more generally. To inflict damage on a bodily gesture is to take away its capacity not just for the execution and completion of an action but also for proclamation and for the expression of inner

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feeling.30 A gesture may sometimes betoken the life within an image even more powerfully than the eyes and provide the clearest indication of the skill with which it is made.31 All this offers a caution—­or a corrective—­when it comes to thinking about iconoclasm in historical or political terms alone.32 The apparent continuities of behavior require interrogation as much as the specificities of context. Sometimes the clamorousness of the former seems to override the constraints of the latter. It is not just a matter of the specific person the image represents. Neither in Byzantine nor in Reformation iconoclasm is it possible to attribute the will to destroy solely to what—­or whom—­the image represents. During the Revolt of the Netherlands it was not just because of resentment against the repressive Spanish regime that the images of the king and his representatives were taken down and eliminated; nor was it solely because of declarations by hedge-­preachers that the images of Christ were idolatrous, contrary to the Second Commandment, and incommensurable with his divine status. None of this could adequately account for the violence of the removal—­and the myriad forms of removal—­of what may seem to be living but is in fact already dead, a mere reproduction of reality. The will to destroy a work more often than not betokens an effort to deny that the image is somehow living. It is precisely this form of life that makes it dangerous, the target for eradication by effacement, mutilation, and destruction. The historical issues are not resolvable aside from the psychological ones. 6. The Evidence of Censorship

Much the same with censorship: the recurrences are striking, the range of targets and actions perhaps even more easily susceptible to classification. When Catholicism’s censors began to disapprove of Erasmus’s apparent sympathies with Protestant positions, they crossed out not only offending words in his texts but also his face. In the woodcut portrait illustrated in Sebastian Münster’s 1550 Cosmographia Universalis (fig. 14),33 Erasmus’s eyes were poked out, his mouth crossed out, and his whole face crisscrossed by a large double X. Almost exactly the same treatment was meted out, almost half a millennium later, to posters of the king of Bahrain in 2011 (fig. 15). “The end of the king!” the image seems optimistically to proclaim. Neither the manual strategies of censorship and cancellation nor the foci of obliteration have changed much. Censorship precedes and phases into iconoclasm. It takes aim at the body, striking the human subject in his dignity and honor. It makes plain that love and hate of images are two sides of the same coin. Time and again desire for the body in the image—­or even the image itself—­is perceived as disturbing and is offset by hostility. Often the authorities are all too aware of this.

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The process whereby an image is perceived as a living body is natural enough until it becomes pathological or usurped by others who wish to control its power or seductiveness. And despite the continuing claim that the aura and effect of images are diminished by their superabundance in the new age of digital imagery, the desire to control them is greater than ever before. Like licentious (or potentially licentious) images, satirical images must be controlled—­and since satire itself is so often predicated on distortions of face or body, censorship turns out to focus on them too; often this turns into direct and blatant iconoclasm, as exemplified in the attack by two men, one white and one black, on Brett Murray’s satirical painting of President Jacob Zuma of South Africa in 2012.34 Satirical images of leaders are removed by the powers that be or effaced by those who have less direct authority. Some censorship is official, much is unofficial—­though we mostly tend to think of it as the former. The same with images of the Godhead. In 2008 Martin Kippenberger’s Zuerst die Füsse showing a crucified green frog was removed from a museum in Bolzano following a stern critique by Pope Benedict XVI, while Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ was taken down from a number of museums in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In both cases, of course, not only theological sensibilities were at stake but also aesthetic ones. So too was the degree to which the artistic status of each work could be allowed to supersede its theological one—­an issue that already lay at the core of the debates in the 1560s about the propriety of the nudes (and the way they were depicted!) in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. The processes of censorship move swiftly from correction to mutilation and destruction or removal. Censorship aims to correct visual content or to discredit or damage the face or body in the image. Outside the obvious political domains, most censorial efforts directed at visual images go together with anxiety about their potential licentiousness or about the ways in which their felt sensuality transgresses social norms. This applies even to institutionalized religions that approve of the use of images in worship. From the beginning, Christian churches have been in the forefront of battles against images because they seem to be embodied and to have a troubling capacity for bodily arousal. Along with the rabbis’ unending concern with idolatry, Talmudic hostility toward images is similarly predicated on the distracting carnality perceived in this or that image. From the early church fathers (like Tertullian, whose treatises on idolatry and on women’s dress, ornament, and makeup significantly overlap) to many Islamic cultures today, the potentially licentious effects of images are directly associated with the potentially arousing effects of a woman’s body and face. Indeed, cancellation or mutilation of parts of the female body are among the most frequent assaults against images across the globe. The so-­called culture wars of the 1980s and early 1990s in the United States involved the censorship of bodies perceived as too carnal and were

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often taken as further reflections of the puritanism that lies at the heart of American society.35 In addition to pieces like Serrano’s Piss Christ, many other works deemed insulting to Christians were censored (there was much less concern about insults to other religions). It was not only images of women that came under fire but anything related (or potentially related) to homosexuality. The furious arguments that raged around Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of nude males in the late 1980s and early 1990s testified abundantly to this.36 Organizations in favor of the preservation of Christian morality, particularly within the family, came together with members of Congress in support of the suppression and removal of what they regarded as pornographic and licentious imagery, all on the grounds of the sexual and moral effects on others—­especially children. Censorship is fundamentally concerned with the control of information, but it also testifies to endless versions of fear of the body in the image. The fear is not just of the representation of the body but of the threat that it might be or become alive, or that the object itself may have some form of liveliness, a mechanical force akin to a living one. When these threats are combined with politics, the mixture can be incendiary. While the relationship between censorship and iconoclasm plays itself out across Christian history,37 it has recently reappeared more frequently in Islamic societies as well. In 2001 some of the mullahs insisted that the Taliban destroyed the faces of the great Buddhas of Bamiyan because they were idols of an infidel religion; others said their destruction would serve to publicize the Taliban cause. But at the same time, this elimination of the face predictably occurred in a society where the faces—­and even the eyes—­of women are suppressed more rigorously than in almost any other part of the globe. Time and again, politics and censorship merge on the grounds of sexual provocativeness and the dangers of arousal. Women most clearly exemplify these threats to purity and disciplined manliness. The perception of animation in images and fear of the body are why pictures and sculptures of women so often rouse the psychopath in the iconoclast and the iconoclast in the psychopath—­and in lovers of art too. Hence the repeated assaults on representations of Leda and Danae, whether the attack on Correggio’s Leda by Louis d’Orleans in the late 1720s or that on Rembrandt’s Danae, poised to receive Jupiter’s shower of gold but doused with acid instead in 1993. Even motivations such as these can come together with politics, as in the now well known case of the suffragist who, when she first attacked Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in 1912, said she did so to attract attention to the suffragist cause. Years later she maintained that the attack was really on the grounds that she did not like the way “men visitors stood and gaped at it all day long.”38 In modern times as in ancient, the arousing body in the image must be made less so. It must be spoiled, crossed out, defaced, deshamed, or

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destroyed. The effects of such actions are violent and shocking, often because they seem to strike directly at the bodies shown or even implied in the image. Indeed to see an image censored—­even the elimination of images of disapproved authors—­is to understand more clearly how censorship becomes iconoclasm, fueled by both hostility and desire. We grasp better what drives people to destroy images (or mutilate or cancel them) when we also consider what makes people love them, even to the point of sexual desire. These two apparently opposing sentiments are often two sides of the same coin. 7. Wholesale Destruction

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The spoliation of monuments and museums has long accompanied invasion, uprising, and territorial usurpation. Since time immemorial the destruction of art has been an inevitable consequence of war. Its iconoclasms are blinder and much less selective than many of the other phenomena discussed in these pages. Though iconoclasm in times of war can be directed in strategic or overtly polemical ways, its impetuous speed and brute force—­though perhaps preceded by selective pinpointing—­ ensure ever more thorough destruction and pillaging of museums and historical sites. Politically and theologically motivated iconoclasm gives way to the possibilities of sheer vandalism; by now it is simply a matter of the paths of war that literally intersect with the spaces of museums.39 The Bamiyan Buddhas were blasted out of existence in 2001, the National Museum of Iraq attacked in 2003, the objects inside it ransacked and looted. Despite some major successes of recuperation, vast numbers of objects were damaged and never recovered. Already in 2011 the Egyptian Museum in Cairo had been systematically looted; less than three years later the Museum of Islamic Art there was bombed, not long after a major rebuilding program; by then looting was endemic throughout the country, from the Black Pyramid of Dahshour in Giza and the Mamluk mosque near the Citadel of Cairo to the Mallawi Museum in Minya. Lists like these abound; they can be made for almost any of the embattled regions in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Egypt to Syria and the murderous paths of ISIL. All of this testifies to the will, explicit or implicit, to destroy the prestige elements of a replaced culture or regime; it bears witness to lawlessness and to the inevitable generation of opportunity under such circumstances to make money in desperate situations. Usually in such circumstances museums are among the last institutions to be adequately protected, and the protection of people must (in most cases) be seen to supersede the protection of objects. But while the failure to protect may be wholly unavoidable, it may also be deliberate (again as in the case of Bamiyan and ISIL), say for the specific purposes of erasing history in favor of a different vision of the future.

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body

There can be no question, however, that part of this newest wave of assault and looting is nourished by the international traffic in antiquities, the desire of collectors in foreign countries to expand their interest to a more global range of objects, and the pressures of new forms of investment. Even here it is worth remembering how often the depredations of what seem to be simply the machines (and men) of war and battle overlap with the political, the religious, and reactions to the apparently libidinous. Given the expansion of wars inflected by covert and not-­so-­covert colonialist and religious motives—­Iraq was the perfect example—­the old question of Islamic attitudes to embodiment by image came to the fore, whether in acts of resistance to imagery or in the suppression of the face in life. Soon after it destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the Taliban “smashed every museum artifact that they could find that bore a human or animal likeness”40 and tightened the regulations concerning the covering of women’s faces, even to the extent of masking their eyes. It was the same old story: the sensuality of images, like that of women, posed dangers so intolerable that they had to be suppressed, covered over, hidden, put out of the way, or simply destroyed. But it would be wrong to think that radical Islam has a monopoly on such destruction. Aside from the depredations of past wars and past controversies in the West, the new global capitalism, which conveniently supports new art in some parts of the world (from New York to Abu Dhabi, from Bentonville to the Bois de Boulogne), indiscriminately destroys art in others. Thousands of petroglyphs in the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia’s Dampier Archipelago were brutally damaged or simply eliminated by the construction of industrial sites for the processing of iron ore,41 while the looting of newly profitable indigenous art becomes ever more widespread, such as the hacking out of petroglyphs in the Chalfant Site in the Sierra Nevada—­unless such acts simply reflect the old scanting and vandalizing of what is regarded as primitive. Heritage sites have as little immunity to such pressures as museums themselves. The forces of capital turn out to be as effective as those of war in eliminating traces of the cultural past, especially in the case of the wars they provoke. 8. Psychopathologies of Destruction

With individual pathologies it becomes more difficult to generalize. They do not always fall into predictable or convenient categories. Sometimes it’s not so much what the attacker says he or she aimed to do (if any statement is made at all) as how the attacks are perceived (even if evidence suggests that the action—­or target—­was simply random). In 2007, for example, a drunken Swiss man was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment (later reduced to ten) under Thailand’s rigorous lèse-­majesté law for spray-­painting a picture of King Bumibhol.42 But repeated attacks on par-

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ticular leaders are a different matter. Disgruntled members of the public continued to pull down statues of Margaret Thatcher long after she left power. Pictures of the queen are removed, decapitated, and otherwise assaulted, evincing not only dislike but perhaps also some distant folk memory of the ancient notion that to damage the image of the ruler is to damage the ruler herself. Even this may be put to quite specific political uses, as in Ralph Heimans’s attack on a portrait of the queen in Westminster Abbey in June 2013 in order, he said, to draw attention to the Fathers-­4-­Justice cause, also cited later in the year when a protester glued a photograph of a boy onto John Constable’s 1821 painting The Hay Wain in Tate Britain.43 Often it’s difficult to separate commitment to a cause from some more individual psychological upheaval—­and sometimes, of course, these two factors genuinely go together. On the other hand, desire for attention or publicity forms at least part of the motivation of the several instances of slashings of Rembrandt’s Night Watch and of the acid-­throwing at the Dürers and Rembrandts at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, if the statements of their attackers are anything to go by. Clearly deranged, they explain their deeds on the grounds that they acted as they did in order to gain publicity for themselves (as much as for any cause they may adduce).44 They generally choose much-­admired works of art—­the more well known the better—­to draw attention to themselves and the neglect or penury into which they feel they have unjustly been cast, or simply to some spurious cause they believe they are espousing. Public fetishism leads to private assault. Often there is some sense—­yet again—­of the need to destroy the life felt to be present in the image. That life can be rhetorical, gestural, or sexual. The man in the picture challenges me too openly; he is the devil. The woman in the picture is too provocative; her seductiveness must be muted or stopped. The damage wrought by the deranged attacker in all such cases simply brings to the fore, often in frightening ways, the elisions that more normal beholders are wont to make—­indeed that they inescapably make. 9. Digitization and Its Consequences

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The regime changes that followed the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 were accompanied both by an increase in iconoclastic episodes and by swift growth of the means and devices of image dissemination via the internet, which had just then become public. It was an ironic coincidence. One might have thought that the seemingly uncontrollable proliferation of images and their compulsive availability would guarantee image survival in the new age of iconoclasm, but the diminution of the aura of images that digitization, the internet, and the rise of social media entrained also made them more vulnerable and more susceptible to attack. Every day it seemed as if new techniques for editing became available. Images lost

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body

the special symbolic and ritual statuses—­often guaranteed by their relative uniqueness—­that had hitherto protected them (at least some of the time). Whatever was sacred about them disappeared. Under these circumstances, images became more manipulable, less auratic, and more available for both censorship and fetishization than ever before. The newly enhanced reproducibility of images and hitherto unimagined possibilities for circulation and consumption had the additional effect of giving the impression of an even greater number of attacks on art and images. Even so, the evidence does suggest a quantum increase in episodes of assault—­from mild and largely innocuous to violently hostile—­on images and art. If the events of 1989 brought about a significant return of iconoclasm to the political, aesthetic, and academic stages, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 marked yet another critical juncture. Both the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square and the dreadful images from Abu Ghraib became instantly known, thanks to the consolidation of new techniques of digital image-­making and the spread of the World Wide Web to almost all corners of the globe. It was no longer possible to think of photography as the last of the reproductive revolutions, nor could it any longer be considered the acme of reproductive possibility. The status of images in society changed profoundly as speed, instantaneity, and sheer quantity became hallmarks of visual consumption. The instant transmission and exploitation of pictures via cell phones quickly became commonplace. As in the cases of people and scenes, we barely see a picture before we take a picture of it (or want to take a picture of it), both for storage and—­explicitly or implicitly—­for distribution. Art is now often not seen directly by the eyes but by ocular prostheses—­not through our own lenses but through the picture of a picture on a cell phone or iPad. In this automatic lifting of the now miniaturized apparatus—­from small cameras to cell phones—­it is as if the mechanical forms of reproduction have become direct extensions of the bodily apparatus of looking. Old forms of aura are lost; new forms of aura are acquired. And the frenzy to control images—­indeed everything that can be seen—­acquires ever greater urgency and force, precisely because of the possibility, the inevitability, of instantaneous reproduction and transmission. No wonder, then, that in this new age of superabundance of images, in which it often seems that hysterical abundance itself can be controlled only by hysterical limitation, the study of iconoclasm has expanded more than I could ever have imagined in the days when people wondered—­it now seems improbable—­what iconoclasm had to do with the history of art. Once it was possible to forbid the reproduction of an image, or to cancel it by blotting, mutilating, or excising with a degree of finality. Now, as soon the image is on the internet, it becomes almost impossible to

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eliminate it forever, and the anxieties of those who wish for suppression become ever more desperate. The implications of the persistence of the body in the image are clear: the evanescence implicit in virtuality stands at fierce odds with the implacable omnipresence of the embodied image. Though images are everywhere, there is no remission of the ways in which the body may be projected onto or extracted from them, and once more iconoclasm accompanies fetishism and desire: the more one wants images, the more one wants to destroy them. 10. Virtuality and Containment: Iraq in 2003–­2004

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It is in this context that the destruction of the statues of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the discovery of the photographs from Abu Ghraib in 2004 must be seen. In them technology, politics, and body fetishism are inexorably combined. They exemplify the ways in which the new paradigms of image consumption and control still further enlarge the meanings of censorship and iconoclasm. It was the worst possible beginning for selfies. The Abu Ghraib photographs were made by the perpetrators themselves, with the aid of digital cameras. They were sent home to the family and friends of those who took them, but the very fact of digitalization made what should have been private completely public. The shame visited upon Muslim prisoners by young and often smiling American soldiers was redoubled by the seemingly palpable corporeality of these scenes. The very tortures they used made the physicality of those insulted and humiliated bodies viscerally, disgustingly, threateningly, and terrifyingly available to any willing beholder. The virtuality of these scenes not only made this possible but actually enhanced it. If they had existed as fixed material images alone, their effects could have been contained; they could have been censored and even eliminated. Now the shame—­and the evidence for it—­suffered immortality. In the case of the removal of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in April 2003 of the previous year, many photographs were made of the dramatic ways in which the statue was pulled down and the image of the dead leader treated (figs. 18, 23, 45–­48, 56). In the physical removal of the statue, the body of the hated ruler was toppled as a signal that he would be gone forever. Even a mute image of wood, stone, or bronze (as the Reformation iconoclasts always referred to images of art) could be insulted as if it were a living body, as if the hated leader were somehow inherent in it, and as if by destroying it one somehow destroyed the leader himself. The striking of the face with the soles of shoes—­and the further insult (which would have registered as such in any society) of pissing into the now harmless and ineloquent mouth—­made the humiliation of the

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body

once proud leader plain (see especially figs. 56 and 18). In older societies that might have been the end of it, since there might not have been any more images to go round. But even then, as Salvatore Settis has recently shown (focusing on images of Septimius Severus and his sons Caracalla and Geta), in Roman cases of damnatio memoriae often what mattered was as much the performative aspects of the deed as the purely destructive ones.45 The aim was not just to excise the image; it was to leave traces of its excision, so that one could forever see what had been done. These traces would often be left on display as testimony to the act itself, while other images—­say those in daily use on coins—­could be left entirely untouched. With the statue of Saddam the situation was different, in keeping with the means of control that digital imagery both offered and surrendered. Here the performative aspects of the destruction turned out to lie at the mercy of an old form of censorship that was rendered first more effective and then less so by new forms of reproduction and consumption of visual images. In them the body, however virtual, remained always available and always susceptible—­and its representation almost never what it might seem. In a short article for the Wall Street Journal on the destruction of Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square (appendix 1), I discussed the several dramatic photographs then available of the scene (figs. 45–­46). It might have seemed to casual readers of the piece that the physical assaults on it were symptoms of popular resentment against the hated ruler and the images in which he was embodied. It looked as if the pictures of the event documented forms of spontaneous anger and action. But even on the basis of my earliest studies of iconoclasm in Antwerp, I realized that skepticism was in order. What I did not know when I wrote that cautious piece was that all the then-­available photographs had been cropped. Such was my faith, in those days, in the fidelity of the photographic image that it did not even occur to me—­as it should have—­that what seemed like accurate representations of the scene might only be partial ones, for I later discovered that the cropped photographs originally included a group of the American marines who had organized and orchestrated the removal of the statue, conveniently standing on the periphery of the central scene (figs. 47–­48). However strongly the forms of image embodiment remained, as evidenced by the treatment of the statue, however powerfully it showed people’s visceral and corporeal reactions to the image of their leader, it was also a lesson in the untrustworthiness of pictures, in the skepticism with which it behooves us—­in our times more than ever—­to regard the direct evidence of our eyes and of the images that proliferate before us.

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11. The Aesthetics of Destruction

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Even more than in the past, the question of what constitutes art has come to play a central role in episodes of iconoclasm and censorship. At least three major issues are at stake in this development: (1) the expansion of the notion of art to include works that do not obviously fall within accepted standards of craftsmanship or manual or performative skill; (2) the related charge that any child could do it (or some such allegation of unsophisticated simplicity or crudeness); and (3) the frequent notion that the status of a work as art is validated and its criteria satisfied by institutional confirmation, especially by being placed in a museum or some such formally or informally accredited institution. None of these issues are especially new, but they have gained much traction in recent years. In the case of Brett Murray’s portrait of Zuma, in which the South African president strikes a pose directly taken from an iconic image of Lenin but with a large penis hanging out from his trousers, many in the ANC government fell back on the old claim that such a picture was not art—­as if this somehow gave an enhanced justification for censorship, suppression, or elimination. In some instances—­as in the Cincinnati Mapplethorpe trial of 1990—­the validation of the artistic status of a troublesome, even aggressively provocative work may lead to its exemption from hostility.46 Sometimes efforts at censorship can be thwarted if the claim for art is made strongly enough, but usually they are not. Often, however, this works the other way. Religious leaders—­Martin Luther is a prime example—­may rail against art, especially expensive art, on the grounds that such resources would be better spent on the poor.47 Laypersons may be impelled to destroy or mutilate works on the hackneyed grounds that they could have produced the same or better works themselves (or that the works were so simple or unaesthetic that no money should be spent on them at all). But in recent years, as the definition of what constitutes art has widened, the relationship between art and its place in public society—­and public space—­has become ever more contested. The Zuma episode in South Africa took place at the time of another surprising episode of iconoclasm, or rather a surprisingly censorial episode that for once did not precede but arose in the wake of an iconoclastic one. The municipality of the old student town of Stellenbosch (once fiercely right-­wing, now more progressive than anyone could have imagined before 1989) had allowed a number of contemporary works of art to be displayed in its oak-­lined streets and other urban spaces. Within days of their installation in these public spaces, the works were attacked and mutilated. The assailants were never discovered, but the surprise was that a number of students and others wrote to the local papers in support of the iconoclastic deeds, largely on the grounds that the public had not been asked whether it wanted art in the streets. The proper place for art, the pro-­iconoclasts insisted, was in a museum.

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body

The question of where art is properly to be shown and seen, as well as that of who decides what can be placed in a public space, was central to the claims of the iconoclasts during the Seventh Swiss Sculpture Exhibition in Bienne in 1980.48 These issues were not dissimilar to many of the objections to Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, removed from Federal Plaza in New York City in 1989, on the grounds of lack of consultation with those who actually used that civic space. Serra’s monumental work was said to block the view and to hamper access to the plaza and its buildings, disrupting the lives of those who worked there. It did the opposite to what Serra said he hoped for, that it should make the viewer more positively aware of her environment as she walked through the plaza. It was dismissed as an overly dominating piece of rusted steel.49 But like the Bienne sculptures, it was site specific, and so, as Serra himself put it, one could claim that “to remove the work is to destroy the work.”50 This episode generated a vast literature at the very height of the culture wars about the proper role of art in modern society.51 Despite the many statements about its disruptiveness in a public space, what underlay many of the objections to Serra’s sculpture was the often unspoken concern that the work did not conform to traditional notions of what constitutes art, or that it was too aggressive, or that art should not be so overwhelming or so dominating but should fit some more pleasant or anodyne criterion. With such criticisms one came close to the portals of philistinism.

• But iconoclasm also reverses these issues entirely—­especially with regard to contemporary art. Almost from the beginning of my research, but particularly from the early 1980s on, there were people who asked about the aesthetic dimension of destructive acts, even iconoclastic ones. Initially I was taken aback. How could the destruction of images be considered a creative activity or thought of in any kind of aesthetic light at all? Tell that to the people, I thought! Was this not sophistry, an attempt to redeem destructiveness, even vandalism, by asking about its creative potential? At best it seemed to be a confusion of two different ontologies, or two entirely different phenomena, and I began to think that the failure to distinguish them might actually be dangerous, if iconoclasm suddenly became aesthetic. But I checked my doubts, acknowledging that they too may have bordered on philistinism—­especially in the light of the develop­ment of art after Duchamp, Fontana, and Rauschenberg. After all, the question was posed clearly enough. Does not the act of creation itself always involve some form of destruction—­of past precedent, of material, and so on? The concept of creative destruction in art—­ and of destruction as aesthetic creativity—­had grown rapidly from the 1950s on. It may have seemed a stretch, at least at the beginning, but the voices were insistent. Werner Hoffman had raised the issue with me in

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the early 1980s; Dario Gamboni had devoted a large part of his discussion of the public attacks on the 1980 sculpture exhibition in Bienne to exemplifications of the question in contemporary art.52 From then on interest in the topic only grew more rapidly, accompanying the increasing role of appropriation, destruction, and violence in contemporary art. In fact, the issue had already emerged in the work of the artists themselves. In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning drawing of 1953 to make a new work of art; in the 1960s Jean Tinguely constructed his famous self-­exploding machines; throughout the 1950s and 1960s Lucio Fontana sliced and punctured the canvases of his Concetti Spaziali; during the same period, Arnulf Rainer developed the art of what he called The Destruction of Form, in which the damaged and bloody body become the object of his art; from the 1960s on, Hermann Nitsch attacked his own body, mutilating and defacing it in order to constitute it as a medium of art. The slashed body operates in a regime of aesthetics that overlaps with the cruel, as George Bataille so vividly described in his account of his ecstatic responses to photos of the Chinese Death by a Thousand Cuts.53 In an age of appropriation, the display of an erased drawing by an admired living artist in a museum becomes the aesthetic objectification of a destructive act; the slash on a painting becomes an aestheticization of the gesture that produces the slash; and assaults on the bodily self become both paintings and works of performance art. Examples are legion. They arrive at our own time—­and are co-­opted in the service of the commercial. “Lucio Fontana’s actions against the holy space of the canvas could also be seen as vandalism, but rather they are a gesture to free and open up the history of painting,” wrote Francesco Bonami in a recent issue of the Gagosian Gallery’s quarterly magazine.54 The commercial galleries capitalize on violence in a multitude of ways, and profits grow if the works themselves are attacked. Following the defacement of Brett Murray’s portrait of Jacob Zuma in 2012, it was swiftly suggested that the value of the damaged work would increase; there was almost the same reaction to Banksy’s Girl with Balloon immediately ­after its autodestruction (by way of a shredder installed in the frame by the artist himself) at the auction of the work in 2018.55 In the name of an alleged new movement called Yellowism, someone scribbled in the corner of Rothko’s 1958 Black on Maroon in the Tate Gallery in London in October 2012. Vandalism or a creative act? The very slashing and puncturing of a work of art had already acquired aesthetic status. Already for a long time the writing of words on one’s own or others’ works had claimed for itself the status of art, and enabled the entire work, including the writing scrawled on it, to be considered as a work of art. Since collage and other forms of palimpsest-­making in the name of art were common enough and by then well inserted into the history of art, it may no longer even have occurred to anyone to think of such acts as destructive.

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body

The breaking of vases and other vessels formed the basis for similar claims. In 1995 Ai Weiwei had himself photographed dropping two ancient Han dynasty urns. In early 2013 a visitor to the Perez Art Museum in Miami, in an evident copycat action, did the same to Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases of 2006–­12. He turned out to be a local artist, Maximo Caminero, claiming that he did it “for all the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here.” After all, he went on to say, “if you saw the vases on display and the way they were painted, there was no way one would think the artist had painted over an ancient artifact. Instead I thought it was a common clay pot like you would find at Home Depot, frankly.” But Caminero also admitted that when he was at the museum he had seen photos of Ai Weiwei dropping an ancient Chinese vase and breaking it. “I saw it as a provocation by Weiwei to join him in an act of performance protest.”56 In Queens in 2009 Hector Canonge and Chin Chih Yang’s 100 Degrees, a translucent globe of plastic enclosing a tree, went up under the No. 7 line in Queens as an installation emblematizing global warming. It was vandalized and deflated. But the artists had a canny enough response. They elaborately dismantled their work and solicited passersby to write their opinions about the iconoclastic act, in a performance intended as a creative and artistic extension of the vandalistic act itself.57 The line is thin—­and therefore all the more challenging. As writing about iconoclasm increased and attacks on old art and on images of hated rulers and regimes multiplied with ever-­increasing frequency and intensity from 1989 on, so too did the assaults on modern and contemporary art. Politics and the idea of art become even more tightly bound together. Contemporary works were attacked for the usual and predictable reasons, often by people with complex psychological disturbances, or by others who wished to draw attention to themselves or to a cause they represented (the pathological elements in such cases, as already noted, are not always easy to isolate). They attacked eyes and mouths, hurled acid at images, or slashed them.58 They wrote words on both old and new art. In some cases they claimed that the aim was the creation of a new artwork from an old one (as with “Yellowism”); in others the motives seemed more plainly disturbed, as when the police instantly applied the all-­purpose term deranged to the man who wrote a vague political reference to 9/11 on Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People in Lens, France, in 2013. When confronted, the assailants of modern and contemporary art often adduce the usual reasons (or rather, complaints), such as the claim that in any case the works are not art; even a child could make them; instead of building museums for works like this, the money would be better spent on more worthy causes.59 The reasons, in the end, are ever the same—­though the resentment at the apparent simplicity of a work in relation to its cost is relatively new. In the old days the charge was clearer,

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because the standards for material and skill were clearer and often, in the case of splendor, more easily visible and verifiable. But at the same time there is a great irony, a kind of temerarious paradox, in all of this. It might seem impossible to suggest a connection between the charge that a work is so simple that even a child—­or an untrained adult—­could do it and the notion that only the Godhead is able to make true images of things and breathe life into them (to pretend to do otherwise is offensive to many religions). But there is. Though it may not initially be obvious, the Berlin and Amsterdam attacks on the two versions of Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue are related to both of these positions: the works are so simple that one couldn’t possibly be afraid of them, there is no mystery in them. But if one were afraid of them, as the title challenges one to deny, that would mean that they have a life of their own—­which only God could give them. So they have to be destroyed. It’s a vicious circle, however, since the very need to destroy them shows that they live after all, blasphemously. The success the iconoclast has in damaging them represents a logical response to the challenge of the title.60 It only seems to prove that these are merely dead pieces of canvas; that they have no life in them of the kind that only God can give them. But at least they are now, finally, unable to retaliate—­ precisely because they are no longer works of art. In the end an image is just that, mere dead material, devoid of all life, not worthy of being feared. Almost every iconoclast has proclaimed this, particularly when caught in the act. These are works that can never aspire to life and if they threaten to, must be shown to be dead (although it is true that in the 1986 assault on the version of Who’s Afraid in the Stedelijk Museum, the assailant had already attacked other paintings by Newman and went on to deface still more). Soon the nexus between the aesthetics of destruction and sheer vandalism tightened. It was as if the progressive legitimation of appropriation, adjustment, and intervention in contemporary art encouraged more acts of mutilation, superimposition, and maculation by members of the public, who could now fall back on the position that what they were doing constituted an artistic act. Hence the scribbling, ink throwing, paint throwing, note pasting, and even regurgitation of foodstuffs onto existing works. Anyone looking at Christopher Wool’s blobs of paint on his otherwise austere work would find it hard to distinguish between the results of what he does to them and an amateur job, the result of a mere hurling of colored paint at words in black and white. Such actions have multiplied in an age in which the idea of art as constituted by concept rather than by making has become more widespread than ever (the tradition, of course, is much older than is commonly recognized).61 In this climate, the mere claim by an artist that a work of art has been destroyed becomes sufficient to constitute both the work as art and the

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body

act of damage, however minor (or apparently minor), as iconoclastic. ­After Jeff Koons completed his meticulous stainless steel train, titled Jim Beam—­J. B. Turner Train, he took it to the Jim Beam distillery and had it filled with bourbon. Then he had the train chimney sealed with the necessary paper tax stamps, declaring that “you can drink and enjoy the bourbon but you’ve killed the work of art because you’ve destroyed the soul of the piece when you break the seal.”62 Even though this would entail only a light act of damage to a paper tax seal, we move here from the basic definition of iconoclasm as the damaging of a physical object (whether art or not) to the more complex one of destroying an artwork, indeed its very concept. Koons can still not get away from associating the destruction of even a very small part of the work with the destruction of its soul. One may think of him as a joker, but in such statements Koons shows how profoundly he retains his keen sense not only of how art is constituted in our time but of how it always was. In an age in which the work of art is largely conceptual and much less a work of the hands, an age in which appropriation has long been standard, and when images are infinitely mutable as a result of the new techniques of digitization and cyber-­multiplication, assaults on images in the name of art have only grown. Most people now have the means—­especially but not only with the aid of their computers—­to edit images with a facility that would have stupefied (and presumably pleased) Duchamp. Aside from the notion that art is constituted by ideas about art, or by the apparently more conservative counterpart of this notion, namely that art is constituted by its institutionalization in museums and galleries, the increase of assaults on art coincides with expansionist claims about its status and definition. In this climate, the question of iconoclasm also becomes a question of art. The commonest attacks on artworks—­setting aside the clearly pathological ones—­are probably those motivated by openly political reasons. Paint is thrown at street art on the grounds that it is actually little more than a “bourgeoisie-­sponsored rebellion” helping pave the way for gentrification; it is called (not without justification) “utterly impotent politically and fantastically lucrative for everyone involved.”63 Murals by Banksy constantly suffer in the same way—­an especially ironic phenomenon on the grounds of his own adjustments, obliterations, and mutilations of the images and artworks of others.64 12. Gesture and Agency

Even at a time when art is constituted by acts of thinking and not by acts of making, by mental process and not by manufacture, the fact of iconoclasm recalls us to the role of the material body in the constitution of art. It makes clear that the agency of the object depends precisely on its evocation of the body of the viewer—­even when the object is conceptual.

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Every iconoclastic attack calls, finally, on gestures of the body. It is not just the relationship between the action of the creative gesture and the action of response, but also the availability of the creative act to the responsive gesture, and the coalition between the iconoclastic action and the idea of creation, that can never be severed. We live in a time in which it is possible to claim—­as it has indeed become fashionable to suggest—­not just that creative and destructive gestures are two sides of the same coin but that they are in fact the same: to create means to destroy, and to destroy create. That is, to create means to destroy something—­including the past—­and to destroy means (in some sense) to create something new. Fashionable or not, what is at stake in all of this is the centrality of the material gesture in both processes—­in other words, the actual gesture of the iconoclastic act and the gesture or gestures inherent in or visible on the actual work. The gesturality of the image—­the gesture it is felt to make and the gestures it actually makes, the sheer physicality, both actual and implied, of its gestures—­is what lies at the core of the Bildakt project of Horst Bredekamp and his colleagues in Berlin,65 as well as the ever-­ insistent theoretical notion that the image looks back not just at the past (a too simple notion, it might be claimed) but, more literally, at the viewer. A further dimension must be added to that of the Bildakt, of the image with agency: that of viewers’ responses to implied actions and gestures, whether the implied completion of an action showed in midcourse (the classic Lessingian criterion)66 or even the action implied by a stroke or a chisel mark in a painting or sculpture.67 It is this sort of response that joins the iconoclast who responds with a gesture to a gesture (as in the many photos of people hacking at or otherwise mutilating a gesturing or pointing leader) to the aesthete, who inwardly responds not only to the movements implied by the figures in an image68 but also to the gestures implied by the maker’s mark.69 We understand Lucio Fontana’s slashes (and perhaps punctured canvases too) through our own bodily sense of the specific movements those slashes entail—­and the same for much else, both figurative and nonfigurative.70 To see a Fontana cut is to have a physical sense of the action that made it, giving the viewer a direct feeling of agency in the opposite hand and arm to that with which he produced it. The same cortical substrate of the action with which Fontana made the cut is activated in the viewer simply by sight of the result of that action.71 As if the actions of the hand in past iconoclasms were not clear enough, contemporary iconoclasm returns us, paradoxically, to the role of the hand and the body in the making of works of art, as well as in responses to them. The cognitive neuroscience of bodily responses to visual images, whether real or imagined, has begun to enable us to understand the bodily aspects and both interoceptive and cortical dimensions even of conceptual gestures.72 It offers critical insight into both iconoclasm and

Iconoclasm: The Material and Virtual Body

whatever it is that we call art. The cut, like a Jackson Pollock “line” (or even the color field in a less overtly action-­impregnated work such as a Rothko), arguably renders explicit the ways in which implied movement is a component even of still images and a critical factor in the way they are perceived. Just as in the case of a Fontana cut, the strokes in a Pollock or a de Kooning give one a physical sense of emulating the action that produced them (a sense that may even be heightened upon close-­up viewing of the texture of the strokes, as if one understood qualities like thickness and granularity through actually feeling them in one’s body and skin). One might well ask whether the role of agency in artistic creation has its effect precisely in relation to its ability to convey to the viewer a similar sense of agency. It seems clear that this sense of agency finds its psychological, pathological, and aesthetic expression in both appreciation of and hostility to works of art. This is why it is profoundly important to attend to iconoclasm. It is not just that contemporary iconoclasm returns us, paradoxically, to the role of the hand and the body in many of the assailed works; nor is it that the destruction of images is the obverse of the love of images. It is that only by acknowledging phenomena such as these can we begin to more fully appreciate the role of art in our lives. Once that seemed a radical thing to say; now, thanks to the abundance of images and the concomitant abundance of iconoclasms, it is much less so. What remains is to find new ways of analyzing the psychic and creative consequences of inhibiting and curtailing the impulse to copy the blow and mimic the destructive movements of the body. Only in this way will we begin to understand both what stops us from going over to the side of the attackers and what might offer us new forms of self-­consciousness about the origins and possibilities of creativity.

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III

Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–­1580 The Case of the Northern Netherlands*

1. Theory: The Question of Images

By 1525 the main lines of the argument about images that was to torment Europe for the rest of the century were already firmly drawn. The consequences of the argument had their epicenter in the Netherlands, but the rumblings and tremors would be felt in areas that covered a vast radius, from the northernmost reaches of Scandinavia to the straits of Gibraltar and Messina, from the British Isles in the west to Magyar Hungary and onward into the Balkans in the east.1 Almost everyone now acknowledges that if there was any single phenomenon that may be said to mark the commencement of the Revolt of the Netherlands, it was the great iconoclastic events of August, September, and October 1566.2 But it is all too often forgotten that the real target of these events—­however they may be explained in terms of social, religious, and economic motives—­ were images: paintings, sculptures, stained glass, prints; and that in the very period covered by this exhibition (but especially in the second and third quarters of 1566) the long-­standing arguments about the use and validity of images, both in the churches and outside them, had come to a sudden and threatening head. This is the critical background to the present exhibition, along with a further equally revealing but in fact more painful issue: what actually happened to the images in 1566 and in the sporadic outbursts of iconoclasm in the 1570s, and why were they attacked? From the very beginning of the century until his death in 1534, Erasmus expressed some of the most pertinent aspects of the problem of the use of both secular and sacred imagery. Like many others, he criticized provocative imagery and nudity in art; he objected to drunken or riotous behavior in the presence of images (especially on saints’ days and other religious festivals);3 he was gravely concerned about the exploita* Original publication: “Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–­1580: The Case of the Northern Netherlands,” in Kunst voor de beeldenstorm: Noordnederlandse kunst 1525–­1580, ed. J. P. Filedt Kok, W. Halsema-­Kubes, and W. Th. Kloek (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1986), 39–84.

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tion of paintings and sculptures for gain (in the same way that holy relics were exploited); and he had deep reservations about the way in which images were allowed to come in the way of more direct relations between humanity and God. It was preferable to pray to God and to implore him without the mediation of images, relics, and saints in general.4 In these respects Erasmus was no different from many other Christian humanists: he had no real wish to break with Catholicism, though he saw the abuses of the established Church and of its ministers all too clearly. But his criticism was firmer in its overall moral stance while at the same time more benign and genial. It was more learned, better articulated, and more widely read—­despite the persistent but unsuccessful attempts to suppress his works. More serious and substantive allegations than these, however, were made by the three great reformers, as well as by a host of minor and usually more virulent writers like Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt in Wittenberg and Ludwig Hätzer, the Mennonite from Zurich.5 The basic arguments against images—­especially religious images—­ were old. They dated to the days of early Christianity (a fact which appealed to the reformers of the sixteenth century), but they were rehearsed in an infinitude of variations throughout the great Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries.6 The arguments against images included the notion that since God and Christ were divine and uncircumscribable, it was impossible—­or sacrilegious—­to attempt to represent them in material and circumscribed form; that the very materiality of the image led to a variety of forms of concupiscence of the senses; that devotion to images in some way obstructed real and direct devotion to saints; that one was dangerously liable to confuse image with prototype, to venerate the image itself, rather than what it represented; that it was better to have the living image of Christ and his saints in one’s mind and heart than to make dead images of them; and so on.7 The most telling arguments in their favor, in the early days, were these: One could have images precisely because of the incarnation of Christ. The fact that he was made incarnate enabled one to make real images of him. The honor paid to an image referred directly back to its prototype.8 And finally—­as Gregory the Great was to put it a little later—­images were the books of the illiterate.9 Those who could not read would learn the scriptures and the mysteries of the faith by seeing them represented around them. It would be hard to overrate the historical significance of this particular argument. Then, in the Middle Ages, the threefold notion that images served to instruct, edify, and strengthen the memory was emphasized and elaborated;10 so was the ultimately platonic idea that the material sign could help the ordinary human mind to ascend to the spiritual.11 But at the same time the feeling grew that images could be abused. Not only were they improperly used for financial gain, but they also proliferated excessively, rather like relics. Too much money was spent on

Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–1580: Northern Netherlands

paintings and sculptures rather than investing in the real images of God, the living poor.12 These arguments, with additions, refinements, and satirical adornments, were to be repeated over and over again throughout the sixteenth century, from the highest to the lowest levels, in the great princely and royal courts and in the humblest sermons. To us, many of these arguments may seem technical and theological, but it is not hard to imagine their crucial relevance in an age when criticism of the malpractices of the church led swiftly to much more fundamental christological and ontological issues. The practical side of these momentous questions was embodied in the church’s use of religious imagery—­which ranged so visibly from sumptuous adornment to the cheaply propagandistic, from unimaginably splendid altarpieces to scruffy broadsheets. And the issues came to a head in the periodic outbursts of iconoclasm, from isolated acts in the first two decades of the sixteenth century to the great German and Swiss movements of the twenties and thirties, the English and Scottish one of the forties, the occasional French ones of the fifties and early sixties, and the culminating cataclysm of the Netherlandish experiences of 1566. Of all the great reformers, Luther was the most benign on the subject of images. He was horrified by the outbreak of iconoclasm instigated by his follower Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt in Wittenberg in 1522. For Luther, the key text from the Decalogue “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth,” was to be understood as part of the First Commandment and was to be taken specifically in conjunction with the insistence that “thou shalt have no other god before me.” But in his catechetical writings and in subsequent Lutheran catechisms, the injunction on graven images was, in fact, omitted. Whereas for men like Karlstadt, the First Commandment implied that one should have no images in churches (or, for that matter, in private houses), Luther’s primary concern was with the abuse of religious imagery. He saw the positive use of illustration both in biblical and in other texts as a means of instructing the faithful; he was tolerant of religious imagery in churches (although he preferred narrative subjects to devotional ones), and he does not seem to have worried too much about secular forms of imagery, whether public or private.13 What he did object to was the excessive money spent on adorning churches, and the motives for doing so—­such as the assumption that the more expensive the material image, the higher the spiritual reward. This kind of implicit belief roused the full force of Luther’s ire; it was self-­evidently better to spend one’s money on clothing the poor.14 From his earliest writings on, Luther returned to these issues, which one might generally subsume under the problem of the relationship between the proper use of images and their abuse. The latter was tantamount to idolatry. In addition to the issues noted above, which he began to adumbrate

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in 1514–­15, Luther soon made it clear that everyday Christian practice had come to lay too much emphasis on the cult of saints at the expense of man’s direct relationship with God. This relationship, between image worship and the cult of saints, would recur with increasing intensity throughout the century. Images, as he repeatedly reminded his readers, were in the end no more than wood and stone. The fullest discussion of images comes in the 1524–­25 tract Wider die himmlischen Propheten, von Bildern und Sakramenten (Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments), where Luther takes his clearest stance on the use of images for the purposes of remembrance and better understanding of the scriptures, and where he insists that if there were to be any iconoclasm, it had better be carried out in an orderly fashion and by order of the proper authorities.15 The issue recurred in the most practical sense with the events of 1566 in the Netherlands. In 1525, the very year of the completion of Heavenly Prophets, the three ‘”godless painters” of Nürnberg—­Georg Pencz and Barthel and Sebald Beham—­were expelled from the town for their radical Protestant sympathies, thus providing us with one of the earliest instances of artists’ espousal of views that at first sight might seem wholly antithetical to their calling.16 In the same year Ludwig Hätzer published his radical and apparently very popular booklet against images titled Ein urteil gottes . . . wie man sich mit allen götzen und bildnussen halten soll;17 isolated outbreaks of iconoclasm took place throughout the German-­ speaking countries; and following the final removal of images from Zurich churches in the previous year, Huldrych Zwingli gave his views on images most fully in Ein Antwort, Valentin Compar gegeben (Compar’s initial critique of Zwingli’s views is unfortunately now lost). The great Swiss reformer was far less sanguine about images than Luther was, and his views about them were perhaps to be most influential of all for the future development of the Reformation. For him, as for the other Swiss reformers, the Decalogue comprised the full biblical text and thus included the whole of the injunction against graven images. But in the Answer to Valentin Compar, Zwingli assembled his views into a massive indictment against representational art. People were not supposed either to worship or to serve images. There were far too many of them in churches and in private places. They led directly to idolatry. Instead of worshiping God, people worshiped strange gods, Abgötter. Images were external, material phenomena leading to false belief, and therefore were no more than idols, Götzen. They were not to be tolerated, unless they were strictly confined to the narrative representation of historical events. In Eine kurze christliche Einleitung (A Brief Christian Introduction), Zwingli had said that these were allowed outside churches so long as they did not give rise to reverence; but for ecclesiastical, liturgical, and any kind of spiritual purpose they were entirely irrelevant, if not downright idolatrous. When the images were finally removed from the churches of Zurich, Zwingli rejoiced in the beauty of their whiteness.18

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The views of Luther and Zwingli were taken up and modified by a host of other Reformed writers including Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, Oecolampadius, and Bullinger, to say nothing of lesser minds like Karlstadt, Hätzer, Thomas Müntzer, and Leo Jud. There is no space to go into the refinements—­or the vulgarities—­they brought to the great debate about images, but it is worth recalling them simply as further indices of the widespread dissemination, from one corner of Europe to the other, of the kinds of views I have been outlining. Whether they were published in book or in pamphlet form, whether heard in sermons in the greatest churches, in barns, or in the open air, few people, regardless of class, could have escaped them; so that everyone had some sense of the image question, and no one would have been left untouched by the grand debate on their institutional, spiritual, economic or even social status. The last of the great reformers to write extensively about images was Calvin. His key contribution to the debate may well lie in his insistence that the injunction against graven images in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 not only was an integral part of the Decalogue (contrary to Catholic and early Lutheran thought) but constituted the substance of the Second Commandment. For Calvin there was no doubt about the biblical injunction against graven images, and it remained universally valid.19 Calvin was scathing and satirical about the uses and abuses of images, particularly religious ones. He knew how to poke fun at the standard Catholic justifications of religious imagery, including the way in which early and only apparently authentic documents and councils were used to bolster the antiquity of the use of pictured images in churches. The proliferation of images was as meretricious as the absurd multiplication of relics, and in some cases the problem was identical: he challenged his readers to consider how many paintings they knew to have been reputedly painted by St. Luke, and pointed to devotion to images of clearly apocryphal saints. How could images that were so misleading serve as “books of the illiterate”? Or so unbecoming? After all, prostitutes in their bordellos were often more decently attired than images of the Virgin in the temples of the papists. Christian image worship had become no better than pagan image worship. Men and women could only be misled by the sensual materiality of images; better to hear and to attend to the pure Word of God.20 These kinds of views not only were disseminated throughout the Netherlands by the early 1560s but were also reproduced and modified—­ either substantially or only very slightly—­in any number of treatises and sermons. I have concentrated on them because it was these writers who informed and stimulated all the others. But let us examine the Netherlandish situation, especially the North Netherlandish situation, more specifically. For the whole period we have been examining, the problem of images was not only topical but crucial: by the time resentment against the Spanish Catholic regime came to a boiling point in the early 1560s, the image question had reached its most critical stage too. It provided

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every one of those traveling preachers21 who purveyed the doctrines of Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin in one form or another with a target that may have been theoretical and theological at its core but was all too visible and implicitly assailable in every corner of the Netherlands. While Erasmus’s criticism of the use of images grew out of his characteristically keen observation of their misuse, and of people’s folly in investing too much in them both spiritually and economically, there were other writers in the Netherlands whose criticisms were considerably more severe and whose arguments agreed with the main lines of Reformed thought. In the course of the 1520s, the anonymous author of the pamphlet Van den Propheet Baruch took the apocryphal prophet Baruch’s attacks on the idolatry of the Babylonians as the pretext for a sustained and passionate attack on what he saw as the idolatry of his own times. He did not mince his words, transforming a basically Lutheran outlook into something much more vehement: Ende en is niet een groote sotheyt, dat yemant meyndt dat die heylighen gheerne souden hebben dat men haer beelden besocht, die houte ende steenen zijn. . . . Daer wort nu alsoo groote affgoderije mede ghedaen, als oyt metten afgoden der Heydenen. . . . Ende nu si doot zijn, soo besoectmense, soo behangtmense met silver gout ende fluweel, ende costelicken cleynodien, als si dies niet en behoeven. Ende die ander levende arme heylighen, diet behoeven, die laetmen naect ende bloot in hongher ende dorst gaen.22 Is it not great folly that someone should suppose that the saints would be pleased to have their images visited, that are only wood and stone. . . . Even greater idolatry is now committed than ever was the case with the idols of the heathen. . . . And now that the saints are dead we visit them, and adorn them with silver, gold, and velvet, and precious jewels—­even though they do not need them. It is the other poor living saints who need them, and whom we allow to go naked, hungry, and thirsty.

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Such blunt versions of well-­known views would be repeated ad infinitum from one side of the Netherlands to the other. We find them in the Dutch translation of Balthasar Friberger’s tract on the subject of 1524,23 in the Lutheran Refutacie vant Salve Regina of the same year,24 and in the straightforward Zwinglianism of the well-­known Hague schoolmaster and writer Willem Grapheus. In seeking consolation from the wooden statues of saints, Grapheus claimed, “wi overtreden dat eerste gebot gods, dat ons verbiet alle vreemde Goden, ende dat we ooc geen gelickenissen noch beelden maken en solden” (we break God’s First Commandment, which forbids all strange gods and [declares] that we should not make any likenesses or images).25

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Much more violent notions are expressed in a Calvinist tract first published in Norwich in 1550: in commenting on the daily superstition of image worship, the author sarcastically observes that want die beelden so langhe als sy inde beeltsnijders winckel zijn, so en connen sy geen miraculen doen, tot der tijt toe datse dese fijne ghesellen ghebrocht hebben in haer hoerachtiche kercke, ende die cruycen dewijle si zijn onder de goutsmitshanden, so en is daer gheen heilicheyt in, maer alse dese ypocriten die eens gevinghert hebben, dan moetmen die bonet daer voor of nemen ende die knien buyyghen, ende sy gaen daer achter bleetende ende crijschende achter haer valsche goden.26 as long as images remain in the sculptor’s workshop they cannot do any miracles, until the time that these fine fellows have brought them into the whorish church; the same applies to the crucifixes in the goldsmith’s shop, when they have no holiness in them; but as soon as these hypocrites finger them, they take off their bonnets and kneel and bow before them, and they go bleating and screaming after their false gods.

In his Apologia of vant schouwender afgoderije of about 1545, the Anabaptist Dirk Philipsz. attacked the service of idolatrous images by drawing parallels from the Old Testament, such as the destruction of idols by Josiah and Elijah.27 Parallels like these were frequently to be drawn, from this time until well after the iconoclasm of 1566, and especially those that demonstrated—­as the Josiah story was taken to do—­the rightfulness of the removal of images by official and lawful authorities.28 These views were commonplace. Even if one could not read them, one would certainly hear them in the sermons of the ministers. The attitudes of Angelus Merula, the attractively broad-­minded priest from Heenvliet, are known only from his Verantwoording of 1553 (images could serve as the “libri idiotarum,” but the money spent on them was better spent on the poor),29 but the Dordrecht priest Marinus Everswaert was obliged to renounce before his former parishioners the view “dat de beelden der Heiligen anders niets doen dan de kerken versieren, gelijk tin koper, metaal of ander huisraad het huis versiert” (that the statues of the saints do nothing but decorate the churches just as tin, copper, metal, and other household materials decorate the house).30 The next year Cornelis van der Heyden published his Corte Instruccye ende Onderwijs, in which he expressed views almost as moderate as those of Merula; his concern, like that of Erasmus, was less with the use of images than with their abuse. One should neither misbehave like Turks, heathen, and madmen when carrying them in procession, nor expect too much from them in times of danger, nor adore them excessively or ostentatiously.31 The issue was clearly a live one; but

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as the Norwich pamphlet suggests, it threatened to become dangerously provocative. In the same year as the appearance of the Corte Instruccye (in 1554), Jan Gerritsz. Versteghe (= Johannes Anastasius Veluanus), the erstwhile pastor of Garderen, published the most radical and sustained attack on images yet in the book titled Der Leken Wechwyser.32 Hardly any time at all elapsed before it was being eagerly bought in Harderwijk; the next year it was translated from the Gelders dialect into Dutch, and new editions would appear with considerable frequency between 1591 and 1632.33 But it is of course the early editions that interest us here. The work could not have been more scathing in its condemnation of all images and in the programmatic advocacy of their removal. People who by then may have been contemplating the purification of churches to make them suitable for Protestant worship of one form or another would have found their manifesto in a work like this; and the unequivocal expression of hostility to the Catholic use of images would have given them courage, support, and—­in all likelihood—­a further pretext for the destruction of images. In the course of his book, Versteghe was unsparing in his attack both on the cult of saints and on the use of images in perpetuating it. Not a single early church father, he maintained (wrongly), advocated that saints be honored in this way; and he caustically observed that the Gregorian dictum that paintings were the books of the illiterate was invalid, since it was nowhere to be found in scripture. But the main recommendation regarding images in the Leken Wechwyser were avowedly evangelical and wholly pragmatic: Wair dat gepredickte evangeli nyt helpt, dar sullen gene beelden helpen. 2 War dat evangeli angenomen & gelovet wurt, dar zynt oick gene beelden nodich. 3 War dat evangeli nyt gepredickt wurt, dair zynt sie gantz scadelicke affgoden. 4 War die beelden afgoden zynt, dar sal men se uyt den Tempelen werpen ende verbranden. 5 Synt sie noch geen affgoden, nochtannich ist nut, dat sie al uyt gewerpen unde verbrandt werden, want sie kunnen ons nymmer baten, mar gering elendich schaden under grate affgoden werden, als mennichmal is befonden in seer iamerlycke manyren.34

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Where the preaching of the gospel does not help, no images will help either. Where the gospel is accepted and believed, no images are necessary. Where the gospel is not preached, they are pernicious idols. Where images are idols, they should be thrown out of the temples and burned. Even if they are not idols, it is right to throw them out and burn them, since they can never help us and only wreak pernicious damage and become great idols, as has often happened in very bad ways.

One could hardly imagine a better rallying cry for all those who wished to purify the churches and make them fit for the preaching of God’s

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Word. Versteghe put the sentiment with rather disingenuous fervor: “Dit alles diep angemerckt, is na myn kleyne verstant nyt wel muegelick, dat rechte evangelische herten, in den gereformierden Templen, noch aide grove gotzen laten blyven, off nyuwen laten maken muegen” (taking all this deeply into consideration, it just does not seem possible to my limited understanding that truly evangelical hearts could allow all the gross idols to stay or have new ones made).35 The best thing would be to limit the decoration of churches to the writing of edifying proverbs on the walls (in large letters), or to leave them completely white.36 Everything else was popish Babylonian abuse. If these were the notions that people were hearing from local pastors and traveling preachers, or from pamphlets they bought, they could not have missed them in their other cultural manifestation either. Among the most well-­known mockers of the Catholic Church (usually in the form of a sniping anticlericalism) were the rederijkers, whose plays and presentations abounded with negative references to images. Sometimes the sentiments they expressed were wholly Erasmian, but as the century wore on they became more direct and more scathing—­despite the frequent placards, from the 1530s on, which were issued in an attempt to curb their outspokenness.37 All across the Low Countries, but especially in the south, they performed plays and recited poetry, often on grand popular occasions like the Landjuweelen in Ghent in 1539 and in Antwerp in 1561.38 Already in 1533 the Amsterdam Chamber of Rhetoricians was sentenced to make a Roman pilgrimage for having produced a play on the subject of Daniel and Bel (Daniel 14:2–­ 21), with its trenchant reference to the destruction of idolatrous pagan images and—­perhaps more significantly at that time—­to the killing of the priests of Bel, thereby mocking contemporary clergy.39 Another Amsterdam play, the Tafelspel van Drij Personagien of 1557, insisted that the greatest of all sins was idolatry and that God put a curse on all those who made likenesses,40 while in the following year the image question was discussed in a dialogue between “Godlijke Wijse” (Godly Sage) and “Weereltsche Gheleerde” (Worldly Scholar).41 The former maintained that the image worshipers took away the honor rightly due to God alone by praying to blocks of gold, wood, silver, and stone; the latter rebuffed him by recalling the Gregorian argument and by claiming that the veneration of images with candles and so on was merely an outward sign; Godly Sage accused Wordly Scholar and his ilk of tricking the world into blatant idolatry.42 So much for the Catholic and even the Erasmian stances . . . In 1562, 1564, and 1565, the crucial years just before iconoclasm, the Antwerp Chamber of Rhetoricians known as the Violieren produced an apostle play by its subsequently well-­known dean, Willem van Haecht. The play gives us some sense of the climate of cultural disapprobation in which all art of the Netherlands is to be placed in these years. It opens with a painter still busy painting the set. A Calvinist appears and petulantly tells him that he is wasting his time making pictures forbidden by God;

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they are all idols.43 The painter responds by saying that the Calvinist had misunderstood the prohibition: it pertained only to the adoration of images, and not to their use as decoration. If they were adored or worshipped he would rather they were destroyed. But God must have given him his talents for some purpose, and there were always the cases of Bezalel and Oholiab, the cherubim on the ark of the covenant, and the bronze serpent as precedents for divinely sanctioned artistic activity.44 There were worse forms of idolatry than images, such as greed. All this, as van Haecht himself acknowledged, was consistent with the Lutheran attitude toward images; and he made his own position on the matter clear when he named his Calvinist protagonist—­whose position on the subject was somewhat overdrawn—­“Vernuft en Blind” (Ingenious and Blind).45 Let’s pause for a moment to consider one of the most significant implications of van Haecht’s play. The guilds most closely associated with the Chambers of Rhetoric were those of the painters, and here, as in several other of their plays, the very validity of their calling and their production was being substantively questioned, if not actually mocked. In van Haecht’s piece a painter is actually at the center of the discussion. Although he defends his calling against the more radical iconoclastic stance, it is worth noting that he admits (or is forced by the circumstances to admit) that if his productions were to be worshiped he would rather destroy them.46 All this in a play that was produced three times in the four years before the great outburst of iconoclasm in 1566 that was to destroy the works of so many painters and undermine the possibilities of patronage for many years to come. What insecurity about their calling—­at the very least—­such attitudes must have generated! It is against this broad cultural background—­and I have omitted vernacular poetry and songs such as the Anabaptist “Liedeken van Vrage ende Antwoort” of 155647 and “Het blyckt nu alle daghen” of 1560,48 as well as an Amsterdam song published in that year and again in 1582,49 to say nothing of the many references to images in the geuzenliederen50—­that we must begin considering the increasing numbers of actual outbreaks of iconoclasm. Initially they were isolated instances, but evidence that they were more than a passing problem comes from very early in the period. On April 29, 1522, an antiheresy edict included a severe injunction against the destruction or removal of images and portraits in honor and memory of God, the Virgin, and the saints.51 That was the year of the destruction of images in Wittenberg, and iconoclasm soon became a widespread phenomenon throughout Germany. News of such events travelled swiftly to the Netherlands through preachers, pamphlets, tracts, and travelers. If there was any single group whose active hostility to images was clear from an early date, it was the Anabaptists. The sight of an image of the Virgin being carried in procession in Delft on Ascension Day 1528 was too much for David Jorisz, who disrupted the solemnity of the occasion by shouting abuse at all involved, even the priests.52 Six years later his

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coreligionists tried to assume control of Amsterdam, while in that year Jan Matthijs of Haarlem and Jan van Leiden supervised a sustained violent attack on images in the millenarian community they set up in Münster, across the border in Germany.53 Meanwhile iconoclasm was spreading still further into Germany, in Switzerland, and in Bohemia and was soon to take on semi-­legalized form in England and Scotland. By the 1550s and early 1560s the problem had become acute in France as well, and the official authorities of the Catholic Church realized they could no longer evade the core of the problem. From Luther’s famous opponent Johannes Eck on, many Catholic theologians and writers—­and even some poets, like the Flemish poet Anna Bijns—­had polemicized against Protestant attitudes to images, but now the time had come to formulate an official position.54 If the Church was to do anything at all about the continued assault—­both polemical and real—­on images, then it had to have an impregnable position on which to fall back (that it ultimately failed to do so is not part of our story). The need for that position must have been made all the more apparent not only by recent events in France but also by the rapid development of Protestant theological positions on the matter, such as the brilliantly concise one in the Heidelberg Catechism of 1562: • XCVI Vraghe. Wat heyscht God in tweede ghebodt? Antwoorde. Dat wy God in gheenderley wijse afbeelden noch op gheen ander wijse vereeren dan hij in sijn Woordt bevolen heeft. • XCVII Vraghe. Machmen dan ganschelick gheen beelden maken? ­Antwoorde. God en en mach in geenderly wijse afgebeeldet werden. Maer de creaturen, al ist dat die connen afgebeeldet werden, soo verbiedt doch God haer beeldenisse te maken ende te hebben, on die te vereeren oft God daerdoor te dienen. • XCVIII Vraghe. Mer soudemen de beelden inden kercken, als boecken der leecken niet moghen lijden? Antwoorde. Neent; want wy en moet niet wijser zijn dan Godt, dewelcke sijne Christenen niet door stomme beelden, maer door de levendighe verkondinghe sijns woordt will onderwesen hebben.55 • Question 96: What does God require in the Second Commandment? That we in nowise make any image of God, nor worship him in any way other than he has commanded in his Word. • Question 97: Should one therefore make no images at all? God can and should not be portrayed in any way; but as for his creatures, although they may indeed be portrayed, yet God still forbids one to make or have images of them, in order to worship him or by them to serve him. • Question 98: But may not pictures be tolerated in the churches as the laymen’s books? No. For we should not be wiser than God who does not wish to have his Christianity taught by dumb images, but rather by the living proclamation of his Word.

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“Stomme beelden” (dumb images) was something to reckon with. Of all the Protestant confessions, this is the one that gained the widest currency in the Netherlands, and almost immediately. In the very year of its formulation it was translated into Dutch. Petrus Dathenus appended another translation of it to his Dutch version of the Psalms in 1566. It was officially adopted by the Convent of Wesel in 1568, by the Synod of Emden in 1571, and by the national Synod of The Hague in 1587; and along with the Confessio Belgica it became the basic creed of the Reformed Church in the Netherlands. This is the confession that entered Dutch Protestant thought at a time when the nation was struggling to dissociate itself from everything associated with Spain, and when images proved to be the clearest focus for the beginnings of the revolt. The ideas encapsulated in the Heidelberg Confession became part of the mainstream of Dutch Calvinism, but their implications were to be much more deeply felt. They became part of the common theological stock of the Netherlands, and almost everyone knew them. But I have moved ahead too swiftly. Not surprisingly, in the very year in which the Heidelberg delegates assembled, the delegates to the greatest council in Christendom, the Council of Trent, came to the realization that the Catholic Church urgently needed a unified stance on the subject of images. There had been plenty of individual defenders of the Church’s position in the face of the Protestant attacks, but the time had come to provide an official definition. Worried by recent outbreaks of iconoclasm in France, a group of French delegates exercised just sufficient pressure to ensure the passage of a decree on religious imagery at the very last session of the council, on December 3–­4, 1563.56 Perhaps it was simply that there was not enough time and the council was exhausted after eighteen years of deliberation—­but it was a case of too little too late. Instead of dealing with the substantive matters raised by one Protestant writer after the other, the council preferred to address the problem of abuses. It is as though the basic issue were beyond discussion; there was nothing wrong with images themselves, it seemed to be saying, nor indeed with the principles of their use. Admittedly they could be misused; and it was to this issue that the council addressed itself. The delegates must have (mistakenly) felt that by taking up the problem of abuse they could deflate Protestant criticism; nothing then could have been further from the case. The decree began with a traditional restatement of the value of the invocation and intercession of the saints and of the veneration of their relics. Images were to be retained in churches because the honor shown to them referred to the prototypes they represented. People could be “instructed and confirmed in the articles of faith” by means of “the stories of the mysteries of our redemption portrayed in painting and statues” (as opposed to the preaching and reading of scripture alone, as advocated by the Calvinists).57

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After a restatement of medieval views of the exemplary value of images of the saints, it swiftly moved on to the matter of abuse. It explicitly forbade any “representation of false doctrine and such as might be of grave error to the uneducated.” Besides the elimination of all super­stition and “filthy quest for gain,” all lasciviousness was to be avoided, “so that images shall not be painted with seductive charm, or the celebration of saints’ days and the visitation of relics be perverted by the people into boisterous festivities and drunkenness.”58 In the final section of its decree, the council set out to ensure the avoidance of abuses in the future, and it gave instructions for the ecclesiastical supervision of art that were to be taken up in any number of local synods in the immediately following years. No new or unusual images were to be installed without the prior approval of the bishop, who also had to give official approval of new miracles and relics. Disputes were to be referred to theologians, and if any doubtful or grave abuse needed to be eradicated, the matter was to await synodal decision and ultimately that of the pope.59 All this may well have had considerable effects on later Catholic art, both in and outside the Netherlands; but for the time being the decree on images formulated by the Council of Trent was like a straw in the gather­ ing wind. The images had been swept out of one German town after another; in France the Protestant forces were still causing trouble, while England had a new queen who would swiftly provide sympathetic asylum to Netherlandish opponents of Catholicism. The Netherlands was wavering and ready to fall; and the doctrines that the Council of Trent had so labored to refute were everywhere in the air. Nothing could avert the impending catastrophe—­least of all a group of aging clerics meeting in a cold and provincial town on the northeastern borders of Italy. 2. Action: Iconoclasm in the Netherlands

On April 5, 1566 three hundred armed members of the Compromise of the Nobility under the leadership of the count of Brederode presented their momentous Request to the Regent of the Netherlands at her palace in Brussels. A member of the court derisively referred to them as “les Gueux,” and the name stuck. But Margaret of Parma could not dismiss the “beggars” so lightly, and in the face of their demands for moderation of the placards and abolition of the Inquisition, she was obliged to instruct the magistrates to be more lenient in their treatment of heretics. But the so-­called Moderation of April 9 with which Margaret responded to the nobles’ Request did little to quiet the growing unrest.60 Nothing seemed to be able to stop the proliferation of Calvinist preachers all over the country, and if they were not Calvinists they were of every other conceivable Reformed persuasion. Wherever they could find a space they performed Communion, baptized infants, or preached sermons. Because

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of the large number attending them, the sermons were most frequently given in the open air, and by the time Margaret forbade them in her placard of July 3, 1566, they could not be stopped.61 Tension mounted, the sermons—­the so-­called hagepreken—­were preached under armed guard, the crowds grew, and demands for their own Protestant places of worship were redoubled with ever greater fervor.62 Preachers poured into the country from France, from Germany, from Switzerland, and from England; and on August 10, 1566, at Steenvoorde in the southwestern corner of Flanders, following an inflammatory sermon by the former hatmaker Sebastian Matte, twenty or so members of the audience rushed to the local convent and smashed all its images.63 The leader in this was Jacob de Buyzere, a former Augustinian monk who had turned preacher and, like Matte, was from Ieper and a former exile who had recently returned from England. In the next three days they proceeded to Bailleul and Poperinghe, in each case preaching sermons and leading a growing group of iconoclasts in the destruction of local images.64 The pattern of preparation and destruction was now established, and the storm swept on. By the time it reached Antwerp on Tuesday August 20,65 the revolt was fully under way, and few towns could expect to be spared the consequences of the iconoclastic fury. Almost everywhere there is evidence of the role of preachers and that at least some of the iconoclasts were hired and organized according to some preliminary plan—­whether by preacher, local nobleman, local Reformed community, or any combination of these acting in concert. The instances of spontaneous mob activity (despite the allegations of contemporary historians) were rare, and most came after news from Antwerp and elsewhere had been carried to the north and east.66 The news fanned out in every direction. I will concentrate on what happened in the North Netherlands, but let us not forget that it affected the southern areas of the country as well, and that the kinds of art on display in the present exhibition were at risk in those places too. Indeed what happened at the Abbey of Marchiennes near Douai, where some of the most splendid altarpieces by Jan van Scorel were spirited away just in time, provides an exemplary and sad case of the connection between image problem, sermon, and image destruction. One day after hearing of the purification of the churches in Antwerp, the Tournai iconoclasts sacked the churches of their city; they then moved on to the province of Douai and upon entering the Abbey of Marchiennes gave out their usual rallying cry, “Vivent les Gueux!” A leader called for silence, and then at his instigation the assembled group began to sing Daniel Marot’s rhymed version of the Ten Commandments. Its second strophe could not have been more explicit: Tailler ne te feras image De quelque chose que ce soit

Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–1580: Northern Netherlands

Si honneur lui fais ou hommage Ton Dieu jalousie en recoit

And then, as if possessed, they attacked the images. An hour later the whole church interior was destroyed.67 These, then, were the main elements in the drama: preachers, who prepared the way for iconoclasm if they did not actually participate in it; their sermons, many of which contained specific references to the idolatry constituted by the images of the Roman Church (or, as they preferred to call it, the Whore of Babylon, the Antichrist, and so on); hired bands (except in a few places in the north, where iconoclasm does indeed appear to have been spontaneous); demand for Protestant places of worship, preferably in existing churches that had been purified of their adornments, even whitewashed; diligent efforts by churchwardens and other church officials to spirit away the best images and decorations before the arrival of the iconoclasts (many of the works in the present exhibition were spared in this way); many town councils’ attempts to close the churches and put them under armed guard so that they could be protected from the disorderly onslaught of the iconoclasts—­sometimes iconoclasm was prevented altogether, and sometimes the images were removed in an orderly way under more or less official supervision. The only significant difference between north and south was that in the north there were more instances of second occurrences of iconoclasm in October; and that the appearance of the Sea Beggars in the coastal towns often meant more cases of sacking and looting of churches during the early seventies—­to say nothing of the marauding militia that tested and ransacked any number of places for the rest of the decade. Barely had the news from Antwerp reached Middelburg and Breda—­on August 21–­22—­when iconoclasm broke out there too, before spreading to the surrounding villages and towns.68 In ’s-­Hertogenbosch it began on August 22. On August 23, nearby Heusden was affected, but so was Amsterdam. Iconoclasm did not proceed in any direct line from one center to another (although in some local instances bands of iconoclasts spread out to surrounding areas); it occurred in sporadic outbreaks all across the country. Delft and Utrecht were smitten on August 24, The Hague and Leiden on August 25. On that day the churches of Eindhoven and Helmond were purified as well. On August 26 the iconoclasts got the upper hand in Den Briel and Heenvliet; by the August 27 they had already begun in Weert in Limburg; and on September 2 they were at Alkmaar. Four days later they entered the churches in Leeuwarden, but in a comparatively orderly manner. In that town the preachers refused to conduct services until the churches had been whitewashed.69 For a variety of reasons it took until September 14 before the images at Culemborg were removed; this was the same day on which Winsum

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was affected. On September 16 there was iconoclasm at Batenburg in the east; on September 18, in Groningen and the “Ommelanden” in the north. Three days later, on September 21, iconoclasts appeared at Elburg, and the day after at Harderwijk. On September 25 the count of Brederode removed the images in Vianen to his castle, and by the time the storm reached Venlo in the southeast on October 5, Delft was undergoing a second attempt at purification. Asperen was affected only on October 8, by which time Den Briel was suffering again, before finally being plundered in 1572 by the watergeuzen—­who simply completed what the iconoclasts had begun five years earlier. It is a frightening catalog; and even though one can point to cases such as those of Dordrecht and Gouda (where no preachings were held at all) or Haarlem, Rotterdam, Amersfoort, Arnhem, Nijmegen, and Zutphen (where the local authorities were successful in preventing iconoclasm), the details of destruction give one considerable pause for thought. How could one hope to form anything but the most fragmentary picture of an artistic heritage decimated in the course of not even a few months but largely of those few brutal days in 1566? And what survived then would remain at the mercy of repeated attacks by soldiers and other plunderers for at least a decade. One can only wonder at what was left. The grim story has its positive and cheering moments too, as we shall see, but by and large it is not hard to understand why later writers should express their horror at the loss of art occasioned by people whom they often referred to as iconoclasts, as Karel van Mander would so graphically describe them less than half a century later.70 A huge amount has been written about the course of iconoclasm in each of these places, and considerable discussion has been devoted to the extent of organization in each case, the role of local nobility (like Brederode and Culemborg) or that of William of Orange (who was frequently appealed to in the hope that he might stave off excesses of iconoclasm or violence), the social status of the iconoclasts, their numbers, the role of the preachers, the element of spontaneity in the initial outbursts, as well as the whole complex issue of motivation and the relationship with the social, political, and economic events of 1566.71 Since this essay has been written in the context of artistic production and thought about art in the period between 1525 and 1580, there is no need to examine the pressures on a population already rendered irascible by the grain shortage of late 1565 and early 1566;72 the reorganization of the Netherlandish bishoprics and the consequent fear of the Inquisition; or the unhelpful attitudes—­to say the least—­of the regent of the Netherlands and ultimately the king of Spain. Here, as we consider the main outbreaks of iconoclasm in the north, in the very period leading to the establishment of an independent Netherlands, I will concentrate on developments that bear largely on the relations between art and social act, between thinking about art and actual event.

Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–1580: Northern Netherlands

As soon as they heard the news from Antwerp on August 21, a number of people gathered in St. Martin’s in Middelburg. Swiftly they began to break the images. The two burgomasters arrived and successfully appealed to the iconoclasts to leave the church, though some vehemently wished to follow the Antwerp example. Meanwhile the consistory was planning a more systematic form of iconoclasm. The next day a proclamation was issued against the destruction of images and the harming of priests and clerics. But already a crowd had gathered in front of the church and, with a cry of “Vivent les Gueux,” assailed its images. Within a few hours the images in the three parish churches, five cloisters, and a beguinage had been destroyed. The high altarpiece of the abbey was saved as a result of the intervention of the magistrate. Then the iconoclasts moved to the Arnemuiden and set about their work with the help of members of the local population. From Middelburg and from Vlissingen iconoclasts spread out and left a trail of destruction over the whole of the island of Walcheren.73 The chain of events is entirely typical. In Breda the destruction was terrible; and here, in the cry of a prominent citizen as he led iconoclasts in the Church of Our Lady, we have some measure of the pitch of sentiment against images: “Smijt alles uit dit pesthuis naar buiten!” (Throw out everything from this plague-­ house!). And then they destroyed the images according to an apparently predetermined plan.74 As for ’s-­Hertogenbosch, we have considerable evidence for the activity, from the end of July on, of a preacher called Cornelis van Diest. There were attempts to stop him, but he nevertheless managed to enter the gates and began preaching. Almost immediately afterward, on the evening of August 22, a group gathered in St. Jans; they sang a psalm in front of the rood screen and then began to smash the images until the schutters finally arrived and closed the church. Much was thereby saved. But the remaining churches and cloisters were severely hit, and on August 24 the first sermon was held in the purified cathedral. Still the reformed party was not satisfied, and they demanded four more chapels for their services. As in so many places the storm was soon stilled—­ but only for a while, as when the townspeople heard that the Inquisition might be introduced there, a renewed and truly remorseless outbreak of iconoclasm swept through the churches and cloisters of the town.75 In Amsterdam there had been a large number of anti-­image sermons, and the situation was so tense that Brederode urgently requested that ­Orange come to the town and set it in order. The very next morning (August 23) a group of merchants appeared in front of the stock exchange in the Warmoesstraat with several pieces of marble and alabaster, purportedly from freshly destroyed altarpieces in Antwerp Cathedral. Not surprisingly, this alarmed the burgomasters, who immediately instructed the clergy of the Nieuwe Kerk to remove and hide as much as they could of their church furnishings.76 Much of our evidence for the events of these days comes from the eyewitness account of Laurens Jacobsz. Reael,

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who, despite his Protestant sympathies and the likelihood that he was present at the onset of at least one iconoclastic outburst himself, made no bones of his deep antipathy to the wanton violence of the iconoclasts, and indeed to the whole process of destruction. This apparently inconsistent stance is entirely consistent with that strand of Erasmian thought that we find in Reael and in so many other of the leading figures in the drama of those days. Here is Reael’s graphic description of the removal of precious objects for safekeeping: “Door dese waerschouwinge sach men de geestelijcke persoonen bij de straet geloopen, dragende uut de kerck alle haer juwelen, als kelcken, ciboria en misgewaden: dit geschiede principael ontrent 11 uren voormiddach, als alle de ambachtslieden gewoon sijn naer maeltijt te gaan” (As a result of this warning, one could see the clergy in the street, carrying all their jewels out of the church, such as chalices, ciboria, and vestments for the Mass; this mainly took place around 11 o’clock in the morning, when the craftsmen were accustomed to go to their meals).77 What happened here, as in many other places, was that attempts were made to remove and hide the best works of art; but by now it was to little avail. A large group of men and women had gathered in the Nieuwe Kerk, but there, fortunately, “veel goede burgers hebben met veel goede woorden het volck uut de kerck gekregen ende kerck vast toegesloten” (by means of many good words a number of good citizens got the people out of their church and closed the church shut).78 The Oude Kerk, on the other hand, suffered badly. There a grain carrier called Jasper took exception to an inscription on a glass panel: “Siet daer hanct in dat glasen bordeken dat gruwelicke en godlasterlicke gedicht” (Look—­there’s a horrible and blasphemous poem hanging on that glass plate), he exclaimed, and smashed it to the ground.79 Upon hearing the noise, a group of youths started throwing stones at the paintings and sculptures and pulling them down. Fortunately, some pictures had already been removed from the church. The schutters were sent there, but the image breaking grew more fiery yet. Finally the iconoclasts were appeased, and the church was closed.80 On September 2, as elsewhere in the country, an official placard arrived from Brussels (dated August 25!) forbidding further iconoclasm under pain of death and confiscation, and insisting on the immediate repair of the churches and their furnishings.81 But the lull was only temporary. Further violent assaults on images followed later in the month. On September 26, the cloister of the Friars Minor was attacked “met een wonderlijcke furie” (with astonishing fury),82 and the next day the Carthusian monastery was similarly invaded. But there, after destroying some glass pictures and books, the crowd was persuaded to go home.83 Here as elsewhere, the Friars Minor suffered particularly, for reasons that are still not entirely clear, but possibly because of their close association with the town government and their reported role in the investigation of heresy.

Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–1580: Northern Netherlands

In Delft women were in the forefront of the attack on the Minderbroeders,84 but there the Oude and the Nieuwe Kerk were most gravely at risk. Images that had not been spirited away in time were destroyed, although in the Nieuwe Kerk the magistrate finally managed to persuade the iconoclasts to stop, and to prevent them from burning the objects they had dragged to the marketplace.85 The overall result of these two horrifying waves of iconoclasm, however, was to deprive the churches of their most significant furnishings—­especially the pictures, organs, and glass. As van Bleyswijck was to comment of the Oude Kerk one century later: De resterende Ornamenten en Cieraden die in dese Kerck wel eer aenschouwt ende gesien weerde en waer mede sy aldermeest pronckte ende verciert was bestonden in overprachtige Altaren, uytnemende Schilderyen en Tafereelen, kostelijke geschilderde Glasen, magnifycke Orgalen en soo voorts alle meest in de Beeld-­stormeryen vernielt, geruyneert of geschonden; het hooge Autaer dese Kerke was in de furie soodanigen aengetast ende verdestrueert dat niet dan een Romp was overgebleven.86 The remaining ornaments and adornments that could previously be seen in this church, and with which it was so shiningly adorned, consisted of sumptuous altars, outstanding paintings and pictures, precious stained glass, magnificent organs, and so on. Most of these were destroyed, ruined, and damaged in the outbreaks of iconoclasm. The high altar of this church was so assaulted and destroyed in the fury that only the core of it survived.

In Utrecht, iconoclasm was immediately preceded by two characteristic events: first by the Protestants’ demand for places of worship of their own, and second by a sermon just outside the town gates, here by a preacher called Schele Gerrit. When members of the Reformed party met, they agreed that “de afgriselijckheyt van de beelden” (the frightfulness of the images) should be removed from the churches but promised to deposit these and other treasures in the town hall.87 The official investigation (of 1567) into the events of these days—­here as elsewhere—­ provides ample evidence of the widespread and often impetuously violent destruction in the town.88 It also provides insight into one of the many personal casualties of those days, in its prolonged investigation into the stance and action of Adriaen de Wael van Vronensteyn. Despite his repeated (and apparently justified) insistence that he adhered to the Old Faith, and despite his attempts to moderate iconoclastic activity, he was finally executed. In St. Gertrude’s, for example—­where there is definite evidence of an attempt at systematic and complete destruction—­he angrily shouted at iconoclasts who were trying to break some windows

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(presumably with painted glass): “Ghy schelmen, wat wilt dij doen? Dat en sijn ymmers gheen beelden!” (You rascals, what do you want to do? They aren’t pictures, after all!).89 A vigorous altercation ensued—­but the glass was saved. There was much else that he managed to save, including the vaulting of the church itself. Since it had figures of the apostles painted on it, De Wael took another approach: “Wat wilt ghij doen? Laet staen, men sel een schilder comen ende laten die beelden uutstrijcken” (What do you want to do? Leave it alone, we will have a painter come and paint the images out) and was successful.90 But Utrecht suffered badly, and the iconoclasts did their work in the Buurkerk, the Mariakerk, St. Nicholas’s, St. Gertrude’s, the cloisters of the Dominicans and the Friars Minor—­and probably St. James’s too.91 Iconoclasm in Leiden on August 25 was almost as frenzied and as random. A few days earlier the local rhetoricians had publicly derided the use of images, and when the iconoclasts got started, men, women, and children apparently ran in and out of the churches to the cry of “Ook hier moet gebeuren wat elders geschied is!” (What has happened elsewhere must be done here too).92 Although St. Peter’s was put under armed guard in the nick of time, the church of Our Lady, St. Pancras, and even the chapter house of St. Pancras were attacked; so, as usual, were the Friars Minor. In many places—­probably most—­theft of objects from the ransacked churches was expressly forbidden (whether by the preachers, the local nobleman, or the organizers of the iconoclasts); but here in Leiden, although the council does appear to have allowed guilds and families to remove their altars and paintings to safety,93 parts of altars and other church furnishings were transported to public places and offered for sale. There appears to have been considerable and promiscuous thievery,94 whereas elsewhere the penalties were often severe and served as deterrents. In The Hague, on the other hand, after an initial spurt of unrest, the churches were methodically stripped. Two days after issuing an ordinance forbidding the destruction of images on August 23, the president of the Provincial Council of Holland ordered that the images be removed from the town’s churches “met alder stillicheyt sonder commocy” (in all tranquility and without disturbance), and saw to it that twelve men were paid seven stuivers each to do the necessary work, while the schutters guarded and locked each church.95 These are the poles of iconoclasm in 1566: on the one hand, disorderly destruction, plundering, and theft, with motives that were violent or mercenary; on the other hand, controlled and sometimes systematic iconoclasm, often for sound theological reasons, with little if any theft and some saving on the grounds of the artistic merit of particular works of art. We cannot examine every outbreak of iconoclasm here, but there are a few further details that are both symptomatic and telling. Den Briel, for example, offers further instances of supervised icono-

Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–1580: Northern Netherlands

clasm (on the day after it struck Leiden and The Hague). It was one of those towns where the range of Reformed beliefs was strikingly broad, from Anabaptism to pure Calvinism, and where it is not always easy to identify the particular grouping to which individuals belonged.96 Here the main churches—­St. Catherine’s and the Maerlant Church—­were closed in time, and thus were spared the worst of the onslaught; but the rest were more or less severely assailed. In the cloister of the Poor Clares, Pieter Michiels gave specific instructions as to which images should be spared and which not, while after the destruction in the cloisters and convents two of the foremost Protestants (one man and one woman) appeared “omme te beziene oft de bellestorminge te rechte geschiet ende volcommen was” (to ensure that the image-­breaking took place rightly and completely).97 Indeed, they were heard enthusiastically to proclaim: “God sij geloeft dat dees verre gecommen es want het moeste aldus geschien” (God be praised that it has come so far, since it had to happen thus).98 This kind of blunt and unreasoning justification was also offered by Sem Jansz. of Monnikendam, when he asserted that those who attacked the images and shattered them were simply doing God’s will.99 How could one provide an argument against folkishly apodeictic assertions such as these? Perhaps the iconoclasts knew that; and even as sophisticated an intelligence as Marnix van Sint Aldegonde could claim of the Antwerp iconoclasm that it must obviously have been the will of God, since otherwise how could so few people have achieved (sic!) so much in so short a time?100 Such determinist views of the destruction of images were not uncommon; and for a short time some people held images very cheap indeed. Den Briel itself offers the spectacle of some very odd but telling behavior on the part of the local rhetoricians (who, one would think, would have been better disposed to pictures and sculptures than the following suggests). On Ash Wednesday in 1567 they gathered in their chamber in the local town hall, where five images from the St. Roch altar, as well as a chest with some liturgical accessories, had been brought for safekeeping. A kind of kangaroo court for images now seems to have taken place. With staff and missal in hand, Huych Quirijnsz. pronounced judgment on the St. Roch images and the other objects. Thereupon the rhetoricians took them and threw them into the fire. All the while they sang refrains and chanted psalms, as if to mock Holy Communion itself.101 As in so many other places, the council of Den Briel sent for advice and help from the prince of Orange before the actual outbreak of iconoclasm, while the local Protestants clearly had contact with the subversive count of Brederode.102 If Brederode was not uninfluential here, then the actions of Floris van Pallandt, count of Culemborg, could not have been more overt.103 One would have thought that at least one of the most pressing reasons for iconoclasm was absent in Culemborg, since the count allowed the local Protestants to hold services in his castle.104

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But iconoclasm did break out on September 7, in a small chapel in the town. The count issued an edict forbidding any destruction in churches and cemeteries; but at the same time he authorized the removal of all exterior images in a civil manner, “in goede en stille manieren.”105 Less than a week later he was less circumspect and issued instructions to destroy the images in his town—­in which process he participated himself. Having wrecked most of the churches and chapels in Culemborg, the small group of iconoclasts (which included two local noblemen) spread out into the neighboring region. Three of the richest iconoclasts (along with four others) had already participated in the outbreak at Utrecht.106 Bedum near Groningen offers the case—­often encountered elsewhere—­of the local priest’s participation in taking down images.107 In nearby Loppersum and in Groningen itself, the schoolmasters took part.108 They too, one feels, might have known better or acted with more restraint. Was it the excitement of emotional release, an outward show of new commitments, a display of long-­pent-­up resentments, or genuine theological antipathy that lay at the root of such behavior? Any combination is possible, even for the learned or half-­learned. One cannot simply blame the ignorant mob, the rude gespuys. In Venlo the Reformed community demanded the use of the cloister of Trans Cedron for their services; the magistrates refused; the preacher Leonardus preached a sermon there; and iconoclasm immediately erupted.109 In the meantime officials of the parish church of St. ­Martin and the four deans of the merchants’ guild helped dismantle the altars—­ although even there (according to eyewitness reports) some out-­of-­ towners were present.110 Members of the shoemakers’ guild participated in the destruction at St. Nicholas.111 In the Trans Cedron cloister the images were either burned or smeared with oil.112 By and large, however, the main towns of Gelderland and the Overkwartier were spared, and it would be superfluous to go into details of the kind I have already provided for places like Elburg and Harderwijk.113 Later on, in 1578–­79, we find extremely aggressive forms of church purification in Gelderland by the troops of John of Nassau.114 Among the many possible examples from Limburg, two are particularly telling. In Maastricht, when the churchwardens of St. Matthias tried to stop iconoclasts from destroying the main crucifix there (the painting of the Virgin from the choir had already been burned), they rejoined that it had to be smashed, since “dat tselve cruys was die meeste affgoderije die in de kercke was” (the cross itself was the most idolatrous object in the church).115 Sometimes the iconoclasts knew what they were doing. No more vivid picture of the kinds of exchange that took place on the eve of iconoclastic outbursts could be offered than the case of Weert. An extraordinary contemporary account by a nun tells of the events of ­August 27–­30, when images were destroyed in the town and its vicinity:

Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–1580: Northern Netherlands

Maer dat volck tierde en maeckte soo bijster gerught met roepen, singen en spotten, dat men den geuzen paep, heer Thomassen, niet verstaan konde. Sij kloterden met de klompen, sij riepen d’een tot d’ander: toet! d’ander riepen; gij liegt het al wat gij seght! de derde riepen: coeckoeck! sommige riepen saemenderhandt: De swarten duyvel staet hier op den preekstoel!116 But the crowd raved and made such a loud noise with their shouting and singing and mocking that one could not understand the Beggars’ pope, Mr. Thomasz. They jumped around in their clogs, they called one to the other, “Toet!”; the other shouted, “Everything you say is a lie!”; a third person shouted, “Coeckoeck!” and some shouted together: “The black devil is standing on the pulpit here!”

Frivolity and fury went hand in hand. Asperen was only affected on October 8. There Wessel van Boetselaer ordered the churches to be stripped. Willem van Zuylen van Nyevelt, drost of Culemborg (who had already destroyed his own family chapel), arrived with a preacher and half a dozen soldiers, whom he placed around the churches and cloisters. Thus guarded, the iconoclasts could range free and do their work of destruction untroubled by zealous wardens or other officials.117 And so the sorry tale continued. Much more unusual than these lamentable events—­lamentable at least for art—­were the cases of the towns that escaped iconoclasm altogether. Haarlem is perhaps the most notable example, for there repeated demands for Protestant places of worship were issued. The requests were at least partly met; but if there was one figure who may be said to have prevented the worst of the storm from affecting Haarlem, it was Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert.118 Despite the risk that his efforts might be grossly misunderstood (as we learn from the sustained inquiry in 1567 into his activities in August and September 1566), and at considerable risk to himself, Coornhert managed to stave off the demands for iconoclasm; he made repeated and sometimes clandestine attempts to reach the prince of Orange in order to invoke his help in those critical days—­and all this despite his evident lack of sympathy with the Catholic use of images. For Coornhert, even if images were misused or abused, there could still be no justification for their disorderly removal; and this, along with his distaste for civil unrest, must have lain at the roots of his strenuous and ultimately successful efforts.119 Like Haarlem, Nijmegen was spared any form of organized or large-­ scale iconoclasm, but even so two commissioners were sent to investigate what happened there in 1566.120 After all, along with Roermond, Venlo, and Zaltbommel, Nijmegen was one of the mauvaises villes of Gelderland, and what seems to have happened there on September 23–­25, 1566, was clearly

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quite enough to justify its reputation (along with its evident sympathy for several of the preachers it harbored). There was nothing that one might call an iconoclastic movement there, no concerted or even spontaneous group assault, but rather a few isolated incidents that provide eloquent testimony to individual hostility to images in general and Roman Catholic image worship in particular. Isolated incidents like these must be taken into account as we learn to accept the modern interpretation of iconoclasm in the Netherlands as organized and nonspontaneous deliberate work. On the night of September 24–­25, two brothers damaged the railings around the crucifixion scene in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s, as well as the image of the Virgin there. On the same evening there seems to have been a particular disturbance around the Kraanpoort, from which the statue of St. Christopher was dislodged and thrown to the ground. So was the statue of St. Anthony in the churchyard of the same name.121 The testimony gathered for Nijmegen is rich in detail, and thus we have a report of the words of the very man—­Adriaen Rijckens—­who along with his brother is reported to have removed the crown of the statue of the Virgin in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s. “Die hoeren to Coelen dragen sodanige croen wanneer sy omgeleydt worden, ghy hebbet lange genoech gedragen” (The whores of Cologne wear these kinds of crowns when they are carried around; and you’ve worn it for long enough), he is said to have cried as he did the brazen deed.122 Into what disrespect images had fallen; how they had lost their aura! Of course there had always been people who knew that images were no more than painted pieces of wood and stone; but now, for a very brief period, there were socially sanctioned ways of proving it, and of demonstrating the futility of believing that they were anything more. Art in the service of the Church would indeed reclaim some of its aura; but art in the Netherlands could never be founded on the same premises again. The consequences were not immediately apparent, but they were momentous. If there were no other justification for an exhibition covering this period of revolution and revision, this alone would be sufficient. Already in November 1567 the punitive Council of Troubles (set up two months earlier by the duke of Alva to investigate, manage, and discipline the rebellion) issued instructions about the repair of churches. Three months later, in February 1568, Alva himself sent a missyve throughout the Netherlands in which he ordered that all the damaged or destroyed churches and cloisters should be rebuilt and repaired.123 In the south his instructions were almost universally adhered to—­if not immediately, then eventually—­as soon as finances and other resources permitted. In the north, of course, many of the churches remained white, purified, and Protestant. But apart from the plundering of the watergeuzen in the 1570s, and cases such as the destruction in Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk in 1578 and the vandalism of Jan of Nassau’s troops in Gelderland at the end of that year, the events of August, September, and October 1566 were never

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to be repeated. The iconoclastic wave subsided with surprising suddenness. But if one thought that its effects were only temporary, one would be quite wrong. It is not the aim of this essay to assess the long-­term significance of iconoclasm; but it is worth looking more closely at the short-­term effects. I have given some indication of the extent and range of the damage in 1566 but have not so far referred much to identifiable works of art. Let us look at a few of the details that can be reclaimed, and at some of the immediate consequences for the great debate about images, that grand theoretical issue which was so dramatically overtaken by the real crisis it had played such a crucial role in generating. 3. Suffering: The Destruction of Art

The records of the large-­scale investigations introduced by Margaret of Parma and the duke of Alva into the events of 1566 are absorbing and horrifying. They are full of mutual incrimination, exaggeration, and grudge-­ bearing; the informers had a field day. From the testimony delivered to the duke’s commissioners we gain some idea—­indeed a most vivid one—­of the depredations wrought by the iconoclasts and the consequences of their excesses. We learn of the extent of the damage and the range and variety of the participants. But what we barely learn from these records at all are the names of the specific works affected by the events of 1566. The most one can hope for is the specification of a subject and a location, but the names of artists are rarely if ever mentioned. Even the medium of particular works is frequently omitted. After all, the aim of Alva’s inquiries was to gauge the scale of civil unrest, to identify its protagonists, and to reintroduce some measure of order; it was not to make an inventory of lost objects. Thus we may get some sense of the overall effects of the emptying of the churches, and of their literal purification as a result of whitewashing and the replacement of stained-­glass figures by plain glass. This was always an easy and expansive step to take, as—­to take one of very many possible examples—­the count of Culemborg did in 1566 and again in 1578: “Dye heere van Kuyllenborch heef zijn kerck gans doir laten wytten. . . . In dye glaessen siin uitgenomen, dair hillichgen in waeren, ind ander glaesse daer weer yn geset sonder hillichgen klaer glaesse” (The lord of Culemborg has let his church be completely whitewashed. . . . In some windows glass that contained saints was removed; in others they were replaced by clear glass without saints on them).124 And everywhere we have evidence of the painting of texts—­say the Ten Commandments—­ directly over the whitewash (and sometimes even on the very surfaces of altarpieces).125 But for the names of artists whose works were affected, we must use either deduction (since we know from other sources where specific works were located, and we usually know which churches were affected)

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or archaeological evidence, or—­most significantly—­evidence from local chroniclers and writers on art. In some works the damage is such that one can only assume that it occurred during the events of the 1560s and 1570s. Among these one should probably include works of art such as the polyptych of The Seven Works of Mercy by the Master of Alkmaar, dating from 1504 and therefore one of the limited number of major works by a North Netherlandish artist to have survived almost in toto from the period immediately preceding that covered by the present exhibition.126 Recent restoration has revealed that the work was mutilated in an evidently purposeful way—­many of the slashes were clearly directed against the eyes of the clerics bestowing charity, for example—­to such an extent that it provides eloquent testimony to the kinds of basic and emotional hostility to images that must so often have underlain the organized iconoclastic attacks (fig. 26).127 Similarly, on the remarkably vivid portrait from Toledo of Jacob Cornelisz. and his wife by their son Dirk Jacobsz. (figs. 27–­28), there is considerable damage to the picture and especially to the eyes.128 Was this one of those not uncommon attempts to deprive an image of its apparent life (and the picture here is very lifelike indeed) by striking out those same organs that, above all, evince its vitality?129 In any event, as in the case of the polyptych by the Master of Alkmaar, it reminds us that whatever the social and economic motives of the iconoclasts, their behavior likely arose from rawer psychological impulses as well.130 Altogether instructive in the paradigmatic quality of its fate is the first great masterpiece of North Netherlandish art in the period covered by this exhibition, Lucas van Leiden’s great Last Judgment triptych (Leiden, Lakenhal) of 1526–­27. On the eve of iconoclasm in Leiden in 1566 it was

78 26. Master of Alkmaar, Polyptych of the Seven Works of Mercy, 1504, detail of the Charity panel showing damage before restoration. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

27. Dirck Jacobsz, Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen Painting a Portrait of His Wife, ca. 1550, oil on wood panel, 62.1 × 49.4 cm. Toledo, Ohio, Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey.

28. Dirck Jacobsz, Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen Painting a Portrait of His Wife, ca. 1550, detail showing damage before restoration. Toledo, Ohio, Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey.

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probably taken for safekeeping from St. Peter’s, along with other works from the church, to the Hospital of St. James (in general, throughout the North and South Netherlands there seems to have been some sense—­ though highly erratic or nonexistent in places—­of the importance of the major works and of the need to save them). In 1527 it was transferred to St. Catherine’s Hospital, before finally being taken to the town hall in 1577. On September 11 of that year the painter Isaac Claesz. van Swanenburgh and another were paid for their expenses in effecting the last move.131 Might it have been Swanenburgh or was it some coarser painter who after­ ward covered the offending figure of God the Father—­only restored to his rightful place by the restoration of 1935—­at the top of the central panel? And when were the Hebrew letters for YHWH painted there?132 The matter must remain uncertain, but the fate of that figure ­reminds us again of the way in which altarpieces were not only wholly over­painted—­ van Mander gives at least one drastic example in his life of Hugo van der Goes133—­but also selectively so. Certainly, in the eyes of most Protestants the representation of the divine, the immaterial, and the uncircumscribable in the person of God the Father constituted one of the worst offenses of Catholic art. It would not be an agreeable task to count the number of times such figures were removed or censored.134 Perhaps the best overall picture of the effects of iconoclasm on specific works of art is to be found, not surprisingly, in the great historian of Dutch and Flemish art, Karel van Mander. Although Het schilder-boek was published in 1604,135 almost forty years after the first outbreak of iconoclasm, we have every reason to take his testimony seriously (though there are lapses, as in his dating the destruction of images in Gouda to 1566 rather than to 1572, and his exaggeration of what actually was destroyed there). Apart from anything else, van Mander was himself a Protestant emigré from Flanders (who left the country after painting one altarpiece for the church in Courtrai),136 and one might have thought that he had no need to overstate the case against the depredations of those who were, broadly speaking, his coreligionists (unless, of course, he was concerned to distinguish his own Mennonite attitudes from those of other Protestants). Indeed he goes to considerable lengths to disown them, repudiate their violent deeds, and make his opinion of their acts known in no uncertain terms. Every time he speaks of the iconoclasts he refers to them in terms such as rasend, woedend, onverstandigh, uytsinnigh, ontsinnigh, const-­vijandigh, woest, blind, and oproerigh (raging, furious, stupid, crazy, senseless, hostile to art, wild, blind, riotous).137 It is not at all surprising to find the rueful reflection that the destruction of many works by Pieter Aertsen was “tot jammer der kunst door het woest onverstandt” (a tragic loss to art through raving stupidity).138 Among these was the high altar of the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, with a Nativity on the center panel and an Annunciation, a Circumcision, and an Adoration of the Magi on the wings; a Martyrdom of St. Catherine was apparently represented

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on the reverse. Delft had been particularly rich in works by Aertsen: the Carthusian monastery had a Crucifixion triptych by him, with a Nativity and an Adoration of the Magi on the wings and Four Evangelists on the exterior, while the Nieuwe Kerk had an Adoration of the Magi on the high altar, with an Ecce Homo “en soo yet anders” (and something else) on the wings.139 All, according to van Mander, were lost; but it is worth noting that two of the Evangelists from Delft altarpiece survive (Prinsenhof, Delft), along with an Adoration of the Magi and a fragment of the Nativity. Yet another Crucifixion altarpiece by Aertsen used to be in Warmenhuysen in North Holland, and this is what happened to it: “Dit werck als A° 1566. t’ghemeen in zijn raserije was, wiert in stucken geslaghen met bijlen, alhoewel de Vrouw van Sonneveldt t’Alckmaer daer voor boodt 100. pondt: want alsooment uyt de Kerck bracht om haer te leveren vielen de Boeren als uytsinnigh daer op en brachten die schoon Const te niet” (Even though the window of Sonnevelt from Alkmaar offered 100 pounds for it, this work was smashed to pieces with axes when the people were raving in 1566; for when it was being brought from the church to deliver it to her, the peasants mindlessly fell upon it and brought the beautiful work of art to nothing).140 Although it may well have been part of van Mander’s “program” to stress the opposition between culture (as represented by painting) and nonculture, the sequence of events is one that we may recognize from contemporary chronicles. No wonder that van Mander tells how Aertsen despaired and dangerously lost his temper with the iconoclasts: “Pieter was dickwils ongeduldigh dat zijn dinghen die hij de Weerelt tot gedachtnis meenden laten, soo te meten wierden ghebracht, ghebruyckende dickwils met sulcke Const-­vijandighe groote woorden tot sijn eyghen ghevaer oft perijckel” (Pieter was frequently angry that the works he had intended to leave to the world for posterity were thus brought to nothing, and he frequently used strong words with these enemies of art to his own danger and peril).141 Aertsen must have been desperate when he saw what was happening to his works—­to say nothing of how he must have feared for his livelihood in a country that at least momentarily appeared so hostile to art. It was, of course, a matter not only of hostility but also of the general precariousness and fragility of the situation. Thus van Mander reports that after the surrender of Haarlem in 1572 the Spaniards obtained many of Heemskerck’s works—­already terribly decimated by iconoclasm—­ “onder decksel van te willen coopen, en nae Spaengien gesonden” (under the pretense of wishing to buy them and send to Spain);142 in the same town the great Crucifixion by Geertgen tot St. Jans, which had formerly stood over the high altar of St. John’s, was destroyed, along with one of its wings. The remaining wing (now one of the chief glories of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna) was sawn in two and could be seen in the Hall of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.143 The Regular Canons outside Haarlem also owned some works by Geertgen (unfortunately

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unspecified by van Mander), and these too were destroyed, either by soldiers or by the iconoclasts.144 All this in a town that, as we have seen, was one of the few usually assumed to have been free from iconoclasm. The doubt whether works were lost in 1566 or as a result of later military depredations is entirely characteristic—­and justified. One cannot always attribute loss or destruction to the dramatic days of 1566. Then there were other disasters, like the great fire of 1576, in which many paintings by Jan Mostaert were said to have been lost.145 It is not only our picture of sixteenth-­century Netherlandish painting that is seriously mutilated because of the events of these years; our view of its fifteenth-­century predecessors is equally deficient, for the same sad reason. In Amsterdam, van Mander records the loss of Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen’s apparently very beautiful Descent from the Cross as well as the same artist’s Seven Works of Mercy from the Oude Kerk (some fragments he reported to have seen at the home of Cornelis Suycker in Haarlem).146 Equally distressing was the loss—­save one small fragment to be seen in the Doelen—­of Dirk Barentsz.’s Fall of the Rebel Angels “met veelderley naeckten, seer uytnemende ghehandelt” (with many kinds of nudes, really outstandingly done),147 to say nothing of Anthonie Blocklandt’s altarpiece The Death and Burial of St. Francis, which disappeared from the church of the Friars Minor.148 All this lost in addition to the works of Aertsen cited above, Heemskerck’s paintings, and several works by Jan van Scorel. Scorel, Heemskerck, and Blocklandt are three of the major figures in this exhibition whose work was seriously decimated by iconoclasm. So was Jan Vermeyen, whose paintings in Brussels—­and especially in St. Gudule—­were either destroyed or removed “door d’uytsinnighe beeldstorminghe” (by the mad iconoclasm).149 With Scorel, van Mander records the loss of some of his prime works in the following way: “Maer dat te beclaghen is veel zijn ander dinghen, t’Crucifix t’Amsterdam, de schoon deuren t’Utrecht in S. Marien, oock een schoon Tafel ter Goude, bij hem in zijnen besondersten Tijdt en Fleur ghedaen, werden A° 1566 van het ontsinnighe ghemeen ghebroken en verbrandt, met noch veel meer fraey dinghen” (But what is lamentable is the fact that many of his other works—­the Crucifixion in Amsterdam, the beautiful wings in St. Mary’s in Utrecht, as well as a beautiful panel in Gouda, done by him in his very best period and at the height of his abilities—­were smashed and burned in 1566 by the senseless common people, along with many more fine things).150 In the case of Blocklandt he is a little more specific: he laments the loss of several beautiful altarpieces in Delft, including the one mentioned above, but he is mistaken in recording the loss of the outstanding Martyrdom of St. James from Gouda, since it is still preserved in the same town.151 Then he goes on to note that there was a large altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin at the home of “Jofvrouw van Honthorst

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dicht achter den Dom” (Jofrouw van Honthorst just behind the cathedral) in Utrecht.152 How it got there we may only guess; but fortunately it survives in the parish church of Bingen. The following passage in the life of Blocklandt gives one a poignant sense of the difficulty of coming to an adequate assessment of the work of artists like him, given the effects of iconoclasm: “Dese schoon dinghen zijn meest door blinden ijver en onverstandighe raserije in de oproerighe Beeldtstorminghe vernielt, en door Barbarischen handen den ooghen der Const-­lievenden naecomers berooft soo datter weynich is overghebleven” (These beautiful things were mostly destroyed by blind zeal and stupid violence in the riotous iconoclasm, and stolen from the eyes of art-­loving posterity by barbaric hands, to such an extent that very little has remained).153 For all its bluntness of tone, the passage may stand as a motto for the present essay and, indeed, for the exhibition as a whole. We now know that the destruction was not always barbarisch and onverstandigh; indeed van Mander records with barely veiled pride how many works were saved, in both the North and South Netherlands. These included the Marienpoel altarpieces by Cornelis Engebrechtsz., which were spirited away to the safety of the town hall in Leiden (and hung too high, according to van Mander, to be properly appreciated).154 But mostly, as we have seen, he goes to elaborate lengths, despite his Protestant affiliations, to distance himself from the acts of the iconoclasts. So do the later local chroniclers who supplement the information provided by van Mander. Unfortunately we do have to depend on seventeenth-­century sources for this kind of specific information. Only rarely are there found archival documents like the proud and unusually specific one of around 1568 describing the paintings by Mabuse formerly on the high altar of the Abbey of Middelburg;155 and there are no equivalents in the north to the remarkable contemporary account by Marcus van Vaernewijck of Ghent, who provides us with so much firsthand information about destruction and saving in the southern Netherlands in 1566.156 We do have some less specific contemporary chroniclers, like Reael, but they are not, on the whole, especially interested in art. By the time we come to Oudenhoven’s 1649 Beschryvinghe der stadt ende meyerye van ’s-­Hertogenbosch, however, the information is valuable indeed. He records in detail the loss of a number of works by Hieronymus Bosch and by Jan van Scorel from St. John’s Church there,157 and we no longer rub our eyes when we read how the unusual high altarpiece by Bosch was replaced by the Ten Commandments written in gold letters.158 By the time Oudenhoven was writing, this is just the sort of thing that was happening in England, on much larger scale, and for the second time in a hundred years.159 Dirck van Bleyswijck is the other seventeenth-­century town chronicler who provides us with a considerable amount of information about iconoclasm. In his Beschrijvinge der Stadt Delft of 1667 he not only excerpts

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a considerable amount from van Mander but also draws on a number of contemporary documents and records to which he had gained access. He provides details of the way in which a significant number of ornaments and quantities of silver and metalware were saved from the churches and cloisters of the town,160 and on occasion he is even able to correct van Mander—­as in his insistence that the painting by Pieter Aertsen mentioned by van Mander as having stood on the high altar of the Nieuwe Kerk did not stand there but elsewhere in the church.161 The high altar was in fact a complex Crucifixion polyptych by Jan van Scorel, which Bleyswijck describes with considerable care: The Crucifixion with the Thieves had on the one wing an Entry into Jerusualem and on the other a Resurrection; on the reverse of these was a Baptism of Christ; the next set of wings (covering the ones just mentioned) had a Preaching and a Decollation of John the Baptist, while on the reverse of these was a Sacrifice of Isaac and The History of the 11,000 Virgins.162 As if daunted by the prospect of enumerating in similar detail the remaining works that had been destroyed, he now simply refers to another source for the loss of paintings by Frans Floris, Maarten van Heemskerck, and Anthonie Blocklandt.163 The consequences of iconoclasm for art were lamentable and clear; he even invokes Reformed authority as he summarizes the damage to such a large number of works: alle welcke rariteyten gelijck die meerendeels de rasend Kerckplunderinghe nevens andere kostelijckheden en Juweelen sonder onderscheyt jammerlijck heeft vernielt (want sulcks self van onse Gereformeerde Theologanten ten hooghste werdt gheimprobeert) soo is oock te beklaghen soo weynigh recht bescheyt van soo groot een schat voor de konst-­ lievende is over gebleven alleenlijck eenige weynige over geblevene en gesalveerde stucken en brocken van dese uytmuntendheden siet men noch heden ten dage in Burgemeesteren Raedt Camerte pronck hangen.164 the riotous plundering of the churches shamefully destroyed all these rarities, along with many other precious items and jewels without distinction (which had also been disapproved of by our Reformed theologians). Similarly it’s also to be lamented that so small a portion of so great a treasure for art lovers remained. Today one can see only a few remaining saved pieces and fragments hanging proudly in the Burgomasters’ Council Chamber. 84

In previous sections I have already quoted Bleyswijck’s very similar sentiments on the dreadful effects of iconoclasm on the Oude Kerk in Delft; but after noting that only the core (“romp”) of the high altar remained there, he proceeded to tell of the splendid new altarpiece by Willem Danielsz. van Tetrode that was almost immediately commissioned

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to replace it.165 That work was commissioned in March 1568 for the huge sum of 1,600 Carolusgulden, but it was never completed. Payments ran until 1572,166 and then the town suffered new troubles. This may be all too typical of the disturbed state of the Netherlands during these years, but the very fact of the new commission, and the classicizing splendor of what was actually made by Tetrode (unfortunately lost in the great fire of 1654),167 raises one of the most profound questions of the period as a whole. Despite the depredations of the iconoclasts, and despite the unrest this caused in the hearts and minds of artists, iconoclasm did not sound the death knell of Dutch art, as might have been expected. On the contrary, it inaugurated a period of unparalleled innovation. To some extent this may have been sparked by the way in which Protestants (as van Bleyswijck suggested) and Catholics united in condemning the iconoclasts. The groundswell in favor of art grew on both sides. One year after the events of 1566 and in direct response to them, the pastor of Delft’s Oude Kerk, Martinus Duncanus, published his Cort Onderscheyt tusschen Godlijcke ende Afgodissche Beelden.168 Although significantly in the vernacular and although it enjoyed two reprintings, the book is filled with extremely traditional arguments in favor of images, buttressed by an armory of biblical quotations; and—­as its title suggests—­it deflected the theological arguments underlying the iconoclast position by suggesting the elimination of abuses, rather than dealing with the fundamental issues at stake.169 In the end, a book like this—­just like the even more traditional De vetustissimo sacrarum imaginum usu published in the same year by Frederik Schenck van Toutenburg, the future archbishop of Utrecht—­was irrelevant.170 Though church art was no longer to flourish in the way it had before, every other form and genre seems to have been newly inspired. Van Mander himself may have bewailed the effects of iconoclasm in no uncertain terms, but as soon as he arrived in Haarlem in 1579 he joined a group of fellow painters and sculptors who seem to have taken what had so recently happened as an opportunity to rethink the very bases of their art and to produce new forms and new styles. The situation in the southern Netherlands must then have seemed even bleaker. Perhaps there the consequences of iconoclasm were even worse, and the application of the Council of Trent’s recommendation for the ecclesiastical supervision of art cannot have helped. It is true that one of the immediate results of iconoclasm in 1566 was the publication, in the South Netherlands, of a great spate of treatises in favor of images—­but only ostensibly in favor.171 In fact, in their attempt to purify images of misuse and abuse (whether actual or potential), many of them turned out to be inordinately prescriptive and censorious. Artists in the south cannot but have been unnerved by phenomena like these; but in the north their situation was, for the time being at least, rather more encouraging. This may have had more to do with the security and stability offered them by their new and newly

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independent homeland, and with the growing mood of confidence in the country at large, than with the direct effects of iconoclasm. But without the challenge offered by the whole question of images and by the terrible consequences it so briefly had, the course of Dutch art would have been entirely different. 4. Significance: The Image Question in Art

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This period, like every other, has left us with many enigmas. Among the questions that relate directly to the objects and concerns of the present exhibition is this: to what extent are the controversies and events I have been discussing reflected in visual form in the years between 1525 and 1585? The issue is not at all as simple or as clear as one might expect. Two monuments, both published by Hessel Miedema,172 could by their very nature not be included in the exhibition but should nevertheless claim our attention. The first, a large-­scale structure that cannot be moved, is typical of the kind of monument that must once have existed in much greater abundance than now. The second is a kind of low-­level pictorial performance on the vaulting of a church that was covered over with a layer of plaster and whitewash until its recent recovery. Both monuments are more representative of the more ordinary kinds of art in the period before iconoclasm—­so much of which is now lost—­than the prestigious objects in the present exhibition. They are thus paradigmatic not only in their stylistic range, from the workaday to the comparatively distinguished, but also and above all in their iconography, which reveals the dialectic between Catholicism and Reformed belief in all its tension—­even though the monuments were for at least notionally Catholic places. They point to the acute difficulty of defining the doctrinal, theological, and fideistic stance implicit in so many of the objects produced before and during iconoclasm. The first of these monuments is the wooden roodscreen-­ like gallery known as the kraak in the Reformed (Hervormde) church at Oosterend in Friesland; it is dated 1554.173 The ornamental elements of this work clearly derive from the latest Antwerp fashions, like the strapwork popularized by Cornelis Floris; but what is of interest here are the notable figural subjects and the vernacular texts above the gallery and below the scenes. The texts derive from a Bible published by Jacob van Liesvelt in Antwerp in the 1530s.174 While Liesvelt fell foul of the Inquisition only for the marginal illustration of his 1542 edition of the Bible (which was not used by the artist of the kraak) and was executed in 1545, we must nevertheless confront the possibility of Reformed influence here. In a general way the use of the vernacular does point, implicitly at least, to the desire for a more direct relationship between laity and scripture; but by this time the phenomenon was not especially unusual. What is unusual is the iconography of the scenes on the kraak. There are eleven subjects from the Old Testament (of which eight are derived from

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the books of Kings) and only eight from the New.175 Some of the scenes are taken from the Liesvelt Bible of 1538, while others are clearly based on illustrations in Bibles such as those published in Antwerp in 1533–­34 by Willem Vorsterman (placed on the index of forbidden books in 1546) and by Hendrick Peetersen in Middelburg in 1541.176 The Old Testament subjects include ones that had rarely been represented before, such as the angel routing the Assyrians, Josiah called to the throne, Joab killing Amasa, David’s last words, David writing a letter to Joab, and—­as an exceptional representation from the apocryphal book of Daniel—­Daniel unmasking the priests of Bel.177 Most unexpectedly, the Old Testament scenes do not stand in typological relationship to the New Testament ones; rather, as Miedema noted, they are exemplary. They emphasize the directness of God’s relationship with humanity and the role of Christ as Redeemer. This is how Miedema characterized the iconography of the kraak as a whole: De scenes geven blijk van een zeer levendige belangstelling voor de moderne bijbelvertalingen, een belangstelling die geen behoefte meer heeft aan traditionele liturgische of typologische formules maar die duidelijke nadruk legt op het exemplarische karakter van bijbelverhalen waar een direkte relatie tussen God en de mens blijkt.178 The scenes provide evidence of a very lively interest in the modern translations of the Bible, an interest that no longer has any need for traditional liturgical or typological formulas, but that places clear emphasis on the exemplary nature of those biblical stories in which a direct relation between God and man is apparent.

But as he rightly cautioned: Het zou voorbarig zijn, deze nieuwe ikonographie te interpreteren als reformatorisch; wel lijkt het waarschijnlijk dat het verlaten van de typologie voor een veel direkter exemplarische ikonographie samenhangt met de nieuwe direkte vroomheid waarin de hervorming tot stand zou komen, maar waarbij eerder de naam van Erasmus dan die van Luther moet worden genoemd.179 It would be rash to call this new iconography Reformation iconography. It seems more likely that the abandoning of typology for a much more direct exemplary iconography is connected with the new direct piety in which the Reformation had its origins, but which should rather be associated with the name of Erasmus than with Luther.

The whole issue of the relationship between iconography and religious beliefs could hardly have been more judiciously put; but before moving

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on let us reflect on the appearance of just one subject which has already been found in an Amsterdam play of 1533 and will feature again—­the story of Daniel and the priests of Bel.180 Although no more prominently placed than any other of the scenes on the kraak, and although not particularly legible from below, it does raise this particular question: what, if any, is the relationship between the increasing criticism of the idolatrous and misguided use of images on the one hand, and a representation of the revealing of the trick by which false priests led people into the idolatrous worship of the image of Bel on the other?181 This is indeed an unusual subject to represent, but we should not push the parallel too far. Even if a relationship is assumed, there is nothing to prevent it from being seen in terms of the context so judiciously described by Miedema; and the same applies to other obviously relevant but less unusual subjects such as Christ driving the moneychangers from the temple.182 The issue of purification comes to the fore in the case of the recently revealed paintings on the vault and pillars of the Grote Kerk at Harderwijk.183 These wonderfully robust and simple decorations of 1561–­62 are accompanied by texts derived from a number of different contemporary Bibles, including the Vorsterman Bible of 1528.184 But the subjects, once again, are most unusual. Part of the decoration is traditional enough, with typological parallels between Old and New Testament and a comparatively straightforward Last Judgment. But the Last Judgment theme is expanded in an extraordinary way: it is followed by representations of the Works of Mercy (necessary for salvation) and by figures showing the absence of Mercy (which leads to damnation); then by nine female figures representing the Beatitudes, with a series of figures showing the vices (including some marked nota bene) opposite them; and finally the wise and foolish virgins.185 All this, as Miedema observed, marks a notable break with Catholic tradition: the compiler of the program may well have had Protestant leanings. At the same time there seems to be a clear desire to avoid the blatantly heretical. In its rejection of traditional formulas and the clear need to return to the original sources, attitude and preferences here may broadly be described as humanistic. “Aan die voorkeur, eerder dan reformatorische, is ook de ikonographie van Harderwijk toe te schrijven. Maar het direkte verband met de hervorming is hiermee, meen ik, wel duidelijk” (The iconography at Harderwijk is to be ascribed to this preference, rather to the reforming one. But in this I believe the direct connection with the Reformation to be clearly apparent).186 Almost exactly the same might be said of two of the most famous artists of the Reformation, Dürer and Holbein. Once again, Miedema exercises a just and prudent caution, but once again we should not omit the immediate context of the commission. The town council of Harderwijk had long been known for its heretical tendencies and Protestant sympathies. Around 1563 it actually carried

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out a minor iconoclasm in the Grote Kerk by ordering purification of the altars under the leadership of heretical preachers.187 And it was just this council that little over one year earlier had commissioned the remarkably untraditional cycle of paintings in the main church of its town. The question of Protestant influence, then, is by no means straightforward. But are there any works that reflect the image question—­and indeed iconoclasm itself—­more directly? Once again the question yields no easy answers. Among the works in the present exhibition, consider the well-­known case of Lucas van Leyden’s Adoration of the Golden Calf. Here is a painting that represents the corruption of the Israelites in the wilderness that led to their erection of the golden calf—­the same theme used by the polemicists in assailing the corruption that inevitably accompanies idolatry.188 While Moses went up to Sinai to receive the tables of the law, the people of Israel, abandoning their true God, erected the image of a false one. The parallel with Reformed criticism could hardly be more striking; but was the parallel intended? It is hard to imagine that in the context I have been describing the significance of such a subject would have been lost. But there is a further puzzle: if one were to paint a subject that was implicitly critical of the idolatry of Christians (and of Catholicism in particular), why should one do it in the form of precisely the kind of object that was usually attacked? Indeed the work appears to have the form of a small altarpiece, although it is unlikely to have been used as such (despite the usual translation of Van Mander’s kasken as “small altarpiece”).189 One cannot assume that the picture is an example of intentional irony on the part of the painter and that he deliberately made an object on which he painted a subject that implicitly undermined it. But what then are we to make of the subject? Certainly it was new (at least on pictures); but how topical was it? And to what extent—­if at all—­would it have been read in terms of the debate over images? The same questions arise in the case of a number of further objects, and not only paintings. The small panel in Hampton Court for a long time attributed to Lucas van Leiden but now more accurately attributed to the Master of the Sermon in the Church shows St. Sebastian and the priest Polycarp at the sickbed of Prefect Chromatius, but in the background of the picture is a scene of iconoclasm.190 It shows the destruction, authorized by Chromatius himself, of a sumptuous idol in the adjoining chamber, after which the formerly idolatrous Roman prefect was cured.191 Did a subject such as this have any topical reference? We cannot be certain; indeed, if one were, one would have to think of the implications of all those representations of the flight into Egypt which show the collapse of an idol (almost always in the background) as a result of the imminence of Christ. It is unlikely that many of these falling Egyptian idols—­if any at all—­would have been explicitly intended to be understood as allusions to the idolatrous use of Christian images, though there is no question that

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some of them might have been read in this way, whatever the intentions of their creators. And what are the implications and overtones of representations of the idolatry of Solomon, as, for example, in the triptych of around 1525 owned by a Zierikzee burgomaster192 and in many other paintings, glass panels, and prints?193 Similarly, if one looks at the problem from the other side of the debate, one cannot tell whether the representation of the bronze serpent would have carried overtones of the Catholic defense of images. There was no shortage of pro-­image writers who pointed to that particular salvific use of a representation194—­just as there was no shortage of writers, in either camp, who fiercely denied the relevance of Old Testament examples and proscriptions. Questions like these accumulate still further and acquire considerable urgency in the case of a number of printed images after designs by Maarten van Heemskerck. For all their marvelous stylistic innovations, Heemskerck’s paintings of religious subjects were done for straightforwardly Catholic patrons, and their iconography—­aside from a few possible cases of Protestant influence—­seems doctrinally and thematically sound. But with several of his print series the situation is much more complex. In the first place we should remember that they not only reached a much wider audience than the paintings but may well have been intended to cater to specific segments of the market for prints and propaganda—­ whatever Heemskerck’s own views. Perhaps the most interesting series in this respect are those that deal with some of the most dramatic instances of Old Testament idolatry and the overthrow of pagan idol worship by just rulers (even though few of them form part of the usual repertoire). They were published in the years immediately before and after the tumultuous events of 1566. In them the idols could hardly have been more clearly represented, their adoration more crassly shown, or their destruction more paradigmatically suggested. The most striking of the series are The History of Bel and the Dragon, designed in 1564 and published by Hieronymus Cock in the following year (e.g., fig. 17); The History of Ahab and Elijah, engraved and published by Philip Galle; The History of Joash and Athaliah, engraved by Harmen Muller after drawings dated 1567; and The History of King Josiah by Galle (e.g., fig. 19) after studies dated 1569.195 How, in 1565, when the Bel series was first published, could prints such as those showing the vast and ugly image of Bel (which the priests used so cleverly to hoodwink and trick the people) not have been seen as an incitement to iconoclasm—­or at least as an allusion to the greedy exploitativeness of the idolatrous clergy?196 And how could anyone have avoided taking the scene showing the systematic destruction of the temple of Bel and its contents (with the child urinating on a fallen bust in the corner) as the logical outcome of the behavior so graphically exemplified in the preceding prints of the series (fig. 17)?197 Such images are followed after 1566 by the repeated representation of huge idols and patently false priests, of the massacre of the priests

Art and Iconoclasm, 1525–1580: Northern Netherlands

and destruction of images by righteous rulers. Take as examples the opening scenes with the idols in The History of Ahab,198 The Destruction of the House of Baal in the Joash and Athaliah series,199 or the magnificent and sustained commentary on the false use of images and their removal by the king in The Story of Daniel, Bel, and the Dragon, which reaches its height in four prints showing violent and vigorous iconoclasm achieved by means of hammers, ropes, fires, and axes (cf. figs. 17 and 19).200 Who could fail to see the topical relevance of such works? Then there is the question of why Heemskerck should have chosen to represent the priests of Bel in the earlier series as tonsured monks: is this simply anticlerical, or is it more tendentious than that—­particularly in light of the abundantly evident idolatry of these priests and their rightful overthrow?201 Certainly almost every one of these series contains scenes of the slaughter of idolatrous priests. These are not the only allusions to idolatry and to iconoclasm in Heemskerck’s work; there are a number more. And yet for twenty-­t wo years before he died in 1574, Heemskerck was church­warden of St. Bavo’s in Haarlem;202 in the Clades Iudaeorum series he represented the destruction of the temples of Jerusalem by Nebuzaradan and again by Titus (enemies of the true religion);203 and he was a close friend of Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert, who more than anyone else appears to have staved off serious iconoclasm in Haarlem.204 Could it be that in prints like these Heemskerck was not actually advocating the destruction of images but rather suggesting that if the churches were to be purified, then the process should be carried out only at the behest of the rightful authorities—­an idea that is frequent not only in the major Reformation writers but also in Coornhert himself?205 One of the most striking features of all the prints noted above is the emphasis on the presence of the ruler (or the prophet) at each of the major iconoclastic events. But whether this puts these images closer to Catholic attitudes or to those of Luther or Calvin must still remain unclear. The most likely possibility is that the stance is to be aligned with that broad Erasmian strain in Dutch culture to which I have already alluded. We now know, as a result of the work of Ilja Veldman, that if there was any artist at this time who might be called a humanist—­in both the narrow and the broad senses—­it was Heemskerck;206 and in this respect we may well want to come to similar conclusions as those Miedema arrived at in the case of the vastly different objects in Oosterend and Harderwijk. For all that, there is certainly a strong sense in these works by Heemskerck of the potential idolatrousness—­at least—­of images. If there are any images of the sixteenth century that seem to be making a statement in favor of iconoclasm, it is these; could it be that the artist is here only insisting on the right way of going about it? It will be apparent from the abundance of questions raised here how difficult it is to come to specific conclusions either about particular attitudes or about the precise nature of the relationship between topical

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(Facing) 29. Attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, Allegory of Iconoclasm, 1566, etching, 43.5 × 31.5 cm. London, British Museum.

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issues and subject matter. If anything, this is simply an indication of the richly textured context of thought about images and their value during the whole period covered by the exhibition. If it were easier to unravel single strands, then the fabric would be less rich than it palpably is, and one would be less given to insisting on the importance of viewing all images of the period in the context I have been describing. There are of course a number of images of a polemical or satirical nature whose import is not unclear at all; but these—­perhaps interestingly—­seen to come mostly from the South Netherlands. It may simply be a question of survival, but one looks in vain for prints like the remarkable Allegory of Iconoclasm (fig. 29) attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder207 or the anonymous engraving of 1566 headed “’T is al verloren, ghebeden oft ghescheten; ick heb de beste canse ghestreken, 1566.” The first shows a monstrous facelike landscape on which are scattered a variety of scenes showing the abuse of the sacraments and other aspects of Catholic devotion; above is the pope, surrounded by monks and bishops, and festooned with indulgences, rosaries, and the like, while below, the accoutrements of the liturgy (including many images) are being smashed to bits or carted away to destruction.208 The second print shows the removal and destruction of images (in the left background), while on the right a devil carries the cross and other Catholic insignia (“want alle dees cremekie hoort den duyvel toe”—­because all this stuff belongs to the devil—­reads the inscription). Below the devil, monks and bishops worship the pope as the Whore of Babylon seated atop a seven-­headed beast on an altar. One assumes there must have been many others like these; but unfortunately we are left with the more ambiguous kinds of imagery. Perhaps it was simply safer to leave the matter ambiguous; or perhaps it was the effectiveness of the censors that eliminated the more explicit and the more blatantly subversive visual commentaries. There is one artist in whom all these questions come together—­ and yet remain elusively and frustratingly unanswered: Pieter Aertsen. ­Despite the attention devoted to him in the last fifteen years—­most notably by Jan Emmens—­the whole question of how it is that Aertsen came to paint his remarkable kitchen and genre pieces has still not been entirely resolved.209 One can do no more than speculate on the possibility that at least part of the motivation (quite possibly unconscious) may have been impatience with traditional forms of religious art and may well have sprung from the influence of Protestant ideas about such forms and their functions.210 But we cannot know the answers to these questions until we have more biographical information (especially concerning the reasons for his return from Antwerp to Amsterdam in 1556) and further insight into the kinds of works he produced after 1566, when commissions for altarpieces were dramatically limited. Certainly we know of his deep and unsurprising exasperation at the destruction of his works in that year and after.211 But what are we to make of the wholly surprising painting The Idolatry of Nebuchadnezzar now in Rotterdam?212 Here is a

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work that shows the massive and clearly idolatrous image erected by the king of Babylon, while in the background, unmistakably, are the three holy children—­Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—­who were prepared to die for their opposition to the idol that so offensively dominates the scene and is so grossly venerated there.213 It is hard to imagine how the topical significance of the scene could have gone unnoticed by anyone in the Netherlands in the years covered by this exhibition (and the same subject was also represented in print by Heemskerck).214 But we are still left with the puzzle of how exactly a work such as this would have been read and for whom it could have been painted. Perhaps it would be as well not to push the possibility of topical reference too far, since the same subject was painted by Aertsen’s son, Pieter Pietersz., for the Haarlem Guild of Bakers—­for whom the subject was oddly, indeed perversely, appropriate—­in 1575.215 But those were different times. We still know too little about Pieter Aertsen. His work seems to pose in acute form many of the questions suggested in this last section of my discussion. Even if the case of Aertsen fails to provide the answers, no one could deny the extraordinary pertinence of the kinds of issues generated in the great debates around him and the cataclysmic events from which he suffered. They are pertinent to our understanding of Dutch history, pertinent to our understanding of Dutch art, and pertinent to the very roots of the way in which we think about all art. In the period between 1525 and 1580 every doubt that had ever been raised about the artistic endeavor was aired and then subjected to the most critical scrutiny imaginable. Every aspect of the validity and the worth of art was raised and raised again; it was debated, discussed, and argued in countless treatises, sermons, and polemics. In the northern Netherlands, just as in the south, these momentous debates coincided with extraordinary social and political pressures to culminate in a brief but fierce assault on images. What resulted, astonishingly, was not resignation and defeat but rather a sustained and extraordinarily imaginative reevaluation of the Dutch artistic tradition. If ever there was a period that testifies most eloquently to commitment in the face of criticism it is this one. One might have thought that the controversies about images would wither the roots of art or that iconoclasm would remove the evidence of its growth—­but that did not happen at all. Not only did art survive; it flourished. It built innovatively on the past and prepared the way for a magnificently inventive future. But it would be wrong to see the period between 1525 and 1580 solely in terms of transition: its achievements stand distinctively on their own.

IV

The Representation of Martyrdom during the Early Counter-­Reformation in Antwerp* No one who has passed through the rooms in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp containing the works of the generation before Rubens can fail to have been impressed by a group of vivid and often gruesomely depicted martyrdoms. They are, notably (and for the time being I give the current gallery attributions), The Martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian (fig. 30), The Charity and Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian (fig. 31), Diocletian Condemns St. Sebastian to Death and Scenes from the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (reverse of the wings of an altarpiece), and Two Scenes from the Martyrdom of St. George (the wings of an altarpiece), all by Ambrosius Francken.1 * Original publication: “The Representation of Martyrdoms during the Early Counter-­ Reformation in Antwerp.” Burlington Magazine 118 (1976): 128–­38. When this article first appeared in 1976, the taste for martyrdoms in Antwerp at the close of the sixteenth century had not yet been specifically discussed, nor had the context in which they were produced received much attention. At the time I observed that only a few definitive solutions of the attributional problems could then be found. Thanks to the efforts of Carolin Behrmann, this updated version of my “Representation of Martyrdoms” was published in German as “Zu den Märtyrerbildern Antwerpens im späten 16. Jahrhundert,” in Autopsia: Blut-­und Augenzeugen; Extreme Bilder des christlichen Martyriums, ed. Carolin Behrmann and Elisabeth Priedl (Munich: Wilhelm Finck, 2014), 181–­211. I anticipate writing a longer piece on this important chapter in the history of art, religion, and the representation of martyrdom and torture (regarding which see also Freedberg, “Art after Iconoclasm: Painting in the Netherlands between 1566 and 1585,” in Art after Iconoclasm: Painting in the Netherlands between 1566 and 1585, ed. Koenraad Jonckheere and Ruben Suykerbuyk (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), 21–­49. The status questionis of the specific problem addressed here has barely changed since I wrote the original version in 1975–­76 (though attributional issues have of course changed; see particularly the various works by Natasja Peeters cited in the following notes). I expect that it will soon, especially in the light of the work of Koenraad Jonckheere for Antwerp. In the meantime I confine myself to signaling some of the essential bibliographic additions to the topic, as well as to addressing some (but by no means all) of the lacunae and errors in the original text.

30. Ambrosius Francken, The Martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, panel, 271 × 217 cm. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten.

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31. Ambrosius Francken, The Charity and Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian, two panels, each 237 × 89 cm. An­twerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten.

Two important historical events should be mentioned first: the An­ twerp iconoclasm of 1566 and the so-­called silent iconoclasm of 1584. The wave of iconoclasm that swept the Low Countries in 1566 (in Antwerp on August 21–­22 of the same year), although long studied by historians,2 had been totally neglected by art historians until fairly recently.3 Much was destroyed, but some works of art were saved. Catholic services were soon restored. Artistic reputations—­and in particular that of Maarten de Vos4—­were made on the basis of altarpieces, or parts of altarpieces, commissioned to replace those that had been lost in the iconoclasm. Immediately after the uprising a number of theological writers sprang to the defense of images, seeking to eliminate abuses in order to counter at least some of the Protestant criticism of image worship. The Council of Trent’s recommendation three years earlier of ecclesiastical supervision of images was used to the same end by these writers.5 The second event is the more peaceful iconoclasm (the “stille Beeldestorm”) that took place in Antwerp in 1581, when the recently elected

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Calvinist Town Council ordered that images be systematically removed from local churches.6 This took place behind closed doors, to prevent any of the disorderliness and riotous behavior of 1566. When Alexander Farnese, the victorious prince of Parma, finally regained control of Antwerp in 1585, Catholic services were restored yet again, and the guilds and local churches busily started setting up their desecrated altars anew, though these were still difficult years for Antwerp.7 Some of the older paintings were returned, but most had been lost in the intervening period, either through neglect or, occasionally, wanton destruction. New commissions were signed, and this time it was the first generation of Francken brothers—­Hieronymus, Frans, and Ambrosius—­who profited most.8 I cannot deal with all such replacement altars here; let us examine, rather, the scenes of martyrdom that so often formed their subject.9 I begin with the altarpieces from Antwerp Cathedral. The altar of the Oude Handboog10 was seriously damaged in 1566, so in 1575 officials of the guild commissioned a new altarpiece from the aging Michiel Coxcie. The center panel, a straight­forwardly traditional Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, survives, but the wings were lost in the events of May 1581.11 Along with a number of other guilds, the new deans of the Oude Handboog had submitted an application to the recently constituted Calvinist town council (clearly with some prompting from it) to do away with the ornaments of their altar. All these applications insisted on the idolatrous aspect of image worship, in keeping with contemporary Protestant criticism. In addition, they needed to sell their altarpieces and other adornments in order to support the poorer members of their guild, who had suffered badly in the events of the preceding years, particularly during the reign of Alva.12 But as soon as Catholicism was reestablished under Farnese, the Calvinist guild officials were deposed and new Catholic ones appointed. In the case of the Oude Handboog, they applied for the costs of having new wings made—­we do not know how it came about that the central panel was saved—­and the commission went to Ambrosius Francken in 1591.13 On the interior of the wings were representations of St. Sebastian in prison (arousing the brothers Marcus and Marcellinus to die a Christian death in the face of parental exhortations), and the miraculous healing of Zoe. On the outside are two scenes from Sebastian’s martyrdom. Diocletian, rearing back in anger, commands that Sebastian be taken to the place of execution. The grimacing faces—­often toothless and bald—­that characterize this group of works make their appearance behind the saint here. On the right-­hand panel, two executioners attempt to kill Sebastian by beating him vigorously with rods. His body is twisted into a violent contrapposto as he successfully resists their efforts, while a third executioner, lips apart, eyes staring, and back muscles bulging, displays a broken rod to the spectator.14 The altar of the Barbers and Surgeons suffered not dissimilar fortunes. On May 5, 1581, their Calvinist deans signed the usual request to do away with their altar in an orderly and peaceful fashion. This time the whole

The Representation of Martyrdom in Antwerp

altarpiece was lost. Prims states that once order was reestablished, the commission for a new one went to Ambrosius Francken. He dates it 1593.15 The center panel was lost at the time of the French Revolution,16 and we do not know what it represented. The side panels, however, show, on the left, Cosmas and Damian replacing an amputated limb with an artificial one (fig. 31). Various healing activities take place on the raised level in the background. The right-­hand panel shows their martyrdom. In the foreground lies the headless torso of Cosmas, blood spurting from his truncated neck. His head lies beside it. Damian kneels in prayer before the executioner, who has his sword uplifted in readiness for the final blow. Lysias is mounted in the background, with his soldiers. The reverse of the wings represents the two saints in grisaille.17 The Shoemakers’ altar suffered the same fate in May 1581. Only in 1589–­ 90, however, did the new guild officials get round to submitting a request to cover the costs of repairing their altar and adding new ornaments.18 They complained that the dean for 1581 and 1584, a certain Jacques van den Cuype (now fled to Middelburg), had taken it upon himself to sell the ornaments of their altar.19 The new altarpiece showing the martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian was commissioned from Ambrosius Francken and survives in its entirety.20 Rarely has such a collection of grotesque and distorted faces been brought together for the portrayal of a martyrdom. On the left panel the saints, in contorted positions, are being tortured by a group of four devilish figures. Wielding the tools of their trade, the torturers insert awls behind the saints’ fingernails and wrench out their toenails with pincers; in the background the saints are led off to further tortures. On the right-­hand panel they find their terrifying end. There, behind the praying saint, stands the executioner grasping the head he is about to cut off. On the ground below the saint’s clasped hands lies the decapitated torso and head of his brother.21 Through half-­ closed eyes he looks out toward the spectator in the same way as in the Cosmas and Damian panels, and in the Salome panel in Maarten de Vos’s Furriers’ triptych of a generation earlier. The center panel has perhaps the most violent scene of all (see fig. 30).22 Stretched out on benches, the saints are being flayed, but the miracle has already begun: the awls and other instruments spring back at the torturers, who shield themselves, scream, and gesticulate wildly. Central to all of this is the figure of a terrified wide-­eyed torturer standing behind the martyrs’ benches as he tries to pull a nail out of his own cheek and holds a dagger in his outstretched hand as if poised to strike and flay the martyr as another torturer is doing to his brother. Further astonishment is expressed by the emperor in the scene to the right, where the brothers and other martyrs flail about in caldrons of oil.23 Prior to the work of Natasja Peeters on the Francken brothers, the dating of Ambrosius’s representations of martyrdoms in the 1590s varied considerably. Prims’s transcriptions of the documents he found were haphazard, and for a long time his datings were followed by the Antwerp

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Museum. In the 1976 version of the present essay, I myself tended to follow the rather late dates proposed by Zoege von Manteuffel in his article in Thieme-­Becker.24 But it is now clear that no amount of comparison with dated works by Ambrosius, such as his Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes painted for the Baker’s Guild in 1598,25 his signed Triptych of the Holy Sacrament in the Museum in Antwerp,26 and least of all his Carry­ ing of the Cross of 1610 in Ghent, can justify datings after the turn of the century. Indeed, rather than assigning a date as late as 1610 to a work such as the St. Cosmas and Damian altarpiece (fig. 31), it may well be that among the latest of the works that form the subject of this essay are the St. George wings from St. George’s Church in Antwerp, which Peeters documented as having been painted in 1595–­98.27 Rather than thinking of the astonishing right-­hand panel as a kind of prolusio to the vigor and viciousness of the other martyrdoms discussed here, we should see the twisted body of St. George as repeating the figure of St. Sebastian in the wing now datable to 1591. It is clear that by the turn of the century the fashion for such works had already begun to subside, rather than just beginning then (as Zoege van Manteuffel implied in his 1933 review28 of Gabriel’s misleading book on the Franckens,29 now entirely superseded by Peeters’s dissertation and articles).30 The Martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian (fig. 30) can on no account be attributed to Hieronymus Francken, as Gabriels suggested in her book.31 We now know enough about Hieronymus for the attribution to fail. Almost all of his life after 1566 was spent in Paris. He did return to Antwerp for a short period between 1585 and 1588, but he never became a citizen of the town nor a master in the Guild of St. Luke.32 The Martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian bears little resemblance to the one certain religious work by him, the Nativity in the Church of the Cordeliers in Paris (signed and dated 1585),33 of about the same time to which Gabriels wished to date the Shoemakers’ altarpiece.34 On the other hand, it may comfortably be said to belong to the group of martyrdoms by Ambrosius Francken and his workshop. It shows the same arbitrary treatment of muscles and drapery with the same flat and dull colors. On this basis it comes after the Sebastian wings, probably around the same time as the panels with Saints Cosmas and Damian. The fact that the documents on which Prims based his discussion all refer to the closing years of the sixteenth century does not really affect the argument. There are many instances during this whole period—­most notably in the case of the high altar of Antwerp Cathedral35—­where requests were submitted for new altarpieces, negotiations concluded, and contracts signed long before the relevant work was finally delivered. The representation of martyrdoms in all their vividness was of course not new in the Netherlands—­in the sixteenth century one thinks immediately of the right wing of Quinten Massys’s famous 1505 Lamentation altarpiece for the Joiners’ Guild, where the Evangelist was shown in his

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32. Frans Pourbus the Elder, Martyrdom of Saint George, 1577, oil on two panels, together 340 × 121 cm. Dunkirk, Musée des Beaux-­Arts de Dunkerque.

vat of boiling oil, surrounded by jubilantly grimacing onlookers.36 Frans Floris’s equally famous Fall of the Rebel Angels painted for the Swordsmen’s Guild in 155437 sparked off—­and sustained—­a growing interest in the possibilities of muscular sword-­wielding figures and tumbling or fallen naked bodies. In 1574–­75 Michiel Coxcie painted a vivid Martyr­ dom of St. George,38 while three years later Frans Pourbus painted his Martyrdom of Saint George (Dunkirk, fig. 32),39 where on the center panel St. George, with his hands crossed over his chest, awaits the blow from the sword-­swinging executioner. In this respect he foreshadowed the Francken martyrdoms of a later period, and even more clearly on the left wing, where the saint is bound back to a wooden pole: he casts his eyes heavenward while a half-­nude figures lies fallen toward the front edge of the picture and another lurches outward, the whites of his eyes showing and his mouth emitting a cry of pain. In this painting, as in his St. Matthew and the Angel of 1573 in Brussels, Frans Pourbus explores possibilities that were only to be developed years later in the Netherlands.40

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Karel van Mander’s Martyrdom of St. Catherine, which was painted in 1582 for the Linen Workers’ Guild in St. Maarten’s in Courtrai, is not dissimilar to the Pourbus painting.41 It is his first known painting, and the only work to survive from his Flemish period, painted just before he fled to Haarlem. The wings were lost, but the center panel shows St. Catherine kneeling in much the same fashion as Pourbus’s St. George, although her eyes are modestly downcast. Behind her the executioner swings his sword, about to let it drop. On the left the emperor rides on horseback, and in the right foreground lies a pile of decapitated torsos, their heads scattered beside them. The middle torso, seen from the back, is clearly derived from the same prototype as the fallen figure on the left wing of the painting by Pourbus. But it was only after Farnese’s reestablishment of the Catholic faith in Antwerp in 1585 that the representation of martyrdoms acquired the declamatory and monumental tone we have already seen in the Francken group. Expressions become emphatically vivid, instruments of torture are graphically depicted, and the increasingly large paintings are filled with figures and activity of all kinds. It must, to some extent, have been the growing popularity of Maarten de Vos that made the old Michiel Coxcie retreat from Antwerp to his hometown of Mechlin. His 1588 Martyrdom of St. George for the Longbowmen’s Guild in the St. Romuald Church there is one of the most turbulent of all such scenes during this period of Antwerp painting.42 The center panel shows the saint bound to a fearsome wheel, which the executioners are about to set in motion. It breaks, and the other torturers, beset by fear, take to their heels. In the top right-­hand corner an angel holds out the martyr’s crown. The wings show St. George before Diocletian and, once again, the decapitation of the saint.43 Now although it was fairly common practice for a guild whose patron saint was St. George to have him represented on their altarpiece ( just as longbowmen’s guilds of St. Sebastian almost always had that saint depicted) what is surprising about this work is the fact that so gruesome and violent an aspect of his martyrdom was chosen, not only for the side panels but for the center panel as well. After all, other scenes from his life might have been chosen for that. This is a question to which we shall return later. In the meantime let us turn to two of the most important martyrdoms produced for Antwerp churches in the 1590’s, by the two leading painters of the time. In 1594 Maarten de Vos (who for twenty years had been responsible for replacing the most important guild altars lost in 1566)44 painted The Execution of St. James the Greater for the high altar of the Church of St. James in Antwerp.45 The bare-­chested saint kneels in the center, his hands clasped in prayer. Around him stand his three executioners, but only the left one stands in the contorted pose and with the sort of grimac-

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ing expression developed so fully by Francken. In comparison with the latter’s works, this is a relatively calm scene, with the calling of the saint in the left background, Christ’s transfiguration behind in the center, and in the background on the right Herod Agrippa, who wears the kind of orientalizing turban common to all these works. The wings were painted by Ambrosius Francken in 1611. For once they do not show additional scenes of martyrdom but rather Salome the wife of Zebedee praying for her sons James and John, and the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus.46 Otto van Veen, the second master of Rubens, became a master in Antwerp only in 1593, although he had been producing independent works before that.47 The following year he was commissioned by the deacons of the Church of St. Andrew to paint its high altar.48 The final painting was not delivered until 1599, after years of deliberation over the sketch and modello, both of which survive.49 It is a very large panel (437 × 287 mm) with no wings, entirely dominated by St. Andrew’s cross, which is bathed in rays of light, just as recounted by the Legenda Aurea. The mounted Roman governor sternly issues his command on the right; putti fly above with laurel crowns, which one of the soldiers tries to push away with his lance in the air; a coarse-­faced figure binds St. Andrew to the cross; and three straining and muscular figures help to erect it. The saint himself wears the briefest of loincloths and, as usual, casts his ecstatic glance heavenward. Representations of the crucifixion of St. Andrew were not uncommon in the second half of the sixteenth century, but they generally formed only part of a series of paintings depicting the life of the saint, as in Frans Pourbus’s series of small panels in St. Bavo in Ghent.50 In the Van Veen painting, however, the martyrdom of the saint is conceived as an independent episode on an impressive and overwhelming scale. It is a work that cannot be forgotten when considering Rubens’s treatment of the same subject in the closing years of his life, painted for the high altar of the church of the Hospital of San Andrés de los Flamencos (fig. 33).51 Of all Rubens’s mature works displaying indebtedness to his old teacher Otto van Veen, this is certainly the closest. Here too are the women at the left, the mounted governor on the right, the muscular torsos heaving up the diagonal cross, and the laurel-­bearing putti, all energetically transformed in Rubens’s hands. There is one further painting we need to consider here: Wenzel Coeberger’s Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, now in Nancy, painted in 1598–­99 while Coeberger was still in Rome for the altar of the guild of the Jonge Handboog.52 This also had a checkered fortune as a result of the events of 1566 and 1581. Hans Vlieghe has published with admirable clarity the documents that relate to the commissioning of a new altarpiece in 1568, depicting the nativity (delivered in 1572).53 It was lost in 1581, and a replacement commissioned in 1586, with designs by Vredeman de Vries.54 But for

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33. Rubens, The Martyr­ dom of St. Andrew, ca. 1639, oil on canvas, 306 × 216 cm. Madrid, Fundación Carlos de Amberes.

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some reason—­perhaps the new fashion for single-­paneled altarpieces enclosed in a monumental sculpted portico—­the guild remained dissatisfied and between 1596 and 1598 commissioned a third new altar­piece. It was to be designed by Otto van Veen, with carved work by the Colijns de Nole brothers.55 Coeberger was commissioned to do the center panel, which was sent from Rome to Antwerp upon its completion in 1599.56 As one might have expected from a guild of longbowmen, it bears a representation of St. Sebastian. But the martyr is not shown as the target of arrows; instead he is being prepared for his martyrdom. His face wears an expression of patience and sublime anticipation as he prepares to suffer for his unshakable faith. Again, his eyes turn to heaven. An open-­mouthed

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old man glowers up at him; two more bind his feet. In the middle ground are various scenes from his life, including the Roman army led by a splendidly plumed rider. Putti bearing the laurel crown hover in the glowing light above his head. This painting marks the end of the sixteenth century in Antwerp, and it shares some characteristics with the group of martyrdoms attributed to Ambrosius Francken.57 The question that remains is whether it is possible to account for this preference—­one might almost call it a taste—­for the depiction of martyrdoms during this long-­neglected period of Antwerp painting. It is the time of Rubens’s youth. Catholicism is firmly reestablished. Painters’ works are no longer threatened by iconoclasm, but a general awareness of Protestant criticism of images remains. The Council of Trent’s decree on painting in 1563 had failed to check such criticisms, and the host of pro-­image works produced in the wake of the first iconoclasm was not an effective counter. What, then, may have encouraged the depiction of these martyrdoms, in the manner described above, from the time of Farnese’s conquest of 1585 onward? It has occasionally been claimed that as a result of the Tridentine decree on painting, the church authorities of Antwerp were concerned to restrict the central panels of altarpieces to representations of Christ and to have the saints and their martyrdoms relegated to secondary posi­tions.58 This may have arisen from their sensitivity to and self-­consciousness about the cult of saints in the face of the attacks on that practice by both Calvinists and Lutherans. But obviously it does not apply to the period in which these vast and violent paintings were produced. Let us turn to some of the printed works that were published during this period, from the very beginning of Farnese’s restoration of the faith. Richard Verstegen’s immediately popular Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis, which first appeared in Antwerp in 1587, with a second edition and a French translation in the following year,59 depicts in gruesome detail the tortures to which contemporary martyrs were subjected by Protestant heretics in Britain, France, and Germany. These illustrations, in both words and engravings, prepare one for the Francken paintings of some years later (indeed Michiel Coxcie’s Martyrdom of St. George had already been painted in Mechlin by 1588).60 There is the same interest in mutilated parts of the body, and in both book and painting the martyrs are often shown on the point of death, bearing final and exemplary witness to the faith they held unwaveringly. Thus were the true faithful to be encouraged.61 On the other hand, thanks to recent research on Coxcie and Frans Pourbus, it has now become clear that many of the developments in book illustration were actually preceded by paintings of the mid-­1570s. The blunt and often grisly detail of their paintings of martyrdoms may well have been inspired by the cruelties that followed upon the iconoclasm of 1566, the repressive policies of Alva’s regime, and finally the sack of Antwerp in 1576. They also surely owe much to raging

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controversies over the relationship between early Christian and contemporary martyrdoms, often described in the most explicit and graphic detail (as in the all too topical case of the martyrs of Gorcum in 1572). In 1588 Christoffel Plantin managed to publish the Martyrologium Romanum of Cesare Baronio, which he had hoped would be the definitive version.62 In his introduction Baronius pointed out the use of the book: “The commemoration of the innocence, charity, fortitude, and other virtues of the Saints provides us with the keenest possible stimuli. Not only do they greatly arouse us, but also, with their example set before us, they make us acknowledge our own idleness.”63 The idea was not a new one, and it was especially current in Italy as well. It had already found a place as an integral part of the Tridentine decree on painting, once often—­but no longer!—­dismissed as an influence on the art of the early Counter-­Reformation. In reformulating the medieval doctrine of the benefits of images (derived in particular from Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas), the decree stated that not only were the people reminded thereby of the benefits and gifts bestowed on them by Christ, but also “through the saints the miracles of God and salutary examples are set before the eyes of the faithful, so that they may fashion their own life and conduct in imitation of the saints and be moved to adore and love God and to cultivate piety.”64 Now although an attempt was soon made to introduce the council’s decrees in the Netherlands, they had a hostile and resentful reception there, especially in Antwerp;65 and the events of 1566 postponed their further execution for a number of years. It was only beginning in 1585 that Farnese could ensure that they were fully implemented.66 One of the consequences of the 1566 iconoclasm, however, was the spate of writings it provoked immediately afterward in defense of images, as I have already noted. I cannot go into these here,67 but we should remember that devotion to images had long been closely associated with the cult of saints; thus many of these works contained long passages on the importance of the saints within Christian worship. Some works dealt exclusively with this aspect of the image question,68 emphasizing the exemplary nature of their lives and, especially, their martyrdoms: they were to provide models for imitation, and their fortitude was to encourage true Christians who were being subjected to persecution for their steadfast adherence to the true and Catholic faith. Johannes Garetius, a Ghent Augustinian, for example, devoted the whole of his De Sanctorum Invocatione Liber (1570) to justifying the invocation of the saints.69 Like so many other writers of the time, he depended almost entirely on traditional arguments, but he did include a significant quotation that is not found in the other works focusing on image worship. Gregory of Nyssa is quoted in the short section on “the usefulness of painting” (utilitas picturae), and his words adumbrate the preoccupation with martyrdoms of the

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late sixteenth century. A painter of the martyrdom of St. Theodore, he said, expressed “the glorious deeds of the martyr, his labors and tortures, the savage aspect of the tyrants, the violence, the blazing and flame-­spewing furnace” in vivid detail. “These he knowledgeably set forth, artistically describing the trials of the martyr as if in a speaking book . . . for he knew that even a silent picture on the wall speaks and contributes much that is useful.”70 And with that Garetius lapsed into the commonplace terms used to justify images. Only three years later (and again in 1577 and 1583), Johannes ­Molanus,71 arguably the most important writer for the pro-­image party after the Council of Trent, published his new edition of Usuard’s martyrology in Louvain.72 But this attempt to codify the sufferings of the saints was premature; the work of Baronius published in 1588 constituted a more acceptable version. In addition, Molanus published a small work on the Belgian saints, the Indiculus sanctorum Belgii (also 1573 and 1583),73 a comforting parallel, perhaps, to all those Catholics who were then ­being made to undergo trials themselves at the hands of heretics; and in 1595 his executors succeeded in publishing a more substantial work, the Natales sanctorum Belgii.74 None of these works, however, describe the martyrdoms of the saints in the same detail as the paintings I have discussed. What then was the major literary source to which the painters could turn for the scenes they chose to represent? The answer seems reasonably clear. Although Baronius gave the prime sources for the lives of the saints in his notes more fully than any of the preceding martyrologies had done—­some indeed cited no sources at all—­it was to the admirable work of Laurentius Surius that painters would have turned for the fullest accounts of these martyrdoms. Surius’s De probatis sanctorum historiis, published in six volumes in Cologne each year between 1570 and 1576,75 was soon accepted as the authoritative version of the lives of the saints.76 In it may be found every detail of the Francken martyrdoms. The life of Sts. Crispin and Crispinian, for example, recounts their punishment of being stretched by pulleys, the stakes that were driven into them and then sprang back at the executioners, their immersion in boiling lead, the molten metal that shot into the eye of their persecutor Rictiovarus, the wrenching out of their finger-­and toenails, and so on.77 The same fullness of detail may be found in the lives of Sts. Cosmas and Damian and St. George, and in the unusual scenes from the life of St. Sebastian.78 Surius’s work, it should be emphasized, was the first of its kind to be regarded as acceptable by the post-­Tridentine Church. The Golden Legend, on the other hand, did not contain all the above-­mentioned scenes and was thoroughly dis­approved of during this period—­a favorite term for it among many of the ecclesiastical writers was not the Legenda Aurea but the Legenda Plumbea, the Leaden Legend.79 Works such as the Theatrum and those of Garetius, Molanus, and Baronius indicate a general interest—­and a most committed one—­in

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the tribulations of the martyrs of the church, but they do not altogether account for the way in which the martyrdoms were expressed in these paintings. We must look further for parallels to their carefully depicted tortures, their grim and violent details. And was not Trent itself concerned to eliminate that which was apocryphal or not wholly canonical in the lives of the saints? It may be easy to account for a martyrdom of St. Sebastian when it was intended to adorn the altar of a longbowmen’s guild, but why choose to depict the most actively gruesome aspects of the punishment and demise of saints like St. George or Sts. Crispin and Crispinian on all three panels of an altarpiece? We can never altogether understand the psychological need for such works, but we come closer when we look through the Theatrum’s graphic illustrations of contemporary martyrdoms, or indeed when we go on to read in Baronius’s letter to his readers of the way in which he conceived his task. He declared that he had taken particular care to discuss “those instruments and machines with which the most abominable opponents of the faith crucified and tore apart, in the most terrible ways, the bravest and most courageous martyrs.”80 And he hoped that he had not erred in the explication of the various instruments of their torture. The literary and pictorial representation of torture scenes was by no means confined to the South Netherlands in these years, although their depiction in panel paintings was unparalleled elsewhere. One of the most disturbing illustrated books from the end of the sixteenth century is the still much-­reprinted work of the Oratorian Antonio Gallonio, Trattato degli instrumenti di martirio, which appeared in Rome in 1591.81 It is a horrifying work. With little introduction it categorized the various modes of torturing martyrs, illustrating each method in exceptionally graphic ways. Chapter 1, for example, was titled “Della Croce, e Pali, e modi di sospendere” and covered all sorts of variations on methods of hanging. The plate on page 11 depicts seven different ways of hanging and crucifixion; on page 13 there is a plate showing even more horrifying forms of suspension; and the plates on the succeeding two rectos, still illustrating modes of suspension, are grimmer yet. Under each of these catalogue entries, as it were, of tortures, are listed some of the martyrs who suffered them. Thus in the chapter headed “Delle Rote Troclee e Torchio,” St. George is cited beside that part of the plate which is explained by the caption “Martire legato al converso d’una rota stretta, e col corpo ignudo giranto sopra ferri taglienti” (martyr tied to the back of a wheel, with naked body revolving over sharp metal blades); in the same chapter a few pages on, Sts. Crispin and Crispinian are cited as examples of the “Martire stirato colla troclea” (martyr stretched out by a pulley) beside the relevant illustra­tion. The catalogue continues through every variation of battering, stretching, whipping, stoning, and squashing to baking, burning, flailing and live burial, for over 150 fully illustrated pages. There are at least three plates, interspersed among the other illustrations, that are

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simply ornamental assemblages of various instruments of torture. With this sort of work emanating from Rome, it is clear that the gruesomeness of the Antwerp martyrdoms was by no means an isolated phenomenon but rather a common aspect of the image culture associated with the late sixteenth-­century cult of martyrs. Both Baronius and Gallonio were priests in the Congregation of the Oratory, but another, perhaps more important, group was responsible for the great torture cycles in Rome: the Jesuits. Already in his important 1957 book on the art of the Counter-­Reformation and Scipione Pulzone, which attempts to assess what we mean by religious art around 1585, Federico Zeri suggested the connection between Jesuit visual strategies and the extraordinary frescoes in San Tommaso di Canterbury, Santo Stefano Rotondo, San Vitale, and Sant’Apollinare.82 Though all quite different stylistically speaking, it is in the choir of San Vitale and in the fresco cycle by Niccolò Circignani and Antonio Tempesta around the circumference of Santo Stefano Rotondo that we find the closest parallels to the meticulous brutality of the Francken martyrdoms of some years later. In his provocative review of Zeri’s book,83 Francis Haskell published one of the few documents that point decisively to Jesuit encouragement of torture scenes. The obituary of the rector of the German College, Padre Michele Lauretano (d. 1587), claimed that he was the first to have the martyrdoms of the saints depicted in the churches, “con le sue note che dichiarono le persone et le qualità di tormenti” (with its inscriptions indicating the persons [that is, the names of the saints] and the kinds of tortures),84 Among other examples of the growing fashion cited by Haskell is San Lorenzo in Damaso, decorated under the patronage of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. In recent years a vast amount of attention has been paid to the question of the relationship between the Jesuits and these early forms of the Counter-­Reformation representation of martyrdoms in Roman churches, particularly Santo Rotondo.85 Attention has also been paid to the abundance of printed material paralleling (or reproducing) the painted scenes of martyrdom in the abovementioned Roman churches, beginning with the first edition (1587) of Giulio Roscio’s Triumphus martyrum in D. Stephano in Monte Coelio expressus of the same year as Verstegen’s gruesomely illustrated Theatrum.86 The Triumphus martyrum was reprinted two years later, along with Roscio’s Emblemata sacra S. Stephani caeli montis intercolumniis affixa, while Maarten de Vos’s own remarkable title page (engraved by C. van der Passe) to the series titled Triumphus martyrum appeared in Antwerp two years after that, in 1591, the very year of the first Roman edition of Gallonio’s treatise. The phenomenon of graphically and sometimes horrifically depicted martyrdoms with parallel illustration in paint and in print was clearly a pan-­European one; and the vivid grimness of the Francken altarpieces thus find their equivalents in places at the very heart of Catholic Christendom.87

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As we have seen, Farnese’s reestablishment of the Catholic faith in Flanders in 1585 coincided with a new taste for martyrdoms and torture scenes in the Netherlands.88 There is abundant evidence to indicate his support for the establishment and renewal of a number of religious orders, and his active encouragement of the Jesuits.89 Their religious education and indoctrination initiative soon got under way and was intended as an important part of the program for religious revival. We might, of course, try to connect the Jesuits’ direct and immediate appeal to the emotions as manifested in their approach to the faith with the martyrdoms that are contemporary with the growth of their houses in the South Netherlands, but documents like those from Rome would be more useful to establish such connections. I have not been able to find such documents in the Antwerp archives, but a search for them would be a rewarding task. By the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, there is a new attitude toward painting in the South Netherlands. By the time of the signing of the truce in 1609, Catholicism had been set on a firm footing there. The new archdukes, Albert and Isabella, continued to lend their support to the by now well established and influential Jesuit houses.90 A certain mood of confidence prevailed, with the true religion no longer so threatened by attacks from its opponents. Neither literary descriptions nor painted representations of the saints were required to be as didactically assertive as they had been in the preceding quarter century.91 Qualities such as this would now yield to a search for authenticity and a return to original sources. Heribert Rosweyde’s sober Fasti sanctorum, which proved to be but a specimen of the gigantic enterprise of the Bollandists, appeared in 1607.92 And in 1608 Rubens returned from Italy to his native town of Antwerp.

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V

The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm* While Byzantine iconoclasm has received much attention from scholars, European iconoclasm, until very recently, has been a surprisingly neglected phenomenon.1 Byzantinists have been prepared to explore the implications and significance of iconoclasm generally, for both theological history and the history of art, and have not shrunk from arguing tenaciously about its genesis, motivation, and scope. But the same cannot be said for European historians: iconoclasm in post-­Byzantine Europe still awaits adequate comprehensive treatment. Outbreaks of iconoclasm in Europe have not always been minor and isolated events. In the Reformation it swept countries like England, Germany, France, and the Netherlands—­to say nothing of Eastern Europe—­with a vigor that was as great as anything in the eighth and ninth centuries, and with a polemical backing that was perhaps greater. And the issues it raises parallel those of Byzantine iconoclasm. Even the arguments against images were entirely derivative. Nothing could be more misleading than to insist on the absence of a connection, either in fact or in spirit, between the iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries and that of the Reformation.2 An attempt will be made here to point to some of the manifold similarities that link these phenomena. There are structural similarities as well, and it is in the framework of these that one may also consider such events as the bruciamenti of Savonarola’s Florence and the iconoclasm of the French Revolution. A useful analysis of iconoclasm, both in general and in particular, may be achieved by considering the problems raised under the following headings. Each poses questions that must be asked in the case of almost all iconoclastic activity and that provide a basis for comparison between events that are distant in time and space. The aim is to discover * Original publication: “The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm,” in Iconoclasm, ed. Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1977), 165–­77.

Chapter Five

ways in which individual outbreaks may cast light on each other, and to point to general features of both Byzantine and European iconoclasm which are characteristic of the phenomenon as a whole. While some of the questions have been frequently raised, others have often been overlooked. Few of them can be considered entirely apart from the others. Theory

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It would be an impossible task to survey everything that was written against images. It would also be a dull one: variations in interpretations of the Second Commandment are endless, and so are the squabbles about how images could or could not reflect the unmaterial Godhead. One side would say that the only true image of God was man, while the other claimed that one could have images precisely because Christ was the incarnate image, eikōn, of the divine.3 Did the honor paid to an image refer to its prototype, or were Christian images really no better than pagan idols? These are the questions that recur from the very first writers on Christian imagery onward.4 It is unnecessary to deal with Eusebius’s letter to Constantia, the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis, Hypatius’s rebuttal of Julian of Atramytion, and the horoi of the Iconoclastic Councils of 754 and 815 here, because all of these have already received much attention in the literature.5 They are worth enumerating, however, because every one of the arguments that appears in them reappears, with appalling monotony, in the writings of the Reformation critics of images—­from Zwingli and Calvin right down to the vernacular publicists.6 Obviously their utilization of the sources varies, but there is not a new argument, nor even a new emphasis, between them. The important—­and useful—­difference is that whereas most of the Byzantine arguments against images are preserved only in the writings of those who seek to rebut such arguments, the Reformation writings have come down to us in their original form. The method of argument is always the same: the marshaling of vast numbers of older sources, some authentic and some spurious, and innumerable quibbles about their validity. The same christological arguments appear, the same charges of idolatry (although in the Byzantine discussions the emphasis on this varies),7 the same parallels with pagan practices, and the same insistence on the uncircumscribable and unmaterial nature of God.8 Images (after all, made only of wood and stone) work miracles that are quite improbable, it is claimed, and relics are held to be an overestimated—­and oversupplied—­ commodity. All the technical points recur, and Calvin, often a livelier writer than one might expect, makes fun of the distinctions between concepts such as proskynesis latreutikē and schetikē, between latreia and douleia.9 Then there is the delicate matter of the meaning of eikōn. Apart from the

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metaphysical, human-­oriented, and Word-­oriented interpretations of that term,10 some writers claim that the only true image of Christ is the Eucharist,11 while others hold that the only image that should be tolerated is the cross itself. In the Reformation, it is true, one finds more sweeping denials than previously of the intercessory abilities of the saints (ordinary human beings can communicate directly with God), so images of the saints are given short shrift.12 But at the same time—­in the Reformation as much as in Byzantium—­the saints are described as living images of Christ; and there is a call for their imitation in place of mere devotion to representations of them. We find this call from Amphilochios of Ikonion in the fourth century down to the Modern Devotion of the Netherlands in the fifteenth century.13 Luther is the most tolerant of Reformed writers. Melanchthon sees religious images as adiaphora (unless they are abused), Zwingli allows the painting of historical scenes outside churches, and Calvin is critical of almost all religious imagery.14 The popular writers, from Ludwig Hätzer in 152215 to Didericus Camphuysen in the seventeenth century,16 tend to be much more critical than the major Reformers. They would do away with all portraits, all tomb imagery, all representations on coins, seals, and other purely secular objects17—­to say nothing of pornographic images in domestic or public places.18 In this respect, there is some divergence from the Byzantine polemic. Many of the later critics were, after all, popular writers presenting their ideas in vernacular form. They were not always clerics. It was through them, and through preachers from the thirteenth century through ­Savonarola to the field preachers of the Netherlands, that theological ideas filtered down into the popular imagination. Theological argument does bear a direct relationship to iconoclastic practice. Whatever the motivation of the individual iconoclast, he could always justify his action by appealing to some semblance of theological thought. One tore down images, it was often claimed on the spot, not because one was excited or greedy for gain but because of the idolatrous connotations of images.19 Motivation

At this stage one must consider iconoclasm itself and the iconoclastic act. The scope of this subject is too broad to permit analyses of specific outbursts, but a number of questions immediately arise. In the first place, one simply asks: why do people destroy images? That, in many ways, is a question that goes beyond the bounds of historical analysis, but it would beg too many questions to ignore the element of fear in people’s attitudes toward images or to overlook the belief in magical properties supposed to inhere in them. Kitzinger’s brilliant study of the cult of images before iconoclasm provides a model analysis of the hold of the image on the popular imagination in a particular period,20 and it is helpful to assume

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with him that the common denominator of beliefs and practices that attribute magical properties to images is that the distinction between the image and the person represented is to some extent eliminated.21 I suggest that there is an unspoken and possibly unconscious awareness of this in that favorite argument of all defenders of images, taken out of context from St. Basil and used from his time through the sixteenth century and after, that the honor paid to an image passes to its prototype.22 There is no question that when image and prototype are conflated, images become prone to abuses. This is why images themselves, and not only what they represent, work miracles. When one considers this along with the fact that it is usually only holy images, consecrated in one way or another, that work miracles, it is not surprising to find a potentially explosive situation. “As long as images remain in the sculptor’s workshop,” claimed an anonymous but frequently reprinted Netherlandish Calvinist, “they can do no miracles—­until they are brought into the Church.”23 And here one remembers the tale of the man who, having failed to receive a cure at the shrine of Cosmas and Damian, shouted that they were impostors with no power to do any good.24 In moving on to the broader motivations to destroy images, it is important to distinguish between destruction and removal ordained from above and spontaneous attacks from below. These are often concomitant phenomena, and frequently the orders from above simply provide the initial impulse, giving free rein to expressions of popular antipathy. Iconoclasm can be ordained by the ruler, as in Constantinople, and in England under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth, or by a person or group temporarily in power, as in Florence in the 1490s,25 in Münster during the Anabaptist uprising,26 under the Long Parliament once again in England,27 and during the French Revolution.28 It often, almost always, has a significant political dimension. Although the motivation of Byzantine iconoclasm is a vexed issue, even there it seems safe to say that it goes hand in hand with a reassertion of imperial authority.29 Images are symbols of a deposed ruling class, as in Florence and the French Revolution, or of a hated one, as in the Netherlands in 1566, where field preachers and the middle nobility grouped together to provoke and then organize the great iconoclastic outburst that marked the beginning of the revolt against Spain.30 Another aspect of motivation is frequently mentioned in the anti-­image polemics but all too often discounted as a real impulse to iconoclasm: resentment of the populace, especially in times of economic stress, against the expense represented by images. Such feelings are exploited by the polemicists, who repeatedly harp on the disgraceful wealth expended on making fine statues, paintings, and other liturgical accessories, money that could have been more usefully expended on clothing the poor—­all of whom, after all, had been created in God’s own image.31 Here is another instance where iconoclastic theory and practice converge.

The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm

Other conditions of stress, too, may help trigger iconoclasm. Once the abuses and theological weaknesses of images are made clear, it is not difficult to suggest that blame may be laid on them for various aspects of God’s wrath, such as military setbacks—­especially when images fail to fulfill their expected apotropaic or palladian function.32 But what of the immediate impulse for image destruction, the spark that lights the fire? Sometimes it is not particularly useful to think in these terms, as when those in authority decree a particular day on which the systematic destruction of images is to commence.33 But often there is an individual action, both when iconoclasm is ordained and when it is an act of rebellion, that breaks the spell of an image and may release a whole range of pent­up emotions. One can think of many cases ranging from early Byzantium to the people who mocked and then pelted Antwerp’s patron image of the Madonna after she had been carried round the city’s streets in the annual procession on August 22, 1566.34 In Antwerp and Wittenberg these individual acts were immediately followed by inflammatory sermons denouncing images.35 Such instances provoked more widespread acts of iconoclasm, giving courage, it would seem, to men suddenly made to realize the helplessness of images previously supposed to have had superhuman and supernatural powers. Participants

Good accounts are given by the chroniclers of the actual destruction of images. We know in many cases from them what instruments were used and how images in relatively inaccessible positions were brought down. For the Reformation we have some illustrations, in painting and engraving, showing iconoclasm in action.36 We also know about the people who participated, and here it is possible to be misled by the sources. The violent wave of iconoclasm in the Netherlands was long thought to be an outburst of popular anger against a repressive regime, but it is now clear that it was organized by field preachers and some of the lower nobility.37 Hired men often took the lead and showed the way to further destruction.38 The participation of clergymen and monks who had convinced themselves of the wrongfulness of images is well documented from Byzantium to the Reformation and the French Revolution. We know that during the Byzantine iconoclastic periods there were iconoclastic monks and monasteries.39 In the reign of Edward VI, a bishop named Nicholas Ridley not only preached against images but actively encouraged their destruction.40 Many lapsed clerics participated in the destruction in the Netherlands,41 even though hounding of the clergy usually went hand in hand with iconoclasm.42 Perhaps even more surprising is the participation of artists themselves: one can only wonder at what must have passed through their minds as they turned their backs on the very concept which sustained their live-

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lihood. During one of Savonarola’s bruciamenti, Fra Bartolommeo and Lorenzo di Credi are supposed to have consigned some of their works to the flames;43 in the Netherlands van Mander recorded that Joos van Lier gave up painting altogether because of the strength of his religious beliefs;44 and even though artists were attacked for not recording the great events of the French Revolution, “no group seemed more anxious to join the iconoclastic crusade than the artists themselves.”45 Soon after the opening of the National Convention, David himself demanded that the effigies of kings and cardinals in the Academy’s school in Rome be destroyed.46 Such examples are worthy of attention not only because of modern idealistic notions about the integrity of artistic endeavor. There are indications that artists like these gave some thought to the problem of pursuing their calling in times when the validity of their productions was being undermined.47 Some gave up painting altogether. Modes of Destruction: Mutilation and Deconsecration

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The next question to ask might be this: in what ways were images damaged or destroyed? This aspect of iconoclasm in progress can be particularly illuminating about attitudes toward images, and it has been somewhat neglected in scholarly research on the topic. On many occasions one is told exactly what part of the image was destroyed, and it is clear that wholesale destruction was not always the aim. The aim is to render images powerless, to deprive them of those parts that may be considered to embody their effectiveness.48 This is why images are very often mutilated rather than wholly destroyed. Once deconsecrated, they lose their power: they are deprived of their holiness. For that, they need only be removed from the context of the consecrated. Relief sculptures and vessels embossed with figures are scraped down,49 the heads of saints are broken off, and the Infant Christ is removed from the arms of the Virgin, which are then amputated,50 or her crown is taken away. When John the Grammarian is removed to a monastery after the restoration of Orthodoxy, he displays his continued devotion to his principles by having the eyes of a picture cut out;51 in Münster the standards of medieval justice are purposefully applied to effigies by depriving them of their extremities or appropriate sense organs.52 There too, images of the upper classes and of members of the previous administration, from bishops to court and treasury officials, have their heads defaced to emphasize the anonymous equality of the new order.53 In East Stoneham an image of St. Thomas Becket is turned into a female saint at the behest of Henry himself.54 Inscriptions are removed, seals destroyed. Obviously, when iconoclasm is subsumed under attacks on imperial or royal power, images that personify it come under particular fire.55 Opponents of Elizabeth slashed her portraits, defaced her arms, even hanged her in effigy.56 It is surprising that Basil’s explanation of the nature of Christ in terms of

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the honor paid to images of the emperor was not more frequently used as a polemical resource for attacking both images of Christ and of the emperor.57 In fact, assaults on the two by no means always go together. Distinctions and Discrimination

The question of the degree to which iconoclasts discriminate—­if at all—­ between the images they confront haunts the history of image-­breaking. Which images are singled out for destruction and which ones left alone? Such questions, when answerable, provide what are perhaps the most positive clues to the motives of iconoclasts—­and those motives are not always easy to isolate when considered from the point of view of chroniclers and theorists alone. There are, admittedly, occasions when the fury of iconoclasts knows no bounds and every image is destroyed—­even when monetary rewards are offered to individual iconoclasts to refrain from doing so, as in the Netherlands in the 1560s.58 But this is the exception rather than the rule. Julian of Atramytion was apparently prepared to leave paintings in place, confining his iconoclastic impulses to sculpture.59 In general, sculpture is regarded as more harmful than paintings. The Council of 754 gave special warning against the indiscriminate destruction of sacred vessels and vestments decorated with figures.60 Such warnings are often given, but in practice they tend to be lost in the general conflagration. During the reign of Constantine V, representations of birds, beasts, and plants were spared, and even horse races, hunts, and theatrical scenes.61 Later medieval critics specifically censured such scenes,62 but even in the Reformation they were allowed to stand. The fate of painted organ wings varied: sometimes they were attacked along with everything else, but on other occasions they escaped the wrath of the iconoclasts, presumably because they were not regarded as in the same class as devotional imagery. Such seeming inconsistencies characterize much Reformation iconoclastic activity; they can also illuminate the aims of the iconoclasts. Although his followers got out of hand, Zwingli was prepared to preserve historical scenes outside churches.63 In Münster, in keeping with their view of the role of the emperor, Anabaptists left royal images and arms alone,64 even though effigies of local officials and the nobility were ruthlessly assaulted. At first, tomb sculptures were left intact in England, by royal ordinance, but during the Puritan revolution they too were destroyed.65 In addition to their theological objections to images, the Puritans were determined to do away with the signs of royalty;66 royalty itself, meanwhile, recognized the threat that was posed to the bases of its power by excessive iconoclastic activity. But discrimination between what is to be destroyed and what not may be made on the basis of other criteria. These too should be explored more thoroughly than they have been, for they tell us not only about iconoclas-

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tic attitudes toward images but also about depth of conviction. At the Council of 815, when the charge that images were idols was abandoned,67 it was decided to tolerate pictures placed in high positions. The reason given then was a surprisingly permissive one: painting might fulfill the purpose of writing. It was argued that paintings in higher positions would not permit the gross acts of adoration accorded to lower ones and that they would provide useful illustrations of Christianity.68 Such a reason would not have been acceptable to any but the most moderate of subsequent iconoclastic movements, and it is difficult to think of any later case in which images were ordered to be retained on the basis of their ­elevated position, except of course when it was impracticable to pull them down—­or the means to do so too expensive. On the other hand, when it was decided that some paintings could be kept, it was on condition that the wings of altarpieces be closed in order to cover the main scene, as in Zwingli’s Zurich.69 But such a proviso bespeaks an unexpectedly deep concern either for the preservation of works of art or for the avoidance of unnecessary vandalism. The latter concern features in most cases of official iconoclasm from the Council of 754 on.70 The Saving of Works of Art

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Some discrimination, therefore, was exercised, and some images were saved as a result. But conscious efforts to save works of art are themselves another concomitant of iconoclastic outbreaks. There are always zealous clergy who get wind of the impending events and manage to hide some objects in time. They hide them in unlikely places, move them to safer out-­of-­the-­way locations, even take them to their own homes.71 The same applies to all sections of the local populace: there almost always seem to be one or two zealous individuals who show their concern for works of art in this way. Some, as has been seen, may offer financial inducements to iconoclasts to forgo the destruction of an image or images.72 When the feeling is intense, however, such offers tend to be rejected. In Florence it is claimed that a Venetian merchant unsuccessfully bid 20,000 gulden for the contents of Savonarola’s last great bonfire.73 In the Netherlands, where iconoclastic activity was very intense in both the 1560s and the 1580s, many of the greatest works of art—­including the Ghent altarpiece74—­were saved as a result of the foresight of concerned members of both clergy and laity. It is as well to remember, when assigning corporate responsibility for iconoclasm to particular sections of the populace, that such lines of social demarcation, if there are any at all, tend to remain remarkably fluid. Monks may be pro-­image and be persecuted for their beliefs, or they may set upon images; the poor may erupt into a group display of anti-­image feeling, or they may protectively ward off the assailants of images; and so on.

The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm

But to return to the saving of works of art: even aesthetic considerations may prevail. In 1793 a member of the Monuments Commission (which had been instrumental in eliminating much imagery) recommended that a scepter from the tomb of St. Denis be preserved as an example of fourteenth-­century goldsmiths’ work.75 If one took into consideration objects preserved for didactic purposes (things that are regarded as memorials and instructive symbols of an order already overthrown or about to be overthrown), one would have to include such phenomena as Hitler’s exhibitions of entartete Kunst.76 But twentieth-­century iconoclasm falls outside the purview of this survey. It is worth noting, however, that even the Louvre was opened to the public in 1793 with the intention of housing proscribed symbols of royalty, feudalism, and superstition that had been preserved specifically for their didactic possibilities.77 The Attack on Associated Objects

Attention has so far for the most part been confined to images. But any student of iconoclasm will know that it is not only images that are attacked on these occasions. Before moving on to the immediate aftermath of iconoclasm, we must ask ourselves: what else is destroyed when people take down images? Some things are obvious, but they are worth dwelling on. Almost all liturgical accessories can be attacked, and objects like altar hangings and vestments, if they are not actually destroyed, are removed for use in more mundane contexts. In England in the 1540s, private parlors are supposed to have been hung with altar cloths, and tables and beds covered with copes.78 In such cases we may see, if we like, the final stage in the deconsecration of holy objects; we are entitled to speak here of their “demystification.” From the days of Byzantine iconoclasm on, candles and incense have been rejected by all enemies of religious imagery.79 Both feature extensively in the writings of the Reformation polemicists, and it is universally agreed, even by those who are tolerant of some imagery, that candles and incense are unnecessary adjuncts to worship.80 The reasons for their rejection are clear: they distance the worshiper even further from the essentials of devotion, they stand in the way of direct communication with the sacred; in short, they are utterly superfluous embellishments. In Byzantium it is possible that the use of lights and incense before images was regarded as objectionable because such things had been used as signs of homage before imperial images ever since the fifth century, if one may trust Photios’s excerpt from Philostorgius.81 It is also instructive to look at the destruction of books, if only because this is a characteristic of both iconoclasm and Orthodoxy. Not only liturgical books (in other words, those that are closely associated with the role of images within Christian worship) but also books that purvey the

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wrong ideas may be destroyed. In the latter case the grievance is somewhat different from that held against images. One of the many constantly reiterated arguments against images was that they misled, rather than instructed, the illiterate.82 But there was concern about persons who could read as well. For the illiterate, books embodied a mystery that in many cases must have bordered on the magical. Time after time book destruction is associated with iconoclastic activity. Under Constantine V books were destroyed.83 It may be that books such as The Sayings of the Fathers were burned because it was from them that monks at least partially derived their hold on their charges.84 Great quantities of books were consigned to the flames of Savonarola’s bruciamenti—­placed immediately below the images that rested on top of those great pyres.85 Such bonfires—­in which liturgical vessels were also melted down in order to give the proceeds to the poor—­were not a new phenomenon in Italy. Preachers like Bernard of Siena and Robert of Lecce had burned books in Milan, Bologna, and Ferrara, along with images of their authors.86 Full-­scale iconoclasm in Münster was preceded by a week-­long burning of books, muniments, and seals in front of the cathedral.87 That served the additional function of doing away with all records of the privileges of the usurped class and the documentation of their authority. After the death of Mary Tudor in 1558, books were burned along with copes and vestments, even though they were not mentioned in parliamentary injunctions against images.88 As always, the zeal of the populace interpreted official decrees in a way that often far outstripped their real intent. In the Netherlands all the chroniclers record the loss of precious manuscripts and the ripping out of pages, if they were not burned. After the assassination and apotheosis of Marat, French iconoclasm proceeded apace, and there too charters were burned along with armorial bearings.89 Even books with the fleur-­de-­lis on their bindings were thrown to the flames.90 Book burning is part of a wider phenomenon, however, and not always within the bounds of iconoclasm, although it is undoubtedly an iconoclastic activity. Now we may turn to a larger class of objects: buildings. They are often attacked after images have been pulled down, but they are not usually destroyed. A variety of motives characterizes the attack on buildings. They may be converted to use as hospitals, barracks, and even prisons. Once stripped of their images and whitewashed, they may be used for new forms of religious service. It is noteworthy that although polemicists frequently called for the finest buildings to be leveled because of their purported similarity with pagan temples,91 this did not usually occur. There are many examples. The call to level religious buildings to the ground was particularly strong in Münster, but there too they were mostly preserved, even if they lost towers, porches, and other parts. ­Abbeys were used for housing the poor; the more ostentatious chapels were mined for their stone; so, for that matter, were cemeteries and parts of the cathe-

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dral, in order to fill up gaps in the walls and stone fortifications of the city. All the towers were knocked down, except one that was kept to be used as a lookout post.92 Such use of building materials extended even to the bells: in England they were melted down to make cannons, and so was the bronze in French monuments, in order to defend the newly defined patrie.93 In England, as later in the French Revolution, churches and surrounding buildings were sold to local lessees as quarries. Thomas Cromwell himself used the stone from the Crutched Friars for repairs to the Tower of London.94 When stripped buildings were not used as churches, they often became private houses. Some monastic buildings provided convenient storehouses for businesses.95 Roofing lead was eagerly sought, and roof timbers then used as fuel for melting the lead.96 The lord mayor of London petitioned Oliver Cromwell to use lead from the roof of St. Paul’s to make water pipes, then in short supply. The nave of St. Paul’s itself was used as a cavalry barracks, with stabling for up to eight hundred horses.97 Throughout Europe during the Reformation, Catholic buildings were stripped bare and turned into Protestant conventicles. Even when there was some measure of toleration, as in Antwerp later in the 1580s, walls were built in the middle of a single building to provide two separate places of worship.98 In France the churches were converted to temples of reason.99 But there too some of the noblest monuments were sold and later used as quarries, such as the great Abbey Church of Cluny.100

• Thus far we have been considering inanimate objects—­whatever degree of life may have been believed to inhere in them. But people too are persecuted and attacked in the wake of iconoclasm. One thinks especially of the monastic orders, often seen to be proponents of images, if not actually on their side. The case for Leo III’s and Constantine V’s persecutions of monks may recently have been exaggerated, but there is no question that they did persecute them.101 Monks encouraged the superstitious practices associated with images, monasteries were the repositories of great numbers of them, and monks were their greatest supporters. They even produced them. Peter Brown may have overstated his thesis, but there is some truth in the suggestion that monks, like icons, were attacked because their holiness was consecrated, as it were, from below.102 The sources of their power therefore were seen as potential threats and had to be demystified. That is why Constantine attacked the monastic schema and Michael Lachanodrakon paraded the monks in his theme in the garb of a bridegroom.103 Indeed the Byzantine situation may be taken to be paradigmatic. Perhaps the most extensive post-­Byzantine antimonastic policy was Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, motivated by political reasons and

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reasons of expediency as much as by a concern for religious reform.104 Iconoclasm followed shortly after. Elsewhere in the Reformation images were taken down and monks immediately run out of town—­if they had not already fled. They are frequently mocked and made the subject of jest. They are stripped of their holiness. In addition to all this, the morals of monks were as frequently open to suspicion as those of artists.105 When iconoclasm occurs, people are no longer afraid to give expression to these suspicions: indeed they are used as the pretext or the basis for such attacks. Substitution and Replacement

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Once one has seen what happens when iconoclasm takes place, one must return to images themselves and consider another question that casts light on the phenomenon: what replaced the images that were effaced, destroyed, or removed? From the very beginnings of iconoclastic polemic, there is an important emphasis on the priority of the word, and so texts may be used to replace images. But not always: there is a whole variety of possibilities. All but the most extreme iconoclasts are prepared to tolerate the cross, although it too is open to a number of superstitious practices. The crucifix, for obvious reasons, is less frequently tolerated. Symbols of royal power replace religious imagery, and many groups allow nonanthropomorphic imagery. During the reigns of Leo III and Constantine V, the famous Christ on the Chalke Gate was replaced by a cross, with an inscription in verse beneath it.106 The Life of St. Stephen the Younger records how Constantine turned the Church of the Virgin at Blachernae into something that looked like an aviary: he scraped down the representations of Christ’s miracles and substituted mosaics of birds, beasts, and ivy.107 Other of Constantine’s crimes against images are recorded with a sort of disapproving enthusiasm; he even replaced the representations of the six ecumenical councils in the Milion with a portrait of his favorite charioteer racing.108 What all of these stories confirm, however, is that Constantine’s antipathy toward art in general was by no means as all-­embracing as that of many of the later European iconoclasts. He shows little of the moralistic fear of sensibilia that characterized the writings of the more fervent polemicists. They insisted that God’s Word was God’s true image, that the Word alone sufficed to lead humankind to him. In England and the Netherlands, biblical texts, especially the Ten Commandments, were painted on whitewashed walls as well as on already painted altarpieces.109 There is a fascinating passage in Karel van Mander on the subject. He records that a crucifixion by Hugo van der Goes was spared by the iconoclasts because of its art. But since the church in which it stood was to be used for Protestant preaching, he says, the crucifixion was taken to a painter to have the Ten Commandments written on it in gold letters on

The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm

a black ground. And van Mander reproaches that painter for wishing to spoil so fine a work.110 Fortunately the overpaint could later be removed, and many present-­day restorers, both in England and on the Continent, will testify that such inscriptions can sometimes be removed to reveal the painting beneath. In the reign of Henry VIII the royal arms replaced the holy rood; and similarly those of Elizabeth appeared on rood screens all over the country.111 As is well known, Elizabeth appropriated to her own image many of the symbols traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary.112 The possibilities when it came to alternative forms of imagery were manifold. The Westcheap Cross in London, already defaced in the reign of Elizabeth, was transformed by the Puritans into a harmless image. For the cross they substituted a pyramid, and for the statue of the Virgin a half-­naked image of Diana.113 The allusions, particularly in Westcheap, to pagan idolatry could not have been more obvious—­nor, probably, the satirical intent. In Zurich, Hans Leu the Elder’s panel representing Christ and the patron saints of the city in front of a topographical representation of it was removed from the Chapel of the Twelve Apostles in the Great Minster in 1524. But it was not destroyed: Christ and the saints were simply painted over with reproductions of those parts of the city that their images had covered.114 Panoramic views are perhaps the most harmless form of decoration of all. Whenever a church was inaugurated as a temple of reason, busts of Marat replaced statues that had stood there before.115 All such replacements of Christian imagery, from Constantine V till the present, represent vigorous assertions of newly established or freshly affirmed political power. Lulls and Relapses

At this point it may be useful to consider one of the stronger testimonies to the persistence of anti-­image feeling. Iconoclasm may in due course abate or be quelled, and orthodoxy reestablished. But it is not uncommon to find a relapse, bringing renewed outbursts that give expression to still-­smoldering sentiments. Byzantium itself provides one of the most notable examples. Leo V rejects the Council of Nicaea and Eirene’s restoration, and he initiates a new policy of iconoclasm (harking back to the first period), which is then continued by Michael II and Theophilos. In England after the Marian interlude, Elizabeth gradually renews the Henrician and Edwardian antipathy; Laud then tries to bring back the images, but his policies fail to withstand the Puritan onslaught. In An­ twerp, the Beeldenstorm of 1566 lasts only a short while before the re­ establishment of Catholic services, but in 1581 there is a second outbreak of iconoclasm.116 Although it is outwardly quieter than the first, it is a great deal more systematic. There is no doubt that everyone concerned is aware of the possibility of

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such relapses, including those who are responsible for restoring images during the lulls, the brief interludes of orthodoxy. This accounts for the many examples found of temporary and makeshift images in such times. Evidence of these may be found, for example, in guild account books preserved in Netherlandish archives. When not of wood, such images are on canvas, and instances are known where the wings of an altarpiece are simply painted on a wall, to be easily whitewashed when next threatened.117 In England during the reign of Mary, “many parishes showed scepticism as to the stability of the revived regime and the unwanted expense of providing images that later might be declared illegal by erecting painted canvas to take the place of the carved figures on rood screens. At Ludlow in Shropshire the great rood was replaced by a makeshift painting of the Crucifixion on boards,”118 and there are many further examples. And how justified such apprehension was! Interim periods such as these hardly inspire confidence in the worth of the aesthetic object: both artist and patron are inhibited by the continual threat of further destruction. Ambiguity of Attitude

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As soon as one considers diffidence of this kind, one finds further ambiguities. People are never sure why they should do away with images, and not even the theorists are sure. And is it not to be expected that people should waver when called upon to assail objects in which supernatural forces were thought to inhere, or, at the least, objects that were invested with all sorts of undefined powers? Then bring in aesthetic considerations, and one can see how attitudes could be confused or ambiguous. It must have been made worse when people were called upon to distinguish between images singled out for destruction and those that were not. A few simple examples of ambiguity in the behavior of people who had decided or been forced to be iconoclasts will suffice. Many examples could be found in England, where there had always been considerable ambiguity over what constituted acceptable imagery; even the behavior of Elizabeth was hardly consistent. She ordered a crucifix for the royal chapel at the very time when its use was supposed to be illegal. The bishops objected, and though a cross was substituted for a crucifix, the chapel retained its images.119 On the other hand, she roundly reproached the dean of St. Paul’s for having placed a new service book with engraved illustrations on her seat. After reminding the dean of her aversion to idolatry and singling out the “cuts resembling angels and saints, nay, grosser absurdities, pictures resembling the Holy Trinity,” she asked of him, “Have you forgot our proclamations against images, pictures and Romish relics in the Churches?”120 But one suspects that such a divergence between private practice and public policy must have been common enough among those who ruled. Image devotion retained a grip on people’s minds, even when it was officially renounced.

The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm

During the prelude to and aftermath of the worst iconoclasm of the French Revolution, there was a great deal of hesitation and ambiguity. In 1791 Bertrand Barère wrote that “the revolutions of an enlightened people conserve the fine arts,” while in the same month the journal Revolutions de Paris observed that “the statues of kings and queens in our cities are not the work of the people, but of courtesan ministers,” and called for their destruction.121 Under such circumstances it is not surprising that people should waver between iconoclasm and the preservation of an artistic heritage. Once the spark had been lit, however, such aesthetic considerations did not matter to those who were determined to do away with the monuments of despotism and feudalism. Still, in the newly converted temples of reason, number six of the revised version of the Ten Commandments read: “Thou shalt cultivate the fine arts: they are the ornament of the state.”122 But even after it was agreed that objects of historical or artistic value should not be destroyed but taken to the newly established museums, the conventionnels could not control iconoclasm for at least another two years.123 Once latent anti-­image sentiment is allowed to be freely expressed, there is not much that can be done to restrain it. When fear of the power of images is broken in the heat of iconoclasm, it takes some time and effort before that feeling seeps back into the imagination. That is why every iconoclast leader gives generally unsuccessful warnings against the indiscriminate destruction of images. In the heat of the moment, people cannot distinguish between images, and there is always the temptation to theft on such occasions, despite the institution of severe penalties against it. The Council of 754 forbade the wanton destruction of vessels and vestments decorated with figures; all alterations had to have the assent of the patriarch or emperor; and secular officials were warned against robbing churches on the pretext of destroying images.124 Such injunctions may be taken as typical of most periods of iconoclastic activity. Although iconoclastic leaders always threatened to punish those who exceeded the stated bounds, and often did so—­as in France, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Switzerland—­their followers rarely adhered to those bounds. Orthodox Reactions: Supervision and Censorship

No one who reads the early church fathers could fail to be struck by the various forms of rigoristic and moralistc attitudes toward images that characterize much of their writing. In a broad sense they are both iconoclastic and anti-­art. They range from grave reservations about the dangers of images, as were expressed by writers like Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Lactantius, and Epiphanius of Salamis,125 to suggested and actual restrictions such as those imposed by the Council of Elvira and the Quinisext Coucil of 692.126 Images could be mere distractions of the senses, incitements to concupiscence, or simply historically inaccurate—­as when

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painters represented St. Peter with short hair and St. Paul as bald.127 Standards of what might be called decorum fluctuate, and it is according to such standards that restrictions are imposed. The feeling that art corrupts morals is expressed in a multitude of ways, and to that may be linked the recurrent criticism of artists themselves. In postclassical times it extends from Justin’s assertion that, among their other vices, artists slept with their models (among the earliest allegations of this kind), to French revolutionary objections about the looseness of their morals,128 to modern notions of bohemianism. In the Reformation, Catholic writers constantly critique the assailants of religious imagery by asking why they do not first get rid of the disgracefully profane subjects they have in their own homes, to say nothing of those in public places.129 Various ways are then devised of controlling such problems, and more restrictions imposed. In the Middle Ages tendencies toward rigor increase. St. Bernard wanted stained glass, paintings, mosaics, and inlaid work to be banned from Cistercian churches.130 He objected to precious materials not only because the money spent on them could better be spent on the poor but also because they aroused admiration rather than true piety: they were mere distractions of the senses.131 But perhaps the most dramatic and serious form of the restrictive tendencies of the Church is represented by its attitude toward books. After the Index of 1248’s proscription of not only heretical books but also Jewish, pagan, and scientific works, book burnings followed all over Europe;132 these may be regarded, for a start, as the forerunners of Savonarola’s great bonfires. All such phenomena are worth noting, because one of the standard reactions to iconoclasm is to impose restrictions on imagery. Once the abuses of art have been highlighted to such a degree that they become the pretext for iconoclasm, then they at least must be eliminated, and it is necessary to tighten controls upon art and image making. After the first period of Byzantine iconoclasm, the Acts of the Council of Nicaea made it clear that the Church had to decide what could be represented.133 The same insistence on ecclesiastical supervision of artistic activity was made by the Council of Trent’s decree on religious imagery,134 a decree that was passed only at the very final session of the council, because of the pressing need to formulate an official stand on images in response to recent outbreaks of iconoclasm in France.135 In the Netherlands a whole spate of Catholic works on images appeared immediately after the first iconoclasm there.136 They all insisted again on ecclesiastical super­ vision and called for doing away with images regarded as unacceptable. They came dangerously close to proposing iconoclasm on the grounds of orthodoxy. Even in Italy during the Counter-­Reformation, there was a large body of writers who, on the basis of the Tridentine decrees, called for the suppression of secular elements in religious subjects.137 The vast question of objections to images on the basis of decorum or the need for fidelity to proper sources and so on has received a good deal

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of attention elsewhere.138 Gilio da Fabriano rejected artistic styles—­like Michelangelo’s—­that he regarded as incapable of doing justice to the spiritual significance of religious themes.139 One finds writers who are primarily concerned with a detailed account of abuses, and someone like Paleotti could actually provide a series of complex categories of the acceptable and unacceptable that amounts to nothing less than an index of proscribed images.140 Consequences

Thus in the reaction to iconoclasm there lurks another form of antipathy toward images. It is perhaps one of the more depressing consequences of iconoclasm, and although iconoclasm might sometimes have had positive results in terms of art produced afterward, its effect was just as frequently stifling. In the Netherlands after iconoclasm, for example, there was a palpable loss in confidence on the part of both artist and patron, who were reluctant to produce or commission works that would be ever liable to attack at the hands of those who were against images. And then, as soon as images were restored, official supervision inhibited artists: they became unsure not only of what to represent but also of how they should represent things. On the other hand, scholars have generally viewed the artistic consequences of Byzantine iconoclasm in a positive light141—­and it did not, admittedly, produce as great a restrictive reaction as later. It is probably safe to say that from Byzantine iconoclasm on, iconoclasts were at least as much in favor of art as iconodules—­with just a very few exceptions.142 No one blames the Byzantine iconoclasts for putting an end to art for six hundred years anymore, as the great sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti did in his Commentarii (written just before his death in 1450).143 This is one of the great paradoxes of iconoclasm, and it leads to further paradoxes. Implicit in the orthodox attitudes toward images was the belief that in some way or another they partook of the supernatural. But could one say that the iconoclasts succeeded in stripping images of their supernatural associations altogether? The mere fact that they felt compelled to do away with some, if not all, of them suggests that they realized they could not. This is the problem that must concern anyone who is aware of the hold of the image on the imagination.

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Iconoclasts and Their Motives* In 1791 James Gillray published a little-­known print (fig. 34)1 satirizing John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery.2 Like others, Gillray was irritated by Boydell’s ambitious project of publishing—­by subscription—­a set of prints illustrating Shakespeare after paintings especially commissioned for this purpose.3 His aim was to encourage the growth of an English school of history painting, but his motives were not felt to be entirely free of the desire for financial gain.4 So when some of the pictures were cut, a “malicious report was started that he had done it to excite public sympathy.”5 One only has to read the words on the print itself. “There! There! There’s a nice gash!—­there!—­ah, this will be a glorious subject for to make a fuss about in the Newspapers. . . . O, there will be fine talking about the Gallery; and it will bring in a rare sight of Shillings,” exclaims the allegedly rapacious Boydell as, with a mad gleam in his eyes, he sets about his work. As it happened, the project was not to be an immediate financial success,6 but the point about the relation between publicity and iconoclasm is clear. We will return to it later. But the issue goes far beyond satire. One has only to consider the number and importance of the works that have been the target of iconoclastic acts in the present century to appreciate its gravity. The subject compels our attention, and it engages complicated emotions. “The assailant and his motives are wholly uninteresting to us; for one cannot apply normal criteria to the motivations of someone who is * Original publication: Iconoclasts and Their Motives, Second Horst Gerson Memorial Lecture, University of Groningen (Maarssen, Netherlands: Schwartz, 1985). Reprinted in Public (Toronto), 1993. This essay would not have appeared without the invitation from Henk van Os when he was professor of art history at Groningen, and owes much to the encouragement and help of Jan Piet Filedt Kok and Wouter Kloek, both of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. They provided information and made suggestions that stimulated the course of ideas set down here; but only I can be blamed for the way these thoughts have been developed.

(Facing) 34. James ­Gillray, The Monster Broke Loose—­Or—­A Peep into the Shakespeare Gallery, 1791, colored engraving, 34 × 23.5 cm. Private collection. Photograph: author.

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35. Rembrandt, The Night Watch (1642), as knifed in 1975. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

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mentally disturbed.” This is what the director of public relations at the Rijksmuseum is reported to have declared after the attack on the Night Watch on September 14, 1975 (fig. 35).7 We must take courage if we are to make some sense of a phenomenon that no history of art can justifiably ignore but that has so persistently affected the objects that stand at the center of our fundamentally materialist discipline. “Take courage” because this is self-­evidently an emotive subject; because it threatens the very existence of objects that we cherish; because we quail at the thought of analyzing the actions of persons who appear to be mentally disturbed; and because we ourselves know the experience of powerful but indefinable emotions in the presence of objects. With us, those emotions—­of catharsis, of warmth, of calm, of difficulty, even of frustration—­are channeled, however inexplicably, along safe and generally rewarding lines. We too may be disturbed and troubled by specific images; but can it be that such feelings, which we know how to sublimate or transmute, often beneficially so, are somehow akin to the overdemonstrative, violent, and ultimately damaging behavior of iconoclasts? Let us leave this thought in abeyance. The view that too much

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talk about iconoclasm might actually encourage further acts of violence, that one might somehow put ideas into people’s heads, is perhaps worth noting.8 Such apprehensiveness is wholly understandable, particularly from the standpoint of those most intimately concerned with the conservation of objects; but it is easy to see why the matter is a delicate one, and why one might well be inclined to shrink from public discussion and analysis. On the other hand, the purely art-­historical case for studying iconoclasm is clear. It seems inexplicable that so significant an element in the history and fate of images should so persistently have been neglected,9 other than on the grounds of the apprehensiveness just outlined. Further­ more, iconoclasm crucially exposes the dialectic of the relationship between image as material object and beholder, and painfully sears away any lingering notion we may have of the possibility of an idealistic or internally formalist basis for the history of art. Perhaps that is why the history of art as it is traditionally conceived has evaded analysis of one of the most dramatic and striking forms of response to real images, one of the few kinds of response to manifest itself on an obviously behavioral level. There are others, of course, like sexual arousal, tears, long journeys, and physical contact of one form or another, which have almost equally been passed by; and they too expose the banality of approaches to the subject that are predicated on wholly intellectualizing conceptions of immanence—­whether the immanence of quality, of formal relationships, or merely of the fallacious assumption of emotion within the image itself. A history of art that does not take account of the historical and biological presence of the beholder (or groups of beholders) degenerates into the practice of criticism. How then do we grant authority to the individual critical sensibility? On what grounds do we privilege the particular critic? Of course we may at least partially validate a critic’s judgment on the basis of intersubjective comparison; but then we do phenomenology tout court, not history (and not even the kind of historically responsible phenomenology that may aid us in our analysis both of the past and of the cognitive processes of men and women). Without real images, on the other hand, we become theologians, or historians of literature and rhetoric—­as when we deal with Achilles’s shield, Zeuxis’s grapes, ­Myron’s cow; with Virgil, Pliny, Philostratus, and Callistratus, or any one of the many species of ekphrasis to be found from antiquity onward. But even then we cannot relinquish the interlocking relationship between perception and description on the one hand, and the hermeneutically assumed image on the other. With the analysis of response, however, we take into full account the dialectic between material image and beholder, and the history of images reclaims its rightful place at the crossroads of history, anthropology, and psychology. The task may be a difficult one, but with iconoclasm the processes of cognition and response terminate in palpable and dramatic symptoms which historians of material objects may well be in the best

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position of all to describe, analyze, and classify—­provided they remain aware of the social and psychological issues that are always at stake. In formulating the title of this lecture—­“Iconoclasts and Their Motives”—­the Committee of the Gerson Lectures Foundation wittingly or unwittingly arrived, at one stroke, at the very heart of the matter, the most difficult but arguably the most crucial aspect of all. It is a fairly straightforward task to document what specifically is affected by iconoclasm in the way of pictures and sculptures,10 and it is not too complicated to unravel the political and social circumstances of iconoclasm when it occurs above the level of the individual—­even though it is not always easy to decide how much relative weight to attach to such circumstances.11 Assailants can be identified, theoretical writings examined, and material consequences assessed.12 All this may be found for the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, where the documentary and literary sources are profuse—­from the Council of Troubles13 to Karel van Mander14 and local chroniclers—­and where anti-­image theory is abundant. Significantly, the analysis of the first group of sources has been left to historians, while the theological material has received increasing attention in recent years.15 But when it comes to motivation, the matter is much more complicated. In the first place, what is the relation between individual and personal motives and those that are recorded in writing or publicly expressed? In the course of the great debate about images in the sixteenth century, a huge amount was written and said against images; but what kind of role can we say this played in individual motivation? And second, are not such motives too idiosyncratic, too personalized, and too disparate to merit any kind of general statements at all? In other words, are we not dealing with isolated neurotic acts, as the director of public relations would have it, rather than anything remotely related to normal behavior? If one surveys the great iconoclastic movements, above all of the eighth and ninth centuries, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of the French Revolution, it does seem possible to discern general structures and overall patterns.16 But what of the unrelated individual deed? Perhaps it is this that is most revealing about the interaction between people and images, rather than when people act in groups, when they have evident and joint political and social resentments, when they are organized, when they have heard the theory (in however etiolated a form). In the case of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, for example, the overall political motivation seems reasonably plain. We know that the iconoclasts were small bands of organized men;17 that many had heard the hedge sermons, even if they had not read the writings;18 that iconoclasm caught on like a craze, especially after news came through—­and how quickly it arrived in places like Breda!19—­of the great destruction in Antwerp on August 20, 1566.20 That event, above all, seemed to provide the ideal mode of expressing antipathy toward the Spanish regime and

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the Church of Rome, of a symbolic and then a real fracturing of power; and so it became the accepted mode all over the North Netherlands as well (though not, of course, everywhere).21 Often there were clear motives, like the Protestant desire for clean white churches in which to worship, as in Groningen itself, in Leeuwarden, Culemborg, Limburg, and Middelburg.22 Sometimes the whole business got caught up in an orgy of destruction. We know that in some cases images were spirited away to safety before the storm broke;23 that in others the town council itself closed the churches (either to forestall further trouble or to give iconoclasm the appearance of legitimate authority);24 and that in others the rage did get out of hand and could involve surprising members of the community, including ministers and schoolmasters.25 All this is most revealing about the spirit of the movement as a whole; but how much does it really illuminate the nature of people’s relations to the image itself? In order to find that out, one has to turn to the individual act, sometimes a part of a larger movement, but preferably where it is isolated from any kind of socially acceptable behavior. Such acts may not interest the straightforward historian, but the quest for understanding them must remain central for the historian of images and their interrelation and interdependence with men and women. It would be comfortable simply to concur with claims like this: “For a person who cares for beauty, it is hard to imagine that anyone would wilfully alter—­let alone mutilate—­a work of art.”26 But we do not have to look far into ourselves to know that the matter is more complicated—­and more precarious—­than that. In terms of motivation tout court, there is much that is easily recognized. Indeed, many of us may share the iconoclast’s resentment of the figure or authority represented, we too may be frustrated by the apparently immoral expenditure of money on art when all around are hungry, and we too may be moved to anger at the purchase or display of that which does not appear to conform to our notion of art at all (or that which any child could do); 27 but we are not, by and large, moved to the destructive deed. It would be well at this stage to articulate the basic principle of what follows. Instead of surveying iconoclastic movements, my aim is to look at several of the most striking instances of individual assaults on well-­ known, publicly displayed objects in the twentieth century, with particular reference to its final decades. Curiously—­and significantly—­enough, these examples have not hitherto been collected.28 Now it could be argued superficially—­and this I think would be the commonly held view—­that one is here dealing with isolated neurotic acts, too idiosyncratic and too peculiarly symptomatic to reveal anything beyond the deranged minds of individuals whose mental operations bear little if any relation to normal psychology. But this, as has already been implied, is precisely the opposite of the case to be made here. The symptoms of such operations, it is true, may have little to do with normal behavior, but what lies behind

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them may well, in however heightened or acute or distressed a form, provide a telling index of the relations between people and the figured objects before them. To put it bluntly, apparently neurotic behavior seems to be capable of providing clues to everyday thought processes in all of us. The fear (to which allusion has been made above) that talk about such matters may actually encourage the violent symptoms that terminate in iconoclasm is in itself testimony of such an awareness, however reluctant and subliminal it may be. Furthermore, reports of such acts turn out to be revealing not only about the iconoclasts themselves, but also—­to an unexpected and surprising extent—­about public and social attitudes that are both embodied in and conditioned by patently individual ones. The individual attitude is found to be intersubjectively valid, as emerges clearly from press reports about iconoclastic events and deeds.29 In most cases, the assault is seen to be the act of one who is mentally disturbed, and this is borne out by psychiatric reports on or psychological imputation to the assailant following the deed. Certainly we are not likely to suffer from the kind of delusions evinced by those who upon attacking an image declare, “I am Christ,” like the man who smashed Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972 (fig. 36),30 or “I am the Messiah,” in the case of the Night Watch in 1975 (fig. 35),31 or insist that they do it because they have been impelled or instructed by some higher, usually divine force. Nor do we normally seek to resolve grudges in this way, as did the sailor-­ cook who felt that the state had unjustly prevented him from getting employment, and then attacked the Night Watch (the state’s most prized possession) in 1911.32 We refrain from attempting to gain publicity for our acknowledged ideas and theories, as did the man who believed his message to the world was being ignored and then threw acid at Rubens’s Fall of the Damned in 195933 and threatened even more hostile anti-­image behavior in 1969–­70.34 We all recognize that these elements of motivation are delusions on a scale that grossly exceeds normal feelings of this kind; and it cannot be claimed that the expression of such notions is likely to have much bearing on the normal perception of images. But the question still remains of why it is images—­paintings and sculptures—­that are chosen as the objects of such attention-­seeking acts, why the neurosis manifests itself in this way rather than in any one of innumerable other obvious possibilities; or why, as in other cases, an attack on an image should seem to be an appropriate mode of making a political point. Let us look more patiently at some of the better known attacks and examine both these and some of the other motives that come to the fore. Although it may be that the following summaries will be regarded as an invasion of individual psychological privacy, the aim will be as much to review and consider public response to specific acts as to deepen the inquiry into motivation. The man who in 1975 slashed the Night Watch (fig. 35) with a common table knife (which he had stolen from a restaurant earlier in the day) had

Iconoclasts and Their Motives

36. Michelangelo, Pietà, as damaged in 1972. Rome, St. Peters. Photograph: Musei Vaticani.

previously received psychiatric treatment and later committed suicide.35 It is clear that immediately following the deed he was in a shocked and incoherent state, and this is to some extent reflected in the accounts of his own apparently confused statements about his motives. “I was commanded by the Lord; God himself instructed me to do it,” runs one version; “I am the Messiah; I wanted to do something spectacular so that my message to the world would appear on television,” runs another.36 On the previous day, a Sunday, he had attended a service in the Westerkerk, Rembrandt’s burial place, and after some mildly aberrant behavior is reported to have said to a couple of congregants that he would make front-­page news the next day.37 Now the justification on the grounds of possession by superior powers and the desire for publicity on a grand scale is common enough in cases like these;38 but he himself seems to have offered some further explanations of his act that are of a more unusual order: “Adam was the Light, Eve darkness; Rembrandt was the master of light, but when he painted the Night Watch he was under the influence of the dark.”39 This view of the symbolic contrast between light and darkness even appears to have some role in determining the loci of his slashes: he seems to have looked upon Banning Cocq, dressed in black, as a personification of the devil, with Ruytenburgh beside him in yellow as an angel (or possibly himself);40 and it was at Cocq that he directed his manic blows.

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Poor Banning Cocq—­admittedly in the very center of the picture—­ had already been the recipient of the most consequential damage when the Night Watch was attacked in 1911. But on that occasion there seems to have been a rather different set of motives. The assailant believed that the state had deliberately stopped him from getting a job after he had been dismissed from his post as corporal cook in the navy. “Did you plan to damage the Night Watch that Friday afternoon when you set out?” the reporter asked him. “No. But when I went for a walk and entered the Rijksmuseum, I suddenly had the idea of avenging myself on the painting, to cool my anger on it. I thought it belonged to the state. . . . I didn’t want to ruin the painting—­I only wished to scratch it a few times.” “But why did you choose the Night Watch?” “Because it seemed to me to be the most expensive possession of the State. . . . When I’m annoyed I’m capable of anything.”41 The range of motives is considerably expanded by the case of the slashing of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (fig. 37) in March 1914.42 This time the attack was clearly premeditated, and it was followed by a press statement issued by the assailant herself, a young suffragette named Mary Richardson who had already gained some notoriety for her actions on behalf of the female cause.43 I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. . . . If there is an outcry against my deed, let everyone remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs Pankhurst and other beautiful living women, and that until the public ceases to countenance human destruction, the stones cast against me for the destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy.44

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In other words, as Miss Richardson was to put it in an interview some forty years later, “I wanted to show that the most beautiful woman on canvas was nothing compared with the death of one woman in prison. I wanted to draw attention to the plight of Mrs Pankhurst, our leader, who was then in an underground cell green with mould in Holloway Prison. We believed she was dying.” She concluded, “I always remember that Mrs Pankhurst was removed from her cell almost immediately.”45 But on the occasion of this interview, she adduced another reason, which may well not have been paramount at the time but is nevertheless of equal if wholly different significance: “I didn’t like the way men visitors to the gallery gaped at it all day long.”46 Two further kinds of motivation thus appear: first, the use—­or rather the abuse—­of images to draw

Iconoclasts and Their Motives

37. Velázquez, The Rokeby Venus (ca. 1640–­ 48), as slashed by Mary Richardson in 1914. London, National Gallery.

attention to a political cause, and second, the more common objection to a painting or a sculpture that somehow offends propriety or morality. Of the latter sort there are, of course, many examples from the past;47 and who is to know how much such basic feelings as offense at what is regarded as impropriety of one kind or another lie at the root even of modern acts of iconoclasm?48 An unusual—­and apparently sophisticated—­ example occurred in the case of the late seventeenth-­century statue of Juno attributed to Rombout Verhulst standing in the gardens of the Rijksmuseum.49 The mirror she holds as her attribute was broken off by a man who thought that such an image was too vain and worldly to have a place in a national museum open to the public.50 Shades of Erasmus, and the severest Reformation critics too! She is a beautiful half-­clothed woman—­which is bad enough in itself—­so she should certainly not hold a mirror in which to gaze at her own voluptuousness.51 But let us return to the ways in which a political statement is made via a damaged picture. In 1981 a young man ripped a gaping hole in Bryan Organ’s portrait of Diana, princess of Wales, shortly after it was put on display in the National Gallery,52 and the subsequent court proceedings provide a surprisingly clear insight into the possible reasons for the choice of assaulting a painting in order to call attention to a political issue. The fact that the picture was of a royal personage (and a particularly popular one at that) and had aroused unusual public interest (possibly because of its almost unprecedented informality for this genre) is of obvious relevance—­particularly given the specific political problem at stake.

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At his trial, then, the young man declared, “I am in sympathy with Northern Ireland. . . . I have done it for Ireland.”53 He explained in court that he had wanted to do something that would be widely reported; the portrait was easy to get at; it represented someone who was very popular in Britain; and so in this manner he decided to bring to the attention of London what he felt about the social—­rather than the political—­deprivation of Belfast;54 or thus his counsel is supposed to have pleaded (but it has the ring of plausibility and a certain empathy).55 It was, he observed, an easy and nonviolent thing to do.56 And this merits brief reflection, since it so simply encapsulates a basic element of ambiguity in the perception of figured imagery, one that is present in us all. When we see an image of the king—­to put it in the classical imperial terms—­we will be inclined to respond to it as if the king himself were present,57 because of the more or less easy elision—­of which every theologian has always been aware58—­of image and prototype. But of course we can always stand back, take hold of ourselves, aesthetically differentiate, and argue with ourselves against that elision. We see a picture, a framed object, a cold and bloodless statue, so we rally at least part of our mind against the conflation, which we know to be inevitable, of signifier and signified. The young man knew perfectly well that if he attacked the image of Princess Diana, somehow the dishonor would accrue to her as well, that public response to this act would have at least as much to do with the fact that it was she who was represented as with the damage to an expensive object in a public place.59 He would not really be damaging her person,60 and so the violent act could somehow and quite self-­evidently be relegated to a second order of harm. He knew that much less publicity would have been generated if the act had not involved an image, and particularly an image of royalty.61 In 1978 a man attacked Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf in the National Gallery in London, concentrating his efforts on the representation of the golden calf itself.62 No statement about his motivation is recorded, other than his declaration, upon being imprisoned for two years, that “it pleased me to do it”63 (almost exactly the words of the man who had thrown acid at twenty-­three paintings across North Germany one year earlier).64 The psychiatrist who examined him declared him to be a schizophrenic, and appropriate institutionalization was recommended.65 But perhaps a clue to the act is to be found in the subject of the painting itself. Both gallery officials and the press expressed more than usual puzzlement regarding the motives for the attack. The public relations officer of the National Gallery declared, “We cannot think of any reasons why this particular work should be attacked. It is in fact a very beautiful painting,”66 while the Liverpool Daily Post opined, “It is not offensive. It just depicts the Israelites dancing round the Golden Calf.”67 It was beautiful, it was not offensive; why then, the naive thought-­train runs, should anyone attack it? But folk memory is long: could it not be that this subject lay, to

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some degree at least, behind the singling out of this work for the attack? There could have been any number of other reasons, but the story of the golden calf, encapsulating the sudden moral descent of the Israelites in the wilder­ness, is of course one of the loci classici of idolatrous image worship and has been adduced as such ever since men and women began worrying about the validity and use of figured imagery.68 How much awareness of this, one wonders, would the assailant of the Poussin have revealed if one had had a chance to probe into his motives? Clearly one could not, in so short a space, thus investigate the motives for every act of iconoclasm in the West in the last twenty-­five years.69 But the phenomenon has been much more widespread than most people might acknowledge, and taken together these actions constitute rather an alarming list. Here, in addition to the ones already mentioned, are some of the works that have been assaulted since 1956: in that year the Mona Lisa; in 1958 Raphael’s Sposalizio; in 1962 Leonardo’s Burlington House Cartoon (which had a bottle of ink thrown at it); in 1972 Michelangelo’s Pietà (fig. 36); in 1974, Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi in Cambridge, where, with a similar motive apparently to the attack on the painting of Princess Diana, the letters IRA were scrawled across it;70 in 1977 the appalling series of acid attacks on twenty-­three paintings in Germany, beginning with Klee’s Goldfish in Hamburg, through Rubens’s Archduke Albert in Düsseldorf (fig. 16), the Martin Luther and other Cranachs in Hanover, and ending with four paintings by and around Rembrandt in Kassel (e.g., fig. 38);71 and the knifing of van Gogh’s Berçeuse in the Stedelijk Museum.72 The list is a frightening one.73 But before drawing general conclusions, let us look at some of the chief characteristics of public reaction to these collisions between deranged and overwrought sensibilities and works of art. The assailant is, of course, regarded as beyond the pale, wildly outside the bounds of socially acceptable behavior, mad. The transition from wholly indignant rejection to more or less sympathetic acknowledgment of madness may be seen in the two different sets of reports on the Night Watch attacks of 1911 and 1975. Het Leven of January 17, 1911, referred to the “impulsive hand of a degenerate” who seriously mutilated the work with an evil intention.74 De Echo actually managed to track down the perpetrator some time later and could barely restrain its indignation at the apparent nonchalance with which he regarded his deed. He is reported to have been completely calm and quite indifferent about “the baseness of so unmotivated an act.” “People like the one sketched here,” the paper concluded, “are a danger to society. Complete lack of conscience is evident from his words. Even in the Indian army [he had hoped to go to the Dutch Indies] someone like this would have caused trouble. One therefore need not regret that he was not accepted for service in the tropics.”75 In the case of the 1975 attack, however, even the police said of the assailant that “we do not think he realizes what he has done”;76 everyone concurred that he was mad, and indignation was swiftly transformed into a kind of

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38. Rembrandt, Self-­ Portrait (1654), as damaged in 1977. Kassel, Gemäldegalerie.

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sympathy.77 But the basic element remains the same in both instances: the only possible reaction to the assault on so great a work of art, indeed the only way to comprehend it, is to see the assailant in terms that set him utterly beyond both the social and the psychological pale.78 What else do we find in almost every report of attacks on major objects? In the first place there is the emphasis on the financial value of the work: how much it was bought for, how much it was currently worth, by how much its value decreased as a result of the deed.79 But this concern with the relationship between money and art is common enough nowadays; it is perhaps a little more surprising to see it featuring so prominently in 1911 (with the first attack on the Night Watch)80 and in 1913 (with the Rokeby Venus).81 There is always a great deal of discussion about security, usually with the conclusion that not much can be done about it, and again that the less talk about security in general the better.82 But there is another more disturbing side of this coin, and that is the quite ­extraordinary ­attention paid to the minutest details of each attack—­the kind of weapon

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used, the precise damage to the canvas, the exact foci of the assault. Every newspaper attempts to give a photo of the damaged work, at least partly, it is true, from the usual awareness of the drawing power of something that is plainly sensational. In 1911 Het Leven captioned its photograph of the damaged Night Watch with the most specific details of the likely movements of the assailant’s hand83 and proudly announced in its columns that its crew had been present in the Rijksmuseum within moments of the attack “so that we can offer our readers several excellent photos of this act of vandalism.”84 But further details of the sometimes almost hysterical reports of this kind may be passed over here. It is not hard to imagine what periodicals like Reader’s Digest would make of the attack on the Night Watch,85 but in the case of the Poussin Golden Calf even the normally dry and sober Press Reports of the National Gallery went so far as to detail the size and number of the slashed strips, how they fell to the floor, and so on.86 It is also worth noting a further aspect of such reports: the interest in restoration, in the awesome difficulties of repairing the work, in the almost magical success of making it appear as if the attack had never happened.87 Thus it is not surprising to find that during the restoration of the Night Watch in 1975–­76, most of which the director of the Rijksmuseum had allowed to be carried out in public, behind glass, many more than the usual number of visitors are reported to have flocked to see it.88 One can hardly wonder at the success of at least one element in the motivation of so many iconoclasts: the desire to gain attention and publicity,89 even if only through amazement at the skill of the restorers.

• One class of iconoclasm emerges clearly from the examples I have gathered, and that is the attention-­seeking act—­which usually appears to be more or less successful in its aim. The other is much more difficult to define, but it has to do with the hold a particular image or part of an image has on the individual imagination; and the iconoclastic act represents an attempt to break that hold, to deprive the image of its power. A third motivation characterizes iconoclastic movements, such as that of the sixteenth century, where it is felt, often on the broadest social level, that by damaging the symbols of a power—­the Spanish regime or the Catholic Church—­one somehow diminishes that power itself. The problem with these broader movements, however, is that it is often difficult to establish the extent to which they somehow legitimize or give license to the “primitive feelings of hate and destructiveness” that are more closely aligned with our first two classes of iconoclasm, the psychologically more fundamental levels of motivation.90 While there is plenty of evidence for the calculated orchestration of iconoclasm in the sixteenth century,91 we often find instances of the more basic and individualized levels of response, of the unleashing of what might loosely be termed “primitive” feelings

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and behavior, the kind of wild abdication of self-­control evident in some of the isolated acts of the present century described here. Any number of investigations in both the North and South Netherlands in the late 1560s will testify to this. One finds men like Hugo the smith in Heenvliet, whom the bailiff described as promiscuously smashing everything around him with a hammer.92 On such occasions a wild delight seems to take over in breaking images and objects that we normally protect and cherish, a delight in and relishing of the sudden loosening of normal social and psychological restraints.93 Here we may briefly turn to a group of objects from earlier periods that bring together two crucial aspects of our problem and that will lead us to our conclusion. Everyone is familiar with attacks on images in which the eyes of the figures represented are the chief targets—­as a little-­known example, take Matteo di Giovanni’s Massacre of the Innocents in Capodimonte, where the soldiers had their eyes scratched out (a fairly frequent phenomenon in the case of this subject).94 Similar motives presumably informed the scoring out of the eyes of the executioner in Mantegna’s Martyrdom of Saint James in the Ovetari Chapel in the Eremitani in Padua.95 While most acts of iconoclasm seem wild and unpremeditated, there are often occasions when this is not so. It seems easy, on the face of it, to maintain that there is no “method” in the attacks. When de Bruyn Kops published his excellent account of the restoration of the polyptych of the Seven Works of Mercy by the Master of Alkmaar in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 26),96 one of the few works where the marks of sixteenth-­century iconoclasm (whether of 1566 or 1572 is not certain) are capable of being plotted, he described the savage slashes and observed how noteworthy it was “that all this did not happen in a wild way, but evidently in a purposeful manner.” The blows were not random but selective.97 But in the end this is not so surprising at all. One can think of several reasons why the main foci of attack should have been the figures performing the acts of charity and why the eyes in particular were scratched out and obliterated. What better way to deprive an image of its life than by assaulting those organs that give us the most sense of its liveliness? If one considers the remarkable painting by Dirck Jacobsz. showing his deceased father Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen painting a portrait of his wife (fig. 27),98 one can grasp even more instinctively why someone might have been impelled to poke out the sitters’ eyes, as once appears to have been the case (fig. 28).99 Here is a work in which the illusion of presence is astonishing. It is one of the real achievements of the artist, and it is not difficult to see why the attacker may have been disturbed by the sense of presence that seems to reinforce even more strongly than usual the feeling that the signifier has become the signified itself, that a mere image has become a living and personal reality. The peculiar effectiveness of this form of mutilation may be brought home by the kind of damage inflicted on Rubens’s portrait of Archduke Albrecht in Düsseldorf

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(fig. 16).100 We feel especial horror at the mutilation of face and eyes (more than if, say, the hands had been damaged), and we are thus provided with deep psychological testimony to the labile inclination to respond as if the body were actually present. And so to a conclusion. From its very beginnings, image theory has either explicitly or implicitly acknowledged the tendency to conflate image and prototype. People worship, venerate, give thanks to, make promises to not the image itself but the Virgin or saint in the image.101 At the same time they also know (for the most part) that it is but an image, manufactured, of a substance that is not flesh. When critical pressures are brought to bear on this tension, men and women break images as if to make clear that the image is just that: it is not living, not a supernatural embodiment of something that is alive. We fear the image which appears to be alive, because it cannot be so; and so people evince their fear, or demonstrate mastery over the consequences of elision, by breaking or mutilating the image; they disrupt the apparent unity of sign and signified by making plain the ordinary materiality of the sign. On the other hand, that identity may not be impugned at all; indeed it may be acknowledged and asserted, as when people think they damage the king when they damage his representation.102 And when inhibition goes, as in frenetic states (whether autogenous or as a result of the reversal of normal social pressures), images may be assaulted simply because of the associations they carry. But by and large iconoclasm represents the most heightened form of making plain one’s superiority over the powers of both image and prototype, of our liberation from their unearthly thrall. This can only happen if conditions are such as to give people the strength to infringe the powerfully intuitive assumptions of identity and its consequences, if they act as part of a similarly disposed group, or if a critical stance toward the conflation of sign and signified has been made explicit and comprehensible. The other possibility is that they are deranged and internally generate the will to make explicit the desire present in all of us to rupture the identity of image and prototype. All this, in nuce, offers one possible way of accounting for iconoclasm, but it is by no means complete. When we are moved by an image (in whatever way), when we find ourselves concurring—­whether as a result of cultural conditioning or not—­with its canonical status, our natural response is protectiveness. The image moves us, benefits us, protects us; it enhances our emotions, sparks our intelligence, arouses meaningful evocation; and so we must shelter it, protect it, conserve it. These things and the fact that a work may be acknowledged as a masterpiece, as the greatest product of a nation, as extraordinarily valuable (in the monetary sense or more), even the fact that it is housed in a grand or public institution, reinforce the inclination to make of the work an object which we preserve against ravage. And so the image becomes a fetish—­not a pleasure to be partaken of and cast aside, forgotten, but something we must

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cocoon. This doting projection of our protective desires onto figured material objects undoubtedly has still deeper psychological roots that I cannot even begin to plumb here; but it is worth emphasizing the obvious importance of preserving all those representations of the world by which we grasp nature itself. If we sighted people let go of representation, we have nothing from which to make sense of all that is outside ourselves, not even words. And so we cling, dote, cherish, preserve, at all costs. The iconoclast overturns these impulses into their very opposite (“I had to destroy that which others cherish,” said the North German acid thrower; figs. 16 and 38),103 and it is in this that his neurosis lies. This too, aside from the shock of destruction itself, is why the action of iconoclasts arouses indignation and a state of troubledness that runs a good deal deeper than many other forms of dramatically neurotic and psychotic behavior. Perhaps only those destructive acts that affect the body itself run deeper yet. These are only two possible analyses, and they are both sketchy and incomplete; but they should at least make clear the insufficiency of explanations of the power of images in terms of magic. The notion of magical efficacy has subsisted since the beginning of time, and even “idolatry” is sometimes equated with a faith in the magical quality of objects.104 This is not, of course, to deny the abundant evidence for beliefs in image magic or the use of images in magical practices. But the notion of magic does not get us as very far as an explanatory category. It explains little or nothing; it merely labels.105 It fails to account for the complex and interlocking relationship between people and images, for the interplay between making and seeing, appearance and perception, intention and response, between the putative autonomy of the object and the context of seeing. Most often it locates the primary source of power in the image itself, rather than arising from the dialectic of its relation with the beholder. This is perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from the study of iconoclasm; and if it in any way helps us in our understanding not just of pictures and sculptures themselves but also of what it is that makes us cherish them, then the aim of this lecture will have been fulfilled.

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Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable* There is, of course, a telltale sign: as if to warn against the possibility of any erotic thought that she might arouse, a small cross hangs beside the left thigh of Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave. And while she certainly covers herself modestly with her right hand (it is the same gesture of modesty as the ancient statues known as the Venus Pudica), the heavy chain that binds her hands and gives a further clue to the intended subject of the sculpture seems to act as nothing so much as some kind of ancient chastity belt. Not surprising, we might think, that this smooth and perfect form should have been one of the great artistic successes of the Universal Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851—­but surely not only because of the chaste thoughts she aroused in her beholders? The very idea of an impure thought, however, would have been swiftly denied by the sculptor—­whether by repression or rationalization, though, we cannot really know. After all, he had a clear moral view of the subject, apparently inspired by accounts of how during the Greek war of independence of 1821–­30, the Turks took a number of beautiful Greek girls as prisoners in order to sell them in a slave market. “These were Christian women,” he wrote, “and it is not difficult to imagine the distress and even despair of the sufferers while exposed to be sold to the highest bidders. But as there should be a moral in every work of art, I have given to the expression of the Greek Slave what trust there could still be in a Divine Providence for a future state of existence, with utter despair for the present, mingled with somewhat of scorn for all around her.” We may suppose that not everyone would have troubled so long with the expression of the Greek Slave—­at least not long enough to discern this moral. For even then she must have seemed, were it not for the sign * Original publication: “Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable,” in The Play of the Unmentionable, ed. Joseph Kosuth and David Freedberg (New York: New Press, 1985), 31–­68.

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of the cross, more pagan Venus than Christian slave. And can the artist himself have been unaware of the most famous story associated with the ancient statue of Venus that served as the direct artistic model for his work, the Venus of Cnidos? For as Pliny, Lucian, Aelian, and many others recount, this was the statue that so excited a young man of Cnidos that one night he stole out of town in order to be alone with her, and left on her beautiful form the very evidence of his desire. But one does not, of course, have this sort of thought inside a museum, let alone a museum that began with as much a scientific as an artistic purpose, and where the moral dimension was so pronounced. Or does one? In the same year as the Universal Exhibition, the Brooklyn Institute—­the precursor of the Brooklyn Museum—­received $12,000 in order to endow a series of Sunday night lectures, “The Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in His Works”; and a few years later, its large collection of casts of Greek and Roman sculptures was singled out by a group of clergymen as providing evidence of the noblest qualities of Man. These may not be the first things that come to mind as we look at the Roman statues of Dionysos and Apollo in the context of the objects displayed alongside them in Joseph Kosuth’s The Play of the Unmentionable; instead the texts and objects Kosuth has assembled for this installation force us to ask ourselves about their meaning both to ourselves and to others, and to be honest about those meanings. They also make us face these inevitable questions: In what ways are the puritanisms of the mid-­nineteenth and late twentieth centuries different from each other? What are the implications of such differences? And what effect do our concepts of art—­of what art is, or should be—­have on judgments of this kind?

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The Brooklyn Museum started as a “museum of everything” (as former director Thomas S. Buechner once put it). It was meant to cover the world: by no means only a museum of art, it was also a museum of science and ethnography. The objects it held ranged from an entire Hindu street to the best collection in the world of kachina dolls, as well as stuffed bears and fifty-­five thousand dried butterflies. As soon as the new cultural institution was on a secure footing, a huge palace of a museum was commissioned from the noted New York architects of McKim, Mead & White, to be constructed in their best classical style. To the burghers and patrons of Brooklyn, no style could have seemed more appropriate for the housing of art and for the architectural declaration of its public status. Although the building may now seem grand enough, only one sixth of the original plan was constructed. By 1934 the decision had been taken to restrict the range of the great museum to art and ethnography alone (by then, of course, ethnography had become institutionalized and

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naturalized as art). Natural history was abolished. The taxidermists took their leave, and one of them expressed his fears for the future in these words: “Modern art was beginning to show its ugly, incomprehensible forms with a vengeance, and there would be no place for anything else, so I decided to look for another job.” Art replaced science, and an old anxiety was again awakened, though not for the first time—­that the radical and the unpalatable might become institutionalized as art. In fact, 1934 was the year in which McKim, Mead & White’s monumental entrance staircase was removed. This was done in the interests of modernism: not only would the entrance appear more in keeping with the modern spirit, but the museum would seem (it was supposed) more accessible to the people. No nexus could have been more fragile than that one, of modern art and its public. In 1933, for example, the Nazi SS wrote a letter to Mies van der Rohe in Berlin concerning the recently closed Bauhaus. (This institution, probably more than any other, was responsible for the change of taste that dictated the removal of the grand staircase in faraway Brooklyn.) The SS letter declared that the Bauhaus could be reopened only on the following conditions: Vassily Kandinsky and Ludwig Hilberseimer were to be fired, the curriculum was to be changed in accordance with the dictates of the Ministry of Culture, and the faculty was to sign its full agreement with the new conditions. That such a letter was in perfect tune with Hitler’s views on art is made clear by Kosuth’s characteristically challenging mosaic of quotations. “Challenging” because Kosuth constantly makes us revise views we take altogether for granted, and he makes us reflect on positions that we unthinkingly accept. For example, although it is hard to imagine agreeing with any utterance of Hitler’s—­let alone with the sentiment behind it—­ Kosuth confronts us with at least one view of his that on the face of it seems quite laudably democratic: when it comes to art, the people are the judge. But beware of taking the view out of context. Soon the material Kosuth presents makes us realize, or remember, that things are never so simple. What Hitler means is that artists must submit their will to “the sure and healthy instinct of the people.” The transcendent, God-­given artist is above all decent; he must eschew all radicalism and must not paint blue meadows and green skies. If he does so because this is the way he feels or experiences things, he is either defective or a liar. Accordingly, there is to be no painting for small cliques; the artist must produce an art that can, from the outset, count on the readiest and most intimate agreement of the great mass of the people (whose instincts, clearly, are more reliable than those of the artists). Otherwise it is a matter for the criminal court. There is no great distance between clusters of views such as these and the ones expressed at the time of the Chicago Armory Show of 1913. The works of the cubist artists, like those of Matisse, were regarded either as forms of mystification, charlatanry, insanity, or simply as hoaxes. At

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best, such artists were believed to be guilty of insincerity. Their pictures corrupted public morals—­especially, of course, the morals of children and women (notoriously more susceptible than men). M. Blair Coan, the inspector for the Senatorial Vice Commission, declared that futurist art was immoral and that every girl in Chicago was being given the opportunity of gazing (not just looking) at examples of distorted art. When a clergyman saw the art on display, he had to turn back his flock of children at the head of the stairs, lest they see the latest degeneracies from Paris. A schoolteacher denounced the exhibition as nasty, lewd, and immoral, while his superintendent declared it off limits. The Chicago Law and ­Order League called for the suppression of the exhibition altogether.

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Who would have thought that views like these could return with such vengeance in 1990? One had believed them to be dead and buried. But no: the guardians of public morality—­and others whom one might have thought less concerned about the well-­being of ordinary men and women—­revived the old connections between art (above all modern art) and immorality. They did so in order to wave the banner of corruption, degeneracy, and the decline not just of morality but of society as a whole. The two things—­corruption of art and corruption of society—­ obviously go together. Although it is true that the issues seemed the same as they always had been, there was one significant difference. Having assimilated—­however uncomfortably, however meagerly—­some of the realities of female sexuality, society was able in 1990 to be less inclined to hide its general fear of sexual representation behind fears for the corruption of women. But now there was some new threat to deal with (or, to put it more accurately, some threat that was newly out in the open): the representation of homosexuality. Naturally, the anxieties about children and sexuality remained. Once again the great social fears were acted out in the domain of art. The year 1990 saw the trial of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and its director Dennis Barrie, the Reverend Donald Wildmon’s legal pursuit of David Wojnarowicz, the National Endowment for the Arts’ rejections, equivocations, and volte-­faces over the performances of Karen Finley and Holly Hughes. Already in 1989 one could detect the beginning of a kind of general hysteria about the permissible and the unmentionable gripping not only the radical Right but also both houses of Congress and a largely craven public press. From every quarter came renewed pressure for the government to control and legislate the arts. Puritanism, prudishness, and hostility to homosexuality—­all as usual in the guise of preserving the best and purest of civilization from degeneracy and corruption—­had waited in the wings. Now they could return to center stage. The prosecu-

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tion of the Cincinnati arts center and Barrie for “pandering obscenity” and for “the illegal use of children in nudity-­related material” by having publicly exhibited seven photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe swiftly became the most famous of these episodes. Proceedings began on September 24 and concluded on October 5. This is the background to The Play of the Unmentionable, and it is in this context that it had—­and has—­to be seen. The installation opened at the Brooklyn Museum on September 26, the day before the selection of the jury at the trial in Cincinnati.

• Asked by the Brooklyn Museum to produce one of the installations for which he was already famous, Kosuth knew that financial support would at least partly have to come from the National Endowment for the Arts. But since he is an artist especially well known for his critiques of the institutionalization of art, the subject of the installation, in 1990, must have seemed both inevitable and urgent. It was to examine the consequences of the institutionalization of art for artistic liberty. His installation would be both a reflection and a provocation. Its aim would be to engender self-­reflexiveness in each viewer’s judgment about the relations between art, morality, and censorship. It was to be less overtly theoretical than his previous installations such as those at the Freud Museum (1982) and in commemoration of the Wittgenstein centennial in Vienna and Brussels (1989), and more specifically related to current political issues. But the theoretical armature of the Brooklyn installation was closely linked to the earlier ones, and the view of the nature of artistic work and the place of the installation within it remained the same. It was the logical outcome of Kosuth’s long engagement with the problems of the production of meaning, with the role of context in the making of both art and meaning, and with the dialectical relations between viewer and work of art. The Vienna-­Brussels installation, Wittgenstein: The Play of the Unsayable, was predicated on the second of the agendas in the great philosopher’s Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus: to demonstrate that what could not be spoken was necessarily to be left unsaid, or to be omitted. (This was clearly different from the first of his agendas, which was to give an articulate basis for what could be said.) Kosuth’s aim was to suggest the ways in which meaning is produced through the play of what is not or cannot be said. He did so by using both artworks and texts, juxtaposed in such a way as to elicit self-­consciousness about context (both personal and institutional) and about the way in which one’s notion of art depends on context. At this stage in Kosuth’s thought, the idea was that art provides the evidence for what cannot be said, or for what can be said only in­ directly. If art can never say anything directly, it has the power of being able to show that which cannot be said.

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For over twenty-­five years Kosuth has been producing mosaiclike juxtapositions in such a way as to produce new (or surplus) meanings that go beyond the individual texts and objects made by others. These mosaics of appropriated texts and objects become works in their own right, in which new meanings arise in the interstices between texts and texts, texts and objects, objects and objects. The Brooklyn installation was thus a work like any other by Kosuth. Fundamental to everything that he has done is the belief that meaning cannot reside in the object or the text alone and is in no sense autonomous. The meaning of a work of art depends wholly on its context and on its relations with the viewer. Meaning, as Wittgenstein himself declared, lies in use. If the Wittgenstein show was about the unsayable, the Brooklyn installation was about that still more remote category, the unmentionable. If art is able to show, even to describe, that which cannot be said, it is even more capable of showing that which cannot be mentioned. The point of the Brooklyn installation was to enable, through the play of these unmentionables, the laying bare of what we are no longer allowed to mention (because of the coils of institutionality) or cannot bring ourselves to mention (because of repression). This Kosuth achieved by juxtaposing objects selected from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection and displaying texts around them on the walls of the Grand Lobby. In making his selection from the museum, and in explicitly acknowledging the subvention from the NEA, Kosuth was able to raise a whole series of questions in the minds of his viewers, beginning with these: What is the role of the institution in the formation of our view of art? Who, finally, decides what is art and what is not art? What are the consequences of that decision? How do our own views of art affect our moral judgments about representation and, therefore, our larger moral and political judgments? The choice may seem to lie between acceptance of the rules and fetishization on the one hand and a constructive, critical, self-­reflective view of art on the other. The latter is the more difficult path; and it is this path, which requires both work and active thought on the part of the beholder, that Kosuth invited his viewers to follow. That so many people should have accepted the invitation is a tribute to his skills and testimony to the urgency of the issues. It was as if people realized that what concerned them most deeply and touched them most profoundly could not be edited out by the dictates of government and by the officers of institutionalized morality. Kosuth’s art, like that of his fellow conceptual artists, does not lie simply in the production of a painting or a sculpture. For him, art is prior to its material; it is constituted by the very process of its being questioned and is therefore wholly dependent on context. Being an artist means questioning the nature of art, not of painting or sculpture. The work of art, as he puts it, “is essentially a play within the meaning system of art.” That play within the system is fundamentally predicated on the historical

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and social context of the individual viewer, and so the artist has necessarily to concern himself with philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and history. Indeed for all his rejection of painting and sculpture as viable art forms now, and for all the fierceness of his critique of the institution of art history, there are few contemporary artists whose commitment to history runs as deep as Kosuth’s. For him the power of the work we see in museums is derived from the concrete experience of the historical moment, both present and past. In short, “no matter what actual form the activity of art takes, its history gives it a concrete presence.”

• Kosuth’s positions have been worked out over a long period in a series of essays, many of which have a direct bearing on the way in which the Brooklyn installation was conceived and presented. The phases of his work have often been presented as being comparatively disjunct, but in fact they follow logically one from the other. If the lodestar of the early phase was the philosophy of Wittgenstein, that of the second phase was radical anthropology, and that of the third the psychology of Freud. Yet Kosuth’s engagement with each of these disciplines is unimaginable without the others. Throughout, the commitment to the role of art within the political and moral life has remained unwavering. For these reasons it is impossible to grasp either the impact of the Brooklyn installation or its place within his work without a brief consideration of the evolution of his thought. In a famous essay of 1969 titled “Art after Philosophy,” Kosuth worked out the consequences of the view that works of art are akin to analytic propositions in language. The crucial proposal was that the work of art, like an analytic proposition (and unlike a synthetic proposition), contains no reference to any matter of fact beyond itself. Its validity is not dependent on any empirical, much less any aesthetic, presupposition about the nature of things. Art precedes its material. It is tautological, like an analytic proposition, in that it contains its definition within itself. The artist’s nomination of the work as “art” is what makes it art. In these respects, art is essentially linguistic in character (Kosuth would later modify this position by claiming, in line with the later Wittgenstein, that a defining characteristic of art is that it can show that which words cannot say). Such a position has serious implications not only for the future of art but also for its past. The difficulty with modernist painting and sculpture is that it exists solely in the realm of aesthetics and is essentially decorative. Since it refers to that which is beyond art (aesthetics), it does not add to our understanding of the nature of art. Worse still, since modernism became institutionalized and fetishized rather swiftly (as one might have predicted), it simply shored up the tradition, the conventional art histories, and—­above all—­the market.

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Much of this may seem to be at a considerable remove from the Brooklyn installation, but it is less so than one might think. For Kosuth, the notion that we can understand art only as the context of art was as fundamental to his work in 1990 as it was in 1969. Of course, as Kosuth noted then, any object is eligible for aesthetic consideration once it is presented in, say, a museum; but because what makes art is its definition, what gives it its meaning—­just like language—­is its use. Kosuth links his political agenda with his concern for the nature and concept of art thus: we cannot ignore the link between politics and the concept of art, precisely because the presentation of the work in the museum or gallery is an ideological position, by the very fact of its institutionalization. I would add that the catch lies in the play between our own responses to the objects as objects, referring to the world of facts beyond them, and our responses to the objects understood (by virtue of denomination or installation) as works of art. We must also allow the discomfort of the never-­ending cancellation of one response by the other, and acknowledge that it is from such discomfort or irritation that we achieve a form of understanding.

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In the course of the next few years, Kosuth developed his thinking on the fundamental problem of context under the influence of Marxism and radical anthropology. The 1975 essay “The Artist as Anthropologist” is, of all his earlier writings, perhaps the most directly relevant to the Brooklyn installation. Throughout it he constantly returns to his belief that the meaning of the work is constituted by the individual beholder. The first implication of this position is that we ought to renounce the old Cartesian distinction between experience and reality. The only reality is experienced reality: we cannot stop emotions from interfering with the judgments that supposedly form the basis of scientific knowledge, and we must acknowledge the repression of sensuality under the domination of rationality. Objectivity can be conceived of only as alienation: the pressures of institutionalization to suppress what is most meaningful to us should be resisted. Hence the need to examine as critically as possible the ways in which fashion and the market determine our taste. Consumption and the fetishization of art as commodity reduce the autonomy of our judgment. It is imperative to remain as attentive as possible to “the sway of society over the inner life of the person,” as William Leiss, one of Kosuth’s great anthropologist heroes, puts it. And so we begin to understand Kosuth’s need to single out works that are not, as he later phrased it, part of the great Autobahn of masterpieces. “Lesser” or less famous works offer a better chance for us to form in­ dependent judgments, since the potential of such works is less likely to

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have been corrupted by their having been institutionalized, commodified, and turned into fetishes. For in their effort—­their desire—­to avoid reality, fetishists focus their attention on what is secondary. This, then, was another advantage of making a selection of works from the collections of the Brooklyn Museum. One could hardly fall into the trap of thinking, as a distinguished modern art historian once did, that “the superior craftsman, and only the superior one, is so organized that he can register within his medium an individual awareness of a period predicament.” The fact is that even undistinguished craftspersons are likely to be able to register within their media the period predicament, whether seen “individually” or as reflection of some common consciousness. If ever one needed evidence of the authority of “lesser” works of art as historical documents, it was to be found in Kosuth’s installation. But the issue went far beyond history and documentation; it forced a reevaluation of ourselves and our relation to present culture. In “The Artist as Anthropologist,” Kosuth sought to show why one had not only to acquire fluency in a culture but also to diminish the spurious distance, imposed by a false scientism, between oneself and that culture. Radical anthropology renounced the notion of the objective investigator; in the same way as one examined other cultures, one had to examine one’s position within one’s own culture. There are abundant lessons to be learned from other cultures, to be sure, but most important is to perceive the subjectivity of our own ideology and the failure of objectivity. The duality between subject and object that permeates the “objectivity” of so much Western thought is only an impediment to understanding the inquiring self itself and therefore to understanding the object of its investigation. And, as the Brooklyn Museum show demonstrates, since art exists only in context and as context, it becomes a critical implement not only in the activity of self-­reflection but also—­and thereby—­in the liberation from the constraints of fashion, taste, and the dictates of dominant social structures. To say this may be to invest too much faith in the possibilities of art; but the moral dimension of Kosuth’s work proposes that with religion no longer viable, and with science doomed to its positivisms, we must turn to art for the understanding of ethics, value, and those issues of meaning that go beyond the laws of physics and the decrees of God.

• Kosuth’s concern with the role of the viewer soon led, naturally enough, to an intense engagement with the work of Sigmund Freud. Through Freud, Kosuth seems to have grown increasingly aware of the ways in which an individual beholder’s contexts change and of how meanings are lost, canceled, reclaimed, and revised in the light of personal ­experience. The

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opening quotation in his notes on the work titled Cathexis came from Freud’s 1915 paper on the Unconscious: “Thought proceeds in systems so far remote from the original perceptual residues that they have no longer retained anything of the qualities of those residues, and, in order to become conscious, need to be reinforced by new qualities.” This provides an important clue to the way in which Kosuth conceived of the Brooklyn provocation. His aim was to make the beholder as self-­ conscious as possible about the relation between conditions of context and the production of meaning. And he did so by making one as aware as possible of the process whereby meaning is constructed. The viewer begins to see the work of art in the way the artist does, “as a struggle to make and cancel meaning and re-­form it.” Understanding the work of art becomes an event that both locates and includes the viewer through the innumerable evocations, cancellations, and superimpositions called forth by the juxtaposition of objects and texts—­in this case, in the domain of the “unmentionable.” One further element in Kosuth’s conception of art and artwork bears directly on the Brooklyn installation—­his view of the problem of the artwork’s aura. He derived it, of course, from that maverick early associate of the Frankfurt school, Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, the aura of a work of art—­and he was thinking particularly of painting—­was tied to notions of authenticity and uniqueness. In an age of religion (or magic), aura was provided by ritual context (ritual space, the ritualization of tradition, or some combination of both); but in what he terms the age of mechanical reproduction, “the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production [and] the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—­politics.” Aura had become a nostalgic bourgeois category. The context that endowed the work with aura had now become the institutions of capitalist society, such as the museum and, mutatis mutandis, the market. Kosuth recognized the factitious aura of painting and the extent to which it was a product of hegemonic institutions—­and so he gave it up. For him, the whole of art became the questioning of art. A truly political art, he realized, would not content itself with the message alone; it would—­it had to—­engage the viewer in a questioning of the nature and process of art itself. Only in this way could we understand the nature of the institutions and the pressures they exert, and thereby subject them to the necessary critique. For Kosuth, then, an art such as Hans Haacke’s—­in which the message lies primarily in the content—­simply reinforces the positions already held by his viewers. It is too unambiguous. It cannot change anyone because it fails to question its status as art, and therefore its institutional presumptions and presuppositions.

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This is the essential background to The Play of the Unmentionable. This is how a major conceptual artist came to select a series of historical works of art from a major museum in order to make a political intervention that, although less obviously theoretical than much of his previous work, was wholly in keeping with the concerns of his practice. The Play of the Unmentionable was an extraordinary success: over ninety-­ one thousand visitors came to visit the installation in the space of a little over three months. At any given time, the Grand Lobby of the museum—­a large space of over eight thousand square feet—­was unusually crowded. In recent years the museum has done everything to ensure that this would not simply be empty space, in the way that grand museum lobbies often are, but now it took on an aspect that was both animated and intense. One had the distinct impression that the visitors to the installation were not simply making their way across the space to the main galleries of the museum, or to the exhibition of the works of Albert Pinkham Ryder that ran, also successfully, for the duration of the installation. They were concentrating, engaged in the issues so clearly presented by the images and mosaics of texts written with calculated elegance across the walls—­beside, over, and under the objects. Kosuth’s habitual skill in the presentation of texts made the installation seem at the same time eminently accessible and deeply provocative. While several of Kosuth’s preceding installations adopted similar strategies, none had enjoyed the same popular success. In comparison with the Brooklyn installation, the Wittgenstein exhibit in Vienna and Brussels would have seemed rather esoteric, both for its texts and for the difficult works it showed. Not that Kosuth would apologize for such difficulty: he has never claimed that art is, or should be, easy. But in the Brooklyn installation the stakes were plain, and they were revealed in the context of works that were clearly a part of our own history. All this proved to be a seductive strategy. In most cases it required no great initial leap to understanding. The works were generally ones that formed part of the traditions and conventions we know. But Kosuth’s juxtapositions and the spatial and intellectual intervention of the texts set an unexpected kind of mental effort in motion. One found oneself meditating on the relations between objects, between objects and texts, and between objects, texts, and oneself. Constantly one sought to construct the work, as work of art, below the fragments of other discourses. By using texts, “the mystified experience of aesthetic contemplation was ruptured.” Because texts, as Kosuth insists, are human marks, and since language is daily and banal, “the individualizing profundity of contemplation was denied.” As he affirmed with regard to his earlier work Cathexis, “the viewer, as a reader, could experience the language of the construction of what is seen. That cancellation of habituated experiences which makes the language visible also forces the viewers/readers to realize their own subjective role in the meaning-­making process.”

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As a result, one could hardly have failed to see that there are no intrinsic meanings in an object or an image but that meaning always exists in relation to the viewer, as well as “to society, and in relation to what preceded it, to what it shares, and to what follows.” Soon one could see that meanings were being produced that went beyond the overt content of the works. We, as viewers, were made aware of our role in the production of meaning, and the old mystifying, transcendental status of art was broken. We could grasp the full extent of art’s embeddedness in history and culture, and in this manner be led to engage the issues of censorship, control, and the limits of art. For they too could now clearly be seen as subject to determination by context, period, and convention. They were as inabsolute as the transcendence of art. The unmentionable was revealed through the play of the unmentionable and through the processes by which meanings are constructed and made apparent. Every beholder was made conscious of the processes whereby history and context interact with the individual. And art could show what words alone could not say. Nor could any visitor to the Brooklyn installation have had any doubt that one was dealing with a new work, one by Kosuth. This was not just another exhibition of individual works of art, curated by an art historian or museum curator in such a way as to leave our sense of the autonomy of art objects and their historical distance unimpinged (let alone unthreatened). The exhibition was clearly dialectical. Individual works were actualized, as it were: because the production of meaning lay so clearly with the viewer, the artworks were charged with meanings and implications they had never had before. Or, to put it more precisely, the objects were charged with meanings that had lain dormant in them, waiting, one might say, to be awakened under the conditions of both Kosuth’s work and the historical moment in which it was set. The challenge became obvious as soon as one entered the museum. For one thing, there were the texts. Printed in white lettering on gray walls in various type sizes, they arrested one’s attention both for their form and for their content. The large banner-­style slogans captured the eye, drawing it down to the longer sentences, and then to the paragraphs, inscribed in the smallest print around discrete clusters of objects and images. The texts insisted that we read them. There was no need to search, as we sometimes anxiously do, for the innocuous and “objective” labels that we generally need as historical crutches with which to look more safely (or less ignorantly) upon works that we do not know or have not seen before, or that come from another period. These “labels” were comments, provocations, insults, puzzles, contradictions, and stimulations. One was impelled into a personal interaction with each text and with each image or object on which the text commented—­if one had not already been forced into some interaction by the strength or unusualness of the object itself.

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• The provocation—­like the challenge to see uniquely—­also began immediately, with the inscription of the title of the installation on the entrance wall of the Grand Lobby. “The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable.” The series of oxymorons, of contradictions, had started off: museum/play/unmentionable: these were not the usual or the conventional collocations. Beneath this title came a frank acknowledgment of the support of the National Endowment for the Arts. The mighty second museum of New York! The greatest grant-­giving body in the field of the arts! What place could there be for the unmentionable within these institutions—­one erected by virtuous citizenry as the very embodiment of the relations between knowledge, art, and authority, and the other nothing less than an arm of government? Off to the left one caught a glimpse of a picture of a naked man and a variety of sculptures of nude young men. Revealing himself, as it were, from behind, the man in the picture (John Koch’s The Sculptor of 1964) seemed casually to be attending to some need (he turned out to be lighting a cigarette) of a seated clothed figure. Off to the right one could make out three large oil paintings of more or less unclothed children. The Cincinnati trial, which began the day before the opening of The Play of the Unmentionable at the Brooklyn Museum, revolved around Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of men in sadomasochistic poses and of Sally Mann’s pictures of children with their genitals exposed. The coincidence of dates was by chance and not by design, of course; but for months—­as everyone knew—­the NEA had been equivocating, vacillating, and finally submitting in the face of pressure not to fund, directly or indirectly, the production or exhibition of artworks representing the supposedly unmentionable. But who decides? This must have been at least one of the many questions that now entered into play. To have opened with the most famous of the passages by that great philosopher of liberty Jean-­Jacques Rousseau (“Man is born free but is everywhere in chains”) would have been too obvious, but it was power­fully alluded to by the first three images in the installation: Barbara Kruger’s We Are Notifying You of a Change of Address, where heavy chains both imprison and bar access to an apparently bare female figure; Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Lucretia with a large chain around her neck, as she stabs herself in shame at her rape; and finally Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, with the heavy chain that both enslaves her and seems to preserve her chastity. These are such contradictory choices that they force us to work to resolve them. Alongside the images came the opening quotation, not the obvious one by the philosopher of Geneva but another, even more germane: “The savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself and knows only how to live in the opinion of others, so that

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he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgement of others concerning him.” Reminders of their autonomy and our slavishness would henceforth punctuate the installation. We had embarked on the difficult search for the integrity within ourselves, by being made to reflect on the process of artistic activity and on the implications of our own definition of art. The constant issue would be our independence of judgment: who, Kosuth seemed insistently to be asking, decided what was or was not art, and what follows from that decision? Freedom and tolerance, or control and censorship? At the same time, though, there was another issue, that of the nature of artistic activity and its legitimate domain. In calling attention to the Koranic parallels between the creative powers of the artist and those of God himself, the text that immediately followed the opening cluster of images presented all too clearly the threat of artistic autonomy to institutional power and the need to control the freedom that comes from creation. “On the Day of Judgment the punishment of hell will be meted out to the painter, and he will be called upon to breathe life into the forms that he has fashioned; but he cannot breathe life into anything. In fashioning the form of a being that has life, the painter is usurping the creative function of the Creator and thus is attempting to assimilate himself to God.” To make what one likes, and to be free to do so, is to aspire to a power that is not of the human realm, because it is the power to make images vital. This is the threat that the lawmakers cannot tolerate, because it is the guarantor of the potential of our resistance to control. But what are the further implications of this freedom—­to make what one likes and to be free to do so—­and of the varieties of constraints that are placed upon it? While the Islamic proscriptions may be concerned with the dangers of aspiring to creative powers that only God is supposed to have, what is it in the West that constrains freedom? In “The Artist as Anthropologist,” Kosuth cites William Leiss on the ways in which the transformation of all of nature (including consciousness itself) into the material of production comes to be “compulsive, blindly repetitive and finally self-­destructive.” For Leiss, “the final stage is reached when the only rationale for production that can be offered is that many persons can be induced to believe that what they really want and need are the newest offering of commodities in the marketplace.” This is the most insidious constraint on artistic freedom. Whether or not we now take such a bleak view of the effects of the marketplace, it is not hard to grasp the lesson here, and it is phrased in such a way as to serve as a perfect motto for The Play of the Unmentionable: “At this stage domination over nature and men, directed by the ruling social class, becomes internalized in the psychic process of individuals; and it is self-­destructive because the compulsive character of consumption and behavior destroys personal autonomy and

Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable

negates the long and difficult effort to win liberation from that experience of external compulsion.” This is a complex and important point; but one can perhaps speak still more bluntly and plainly, just as Kosuth himself does. The Brooklyn installation, as we have seen, was conceived as a direct response to recent assaults on freedom of expression and artistic liberty. The situation was all too clear. The NEA had refused to give grants to works that it, in its ­wisdom, had decided were immoral or pornographic; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington had, at the last minute, canceled a show of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe; and the Cincinnati trial was about to open. The issue of what an artist could or could not do—­should or should not be allowed to do—­was on the minds of many more people than usual. Under these circumstances, photographs such as those by Larry Clark could have been taken only as some kind of deliberate provocation. Beside them, photographs by Mapplethorpe such as the one on display from the Brooklyn Museum collection must have seemed altogether innocuous and tame, slick and decorative. One has no difficulty in finding in them just those formal qualities that seem to be so lacking in Clark (though, as always, there is no shortage of people willing to offer a formal analysis of his works too). The depiction of sex in Larry Clark’s photographs seems plain and explicit enough. Even the more sophisticated viewers, upon seeing them for the first time, are likely to ask themselves (or at least, to entertain the thought): Can these works really be art? And if they are, what then are the conditions of art? These are exactly the questions that Kosuth wants us to raise. The whole of his own art is about this. It is not just that he brings out of storage a painting of an apparently homosexual exchange, showing a wholly nude male figure (the model for Prometheus!) with an attractive rump, or coy pictures of seminude children, in order to bring the very issues that were most debated in 1990 to mind. It is that his use of context and contextualization is so effective. For example, in confronting us with Clark’s picture of a boy grasping his exposed penis, and setting it in the visual context of the Roman statues of Dionysus and Apollo, he makes us face the possibility that we may be more aware than we like to admit of the absence of the male member (whether lost by chance or by deliberate mutilation) in the antique works. Or that we may either be more sensitive to or more inclined to suppress the sexual aspects of the Egyptian bronze of a pharaoh worshiping the Otter (which he does, we may not immediately notice, with a phallus attached to his forehead and by masturbating as he worships). We have no difficulty in classifying these Egyptian, Greek, and Roman works as art, and we tolerate their sexual dimension by suppressing our interest in it; but with Larry Clark—­? In the case of the ancient statues it all seems much clearer. Either we do not notice the sexual dimension

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because the objects are in a museum, and because art permits us to repress that which would trouble us in an object we are more reluctant to admit as art—­or we simply pretend not to notice. From Rodin’s bronzes of lesbian couplings to the Japanese shunga woodblocks, these were the issues that The Play of the Unmentionable brought constantly, insistently, and trenchantly to the fore. In a direct allusion to one of the Mapplethorpe photographs singled out by the Cincinnati prosecution, Kosuth showed a Mughal painting, Intoxicated Ascetics, the central scene of which is a man urinating directly into the mouth of another. Kosuth did not hesitate to have an enlargement made of this scene, as if in defiance of all “scientific” art-­historical commentary, which has never commented directly on it (even though the page itself is well enough known). It is reported to be an illustration of the fastest way of allowing opium to enter the bloodstream; but once we have this information, there is yet another problem, yet another aspect of the play of the unmentionable. Are we somehow supposed to feel that historical knowledge—­essentially social knowledge—­somehow detracts from the transcendental status of art? Or does it have nothing to do with art at all? The other photographs by Clark present similar difficulties. Kosuth showed these images of adolescent sex in the company of three paintings of disrobed children and a pair of textual reminders by me, the first about the barrier against regarding realism as art—­ Art is beautiful and high. The photograph is realistic; it is vulgar; it elicits natural and realistic responses. In art, nudity is beautiful and ideal; in the photograph (unless it has acquired the status of art), it is ugly and (therefore?) provocative.

—­and the second about the contextuality of pornography: Arousal by image (whether pornographic or not) only occurs in context: in the context of the individual beholder’s conditioning, and, as it were, of his preparation for seeing the arousing, erotic, or pornographic image. It is dependent on the prior availability of images and prevailing boundaries of shame . . .

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But beside the oil paintings he also inscribed in large letters a passage from the biography of William Sergeant Kendall, the painter of the picture evasively or coyly called A Statuette. “Americans,” wrote Kendall’s biographer, “have never felt entirely comfortable with paintings of the nude. Perhaps Kendall’s nudes were so well liked because they showed children and were therefore removed from a sexual context.” While the first part of this passage may be a fair acknowledgment of a certain state of affairs, the evasiveness of the second only became fully apparent in the context of the Larry Clarks.

Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable

But with evasion comes great illumination. It is as hard to believe in the absence of sexual content in Kendall’s (seminude) painting of a child as it is to deny that our discomfort with Clark’s photographs, however enlightened we may be, springs precisely from the unadorned adolescent sexuality they portray, as well as from our persistent reluctance to integrate sex and art. Kosuth’s installation spoke for itself—­one had only to survey the history of art to see that they need not be seen as contradictory in terms. At the same time, though, it raised the question: what is the force of institutionalization that impels the separation of these categories? This was the motor that drove Kosuth’s selection of works from the Brooklyn collection, a selection sanctioned by the authority of the very institution that had collected them. This, in short, was the paradox that provoked.

• We may think a representation pornographic, or acknowledge that others are likely to think it pornographic. We know that this judgment, this assignment of category, is wholly dependent on context, convention, and education. But how is this judgment affected by the knowledge that the work is a work of art, or even by the suspicion that it may be? Who, after all, determines? And how is autonomy of judgment affected by the determination of the work as art? It may be that in making his spectators reflect more on the question of the concept of art than on the narrowness of censorship, Kosuth overstated the problem—­his favored problem. But one must acknowledge the prescience of his demonstration that the very act of social control manifested as censorship is nothing more than an extension of power into the domain of autonomy embodied in the idea of art. And indeed his prescience was clearly vindicated by the proceedings and the outcome of the trial in Cincinnati. From the very start of the trial, it was clear that the central issue would be the artistic status of the seven photographs. The fundamental question was, could such (pornographic) images possibly be regarded as art? The lead prosecutor would show and describe every photograph and ask each member of the jury: “Is this art?” Of course the prosecution’s hope was that the jury would see that the photos could not possibly be art (since art is pure, transcendent, culturally and spiritually enhancing, and so on). As in the early days of photography, if the image was too realistic it could not be art. But to the prosecution the matter must have seemed clear, even if tautologous: if it is art, it is art, but if it is pornography, it is not art. The prosecution cannot long have considered the possibility that someone might demonstrate the contrary. And yet someone, many people, did. The jury was swayed by those authorities (museum officials and critics) who convinced them that the images were art—­and therefore not pornographic. Now the legal position was clear, and was set forth with surprising lucidity by a judge whom everyone had taken to be hostile to

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the museum’s case. The threefold test of obscenity was “that the average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the picture, taken as a whole, appeals to a prurient interest in sex, that the picture depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and that the picture, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Yet it is impossible not to feel a little uneasy at the facility of the outcome. If the members of the jury genuinely believed at the outset that the images were pornographic (say, sexually stimulating in a way that presented some kind of danger to public morality), how could they suddenly have changed their minds just because the images were nominated as art? How does the category of art come to have such power—­if indeed it has this power—­to alter perceptions? And on whose say-­so are such images thus nominated? Do they become art only when they enter a museum? The temptation is to suggest that it was a moral failing of the jury not to retain their independence of judgment, stay with their sense of the pornographic, and refuse to be swayed by the fact that the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the director of the University Art Museum at Berkeley, and the former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania (and current director of the American Craft Museum) all declared that these images were art. Could not at least one member of the jury have responded, as the prosecutor presumably did, by saying (or at least thinking): “Whatever you claim, I think these images are pornographic”? And could he or she in that case not have resisted adding, “And therefore certainly not art”? Here lies one crux of the matter. But there is another, just as crucial, in what we now may take to have been an unexpected triumph for the position demonstrated by Kosuth’s work. That is, it can only have been a sense of the contextuality of pornography that made the jury refuse the obvious position: once pornography, always pornography. “The picture [of the girl with her skirt up] is a perfect illustration of the phrase ‘Evil is in the eye of the beholder,’” concluded the art critic of the Cincinnati Enquirer. “Who determines what is a work of art?” asked the prosecutor. “It’s the culture at large—­museums, critics, galleries. No one person makes the determination. It’s more than personal, more than local,” replied an expert witness. To refuse the position “once pornography, always pornography,” as we shall see, is neither to repudiate the power of images nor to deny their capacity to arouse. Nor is it, as some skeptics might claim, simply an indication of upward cultural mobility (“now we too can recognize what makes these images art”). One further aspect of both the proceedings and the jury’s decision merits reflection. The jury seems to have been chiefly convinced by those critics who offered a formalist defense of the photographs (their strategy was to prove that the photos qualified as art on formal grounds, as if

Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable

this were the sole possible basis for proof). Could such a jury, consisting of ordinary members of the Cincinnati community, really have been persuaded, almost overnight, by arguments such as those regarding the figure study of the photographer with a bullwhip in his anus? “The human figure is centered. The horizon line is two-­thirds of the way up, almost the classical two-­thirds to one-­third proportion. The way the light is cast so there is light all around the figure [is] very symmetrical, which is very characteristic of his flowers . . .” Surely one might have thought that this was too fancy a diversion from the reality of the image? Apparently not. The trump card was provided by the most adept of the formal analysts, who, when asked, “So when you look at a picture, you look at it differently?” replied emphatically, “No! Training in art is just training in life, really.” One could hardly have wished for a more spectacular vindication of the strategy of The Play of the Unmentionable. If anyone thought that Kosuth had overestimated the importance of the question of art, the result of the Cincinnati trial (and the relaxation of restrictions by the NEA that followed in its wake) proved that he had not. It was precisely their own reflection on “the historical relationship between the artist and the concept of art in this society” that made members of the jury realize the impossibility and futility of censorship.

• The jury was swayed by an exposition of the formal aspects of the works at issue. Apparently, either one meaning of the work was set aside or, as a result of their questioning of the nature of art, form became meaning (or, at least, integral to it). One might not have predicted that a jury of people not normally involved with the making or business of art would be moved by formal arguments—­and yet they were. This can only mean that both the art establishment and the anti-­art establishment misjudge the involvement of most museumgoers with issues of art. But was the day saved only because the works were proved to be art? Once again the question returns: who decides? We know well enough that at Cincinnati it was the directors of the museums. We could take this as just one further sign of the institutionalization of the radical, which has become so complex an aspect of the cultural politics of our times. But it also seems to mean that Mapplethorpe is now safely institutionalized. Could this be why Kosuth insisted on the inclusion of the photographs by Larry Clark? Beside him, as I have noted, Mapplethorpe’s works look a little too smooth, stylish, and marketable. But herein lies a considerable irony. For all his assaults on the connection between style and the market, Kosuth’s own work betrays an extreme degree of what might roughly be called high formalization. It is cool and elegant, and its junctures of words, light, and visuality are almost seam-

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lessly consistent. Initially, in his work Kosuth sought a certain neutrality of presentation. Lettering was intended to be undistinctive rather than overtly “artistic.” But whether or not he intended it, even this neutrality gained its own historical momentum and status with the passage of time. The result, ironically enough, has been a distinctive Kosuthian style. We see it in the Brooklyn installation as much as in his other works. And it has, inevitably, become eminently marketable. The artist has been caught on the very hook that he so effectively baited. At least two more paradoxes, or problems, arise from Kosuth’s thinking. To overlook them would be an abnegation of the very candor his art demands. After the paradox of institutionalization come those of contextuality and aura. They are less obviously paradoxical but equally relevant to the effectiveness of the installation. They are paradoxical for two reasons: the strength of the installation could be seen to depend, at least to some extent, on a community of response that somehow infringes the rule of contextuality (as is now most obvious in the case of images that are seen to carry a sexual charge); and the power of its images appeared to depend on a quality that might once have been described as aura, had it not been for the critique that Benjamin based on the commodification and institutionalization of art. In my book The Power of Images I emphasized the poverty of a view of the history of art that does not take the constitutive role of the viewer into full consideration, whether for the meaning or the power of images. I argued that it is impossible to understand either the present or the past of images unless one takes the active role of the viewer into account. And I suggested that one means of gaining access to the dialectic of inter­ action is plotting and investigating the symptoms of responses, however troubling and difficult, to art and to images. Such an investigation seems feasible only if it is based not simply on the internal history of images but also on the application of the lessons of philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. My trajectory, therefore, is not dissimilar to Kosuth’s; we have a kindred sense of the constructive and the limiting roles of context. It is instructive that, as if in alarm at my delineation of responses that intellectuals in general, and art historians in particular, either deny or seek to banish from their territories, choruses of art-­historical fear arose. These choruses were reinforced by two anxieties. First, predictably enough, there was the fear that I was somehow reducing the status of art by suggesting that we recall our responses to everyday imagery when we investigate our responses to what we regard as art; and, second, there was the anxiety that I was attributing to images some mysterious power and thereby failing to acknowledge individual needs and the projection of individual desires. I mention these reactions because they offer some insight into the premises of Kosuth’s practice, specifically that of The Play of the Unmentionable.

Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable

As we have seen, Kosuth repeatedly insists on the operative role of the viewer, his or her constitutive role. There are no intrinsic meanings—­no intrinsic power, I would add—­in objects and images. It is the viewer who must struggle for the meaning of art, in the face of the dictates of market and institutions. Some critics of The Power of Images were apparently so afraid of the responses to art that might thus arise that they compounded their fears by suggesting that I attributed the power of images to images themselves, autonomously and therefore somehow magically—­the very position I had repeatedly sought to undermine. Such is the power invested in images, it would seem, that even my repeated acknowledgment of the necessity of context renewed old fears that they might have an inherent power of their own. The days of belief in the passive spectator are now happily over; and only the most intransigent believers in the absolute transcendence of great works of art and the staunchest proponents of the market’s determining role lament their passing. But that forlorn position has recently come to be replaced by a positivism that, though it has been nurtured by the worthiest of motives, has become the domain of the fearful and the timid: the positivism of small context, of anecdote, of the narrow forms of what has fashionably come to be called “microhistory.” The viewer constructs the meaning of the work—­but how is the viewer himself or herself constructed? This is the question that has led many astray. The attentive and up-­to-­date reader may already have raised at least one eyebrow at the ways in which both Kosuth and I sometimes refer to “people,” or “the viewer,” or make use of the generalized first-­person plural. To do so is neither to hypostatize “the viewer” nor to sacrifice individuality for the sake of some kind of corporate response. It is not to minimize difference, nor to say that everyone responds in the same way to a given work or set of circumstances. Rather, it is to point up those common bases of response, emotion, and cognition upon which context acts and whose very commonality makes them amenable to analysis. We have no good words for them. They relate to hunger, sexuality, grief, gladness, terror. They are those awkward facts of feeling, instinct, and desire that have their roots in our humanity. Of course these categories are themselves inflected by context and subject to social and gender construction—­always. Prior to such inflection we must reckon with whatever it is that enables arousal and emotion. To say this is to do no more than declare the work that has still to be done: theoretical on the one hand, technical on the other. While different images may arouse the sexual feelings of different people at different times under different circumstances, it would be futile not to acknowledge the cognitive process, prior to context, that enables arousal by representation; and because this is a process that is prior to context, it cannot be named (except perhaps in neurophysiological terms). It is a theoretical construct with physiological reality.

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One cannot understand the desire to censor without understanding desire tout court—­specifically the desire for what is represented. However much context shapes content, and however much one acknowledges that standards of morality, when applied to art, are wholly determined by sociohistorical context and the varieties of conditioning, the link between vision and desire nevertheless remains to be excavated and theorized. For the sake of argument, let us say one attributes the greater popular success of the Brooklyn installation (in comparison with the 1989 Wittgenstein installation, The Play of the Unsayable) to the fact that people are more interested in the unmentionable than the unsayable. But to maintain such a position these days causes scandal, and it is not hard to imagine Kosuth himself, the artist as anthropologist, objecting on the grounds that there is no such thing as “people” in general, only different people and different contexts. But it is clear enough that the installation would have failed had not every spectator been able to recognize the sexual charge of Larry Clark’s photographs, or the mysterious brutality of Cindy Sherman here, and the slicing off of the breasts of Saint Agatha in the early sixteenth-­century Spanish painting; or the pricking of the needles in Clark’s First Time Shooting Up, Norman Rockwell’s 1944 The Tattoo Artist, and the nails driven into the naked body of the Nkisi power figure; or the deprivation of vitality betokened by the willful removal of the eyes of a figure in a picture such as the fifteenth-­century Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian with Their Three Brothers, where the eyes were presumably scratched at the time of the iconoclastic disturbances of the next century in an attempt to deprive the executioners of their malevolent life or vitality. Of course there are plenty of other aspects of the Play of the Unmentionable that would have been incomprehensible in other contexts; but the power of the installation resided precisely in the degree to which it forced its spectators to reflect on the ways in which they judged the inflection of response by context. Of course one might also claim that its effectiveness depended wholly on the common cultural identity of its spectators—­but in Brooklyn, of all places? The argument would be a weak one. No more representative microcosm of the world could we know. The installation forced one to reflect on context, but it depended for its effectiveness on a cognitive grasp of the roots of emotion, appetite, and fear: fear of oneself as much as fear of the other.

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In The Power of Images I was chiefly concerned with the power that arises in the case of all imagery, and not only in those images we call “art.” Kosuth, however, in the Brooklyn installation took one important step further: he decided to use the power of images as a means of understanding the power of art. While the role of the viewer in making meaning is funda-

Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable

mental to both his and my own aims, Kosuth’s breakthrough was to take the step from representation in general to art itself. “The meaning of art is how we describe it. The description of art—­which art itself manifests—­consists of a dynamic cluster of uses, shifting from work to work, of elements taken from the very fabric of culture—­no different from those which construct reality day to day.” On the basis of this position, Kosuth can make the most satisfactory claim we yet have for considering the role of the viewer as a means of insight into making. Viewers make meaning in the way artists make meaning: in both cases meaning is predicated on the questioning of art. Once one acknowledges the definition of art as a questioning, as a test rather than an illustration, one may begin to see it in terms of its liberating possibilities. It is a (the) fundamentally unalienating activity precisely because it allows us to participate in the making of meaning rather than having it foisted on us by some outside force such as superior taste, the market, some august institution, or anything else we might accept unquestioningly. Finally, we are able to interrogate our own complicity. To remember the lessons of the everyday and the ethnographic is to begin to understand the power of what we call “art.” We fail to grasp the force of images in our culture because they have become anodyne from familiarity, and because of our constant inclination to repress. Who in a civilized society finds it easy to admit to the savage within ourselves, to responses that seem primitive, raw, and basic—­the kind we think characteristic of other, more “primitive” cultures? As long as we think of art as no more than expensive decoration, no more than the unthinking “regurgitation of traditional forms ignorant of tradition,” we will continue to think of form as pure and autonomous content; and the motivation to censor—­as well as art’s capacity to offend us (or them)—­will continue to elude our grasp. If we fail to recognize the full extent to which art can go beyond the pleasing and the decorative, we fail to see the essential disturbances of art, and fetishize instead everything that is on its periphery: style, formalism, aesthetics, and those postmodernisms that are ignorant in their derivations. And so the problem of aura remains. It remains a useful term, Benjamin’s critique notwithstanding, for referring to the powers of images that we are inclined to repress, such as those that follow from the conflation of signifier and signified. Aura might also be applied usefully to those effects of images that were once clearer and easier to recognize in an age of ritual and religion. And it serves to underline the continuity between responses to religious images in the past and responses to other kinds of images now, including sexual ones. The corollary, of course, is that we fail to acknowledge the full effects of images because of the varieties of repression legitimized by art. But how to move from the power of images to the meaning of art? There is, in Kosuth, a high faith in art: not in the art we unthinkingly

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accept, nor in the art of market or fashion, but rather in art that makes itself by questioning, describing, and defining itself. This, for him, is what replaces the old notion of aura. The viewer, not the ritual, makes the meaning of the work. Power comes from an active, dialectical engagement with the work and from a testing of its status as art. Aura was provided by religion in the past, by various cultural institutions now; but it has become an empty vessel. In an age of easy reproduction, aura can serve only the interests of the market; and it does so, of course, by furthering the commodification of the object. Kosuth offers us the only compelling alternative. By replacing the fetishization of the object with reflection on the nature of art, and by showing the actual work involved in the process of reflection and questioning, he has reinstated the power of art. This power, in the end, is a liberating one, because it encourages consciousness to become aware of itself and to recognize the forces that act upon it.

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The Play of the Unmentionable, therefore, is not only about censorship but also—­above all—­about the conditions of art. It brings to the fore censorship’s direct dependence on how we and all other viewers think about the nature of art. Censorship is incapable of being programmed; it cannot be made into a set of immutable rules, precisely because it, like our notions of art, is wholly context dependent. Meaning is made by individual viewers in their context; it is not immanent in the objects of art. When we accept the meanings with which the institutions of our culture—­whether market, museum, or people “of superior taste”—­endow the work, we relinquish some of our freedom. Kosuth shows how liberation can come only from ceaseless questioning and requestioning of the nature of art. We ourselves make meaning in the way the best artists do, by never giving up that questioning. Only in this way can we challenge the sterile dominance of institutionally imposed taste. Art, in the end, is what art means to us. It opens to us one of the few roads to authenticity in a society that insists on imposing its taste at every turn and by every means—­nowadays, above all, by the market. By means of the questioning on which Kosuth insists, by means of the interrogation of the nature of art, we at least make some progress in freeing our inner life from the sway of ideology. No wonder that Kosuth begins with Rousseau’s critique of social man, who “lives constantly outside himself and only knows how to live in the opinion of others.” Rousseau offers the savage as the model of authenticity; but what is really at stake here is authentic autonomy of judgment. Kosuth seeks to lay it bare not simply by insisting on the independent questioning of art, but by encouraging us to reflect on the ways in which other societies are capable of purer and more independent judgments—­though, admittedly, also of similar sorts of social control—­with the result that art retains some of the force it has lost in our own.

Joseph Kosuth and the Play of the Unmentionable

This loss of force is to be attributed not simply to the dominance of the institutions but also to the irreversible historical fact that the society in which we live is no longer unified. This, for a start, is why works of art can no longer be pictures of the world. In a fragmented, nonunified society such as ours, meanings necessarily differ from viewer to viewer. As we have repeatedly seen, it is the viewer in context who makes meaning—­a meaning achieved by an attentiveness to the play within systems of meaning. The Play of the Unmentionable makes us see how meaning emerges from the interstices within the relations between relations, in such a way that we begin to discern still further relations not seen before. Meaning may be elicited by texts, but texts themselves are limited. Art says what texts cannot say. It offers to us the constructive elements for what can be said only indirectly, for the unsayable and even the un­ mentionable. Kosuth’s achievement is to help us understand that art is more than its objects, that it resides in how we question the nature of art, and that understanding emerges from the play of relations. We can begin the process of understanding only if we open ourselves to that play and succeed in ridding ourselves of our socially determined preconceptions about the meanings of works. Above all, however, Kosuth has succeeded in taking that most conservative of institutions, the museum, and turning it into a liberating place. As in the past, so too now, the museum has become a cathedral where we submissively pay homage to the dogmas of art and where we either passively yield or actively embrace an orthodoxy imposed from on high. But for a brief period the Brooklyn Museum—­with its complicity—­became a place where meaning could be made as a result of critical thinking about the process and nature of art itself. For once, ironically enough, that meaning could be achieved free from the dictates of the institution itself, since the play of texts and objects allowed a play of the imagination unfettered by normal rules and constraints. Once we censor, however, once we accept the full consequences of institutionalization and impose the rules and cancellations censorship demands, we exclude the possibility of art. That is both the threat of censorship and the challenge it poses, not merely to art but to the liberation art offers. This liberation is in turn the most essential, the most indispensable part of the nature of art. By refusing its dangers, censorship takes away art’s possibility.

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From Defamation to Mutilation Reason of State and Gender Politics in South Africa*

Gherardo Ortalli’s La pittura infamante of 19791 was of much wider relevance to the modern history of the relationship between politics, image making, and the defamation and mutilation of images than its explicit chronological range might suggest.2 Although Ortalli himself was aware of the applicability of his topic to the broader sociology of images, he explicitly abstained from drawing any wider conclusions. His was a strictly historical analysis of the uses of defamatory images in the Middle Ages, especially in Italy. He dealt largely with a specific legal use of images, often by the authorities themselves, intended not only to defame the persons they represented but actually to punish the images, especially when the traitors or criminals they showed were absent. The immagini infamanti were thus more of a top-­down than a bottom­up phenomenon, whereas this essay may seem to be about the opposite—­ the even more familiar phenomenon of an image that is intended to defame from the bottom up by the people themselves, and that is eventually punished and executed. But in the end this may be misleading too. It turns out that such cases were often orchestrated from the top and that the eventual destruc­tion of the image was in many ways intended to save the reputation of the person represented rather than to destroy it. Although Ortalli was very clear that his book was about a legal practice that was both juridically and penally normative,3 for the rest his definition applies very much to the particular case presented here. He showed that the aim of the medieval and early Renaissance defamatory images was to strike their human sub­jects in their individual dignity and honor by displaying their images to the derision and disdain of the community. * Original publication: “From Defamation to Mutilation: Gender Politics and Reason of State in South Africa,” in Images of Shame: Infamy, Defamation and the Ethics of Oeconomia, ed. Carolin Behrmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 193–­216.

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In it they were deprived of the necessary attributes of their social status, and sometimes even of those even more elementary attributes that are particular to every human being (such as the parts of the body). Ortalli noted that “to strike at an individual via his image meant using a symbol for a concrete purpose, following a method that was especially congen­ial for a still largely illiterate context, and one that was—­precisely for this reason—­all the more attentive to figurative representation, capable of conveying a rich series of messages and information.”4 Moreover, in a society in which the image offered an especially good vehicle for news, information, and persuasion—­just as ours has become, perhaps more than ever before—­the defamatory image had a par­ticularly strong effect. All this offers a remarkable parallel to the South African case I will describe. It offers a striking example of how a single image may stand at the center of a com­plex array of political, legal, and aesthetic issues, culminating in iconoclasm. Many similar examples of images that begin as defamatory—­or are con­strued as defamatory—­and end in being destroyed, whether spontaneously and illegally or by design and legally, can be found elsewhere as well. The context of this case contains a personal trajectory. I had returned to South Africa for the longest period since I’d left as a young political exile in 1966. Since then I had only gone to the funerals of my parents in the early 1980s. The country had totally changed. Although the socio­ economic fault line was as strong as ever—­if not stronger—­and fell, as it always had, along the major racial divisions, the moral and ethical situation had been transformed. For the most part, people seem to have genuinely changed their views from the old apartheid days. No doubt there were also pragmatic motives for such change, especially among the minority white population (3 million vs. 30 million), but even so it was clear that people on both sides had worked hard to overcome, or even sub­merge, the old racial prejudices. When I left South Africa, the main opposition party, the African National Congress (ANC), had gone underground, and its military wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the People, operated largely from outside. The South African Communist Party, which largely supported the ANC, and still more radically revolutionary groups like the Pan African Congress (PAC), also remained deep underground. Even people like me who were not involved in any dangerously subversive activity were suspected of somehow being communist operatives in the struggle against apartheid. Censorship was tight; one could publish nothing against the government, and when they weren’t directly banned, texts were widely censored and mutilated by cutting or blotting—­both in newspapers and in books. On the other hand, despite many restrictions on them, the visual arts played a significant role in the resistance to apartheid.5 It is hard to entirely suppress the will to representation, indeed the will to make art,

From Defamation to Mutilation: South Africa

especially in the context of the expression of opposition to perceived or real repression. Hence the relative abun­dance of strongly political imagery even in the worst days of censorship of the apartheid era. In a society still with a large proportion of illiteracy, pictures served their traditional functions. Poster art was quite widely available, in the townships and more generally underground. But satirical images were rare, and even mild pornography was strictly banned. The Immorality Acts of 1927 and 1957 (“Sexual Offences Act”), which criminalized sexual association between the races, was rigidly enforced. Whites lived in fear of blacks, of miscegenation, and particularly of the supposedly rampant sexuality long associated with the black Other. When I returned to South Africa in 2012, all this had changed—­or so it seemed. The ANC was in power; Umkhonto we Sizwe was legitimized. Mandela was elevated to near-­sainthood, and the reputation of Bram Fischer, Afrikaner leader of the Communist Party of South Africa, was freed of its stain and rendered heroic. My friend Raymond Suttner, who spent more than eleven years in prison and house arrest for underground and insurrectionary activities, was then writing on Chief Albert Luthuli, South Africa’s first Nobel Prize Winner. Howard Smith, a former schoolmate, was running the finances of the Cape Province Communist Party. There were some alarming signs, of course: I remember a chilling conversation with Suttner about ANC Member of Parliament Ben Turok, who had voted against the proposed Secrecy of Information Act and was about to be disciplined for not voting with the party. I lamented this breach of democratic right; Suttner, who had written about the dangers and complexity of subordinating the individual voice to the collective, reminded me that the ANC parliamentary caucus, like many other parliamentary caucuses, demanded that its members vote as one. The old puritanism, so to speak, was back. Even so, art flourished in the new South Africa—­and by this I mean not only the much-­acclaimed work of William Kentridge, son of one of Mandela’s lawyers, Sidney Kentridge, but also the myriad lesser figures who produced more radical art. But what now of political art, of politically focused art? Of course there was much of this too. John Peffer had written a fine book called Art and the End of Apartheid, which set out both the achievements of and the setbacks to art in the years largely between 1976 and 1994.6 In it he described several instances of the slippage between censor­ship and iconoclasm, both before 1994 and in the wake of the first free elections in South African history in that year.7 Later, an allegedly pornographic work, Mark Hipper’s show about children’s sexuality in Grahams­town in 1998 titled Viscera, had been the target of censor­ship efforts, to little avail. Deputy Home Affairs minister Lindiwe Sisulu, daught­er of revolutionary hero Walter Sisulu, had wanted to ban it on the grounds of child pornography. Already in that year, the CEO of the Film and Publications Board, Nana Makuala, made it clear that Sisulu could advise but not impose

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decisions. Even in this earlier case, the close link between politics and pornography—­or allegations of pornography—­remained clear. Perhaps it is everywhere so. During my return in 2012, I was the guest of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, beautifully located at the center of the Cape’s prosperous wine country. I grew to know Aryan Kaganof, who, along with his wife Nicola Deane, had long been the target of potential censorship for their bluntly sexual works and had for some time had a blog on similar works that were targeted for their alleged pornography. At this point Kaganof was also making films about the struggles in the townships and distributing cellphones to the people so as to enable them to make their own films about what was happening: riots against the police, necklacing, tensions between supporters of Presi­dent Jacob Zuma and his rebellious follower the firebrand youth leader Julius Malema, who was soon to be expelled from the ANC. The National Gallery of South Africa had gone from being a very traditional place to one that showed advanced art, art often inflected by the history of racism in South Africa. At the Stellenbosch Institute I agreed to give a seminar on my old topic of censorship and iconoclasm, given the history of such phenomena in the country both before and after apartheid. At the end of the seminar on May 3, 2012, a group of students and professors at the university asked me to give a similar lecture at the university to the body of their students, for a reason that I would not have anticipated. The town council of Stellenbosch, the art school, and a number of organi­zations had decided that it would be a good idea to show art in the streets of the town. For the most part, the works weren’t explicitly political at all; on the contrary, they were traditional and relatively subjectless abstract or figurative large sculptures. Some were quite mediocre. Within a few days, a number of these seemingly innocuous works were attacked. A month or so before my talk, for example, three students had tried to push over Angus Taylor’s Grounded I and Grounded II before they were stopped. What troubled the people who’d heard my first lecture was the fact that many of the Stellenbosch students—­who one thought had grown more liberal, in accord with the general liberalization of their racial views—­had come out in support of the attacks on the public works of art. And they did so for reasons that I had not yet encountered previously in my studies of iconoclasm. They argued that the art was invading public space, that the public had not been asked permission to have works of art put up the streets—­and that, in any case, the proper place for works of art was a museum. This seemed to me to be sufficient reason—­and sufficient context—­to agree to talk to the students and their teachers about the history of resistance to images, from censorship through to iconoclasm. I had gone to Cape Town to meet Sue Williamson, who had long been engaged in

From Defamation to Mutilation: South Africa

39. Brett Murray, The Spear, 2012, oil on canvas, 185 × 140 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of Brett Murray and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

the artistic struggle against apart­heid. There we happened to run into Brett Murray, a well-­known protest artist who had produced many ironic, sarcastic and satirical works about the South African situation over the previous two and a half decades. When I met him on May 4, 2012, the first waves of an intense artistic and political controversy were just beginning to break. Murray had just painted a portrait of President Zuma based on Viktor Ivanov’s iconic image of Lenin. The Spear showed the president gazing prophetically to the future, stretching his arm out toward the viewer, and poised to move forward. Painted in a restricted palette of red, black, and yellow, it was, by any reckoning, a strong image. At first glance it seemed authoritative and leaderly enough for the president of South Africa. But then one saw that his trousers were unzipped and that his penis hung out from his open fly (fig. 39).

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A week later, on May 10, the painting was put on display in Johannesburg in an exhibition at the Goodman Gallery titled Hail to the Thief II (following an earlier 2010 exhibition at the Goodman Gallery titled Hail to the Thief). This was a clear reference to the widespread perception of corruption in the govern­ment and at the highest levels of the ANC. As in the case of almost all the pitture infamanti described by Ortalli, the work immediately attracted attention. News of it spread widely, and its re­ production was ensured by the use of the social media and of cellphones. The fact that people take pictures of pictures with their cellphones even before they actually look at them—­that is, even before they devote any significant degree of attention to them—­is a phenomenon of our new postdigital world. Pre­occupation with disseminating an image now precedes attentive visual interest in it. The German term handy is an appropriate one for this prosthetic exten­sion of the eye. As for Murray’s picture itself, every South African viewer would immedi­ately have grasped its satirical intent in its blatant allusion to the president’s exuberant sexuality. Painted just before Zuma’s marriage to his sixth wife, the work surely referred to his well-­known history of polygamy, seduction, and alleged rape. At his 2006 trial for raping the young HIV-­positive daughter of an old ANC comrade, Zuma insisted that the sex was consensual and that by showering after sex he had minimized the risk of contracting HIV. In response, the cartoonist Zapiro drew several cartoons in 2008 showing Zuma with a shower growing out of his head that had roused ire in official ANC circles (fig. 40). Already in 2011 a lawsuit, precisely for defamation, had been initiated by the ANC against his 2008 cartoons showing the Rape of Lady Justice, which Zuma had declared to be degrading and offensive to his dignity. Now, hearing of the threats to censor Mur­ray’s painting, Zapiro produced a cartoon based on The Spear, this time with a shower in place of the penis.

40. Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro), Rape of Lady Justice, Mail & Guardian, September 11, 2008, cartoon. © 2008 Zapiro. Originally published in Sunday Times. Republished with permission. For more Zapiro cartoons visit www​.zapiro​.com.

From Defamation to Mutilation: South Africa

But it was the painting itself that aroused the fiercest controversy. Here was a picture in which efforts to censor on grounds of reason of state conveniently coincided with efforts to censor what could be—­and was—­regarded as por­nographic. It is not surprising that some of the proponents of this image should have cited Mapplethorpe’s famous Man in a Polyester Suit of 1980 in its defense. But that work too had been the subject of a famous lawsuit and effort at suppres­sion during the American “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s.8 The fact that the photograph also showed a black man with a super-­sized organ was less of an issue than than it now became. Rarely had politics and pornography coincided quite so firmly. But here too the precedents are not hard to find, as, for example, in the late twelfth-­century reliefs revealing the sexual organs allegedly of Federigo Barbarossa and Beatrice of Burgundy (or an apotropaic or distracting Empress Leobissa shaving her pubic hair) on the Porta Romana and the Porta Tosa in Milan.9 But here in South Africa the relationship between pornography and reason of state took on a yet further dimension. Things moved swiftly. No one could have doubted the satirical intention of Murray’s painting. As every South African knew, its title alluded to the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). It was bound to be incendiary and was immediately perceived as such. The next week, on May 17, the Goodman Gallery received a letter on behalf of the ANC demanding that The Spear be taken down and threatening a lawsuit if not. On May 18, the General Council of the ANC, along with Zuma and several of his children, sought an injunction to have the picture removed from display at the Goodman Gallery and from the website of City Press. While politicians, political spokespersons, and ministers of both government and religion insisted that art should not be allowed to insult people with impun­ity, most artists—­of all colors—­felt that the ANC’s action went too far. Two days later, on May 19, the Goodman Gallery announced that it could not “give up its right to decide” what art would hang on its walls. “For this reason,” they said, they were “opposing the application brought by the ANC and President Zuma for the removal of the art work.”10 The basis of the ANC lawsuit was that it violated the dignity of the president and his office, as well as of the government, the ANC, and all Africans. Zuma’s own affidavit claimed that it impugned his dignity “in the eyes of all who see it.” He said that “he felt personally offended and violated” and that it showed him as “a philanderer, a womaniser and one with no respect.”11 On May 21, the Film and Publications board sent five classifiers to the show at the Goodman Gallery, and the National Prosecuting Authority announced a case of crimen injuriae against Murray. The minister of public works declared that the picture was sadistic, an insult not only to the president but to millions of South Africans. Other cabinet ministers joined in the attack. The leader of one of South Africa’s largest

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Bap­tist churches said that the artist deserved to be stoned to death. Murray had insulted the entire nation. He did not understand, it was said, the culture of the majority of South Africans.12 Matters threatened to become dangerous. The ANC’s call to ban City Press was eerily reminiscent of the old days of the white apartheid regime, in which the banning of people and press formed a regular element of repression and censor­ship. The minister of education called for a boycott of City Press. Piles of the newspaper were burned, recalling the book burnings that so often accompanied censorship in the past, from the Reformation to the Nazi period and after. Such events have frequently been a violent and visually spectacular prelude to iconoclasm. To many South Africans, and certainly to ordinary visitors to the country (who can hardly have failed to note the controversy), the reaction of the ANC seemed excessive. One might have thought, if one were not well acquainted with the sensibilities at stake, that the ANC and its supporters in this matter could have ignored the picture entirely and allowed it to enjoy its temporary satirical notoriety before letting it sink into the typical oblivion of second-­rate works of art (as one might have claimed it was). Or its target (and his allies) could have made some coolly dismissive remark, like Canadian premier Stephen Harper’s aides, who, when confronted with a picture of their boss showing him in a nude pose with a dog at his feet, simply said that that he was really a cat man. Of course the wags wondered why Zuma and his allies didn’t just say that the size of his organ might be construed as a compliment. But the dignity of the president was impaired. Freedom of artistic expression was at stake. The usual inconsistencies emerged: on the one hand, the politicians said it was hardly worth calling a work of art; on the other, by the very act of attempt­ing to censor it, they acknowledged its power, even in the case of yet another derivative work such as this. The minister of justice opined that “if that is called a work of art, it is an insult not only to the President but to any human being.”13 It might indeed have been more sensible for Zuma and the ANC simply to have ignored it, thus showing just how little so derivative a work counted. On the other hand, perhaps its effectiveness was precisely predicated on its derivative­ ness and its recall of historical examples. Indeed the ANC might well have made something of the way in which Murray, by appropriation, had exploited earlier images in the struggle against apartheid against the very protagonists and inheritors of that struggle. But the image of Zuma stood at one of the most dra­matic—­though not perhaps unprecedented—­ intersections of aesthetic and political issues that I know of, certainly in modern times. Let us examine the context more closely. There were two critical political issues at stake. It was not just a matter of lèse majesté or even personal insult. Surely Zuma was above being so sensitive to the implicit satire—­for it clearly was political satire—­of this work. On the other hand, it is true that political figures, however power­

From Defamation to Mutilation: South Africa

ful, often turn out to be much more sensitive than most of us would expect to the forms of misrepresentation on which satire depends. But this was not the point. It would have been a rather naive reaction to the work under the current circumstances. What was at stake was much less obvious but no less politically critical—­indeed much more so. While freedom of expression was widely regarded as one of the great achiev­ements of the new South African constitution, of which all South Africans were immensely proud, The Spear was being put on exhibition in the very weeks preceding the election for the new leader of the ANC—­and therefore for the per­son who would ipso facto become the next president of South Africa. Zuma’s elec­tion to this position was already at risk. He’d disgraced himself in the eyes of many (but not all) by his sexual behavior, as well as by the graver allegations of rape recently dismissed in South African court. He and his government were seen to be ever more corrupt (that the very title of the Goodman Gallery’s exhibition was Hail to the Thief II). Malema was constantly threatening Zuma and his allies for not having been radical enough, for living in the lap of luxury while the poor were starving, and so on; the economy was facing a major downtown. More than ever the ANC needed to shore up Zuma’s position. The emergence of so allegedly insulting an artwork thus provided an almost ideal opportunity to drum up support for him. But how? An obvious pretext emerged within days. At this point it was not so much pornography as gender politics that became elided with reason of state. Although the public emphasis was on the assault on the president’s dignity (which many claimed, implicitly or explicitly, should trump freedom of expression), what better way to gain support for Zuma than to insert this case into the whole history of racist prejudices about black male sexuality? A picture such as this, it was claimed, was clearly predicated on the age-­old clichés about the sexuality of blacks—­not just about the superior sexual prowess of black men but also about their sexuality as indices of their primitive and barbaric status, of their separation from the restraints demanded by culture. Such prejudices were of course ingrained in the history of Africa. The case was set under way, and so were the protests. These were well orches­trated and often large. In this way, the controversy went beyond a satire on the president’s well-­known sexual behavior and an alleged affront to his official and personal dignity. The picture was turned into a colonialist, racist defamation of all black people—­“a violation of the black body by racist South Africans over the centuries,” added the minister of education.14 Thousands appeared before the courts with posters to this effect. Brett Murray, once a fierce critic of the apartheid regime, was demonized as a racist. It was said that no white man would ever be portrayed that way. Freedom of expression, newly enshrined in South Africa’s constitution, had to give way to respect for the president (even though the con­stitution provides for no guarantee of his dignity), or for

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41. Lisa Dewberry, Women Protesting Assault on President Zuma’s Dignity.

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black culture (where the nude male organ was always covered, where respect for one’s parents excluded such pornographic forms of representation, and so on). What was remarkable was the fact that large numbers of women protested against the picture as well (fig. 41), in favor, in other words, of the lawsuit—­although a number of black women to whom I spoke felt that the satire was entirely merited and that it was high time that the president’s behavior be exposed for what it was: fundamentally sexist and disrespectful of women. But their voices were lost in the commotion and in the ways in which the picture was instrumentalized by the ANC. Its lawsuit became “a matter of great national importance,” as one of the judges on the case herself declared—­just as the ministers of religion and politics had already anticipated when they turned the insult to Zuma into an insult to an entire nation.15 Once more a painting stood for a vast political and sexual issue. Indeed when I told Howard Smith, for example, of my dismay at the way in which the picture was being used for political purposes, at how the efforts to censor it seemed at odds with the new constitution, he grew angry. When I suggested that what to me seemed an all too justifiable satire of Zuma’s behavior surely did not constitute an insult to an entire race (though I suppose he could have said that it used a terrible cliché to make that insult), he dismissed my proposal as racist itself, or as somehow buying into the whole ancient prejudice of kaffir sex­uality, or simply as being insensitive to the racial divide that the picture threaten­ed to open up again. On May 21 the columnist Gillian Schutte wrote, “The point is that this is not the president’s penis. It is the grotesquely huge Black male ‘dick-­ness’ that resides somewhere in the deep collective consciousness of the White psyche—­a primal and savage ‘dick-­ness’ that was entrenched about 500 years ago as a White supremacist plot to control the world of women and racism. . . . [It suggests that this] is the essential ‘nature’ of the

From Defamation to Mutilation: South Africa

Black man, because, although in a suit, the unzipped dick confirms his failure to gain access to ‘culture.’”16 Many old friends wrote to me to this effect. Cabinet members and then many others referred to the well-­known case of Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot woman who was exhibited in London and Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century for her steatopygia,17 and suggested that Zuma was being treated in the same way. I was put in my place. My sense that the uproar about the picture had been stirred up simply as a preelection ploy was called seriously into question. I began to have doubts whether I too was not just falling into some white bourgeois set of assumptions, oblivious to the deep insult offered by a work that drew on such ancient prejudices. But it seemed hard not to acknowledge the ways in which a picture was being exploited for blunt political purposes. I called Suttner’s wife Nomboniso Gasa, who had been chair of the South African Commission for Gender Equality before Zuma and his henchmen made totally fabricated allegations of corruption against her; and she affirmed precisely what had worried me from the outset. Despite all the pride in the new national constitution, this was precisely the time when Zuma and the ANC were attempting to reinstitute the old tribal courts. It was a move that effectively called into question the authority of the new constitution and the notion of equal rights for all citizens of a united and multi­racial South Africa. In other words, it called into question the authority of the very national courts intended to execute the constitution. The matter was of con­cern to many, not least because it would be detrimental to the status of women. The tribal courts would enact ancient laws that regarded women as chattel of their husbands, reenact old dowry systems, and render women more subject to male decision making in the domestic and property spheres—­at least. So here too, very precisely, reason of state trumped sexual politics, and the reclamation of gender rights clashed with a radical commitment to autochthonous political claims—­claims that were paradoxically predicated on rejection of the very racist views on which the preceding society depended. The irony was supreme, the paradox damaging, at least to the rights of women. But speaking with people like Nomboniso reassured me that the need to repair old racist insults should not be and need not be by way of a self-­serving interpretation of the ways in which a clearly satirical picture encapsulated ancient sexual slanders. But of course the court case—­and the protests—­continued. The old sexual clichés about race were exploited to reinforce them. ANC secretary-­ general Gwede Mantashe told supporters outside the court that the fight would have to be won in the streets.18 On May 22, 2012, the day after Gillian Schutte’s piece appeared, I gave my lecture to the Stellenbosch University students. It was titled “Iconoclasms Past and Present.” The auditorium was packed. My aim was to speak, as requested, about the backgrounds to the recent attacks on pub-

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lic art in the streets of Stellen­bosch. But as my timeline will have made clear, between the invitation and the event the whole Zuma episode had exploded. By then I had the strong feeling that there was a danger, as indeed so often in the past, that efforts at censorship could erupt into iconoclasm. The matter of freedom of expression had receded ever more into the background as the point was made, ever more heatedly, that if art was insulting, it should not be tolerated. In fact, as I’d long ago written in The Power of Images, censorship, in its efforts to mutilate, erase, or destroy offensive images, was often actually tantamount to iconoclasm.19 At the very moment I sat down, a student jumped up, waving her cellphone, saying that just as I was speaking Brett Murray’s painting had been attacked and mutilated. It had been a quiet morning at the gallery when a white man in an elegant black suit entered the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, calmly took out a paint­brush and a small pot of red paint, and put a giant cross, first over Zuma’s penis and then another over his face (figs. 42–­43). A staff member asked him what he was doing. It all seemed to happen in slow, even dignified and deliberate motion. As a certain air of puzzlement rather than agitation settled over the scene, a much younger black man came in, and before anyone could react, was daubing heavy black paint over the picture (as in fig. 44). Then security guards moved in, handcuffed the black man, and whipped him upside down—­much rougher treatment than had just been meted out to the white assailant, who was then arrested as well. Both were let out on bail soon enough. Barend La Grange, a fifty-­eight-­ year-­old Afrikaner, stated that it was important that a white man show resistance to the racism implied by the picture, while Louie Mabokela,

42. Iman Rappetti, Barend La Grange Painting a Red “X” over President Zuma’s Face in Brett Murray’s “The Spear” at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, on May 23, 2012. eNCA South Africa.

From Defamation to Mutilation: South Africa

43. Iman Rappetti, Barend La Grange Painting a Red “X” over President Zuma’s Genitals in Brett Murray’s “The Spear” at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, on May 23, 2012. eNCA South Africa.

44. Patrick Conroy, Brett Murray’s “The Spear” following Attacks at the Goodman Gallery on May 23, 2012. Photograph: SA / The Telegraph.

a young taxi driver from Limpopo, said that he came from an artistic family and had simply wanted to see the pic­ture.20 At that point, many of the opponents of the picture jumped on the con­venient bandwagon of declaring that something so pornographic could not poss­ibly constitute art and that the work thus merited its fate—­the second oldest iconoclastic cry of all. The first, of course, is embodied both in the Second Commandment of the Jewish and Christian religions and in the Islamic Hadith—­namely

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that one should not have images at all. Image making is the basic prerogative of God. Mere humans should not make them at all—­in the Jewish and Christian case because they are idolatrous (any figurative image risks being worshiped, especially dan­gerous if the God is a jealous one), in the Islamic case because only God is capable of investing images (including human beings, poorer images of himself) with life and liveliness. Such positions are not just theological. They encapsulate in the most profound of ways the ultimate basis for the fear of images: that they are somehow alive, that they contain within them a force, a form of vitality, that transcends their materiality. From the earliest times on, one of the funda­mental iconoclastic motivations is to make as clear as possible that something that seems lively, or indeed a living representative of what is shown in an image, is nothing more than a form on a piece of wood or stone. One destroys it—­or erases its eyes, or removes its limbs—­to show that it is powerless, that it cannot see or move or affect us in any of the ways that sight and movement imply. The notion that images are nothing more than pieces of wood and stone was a consistent anti-­image argument during the great periods of Byzantine iconoclasm in the seventh and eighth centuries and recurred with great vehemence during the Protestant revolution—­particularly in its Calvinist form—­during the Reforma­tion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But another version of the perception that images are somehow alive, despite the fact of representation, had manifested itself even earlier. The notion of the presence of the represented in the representation itself is one of the oldest of all. The ancient Romans held it as a matter of political doctrine that where the image of the emperor was, there too was the emperor. You had to respect the image of the emperor as if the emperor himself were actually present. It is almost as if the opponents of Brett Murray’s picture clung to this ancient doctrine, somehow believing that a mere satirical representation was in fact a breathing and pornographic one. Such suspicions about the status of images also underlay medieval con­cerns about grotesques and other forms of imagery regarded as in­ appropriate; but it was during the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-­Reformation that they reached fever pitch, and censorship and iconoclasm often merged. For example, both official and amateur censors often crossed out the eyes or whole face of Erasmus (fig. 14), the wisest of religious thinkers during the six­teenth century, on the grounds that he was either too Protestant or too Catholic (in fact, despite his insistence on reform and change within the official Church, he never went over to the other side). The Index of Prohibited Books was set up; it banned unapproved literature or recommended censorship. Book burnings fol­lowed. Images too were banned. Throughout Europe attacks were launched on images because they were deemed either idolatrous, or too licentious, or both. (Already in the eighth century, Pope Gregory the Great had the best classical statues thrown into the Tiber, either because

From Defamation to Mutilation: South Africa

they were the idolatrous gods of pagan antiquity or because they were too licentious—­usually nude statues of female gods, of course.) The censors of those times would have approved of the various South African calls for a boycott—­if not the destruction—­of potentially insulting images, as well as of the calls for boycotting the City Press. The parallels with past cases of censorship, and the censorship that leads directly to iconoclasm, could not be more striking. And as so often in earlier episodes, iconoclasm reflects—­or masks—­major cultural divides. The varieties of iconoclasm are many, the motives disparate, but all in one way or another relate to fear of the body in the image, the body that somehow lurks in representation. This lies at the basis of the political fear of images as well as the sexual one (the image is invested not just with life but with carnality—­especially but not only in the case of images of women). In the French Revolution the images of the old order were torn down as once vivid but now dead tokens of the monarchy. Likewise with the destruction of statues of the czars during the Russian Revolution: the power of the rulers fell along with their images. At the far end of that revolution, the overturning of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 was accompanied everywhere by the overturning of images of Stalin and Lenin. The same fate for many statues of Mao in China. In fact, the modern instances have multiplied: Statues of the shah of Iran were pulled down in 1979. Those of Saddam Hussein in Iraq came down in 2003. Two years earlier the great Buddhas of Bamiyan, statues that in the eyes of the Taliban were idolatrous representatives of another religion, had been blown up.21 Then there are what seem to be purely pathological assaults on images such as those on Rembrandt’s Night Watch in Amsterdam in 1975 (fig. 35) and the great Rembrandts in Kassel in 1977 (fig. 38), and the 1982 attack on Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV.22 In the latter case, however, the title alone may have provoked the iconoclast to show that he was precisely not afraid (indeed he attacked the picture with the very bar used to keep visitors at a dis­tance, as if to demonstrate that no one, least of all he, need to be afraid of a mere painting—­and that that if one hit it, it wouldn’t strike back). In all of this, motives are never really clear—­as little as in the case of the mutilation of The Spear. Often the motive is to draw attention to oneself or to a political cause. Here the political may well overlap with the pathological, as well as the sexual. When Mary Richardson attacked Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in 1914, she declared that her aim was to draw attention to Mrs. Pankhurst and her suf­fragist cause; many years later she said that she did not like the way male viewers “gaped at it all day long.”23 This entanglement of motives for an attack on an image may well also have prevailed in the case of The Spear—­but perhaps even more complicatedly so. Every powerful image arouses deep emotions. It does so not just because of what or whom it symbolizes but because of the degree to which it involves the viewer’s body and feelings. It draws tears easily. The fact

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that the ANC’s lawyer burst into tears early in the hearing against the picture was surely not only attributable to the judicial tensions of the day or the legal complexities of the case. In the case of The Spear, just as so often in the past, there was a con­ flation—­not just a convergence—­of censorship and iconoclasm. But there was a further conflation too: of the effort to mutilate or destroy the image and execu­tion of the body represented on the image, as in the case of the immagini infamanti. When one couldn’t find the traitor or wanted to publicly defame his image, one actually executed his representation, as in the case of the images that were hung and decapitated outside the Bargello in Florence for several centuries, or the famous six drawings of the traitorous capitani of 1530 by Andrea del Sarto. The ways in which the defamatory images of Zuma were attacked also raised an age-­old question about iconoclasm itself regarding the degree to which such attacks are spontaneous or organized. At first sight the attacks in the Goodman Gallery seemed spontaneous. “It was spontaneous on both their parts. They both just happened to be here at the same time,” said Mabokela’s lawyer.24 In a useful inversion of the usual presuppositions, the white man said he did it out of shame for the nation’s history of racism; the black man said he did it because it wasn’t really art at all. But how true were these expressed motivations? Indeed it all seemed too good to be true. As we now know, very often the motives, both personal and col­lective, of iconoclasts is to draw attention to themselves, or to the work itself, by attacking it. It is often, as I wrote in Iconoclasts and Their Motives, a desire for pub­licity—­and in this case, if not a desire for publicity for the perpetrator, then surely a desire to publicize the ANC, the case for Zuma, and so on—­all by way of emphasizing that in South Africa this was, after all, a racist image. We may well be inclined to think that the fact that these two attacks occurred more or less simultaneously was not coincidental. One of the most commented-­upon aspects of the attack was the fact that both the video camera monitors and cellphones were on throughout and showed the whole episode as it happened. For what seemed like an age, no one seemed to interfere with these aggressive acts at all. The racial implications of the attack on this image were immediately obvious. And the cameras that kept rolling made very clear the different treatments of black and white. The issue of whether an assault on an image (or group of images) is sponta­neous or organized, or whether the individuals who seem to be solely motivated by personal hostility to the image are in fact set up to attack it, is as old as iconoclasm itself. When Protestant rioters stormed into Antwerp Cathedral on the night of August 21, 1566, the fury and destruction seem to have been a spontaneous outburst of popular anger against images. For years historians debated whether the fury was indeed spontaneous or not, but it is now generally agreed that the attacks were

From Defamation to Mutilation: South Africa

actually orchestrated and planned by astute political figures who knew how to mobilize popular support on their side.25 After all, the basic fears and emo­tions that images so often arouse are easily aligned, as I’ve tried to suggest, with politi­cal motives. When I wrote about the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003, it may have seemed that some of the popular responses to it were purely spontaneous; but once again it turned out that the whole event had been organized, in this case by the US marines who had been cropped out of the initial photographs made available to the public (figs. 45–48).26

45. Ramzi Haidar, Iraqis Place a Rope around a Statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, Baghdad, April 9, 2003. Photograph: AFP / Getty Images.

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46. Toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, Baghdad, on April 9, 2003. Photograph: Mirrorpix / Getty Images.

47. Goran Tomasevic, U.S. Marine Kirk ­Dalrymple Watches as a Statue of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein Falls in Firdos Square, Baghdad, on April 9, 2003. Photograph: Reuters.

48. Jerome Delay, US Soldiers Cover the Face of Saddam Hussein with an American Flag before Toppling the Statue in Firdos Square in Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Photograph: Associated Press.

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In the case of The Spear, however, the picture was attacked not because it showed a hated leader but because it supposedly insulted him and the whole nation he represented, indeed the whole race of blacks. In any event, whether the attacks were spontaneous or organized, the entire brouhaha had substantial benefits for a leader who was losing political traction. No wonder that the actions of the iconoclasts should here too have met with considerable approval. One can debate at length the degree to which freedom of expression should give way to respect for human dignity; whether presidential dig-

From Defamation to Mutilation: South Africa

nity is more or less fragile than ordinary human dignity; at what point a justified satire on the president’s sexual history turns into the perpetuation of ancient racist and colo­nial prejudices; whether the best way to overcome such prejudice is to acknowl­edge how little sense it has in the modern world, and therefore to ignore it; whether a work of art should be suppressed in the interests of managing a certain degree of social unrest; whether City Press editor Ferial Haffajee was justified, in the interest of public safety and in light of fear that the work (however unjustifiably) fed into still-­festering ancient prejudices, in suppressing a work that she had for some time supported. What is clear is that the fate of The Spear forms part of a long history of fear and antipathy to images and testifies to an acknowledgment of their powers. The age-­old emotions it stirred up mobilized thousands of people. But in a reversal of the old view that an assault on an image is an assault on the person it represents, the metaphorical attack on Zuma (in the form of a painting) led to an attack on the painting itself. For a while the Goodman Gallery closed its doors, but the lawsuit proceeded. As noted above, on almost the first day, the ANC’s advocate burst into tears as he set out the ANC case. It was as if to give the impression that not only the racial dimension of the picture but also the pressures of having white and Indian judges preside were too much for him. At around this stage, the Committee of Young Communists announced that the defacing of the portrait was people’s justice and that the attackers should be awarded the Order of Ikhamanga, usually assigned to excellence in the arts, jour­nalism, or sports, for bravery. Slowly both City Press and the gallery gave way. The editor of the paper, Ferial Haffajee, apologized to one of Zuma’s daughters and removed the picture from the paper’s website. On May 28, 2012, the day I left South Africa, Haffajee wrote, “The Spear is down. Out of care and as an olive branch to play a small role in help­ing turn around a tough moment, I have decided to take down the image.” The power of images could hardly have been more clearly manifest. “When we pub­lished an art review which featured The Spear as one image, I could not have anticipated that it would snowball into a moment of such absolute rage and pain,” Haffajee acknowledged.27 One can debate at length whether Haffajee, in suppressing a work that she had for some time supported, was actually justified in her argument about the interests of public safety and about the ways in which the work (however unjus­tifiably) fed into ancient prejudices that still festered. But at least she acknowl­edged, “Of course, the image is coming down from fear too. . . . The atmosphere is like a tinderbox: City Press copies went up in flames on Saturday. I don’t want any more newspapers burnt in anger. My colleague has been removed from a huge trade union congress and prevented from reporting.” And so on. The secretary-­general of the ANC and the owner of the gallery met to

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announce that the ANC would withdraw its case if the gallery agreed not to dis­play The Spear any longer. A press conference was held on May 30, at which the Goodman Gallery and the ANC announced a deal that would include the removal of the painting from the gallery’s website as well. The ANC case against the gallery and the call for a boycott of City Press was dropped. The gallery denied that it had agreed to remove the image. Also on May 30, the Film and Publications Board rejected all juris­ dictional arguments and age-­rated the picture to 16+. The defamation case against Zapiro sputtered on for a few more months. On October 17, damages were reduced from the initial claim of R5million to R100,000; on October 24, five days before the trial in the Johannesburg High Court was to begin, all charges were dropped. The only requirement was that Zapiro’s cartoon should be accompanied by an advisory warning. An appeal is under way. “The row has been good for business at the gallery,” noted the Guardian.28 How much the value of the work rises, even in its damaged state, remains to be seen. I was disappointed. I had my old South African feeling: surely there was more muscle to the resistance than this. The picture is not seeable anymore in its earlier state. When I was asked to write an article on the destruction of the painting in the lead­ ing—­liberal—­South African art journal, I was not allowed to publish the original version of the pic­ture. The kind of resistance embodied in the picture collapsed—­a huge dis­appointment to many of us. Murray has been consigned to relative oblivion, either—­despite his history of protest—­as a racist or as a plagiarist, rather than an appropriator of an old image for satirical purposes. In the light of modern critical standards, this seems a harsh conclusion. Politics have won out over the art. Indeed when I told another old schoolmate of mine, now resident in the US, about the case, he was impatient. It was unimportant, he averred, in comparison with the much larger political issues facing South Africa today. But how wrong he was! This was a picture that had mobilized the masses in protest against it, that had mobilized the ordinary intelligentsia in its favor on the grounds of freedom of expression and the new South African Constitution (of which everyone was so proud), then mobilized the sophisticated intelligentsia against it. It showed that the mere picture of something could be felt as offensive, that the president, like the Roman emperor or even Christ himself, was somehow present in his picture and therefore liable to personal insult, just as in the old cases of damnatio memoriae and the immagini infamanti, so often used as a stand-­in for the absent crimi­nal or traitor. The ANC rightly realized that the picture had to be taken down from the web because otherwise it would be reproduced ad infinitum. And it demonstrated, quite con-

From Defamation to Mutilation: South Africa

trary to what Ortalli had written in that silent period between the two great reproductive revolutions—­the flourishing of photography and the arrival of the digital revolution in media—­that the very fact of the possibility of instant reproduction had made the aura of images all the more frightening to the masses, and all the more exploitable and capable of instrumentalization by the elite, at the expense of the very people whose cause was recog­nized by the work. Such are the many lessons—­or rather, just some—­of the remarkable case of The Spear.

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IX

Charlottesville

By August 12, 2017, the continuities and general structures were clear—­or so it seemed. The terrible attacks on images, buildings, and people in Mosul and Palmyra seemed to be of a piece with many earlier episodes of iconoclasm from the beginning of time. Despite all the differences in scale and practice, the long history of iconoclasm continued to offer lessons not only about the role of images in society but about their ontology. It was a history that illuminated not just the political and sociological status of images but also their modes of being and the ways they are psychologically constituted. I had come to think the following: To attack an image is to acknowledge its power. To destroy it is to eliminate the life that is believed to inhere in it, either in what it shows or in how it is made. To make an image lifeless is to acknowledge the life it contains. But what does it mean to say an image has life in it? That it partakes of the life of the represented? That it has a kind of intangible vitality in and of itself, making vitality less of a metaphor than critics and theorists of representation like to think? To remove the mouth of an image is to eliminate its power to speak; to remove its eyes is to deprive it of its ability to see or to look back at one. But what do all these metaphors mean, these metaphors for speaking or looking or looking back at a beholder? To take out the eyes or seal the mouth is to take out what makes the image seem alive, what most directly signals its potential for responsiveness and utterance. Eyes are

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vivid tokens of life in an image, of its ability to look us back in the face. The same, to some lesser extent perhaps, may be said for its ability to smile at us or to scowl in disapproval. These are all ways of speaking about images that teeter on the edge of metaphor. The images don’t actually speak; they are not actually animated by eyes, or by corrugator or superciliary muscles. They are representations of eyes and muscles—­and the degree of liveliness perceived in them depends quite precisely on how (or how well) they are painted or sculpted. The marks of what we habitually call vitality in an image are what gives them the appearance of life, life so real that they force embodied responses on us, right up to and including destroying them. But even abstract representations, even the merest suggestions of faces, eyes, and mouths, of movement and muscular torsion, can also produce such responses. From this arises the great paradox of iconoclasm: to be hostile to an image is to be enamored of it and to acknowledge its thrall. Iconoclasm testifies to the struggle to resist the life that the iconoclast—­and the rest of us—­attributes to it; it is the most adequate response to the desire it evokes (the image never gives us fully what we need, so we put it away). To destroy an image is to acknowledge the attribution of a life that is even more magical than the power of loving and desiring another person. It is to acknowledge a love so intense that its clutches cannot be escaped until the work is destroyed. This, fundamentally, is what joins pornographic with religious imagery and gives propaganda by image its power.1 Or so I thought. We may want to believe that art is constituted only by the idea of art, not by its physical state, or even its imagined physical state; but in the end it is impossible to get the body out of the image whether one refers to its presence in the image or to the ways in which it responds to images. To see an image is to activate the neural and material substrates of the imagination that ensure the activation of the neural correlates of bodily response—­even if we don’t actually destroy it, or even if we lack the physical capacity for movement. Until that day in August 2017, I had little doubt that the history of iconoclasm offers clear and often vivid proof that images can never be disembodied, that they are never merely signs but are embodied—­thereby implicating their viewers in biological transactions that demonstrate just how little the relationship between signified and signifier can be regarded as purely arbitrary. It seemed possible to argue that iconoclasm, like art history, is not fundamentally semiotic, since its biological dimensions, its engagement of the living flesh and pulsing blood and dopamine of every spectator, are incapable of being imagined away, as a purely semiotic theory of images might require or imply. Every response to an image

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involves the activation of the viewer’s body or the cortical correlates of a motor or sensory response, or both. It could of course be said that biology is itself semiotic, but this would be pure sophistry. If one accepts the semiotic argument that the image is but a sign and a symbol (and an arbitrary one at that), it cannot be its physical self (let alone a work of whatever we regard as art). If one thinks of the embodied image as a sign, then one takes away its role in the fundamentally biological transactions that underlie all our responses to visual imagery—­even if one were to argue that it is precisely the disjunction between the arbitrary relationship between the sign and its signifier on the one hand and its irrevocable call on the body on the other that constitutes the work of art, as well as the force of the image. For several years before 2017, both public and private figures in the United States had sporadically called for the removal of statues of Confederate generals and proponents of slavery and racism across the country. Already in April, the city of New Orleans had ordered that four monuments dedicated to the Confederacy and opponents of Reconstruction be taken down. Anticipating trouble of this kind, the state of Alabama passed a new statute prohibiting local governments from moving, relocating, or even altering any historical monuments that had been in place for forty years or more. At the beginning of August the mayor of Birmingham, William A. Bell Sr., ordered the covering of the base of the Soldiers and Sailors monument prior to its removal. The state forbade this on the basis of the new statute. A judge in turn struck down the statute. Its Republican sponsor responded by insisting that it was “meant to thoughtfully preserve the entire story of Alabama’s history for future generations.”2 The cries for removal of Confederate monuments became ever more intense across the South, with equally intense resistance. On August 12, large groups of right-­wing extremists gathered in military gear in the peaceful university town of Charlottesville to protest—­they said—­the city government’s decision to take down the statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee (fig. 49). The usually calm and picturesque streets of the city were taken over by groups of heavily armed thugs carrying fascist and Nazi insignia (figs. 50–­51); they were faced off by a peaceful group of resisters. Large numbers of police in riot gear were sent in. Suddenly a car accelerated and drove into the crowd, killing one of the demonstrators. The planned removal of a statue by a city council aware of the implications of the positions adopted by major figures in its past, and attentive to current political sensibility, had occasioned violence and murder.3 This was only the tip of the iceberg. “Political correctness” now became an inflammatory, indeed explosive matter. Once more images and the removal of images stood at the forefront, at the very junction of political action and moral responses. Soon city authorities all over the US planned to move forward with the removal of statues of many civic figures of the

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49. Equestrian monument of Robert E. Lee, Charlottesville, VA, 1924. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0: https://​ creativecommons​.org​ /licenses​/by​-­­sa​/3​.0​ /legalcode.

50. Armed men at the Charlottesville protest on August 12, 2017. Photograph: The Guardian.

51. Andy Campbell, Demonstrators Hold Confederate and Nazi Flags at the Protest in Charlottesville, VA, on August 12, 2017. Photograph: The Huffington Post.

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nineteenth century for their support of slavery.4 And the right wing continued to oppose them. On the same day as the events in Charlottesville, demonstrators confronted proponents of the removal of the statue of a Confederate soldier in San Antonio. On August 14, there were tense discussions in Richmond and Nashville about the proposed removal of Confederate statues, and protestors pulled down a statue of Lee from the University Chapel door in Durham, NC, as well as that of an anonymous Confederate soldier in front of the courthouse (fig. 52). On August 16, four monuments to Confederate figures were taken down before dawn in Baltimore (as in fig. 53); on the next day senior Democrats called for the removal of Confederate statues in the US Capitol, and the Lexington, Kentucky, city council voted to remove similar statues from the local courthouse. On August 18, the Annapolis city government authorized the removal of the statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, author of the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision which denied US citizenship to all African Americans, whether enslaved or not.5 On August 21 in Austin, Texas, the statues of Lee and Alfred Sidney Johnson, another Confederate general, as well as that of the Confederate politician John Reagan, were removed from the university campus.6 On August 23 the monument to Lee in Charlottesville was covered over in black plastic (fig. 54) while municipal authorities debated what to do next. And it went on—­and on. By the end of the week over eighteen cities had taken down statues of Confederate leaders and another twenty were planning to do so. In Boston, the Massachusetts governor had already said that there should be no public display of symbols not supportive of liberty and equality;7 in New York, the mayor said he would

52. Virginia Bridges, Toppled Confederate Statue in Durham, N.C., on August 14, 2017. Photograph: The Herald-­Sun, via Associated Press.

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53. Jerry Jackson, Removal of a Confederate Monument in Baltimore at Dawn on August 16, 2017. Photograph: The Baltimore Sun, via Associated Press.

54. Steve Helber, Monument of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, VA, as Covered on August 23, 2017. Photograph: Associated Press.

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consider the possibility of removing the city’s famed statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle in the light of his treatment of Native Americans.8 The Knights of Columbus took out a full-­page advertisement in the New York Times expressing their commitment to the preservation of the monument and to celebrating his role in the shaping of America.9 No wonder that Trump seized the opportunity to suggest that if the logic of his opponents demanded that statues of Lee and Jackson should come down, then those of Washington and Jefferson should as well.10 But in the meantime, what to do with all the statues? Just cover them over, waiting for a solution? Then what? By this time it was clear that I would have to reorganize my thoughts on iconoclasm, for if ever there was a battle about images, this was it—­

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not just the question of images (the German Bilderfrage) but an open battle over them. And it had very little to do with the way the images look, or indeed with direct physical responses to them, as in so many image wars of the past and present. Images had become pure signs, loved or removed, for symbolic reasons alone. The statues of Lee and the other Confederate generals were not of the emperor. They were not believed to be present, enduringly present there in their own body; they were attacked or admired or protected with force because of what they symbolized. It was a world in which there were too many images, after all, so it didn’t matter how good they looked, even how closely representational they were. They were irrelevant except as signs and symbols. Things are not removed, as I had always claimed, because they are bodies but precisely because they are symbols. Statues are increasingly referred to as symbols, not as statues. They are symbols of political positions—­and that’s it, that’s all. They could go or stay for their symbolic quality, and nothing else. Nobody cared who they really were, or even what their images looked like; all that mattered was what they stood for, or supposedly stood for. Perhaps, I now realized, I had been wrong; perhaps this was the case in many earlier episodes of iconoclasm too. Across the Atlantic and far across Europe, Antoni Dudek, historian and member of the board of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, concluded, “The argument about monuments, which should be resolved mostly between historians and citizens, has become a substitute for every­day political fights.”11 When the American historian Eric Foner wrote shortly after Charlottesville about statues as symbols, he went on to say, “Like all monuments, the statues say a lot more about the time they were erected than the historical era they evoke. . . . Historical monuments are, among other things, an expression of power—­an indication of who has the power to choose how history is remembered in public places.”12 One could not argue with this—­especially with the precautionary “among other things” appended to it. And so the Charlottesville riot and its aftermath challenged my long-­ standing positions on iconoclasm. Despite my earlier skepticism, it did indeed seem that the image had reached its pure semiotic state (as semiotically inclined historians of images had long claimed). Images were removed not just because they were of political leaders but because of what they stood for—­and often enough, simply and only because of what they stood for. Their symbolic value was total. It was not a matter of corporeality, not even a matter of their representationality. Their bodies were nothing in terms of their meaning. It was not a matter of how they looked. My old claims about the centrality of the human inclination to conflate image and prototype had become irrelevant. The statues must stand or go not because they are living people, great works of art, but because of their symbolic status and implication. Their mere presence, their mere labeling, was sufficient for signification and memory.

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55. Bebeto Matthews, Removal of a Plaque Recording the Planting of a Tree by Robert E. Lee in Brooklyn, August 16, 2017. Photograph: Associated Press.

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For centuries it had been argued that one of the main purposes of images was to reinforce memory, for both the literate and the illiterate. Often enough, this old justification of images was used, especially in religious contexts, as an argument against those who wanted to take images down because of their sensuality or their material contradiction of pure spirituality. But no longer. In some places, as in the disused precinct of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Fort Hamilton (Brooklyn), plaques were torn out and cast to the ground just like statues (fig. 55)—­almost as if to emphasize the equivalence between word and image. The statues of Lee and Jackson were not like that of the emperor. They were not really there in their image. They were symbols of a movement that must be supported or rejected. They were labels that could be torn off as were the plaques in Brooklyn, or erased or blotted over or covered up as were the inscriptions on so many monuments across the South. But what to do with the images that had to be taken down? The final twist was to propose that rejected works like these be moved into museums. The iconoclasts became preservationists. In the museum the public could be provided with historical and contextual material that would enable them to judge the moral and political significance of the objects. This was the position of most progressive critics and historians. The art museum would become a kind of history museum in which moral conclusions could be drawn. Holland Cotter, chief art critic of the New York Times, noted the ambiguity of interpretation that arises in such cases: “To the white nationalist protesters, Lee is a hero, his statue an emblem of a white dominance that is, in a steadily browning America, in decline. To the racially mixed counter protesters, the same image is a reminder of a time when the South attempted to split the country in two to preserve black slavery.”13 He also pointed out that the statue in Charlottesville

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(and others like it) was not even a relic of the Civil War but rather an indication of the Jim Crow prejudices of the 1920s, when it was put up. Such are the liberal critics who want the statues to come down but don’t want to destroy anything, whatever they symbolize politically. The contested public works should be placed into museums. A masterly expression of ambivalence! Cotter wishes “to preserve statues, not to trash them.” In the museums they can serve as evidence for the ways in which images are turned to symbolic purpose. On the one hand Cotter notes the essential ambiguity of all images and of the ambivalence they arouse; on the other he forgets that it is precisely from this ambiguity and ambivalence that moral judgment actually arises. But he does register that such judgments are inflected by the implications of current technology: “We need to learn to be symbol readers with our eyes wide open in our own political moment of rapid-­fire tweets and manufactured distraction.” The solution: “Museums can be training grounds for that reading.”14 Is this enough to save the phenomenon of iconoclasm? Might the works by the same token not simply have remained where they were? Both Cotter and Foner noted that in addition to their symbolic functions, images such as these served as reminders. But it’s not just that images serve as reminders, as words also do; it’s how they strengthen memory through their art. The iconoclast had become a kind of iconophile they wanted to remove the work, but they also wanted to save it. In this case they wanted to save it not because of its art but because of its ability to serve as a reminder and a symbol of a period of oppression. Its actual subject became irrelevant except for its purely symbolic freight. And if it served as a reminder it was because of its symbolic content, not its form—­or, at best, because it offered testimony to the ways in which people make reminders, not art, objects to be viewed historically, not aesthetically. They operate little differently from textual reminders, even jotted notes, that require no hermeneutic adjunct in the form of art or even shape. The fate of the work of visual art in the age of iconoclasm is to be reduced as closely as possible to the status of a propositional text. Even in the sixteenth century, reformers from Luther on who insisted on the priority of scriptural text over holy images might not have been quite as austere. In the articulation of a clear motive for image destruction or removal, the modern image removers are no different from the iconoclasts of the sixteenth century, but in the motivation for saving the work, the difference is clear. In the sixteenth century the only ones who wanted to save works of art did so because of their commitment to a clear idea of what art was. But few, if any at all, of the contemporary iconoclasts who want to move the images or artworks from public spaces to museums are concerned about the loss to art or the loss of art as such. And so museums make works innocuous, deprived of their effect. All very well, of course, but note how poor all these Confederate monuments are! How poor and uninventive by any artistic or aesthetic reckoning are

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these images for which space must now be found in museums, or even have new museums built for them! They are forced in the direction of pure propositionality and textuality. And sometimes even further. Their objecthood is transformed not into idea but into something lower: it is reduced to the level of raw materiality, devoid of shape or meaning. “Any Confederate museum that wants this thing can have it,” said Randall L. Woodfin, the new mayor of Birmingham, of the sandstone obelisk erected in 1905 to commemorate the Confederate fallen (which his predecessor, William Bell Sr., had tried to remove).15 It was no longer an expression of disdain for what the statue symbolized but a declaration of exhaustion. “Hell, I’m even willing to give them whatever they need to get it to them,” he went on. Once the obelisk may have been regarded as a work of art or as a historical monument; now it had become just a thing to be dismissed, granted free to the first willing taker. But the ambivalence about what to do with the contested monuments continued. Over a year after Charlottesville, many had still not been taken down. People dithered. At the end of 2018, in Winston-­Salem, North Carolina, the city ordered the removal of a 1905 statue of a Confederate soldier from the downtown courthouse to a cemetery where Confederate soldiers were buried. The city attorney objected on the grounds of safety and the risks of vandalism. The statue’s owners, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, then protested against the removal, and the arguments went back and forth with emotions on both sides rising. The mayor intervened again, acknowledging that while he knew that there were “strong issues on both sides,” there were “people who want it there because of history [but] on the other hand this monument represents oppression and the subjugation of a people.” So how to proceed? The question remained open. In the same state, the locally famous Silent Sam monument at the University of North Carolina had been toppled, but the chancellor later ordered its return to the campus—­to a museum specially constructed to house it. Then she announced her resignation, and the arguments about the fate of the statue continued. The final destination of the statue has still not been decided. In Pensacola, Florida, Mike Hill, a Republican state representative, had already led a rally against the proposed removal of a cross on public grounds in June 2017 and then grew even more concerned when the mayor later proposed taking down a Confederate monument in the city. In 2018 he filed a bill making it illegal to remove “remembrances” (the old memorial status of images redux) on public property. Hill was a third-­generation veteran and the founder of a local Tea Party group. Objecting to the removal of monuments, memorials, and flags honoring soldiers—­including those who fought in the Civil War—­he declared that even though he was black, he did not find the Confederate memorials

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hurtful. “Our history is what makes us up as a people. . . . We can learn from the ugly parts that it can never happen again.”16 Here as elsewhere the ironies are plentiful, the paradoxes clear. The central dilemma could not have been plainer: either acknowledge the ambivalence and polyinterpretability of images, and let them stand, or emphasize what they unambiguously stand for (or might be taken to stand for)—­and take them down. In either case the images are reduced to the status of signs, just like flags, crosses, memorial plaques, and simple verbal labels. There were some people who still respected the Confederate leaders and their armies, but nevertheless realized that a changed political situation and changing attitudes toward race made it necessary to remove the monuments. But under new forms of pressure they too reversed their position. In Trump’s America, “political correctness” had increasingly become a negative moniker—­and this strengthened the hand of those who wished to retain the statues. Indeed many of the progressives who initially wanted to take them down also began to have reservations about moving too precipitately on this front. The back-­and-­forth continued. Many others—­and not only in the US—­wondered what to do with the sheer quantity of objects that are symbols of an oppressive colonial past. From Brussels to Berlin and in many places elsewhere, museums began to prepare for reassessments of entire portions of their holdings, not on artistic but on historical grounds. They did so not only because of what the objects showed but because of the evidence of the prejudices embodied by what the objects stood for, or of the motives—­whether prejudice, piracy, or simply a ruthless desire for acquisition—­of those who acquired them. This was a Bilderfrage that was less and less about the meaning of images, more about the meaning of labels; less and less about the look of the objects, more and more about they stood for, like crosses, flags, and plaques. “Fate of Federal Monuments Is Stalled by Competing Legal Battles,” read the headline of the New York Times article of January 20, 2019.17 Art (and both artistic and artisanal skills) flew out of the window as a criterion for retention (as was often enough the case during the so-­called culture wars of the 1990s).18 Its objects were just things that stood in the way (as in the case of the 1989 removal of Serra’s 1979 Tilted Arc at Federal Plaza in New York, or the public sculptures the Stellenbosch students vandalized on these same grounds in 2012). The symbol stood apart from its look. All it required now was a descriptive verbal label. Semiotics had its day. Or so, once more, it might have seemed. We may think that the impulse toward actual image destruction has now passed into its final stage, that iconoclasm has finally passed from the history of art, that it has become purely about politics and not at all about art, that the way the image looks doesn’t matter, that images have indeed become completely ideological stand-­ins, reduced to mere and arbitrary signs.

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But even when a statue or commemorative object (whether regarded as art or not) is reduced to the status of a thing, a lump, it still entrains the ambivalence that is more generally associated with an object of art. It trails with it something else besides its symbolic or its purely iconographic meaning. However formless, it remains a shape, a form, a formal finality (as Kant would have put it) whose fate lies in the aesthetic judgment of the viewer. In the end, nothing more dramatically illustrates this ambivalence than the perplexity of those who initially want to remove the monuments but then have second thoughts. The very polyvalence of objects is testimony to their art. Not only does it bring them back to both ideology and concept (as Kant would not have wished), but the ambiguity and the dialectical processes that arise with ambiguity lead to the ambivalence that we can also recognize as constitutive of the play of imagination that is essential to both the work of art and aesthetic judgment. In the end, too, pictures (or sculptures) are not, as Ernst Gombrich always insisted, propositions. Or rather, works of visual art are not just propositions (although they sometimes can be—­or might always be). As often as not, images have an effect, whether benign or malign, that depends on the body—­both the perceived body in the work (whether human or not) and the viewer’s. Without one or the other of these, the art is drained away from the object, and access to that art limited or even denied. Access begins with the evocation of the body or its cortical and subcortical correlates; and only then does the endless succession of error correction ensue (if it does at all). That is the radical aesthetic claim of this book. If we look at the toppling and subsequent treatment of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Baghdad in 2003 (figs. 45–­48), it is clear that even under the supervision of the marines, the focus of the attacks on the body of the leader cannot be diminished or diverted. It is more than a dead or toppled monument; it is his body that is fallen yet is always present, either in its fall or in its fate at the hands of others. This, it would seem, and as the old theory of the emperor’s presence in his image requires, is the fate of all statues of tyrants and overthrown rulers. In the responses to such statues the biological dimension is always present, and the statues are treated as if they were living bodies. The iconoclasts aim for those parts of the statue that in the living person would be the most sensitive (or that executed the most offensive actions). In turn, the actions of the iconoclasts are inflected by particularized forms of bodily disdain. In a region in which smacking with the dirty soles of shoes is a particular insult, the people insult the statues in exactly the same way (fig. 56). As we learn from the same episode, and then from countless others, digitization makes censorship not only easier but also easier to disseminate; on the other hand it reveals to us the impossibility of eliminating

Charlottesville

56. Karim Sahib, An Iraqi Woman Hitting the Toppled Statue of President Saddam Hussein with Her Slippers in Firdos Square, Baghdad, in April, 2003. Photograph: AFP / Getty Images.

the body, even the virtual body, whether via Skype, Instagram, or any other of those digital products from which the human hand and handling has all but been removed. The images may just be signs and ciphers—­but when the statues come down, still people look, perhaps even more than when the images still stand. In the course of the resurgence of image removals at the height of the pandemic of 2020 another ancient phenomenon reappeared in the United States: that of hangings in effigy (about which I also wrote at some length in The Power of Images of 1989, that fateful year for iconoclasm and for freedom). Once again, where the body of the disgraced person or traitor was absent, their image was punished and treated as if it were a body itself. In California, the first such hanging was of a caricatural body, but, it was still recognizable as just that, however anonymous. These executions in effigy (as they were called) were not coincidental, especially since they appeared immediately in the wake of the discovery of the bodies of two black men hanging from trees, as if they had been lynched. Some argued that they were suicides; others noted wisely that no black person would have been unaware of what such an an image really signified. Both lynching and executions in effigy depend entirely for their effect on the ways in which an image, however rudimentary, can be seen, imagined, or, especially, felt as a living body. And though the lynched body is itself a sign, indeed the very image, of racism, it is above all a human body. Gregory the Great and almost every medieval Christian theologian after him may have held that pictures were the books of the illiterate, but how did they serve this function? As reminders of what they had heard from their parents and from preachers, indeed to serve to enhance and

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strengthen memory, as St. Thomas Aquinas and many other thinkers held, for both the educated and uneducated? That cannot be the complete answer. There is more, evidently enough, because it is precisely the aesthetic dimensions of an image that may both strengthen its mnemonic function and play a critical role in the ways in which images become available to their spectators, whether in terms of attracting attention or facilitating access—­or both (since the two functions clearly overlap). Here too the biology of the body remains crucial—­as it does for any project on the making or breaking of images. Memory comprises not only episodic memory, memory of events and facts, but also long-­term memory, and all those forms of memory that determine the movement and actions of our muscles. Images are more effective than a thousand words because they are made by hands (or by thought of the capacity of hands), and this, whether in imagination or actuality, is how we as viewers understand their making, their manufacture; it is how we understand in our bones how they are made, how they look, and how they affect us. Perhaps it is precisely because of the body that the difference lies in the art. Perhaps we cannot be pure Kantians after all, standing away from all interest and setting aside all sense of the political meanings of the work as criteria of validation, aesthetic or otherwise. What we see in the images is irrevocably associated with their bodily dimensions and their bodily implication. It’s striking to note the continued repetition, across long periods and very different places, of identical forms of bodily disdain and aggression toward representational targets of aggression (see figs. 17–­18). When the statues come down, for whatever purpose, they are treated as if they were humans, and the ways in which they are beaten are limited as much by the limitations on our bodily repertoire of striking as by imitation of what we have seen in previous representations—­perhaps even more so.19 Our reactions are constrained by our physiology; we can strike a statue with a hammer in only so many ways (cf. figs. 12, 17, 19, 23, and so on). Especially when spontaneous, the actions performed by iconoclasts are likely to be much less variable than courteous acts of respect might be. There may be cultural forms of salutation and thanksgiving, but there is little variation when it comes to hammering a plinth or poking out eyes—­ little variation, that is, of performative action. Maybe even the soldiers supervising the iconoclasm in Firdos Square knew they could count on the bodily responses to statues as bodies, as toppled but somehow still living bodies. And so back to square one. In the end, images are not just unembodied signs or ciphers. We may want to conclude semiotically and return to the arbitrariness of the visual sign, but first we should remember that even if the way images resemble their prototypes may seem arbitrary, the ways they are treated are not. The relationship between signified and signifier may be moot, and the reasons for the destruction of images may

Charlottesville

have nothing to do with how they look, but how they are treated often has more to do with how they look than most semioticians are generally ready to acknowledge. The severity of a blow may be related less to the message an image conveys than to its look, and more to the closeness of its relationship to its archetype than we may be willing to acknowledge, given the currently hegemonic assumption that this relationship is, in theory at least, preferably to be described as arbitrary. When images come down, they are still treated as if they were embodied and alive. They are tormented as if they were somehow present in their bodies; even if the leader is already dead, blows are aimed at particular parts of the body—­cutting off the arm that held the scepter or the hand that pulled the trigger, poking out the eyes that could see what subjects have done, or defacing parts that are sexually arousing or regarded as licentious or provocative. However arbitrary we may believe the relationship between sign and signified to be in any work of art, the history of iconoclasm—­and the censorship and punishment of images more generally—­shows how little that to be the case. Even when statues are seen as purely ideological stand-­ins, we cannot afford to ignore the lessons of these paradoxes of our relationship with images and with art. No phenomenon illuminates them better than iconoclasm.

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The Wag in the Tail Image, Iconoclasm, Art

There was always some wag on the sidelines, pretending to be indifferent to what had been destroyed. In 1966 the Irish Republican Army dynamited Nelson’s Pillar in the center of Dublin. No one was hurt and just a few buildings were affected. It was an efficient operation. The only real damage was to Nelson’s head, “lopped off clean as a chicken’s.”1 Hearing a radio report about the event on the other side of town, the writer Roger Rosenblatt wandered off to see what he could find of the remains of the statue. They were startling enough—­a head with chipped lips and forehead and an eye socket, “looking like Yul Brynner’s in ‘Westworld,’” that had rolled away. “I found the whole daring business thrilling and published a poem about it in The Irish Times,” he recalled. A few minutes later Rosenblatt met an older woman who’d found it all less exciting than he (or so she pretended). “Och, sure,” she said, looking at the open space where the monument had just been, “it was always gettin’ in my way, anyway.”2 All this was quite different from the blowing up of the statue of Napoléon in the Place Vendôme by the Paris Commune in 1870.3 The painter Courbet himself played a key role in organizing and funding the entire operation. But the column was swiftly rebuilt and Napoléon restored to his high plinth. Nelson’s Pillar, on the other hand, was not, for obvious reasons. The Irish were only too happy to keep any symbol of their ancient oppressors off its plinth and out of eyesight.4 The monument itself, after all, was not so damaged that it would be difficult to rebuild. But was not the old Irishwoman’s remark too cool by half? It reminds one of Ad Reinhardt’s famous definition of a sculpture as “something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.”5 It’s hard to take such comments as much more than slightly frivolous quips. They suggest a certain indifference to the basic issues at stake, not only to the symbolic meaning of the work but to the fate of the work of art itself. Was Reinhardt also being a little raffish, implying something like “what do I care about a work of art (or at least about a sculpture)?”

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Wags always suggest that they don’t really care about what other people value. Do such seemingly offhand remarks matter? Well, yes. For the question of indifference is central. In the first instance, of course, the question is whether the indifference is to the subject or to the art; we will return to it. But could it be that neither the old lady nor the artist was quite so indifferent after all—­she because she was glad of the removal of that hated symbol of oppression, he because he may have been “prompted by the frustration many modern painters feel when they have to share gallery space with large sculptures that may upstage their paintings”?6 It may simply have been Reinhardt’s strong feelings, wryly expressed, about the superiority of painting over sculpture—­the ancient paragone all over again, the arguments about which of the two media was superior to the other. Perhaps even in the raffish remarks of both artist and layperson there lurks a grain of truth. In 1981 Richard Serra installed his Tilted Arc in Federal Plaza in New York. Commissioned by the Arts in Architecture Program of the US General Services Administration, it was made of raw steel, 120 feet long by 12 feet high, separating the Federal Building from the rest of the plaza and the street. Soon the protests began. Serra’s idea was to engage the spectators who had to walk around the sculpture to access the building. “The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza,” he explained. “As he moves, the sculpture changes. Step by step the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.”7 But engagement of the spectator’s body by a work is always threatening to some. Grace Glueck of the New York Times described it as “an awkward and bullying piece, perhaps the ugliest piece of public art in the city.”8 For the most part, however, artists and critics were in favor of the sculpture; in fact, most admired it. But rather like the old lady in Dublin, opponents of the sculpture, mostly people working at Federal Plaza, thought of it as being in the way. It blocked access to the building, it was an unnecessary obstacle, it would attract graffiti and rats, it might even provide shelter for terrorists. Of course, beneath her witty sangfroid the Irishwoman may have been hiding a deeper objection to the statue of an English hero erected in the center of Dublin. Or she may not even have cared at all. Perhaps the basis of New Yorkers’ objections was really their suspicion about whether such a piece of raw steel could actually be a great work of art; perhaps their aim was simply to convey their distaste for it. It never takes long for the prospect of iconoclasm to raise the question of art itself. There was a significant difference, however. No one made any claim for the artistic status of Nelson’s Pillar; the main objection to it could only have been that it represented an alien hero, the symbol of a hated hegemony, in the heart of the capital. In the case of the Serra, however, it is almost as if the artistic status of the work was taken for granted; the

The Wag in the Tail: Images, Iconoclasm, Art

objection was not so much about what Tilted Arc stood for but rather that it was a dominating and intrusive work of art. A public hearing was held in March 1985; 122 people testified in favor of Tilted Arc, 58 against. Still, the jury voted in favor of removing the work. Serra appealed; his appeal failed. On the night of March 15, 1989, workers dismantled the sculpture and carried away its remains to a scrapyard, removing the alleged obstacle forever.9

• And so wryness gives way to reasoning, art to iconoclasm. But out of this comes an extraordinary dialectic, one that that has only recently become clear. Embedded in it are several of the great paradoxes of iconoclasm, well beyond the basic one that love and hatred of images are two sides of the same coin. Courbet declared that because the column in the Place Vendôme was devoid of artistic merit, it could be taken down. In Stellen­ bosch in 2012 many of the works in the Art for the Public program displayed in the streets and courtyards of the town were damaged or hauled off by student aggressors; their supporters argued not just that the art got in the way but that it got in the way in public spaces, and that precisely because it was art it should be in a museum. The apogee of an institutional view of art! Or rather, the populist payback of the sophisticated view that the artistic status of a work depends on its institutional ratification. The work, it is alleged, does not belong in a public space, unasked for by the public it is supposed to serve; it belongs in a museum (implicitly, a museum for the elite).10 It’s not for the streets, whatever the artists themselves may say. In any case, if it is art, it has a better chance if it looks like something made from modest materials such as one might find in the streets themselves, as for instance in Thomas Hirschhorn’s 2013 Gramsci Monument in the Bronx. Of course it is entirely possible, even probable, that had this been allowed to stay in the streets or parks, someone would have damaged it too. But then a further twist in this complex strand appeared. While the image assailants in Stellenbosch in 2012 (like those at Bienne in 1980)11 maintained that because these images were art they should be placed in a museum, the people who supported the removal of Confederate monuments decided that they wished to save them by sending them to museums. But the aim in sending them there (or making new museums for them) was not primarily for safekeeping as works of art in places of aesthetic attention. It was for them to serve as history lessons, as propositions to ponder. Perhaps that is as it should be. The case is rich in irony. The Stellenbosch story of 2012 sheds light on the American story of 2017 by contrast. The new American iconoclasts want the monuments they take down to be housed in museums—­not because they are works of art (at least not in the first instance) but as

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objects to study because of the political, historical, and social messages they convey. They are there because of what they denote, not because of their form or look or because they are regarded as works of art. Of course it may also be some kind of insurance against the possibility that in this age of ever-­changing criteria of art, these objects too might one day pass the bar and actually be works of art after all—­the very fear of philistinism amongst the progressives! In any case, objections to subject matter alone, to the associations of a particular subject (however represented or defined), do indeed seem to be a hallmark of some of the commonest arguments for image destruction—­ much more so, say, than objections to the aesthetic qualities of art (though such objections are often used as either pretext or justification for destruction). Such objections and resistances are common enough, especially when the evident art in a work can be seen to serve pornographic (or allegedly pornographic) aims, or is regarded as too narcissistic or self-­indulgent, too much a manifestation of style for style’s sake (as in the case of the nude figure serpentinate by Michelangelo so criticized by Gilio da Fabriano in his 1564 Dialogue on the Errors of Painters). But it does seem that the latest campaign to remove images in the United States was predicated not so much on the sign itself as on what it stands for. The work has become the ideal arbitrary sign. But to conclude that this is what lies at the root, if not of all iconoclasm, then of almost all current iconoclasm seems a little premature—­if not banal. For the same dialectics persist. On the one hand, the issue is the fate of the work of art; on the other hand it is monuments that have very little or no claim to be works of art at all—­whether Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin, the statue of Saddam in Firdos Square, or the statues of Cecil Rhodes on the slope of Devil’s Peak in Cape Town and on the facade of Oriel College in Oxford. To the iconoclast in such places, it doesn’t really matter what any of these statues look like. The relationship between their look and their signification seems to be arbitrary: mere labeling or repute suffices as meaning. The same logic seems to underlie much of contemporary art: ever since Duchamp, art has grown closer to being entirely constituted by concept and has moved away from mimesis and all the traditional criteria of art, other than that of idea.12 Labeling suffices. It is the final irony. The constitution of art comes ever closer to the destruction of art when the key to both lies in the notion that representation has a purely arbitrary relationship with its signified, thus allowing for the detachment of signifying form from representation. 226

• For some time after the riots in Charlottesville and the events that sparked them, I wondered whether there was anything left to say about iconoclasm at all. But were we really to be struck dumb at this critical juncture, when the question of iconoclasm seemed more varied and more pressing

The Wag in the Tail: Images, Iconoclasm, Art

than ever? At a time in which so many apparently different motivations for destruction intersected—­whether religious, moralizing, propagandistic, or just crazed? Perhaps the impulse to destroy material images, like art itself, had indeed now passed into its final stage, that of pure semiosis, of signification with an entirely arbitrary relation to appearance. Was this, I wondered, how I wanted to conclude? Surely not. It could not be as simple as that. The problem of iconoclasm could not just be a matter of what a work shows. Even though mimesis had long fallen out of reckoning as a criterion of adequacy of meaning or even of representationality, had it now really been supplanted by pure denotation—­ especially (but not only) in the context of iconoclasm? At the beginning of the last chapter I confessed that the events at Charlottesville and the controversy about monuments that they exacerbated had made me reconsider some of my core views on iconoclasm. The first of these was that “to attack an image is to acknowledge its power.”13 To me this had always seemed straightforward enough. And yet now, after Charlottesville, the attacks seemed not so much against the power of the image itself, or the skill with which it was made, or the ways in which the feeling motivating the representation was conveyed by the maker to the beholder, but rather against the power of what it stood for—­and that alone. It was as if we had arrived at a place in which, as most semioticians have asserted in one way or another, there was only an arbitrary relation between what things stand for and how they look, between what they might actually mean and how they look. Perhaps, one might have concluded, it is indeed only by agreement and inculcation—­as Nelson Goodman insisted—­that something represents something else. In this case the look no longer matters at all (and mimesis becomes irrelevant). In the wake of Charlottesville the number of people in the US who wished to remove images grew dramatically, and they came from both sides of the political spectrum. For many, images were the signifiers of a past they would have preferred to erase from memory (as if they could) or to which they wanted to show their opposition. Pictures and sculptures showing people and battles (say) were treated no differently from plaques recording them. Take them down and toss them all away! Put them in museums where they can be accompanied by texts explaining what they mean, then and now, where we can better understand the perverse ideas of the past, and where we can assess how far we have come beyond such ideas. There, it is assumed, we will better see that it is what these works represent—­not pictorially or descriptively, but ideologically—­that justifies their removal from the public sphere. It is as if the image itself is not at stake, but only its symbolic value. It does not matter how it looks. It is what it stands for, irrespective of how it looks, that counts. Perhaps in the end there is little more to say about iconoclasm than this. The same clue to the connection between iconoclasm and contemporary art resurfaces: in these days, form of representation counts less and less. Things mean however they look; they mean on the basis of what

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they are declared to mean. They show anything; meaning is constituted elsewhere—­but not in representation. As if one could believe that! It would be to neutralize art forever. It would suggest that there is no ideology in art, or in artmaking, at all. Back to the worst of the culprits! Back to notions like “the age of art,” or an age of art that (allegedly) supersedes an age of image meaning (implicit in Belting’s influential notion of the Renaissance age of art superseding the medieval age of the devotional icon). The entire meaning of a work can never lie in representation alone. That old dream is over. It went even before Banksy made one of his paintings self-­destruct and thereby increase in value. It went when works of art became pure investment vehicles. This is the fate of the work of art in the new age of iconoclasm. It is, after all, also the age of unfettered capitalism, the age in which choice and judgment have only to do with financial investment and nothing with aesthetics. Banksy puts one of his own works of art for auction. He clearly labels it as what it actually shows, Girl with Balloon. In its frame he covertly installs a shredder. The bids go up and up—­and at the very moment the hammer comes down (at $1.37 million), Banksy activates the shredder. At first the staffers look at the auctioneers’ hammer. No one looks at the work itself. But then one of them notices what is happening to it (fig. 57). All the assistants gape; the audience gasps. The buyer is not fazed, since she knows that the value of the work has suddenly increased. In it, representation had seemed perfectly to match meaning—­until the device the artist had secretly installed in its frame shredded it to pieces and its value increased. Both its label and its representation become irrelevant to its value, in any sense other than purely financial. Indeed only its destroyed form mattered now. The new age of iconoclasm coincides with the new age in which the only criterion for the value of a work of art is that of its investment value. But however much representation may have been supplanted by denotation, description by labeling the image has not entirely lost its force in our time. For this is also the digital age, perhaps the greatest age of image multiplication and image effectiveness ever. Image worship returns in more abundant forms than the old idolaters could ever have imagined, as the massive use of digital media technologies provides vehicles for new and universal devotions. Never before have we been more entrained by images; never before have we attended as much to how they look. We need images for our very subsistence. We love them, are aroused and distressed by them beyond measure—­even when we pay no attention to them, even when their effects seem diluted.14 Indifference is always a feint. In an age of habituation we are more entrained and more enthralled than we are ready to admit. We think we have seen something before, and yet still we attend—­ and even if we think we don’t, still the image inserts itself in our memory,

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to be reprocessed and brought forward with enhanced efficacity. It gets under our skin, reappears when we least want it, acts interoceptively and viscerally, and adjusts our body schemas in ways that can be manipulated both for ill and for good, for propaganda and exploitation as well as for therapy and life enhancement, for destruction and finally for human creativity. The reasons for eliminating images overlap with the reasons for valuing them. The tension between these two poles lies at the core of what we make of images and what we can do with them. That is why, when it comes to images, the time, the temporal space, for reflection and judgment has become more critical than ever. It always was; never has it been more so. Images flash before us at lightning speed and in bewildering abundance. We have no time to process the reflexive and automatic responses they generate. We see them and react impulsively, in ways that precede reflection and rationalization; instantaneity of response trumps inhibition of response. But that is no irrefragable law. We need to slow down and halt the relentless procession of images, so that we can attend to them and then ponder, as necessary, ways of discarding them—­from taking them temporarily out of our minds to more drastic measures of removal, including removing them from the face of the earth altogether. It may seem that in the age of hyperreproducibility the hyperabundance of images induces indifference. There are so many images, and so many similar ones (or seemingly similar ones, since attention becomes poorly discriminatory under the pressure of quantity), that we do not notice them. Or we become so habituated that the effects they once had wear off and give way to indifference. But expressions of indifference, especially to effect (as well as affect), are deceptive. More often than not

57. Banksy’s Girl with Balloon self-­destructs at Sotheby’s, London, October 5, 2018, screenshot from https://​www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​ eXKE0nAMmg4.

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they indicate the opposite—­antipathy rather than apathy, engagement rather than detachment, fear rather than indifference. For the fact is that in this age of alleged indifference, people seem to need images more than ever. They are compelled not only to make selfies but to look at them, to use Instagram and Snapchat, malign inducements away from reflection. Consumers prefer virtual reality to reality. “Regular reality is just so, uh, real,” says an advertisement for a virtual-­reality-­enhanced treadmill, with clear therapeutic benefits.15 Better to put on goggles than to confront the real. But still the body is insistently there, even when it may seem to be there only virtually—­and now even more so, in the digital age, where you can never destroy an image, and especially not the body in the image. It always has the potential to come back—­and it does. Images in the digital age are more alive than ever before; they are easily eliminated but they just as easily reappear. It is the age of the perpetual resurrection of the flesh—­but in virtual form. Despite the facility with which we press a button or keyboard to take out an image, it is impossible to prevent its recurrence, even its recurrence in living form. Even with virtual bodies, actual flesh is always implicated.16 If only for this reason, theologies of images that are predicated on the incarnation of a savior are central to the understanding of images—­and of art. In the digital age it turns out to be easier to eliminate a human body than to eliminate an image—­since digitization ensures immortality in a way that is beyond the capacity of actual flesh. The unremitting ability of images to become enfleshed is one of the main causes of our ambivalence toward them. They transcend normal probability. We see them as dead matter and feel them as somehow alive, even when we do not know exactly what it is about the image that makes us feel such things. We may have a general sense of why we feel this way, and for what psychological or psychohistorical reasons we see the image as living or project onto it the qualities of life. But suddenly the image is there—­and it acquires conviction and the status of truthfulness because we have no way of resolving the paradox of its twofold ontology other than by destroying it. Ambivalence about the truth of the image in our time is a matter not only of the old suspicion of mimesis but also of the ever clearer and ever greater facility with which images may now be edited, doctored, faked, and turned into ever more deceptive reflections of the truth they seem to represent or to instantiate. We are fundamentally suspicious of images because they are not alive, yet we repeatedly take them as if they were. We know that they can deceive and cheat even the most skeptical and alert among us. And so in extreme or eccentric cases, we destroy them—­or we remain with our ambivalence. If there is any single factor that generates our ambivalence toward images, it is that we derive our pleasure as well as our fears and misgivings from the elision of inert matter with living or animated flesh—­a process

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that reaches its acme in the living image. But the greatest ambivalence also produces the greatest effect. It enables the engineering—­in the best of cases, the resolution—­of the tension between automaticity and restraint, between automatic responses to images and the constraints on reflex that arise from the modulatory effects of reason. Our pleasures are often instantaneous and therefore fugitive. We know that we must arrest our reflexive and automatic responses to an image so that we can reason on it, understand it, regain its instrumentality, and assess its agency. We need to be involved for the purposes of empathy but also to be detached in order to judge whence that yielding of the self comes and become aware of ourselves as judging beings. How successful we are will depend on the time we allow ourselves to process as adequately as possible the range of our ambivalences toward images: dead or alive, beautiful or ugly, symmetrical or asymmetrical, even truthful or untruthful (in our own eyes first and in the world’s next). From images to art, then, and from aesthetic to moral judgment—­the very passage that underlies and is illustrated by the course of iconoclasm. As Kant showed, the pleasures we derive from judgment arise precisely from the weighing of ambivalences that ensue upon the play of imagination, from our sense not only of the beautiful but also of the sublime. In both of these we must set one form of response beside another and suppress our body in favor of the finality of form, or become aware that the form which threatens our bodies cannot really do so, because it is just form. This dialectical process constitutes the fundamental pleasure of aesthetic judgment and yields the markers of greater or lesser art. But the body continues to war with such judgment, and it is on the tensions that result that most iconoclasm finally depends, just as it is on them that the first pleasures of art often rely. Kant, however, forgot that they often provide access to the free play of the imagination and to what he would call aesthetic judgment as well as the intersubjective dimension of both aesthetic judgment and the pleasures of beauty. But the intersubjectivity that is essential to aesthetic judgment also forms the basis of the moral law within us. From ambiguity and ambivalence arises the certainty of judgment, even if that certainty is only emergent and never consciously settled or accepted (whether by the self or by others). In this endless state lie the ultimate doubts we have about the status of our moral and aesthetic judgments, as well as the richness of our experience of them. Iconoclasm calls both into question, sometimes conclusively, sometimes less so. It and its sister phenomenon, censorship, reach deep into the fundamental ambivalence of our responses to both art and images: on the one hand, freedom of expression; on the other, the need to set images aside and suppress them because of their potential for moral and emotional exploitation and their effectiveness as disrupters of norms we hold dear. Nowhere does this ambivalence appear more acutely than in digital media such as Facebook, where the most liberal

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societies rediscover the need to disallow, for example, the freedom to show and disseminate images of extreme violence or the most blatant prejudice. The body is always within the image, even when we don’t want it there, even when we know, somehow, that it is at least as illusory as it is real. The ambiguity of these lessons is nowhere more clearly displayed than in the great variety of cases that we call iconoclastic—­even when it is just words that are erased and plaques removed—­because then the body reappears more like a ghost, an eidolon, than ever before. The eidolon—­ now both idol and ghost—­remains, even if the actual image or text goes. There are many lessons to be learned from the episodes tracked and illustrated in this book, and the latest one, perhaps, is exemplified by the contrast between the obliterating iconoclasms of ISIL and the less violent ones that followed so shortly after in the United States. ISIL’s iconoclasm had body and theology at the forefront; the iconoclasm of the American South seemed to make the body irrelevant. But the suggestion that the Confederate statues should be placed in museums seemed, in the first instance, to allude—­at least—­to their aesthetic status, as did the notion that they would now be housed in a place where their moral status could be evaluated as well. The highest irony of these days was provided by Trump’s co-­opting a position well known to the Left during the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the US.17 It was precisely the aesthetic status of the contested works, argued for by experts in the courtroom, that stopped them from being discarded on pornographic grounds and elevated them into objects worth saving. They were saved because they had been shown to pass the bar of critical aesthetic judgment.18 Trump’s assertion that the statue of General Lee in Charlottesville was beautiful implied an elevation to the status of art and therefore, however vulgarly and spuriously, an appeal to aesthetic judgment. At the same time he insisted on the historical lessons they offer about positions once held dear in the US. Trump’s own positions evidence the essential unity of aesthetic and moral judgment—­the unity, not the equivalence. This form of judgment has nothing to do with beauty on the one side or the other, as Kant himself knew, but with the kinds of weighing, pondering, and opening up of the play of imagination that meditation on the body and the utilization of sight inevitably produce. Trump himself, of course, would not be capable of the reflection, wisdom, or self-­awareness required to attend to these lessons of the fate of images. This final chapter began with the question of indifference. It (or its exemplars) may often seem to be frivolous, but it turns out to be critical. One of the chief lessons of iconoclasm is that we are not indifferent to images, however much we may say we are. It may all be a pose, after all: the wag may be trying to be cool or debonair about something that touches him, or threatens to touch him. Indifference becomes a mask for emotion.

The Wag in the Tail: Images, Iconoclasm, Art

Often indifference turns out to be less (or not at all) toward the subject of the work than toward the art within it. It may be claimed that we are living in an age of indifference, but—­as we have learned to our cost—­we are not. To our cost, because we may be so entrained by images that we grow angry with them and destroy them; we incline all too easily to use them as targets of both political and personal anger. At the same time the inevitability of entrainment helps us better understand why images have the effects they do, why they generate not only empathy but antipathy, and why image destruction so often entails people destruction too. Is indifference to someone or something actually an exercise in power or just a symptom of it? On what does agency, whether of people or of images, depend? By now it is almost as difficult to say “mere images” as it would be to say “mere people.” It is often claimed that the multitude of images that now envelops our lives, and the easy repetition of more or less the same images over and over again, leads to deadening forms of familiarity and habituation. The question, then, is no longer one of habituation but of remediation, of being aware of the need to remain sensitive to the effects of images in such a way as not only to avoid iconoclasm but to enhance positive and meaningful responses to them. One can be indifferent only if one fails to give things or feelings about them time to grow and become at least part of what they might yet be. Every iconoclast contains the makings of an iconophile. One of the good reasons for pausing to look is that if you don’t pause, you never see anything new in the image; you give it no time to come alive. The coming alive of art may be metaphor, but metaphor is given flesh by imagination, just as imagination itself is rooted in our carnality. In this combination lie both the danger of images and the redemptive powers of art. Often enough, iconoclasts of a modern work destroy it out of fury that it doesn’t qualify in their view as art at all; that they could have made it as well (or better) themselves, that the work is childish, crude, insufficiently depictive, insufficiently like the object itself, and so on. Few think of the more or less adequately mimetic as a criterion of art anymore. But that would hardly be the point. The reason we attend to iconoclasm is not just that it so clearly reveals our diffidence about the love and hate images bear us (and vice versa), but that more than any other phenomenon, it discloses the many tensions that arise within our mental insistence on seeking the visualization of mere denotation. In these days of concise signs and diagrams, of labels rather than pictures for concepts, the body persistently returns, and the sign is ever newly incarnate. There is no grasping without the capacity for proprioception and no elimination without action. We cannot think the images away, nor the agencies they entail. The only possibility is to reflect upon the automaticity of our reflexive responses to them and to find the space to meditate on what this entails: nothing less than the

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emergence of self-­awareness, and the generation of reason out of human automaticity. Here lies an inescapable tension—­on the one hand, the automaticity of the ways in which we respond to images as if they live and behave somehow beyond their purely material status; on the other, the need for contemplation and the exercise of reason as it struggles to come to terms with the frailty of our attempts to keep the body out of the already dead image. This insistent dialectic between automaticity and reflection plays out in the war between the appeal to the body, the body that persists in its realities and its illusions, and the often-­failing constraints of reason. It is precisely this inclination to fail that wrecks both our images and ourselves, but at the same time offers up the possibilities of imagination, creativity, and regeneration. The question of the relationship between art and morality is almost as old as the question of art itself. It was Kant’s great achievement to have set out the continuity between aesthetic and moral judgment and to have brought the question of the free play of the imagination into the space of judgment. Even though—­or perhaps precisely because—­his aesthetic theory was predicated on the detachment of the body from aesthetic judgment, he would not have disagreed with my view that the actions of iconoclasts are to be understood primarily in terms of embodied perceptions and embodied responses to images; but he almost certainly would have had reservations (as other readers will too) about my insistence on the ways in which embodied responses are critical to aesthetic response. The destruction of art forces upon us the question of art itself. So too does the destruction of images that we do not consider art, for that indeed is how art begins—­as only God knew but as we too now know. It is in the destruction of the image that ambivalence also begins, and in the play of the imagination, that close companion of ambivalence, that art may be said to begin too. Art does not end in idolatry and image worship; it is in the negation of the image—­both of God’s image and of the mimetic image—­that art begins. Mimesis finally slips away and opens the field for the play of imagination. If we have learned anything from the loss of faith in mimesis as a criterion for art, it is that ambivalence about representation itself—­which inevitably ensues when mimesis is inadequate—­enhances hermeneutic opportunity as well. The hallmark of the iconoclast is ambivalence; so too is that of the work of art. In its pondering of the free play of the imagination, aesthetic judg­ ment—­whether detached from the body or not—­offers a training ground for moral judgment and insight into its processes. These two forms of judgment are psychologically and neurologically monitored in similar ways. But what help, what comfort, is that in the face of the human tragedies that ever more frequently are associated with iconoclasm? Even if the processes of aesthetic judgment involved in the assessment of a work as art (or of the art in a work of art) offer biological models for the

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forms of decision making and deliberative imagination involved in moral judgment, they cannot ensure success. We need the idea of art because it instructs us not in what is right and wrong, but rather in how we make such judgments, both in the aesthetic and the moral domain. The lessons of art serve to refine our judgment on the play of imagination elicited by individual works of art; our moral judgment is predicated on the same disinterested view of value that drives our aesthetic judgment. But as we have bitterly learned, refinement of aesthetic judgment does not always cause the arc of moral judgment to bend toward the good. Göring may have been a great lover and accumulator of art, but he was also a destroyer of lives. There is no guarantee that love of art engenders humanity or empathy, but we should not dismiss the possibility and the promise that pondering a work of art, like reflection on iconoclasm and the damage it causes both in human and in cultural terms, provides an antidote to unthinking viewing and unthinking responses. However quixotic or idealistic this may seem, the kinds of ­reflection and appraisal that a work of art engenders offer constant lessons in the modes of decision making and judgment in the moral sphere as well. What the modulatory constraints on automatic and unthinking responses might achieve in terms of the inhibition of impetuous action, cruelty, and destructiveness is probably very little; but ought we not consider the benefits that might be generated by the evidence for the sublimity rather than the baseness of human imagination? This would entail accepting the possibility that this baseness exists within us too, but that we are also capable of placing into the counterbalance the potential of its nobler opposites. Iconoclasm has much to teach us about the role of art in society. But in this new age of many iconoclasms, whether individual or collective, of iconoclasms ever more closely linked to murder, there is yet another paradox besides those I have already identified. Image destruction and monument destruction have become features of an age in which judgments about what constitutes art remain confused, yet in which moral judgments have become more decisive and are often played out via destruction. But when iconoclasts say that they are destroying an image because the money spent on it were better spent on the living images of God, we begin to understand why the only result of the modern escalation of art prices can be destruction (as in the case of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon) or further inflation (as in the case of the pseudo-­Leonardo Salvator Mundi), where the borderline between capital and iconoclasm becomes all the more apparent, where fetish value totally absorbs use value, succumbing to the forces of investment markets of greater value than the economies of all but the richest countries in the world. Banksy’s self-­shredding of Girl with Balloon represents the final consequence of investment-­driven criteria of art.

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At the beginning of this book I claimed that the fate of the work of art in the age of its digital reproducibility is its destruction. It could justly have been asked whether I meant the literal destruction of works of art or the metaphorical destruction of the idea of art. It would be easy to say that in times like ours, when calm is always on the verge of disruption and the means of destruction are so easily activated, the great risk is the liability of all works of art to be destroyed or mutilated; or that in this era of digitization we stand ever on the edge of eliminating the uniqueness that is supposed to constitute artworks and their aura. But it is now also impossible to eliminate an image forever, and we have become all too aware that, contrary to the views of Walter Benjamin (and what some readers of this book may still be inclined to think), the work of art can indeed retain at least something of its aura in the age of its digital reproducibility. Habituation is not necessarily the enemy of reflection. Even in this era of overfamiliarity with images, we attend to them more than we think we do and see more in them than we think we have (how much and how closely we attend lies at least as much in the hands of the maker as in the projections of the viewer). In this too their often insidious power lies. But it is not insidious all the way down—­at least not if we can learn from iconoclasm that images are not just subversive but constructive as well, not just provocative but redemptive. In order to understand the latter we need to acknowledge the former; we must grasp that images are rarely anodyne. To study iconoclasm is to better understand both the power of images over people and the power of people over images. It involves admitting and acknowledging such powers. Beside the tragedies that accompany iconoclasm, the consolations of art may seem trivial, irrelevant, or ineffectual. Beside the suffering of those who live in the places of image destruction, to claim that the assessment of the play of the imagination is similar (or even identical) in both art and morality may indeed seem irrelevant; but it is not. What could be more all-­embracingly constitutive of our freedom than the free play of imagination? After all, in the face of pain, whether physical or psychological, imagination must yield to constraint or obliteration. The same for the pleasures of art (whatever we regard as art) and the benefits of instruction in how to refine the judgments from which those pleasures proceed. What is at stake is nothing less than the possibility of enhancing our freedom and the potential of human imagination to liberate its owners from oppressive as opposed to generative constraint. To enjoy looking at and pondering an image is to be aware of the tensions that reside within it and that it is capable of provoking. To release imagination from the aesthetic and bodily sphere to that of morality is to bring self-­consciousness to the fore and to acknowledge the iconoclast within ourselves. It means seeking to discover where imagination needs to be inhibited or diverted and how it may be beneficially employed.

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If we think of imagination, especially the embodied roots of imagination, as a hallmark of what makes us human and as testimony to the one freedom that remains within us until utter exhaustion, then the link of consolation and strength with the last possibility of imaginativeness testifies not only to what makes us human but also to the possibilities of liberation from the woes of being human. This may be an all too optimistic hope, and possibly even a demanding one, but it is surely worth clinging to. Whatever wars and struggles it may mirror or entail, art will always remain a training ground for peace and restitution, as well as a supplier of solace and consolation amid the turbulence of our personal and civic lives. What iconoclasm reminds us of is the fragility of that supply of peace. What it challenges us to do is to reinforce that supply.

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Appendix 1: Damnatio Memoriae Why Mobs Pull Down Statues*

For hours the TV cameras played on the efforts to topple the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Al-­Fardos (Paradise) Square last week, and we all watched, fascinated. It seemed an epochal event. Yet the crowd that tried to tear the statue down was a smallish one, its efforts mostly futile. Every now and then the effort seemed slightly amusing, as if offering a kind of light relief beside the real horrors of war. Some men try to tie a noose round the neck of the statue, but nothing happens. The gestures seem more symbolic than practical, however strenuous. The same for the scuffles that ensue when a few men fight to * Original publication: “Damnatio Memoriae: Why Mobs Pull Down Statues,” Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2003. This brief article appeared a few days after the statue of Saddam Hussein was taken down on April 9, 2003, toward the beginning of the Iraq War. But it failed to raise an important question: to what degree were the crowd’s attempts to pull down the statue spontaneous, and to what degree an organized performance? When I wrote the article, this second possibility never occurred to me. Though I began by commenting on the relatively tepid efforts of the Baghdadi crowd to pull down the statue (as if sensing that their anger may have been somehow lacking in passion, perhaps even pro forma), I went on to note the apparent intensity of the feelings it aroused, as shown by the photos of the crowd’s violent behavior toward the collapsed body and face of the statue. The editors at the Wall Street Journal gave the title “Damnatio Memoriae” and subtitle “Why Mobs Pull Down Statues” to the piece, and I confess that at the time I thought that the “mob’s” behavior was a good instance of spontaneous popular anger against a hated leader. Although I mentioned the role of the US marines in actually pulling down the statue, it did not occur to me that those who participated might have been summoned and brought together by US troops (figs. 47–­48). It was only when I saw the original photographs, not available to me at the time, of the role of US marines in gathering the crowd to watch their efforts to bring it down that I realized this. In the new digital age it had become all too easy to adjust the news (and the apparently incontrovertible evidence supporting it) by censoring out those parts of the image that did not suit those in possession of the original images or that did not fit the desired message (or by adding parts that fit the message). Of course this form of manipulation and adjustment of truth was not new, but thanks to digitization it had become much easier than ever before.

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grab a hammer that they swing ineffectually at the plinth. They produce a dent or two. Still nothing happens. Finally an M88 tank removal vehicle, aptly named a Hercules, rolls up to the statue, and US marines tie chains of iron around the statue and bring it down. Everyone is jubilant. What is it about a dead and really poor statue—­a boring one indeed—­ that rouses such personal antipathy? And why were we who were not there so gripped by the whole business? All of us are aware of the symbolic freight of statues like this one. Their toppling clearly symbolizes the end of the overthrown regime. Often pent-­up resentments against a now-­absent leader are taken out on his images. But is this enough to explain the intensity of feeling in Paradise Square—­and the efforts to sully the statue once it was down? People spat on it and smacked its face with their shoes as it was dragged through the streets of the city (see fig. 56). Even the children joined in the frenzy of insult. But it was not the once proud and arrogant Saddam himself. It was simply a statue of Saddam, one of many. Why should we ourselves have been so engaged? Is it just that the statue is the symbol of a hated leader, or is it more? The history of art and the history of all images is punctuated by events of this kind. It happened in the French Revolution, in the Russian Revolution, in the wake of the fall of Nazism, in the months following the expulsion of the shah of Iran, and at the time of the dismantling of the regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989–­92. It happened long before too, over and over again: repeatedly with regime change in ancient Egypt, and often enough during the Roman Empire. Throughout the Roman Empire statues were erected in cities and colonies and held to be stand-­ins for the emperor himself; they had to be treated with respect. One had to respond to the image of the emperor as if the emperor himself were present. But images of Roman emperors were sometimes submitted to the insult known as the damnatio memoriae, the attempt to eliminate even the memory of the past by removing its symbols. Then, of course, came the many instances of religious iconoclasm, from the Byzantine iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries, through the great iconoclastic movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (when more objects of artistic value were destroyed than on any other occasion), up until the dramatic destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Religious statues are removed not just because they are images of the infidel, not just because they are cult statues worshiped by opponents of the victors, but because some of the life of the gods they represent is believed to inhere in them. And when they are pulled down, well, are they not just pieces of dead wood and stone, powerless and ineffectual, just like the statues of Saddam? The history of art, just like the history of image destruction, provides one example after another in which images are treated as if they are liv-

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ing. To pull them down is not just to exhaust them of all the life and power we habitually attribute to them—­it is to assert our own triumph over the people they represent. Last week’s events in Baghdad revealed all this, every step of the way. So does the continuing destruction of statues and ripping of photographs and posters all over Iraq. The headlines read “Saddam Toppled”; the photos show the statues of Saddam toppled. Thus do the very metaphors illustrate the conflation of image and prototype. Everyone spoke of the “head of state” being treated with new indignities, as people put the boot in his face. The statue was down, and yet people felt compelled to hit and spit. They did not just tear the photographs, they stomped on them—­the ultimate indignity. We watched compulsively not only because of the glee at the toppling of the regime, but because the treatment of a statue as if it were human was in itself peculiarly compelling, as if we were watching such gruesome treatment visited upon a human being. And the covering of the face with the US flag (see fig. 48) had particular force because it entailed elimination of the very signs of vitality in an image: the features of the face, and the eyes in particular (the first thing iconoclasts often do is to take out the eyes of an image, to make clear that it has finally been drained of its supposed life). To see a face mutilated or covered is to be forced to think about the obliteration of life itself. The lesson of all this is not just the political one. It is not only about the pleasure to be derived from the deposition of a tyrant. It is also about our relations with images in general, and about the power all images, whether good or bad, have over us. For years it has been fashionable to claim that the modern multiplication of images by photography, by the computer, and now on the web have drained images of their force. The German cultural critic Walter Benjamin once implied that in the age of mechanical reproduction images lose the aura they had when they were at the center of religion and ritual. Susan Sontag implied this too in a famous essay on photography. Not surprisingly, especially in the light of the strength of our reactions to images of atrocity, even when multiplied by the million, she has revised her views. She too has come to recognize something about images that we all know in our bones: that statues, like pictures and photographs, become compelling because of our inescapable tendency to invest images of people (and sometimes things too) with the lives of those whom they represent. Hence our fascination with the events of last week. Such images may be reproduced a thousand times over, and still we will be moved, because we see the being in the image. This fundamental response to sculptures, paintings, and photographs could not be better exemplified than by our reactions to the transformation of the once proud and arrogant statue of Saddam Hussein into a forlorn heap of twisted metal and stone.

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Appendix 2: The Power of Wood and Stone* The Taliban were not the first to fear the mysterious lure of art. The demolition of the two colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, was chilling in its ferocity. The artistic value and the scale of these great carvings—­and our awareness that there are no other images like them anywhere, bearing witness to the early practice of one of the world’s major religions—­evokes horror and indignation at their destruction. Equally shocking to many is the manner in which Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders shrugged off the world’s distress. “All we are breaking are stones,” said Mullah Muhammad Omar of the attack on the colossi. His minister of culture, Mawlawi Qudratullah Jamal, echoed him: “It is not a big issue. The statues are objects only made of mud and stone.” Yet these statements reveal a central paradox not only of the Taliban’s actions but of iconoclasm throughout history: if paintings and sculptures are simply pieces of wood and stone, inert and insignificant, why bother to destroy them? The very act of iconoclasm testifies to the mysterious—­and often threatening—­power images can hold over us. In ravaging their country’s artistic heritage in the name of fundamentalist Islam, the Taliban rulers revealed not their strength but their fear. In this they took their place in a long line of despots and others who have trembled in the sight of creations they did not understand, creations that seemed somehow to embody a life and to emanate an inexplicable and ominous force of their own. Iconoclasm is generally a response to the discomfort elicited by such images. One can argue that there are two basic kinds of iconoclasm. In the first, images are destroyed because they are invested with the powers * Original publication: “The Power of Wood and Stone,” Washington Post, Outlook, March 25, 2001. I should add that the title of this article was not my own. Whether the fear I describe in this article is fear of art is entirely moot and may well be a projection of the editors.

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of those whom they represent—­God, Christ, the saints—­and the authorities worry that ordinary people expect too much of them or even worship them. In cases such as the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century or the extraordinary wave of iconoclasm that followed upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989–­90, images are taken down and smashed because they are symbols of a hated or repressive order that has been overthrown. The Taliban’s iconoclasm is of the first kind. Omar’s pronouncements that the statues were “false idols” and representations of “gods of the infidels” have an eerie familiarity. These phrases possess a long and rich history—­and not only in Islamic tradition. The second verse of the Ten Commandments of the Judeo-­Christian tradition declares: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” It is followed immediately by the phrase “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” which establishes the most famous and most fundamental restriction on the making of images and art. At the basis of every edict against idolatry lies exactly this connection between false gods and material images, and the fear that as soon as you make an image, you are bound to worship it, and therefore to worship something false and illusory. This fear has led to the sort of wholesale destruction of sacred art that occurred in the Byzantine iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries and during the Reformation, when Martin Luther wrote constantly of the “false idols” of the Roman Church and “Against the Pagan Idols” was the title of many a sermon by Lutherans and Calvinists. Many of these iconoclasts argued that since God is divine and un­ circumscribable, how can he be represented in material and circumscribed form at all? How can the divine be shown as a person of the kind we all know? Similarly, the earliest followers of Buddha doubted that he should be represented in human form; better to concentrate on nothingness, they felt, than on represented forms of the body. If reverence must be paid to an image of God, the opponents of sacred art declared, then better that it be paid to living embodiments of him. In twelfth-­century France, St. Bernard roundly condemned the use of certain kinds of holy images in churches—­paintings, sculptures, even mosaics—­and suggested they be removed. Was it not better, he asked, to spend money on the poor, who were after all the living images of God, rather than on dead ones? The Taliban recently offered an echo of this argument, expressing anger that the United Nations and Western governments were willing to spend money on the Buddhas rather than helping starving Afghani children. “If money is going to statues while children are dying of malnutrition next door, then that makes it harmful, and we destroy it,” a Taliban envoy said on a visit to the United States. But to say that the destruction of the “idols” of Afghanistan can be inserted into a recurrent dimension of human history is to tell only half

The Power of Wood and Stone

the story. There is something much more fundamental at play in human reactions to art. The truth is that art can inspire ambivalence, that there is something about images that arouses both admiration and hostility, desire and revulsion—­and that this truth as much as Islamic edict may have guided the hand of the Taliban and makes our own responses to their actions so very strong. Images are feared not because they are dead but because they seem to be, and are often believed to be, alive. Since time immemorial, people have responded to images as if they were real, as if they somehow partook of the life of what they represent. They are said to move, they seem to speak, they arouse desire. All cultures show concern about the sensuality of images that look as if they are living beings (although the phrase “it almost seems alive” is often applied not just to naturalistic imagery but also to images that have strong vitality of line or vibrant colors). Aisha, the nine-­year-­old wife of the Prophet Muhammad, for example, was allowed to play with dolls only on the condition that they did not resemble people. And certainly this belief in the “life” of images is at the root of the miracle-­working powers attributed to countless sculptures and paintings all over the Catholic world. Like the Taliban, Luther insisted that paintings and sculptures are just “pieces of wood and stone.” An image of St. Anthony or the Virgin or even Christ was just inert material. St. Anthony himself, like Christ and the Virgin, might well have been capable of the miracles attributed to him; but this was certainly not true of the many and varied images of him, Luther and others repeatedly insisted. Art lovers speak of the “divine powers” of the artist, but the notion that an artist can create like God is at bottom a dangerous one. There is a notable reformulation of the idea that artistic images are somehow blasphemous in the Islamic Hadith—­the retellings of the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings. One addresses the subject of the artist. Since only God has the power to give life to form, it says, the artist’s presumption in attempting to emulate him must be punished. When the artist finally reaches heaven, God challenges him to breathe life into his creation. When the artist fails to do so, he is cast into hell to be tormented. During the Roman Empire it was asserted that “where the image is, there, too, is the emperor.” All the respect due to the emperor was due to images of him as well. In the light of this interpretation, it is no wonder the Byzantine iconoclasts felt that images of the emperor, at least, had to be destroyed. If you could destroy or damage his image, you somehow also impugned and mitigated his power. We see this same thinking in other instances where those who have a grudge against the representatives of a regime assault their images—­whether of Lenin, or the shah of Iran, or even Princess Diana, whose portrait in London’s National Gallery was slashed by an IRA sympathizer in 1981. And there is a direct line here from official doctrine to psychopathic behavior. Disturbed individuals often attack images precisely because

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they believe that by destroying an image, or by damaging a part of it, they can do away with its powers, with its strange grip on its beholders, with its sensuality. This was the case in the 1972 attack on Michelangelo’s famous Pietà (an image in which the borderline between the sacred and the sensual has often appeared quite thin), or Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, defaced in 1914, and countless other examples. Often the parts destroyed are the eyes, the prime indicators of life in a body, followed by the mouth, the nose, and finally the limbs (as a general, though certainly not universal, rule). Could it be, then, that the mullahs were not merely blasting away idols of the infidels but that they feared a real possibility—­that the peasants living in the valley of Bamiyan might be so impressed by the size and the beauty of those 120-­ and 175-­foot statues that they might see them as gods, that they might begin worshiping Buddha himself because of them? This may seem a preposterous idea; but it is surely the kinship—­ not the difference—­between such primitive notions and our own susceptibilities to art that is the source of at least part of our shock at what happened in that remote and beautiful valley. But it could be said that there is another reason as well. In blasting and hacking away the giant Buddhas, the Taliban’s leaders have shown the same responses that drive their rule of the people of Afghanistan. They have shown themselves to be menaced both by the inexplicable sensuality of art and by its multifold attractions—­attractions that have for centuries been held, in both East and West, to be as wanton and as little subject to reason as the attractions of women. To the Taliban, presumably, the powers of art, like the powers of women, are frightening because they cannot be controlled, unless you blast the face off a statue or cover the face of a woman with a burka. Now it will become as difficult to see the face of a statue in Afghanistan as it is to see the face of a woman. And the suffering will go on.

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Notes

Preface 1. Throughout

this book I use the term iconoclasm in its common sense of the willful destruction of images. By images I refer to all images, whether representational or abstract, high or low, religious or secular, everyday or elite, regarded as art or not regarded as art, cultural icon or not. In the following chapters I use the term iconoclasm in the context of the destruction of architecture as well. Of course I am aware of the various nuances, modulations, qualifications, and constraints that are occasionally applied to the term, as in the thoughtful work on revolutionary France of Richard Clay. He wishes to place iconoclasm in quotes in order to highlight his reservations about its common usage, which in his view “emphasizes the breaking of representational objects obscuring the fact that such acts generate new signs as well as altering old ones” (Clay, “Violating the Sacred,” 3). For my views on the semiotic implications of iconoclasm, see the last two chapters of this book. 2. Von Végh, Die Bilderstürmer. 3. As noted above, Von Végh’s slim Die Bilderstürmer was the only general work on the phenomenon. For other more specifically oriented exceptions, see Freedberg, Power of Images. 4. Freedberg, Power of Images. 5. Freedberg, Le pouvoir des images; Freedberg, Potega wizerunków; Freedberg, Il potere delle immagini. 6. To these writers should now be added still others who have adjusted, refined, and critiqued the basic positions of those mentioned here. They include scholars such as Peter Brown, Robin Cormack, Paul Speck, Sister Charles Murray, Charles Barber, John Haldon, Leslie Brubaker; for further references as well as to the work of others, see nn. 15 and 47 below. 7. It is perhaps worth noting that the increase in actual iconoclastic events anticipated by a good decade the recent efflorescence of writing on the subject. 8. Now taken for granted. See, for example, the quotations from the work of James Simpson and Jaś Elsner further below. 9. Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors. 10. Warnke, Bildersturm. 11. Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting.” 12. Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium. See also his “Autonomie und Askese.” 13. This also emerged very clearly from the pioneering essay on the relevance of iconoclasm and attitudes toward images—­and organ music—­by Gary Schwartz (Schwartz,

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“Saenredam”). I remain indebted to Gary Schwartz for his encouragement to pursue my initial researches on Netherlandish iconoclasm. 14. For a recent discussion of the pretty comprehensive and wide-­ranging Byzantine positions on the circumscribability—­or noncircumscribability—­of the divine, see Parry, Depicting the Word. 15. Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm; Cormack, Writing in Gold; Belting, Bild und Kult. Since then, further important adjustments have been offered by Paul Speck, Sister Charles Murray, John Haldon, Marie-­France Auzépy, Charles Barber, Leslie Brubaker, and very many others. 16. Phillips, Reformation of Images; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts; Aston, King’s Bedpost; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars. 17. Christensen, Art and the Reformation; Scribner, Bilder und Bildersturm; Schnitzler, Ikonoklasmus—­Bildersturm; Koerner, Reformation of the Image. 18. Eire, War against the Idols; Dupeux et al., Bildersturm. See also the perhaps even more aptly titled collection of essays in Blickle, Macht und Ohnmacht. 19. One most useful handbook that is often overlooked but deserves mention is Clapp, Art Censorship. 20. Freedberg, “Hidden God.” 21. Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives. 22. Freedberg, “Representation of Martyrdoms”; Freedberg, “Problem of Images.” 23. Freedberg, “Art and Iconoclasm.” 24. Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne. 25. Pickshaus, Kunstzerstörer. 26. Freedberg, Power of Images, especially 378–­428. In the prefaces to the subsequent Italian, French and Polish editions, I updated the rapidly expanding material on these topics (see n. 5 above). 27. That these all merge is nowhere better demonstrated than in the repeated attacks on three famous paintings: Rembrandt’s Night Watch, where the assailants—­all clearly mentally disturbed—­made claims that the fame of the work would ensure them publicity (an old motivation if ever); Barnett Newman’s two versions of Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, where the assault had surely to do with the open challenge of the title; and Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf in London, where the theological motivation—­the idolatrous worship of an image that was not the true god—­could hardly have been forgotten. In the first case, though, the attacker may indeed have been challenged by the vivacity of Banning Cocq’s challenge, or the devilish appearance, as he himself insisted, of his fellow guardsman, De Ruyter; in the second case, of course, there was no better way to demonstrate that one was not afraid of an image by making its material lifelessness plain by mutilating it; and the same for Poussin, where the picture was knifed in the first episode (1987) and spray-­painted in the second (2011). 28. Michalski, Reformation and the Visual Arts. 29. Michalski, “Das Phänomen Bildersturm.” In Scribner, Bilder und Bildersturm. 30. Barber, “Body within the Frame”; Barber, “From Image into Art.” 31. Réau, Histoire du vandalisme. 32. Besançon, L’image interdite. 33. There were several important precedents for this approach, driven by quite different motivations and areas of research, in the works of François Boespflug, Giuseppe Scavizzi, and a number of important chapters in G. G. Coulton’s sometimes too swiftly dismissed Art and the Reformation, which originally appeared in 1928 and was reprinted in 1953, 1958, and 1969. For the others, see Scavizzi, Arte e architettura sacra; Boespflug, Dieu dans l’art: Sollicitudini; Boespflug, Le dieu des peintres; Boespflug, Dieu dans l’art

No t e s t o Page s x v–x v i à la fin du Moyen Age. A similar position reappears in Mondzain (for references, see Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy). 34. Belting, Bild und Kult; Gamboni, Destruction of Art. 35. For the end of this decade, see Stewart, “Destruction of Statues”; Holloway, “Mutilation of Statuary.” Needless to say, since 1989 there has also been a substantial growth of interest in the topic of the damnatio memoriae, so central to iconoclastic activity in the ancient world (for some instances, see chap. 2 n. 10 below, as well as Settis, “Periferie, epitomi, residui”). 36. Already in 1995, in concentrating on examples from the cities of Nineveh and Susa, Bahrani set the attacks on images there not just in their political and psychological contexts (Freudian and Lacanian) but also in terms of postcolonial theory (Said and Homi Babha chiefly); see Bahrani, “Assault and Abduction.” Here she acknowledged her indebtedness, despite her reservations, to Nylander, “Earless in Nineveh.” The pioneering article in this area is generally acknowledged as Brandes, “Destruction et mutilation.” The Mesopotamian region has, of course, become an even more critical locus for iconoclasm since 2003. For iconoclasm in Bahrani’s later work, see Bahrani, Graven Image; Bahrani, Rituals of War. Even before the events of Tahrir Square in 2011, the study of ancient Egyptian iconoclasm was being taken up with increasing fervor since 1989, but especially in the new century. For an extraordinary collection of essays which brings the bibliography on both Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian iconoclasm up to date, see now May, Iconoclasm and Text Destruction. The collection reminds us not only of the recurrence of strategies and instruments of iconoclasm across time, but also of the fact that the destruction of images is frequently accompanied by the censorship and destruction of texts. 37. Latour and Weibel, Iconoclash. 38. As if on cue, Madeline Caviness’s selection of essays appeared in 2003; see Caviness, “Iconoclasm and Iconophobia.” 39. But the problem of the relationship between idolatry and iconoclasm has no end. It has moved from a problem that was once chiefly an issue in early Christian and Byzantine studies to one that has become central to the study of Islamic and many other cultures as well. When I first worked on the subject of iconoclasm, Ernst Gombrich immediately referred me to the now much-­refuted text of Edwyn Robert Bevan, Holy Images. Once more the pace of studies of idolatry picked up again in 1989, beginning with the auspicious volume L’idolâtrie. This expanded even further with the renewed discussion, especially after 2003, of the position of images in the Islamic Hadiths and the implications for the fraught relationships between politics and religion in the Middle East, as much discussed, for example in Flood, “Between Cult and Culture.” For a useful introduction to Jewish attitudes toward idolatry, see the provocative and philosophically wide-­ranging volume by Halbertal and Margalit Idolatry. 40. Simpson, Under the Hammer, 11–­12. 41. In addition to the anthologies edited by Scribner (Bilder und Bildersturm) and Cole and Zorach (Idol in the Age of Art), see also McClanan and Johnson, Negating the Image; Boldrick and Clay, Iconoclasm; Kolrud and Prusac, Iconoclasm. See also the outstanding collection of essays edited by Natalie May on the basis of a seminar that she organized at the Oriental Institute in Chicago in 2011 (n. 36 above). While concentrating on the ancient Near East and Egypt, this collection also contains several valuable essays on Byzantine, Reformation, and contemporary iconoclasm, further testimony to the globalization of the field. 42. For example, Flood, “Between Cult and Culture”; Strother, “Iconoclasm by Proxy.” 43. Elsner, “Iconoclasm as Discourse,” 386. Elsner’s remarkable survey of the discourses of iconoclasm has a rich bibliography that should be used to supplement the meager

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No t e s t o Page s x v i– 4 references in the present preface. It is especially strong, as one might expect, on recent literature in the classical and Byzantine fields. 44. Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne and Destruction of Art; Groys, “Iconoclasm.” 45. Flood and Strother, “Between Creation and Destruction.” 46. Simpson, Under the Hammer. 47. See, for example, among many others, Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians; Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium; Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm. 48. Flood, “Between Cult and Culture,” 641. 49. Flood, “Between Cult and Culture,” 641. Flood rightly observes that “the conception of a monolithic and pathologically Muslim response to the image” is one such essentialist trope that “obscures any variation, complexity or sophistication in Muslim responses to the image.” 50. The words of Hannah Black, a young British-­born black artist, as cited in Randy Kennedy, “White Artist’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Draws Protests,” New York Times, Art & Design, March 21, 2017. 51. As Weiss notes, Arnautoff was also interrogated in 1956 by the House Un-­American Activities Committee for drawing a caricature of Vice President Richard Nixon. See Bari Weiss, “San Francisco Will Spend Almost $600,000 to Erase History,” New York Times, Opinion, June 28, 2019. 52. Weiss, “San Francisco Will Spend.” 53. Weiss, “San Francisco Will Spend.” 54. And perhaps also the penultimate chapter of Power of Images, titled “Idolatry and Iconoclasm.” 55. Freedberg, “Märtyrerbildern.” 56. My “The Problem of Images in Northern Europe and Its Repercussions in the Netherlands” appeared in the same year (1976) and set out some of the theological implications for iconoclasm in the Netherlands, as well as the impact of relevant biblical histories for printmaking at the time—­as also did my “The Hidden God: Image and Interdiction in the Netherlands in the Sixteenth Century” of 1982. What I failed to note in that essay was the critical fact—­which I did not know at the time—­that the cutting and mutilation of the late sixteenth-­century prints in Magdalen College Library in Cambridge were not the work of Flemish iconoclasts. They were almost certainly deliberately selective clipping of the prints collected by Nicholas Ferrar in the first two decades of the seventeenth century by Ferrar’s nieces and perhaps others in the devotional and irenic group around George Herbert and Ferrar himself at Little Gidding in the 1620s and 1630s in the course of their compilation of their Biblical Harmonies (the literature on the Little Gidding community is now large, but see Ransome, The Ferrar Papers, for the basic information on the Magdalen material, and pp. iv–­v on the prints more generally). 57. See also my 1992 “Censorship Revisited.” 58. I offer an updated and more expansive survey of the reasons for this kind of slide in my “The Fear of Art: How Censorship Becomes Iconoclasm” of 2016.

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Chapter I 1. For a rich bibliography on this subject, see the aptly titled article by González Zaran-

dona et al., “Digitally Mediated Iconoclasm.” 2. See Bataille, Theory of Religion, 24–­25, as well as The Cradle of Humanity, 150–­73, on the

human consciousness of death and animal indifference to it. 3. As in Freedberg, Iconoclasm and Painting. 4. See, for

example, Freedberg, “Problem of Images,” 25–­45; Freedberg, “Art and Iconoclasm,” 69–­84.

N o t e s t o Page s 4 – 1 2 5. See, for example, Freedberg, “Case of the Spear,” 36–­41; Freedberg, “From Defamation

to Mutilation.” Freedberg, “Problem of Images,” 25–­45; Freedberg, “The Hidden God,” 133–­53; Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives; Freedberg, “The Power of Wood and Stone,” Washington Post, March 25, 2001, Outlook, B2 (reprinted as appendix 2 in this volume); Freedberg, “Damnatio Memoriae: Why Mobs Pull Down Statues,” Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2003, D10. 7. Clément, L’image, 11–­42. 8. See, for example, the striking image of an assailant about to slash a large photograph of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines; he responds directly to the aggressively pointing gesture of the president, with his mouth wide open as if in emulation of the president’s (reproduced in Freedberg, Power of Images, 214). 9. Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 85–­150; MacCormack, Art and Ceremony, 67. 10. For the initial use of this term to describe a variety of acute psychotic attack in front of pictures in museums, see Graziella Magherini, Sindrome di Stendhal. They ranged from perceptual and affective disorders to forms of extreme somatic anxiety, including panic, chest pain, heart attacks, and tachycardia. 11. Kareem Shaheen, “Isis Fighters Destroy Ancient Artefacts at Mosul Museum,” Guardian, February 26, 2015, World, http://​w ww​.theguardian​.com​/world​/2015​/feb​/26​/isis​ -­­fighters​-­­destroy​-­­ancient​-­­artefacts​-­­mosul​-­­museum​-­­iraq. For a detailed analysis of these events, see González Zarandona et al., “Digitally Mediated Iconoclasm.” 12. Anne Barnard, “ISIS Onslaught Engulfs Assyrian Christians as Militants Destroy Ancient Art,” New York Times, February 27, 2015, Middle East, http://​w ww​.nytimes​ .com​/2015​/02​/27​/world​/middleeast​/more​-­­assyrian​-­­christians​-­­captured​-as​ ­­ -­­isis​-­­attacks​ -­­villages​-­­in​-­­syria​.html. 13. See, for example, Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives; Freedberg, Power of Images, 429–­42. 14. As in Freedberg, “Power of Wood and Stone,” reprinted as appendix 2 below. On Bamiyan, see now, much more fully, the excellent piece by Flood, “Between Cult and Culture.” 15. See pp. xxx and xxx below, as well as Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives. 16. These comments were made by Mirjam Brusius in a critique of what constitutes heritage in both conceptual and visual terms in a paper titled “Outside the Archive: Museums, Institutional Boundaries and the Difficulty of Writing Histories of Archaeology and Heritage,” presented to the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, October 8, 2019. 17. Goya’s great etching Lo mismo (from the Desastres de la guerra series) offers a striking example of just this effect from the history of art. For the neural response to anticipation of a proleptic attack by hammers and other instruments, see Ehrsson, “Threatening a Rubber Hand.” 18. See nn. 19 and 22 below, as well as Ehrsson, “Threatening a Rubber Hand,” for a small selection of the now vast neuroscientific literature on interoceptive responses to seeing the pain both of others and of represented others. 19. See, for example, Bushnell et al., “Pain Perception,” and for one of many examples on empathy for pain, Jackson et al., “Pain of Others,” as well as the articles by Avenanti and Keysers cited in n. 22. 20. Freedberg, “Memory in Art.” 21. For a basic overview of the neural correlates, see Freedberg, “Empathy, Motion and Emotion”; Freedberg and Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy.” For more details of puncturing, piercing, and cutting, see the works cited in the following note. 22. Avenanti et al., “Stimulus-­Driven Modulation”; Keysers et al., “Touching Sight.” 23. The Northern European examples are many and perhaps most frequently provided 6. As in

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No t e s t o Page s 1 2 – 2 2 by striking out of the eyes and sewing up of the mouth of Desiderius Erasmus, as, for example, in Münster, Cosmographia universalis, 130 (fig. 14), but they occur in many other contexts as well (see, for example, the illustrations and references in Freedberg, Power of Images, 415–­17). With regard to assaults on the image of the sultan of Bahrain, see the photograph by Andrea Bruce in Michael Slackman, “Bahrain Takes the Stage with Raucous Protest,” New York Times, February 16, 2011. 24. Just like the more cognitively motivated forms of retributive punishment visited upon statues of figures of power—­not only the deprivation of sensory organs but also the assaults on parts of the body that symbolically or literally exercised power, such as the scepter or the sword-­bearing hand. For examples of how Anabaptist iconoclasts in Münster in 1534–­35 punished statues as if they were living persons by cutting off the legally stipulated parts of the body for particular crimes (e,g,, cutting out the tongue for blasphemy or hands for theft or rebellion), see the excellent pages in Warnke, Bildersturm, 85–­96, on what he (following Max Geisberg) calls the selective character (Auswahlscharakter) of destruction. For an analysis of iconoclastic attacks on the same parts of the body—­especially hands and heads—­to which actual corporeal punishments were directed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, see Graves, “Archaeology of Iconoclasm.” 25. Scribner, Simple Folk, 161, 170–­74, 180. 26. As, above all, in Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors. Chapter II 1. A neglected but very useful listing of efforts at censorship, which it would be difficult

to bring fully up to date now (because the list is so immense), is Clapp, Art Censorship. 2. Even in America in the nineteenth century—­or perhaps not surprisingly in America

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in the nineteenth century—­Washington Allston could declare (in 1816) that he would never attempt to paint Christ because “I think his character too holy and sacred to be attempted by the pencil.” See Wright, Correspondence, 91. 3. One might well ask how such ideas, outlined in countless treatises at the time, were transmitted to the people. Throughout the Reformation, complex theological positions were simplified and exploited for political purposes in the passage from high to popular culture. For a comprehensive though still incomplete listing, see Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting”; Freedberg, “Problem of Images.” For what is still the greatest analysis of the ways in which high theology can enter popular culture, see Ginzburg, Cheese and the Worms. We know, for example, that the theological and moral arguments against images were repeatedly articulated before the Antwerp iconoclasm, especially in the subversive “hedge sermons” held outside the city gates (see Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching). Not for the first time, politics and theology intersected at the roots of iconoclasm. 4. As noted by all the writers on Byzantine iconoclasm, from André Grabar through Cyril Mango, from Ernst Kitzinger through Gerard Ladner, Hans-­Georg Beck, Peter Brown, and many others, who rarely scanted this connection. 5. In this I was encouraged by several remarks about the exemplary ontology of religious images in Gadamer, Truth and Method. See also Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, which also deals with both Byzantine and contemporary image theory. 6. The literature is vast. One article directly relevant to iconoclasm that I missed in writing Power of Images was Henry, “Iconoclastic Controversy.” 7. When Tertullian wrote against images in the De idololatria, he coupled his assault on idolatry with an attack on lust and women’s makeup (as he did extensively in his De cultu feminarum). 8. As in Freedberg, “Johannes Molanus.”

N o t e s t o Page s 2 3 – 3 0 9. On these

rich topics, see the excellent introductory essay by Natalie May in May, Iconoclasm and Text Destruction. For Egypt see also the splendidly detailed pages on Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, and New Kingdom iconoclasm in Bryan, “Episodes of Iconoclasm.” 10. On this classic topic, see Hedrick, History and Silence; Varner, Mutilation and Trans­ formation; a rich overview of the abundant recent bibliography on damnatio memoriae and its manifestations is to be found in Elsner, “Iconoclasm as Discourse,” nn. 25–­31. See also section 10 in the present chapter, and the commemorative forms of erasure itself, where the marks of erasure are left on the work as a way of recording for posterity damnation through damage or destruction. 11. Ortalli, La pittura infamante, 25. 12. The literature is now vast, but for early and important works on the topic, see Christensen, Art and the Reformation; Eire, War against the Idols. 13. Indeed it has recently been suggested that Luther’s relatively relaxed position on the Reformation controversies over images (what the Germans have long called the Bilderfrage, the “image question”) actually encouraged a freer development of art than might otherwise have been the case (see for example Thomas Sternberg’s claim that “Martin Luther nahm die Bilderfage nich so ernst und hat paradoxerweise dadurch die freie Entwicklung der Kunst befördert” [Martin Luther did not take the question of images so seriously and thereby paradoxically promoted the free development of art], in “Martin Luther und die Folgen für die Kunst,” Politik & Kultur, April 2015, 12). 14. For a balanced and thoughtful evaluation of these constraints and their implications for art, see Koerner, Reformation of the Image. 15. For a while the theological constraints inhibited the growth of religious art, and the threat of iconoclasm reduced levels of patronage. Economic, political, and theological factors thus combined to stunt traditional forms of art, resulting in both emigration of artists and the stimulation of new forms of art that would not be subject to such constraints. For a brief argument along these lines, see Freedberg, review of The Golden Age and Scenes of Everyday Life. For a longer one, see Mochizuki, Netherlandish Image. But there is no doubt that the fundamental article for the relationship between iconoclasm—­and attitudes toward images and music more generally—­and Dutch seventeenth-­century art remains the too often forgotten discussion in Schwartz, “Saen­redam.” 16. On British iconoclasm see the pioneering work by Phillips, Reformation of Images. This has now been superseded by the excellent analyses of Duffy, Stripping of the Altars. For a vivid example, see the notes, however hyperbolic they may be, of William Dowsing about his depredations in East Anglia: see Dowsing, Journal. The volume edited by Barber and Boldrick, Art under Attack (accompanying an exhibition with the same title at Tate Britain), is an important addition to public knowledge of the impact of iconoclasm in British history. 17. See now Clay, Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris. 18. See the work of Zoë Strother, notably her “Iconoclasm by Proxy.” 19. Hoffman, Luther. 20. Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne. 21. And this also intentionally lends force to the parallel, almost certainly intended by Heemskerck, between idolatrous Old Testament images and idolatrous Christian ones. 22. For other still more striking cases of the exact repetition of physical action and specific bodily targets across centuries and cultures, see Freedberg, “Case of the Spear” and “Fear of Art.” 23. As for example in the case of Tinguely, Yves Klein, Herman Nitsch and the Viennese

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Actionists, and Ai Wei Wei (as in section 11, “The Aesthetics of Destruction,” of this chapter). 24. Risky because the idea of structure was still associated with structuralism, already on its way out, and because of its hint that despite the pressures of context, many aspects of iconoclasm, whether theoretical or entirely practical or physical, might well be recurrent. Freedberg, “Structure.” 25. Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives. 26. In the sense of suggesting (I suppose) an ideal structure of iconoclasm, as Alexander Každan wrote to me in 1976 about my essay “The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm” (Freedberg, “Structure”). 27. For specific examples of such assaults, see especially the illustrations in Freedberg, “Structure.” Even more trenchant, of course, in cases of judges, where the willed irony of poking out the eyes makes reference not only to the ignorant blindness of judges who make wrong decisions, but also to the supposed impartiality of blind justice, in image after image of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. 28. I omit from the brief survey here the mutilation and excision of other parts of the face, such as the nose (as often seen in damaged statues in both East and West and referenced in texts that range from the Talmud to the Shahnameh and in places from Ur to Nineveh and Nimrud), and the ears, as occasionally occurred in the ancient Near East as well. 29. This, of course, is also consistent with the possibility of mirror responses to the perception of movement and emotion in a work. On this see Freedberg, “Empathy, Motion and Emotion”; Freedberg and Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy.” 30. Cf. comprehensive passages such as “His tongue which had been slandering, I cut off; his lips which had spoken insolence, I pierced; his hands which had grasped the bow to fight Assyria, I chopped off,” said of Hallusu, king of Elam and enemy of Sennacherib (Bahrani, “Assault and Abduction,” 375). 31. This is also, of course, a manifestation of the will to torture the person by means of torture of the image. The physical evidence of such attacks constitute the ultimate index of assailing images as if they were alive—­or even livelier still because of the enhancements of art. 32. For a recent insistence on the political dimensions of iconoclasm, see Noyes, Politics of Iconoclasm. 33. Münster, Cosmographia universalis, 130. 34. See chap. 8 for a full account. 35. For early summaries of mine, see Freedberg, “Censorship Revisited” and “Joseph Kosuth.” A useful general summary with relevant documents from the period is provided by Bolton, Culture Wars. 36. Mapplethorpe’s photographs of nudes, especially nude black males, touched not on one but three taboos pertaining to the body in representation even more than reality: the suggestion of sexuality, the combination with a black body, and the plainly homosexual contexts of many of them. At the apex of this period, in 1997, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and some members of religious establishments attempted to close an exhibition of Young British Artists (Sensation) at the Brooklyn Museum on a variety of grounds—­some having to do with the allegedly low quality of the art, but mostly because of (1) the insinuations of sexuality and (2) the ways in which the body of the Virgin was insulted by Chris Ofili’s use of elephant dung as part of the medium in which she was shown. 37. The body of the Virgin—­like that of Mary Magdalene—­had long been a container for anxiety about the conflation of the sexual body with religion. From the earliest Christian times on, the Magdalene has been depicted in potentially licentious ways,

No t e s t o Page s 3 5 – 4 4 and in the sixteenth century objections arose to such representations, exactly at the height of the iconoclastic outbreaks that marked the beginning of the Revolt of the Netherlands. Not surprisingly, perhaps, one also finds many prescriptive writers suggesting that when the Virgin is painted in the company of St. Joseph, the latter be shown as an old man to eliminate any possibility of imagined sexual attraction between the spotless Mother of Christ and her earthly (as opposed to her heavenly) spouse. 38. See Freedberg, Power of Images, 410. 39. It is not surprising that Réau’s Histoire du vandalisme, which grew out of his interest in the destruction of medieval monuments in the French Revolution, should have been reprinted again in 1994, at the end of the quinquennium in which the geopolitics of the world had so significantly changed. 40. Rod Nordland, “Saving Relics, Afghans Defy the Taliban,” New York Times, January 13, 2014, World, https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com​/2014​/01​/13​/world​/asia​/saving​-relics​ ­­ -­­afghans​ -­­defy​-­­the​-­­taliban​.html. 41. See González Zarandona, “Landscape Iconoclasm”; González Zarandona, “Destruction of Heritage”; González Zarandona, “Rethinking Heritage.” Throughout his important work on these new forms of secular iconoclasm—­to use a term now current—­ González Zarandona cites the fundamental work of Peter Bednarik on the Burrup Peninsula petroglyphs. See, for example, Bednarik, “Murujuga (Burrup) Petroglyphs.” The second of the articles by González Zarandona cited here comes from a session at the international conference of art historians (CIHA) held in Nuremberg in 2012, significantly titled World Heritage: Cultural Identity and the War against Works of Art / Weltkulturerbe: Kulturelle Identität und der Krieg gegen Kunstwerke. It also contains references to other forms of destruction of native and primitive art in Australia. 42. Ian MacKinnon, “Swiss Man Jailed for 10 Years for Insulting Thai King,” Guardian, March 29, 2007, World, https://​w ww​.theguardian​.com​/world​/2007​/mar​/29​/ianmac kinnon. 43. David Batty, “Man Charged over Attack on Constable’s The Hay Wain,” Guardian, June 29, 2013, Art & Design, https://​w ww​.theguardian​.com​/artanddesign​/2013​/jun​/29​/man​ -­­charged​-­­constable​-­­hay​-­­wain. 44. See pp. –­below. 45. In a brilliant lecture given at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence in honor of Alessandro Nova on May 16, 2014 (Settis, “Periferie, epitomi, residui”). Performative traces of an iconoclastic act left as a means of making elimination more apparent probably appear in more cases than is often acknowledged. 46. See Freedberg, “Joseph Kosuth.” 47. The position persists, as recently expressed with characteristic firmness by Peter Singer, “The Ethical Cost of High-­Priced Art,” Project Syndicate, June 4, 2014, https://​ www​. project​- ­­syndicate​. org​/ commentary​/ peter​- ­­singer​- asks​ ­­ - ­­why​- ­­collectors​- pay​ ­­ -­­millions​-­­of​-­­dollars​-­­for​-artwork​ ­­ -rather​ ­­ -­­than​-­­using​-the​ ­­ -money​ ­­ -to​ ­­ -­­save​-lives​ ­­ ?barrier​=​ accesspaylog. 48. Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne. 49. Michalos, “Murdering Art,” 179. 50. Kammen, Visual Shock, 241. 51. Freedberg, “Joseph Kosuth”; Kammen, Visual Shock. 52. Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne. 53. Following the Marquis de Sade, Bataille used his responses to these photographs used to illustrate his notion of the way in which animal apathy—­the normal state of nature—­may be overcome by a heightened state of aesthetic involvement, a kind of transgressive ecstatic engagement with such gruesome images. See Bataille, Tears of

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Eros, 205–­7, brilliantly discussed in Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. For the relationship between such responses and the distinction between empathy and apathy, see chap. 1 above. 54. Bonami, “La fine di Dio,” 70. He made this remark in the context of an article about Maurizio Cattelan and following a description of an American soldier who attacked a portrait of Hubert Lanzinger’s 1935 portrait of Hitler as Joan of Arc, supposedly because he was “enraged by not having the real Hitler in front of him.” 55. For these examples, see pp. –­and –­. 56. Cited by Michael E. Miller, “Miami Artist Destroyed $1M Ai Weiwei Vase Because PAMM ‘Only Displays International Artists,’” Miami New Times, February 17, 2014, https://​w ww​.miaminewtimes​.com​/news​/miami​-artist​ ­­ -­­destroyed​-­­1m​-­­ai​-­­weiwei​-vase​ ­­ -­­because​-­­pamm​-­­only​-­­displays​-­­international​-­­artists​-­­6524159. The degree to which copycat actions have contributed to the seeming growth in iconoclasm in the last decade remains to be carefully and prudently analyzed. See also p. above. 57. Anne Barnard, “Violent End for an Artwork That Symbolized Fragility,” New York Times, July 10, 2009, NY Region, https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com​/2009​/07​/11​/nyregion​/11bubble ​.html. For other contemporary cases where iconoclasm issues in the aestheticization of a destructive act, see chaps. 9 and 10 above. 58. For examples up through 1984, see Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives. 59. This position goes back at least to St. Bernard, and if not to him, then the image critics of the Reformation, including Luther. For a recent, slightly exasperated expression of this position by a well-­known philosopher, see the widely syndicated Singer, “Ethical Cost of High-­Priced Art” (n. 47 above). 60. Indeed, however ironically intended the title may have been, the assailant’s response has a double logic to it. He is neither afraid of the image itself nor of an abstract artwork in plain bands of color. 61. It is already present in Renaissance theories of disegno, is clearly set out in in the conversation between the Prince and the Painter in act 1, scene 4 of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, and finds its modern apogee in the work of Arthur Danto. 62. Koons, “Luxury and Desire,” 73. 63. Cf. Colin Moynihan, “As Street Art Goes Commercial, a Resistance Raises a Real Stink,” New York Times, June 28, 2007, Arts & Design, https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com​/2007​/06​/28​ /arts​/design​/28stin​.html. 64. For a significant sequela to this, see chap. 10. 65. For a summary of Bredekamp’s own positions on the Bildakt, see Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts. But see also the series of publications edited by Horst Bredekamp, Jürgen Trabant, and John Krois, titled Actus et Imago: Berliner Schriften für Bildaktforschung und Verkörperungsphilosophie. 66. A topic I discuss at greater length in my forthcoming book on art and neuroscience, as well as in the published version of a lecture titled “The Painter without Hands,” which I first gave at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2009 and have given in different versions with different subtitles on various occasions since. For the last version, given as the introductory lecture to my Cambridge Slade Lecture Series in 2016 and later at the Warburg Institute, see https://​warburg​.sas​.ac​.uk​/events​/david​-­­freedberg​ -­­art​-­­history​-­­and​-­­neuroscience​-­­series​-­­lecture​-1​ ­­ -painter​ ­­ -without​ ­­ -­­hands​-­­phantom. 67. See Freedberg and Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy”; Taylor et al., “Uncovering the Connection between Artist and Audience.” 68. As, for example, in Battaglia et al., “Corticomotor Excitability.” Already implicit in Gallese’s notion of embodied simulation, as chiefly in Gallese, “From Neurons to Phenomenal Experience” and “From Mirror Neuron Systems to Inter­personal Relations”; Freedberg and Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy.”

N o t e s t o Page s 4 8 – 5 4 69. It should

be noted, however, that these forms of responses are not necessarily self-­ consciously aesthetic; they happen involuntarily and in those untrained in art as well. For more on responses to the gestures behind maker’s marks in works of art, see the proposals in Freedberg and Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy”; Taylor et al., “Uncovering the Connection.” 70. Umiltà et al., “Abstract Art.” 71. See Battaglia et al., “Corticomotor Excitability,” and Umiltà et al., “Abstract Art.” 72. See, for example, Freedberg and Gallese, “Motion, Emotion, and Empathy,” as well as Battaglia et al., “Corticomotor Excitability,” and Umiltà et al., “Abstract Art.” Chapter III 1. The only general survey still remains the unsatisfactory and superficial book by Von

Végh, Die Bilderstürmer. For more recent attempts at different kinds of overview, see Freedberg, “Structure,” and Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives, as well as the excellent selection of essays in Warnke, Bildersturm. 2. Scheerder provides a sound but all too brief general survey in De Beeldenstorm. De Jong (Beeldenstorm) provides a good summary in a small compass. For good assessments of the general problems and issues involved, see Dierickx, “Beeldenstorm”; Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting”; and the excellent study by Duke and Kolff, “Time of Troubles,” which although comparatively local gives the reader the best possible impression of the main historiographic and sociological issues. 3. On these particular aspects of Erasmus’s criticism, with the relevant sources, see Freedberg, “Johannes Molanus.” 4. For these and other aspects of Erasmus’s attitude to art, see, inter alia, Giese, “Erasmus and the Fine Arts,” 257–­79; Panofsky, “Erasmus,” 200–­227; Moxey, Pieter Aertsen, 122–­26. 5. For the best overview of the Reformation debate, see Von Campenhausen, “Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation.” Karlstadt’s Von Abtuhung der Bilder (Wittenberg, 1522) is available in the edition by Lietzmann, Andreas Karlstadt. For Hätzer and his 1525 booklet titled Ein urteil gottes . . . wie man sich mit allen götzen und bildnussen halten soll, see n. 17 below. 6. The literature on Byzantine iconoclasm is now vast. A good compendium of information, with a useful bibliography and selection of texts, is provided by Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm. 7. For the best discussions of these arguments, see Von Campenhausen, “Die Bilderfrage als theologisches Problem,” and Kitzinger, “Cult of Images.” 8. The argument comes from St. Basil and is to be found in the course of his discussion of the essential unity of the Trinity in the De Spiritu Sancto 18.45 (Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca 22, col. 149C), and is stimulatingly discussed by Ladner (“Concept of the Image,” 3–­33), as well as by Kitzinger (“Cult of Images,” 91). 9. The classic Gregorian position is to be found in the famous letter to Serenus, bishop of Marseilles (who had removed the images from the churches in his diocese): Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina 67, cols. 1027–­28. 10. For the Middle Ages in general, see Kollwitz, “Bild und Bildertheologie im Mittelalter,” 109–­38. The threefold argument is to be found in one of its classic forms in Thomas Aquinas, Commentarium super libros sententiarium, Commentum in Librum III, dist. 9, art. 2, qu. 2, a passage that is practically never correctly cited. For Thomas’s full statement and further discussion, with other medieval parallels, see Freedberg, “Hidden God,” 149n53. 11. Cf. St. Bonaventure in the Itinerarium mentis ad deum 2.11: “Sunt umbrae, resonan-

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tia e picturae; sunt vestigia , simulacra et spectacula nobis ut contuendum Deum proposita et signa divinistus data; sunt exemplaria vel potius exemplata, proposita mentibus adhuc rudibus et sensibilibus, ut per sensibilia, quae vident, transferantur ad intelligibilia, quae non vident, tamquam per signa ad signata” (These shadows, resonances, and pictures, these traces, sculptures, and shows [of the first principle] are signs divinely given to enable us to look upon God; they are exemplifiers or rather the exemplified proposed to minds that are still rough and sensible, so that the sensible things which they see might be transferred to the intellibile things which they do not see, as if through signs to the signified). See the nice outline of the semiotic implications of these ideas in Sukale, “Arma Christi,” 188–­89. 12. The classic position here is to be found in St. Bernard’s often cited letter to Abbot William of St. Thierry, Apologia ad Gullielmum Sancti Theoderici Abbatem, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina 182, cols. 915–­17, with its trenchant opposition of the refulgent but superfluous adornment of the churches to the real needs of the poor. For the relevant passages as well as some of the main Reformation derivations (such as Luther’s), see chap. 6 n. 55 below, as well as Freedberg, “Hidden God,” 149–­50n56. 13. The best and fullest discussion of Luther on the Decalogue is to be found in Stirm, Die Bilderfrage, 17–­23; on Luther’s views on iconoclasm and on Karlstadt, see 24–­58 there. A general appraisal of the relations between Luther and art, as well as his position on the image controversy, is provided by Christensen, Art and the Reformation, which also has a useful bibliography of the preceding general works on the subject. See also Von Campenhausen, “Zwingli und Luther.” 14. For example, in the “Sermon on Indulgences” of 1518, the Sermon of March 12, 1522, the letter to Count Ernest of Saxony (D. Martin Luthers Werke, 1:36, Br. 10:3, 32, 558), and many other places including the Commentary on Deuteronomy of 1529 (e.g., D. Martin Luthers Werke 1:556, 598). See too Stirm, Die Bilderfrage, 57 (with further sources in Luther); Christensen, Art and the Reformation, 42–­65; and Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, 88–­93. 15. For these positions, see the works cited in the previous note. For the need for iconoclasm to be carried out by the proper authorities, see Christensen, Art and the Reformation, 49–­50, as well as further below. 16. For all its overt ideological interests, still see Zschelletschky, Die ‘drei gottlosen Maler.’ 17. On Hätzer and his booklet, see Garside, “Ludwig Hätzer’s Pamphlet,” 20–­36. 18. For the views of Zwingli, see (in addition to the pioneering articles by Von Campenhausen, “Zwingli und Luther” and “Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation”) Garside, Zwingli and the Arts, and the excellent analysis in Stirm, Die Bilderfrage, 138–­60. Both Garside’s book and that of Christensen, Art and the Reformation, suffer from too general a view of the problem and an inadequate use of the appropriate documentary sources. 19. Stirm, Die Bilderfrage, especially 166–­80. 20. For most of these attitudes and ideas, see the marvelously sustained assault in the Institution de la religion chrétienne of 1560 (Calvin, Institution), 1.11. 21. The literature on the preachers is vast, but a useful guide to their role and to the literature on them is provided by Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching. For an attempt to assess the relationship between the kinds of ideas about images that might have been purveyed by the preachers and the actual outbreak of iconoclasm, see Freedberg, “Problem of Images.” 22. Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica 1:261, 271. For the references in this and the next paragraph, I am indebted to Moxey, Pieter Aertsen, 144–­48. 23. Articulen van Balthasar Friberger, in Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 1:122. The work appears already on the 1559 Index.

N o t e s t o Page s 5 8 – 6 1 24. Published by Sebastian Heyden in Nürnberg in 1524. 25. The

passage is taken from Grapheus’s Troost ende Spiegel der Siecken and is reproduced in Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 1:188. The Troost ende Spiegel der Siecken first appeared in 1525 and again in 1531 and 1557; inevitably it found its way onto the Indices of 1550 and 1576. 26. Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 1:416. The work concerned is Den Val der Roomsche Kercken, which after its first appearance in Norwich in 1550 was reedited in London in 1553, Emden in 1556, and Antwerp in 1561 before appearing on the Index of 1570. 27. Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 10:191–­92. 28. For more on the significance of Old Testament subjects involving idolatry and the destruction of idols, see Saunders, “Commentary on Iconoclasm,” esp. 64–­69, 73–­80. Cf. also the discussion of the appearance of subjects like these in the works of Maarten van Heemskerck, discussed in section 4 of this chapter. 29. Hoog, De verantwoording, 56–­57, 131–­32, 161. For recent new material on Angelus Merula (recte Engel Willemsz.), see Troost and Woltjer, “Brielle in hervormingstijd,” 321–­32 (with appropriate references to the earlier studies on him). 30. This is the modern Dutch orthography given by Kronenbrug, Maria’s heerlijkheid, 7:59, from the Revocatie ende abjuratie van H. Marino Everswaert, vicepastoor eertyts vander nywer kerk tot Dortrecht of 1533. 31. For the text of van der Heyden’s pamphlet (which appeared on the lists of forbidden books of 1550 and 1569), see Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 4:19–­21. The particular sentiment expressed here occurs on 19. On van der Heyden himself, see F. Pijper in Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 4:3–­19. 32. On Versteghe, see F. Pijper in Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 4:79–­123. The text of De Leken Wechwyser is reproduced in Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 4:123–­363. 33. For the editions and translations of De Leken Wechwyser, see Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 4:117–­18. 34. Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 4:289. 35. Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 4:289. 36. Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 4:289 (continuation of previous passage): “Men mocht die tempelen mit treffelicken historien uyt hilliger schrifft laten bemalen, wil men figuren hebben. Off alleen schone sprueken, met grote letteren an die mouren laten schryven unde gar wit sonder figuren laten blyven.” 37. On these aspects of the rederijkers’ plays, see Loosjes, “De invloed der rederijkers,” 246–­90; Enno van Gelder, Erasmus, esp. 23–­27, 59–­86. 38. The literature on the Landjuwelen is substantial, but for a useful general overview, see Steenberghen, Het landjuweel, with a good bibliography of earlier works on the subject (and on the rederijkers generally) on pp. 215–­19. For the few anti-­image allusions at the Landjuweel of 1539, see Moxey, Pieter Aertsen, 153. 39. Ellerbroek-­Fortuin, Amsterdamse rederijkersspelen, 26; for the reappearance of this subject and more on its possible significance, see the discussion of the kraak of Oosterend and of Maarten van Heemskerck’s representations in print form in section 4 of this chapter above. See also Saunders (“Commentary on Iconoclasm,” 76) for further Bel references in poetry and songs. 40. Ellerbroek-­Fortuin, Amsterdamse rederijkersspelen, 190. 41. Een Tafelspel van twee personagien, te weten de weereltsche gheleerde ende godlijcke wijse, om te spelen voor een christelijcke congregatie, published in Ellerbroek-­Fortuin, Amsterdamse rederijkersspelen, 196–­211. 42. Ellerbroek-­Fortuin, Amsterdamse rederijkersspelen, 201–­2. For the plays and songs in this and the next three paragraphs, see Moxey, Pieter Aertsen, esp. 144–­63.

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mij dunckt gij doet al verloren pijne,/aen dees gemaelde belden van godt verboden . . . het sijn al afgoden,” as in De Vooys, “Apostelspelen in de rederijkerstijd,” 191–­92; for the rest of this prologue to the Second Apostel Play by van Haecht, see 191–­97. De Vooys plausibly suggests that while the painter, like van Haecht himself, appears to have adopted a Lutheran position on these matters, his opponent is presumably to be regarded a Calvinist. 44. De Vooys, “Apostelspelen in de rederijkerstijd,” 40–­41. These are exactly the precedents that appear in any number of pro-­image treatises, especially the Catholic ones—­for example, M. Duncanus (recte Donk), Een cort onderscheyt tuschen Godlycke end afgodissche beelden, fol. Avii v–­Aviii r. 45. De Vooys, “Apostelspelen in de rederijkerstijd,” 40; on Van Haecht’s affiliation and beliefs, see 20–­37. 46. “Ick en ben ick saeg liever mijn werck versleten, / mijns hertsen secreten kent godt de heere, / tmoet ver van mij sijn dat ik met lof en eere,/sou laeten aenbidden mijn constich verven.” De Vooys, “Apostelspelen in de rederijkerstijd,” 41. 47. Published in Een Lietboecxken tracterende van den Offer des Heeren (1563), and available in Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 2:601. 48. Wieder, De schriftuurlijke liedekens, 83. 49. Veelderhande Liedekens (Amsterdam, 1582), 138. 50. As, for example, in Kuiper and Leendertz, Het geuzenliedboek, 1:52. 51. Cited by De Hoop Scheffer, Geschichte, 357. 52. De Hoop Scheffer, Geschiedenis, 2:541–­42. 53. On the extraordinary iconoclasm in Münster, see Warnke, “Durchbrochene ­Geschichte.” 54. Eck’s views may, for example, be found in the fifteenth chapter of his Enchiridion (Ingolstadt, 1529), but his position was clear as early as 1522, when he published his response to Carlstadt’s Von Abtuhung der Bilder and the Wittenberg iconoclasm. It was titled De non tollendis Christi et Sanctorum Imaginibus (Ingolstadt, 1522). For the pre-­Tridentine Catholic response and polemic, see Polman, L’élément historique, especially 410–­41; Scavizzi, Arte e architettura sacra, 43–­234; and Freedberg. “Iconoclasm and Painting,” 50–­56. For examples of the poems in which Anna Bijns satirized or attacked what she regarded as Reformed double standards in the matter of images (they retained lascivious and other unsuitable images in their homes), see Bogaers and Van Helten, Refereinen, 106, 118, 124. 55. The text of this portion of the Heidelberg Confession is Dathenus’s translation. It is also the one that appeared in Richard Schilder’s Formulierenboek (Middelburg, 1611), which in turn lay at the basis of the Dort Synod’s discussions in 1619. For the full text, the textual history, and the variants, see Bakhuizen van den Brink, De Nederlandse belijdenisgeschriften, 201–­8 (for more on the various translations see 35–­36). It is worth noting—­as one considers the problem of variant readings—­the differences between the text of the answer to question 98 as given here and that of the two Emden trans­ lations of 1563 and 1565, which runs as follows: “Neent; want wij en zullen niet wijser zijn dan Godt, de welcke sijne Christenheyt niet door stomme afgoden, maer door de levendige predicacie sijns woordts wil onderwesen ofte gheleert hebben.” “Predicacie” (preaching) for “verkondinghe” (proclamation) and “stomme beelden” (dumb images) for “stomme afgoden” (dumb idols) are changes worth pondering. 56. These matters are all carefully and brilliantly set out in Jedin, “Entstehung und Tragweite,” 143–­89, 404–­29. 57. “Imagines porro Christi, deiparae Virginis et aliorum sanctorum in templis ­praesertim habendes et retinendas. . . . quoniam honus, qui eis exhibetur, refertur ad prototypa, quae illae repraesentant. . . . Illud vero diligenter doceant episcopi, per historias mysteriorum nostrae redemptionis, picturis vel aliis similitudinibus expressas, erudiri

No t e s t o Page s 6 4 – 6 8 et confirmari populum in articulis fidei commemorandis et assidue recolendis.” Decretum de invocatione, veneratione, et reliquiis sanctorum et sacris imaginibus (Sessio XXV). 58. “In has autem sanctas et salutares observationes si qui abusus irrepserint: eos prorsus aboleri sancta synodus vehementer cupit, ita ut nullae falsi dogmatis imagines et rudibus periculosi erroris occasionem praebentes statuantur. . . . Omnis porro superstitio in sanctorum invocatione, reliquiarum veneratione et imaginum sacro usu tollatur, omnis turpis questus eliminetur, omnis denique lascivia vitetur ita ut procaci venustate imagnes non pingantur nec ornentur; et sanctorum celebratione ac reliquiarum visitatione homines a commessationes atque ebrietatis non abutantur, quasi festi dies in honorem sanctorum per luxum ac lasciviam agantur.” Decretum de invocatione, 775–­76. 59. Decretum de invocatione, 776. For the influence in the Netherlands of this part of the decree, both theologically and artistically, see Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting,” 165–­70, as well as Freedberg, “Problem of Images.” 60. It is still worth consulting the remarkable compendium of documents in the estimable work by Te Water, Historie. The most useful up-­to-­date summary in English of these events is provided by Parker, Dutch Revolt, 68–­71 (with good bibliographical references on 286–­88), while a popular account in Dutch (with interesting illustrations) is provided by De Schepper in Van Deursen and De Schepper, Willem van Oranje, 54–­63. 61. For a comprehensive summary of the role of the preachers in the beginning of the revolt, with a good bibliography of primary and secondary sources (though see the following note), see Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching, and Decavele, “De reformatorische beweging,” 1–­42, as well as the works cited in the following note. 62. The classic article on the hagepreken (astonishingly absent from Mack Crew’s bibliography) is Fruin, “Haagpreek.” But the accounts are so numerous (even the exactly contemporary ones) that it would be futile to list them here. Amongst the most interesting for the North Netherlands are Van Campen, “Hagepreken en beeldenstorm,” and Smit, “Hagepreken.” 63. Backhouse, Beeldenstorm, 78. 64. Backhouse, Beeldenstorm, 91–­111 for this and the further progress of the group. 65. The literature on iconoclasm in Antwerp is substantial, often good, and sometimes very provocative. Among the works worth consulting and perusing, see Van Roosbroeck, Het Wonderjaar, with a full bibliography of contemporary accounts, of which perhaps the most revealing is the one by Godevaert van Haecht edited by Van Roosbroeck himself, De Kroniek. Also useful (for other places as well) is “Corte verhalinge vande Beeltstormerije, geschiet binnen dese Nederlanden als Brabant, Vlaenderen, Hollant ende Zeelant, ende int lant van Luydick,” in FGV 1743, 82–­85. 66. For a summary of the extent to which iconoclasm was planned—­and whether it was locally planned or done so on a wider and possibly national scale, as once was thought in certain quarters—­see Scheerder, “Le mouvement iconoclaste,” 67–­74; Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 98–­101; see also Dierickx, “Beeldenstorm,” 1040–­48. Almost all of the articles cited in the notes in this section of the present chapter contain evidence of organization; but some—­for example, nn. 116 and 121—­also cite instances where iconoclasm seems to have taken a more spontaneous turn. 67. For an excellent summary of these events, see Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 48–­51. 68. For a good chronology, see Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 117–­20. 69. Woltjer, Friesland in hervormingstijd, 150–­52, and Woltjer, “Beeldenstorm in Leeuwarden,” 170–­75. 70. “Woest,” “woedend,” “uytzinnigh,” “constvijandigh.” For these and many other terms,

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see section 3 of the present chapter, as well as Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fols. 210v, 213v, 224v, 244v, 254r–­254v—­to take a very few of the many possible examples. 71. For some of the social and economic issues and factors, see the now well-­known left-­wing work of Kuttner, Het Hongerjaar 1566, as well as Van der Wee, “Economy as a Factor.” 72. In addition to the works cited in the preceding note, see, for example, the contemporary observations by Van Vaernewijck, Mémoires d’un patricien Gantois, v1:87; De Potter, Dagboek, 10–­11 (both with reference to Ghent); and Van Haecht’s Kroniek (cf. n. 65), 14, 17 (for Antwerp). 73. For Middelburg and its surroundings, see Van Vloten, Onderzoek. 74. Beenakker, Breda in de eerste storm, 71. 75. See the chronicle in Ackersdijck, “Verhaal der Beeldenstorm.” 76. Van Nierop, Beeldenstorm, 30. 77. Breen, “Uittreksel,” 24. 78. Breen, “Uittreksel,” 25–­26. 79. Breen, “Uittreksel,” 26. 80. “Want door het vriendelijck spreeken van de schutterij sijn alle vertrocken, ende kerck worde geslooten” (since as result of the friendly speech of the civic guards, they left, and the church was closed). Breen, “Uittreksel,” 27. 81. Breen, “Uittreksel,” 31–­32. 82. Breen, “Uittreksel,” 38. On the course of the second iconoclasm in Antwerp, see Van Nierop, Beeldenstorm, 36–­38. 83. Breen, “Uittreksel,” 38–­39. 84. See 180–­81 of the Proces-­Verbael ghehouden na het inne-­nemen van het clooster van de Minnebroeders in Soutendam, “Beeldstormerij,” 179–­221. On the course of iconoclasm in Delft, see also Smit, “Hagepreken.” 85. Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 75; cf. Van Bleyswijck, Beschrijvinge der stadt Delft, 250. 86. Van Bleyswijck, Beschrijvinge der stadt Delft, 168. 87. Kleijntjens and Van Campen, “Bescheiden,” 67, where the provocative sermon of “Gerrit van Kuilenburg” is also mentioned. On other preachers active in and around Utrecht, see 66–­68. 88. For the “Raads dagelijckx boeck” on the events of August 24–­25, 1566, in Utrecht, see Kleijntjens and Van Campen, “Bescheiden,” 71–­243. 89. Kleijntjens and Van Campen, “Bescheiden,” 171. 90. Kleijntjens and Van Campen, “Bescheiden,” 172. 91. The course of their activities is made abundantly plain in the extraordinary testimony published in Kleijntjens and Van Campen, “Bescheiden,” 71–­244. St. James’s really only appears in the hearing of Jan van Amerongen on 207–­10, and in Alva’s instructions to repair the churches, reproduced on 244–­45. 92. Cited in Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 79. For the actions of the rhetoricians, see Loosjes, “De invloed der rederijkers,” 623; Knappert, De opkomst, 207–­8; and Kolff, “Libertatis ergo,” 141. 93. For the relevant document of August 26, 1566, see Kist and Moll, Kerkhistorisch ­archief, 429. On August 28 the council insisted on the storage and safekeeping of objects (Kerkhistorisch archief, 431). Indeed just over a year later, on December 16, 1567, in a letter to the Court of Holland the council was to claim that thanks to its care and foresight the most important works of art were saved (433–­36). Cf. Hermesdorf et al., “Examination and Restoration,” 401n60, as well as n. 131 below. 94. Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 79. The best account of the troubles in Leiden is Kolff, “Libertatis ergo.” 95. Breen, “Uittreksel,” 32–­33; cf. also Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 76–­77.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 7 3 –7 5 96. For a brilliant discussion of the whole problem of the range of beliefs in a town like

this, see Troost and Woltjer, “Brielle in hervormingstijd,” especially 318–­26, as well as the interesting material on 340–­42 about lapsed or lapsing priests in the neighborhood. 97. Troost and Woltjer, “Brielle in hervormingstijd,” 328. 98. Troost and Woltjer, “Brielle in hervormingstijd,” 328. 99. Duke and Kolff, “Time of Troubles,” 326 (with appropriate archival reference in n. 77). 100. See Van Marnix van Sint Aldegonde, Vraye narration, 109. With this one may compare the very similar sentiments expressed by the altogether notorious preacher Herman Moded, also about the Antwerp iconoclasm, in his Apologie ofte verantwoordinghe (Maastricht, 1567), reprinted in Brutel de la Rivière, Hermannus Moded, 65. 101. See Wils, “De Reformatie en beeldenstorm,” 417, and supplement with Troost and Woltjer, “Brielle in hervormingstijd,” 335. 102. Troost and Woltjer, “Brielle in hervormingstijd,” 334. 103. His actions are documented with great care in De Jong, De Reformatie. 104. De Jong, De Reformatie, 102. 105. As cited in Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 86 (85–­87 provide an excellent summary of the events of the week following September 7 in Culemborg). 106. Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 87. 107. Kleijntjens, “Beeldenstorm in Groningen,” 173. For another instance of the participation of a lapsed priest in the iconoclasm around Groningen, see 174 (Loppersum). But everywhere the priests were changing sides, and sometimes there were former priests among the preachers who led the image breaking in so many places. 108. Kleijntjens, “Beeldenstorm,” 174. It is perhaps worth recalling here that in 1568 twenty-­t wo Antwerp schoolteachers lost their jobs, as they were alleged to have taught Protestant catechisms and psalms and encouraged their pupils to defy the authorities (Briels, “Zuidnederlandse onderwijskrachten,” 92). 109. Kleijntjens, “Stukken betreffende ketterij,” 6; cf. also the documents reproduced on subsequent pages of Kleijntjens’s article, as for example, 20, 27. 110. Kleijntjens, “Stukken betreffende ketterij,” 6–­7, 43. 111. Kleijntjens, “Stukken betreffende ketterij,” 44–­46, for the role of a number of members of the shoemakers’ guild. 112. Kleijntjens, “Stukken betreffende ketterij,” 51. 113. The events in these places are neatly summarized in Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 87–­ 89. 114. See Rogier (Geschiedenis, 1:537–­39) for what he calls, on 538, “de schandelijkste episode van de Noordnederlandse protestantisering, een van de brutaalste vormen van minderheidsterreur en gewetensknechting” (one of the most disgraceful episodes in the Protestantization of the Netherlands, and one of the most brutal forms of minority terror and enslavement of conscience). 115. Quoted in Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, 92. For more on the wonderjaar in Maastricht, see Bax, Het protestantisme, 2:101–­208 (“Maastricht omstreeks het wonderjaar”). 116. As quoted in Salomons, “De beeldenstorm in Weert,” 179. The rest of this article (179–­ 90) provides an excellent short analysis of the rise and subsidence of the particularly fierce outburst of iconoclasm in this small weaving town in Netherlands-­Limburg. 117. See Duke, “Enquiry.” 118. For the events in Haarlem and the role of Coornhert, see especially Kleijntjens and Becker, Corpus iconoclasticum, 1–­134 (reproducing the documents of the official investigation and proceedings against him in 1567), with an excellent summary of his actions and attitudes on xi–­xiv. 119. In addition to the documents cited in Kleijntjens and Becker, see the pages on the re-

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lation between Coornhert’s and the iconoclastic position in Saunders, “Commentary on Iconoclasm,” 80–­83. 120. The characteristically copious testimony taken before them is reprinted in Van Hoeck, Corpus iconoclasticum, 215–­433. 121. Van Hoeck, Corpus iconoclasticum, 206–­7, with plenty of further evidence on the following pages, for example on 250. 122. Van Hoeck, Corpus iconoclasticum, 286. 123. See, for example, Kleijntjens and Van Campen, “Bescheiden,” 244, which also reproduces the further instructions from the Utrecht Schout, upon receipt of Alva’s missyve, to the churchwardens of all the local churches. 124. De Jong, De Reformatie, 144. 125. See, for example, the extraordinary case of the painting of the Ten Commandments in gold letters on a black ground on the surface of a now lost Crucifixion by Hugo van der Goes in St. James’s in Bruges, described by Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 204v. Van Oudenhoven (Beschrijvinge, 25) reports the replacement of a painting by Bosch on the high altar of St. Johns in ’s Hertogenbosch with the text of the Decalogue in large gold letters; and so on and so forth. It is perhaps worth recalling here how frequent were the recommendations that figured imagery be replaced by text, as in the case of the recommendation by Versteghe (as in n. 32 above) that if one had to have something on the walls, it should be either stories from scripture or edifying sayings in large letters (“off alleen schone sprueken mit grote letteren an die moeren laten schryven unde gar wit sonder figuren laten blijven”; Cramer and Pijper, Bibliotheca reformatoria Neerlandica, 4:289)—­which was much better. 126. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, no. 2815; each panel 101 × 54/55.5 cm. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 10, no. 55. 127. On the history and restoration of the Seven Works of Mercy polyptych, see the excellent account in De Bruyn Kops, “De Zeven Werken.” 128. As appears from the photographs of the painting in its stripped state, which were made by William Suhr in 1959, immediately before he undertook restoration and repairs. These photographs show severe X-­shaped cuts to the eyes and mouths. I am grateful to Jan Piet Filedt Kok for drawing my attention to this aspect of the painting’s history and to the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art for letting me have copies of the relevant material. 129. See also pp. and above on this topic. 130. For further discussion of these aspects of iconoclasm, see chapter 6 in this volume. 131. For the fate and fortune of Lucas’s triptych during this period, see Rammelman-­ Elsevier, “Het Laatste Oordeel,” 75–­76; Dülberg, “Das jüngste Gericht”; and, above all, Hermesdorf et al., “Examination and Restoration,” 325–­30, 401nn58–­60 (with an important consideration of the validity of a group of documents about its movement in 1566–­77), and 411, docs. 1–­2 (instructions and payments in 1577). 132. For the history of the restorations and the final removal of the paint covering God the Father (already detected but not completely “freed” in or around 1806), see the comprehensive documentation in Hermesdorf et al., “Examination and Restoration,” 328–­35, 415–­17 (restorers’ report). 133. De Jong, De Reformatie, 144. 134. For further examples, see Hermesdorf et al., “Examination and Restoration,” 402n67, as well as Freedberg, “Hidden God,” with illustrations and discussion. 135. The main relevant source is, of course, Het Leven der Doorluchtighe Nederlandtsche en Hooghduytsche Schilders, published as fol. 196–­305 of Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, but printed in Alkmaar by Jacob de Meester for Passchier van Wes[t]busch of Haarlem. 136. For a sound recent overview of his life (with the appropriate references to earlier sources), see Van Mander, Den grondt, 297–­306. For the Martyrdom of St. Catherine

No t e s t o Page s 8 0 – 8 3 of 1582 (commissioned by the Courtrai linen-­weavers in 1581) still in St. Martin’s in Courtrai, see Valentiner, Karel van Mander, 6–­9, and no. 7, reproduced in pl. 1. 137. As in Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 210v, 213v, 224v, 244v, 254r–­254v—­to take only a very few of the many possible examples (which include several of the instances cited in the following notes). 138. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 244r. 139. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 244r. 140. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 244v. 141. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 244v. 142. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 247r—­and this apart from “al d’uytnemende constighe stucken die de rasende beeldtstorminge schandlijc heeft vernielt, so datter nu ter tijt niet veel van hier te Lande gevonden en wort” (all the outstanding works of art which the raging iconoclasm destroyed, so that at present not much can be found here). 143. “Eene die overbleven was is doorgesaeght en zijn nu twee schoon stucken tot den Commandeur in de sael van t’nieuw ghebouw.” Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 206r. 144. “Doch door den krijgh oft beeld-­stormen vernielt.” Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 206r. 145. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 229v: “want zijn huys doe afghebrendt is met dat van hem daer in overghebleven was” (his house was burned down with whatever of his remained inside). 146. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 207v. 147. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 259v. 148. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 254v. 149. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 224v. 150. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 236r. 151. Gouda, Museum St. Catherinagasthuis; Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 254r. 152. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 254v. 153. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 254r–­254v. 154. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 210v. 155. “Wert principalyck beclaecht een seer schoene ryckelycke tafel van de hoogen outaer eertyts geschildert by Jasmyn Mabuyze, daer hy vyffthien jaren over besich geweest hadde; dewelcke gereputeert was to syne de schoenste schilderye van geheel Europa” (lamented most of all was the very beautiful painting on the high altar painted by Mabuse, on which he worked for fifteen years and which was thought to be the most beautiful painting in all of Europe). Register Perpetueel der stad Rumerswaal (Middelburg: Stadsarchief), no. 84, fol. 173; published in Messager des sciences historiques, 29 (1855): 416, and more recently in Pauwels et al., Jan Gossaert, 381. 156. In the manuscript now in the library of the University of Ghent (MS.G. 2469), available in Van Vaernewijck, Van die beroerlicke tijden, and as Van Vaernewijck, Mémoires d’un patricien Gantois. Perhaps the most spectacular of his accounts of the saving of a work of art is that concerning the Ghent altarpiece, but he also alludes, for example, to the painting by Gossaert mentioned in the previous note (albeit in rather vague terms) and refers to the devastation in northern places like Leiden. 157. Including Adoration of the Magi and Siege and Attack of Bethulia by Bosch; Creation of the World with David and Abigail and Solomon and His Mother Bathsheba (surprisingly on the high altar), also by Bosch; and a Crucifixion (on the altar of Sts. Peter and Paul) by Jan van Scorel. Van Oudenhoven, Beschrijvinge, 25. 158. Van Oudenhoven, Beschrijvinge, 25. 159. As recorded, for example, in Phillips, Reformation of Images, with visual evidence of just this phenomenon in his figs. 24a, 24b, 28, 29a, 29b.

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N o t e s t o Page s 8 4 – 8 9 160. Van Bleyswijck, Beschrijvinge der stadt Delft, 167, 250. 161. Van Bleyswijck, Beschrijvinge der stadt Delft, 249. 162. Van Bleyswijck, Beschrijvinge der stadt Delft, 247–­48. 163. The

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reference is to the geographer George Braun. Van Bleyswijck, Beschrijvinge der stadt Delft, 249. 164. Van Bleyswijck, Beschrijvinge der stadt Delft, 250. 165. Van Bleyswijck, Beschrijvinge der stadt Delft, 168. 166. For the commission and fortuna of this project, see Oosterbaan, De Oude Kerk, 32–­36. 167. Oosterbaan, De Oude Kerk, 36–­42 gives an excellent anthology of contemporary and early descriptions of the magnificent marble and alabaster altar. 168. For Duncanus’s book, cf. n. 44 above. 169. For more on the contents of this book (and on its immediate context) see Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting,” 69–­88, as well as Oosterbaan, De Oude Kerk, 157–­59 (more broadly, Oosterbaan has an excellent brief account of Duncanus’s career on 150–­63). 170. F. Schenck, De vetustissimo sacrarum imaginum usu in Ecclesia Christi catholica (Antwerp, 1567); briefly discussed in Polman, L’élément historique, 412–­18. It is perhaps worth noting here that Schenck’s was the last burial to be held in the cathedral at Utrecht and that on that occasion members of the Reformed community crowded into the building in order to sing their version of the psalms. 171. The extraordinary flood of works in defense of religious imagery—­in a comparatively short space of time—­is discussed at some length in Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting,” 68–­96, 136–­65; very briefly in Freedberg “Problem of Images,” esp. 28–­29 and notes; and usefully but summarily in Polman, L’élément historique, 409–­18. 172. In Miedema, “De bijbelse ikonografie,” and Miedema, “De ikonografie van de schilderingen.” 173. Miedema, “De bijbelse ikonografie,” 63. 174. Miedema, “De bijbelse ikonografie,” 67–­69. 175. Miedema, “De bijbelse ikonografie,” 69. The New Testament subjects may show a significant concentration; they are (on the west side) Christ entering Jerusalem, Christ driving the moneychangers from the temple, Christ teaching in the temple; (on the east side, in better chronological order) the annunciation, nativity, circumcision, and resurrection. 176. Cf. Miedema, “De bijbelse ikonografie,” 67–­72, and figs. 9–­24. 177. Miedema, “De bijbelse ikonografie,” 71. For speculation about the possible contemporary significance of the Daniel subject, see pp. and in this volume, and in the references in nn. 39 above and 196 below. 178. Miedema, “De bijbelse ikonografie,” 87. 179. Miedema, “De bijbelse ikonografie,” 71. 180. As on p. and n. 177 above. On the representation of this unusual subject, see also Schneider, “Daniel und der Bel zu Babylon.” 181. See p. above and n. 196 below. 182. Indeed the glass panel designed by Crabeth was conceived of as part of a series devoted to the Defensores Ecclesia. 183. Discussed at length by Miedema, “De ikonografie van de schilderingen,” 259–­83. 184. Miedema, “De ikonografie van de schilderingen,” 273. 185. See Miedema, “De ikonografie van de schilderingen,” 261–­72, for the precise details of each subject and each inscription, with an attempt to make sense of the “program” as a whole on 269 and 276–­74. 186. Miedema, “De ikonografie van de schilderingen,” 281. 187. Miedema, “De ikonografie van de schilderingen,” 278.

N o t e s t o Page s 8 9 – 9 1 188. The notion of corruption is strongly present in Van Mander as well, who notes of the

behavior of the Israelites, “In dit bancketteren sietmen seer levendich uytghebeeldt des volcx dertel wesen en den oncuyschen lust ten ooghen uyt hem openbarende” (in all this partying one sees a very vivid representation of the frivolous nature of the people and the unchaste lust revealed in their eyes). Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 213v. 189. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 213v. 190. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 10, no. 94; but see also Bruyn, “Twee St. Antonius-­panelen,” 80–­81. The panel is one of three devoted to the life of St. Sebastian. 191. This most unusual scene comes from the life of St. Sebastian in the Legenda Aurea. 192. The Hague, Mauritshuis, no. 433; Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 11, no. 64. The arms on the reverse of the wings are those of Willem Simonsz. (1498–­1557), who among several other offices was eight times burgomaster of Zierikzee, and of his wife Adriana van Duyveland (1506–­45). 193. As noted in Tóth-­Ubbens, Catalogus der schilderijen, 36 (where a few other examples of this subject are also given), the composition and iconography derive from prints by Lucas of 1514 and 1517–­18 (Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, 10:82, 204). 194. The erection of the bronze serpent had long stood as a typological antecedent for the crucifixion: its raising saved the Israelites from the plague in the wilderness, just as Christ on the cross saved humankind from its sins. On the other hand, one could always point to the fact that it was later pulled down by Hezekiah. For a marvelous encapsulation of the relevance of the bronze serpent to the debate about images, see Van Marnix van Sint Aldegonde’s fierce response to a Lutheran interlocutor about the matter in the Antwoord P. Marnixii, Heere van St. Aldegonde, op d’assertie eenes Martinists dat het afwerpen der beelden niemande dan der hoogher overheti gheoorlooft en zijn (in Van St. Aldegonde, Godsdienstige, 1–­34, esp. 12). The survival of these arguments in the North Netherlands (as well as many of the others about images) is wonderfully testified to by Didericus Camphuysen’s Stichtelyke Rijmen, in which he translated Johannes Geesteranus’s late sixteenth-­century Idolelenchus as Tegen ’t Geestigdom der Schilderkunst, Strafrijmen (for the reference to the bronze serpent, see Camphuysen, Stichtelyke Rijmen, 190–­91. 195. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, 8:247, nos. 534–­43; 242, nos. 230–­33; 246, nos. 414–­17; and 243, nos. 240–­47. For the many surviving drawings for the prints in these series, see Saunders, “Commentary on Iconoclasm,” 63nn16-18. 196. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, 8:247, nos. 534–­43, no. 5. 197. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, 8:247, nos. 534–­43, no. 6. The possibility of topical allusions in these series by Heemskerck was raised by me (in Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting,” 193–­94, and “Problem of Images,” 35–­37) and then taken up and expanded by Saunders (“Commentary on Iconoclasm,” 59–­83), who rightly emphasized the relationship with discussions about the role of authority in the removal of images. But see also Bangs, “Bel and the Dragon,” 8–­11, for a further discussion of this particular print, as well as a remarkable stained-­glass panel after it (ibid., plate 1). 198. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, 8:242, nos. 230–­33. 199. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, 246, no. 414–­17, no. 4. 200. See especially Josiah Destroying the Temples of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom (Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, 8:240–­47, no. 5; see fig. 19 in the present volume); but compare the equally violent scenes of The Destruction of the House of Baal (no. 3), The Removal of the Horses of the Sun (no. 4), The Destruction of the Altars at Bethel (no. 6), and The Priests of the High Places Slaughtered on Their Altars (no. 7).

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N o t e s t o Page s 9 1 – 9 9 201. On this aspect of the series, see the excellent outline in Bangs, “Bel and the Dragon.” 202. According

to Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 247r. A more recent monograph on Heemskerck (Grosshans, Maerten van Heemskerck) has a summary of his life and of some of the issues raised here on 18–­26 but still does not supplant Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck. 203. Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, 8:242, nos. 202–­23; cf. Freedberg, “Problem of Images,” 35. 204. See n. 118 above and Saunders, “Commentary on Iconoclasm,” 80–­82. 205. This possibility—­together with the relevant material from and about Coornhert—­is excellently discussed by Saunders, “Commentary on Iconoclasm,” 67–­83. 206. Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck. 207. London, British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings. Hodnett, Marcus Gheeraerts, 26, pl. 2; noted by Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting,” 187–­91, in the context of iconoclasm; and in Vroom et al., Willem van Oranje, 41, no. B12 (as Allegorie op de Verwording van de katholieke kerk). 208. Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet F.M. 479A. Discussed in cat. exhib. Hamburg 1983–­ 84, 144–­45, no. 18; Van Deursen and De Schepper, Willem van Oranje, 63; Vroom et al., Willem van Oranje, 41–­42, no. B13 (as De calvinistische propaganda verdedigt de beeldenstorm). 209. For a variety of attempts to come to grips with these problems, see especially Emmens, “Eins aber ist nötig,” and Moxey, Pieter Aertsen. Kreidl, “Die religiöse Malerei,” is devoted to the religious paintings but does not raise the kinds of issues broached here. 210. A possibility also adumbrated by Freedberg, “Hidden God,” 142. 211. See p. in this volume and Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 244v, as well as Freedberg, “Aertsen, Heemskerck en de Crisis van de Kunst.” 212. Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-­van Beuningen, no. 1007; Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. 13, no. 297. 213. Daniel 3:5–­25. 214. This possibility was again noted by Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting,” 191–­93, and Moxey, Pieter Aertsen, 243–­49 (substantially reproduced in Moxey, “Reflections on Some Unusual Subjects,” 70–­74). For Heemskerck’s prints of the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, see Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, 8:243, no. 264–­67. The first of these bears remarkable similarities to Aertsen’s painting. 215. See Wescher, “Der Maler Pieter Pietersz.,” 155–­57, reproduced on 155. The painting is still preserved in the Frans Hals-­Museum, Haarlem, no. 234. Chapter IV 1. Like Natasja

268

Peeters I am now convinced that the Martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian can on no account be attributed to Hieronymus Francken (as it still often was when this article was written). The wings of this altarpiece are still preserved in the Church of St Charles Borromeo in Antwerp. My own earlier work on the Franckens, both in the original version of this article and in my dissertation of 1973 (see n. 3 below) has now been entirely superseded by the outstanding PhD dissertation of Nastasja Peeters (“Tussen continuïteit en vernieuwing”) as well as in subsequent articles such as “Frans I and Ambrosius I Francken,” “Resilience and Enterprise,” and “From Nicolaas to Constantijn.” 2. The literature on the subject is vast, ranging from general inquiries to detailed local accounts. Good summaries of the present state of historical research are Dierickx, “Beeldenstorm,” and Freedberg, Iconoclasm and Painting. See also the following note.

No t e s t o Page s 9 9 – 1 0 0 3. The literature

on iconoclasm in the Netherlands has grown substantially since 1976; among the works that have appeared since my dissertation of 1973 (Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting”), see my “Art after Iconoclasm,” notable area studies such as Deyon and Lottin, Les casseurs, and the excellent exhibition catalogue of Dupeux, Jezler, and Wirth, Bildersturm. See also Jonckheere, Antwerp after Iconoclasm. Jonckheere’s work finally does justice to the painting produced in Antwerp in the period between 1566 and 1585, and thereby also to some of the effects of the iconoclasm of 1566 on art first discussed by me in 1973 and now finally brought up to date in the light of recent research. 4. See Zweite, Marten de Vos, as well as Jonckheere, Antwerp after Iconoclasm. 5. They are very numerous indeed. A short list is given in Polman, L’élément historique, but the literature has now grown too large to be fully cited here. For the council’s decree of December 3–­4, 1563, see n. 66 below. Freedberg, Iconoclasm and Painting, 38–­95, lists some of the sixteenth-­century writers relevant to the question. See also Freedberg, “Problem of Images,” and Hecht, Katholische Bildertheologie. 6. See Prims, “De Beeldstormerij.” See also Freedberg, “Kunst und Gegenreformation.” For the effects of the “Stille Beeldestorm,” the authoritative work is Woollett, “Altarpiece in Antwerp,” as well as the new groundbreaking work on iconoclasm in the South Netherlands by Jonckheere, Antwerp after Iconoclasm. 7. On the reign of Alessandro Farnese in the Netherlands, see the standard work by Van der Essen, Alexandre Farnèse. For the artistic consequences of the installation of Alexander Farnese, see Prims, “De Beeldstormerij”; Baudouin, “1585,” 94; and Woollett, “Altarpiece in Antwerp.” But also see the important study by Van den Nieuwenhuizen, Antwerpen in 1585. On September 9, 1585, the guilds and trade associations were called upon by the city to finalize the repairs of the affected altars. A very good survey with the relevant sources relating to the restoration of Catholic services and symbols after 1585 is provided by Peeters, “Frans I and Ambrosius I Francken,“ 72–­74. 8. On the work of the Francken brothers, see Peeters, (“Tussen continuïteit en vernieuwing”) as well as in subsequent articles such as “Frans I and Ambrosius I Francken,” which entirely replace the rather inadequate monograph on the Francken family by Gabriels, Een Kempisch Schildergeslacht—­the only work on the subject available when I first wrote this article in 1976. 9. Prims, “Altaarstudien [1938; 1939].” Here, Canon Floris Prims, the former Antwerp archivist, graphically recounted the fortunes of the altars concerned, although some of the documents he found were carelessly or superficially transcribed. For fuller documentation, see Van Brabant, Rampspoed, 47–­70; and Vervaet, “Catalogus,” 197–­ 99. For much further supplementary material, see now the articles by Peeters (as in note 1) and Woollett’s 2004 dissertation, “Altarpiece in Antwerp.” 10. The name of the guild is difficult to translate succinctly. The first guild of longbowmen to be founded was called the Oude Handboog; the one founded later was called the Jonge Handboog. The same applies to the Oude and Jonge Voetboog, the two crossbowmen’s guilds. 11. As was the center panel of Coxcie’s altarpiece for the Jonge Voetboog, of which only the wings of 1574–­75 survive. See Woollett, “Michiel Coxcie,” 86–­87, with the relevant documentation on 89. For a vivid description see the account by Carolus Scribani (in his Antverpia of 1610) transcribed in Held, “Carolus Scribanius’ Observations,” 200, 204. It is wrong to suggest, as the Antwerp Museum’s catalogue does, that the St. George panels came from the altar of the Oude Handboog (Beschrijvende catalogus, 63–­64). They come from the altar of one of the crossbowmen’s guilds. For this work and Coxcie’s Martyrdom of St. George altarpiece, see Van de Velde, “De Coxcies.” Cf. Woollett, “Altarpiece in Antwerp” and “Michiel Coxcie,” with further literature.

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No t e s t o Page s 1 0 0 – 1 0 3 12. Prims,

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“Altaarstudien [1939],” 357–­63, 383–­88. Also see Woollett, “Altarpiece in Antwerp), chap. 2, especially 93–­95, for further detailed discussion as well as the documents only partially reprinted by Prims. 13. Prims, “Altaarstudien [1939],” 363. For further, more careful, and more critical details, see Woollett, “Michiel Coxcie,” 86, and Peeters, “Tussen continuïteit en vernieuwing.” 14. Antwerp, nos. 151–­54. Beschrijvende catalogus, 92–­93. 15. Prims, “Altaarstudien [1939],” 319. 16. Prims, “Altaarstudien [1939],” 320. 17. Antwerp, nos. 146–­49. Beschrijvende catalogus, 91–­92. 18. Prims, “Altaarstudien [1939],” 390–­92. 19. Peeters, “Frans I and Ambrosius I Francken,” cites the relevant unpublished document from Privilegiekammer 668, Rekwestboeken (1589–­90), fol. 105 (August 28). 20. As in Peeters, “Frans I and Ambrosius I Francken.” 21. Both wings are in the Museum of the St. Charles Borromeo Church in Antwerp. They do not appear to be curved at the top as in the central panel. 22. Antwerp, no. 145. Beschrijvende catalogus, 96. Many copies exist of this work, including those by the anonymous painter in the church of Katharinakerk in Hoogstraten (ca. 1600), by Adriaen de Bie in St. Gommarus in Lier (1626), and a small copy in the Landesmuseum in Hanover. See Peeters, “Frans I and Ambrosius I Francken.” 23. All vividly conveyed in Surius, De probatis sanctorum historiis, v, 959–­61. 24. Zoege von Manteuffel, “Franck(en), Ambrosius I.” 25. Antwerpen, no. 135. Beschrijvende catalogus, 90. 26. Antwerpen, nos. 136–­40. Beschrijvende catalogus, 90–­91. 27. See Peeters, “Painters pencells,” 101, citing her dissertation “Tussen continuïteit en vernieuwing,” Cat. A 12. 28. Zoege von Manteuffel, “Review of Een Kempisch schildergeslacht.” 29. Gabriels, Een Kempisch schildergeslacht. 30. Peeters, “Tussen continuïteit en vernieuwing,” as well as her subsequent articles such as Peeters, “Frans I and Ambrosius I Francken.” 31. Gabriels, Een Kempisch schildergeslacht. The attribution was repeated in Gabriels’s 1930–­31 essay “Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis.” 32. See Auzas, Hiérosme Francken. 33. Illustrated in Auzas, “L’Adoration,” pl. 1. 34. Gabriels, “Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis,” 59, claimed that she found the monogram HF on one of the wings in the Jesuit church. If this is so, it could be that they are the initials of Hieronymus Francken II, who entered the workshop of Ambrosius in 1605. 35. For a full and accurate account of the fortunes of this high altar before it received Rubens’s Assumption of the Virgin in 1625, and the various temporary altarpieces borrowed for use on it until then, see Van de Velde, “De Aanbidding.” 36. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, no. 248. 37. Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, no. 112. On the history of this work and its place in Floris’s oeuvre, see Van de Velde, Frans Floris. Without the encouragement of Van de Velde this article—­like so many others in the field—­would never have been written. 38. See Woollett, “Michiel Coxcie.” 39. Illustrated in toto in Faggin, La pittura, 268, pl. 163. The center panel was lost in World War II; the wings survive in the Dunkirk Museum. See Jonckheere, Antwerp after Iconoclasm, 183–­84. 40. Illustrated in Faggin, La pittura, 267, pl. 162. See also Freedberg, “Art after Iconoclasm,” 36.

N o t e s t o Page s 1 0 4 – 1 0 8 41. See Valentiner, Karel van Mander, 6–­8, pl. 1. 42. See Laenen, Histoire, 239–­42, but also Jacobs, “Les tableaux,” 228–­36. Woollett rightly

notes that this work may well closely reflect the lost center panel for the Antwerp St. George of about thirteen years earlier. See Woollett, “Michiel Coxcie,” 86–­89. 43. Additionally in Jacobs, “Les tableaux,” and Woollett, “Michiel Coxcie,” 86–­87, with further material on this important work by Coxcie, so notably described by Carolus Scribani as in Held, “Carolus Scribanius’ Observations,” 194, 224. 44. E.g., the St. Thomas Altarpiece, dated 1574, for the altar of the Furriers (Antwerp, nos. 77–­81); the triptych with Christ Triumphant, dated 1590, for the altar of the Oude Voetboog (Antwerp, nos. 72–­76); and the Wedding Feast at Cana (1596, Antwerp Cathedral) for the Vintners’ Altar. 45. Zweite, Marten de Vos. See De Wit, De kerken, 35; Van den Branden, Geschiedenis, 222–­ 25; and Van Lerius, Notice, 111–­12. 46. Van den Branden, Geschiedenis, 352; the date, however, is not 1600 but 1611, as Zoege von Manteuffel pointed out (“Franck(en), Ambrosius I,” 337). 47. See Müller-­Hofstede, “Otto van Veen.” 48. Müller-­Hofstede, “Otto van Veen,”142. 49. In the collections of Frans Baudouin and the Besançon Museum respectively. Müller-­ Hofstede, “Otto van Veen,” 142–­46 (the reproductions are incorrectly captioned: pl. 9 is Baudouin’s sketch, pl. 10 the modello in Besançon, and pl. 11 the final painting). 50. See Dhanens, “Retabel van het Lam Gods,” 194–­97. 51. Commissioned by Jan van Vucht, the agent of the Plantin Press in Madrid, and now in the Fundación San Carlos de Amberes. See also his late Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Peterskirche in Cologne. 52. When Coeberger returned to the Netherlands, he turned his efforts almost exclusively to architecture. See De Maeyer, Albrecht en Isabella, and Meganck, Kerkelijke architectuur. 53. Vlieghe, “Altaar.” 54. Vlieghe, “Altaar,” 345n14. 55. Vlieghe, “Altaar,” 344. 56. Vlieghe, “Altaar,” 344. 57. The matter of its stylistic characteristics is an immensely complex one. Antal, “Problem of Mannerism,” explores some of the stylistic problems involved but does not altogether clarify them, neither mentioning the Francken brothers and their contemporaries nor pointing out their Tusco-­Roman connections or, just as critically, their place in the Heemskerck-­Floris lineage. 58. E.g., in Van Puyvelde, Peinture flamande, 382; and Prims, “Altaarstudien [1938],” 287. 59. Verstegen, Theatrum crudelitatum and Théatre des cruautez. On Verstegen, see Rombauts, Richard Verstegen. 60. See also Woollett, “Michiel Coxcie.” 61. The deaths of the famous Gorcum martyrs in 1572, for example, would still have been fresh in the minds of many. Knipping, Iconografie, 1:136–­37, has a brief passage on the commemoration of contemporary martyrs in the Netherlands. 62. Gregory XIII brought out a new revision of the Martyrology, which was printed in Rome in 1582, Lyons in 1583, and Rome again in 1584. Plantin published his version, based on the Lyons edition, in 1586, with a second edition in 1589. Baronius himself was dissatisfied with the printings that his version of the Martyrology received in 1586 and 1587, and it seems likely that he was happy with Plantin’s offer to publish it in Antwerp in 1588. Some years lapsed before it received somewhat mild official approval. 63. “Habet etiam Sanctorum innocentiae, charitatis, fortitudinis, ceterarumque virtutum

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commemoratio stimulos quosdam acerrimos, quibus tum maxime incitamur cum illorum propositis exemplis, nostram desidiam agnoscimus.” Baronius, Martyrologium romanum, iv. 64. “Tum vero ex omnibus sacris imaginibus magnum fructum percipi, non solum quia admonetur populus beneficiorum et munerum, quae a Christo sibi collata sunt, sed etiam, quia Dei per sanctos miracula et salutaria exempla oculis fidelium subiiciuntur, ut pro iis Deo gratias agant, ad sanctorum imitationem vitam moresque suos component,excitenturque ad adorandum ac diligendum Deum, et ad pietatem colendam.” Alberigo et al., Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, 751–­52. An excellent commentary on the etiology of the decree is Jedin, “Entstehung und Tragweite,” 142–­ 82, 404–­28. 65. See, for example, the entry for August 19, 1565, in the diary of Godevaert van Haecht (published in Van Roosbroeck, De Kroniek) on the announcement of the publication of the Decrees at Antwerp: “Maer alle landen en waeren niet wel tevreden gheweest, want t’ginck meest al na ’t Spaens sin.” See also Willocx, L’introduction. 66. See Willocx, L’introduction, and De Moreau, Histoire, 268, 436–­37, 443. 67. But for a long—­yet still partial—­list, see Freedberg, Iconoclasm and Painting, 67–­95. 68. E.g., Hessels, Tractatus; Garetius, De sanctorum invocatione liber. 69. Garetius, De sanctorum invocatione liber. 70. “Et pictor, artis suae flores in imaginibus, exprimens res Martyris praeclare gestas, labores cruciatus imagines tyrannorum aspectus, impetus, ardentum illam & flammas evomentem fornacem  . . . Haec, inquam, nobis tamquam in libro loquente artificiose describens Martyris certamina, sapienter exposuit, . . . Novit enim etiam pictura tacens in pariete loqui, & utilitatis plurimum afferre.? Garetius, De sanctorum invocatione liber, fol. 2 IV. 71. On Molanus, see Freedberg, “Johannes Molanus.” 72. Molanus, Usuardi martyrologium. Further editions in 1573, 1577, and 1583, with the following addition to the title: Cum addendis ex martyrologis romanae Ecclesiae et aliarum, potissimum Belgii, et annotationes auctorum qui de vita vel martyrio fuse aut aliquando obiter nonnulla scripserunt. 73. Molanus, Indiculus sanctorum Belgii (1573 and 1583). 74. Molanus, Natales sanctorum Belgii. New edition in Douai (1616), with a Supplementum in 1626. 75. Surius, De probatis sanctorum historiis. Each year until 1575 a new volume appeared. A French translation by G. Gazet was published in Rouen in abridged form in 1610. 76. See Dictionnaire de théologie Catholique, vol. 14, cols. 2842–­49. 77. October 25, Surius, De probatis sanctorum historiis, v, 959–­61. 78. Sts. Cosmas and Damian, September 24, Surius, De probatis sanctorum historiis, v, 360–­ 68; St. George, Surius, De probatis sanctorum historiis, ii, 798–­822; and St. Sebastian, January 20, Surius, De probatis sanctorum historiis, i, 434–­52. 79. E.g., in Molanus, De historia, 89. 80. “Tum etiam plurimarum dictionum sane obscuram notionem ac vim declaravi, earum praesertim, quae ea instrumenta ac machinas designant, quibus teterrimi fidei oppugnatores fortissimos Martyres miris modis cruciarunt, divexaruntque.” Baronius, Martyrologium romanum, vii. 81. Gallonio, Trattato de gli instrumenti di martirio; swiftly reprinted, with the same illustrations, in Latin as De sanctorum martyrum cruciatibus, and swiftly again in Cologne (Gymnicus) in 1602; for further editions, see Touber, “Techniques of Torture.” A French version appeared in the same year (Gallonio, Traité des instruments de martyre). The extraordinary survival of Gallonio’s treatise until well into the twentieth century merits further attention. Briefly referred to in Mâle, L’art religieux, in his section on martyrdoms, 109–­16.

No t e s t o Page s 1 1 1– 1 1 2 82. Zeri,

Pittura e Controriforma, 66–­69. For the decoration of the Gesù and further instances of the Roman interest in martyrdoms at exactly this period, see Hibbard, “Ut picturae sermones,” esp. 30–­31. For critical new additions to the now vast literature on the subject, see particularly Bailey, Renaissance and Baroque; Monssen, “Rex Gloriose Martyrum”; Monssen, “Martyrdom Cycle I” and “Martyrdom Cycle II”; Monssen, “Antonio Tempesta”; as well as Behrmann, “Tyrann und Märtyrer.” It should be noted here that already in 1583, Giovanni Battista Cavalieri illustrated and published Giulio Roscio’s Ecclesia militantis triumphi (based on the frescoes of Santo Stefano Rotondo and swiftly reprinted again in 1585), while in 1584 the same combination of engraver, publisher, and author produced the Ecclesiae Anglicanae Tropaea sive martyrum about the frescoes in San Tommaso di Canterbury; in 1586 their work on the frescoes of Sant’Apollinare, adjacent to the Collegio Germanico, also appeared, Beati Apollinaris martyris . . . (Rome, 1586). See also Noreen, “Ecclesiae Militantis Triumphi.” 83. Haskell, review of Pittura e Controriforma. 84. Haskell, review of Pittura e Controriforma, 395. See also Haskell, Patrons and Painters, 66–­67, and Cesareo, “Collegium Germanicum.” But for further documents relating to Loretano’s role in the restoration of Santo Stefano Rotondo, as well as relevant extracts from his diary, see Noreen, “Ecclesiae Militantis Triumphi,” 696–­99. 85. See Monssen, “Rex Gloriose Martyrum”; Monssen, “Martyrdom Cycle I” and “Martyr­ dom Cycle II”; Monssen, “Antonio Tempesta”; Vannugli, “Affreschi di Antonio Tempesta.” A key article on the role of the Jesuits in the graphic illustration of printed images remains Buser, “Jerome Nadal” (with an important contribution on San Tommaso di Canterbury also); but more generally see Bailey, Renaissance and Baroque. The material on the Jesuit involvement in the representation of martyrdoms and tyranny has been comprehensively assembled and brilliantly developed in the dissertation by Behrmann, “Tyrann und Märtyrer,” esp. 85–­104. 86. Verstegen, Theatrum crudelitatum and Théatre des cruautez. Roscio’s Triumphus martyrum also reproduced Cavalieri’s illustrations in the Ecclesiae militantis triumphi of 1583 and 1585 as well. On these now much-­discussed works, see also Monssen, “Rex Gloriose Martyrum”; Monssen, “Martyrdom Cycle I” and “Martyrdom Cycle II”; Monssen, “Antonio Tempesta”; Noreen, “Ecclesiae Militantis Triumphi.” 87. For a further discussion of what one might call the globalization of these styles and the ideological tendencies they betoken, see Freedberg, “Art after Iconoclasm,” esp. 43–­44. 88. See, for example, Pasture, Introduction to Restauration religieuse; Axters, Geschiedenis van de Vroomheid, 28–­30; De Moreau, Histoire, 265–­66, 371–­72; Van der Essen: Alexandre Farnèse, 1:36–­37. 89. Pasture, Restauration religieuse; De Moreau, Histoire, 372–­73. For the Jesuits in the Netherlands generally, see Poncelet, Histoire. But see also Monssen, “Rex Gloriose Martyrum”; Monssen, “Martyrdom Cycle I” and “Martyrdom Cycle II”; Monssen, “Antonio Tempesta”; Noreen, “Ecclesiae Militantis Triumphi”; Buser, “Jerome Nadal”; Bailey, Renaissance and Baroque. 90. De Maeyer, Albrecht en Isabella, as well as the still-­useful summary in Baudouin, Rubens, 65–­112. See Thomas and Duerloo, Albert and Isabella: Essays, and the accompanying exhibition catalogue, also edited by Duerloo and Thomas, Albrecht & Isabella: Catalogus. 91. Possible exceptions are the works of Maarten de Vos’s pupil Hendrick de Clerck, such as his Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (Asse, St Maarten) and Martyrdom of Chrysanthus and Daria (Brussels, Kapellekerk). For these works, see Terlinden, “Henri de Clerck.” 92. Rosweyde, Fasti sanctorum. See also Dictionnaire de théologie Catholique, vol. 14, cols. 9–­14.

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Végh, Die Bilderstürmer. A useful collection of essays on selected manifestations is Warnke, Bildersturm. Some regional studies have appeared, but few as comprehensive as Phillips, Reformation of Images. 2. The insistence appears in Martin, Iconoclastic Controversy, 272. 3. Ladner, “Concept of the Image,” remains an excellent summary and selection of the most relevant sources. 4. For the sources, see Hennephof, Textus Byzantinos. An excellent selection of sources, with good translations, appears in Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 3–­190. For the pre-­Byzantine period especially, these may be supplemented by Elliger, Die Stellung, and Koch, Die altchristliche Bilderfrage. 5. For Eusebius’s letter itself, see Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 20, cols. 1545–­49. For Epiphanius of Salamis’s writings on images (whether spurious or not), see Holl, “Die Schriften des Epiphanius.” For Hypatius of Ephesus and Julian, see Diekamp, Analecta Patristica, 118–­20, 127–­29; Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 94–­95n33, 138; and Alexander, “Hypatius of Ephesus”; and for the horos of the Council of 754, see Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 13, cols. 208–­68 (read out and refuted by the Council of 787), and Anastos, “Ethical Theory,”; for that of 815, partially preserved in the Refutatio et Eversio of the Patriarch Nikephoros, see Alexander, “Iconoclastic Council,” 58–­66. The evidence for the religious views of the iconoclasts comes largely from these councils, and also from the peuseis of Constantine V, extracted from Nikephoros, Antirrheticus I; see Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 100, cols. 206–­ 534; text in Ostrogorsky, Studien, 8–­11, and Hennephof, Textus, nos. 141–­70. See also the anthology of texts in Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, 180–­86 (no. A5, Epiphanius; no. A6, Eusebius; no. B13, Hypatius; no. C18, Constantine V; no. C19, Iconoclastic Council of 754; no. D22, Iconoclastic Council of 815). 6. In contrast to the Byzantine writers, the Reformation critics have received little attention. Notable exceptions include the two basic and comprehensive essays by Von Campenhausen (“Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation,” and “Zwingli und Luther”). I have dealt with the minor writers and vernacular publicists in my unpublished Oxford D.Phil. dissertation, “Iconoclasm and Painting in the Netherlands, 1566—­1609,” 32–­104 and 136–­169. On Zwingli, see Garside, Zwingli and the Arts; and on Calvin, see Wencelius’s not wholly adequate L’esthétique de Calvin. 7. The charge of idolatry, made at the Council of 754, for example, was abandoned at the Council of 815. See also Alexander, “Iconoclastic Council.” 8. See especially the peuseis of Constantine V, in Ostrogorsky, Studien, 8–­11. 9. As in Calvin, Institution de la religion chrétienne, 54. The distinctions are between the veneration due only to God and the relative veneration of images (προσκύνησις λατρευτική σχετική ) and between the reverence that is reserved for God alone and that which is paid to saints ( λατρεία δουλεία). Υπερδουλεία, the special veneration paid to the Virgin, is a further complication satirized by Calvin. 10. For a full discussion with sources, see Ladner, “Concept of the Image.” 11. See Gero, “Eucharistic Doctrine.” 12. Even Claudius of Turin (discussed in Martin, Iconoclastic Controversy, 262–­66) had criticized the concept of the intercession of saints and, like Erasmus much later, the excessive importance attached to going on pilgrimages. For Erasmus’s views on art generally, see Panofsky, “Erasmus.” In almost every Reformation treatise, both for and against images, the cult of images is inextricably associated with that of saints. Vicious criticisms may be found, for example, in Veluanus, Der Leken Wechwyser; and

No t e s t o Page s 1 1 7 – 1 1 8 biting satire in Van Marnix van Sint Aldegonde, Vraye Narration; and even as late as Lydius, Den roomschen uylen-­spiegel. Vigorous pleas on behalf of the cult of saints occur very frequently, but amongst the Reformation treatises specifically devoted to them, see, for example Cochlaeus, De sanctorum invocatione, specifically countering the views of Bullinger; Hessels, Tractatus, and Garetius, De sanctorum invocatione liber. 13. See Anastos, “Ethical Theory,” 151–­60. For the relevant passage of Amphilochios, see Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 13, col. 301D; Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, anthology, no. A7. For similar notions in the Reformation, see Hessels, Tractatus, and Garetius, De sanctorum invocatione liber. 14. See Von Campenhausen, “Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation,” on all of these. 15. Hätzer, Ein urteil gottes. 16. Camphuysen, Stichtelyke Rymen. 17. An early critic of all these, who practiced what he preached, was Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt. See his Von Abtuhung der Bylder und das keyn Bedtler unter den Christen seyn sollen, reprinted in Lietzmann, Andreas Karlstadt. 18. These came under fire from Catholic critics as well, such as Anna Bijns, Martin Donk (Duncanus), and Erasmus. On all of these and others more fully, see n. 129 below. 19. See n. 58 for an instance of the rejection of a monetary reward in return for an image. When asked whether justification for the breaking of images could be found in the gospel, one of the iconoclasts at Brill simply replied, “Dattet zoo behoorde ende dat de hoer van Babilon moest vallen,” (that it should be so and that the whore of Babylon should fall; quoted in Wils, “De Reformatie en beeldenstorm,” 410). 20. Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 83–­150. 21. Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 101. 22. ἡ τῆς εἰκόνος τιμὴ ἐπὶ τὸ πρωτότυπον διαβαίνει. The whole paragraph, intended to serve as an illustration of the unifying image relation of the Son to the Father in the Trinity, may be found in St. Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto, 18, 45, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 32, col. 149C, and is well discussed by Ladner, “Concept of the Image,” 3–­10, as well as its relationship with other similar texts; see also Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, anthology, no. B9. 23. “Want die beelden so langhe als sy in den beeltsnijders winckel zijn. so en connen sy gheen miraculen doen, tot der tijd dat dese fijne ghesellen ghebrocht hebben in haer hoerachtiche kercke.” Anonymous, “Den val der roomsche kercken,” 406. 24. ἐπιθέτας

ἀποκαλῶν τοὺς ἁγίους καὶ μηδεμίαν ἐνέργειαν εὐεργεσίας κεκτημένους ἀλλὰ μάτην καὶ ἔκ τινος προλήψεως τὴν δόξαν τοῦ δύνασθαι παρὰ Θεῷ ἔχοντας

(yelling epithets at the saints, saying that they did not have the power to do miracles, that they were impostors, and that their reputation for favor with God was a work of vain trickery). Deubner, Kosmas und Damian, 145. 25. For a recent study of Savonarola’s activity, see Bredekamp, “Renaissancekultur.” 26. Now thoroughly analyzed in Warnke, “Durchbrochene Geschichte,” 65–­68. 27. All the English phenomena are discussed in Phillips, Reformation of Images. 28. See Idzerda, “Iconoclasm.” 29. See Grabar, L’empereur, 166–­70, and the judicious modifications made by Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 128, with further references there. 30. For a good survey of this subject, see Dierickx, “Beeldenstorm.” 31. These arguments, going back to St. Bernard, may be found from Luther and Zwingli right down to the popular writers of the Reformation. Cf. St. Bernard in the Apologia ad Gullielmum Sancti Theoderici Abbatem, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, 182, cols. 915–­16: “Fulget ecclesia in parietibus, et in pauperibus eget,” etc. For Zwingli, see his “Ein Antwort Valentin Compar gegeben,” in Egi et al., Corpus Reformatorum, 4:146. Luther discusses the problem from this socio-­ethical point of view

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in his “Sermon on Indulgences”: D. Martin Luthers Werke, 246. The vigorous popular view is expressed by Veluanus, Der Leken Wechwyser, 288–­90, 296; cf. Von Campenhausen, “Die Bilderfrage,” 103–­5. 32. Or could setbacks have been regarded as punishment for that root evil, the sin of idolatry, into which humanity had lapsed? See the ὅρος of 754 in Hennephof, Textus, 62, no. 205; Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 13, cols. 208–­68; Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, anthology, no. C19. There were always the many parallels that could be drawn with the idol worship of apostate Old Testament kings. 33. As when the newly constituted Calvinist City Council of Antwerp ordered the cathedral to be closed on June 19, 1581, and in the next three days had all the altarpieces systematically removed; see Prims, “De Beeldstormerij,” But many other similar cases may be found, from Zurich in 1523 to the towns newly run by Calvinist councils throughout the Flemish provinces between 1579 and 1581. 34. For a detailed account of what happened, and a full bibliography, see Van Roosbroeck, Het Wonderjaar. It is worth noting here how often miraculous or traditionally venerated images are at the center of the storm, from the ἀχειροποίηται of the Byzantine Empire to the sculpted wooden Madonna of Antwerp. 35. In Antwerp by the fiery Herman Moded, see early chronicles like the Antwerpsch Chronykje for graphic accounts (Van Loon and Ullens, Antwerpsch Chronykje, 87); in Wittenberg by Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, on whom see Barge, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt. 36. E.g., Erhard Schön’s Klagrede der armen verfolgten Gotzen und Tempelbilder (ca. 1530) and F. Hogenberg’s illustration in Aitsinger, De leone Belgico (1588 and many subsequent editions). 37. The extensive literature on the subject is reviewed by Dierickx, “Beeldenstorm,” 1040–­ 48. 38. Cf. Duke and Kolff, “Time of Troubles.” 39. Cf. Gero, “Byzantine Iconoclasm,” 39–­40. 40. On Ridley, see Ridley, Nicholas Ridley. 41. Cf. Dierickx, “Beeldenstorm,” 1043; but examples are too frequent in the Netherlands to be listed here. A selection is presented in chap. 6 n. 25 below; but see also chap. 3, p. , and chap. 6, n. 47. 42. Almost every direct account of iconoclasm in the Netherlands and the German-­ speaking countries in the sixteenth century refers to the treatment of the clergy—­for example, in Antwerp in Van Loon and Ullens, Antwerpsch Chronykje, 87, and in Wittenberg by Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (Barge, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt). 43. Vasari, Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori e archittetori, 4.178–­79. 44. Van Mander, Het Schilder-­boeck, fol. 257r. 45. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 21. 46. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 21. 47. Cf. the case of Joos van Liere cited above, as well as Deneke et al., Albrecht Dürer, 199, on the Beham brothers and George Pencz. 48. A good discussion is in Warnke, “Durchbrochene Geschichte,” 91–­96, under the heading “Deformationsformen.” 49. Cf. Scriptor Incertus de Leone, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 108, col. 1036; Vita Nicephori, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 100, col. 141A; for the scraping of images off walls, cf. Vita S. Stephani iunioris, in ­Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 100, cols. 1112–­13, and Nicephorus, 76, translated in Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 152–­53. 50. Warnke, “Durchbrochene Geschichte,” 83. 51. Theophanes Continuatus, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 109, col. 172.

No t e s t o Page s 1 2 0 – 1 2 2 52. Well analyzed in Warnke, “Durchbrochene Geschichte,” 93–­94. 53. But cf. Warnke’s assertion that “die Standeszeichen müssen erhalten bleiben, wann

das Standesbewusstein sich als gebrochen darstellen soll” (the signifiers of rank should remain when the consciousness of rank should be shown as broken; “Durchbrochene Geschichte,” 93). 54. Borenius, “St. Thomas of Canterbury,” 182. One might note here that much earlier Wyclif had attacked Becket on two grounds: (1) for his defense of the temporal powers of the church, and (2) because of his association with the pilgrimages, legends, and miracles at Canterbury, all aspects of image worship always set upon by its critics. See Davis, “Lollards.” 55. Brown (“Dark-­Age Crisis,” 11) points out that “disrespect for the imperial image released a very real charge of feeling.” For attacks on images of the emperor and bishops, especially in the eastern empire, see Browning, “Riot of 387,” 20; and Majewski, “L’iconophobie.” On the other hand, imperial antipathy toward images of Christ may have sprung from the fact many such images had been accorded honors traditionally due to the imperial image, as, say, in the case of the Christ of Camuliana; on this see Von Dobschütz, Christusbilder, 40–­60. See also the perceptive discussion of this subject by Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 90, 122. 56. Examples collected in Strong, Portraits, 40. 57. For the full text from Basil, see his De Spiritu Sancto, 18, 45; also as in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 32, col. 149C. Athanasius had also used the simile of the image of the emperor, but in his case in order to show the relationship of Christ’s divinity to the image: Εν γὰρ τῇ εὶκονι τὸ εἶδος καὶ ἡ μορφὴ τοῦ βασιλέως

ἐστὶ· καὶ ἐν τῷ βασιλεῖ δὲ τὸ ἐν τῇ εἰκόνι εἶδος ἐστιν. Ἀπαράλλακτος γὰρ ἐστιν ἡ ἐν τῇ εὶκονι τοῦ βασιλέως ὁμοιότης. ὥστε τὸω ἐνορῶντα τῇ εἰκόνι ὁρᾷν ἐν αὐτῆ τον βασιλέα. . . . Ἐγὼ καὶ ὁ βασιλεὺς ἕν ἐσμεν. ἐγὼ γὰρ ἐν ἐκείνῳ εἰμὶ . κακεῖνος ἐν ἐμοι

(For in the image is the appearance and form of the emperor. And in the emperor and in the image is the appearance. The likeness of the emperor is identical to his image, so that those who worship it also worship the emperor. . . . I the emperor am in the image, and the image is in me). Oratio III contra Arianos, 5, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 26, col. 332A; see also Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, anthology, no. B10. 58. Van Mander (Het schilder-­boek, fol. 244v) records how a woman offered the iconoclasts in Warmenhuysen in North Holland one hundred pounds for a Crucifixion altarpiece by Pieter Aertsen, but the offer was refused and the painting was smashed to pieces. 59. Alexander, “Hypatius of Ephesus,” 177. See also Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 90n33, 131. 60. Permission had first to be obtained from the patriarch and emperor; Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 13, cols. 329D–­332D. 61. Vita S. Stephani iunioris, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 100, col. 1120. 62. See Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia ad Guillelmum, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, 192, cols. 914–­15. For a fifth-­century criticism of such decorations, see St. Nilus of Sinai’s letter to Olympiodorus, in which he disapproves of distracting the faithful with animal hunts, fishing, birds, plants, and reptiles, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 79, 577–­80. 63. See the Short Christian Introduction in Egi et al., Corpus Reformatorum, 2:658. 64. Warnke, “Durchbrochene Geschichte,” 83. 65. Phillips, Reformation of Images, 117, 194. 66. Although already in the reign of Edward VI, Bishop Gardiner had expressed the fear that the destruction of religious images might lead to destruction of the symbols of royalty as well: Gardiner, Letters, 272–­76. 67. Cf. Alexander, “Iconoclastic Council,” 41.

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ad Ludovicum in Werminghoff, Monumenta, 2:2, 479. The parallel between painting and writing was, of course, used throughout the Reformation as part of the argument in favor of images and as a basis for censorship, on which see below. 69. Garside, Zwingli and the Arts, 152. 70. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 13, cols. 329D–­332D. 71. Often the case in the Netherlands: for the saving of Cornelis Enghebrechtsz’s Marienpoel altarpieces, see van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 210v. For other examples, see also Prims, “Altaarstudien,” 397, and Van Autenboer, “Uit de geschiedenis van Turnhout,” both drawing on extensive archival material. 72. As in the case of the woman in Warmenhuyzen in North Holland who offered iconoclasts one hundred pounds for a Crucifixion altarpiece by Pieter Aertsen (though the offer was refused and the painting smashed to pieces). Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 244v. 73. Admittedly recorded in the highly unreliable Pseudo-­Burlamacchi, Ieronimo Savonarola, 131. The size of the bid may be exaggerated, but there is no reason one like this should not have been made. 74. The vicissitudes and saving of the Ghent altarpiece during the Netherlands iconoclasm is fully documented: see Dhanens, Het retabel van het Lam Gods, with all the relevant archival data. For the best contemporary account, see Van Vaernewijck, Van die beroerlicke tijden (Ghent University Library, MS, G, 2469. fol. 29v). 75. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 24. 76. On these, see Hinz, Die Malerei. 77. Although the destruction of Christian and royal images still continued outside the museum: Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 24. 78. Phillips, Reformation of Images, 68–­69. 79. See, for example, the horos of 815, in Alexander, “Iconoclastic Council,” 58–­59; Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, anthology, no. D22. 80. The examples are many: cf. Veluanus, Der Leken Wechwyser, 288–­90, and the Justification of Angelus Merula, available in Hoog, De Verantwoording, 21. 81. Cited and discussed by Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 91–­92, with further discussion on 98. 82. Since images were traditionally regarded as the books of the illiterate. Stemming from Gregory the Great (see the letters Ad Serenum Massiliensem Episcopum, in Galliccioli, Sancti Gregorii Papae, 8:134, 242) and passed down through Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, this latter argument occurs in almost every pro-­image writer of the Reformation—­seemingly without the realization of how easily it could be turned against them (although some added the proviso that what was forbidden in books should also be forbidden in paintings, for this very reason). Cf. Molanus, De historia, 31. 83. For a report on this by Leo, bishop of Phocaea, to the Council of Nicaea, see Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 13, col. 185. 84. Cf. Brown, “Dark-­Age Crisis,” 33. 85. See Bredekamp, “Renaissancekultur,” 57. 86. Bredekamp, “Renaissancekultur,” 57, with sources. 87. Warnke, “Durchbrochene Geschichte,” 80, 90. 88. Phillips, Reformation of Images, 117. 89. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 17. 90. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 18. 91. But even Orthodox writers felt that the filling of churches with excessive or indecorous decorations rendered them liable to criticism on the basis of their similarities with “paganism.” Cf., for example, Catharinus, “Disputatio,” cols. 143–­44.

No t e s t o Page s 1 2 5 – 1 2 9 92. All well discussed in Warnke, “Durchbrochene Geschichte,” 71, 78. 93. Phillips, Reformation of Images, 68, and Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 16. 94. Davis, “Transformation of London,” 306. 95. Phillips,

Reformation of Images, 69; on 63–­65 Phillips provides a good analysis of the uses to which buildings were put after the Henrician reform. 96. Phillips, Reformation of Images, 68. 97. Phillips, Reformation of Images, 197–­98. 98. See Monballieu, “De reconstructie.” 99. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 17–­24. 100. See Bruel, Cluni. 101. Although, as Gero (“Byzantine Iconoclasm,” 27) points out, this is better attested for the reign of Constantine V than that of Leo III. Cf. Brown, “Dark-­Age Crisis,” 30, for example, and his broad statement that “iconomachy in action is monachomachy.” 102. “For both were, technically, unconsecrated objects. . . . He [the monk] was holy because he was held to be holy by his clientele, not because any bishop had conferred holy orders on him.” Brown, “Dark-­Age Crisis,” 21. 103. Theophanes, in De Boor, Theophanes chronographia, 446. 104. See also Woodward, Dissolution of the Monasteries, and Youings, Dissolution of the Monasteries. 105. In England the monastic visitors at the time of the Dissolution noted in their findings both sexual misconduct and superstitious veneration of relics: Phillips, Reformation of Images, 129. 106. The inscription beneath the second cross is recorded by Theodore the Studite, Refutatio poematum iconomachorum; see Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 99, col. 437; Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, anthology, no. E24. 107. Vita S. Stephani iunioris, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 100, col. 1120. 108. Vita S. Stephani iunioris, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, 100, col. 1172; cf. Cormack, Writing in Gold, 38. 109. Phillips, Reformation of Images, pl. 24b, reproduces a photograph of the base of the rood screen of St. Mary’s Priory in Binham, Norfolk, whitewashed and painted over with texts from Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament. See also pl. 29b for the painting of the text of the Decalogue on the exterior of a triptych at Preston, Suffolk. 110. Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek, fol. 204. 111. See Phillips, Reformation of Images, 88, 119, 128–­29, 138, for examples, as well as for other instances of replacement. 112. Yates, “Queen Elizabeth as Astraea.” 113. Vallance, Old Crosses and Lychgates, 102–­6. 114. Garside, Zwingli and the Arts, 112. 115. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 17. 116. Prims, “De Beeldstormerij.” 117. For an interesting example in Malines, see Monballieu, “De muurschildering.” 118. Phillips, Reformation of Images, 109. 119. Phillips, Reformation of Images, 126. 120. Strype, Annals, 408–­10. 121. Both quoted in Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 15. 122. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 23. 123. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm,” 25. 124. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, 13, cols. 329D–­332D. 125. For all these, see Elliger, Die Stellung. 126. The thirty-­sixth canon of the Synod of Elvira (ca. 306), one of the councils that Calvin (Institution de la religion chrétienne, 718) played off against the Second Council of Ni-

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No t e s t o Page s 1 2 9 – 1 3 1 caea, read, “Placuit picturas in ecclesia esse non debere ne quod colitur et adoratur in parietibus depingatur” (there should be no paintings in churches lest what is worshiped and venerated be painted on walls); cf. Bareille, “Elvire.” The eighty-­second canon of the Quinisext Council of 692 (the Trullan Synod), while not by any means objecting to the principle of religious imagery, nonetheless insisted on the replacement of representations of Christ as a lamb—­see Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 11, cols. 977–­78; Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, anthology, no. B15. Canon 100 raises objections to pornographic imagery. 127. A specific objection made by Erasmus in the Christiani matrimonii institutio, in Clericus, Desiderii Erasmi, t. 5, 696F–­697A. 128. Justin, Apologia 1.9.4. Idzerda (“Iconoclasm,” 20) refers to opposition to the inclusion of the fine arts in the education of children—­because the arts corrupted morals; the lax morals of artists were adduced as proof. Superstitious suspicion of a related sort may be found in the objection of many of the pro-­image writers of the sixteenth century to artists who worked on Sundays and other holy days: cf. Molanus, De historia 3.71: Admonitio ad pictores de non pingendo diebus sacris. 129. Even secular writers, like the poet Anna Bijns, accused the iconoclasts of destroying what aroused devotion while allowing the depiction of which aroused unchastity ­“after the manner of the heathen.” In their own homes they had unedifying and immoral representations of Cupid, Lucretia, and Venus: Bogaers and Van Helten, eds., Refereinen, 106, 118, 124. This sort of reproach had first been made by Clement of Alex­andria but was popularized in the Reformation period by Erasmus and rendered topical by the controversialists. For Clement of Alexandria, see his Exhortation to the Heathen, chap. 4, in Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, 189. For Erasmus’s reproach, see Clericus, Desiderii Erasmi, t. 5, 719B–­E, and for one of the polemicists, see also Duncanus (Donk), Een cort onderscheyt, fols. Biv, recto and verso: “Waerom en gaen wy dan niet eerst ons cygen huysen reyn maken, etc.” 130. Cf. Bilson, “Architecture of the Cistercians,” 190–­95. See also St. Bernard’s comments in the Apologia ad Guillelmum, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, 182, cols. 912–­16. 131. “Quid putas, in his omnibus quaeritur? poenitentium compunctio an intuentium admiratio?” In Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, 182, col. 913. 132. Lea, History of the Inquisition, 1:554–­55; 2: 55, 3:43–­47, 480–­88, 612. For the sixteenth-­ century indices, see Reusch, Die Indices. 133. Τῶν

ζωγράφων ἐφεύρεσις ἡ τῶν εἰκόνων ποιήσις · ἀλλα τῆς καθολικῆς ἐκκλησίας ἔγκριτος θεσμοθεσὶα καὶ παράδοσις; in Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 13, col. 252.

See also Grabar, L’iconoclasme byzantin, 259. ut fidelius observentur, statuit sancta synodus, nemini licere, ullo in loco vel ecclesia, etiam quomodolibet exempta, ullam insolitam ponere val ponendam curare imaginem, nisi ab episcopo approbata fuerit” (so that these things may be more faithfully observed, the holy council has decreed that no one is permitted to place or cause to be placed in any place or church, howsoever exempt, any unusual image unless approved by a bishop). Alberigo et al., Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, 752. 135. See Jedin, “Entstehung und Tragweite.” 136. These are too numerous to mention here, but for a selection, see Polman, L’élément historique. 137. Well discussed in Blunt, Artistic Theory, 103–­6. 138. Blunt, Artistic Theory, especially 110–­26. Though now much maligned, Blunt’s book remains an efficient summary of these issues. 139. Gilio da Fabriano, Due dialogi . . . degli errori de’ Pittori (Camerino, 1564), available in Barocchi, Trattati d’arte, vol. 2. 134. “Haec

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No t e s t o Page s 1 3 1– 1 3 7 140. Paleotti,

Discorso intorno (1582); Latin translation, De imaginibus sacris et profanis (1594). On this aspect of Paleotti’s work, see Prodi, Gabriele Paleotti, 2:527–­562, and cf. Prodi, “Ricerche.” 141. See even Diehl, Manuel d’art byzantine, 352. 142. The Byzantine and Early Christian iconoclasts were not so much against art as much as against all attempts to invest the figurative with any form of holy signification. 143. Ghiberti, Commentaries 2.1, in Von Schlosser, Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwürdigkeiten. Chapter VI 1. Colored

engraving, 34 × 23.5 cm., published April 26, 1791, by H. Humphry, N18 Old Bond Street, London. George, Monster Broke Loose, 846–­47, no. 7976. 2. Boydell and Boydell, Collection of Prints. On the gallery itself, see the introduction to the edition by Santaniello, Boydell Shakespeare Prints, with a useful bibliographical note (no pagination), and Hutton and Nelke, Shakespeare Gallery. 3. See especially Boase, “Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Plays”; on Gillray’s exasperation see George, Political and Personal Satires, 639 (sub no. 7584), 867 (sub no. 8013), and 917 (sub no. 8015). 4. George, Political and Personal Satires, 639 (with earlier sources), and Santaneillo, Boydell Shakespeare Prints. 5. George, Political and Personal Satires, 847. 6. For the financial and commercial aspects of the Gallery, see Hutton and Nelke, Shakespeare Gallery, 14–­15, as well as Friedman, “Commercial Aspects,” 396–­400. 7. “Der Täter und seine Motive sind für uns völlig uninteressant, denn man darf an die Beweggrunde eines mental Gestörten nicht normale Maßstabe anlegen,” according to the Neue Kronen Zeitung of October 11, 1975. Whether or not precisely reported, the sentiments thus expressed have the ring of plausibility, and they are widely shared. To take only one out of many such reactions, compare the immediate response of the Rijksmuseum curator the day after the attack: “Iedereen die de Nachtwacht aanvalt moet gestoord zijn” (anyone who attacks the Night Watch must be deranged), reported in De Volkskrant, September 15, 1975; and see the further discussion on p. above. 8. The psychoanalytic concept of suggestibility, as Dr. Ernest Kahn once reminded me, is of obvious applicability here; its usual relevance is to the case of hysterics, but it may well operate with respect to the varieties of violence involved in iconoclasm and the inclination toward it. On several occasions in the course of preparing the present essay, I encountered reservations about allowing me access to files on works damaged in the course of iconoclastic acts, on just these grounds. The responses of museum curators in charge of such files varied from grave concern about the public airing of matters like these to free acknowledgment of the significance of the subject for the history of images. The views are not, of course, incompatible, and often they were expressed by one and the same person. Such ambivalence reflects the psychological complexity of the subject and the interlocking polarities of emotion it is capable of arousing. 9. At least until fairly recently. The situation with respect to the study of iconoclasm and iconoclastic movements and acts is not as acute as it was a decade or so ago. Almost alone in the 1960s, Julius Held made a brilliant and extraordinarily wide-­ranging assessment of both past and contemporary attacks on works of art, although he included one category of mutilation not discussed here: the doctoring, excision, or curtailment of works of art to make them look more aesthetically pleasing—­usually for financial motives; or the discarding of all but the most “beautiful” parts. See Held, “Alteration and Mutilation.” Since I commenced my own work on my doctoral dis-

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sertation in 1969 (Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting”), an increasing number both of general and of case studies has appeared. These include, notably, the collection of essays edited by Warnke (Warnke, Bildersturm), as well as Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium; Phillips, Reformation of Images; Scheerder, De beeldenstorm (on the Netherlands in the sixteenth century); and Christensen, Art and the Reformation. Interest in recent and contemporary iconoclasm continues to grow apace, as evidenced by particular case studies such as Staeck and Adelmann, Der Bonner Bildersturm, and Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne, which also contains an extremely useful survey of recent works on the vandalism of works of art. In the 1970s and 1980s art historians have also shown greater awareness of the significance of the great iconoclastic movements of the Reformation (perhaps most brilliantly in Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors, esp. 69–­93), of the French Revolution (for an out-­of-­the-­way study see Scheinfuss, Von Brutus zu Marat), and of the Russian Revolution (see now the stimulating discussion of the removal of monuments of the czarist regime in Gassner, “Zwei Arten,” as well as Dregenberg, “Die sowjetische Politik”). None of these areas have been neglected by political, social and theological historians. For further references, see Freedberg, “Structure.” Indeed, the collection of essays edited by Bryer and Herrin (Iconoclasm) bears ample witness to the fact that of all iconoclastic movements, that of the eighth and ninth centuries in Byzantium has received by far the most attention, and their list of abbreviated works on x–­xi includes the most outstanding of the many excellent and thorough works in this specific area (but again, they are not primarily by historians of art). That the interest outlined above continues is evidenced by a number of still more recent works—­not all as adequate as one might have hoped—­especially in the theological field. See, to cite only a few examples, De’ Maffei, Icona, pittore e arte, and Fazzo, La giustificazione, for the Byzantine period; Scavizzi, Arte e architettura sacra, for the late medieval period as well as for the sixteenth century; the useful general Reformation survey Stirm, Die Bilderfrage; and so on and so (abundantly) forth. I list these references merely to indicate the spate of interest in the subject during the last fifteen years, not to make any qualitative or ranking judgments about them. The present essay, however, seems to be one of the few to concern itself with the individual rather than social movements or the movements as a whole. I have omitted the equally important areas of non-­Western iconoclasm and non-­Western outbreaks of hostility, antipathy, and violence to images, largely for want of space. These areas have also received considerable—­but still insufficient—­attention, especially with respect to Islam. Here too, general and comprehensive analyses are still wanting. For a useful survey of the problem by a criminologist, see Geerds, “Kunstvandalismus,” which deals summarily with several of the issues raised in the course of the present essay. Geerds’s footnotes are especially useful for references to further approaches to the subject from the forensic and criminological point of view. 10. Naturally the quantity and specificity of the evidence varies enormously. For the fate of specific works in the Netherlands (particularly in Antwerp), see especially Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting,” chaps. 5 and 7 (“Effects of the Netherlands Iconoclasm on Art: Destruction, Saving and Repairs,” and “New Altarpieces and Other Aspects of Antwerp Painting in the Age of Iconoclasm,”), as well as Freedberg, “Representation of Martyrdoms.” For some German and Swiss examples, see Christensen, Art and the Reformation, and Garside, Zwingli and the Arts. The interested investigator will find any number of further instances in local sources and chronicles. One of the most spectacular of such sources comes from England, with the frighteningly vast listing of destruction for Suffolk and Cambridge alone, in the journal of William Dowsing, in which he me-

N o t e s t o P AGE 1 3 8 thodically records his achievements in these counties (acting on commission from the earl of Manchester following the Long Parliament’s 1643 ordinance concerning images). For a summary of his activities, with further examples and a good range of bibliographical references, see Phillips, Reformation of Images, 184–­87. Dowsing’s journal was published in 1786 (Dowsing, Journal). See for example, p. 2: “At Haver L. Jan. the 6th 1643. We broke down about an hundred superstitious pictures, and seven Fryars hugging a Nunn; and the Picture of God and Christ; and diverse others very superstitious . . . and we beat down a great stoneing Cross on the top of the Church.” For Dowsing’s Cambridgeshire depredations, see Cheshire, “William Dowsing’s Destructions.” 11. The relative status of social and political motivation has been much discussed, above all for the Netherlands. See the excellent summary in Dierickx, “Beeldenstorm,” as well as the more recent discussion in Scheerder, De beeldenstorm. The debate about levels of motivation has been particularly acute in the case of iconoclasm in Flanders and Antwerp, where the evidence is abundant and where discussion has been stimulated by the views of Marxist historians, as in Kuttner, Het hongerjaar 1566, and Wittman, Les Gueux. The earlier views of motivation are usefully summarized in Van Roosbroeck, Het wonderjaar. For a brief general survey of questions of motivation, see my section on this aspect of iconoclasm in Freedberg, “Structure,” 167–­68; but see also Freedberg, “Problem of Images.” 12. The evidence of material destruction obviously varies from locale to locale; but a good early example from a then less studied area was provided by McRoberts, “Material Destruction.” 13. Verheyden, Le conseil des troubles, as well as the vast number of documents recording the investigations of the Raad van Beroerten in the Archives Générales du Royaume (Algemeen Rijksarchief), Brussels, which have been widely and extensively published in the various works on Netherlandish iconoclasm recorded in the preceding notes. 14. For examples culled from Van Mander’s Schilder-­boeck, see Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting,” especially 124–­35. 15. For the Reformation, the key articles on the theological aspects of iconoclasm are by Von Campenhausen: “Die Bilderfrage als theologisches Problem,” “Zwingli und Luther,” and “Die Bilderfrage in der Reformation.” Also, amid much else, see the useful surveys in Stirm, Die Bilderfrage, and Moxey, Pieter Aertsen. For Netherlands image theory, the fundamental reference is Polman, L’élément historique, especially 411–­18; this has been greatly expanded (with an extensive bibliography) in Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting,” esp. 33–­104, 135–­69, and more recently in Freedberg, “Problem of Images,” where, furthermore, anti-­image theory in iconoclastic motivation is discussed at greater length. 16. See Freedberg, “Structure,” for an attempt. 17. The situation is usefully summarized in Parker, Dutch Revolt, 74–­81, with the important observations and distinctions on 78 that “the fury was carried out, at least in the southern provinces, in a remarkably orderly way. In contrast to the ‘casting down’ of the Catholic churches in Scotland and France, the destruction in the South Netherlands was the work of a very small band of determined men. . . . The iconoclasm in the northern provinces was accompanied by more tumultuous scenes and involved more popular participation.” Parker (Dutch Revolt, 288n7) gives specific details (with sources) of organization. For Holland, see the excellent article Duke and Kolff, “Time of Troubles.” For the element of organization in Breda, see Beenakker, Breda; and in Nijmegen, Van Hoeck, Corpus iconoclasticum, 183–­85. See, furthermore, Scheerder, De beeldenstorm, esp. 98–­100 (“De Beeldenstorm een spontane beweging”’), for a very succinct summary of the degree to which the various iconoclastic bands were

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organized. Almost everywhere there is evidence of at least some organization, even though in some places crowds either joined in the fury once a few began it, or remained passive while the image breaking went on. 18. The classic and fundamental piece on the hedge sermons is Fruin, “Haagpreek.” For the relationship between hedge sermon, theory, and action, see Freedberg, “Problem of Images.” 19. On Breda itself, see Beenakker, Breda, 68–­73. The Antwerp iconoclasm took place on August 20. The next morning—­Wednesday August 21—­reports of that event were already circulating in Breda, and on Thursday the storm broke loose there too. The same dates apply, for example, to Middelburg, Vlissingen, and—­very slightly later (though still beginning on August 22)—­’s-­Hertogenbosch. 20. See n. 10 above for a selection of references to this now very well described event. 21. Perhaps the most important town to have been spared was Haarlem. That this was so appears largely to have been a result of the efforts of Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert, who, despite his reservations about images and his hostility to the Spanish regime—­ and despite allegations to the contrary—­managed to restrain the more destructive and willful elements within the Haarlem populace. See Kleijntjens and Becker, Corpus iconoclasticum, 1–­110. In Haarlem Brederode’s agitation was mitigated not only by ­Coornhert but also by the timely provision of a separate church in which the Protestants could worship—­a measure that failed (or was refused) elsewhere. Gouda and Dordrecht were spared as well; so were the main towns of Gelderland, Arnhem, ­Nijmegen, and Zutphen. At Hoorn the iconoclasts appear to have been thwarted in the nick of time—­they were successfully driven off by mud-­and-­dung-­throwing Catholics (Duke and Kolff, “Time of Troubles,” 323, also listing other places in Holland that escaped the worst of the storm). 22. For the purification of churches in and around Groningen, see Kleijntjens, “Beeldenstorm in Groningen.” For the purification and whitewashing of a Leeuwarden church (Oldehove), see Woltjer, Friesland in hervormingstijd, 152, and Woltjer, “Beeldenstorm in Leeuwarden.” For Limburg see Van Vloten, “Pièces concernant les troubles.” For Culemborg, see De Jong, De Reformatie, 144 (“Dye heere van Kuyllenborch heef zijn kerck gans doir laten witten” [the lord of Culemborg had his church completely whitewashed]); for Middelburg, Van Vloten, Onderzoek. Indeed in some places—­Utrecht most notably—­the richest churches were spared, since the iconoclasts’ desire seems to have been simply to have their own church in which to hold services (see Van Hulzen, Utrecht, as well as Van Vloten, “Stukkenbetreffende ketterij,” and Kleijntjens and Van Campen, “Bescheiden”). 23. See Freedberg, “Iconoclasm and Painting,” 105–­35, for many instances. There often—­ but by no means always—­appears to have been some awareness of the importance of saving the most famous or most skilled works of art. The most renowned work to have been saved was probably the altarpiece of the Mystic Lamb in Ghent; the way in which it was preserved is recorded in Van Vaernewijck’s manuscript in the University Library in Ghent, but more easily available in the French translation by Van Duyse, Mémoires d’un patricien Gantois, 1:129–­32, where many further instances of destruction, saving, and repair are recorded as well. Many characteristic examples of the saving of works are recorded by Van Mander, Het schilder-­boek (see the case of Cornelis Engebrechtsz’. Marienpoel altarpiece on fol. 210v, for instance); but the most extensive published material is provided in the brilliant examination of Turnhout by Van Autenboer, “Uit de geschiedenis van Turnhout.” 24. The classic Netherlandish rebuttal of this point of view—­though here attributed to Luther—­is the pamphlet ascribed to Marnix van Sint Aldegonde titled Van de Beelden afgheworpen in de Nederlanden in Augusto 1566 and significantly subtitled Antwoorde P. Marnixii, heere van St Aldegonde, op d’assertie eenes Martinists, dat het afwerpen der

No t e s t o Page s 1 3 9 – 1 4 0 beelden niemande dan der hoogher overheit gheoorlooft en zij (On the images thrown down in the Netherlands in August 1566 . . . The answer of Marnix van Sint Aldegonde to the assertion of a Martinist that the throwing down of images is permitted to no one but the higher authority). reprinted in Van St. Aldegonde, Godsdienstige en kerkelijke geschriften, 1–­34. For efforts at legitimation—­rather than toleration of promiscuous individual destruction—­in Nürnberg and Zürich, see Christensen, Art and the Reformation, 71, and Garside, Zwingli and the Arts, 120, 158–­59, respectively. Duke and Kolff (“Time of Troubles,” 322) provide instructive details of the application of the principle to immediate social and political necessity: “In The Hague, for example, the churches were stripped deliberately and methodically. Still more extraordinary, this was done with a semblance of legality. Two prominent members of the Reformed communities in The Hague and Delft informed the President of the Court of Holland that they had a warrant to purge the churches. Without probing more deeply, Mr. Cornelis Suys told them to proceed about their work without causing a commotion, and the twelve men so employed were paid out of the President’s pocket.” In any number of places the removal of images was thus carried out under direct supervision of the town authorities (or local nobleman), either because of avowed Protestant principle or—­more frequently—­in order to forestall indiscriminate destruction and violence. Such was the case in Leeuwarden, where images were removed by command of “regent and authorities” (Woltjer, “Beeldenstorm in Leeuwarden”). In The Hague, as we have seen, the magistrates actually paid for images to be removed as soon as they heard of the events in Antwerp (in order to avoid any unseemly tumult that might excite the mob; cf. Parker, Dutch Revolt, 80). Above all, local authorities instigated the removals in Antwerp in 1581 (Prims, “De Beeldenstormerij”). 25. Any number of ministers were involved either in the organization of iconoclasm or in the image breaking itself. At the very least they stood to gain a church building in which to preach. Kleijntjens (“Beeldenstorm in Groningen”) gives several instances, including the following: at Loppersum two lapsed priests destroyed images that had not yet been taken to safety (174); at Bedum the pastor himself took them down—­ although he did not destroy them (176); while in other places—­Saxum, for example—­ the pastor, presumably under suspicion, declared that he was not himself responsible for breaking the images (175). Kleijntjens also records that at Loppersum the schoolmaster helped the two lapsed priests destroy the images in the church (174); the rector of the school in Groningen together with his students helped pull down and smash images (Kleijntjens, “Beeldenstorm in Groningen” 174; cf. 212). It is worth recalling that in Antwerp in 1568 no fewer than twenty-­t wo schoolmasters lost their jobs “because they had taught their charges Protestant psalms and catechisms and had encouraged them to defy authority” (Parker, Dutch Revolt, 289n10, citing Briels, “Zuidnederlandse onderwijskrachten,” 92). 26. Held, “Alteration and Mutilation,” 1. 27. For the second of these concerns, see n. 55 below; for the third, n. 72; for the last category see—­out of many possible examples—­the entirely characteristic sentiment expressed by the headline in the Berliner Zeitung of April 22, 1982, to an article reporting the attack on Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue IV (the irony of the title in this context can hardly be overlooked): “Das hätte jeder Lehrling malen können” (Any student could have done this). 28. With the possible exception of the few examples and references listed in Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne, 19–­`, 114–­17, as well as the slightly older listings in Kinnane, “Kunstvandalismus”; Geerds, “Kunstvandalismus”; and Clapp, Art Censorship. 29. Such reports usually reveal a mixture of panic and enthralled excitement; further-

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more, they recount the iconoclastic act in such precise and minute detail that a well-­ nigh fetishistic fascination with the object itself is laid bare (cf. my comments —­in addition to the obviously sensationalist aspects of derangement and destruction). On validation by intersubjective comparison, see also my comments on pp. and above. 30. As Teunissen and Hinz (“Attack on the Pietà”) suggest (in an otherwise unhelpful analysis), it is also possible (indeed quite likely) that Laszlo Toth somehow identified with the figure of Christ in the lap of his mother—­an extreme case of the conflation of image and reality. “Nobody will ever know what went through the scrambled circuits of Laszlo Toth’s brain. . . . But one may guess: Toth had lost all power to distinguish between image and the reality it connotes” (Robert Hughes, Time, June 5, 1972, 40). 31. See De Telegraaf of September 16, 1972 (two days after the attack): “Ik ben de Messias.” Cf. the report in the Neue Kronen Zeitung of October 11, 1975: “Gott selbst, Jesus Christus, hat mir den Auftrag gegeben” (God himself gave me the task). 32. De Echo of January 17, 1911, carried an interview with the assailant, who made his resentments clear, along with the following brief exchange: “Maar waarom koos je juist de Nachtwacht uit?” (But why did you specifically choose that picture?) “Omdat het naar mijn weten het duurste stuk van ’t Rijk was” (Because to my knowledge it was the most expensive piece of the kingdom). 33. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, no. 320, oil on panel, 288 × 225 cm. Attacked on February 26, 1959. See the report in Kunstchronik 12 (1959): pt. 4, 89, as well as the account of its restoration in Maltechnik-­Restauro 65 (1959): 65–­70. The assailant was one Walter Menzl, who a year before had published a booklet titled Die Welt von Morgen: Aufgang einer glücklicheren Zeit (Uberlingen-­Bodensee, 1958), and who was later to describe himself as “eine Philosophischer Schriftsteller” (a philosophical writer) who was trying to bring about a new world in which war would no longer be known. This declaration followed the confiscation of several of his books and pamphlets (written under the pseudonym Paul Brecher) by the authorities in Konstanz. These included such titles as Der Schlussel zum Eros, Faust und Gretchen, Erotik der Elite, and Jenseits vieler Grenzen (reviewed as “Die Geschichte eines Abenteurers und Casanovas” in Pforzheimer Zeitung, October 21, 1966). He thus issued a “Hilferuf eines deutschen freischaffenden Schriftstellers, der durch einen Literaturunterdruckungsversuch ohnegleich um Existenz und Lebenswerk gebracht werden soll” (Cry for help from a freelance German writer who will be robbed of life and his life’s work by an attempt at literary suppression). 34. For these threats, see, for example, the articles in the Neue Rhein Zeitung of January 5, 1970 (“Alle Museen sind gewarnt. Rubens Attentäter ist noch immer verschwunden” (All museums are warned: Rubens attacker is still at large), and Saarbrücker Zeitung, January 7, 1970 (“‘Weltverbesserer’ Menzl stellte sich der Polizei” (“World-­improver” Menzl gives himself up to the police). That his messianic impulses continued is evidenced by his advertisements for help in the Munich Abendzeitung of January 24, 1970, and a variety of other public acts during that month (including interrupting an SPD conference on January 15, 1970). All this followed a number of letters and “final appeals” to a variety of newspapers in November and December 1969. His letterhead described him as “Der Mann, der eine Milliarde braucht, um die Welt in Ordnung zu bringen” (the man who needs millions to get the world into order). 35. See De Telegraaf and Trouw of September 16, 1975, for brief reports on the early history of Wilhelm de Rijk, a thirty-­eight-­year-­old former teacher from Bloemendaal. 36. Subsequent reports in German newspapers all maintained that at his hearing he insisted in words translated as “Es wurde mir von Herrn befohlen. Ich musste es tun!” (I was ordered by God: I had to do it!) and “Gott selbst, Jesus Christus hat mir den Auftrag gegeben” (God himself, Jesus Christ, gave me the task; Neue Kronen Zeitung, October 11, 1975). But cf. the report in De Telegraaf of September 16, 1975: “Ik ben de

No t e s t o Page s 1 4 1 – 1 4 2 Messias. Ik wilde een spectaculaire daad verrichten, zodat ik op de tv mijn boodschap aan de wereld zou kunnen uitdragen” (I am the Messiah. I wanted to do a spectacular deed, so that I could transmit my message to the world on television). 37. Cf. De Telegraaf, September 16, 1975, and Het Parool, September 15–­16, 1975. 38. For the classic case of publicity seeking—­Herostratos’s destruction of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus—­see n. 89 below. But such a motivation has been common. With regard to both the desire for publicity and the claim of possession by superior powers, the case of Leutard and the bees, recorded by Raoul (recte Radulphus) Glaber, is instructive in several respects. One day around the end of 1000 the peasant Leutard was working in a field round Châlons. He fell asleep, and it seemed to him that a great swarm of bees entered his body through his privates. . . . They seemed to speak to him bidding him to do things impossible to men. . . . He sent away his wife as though he effected the separation by command of the gospel; then going forth, he entered the church as if to pray, seized and broke to bits the cross and image of the Saviour. Those who watched this trembled with fear, thinking him to be mad, as he was; and since rustics are prone to fall into error, he persuaded them that these things were done by a miraculous revelation from God. . . . In a short time, his fame, as if it were that of a sane and religious person, drew him no small part of the commonpeople. [The wise bishop Gebuin then investigated Leutard and] made it clear that the lunatic had become a heretic; he recalled the people from insanity. . . . But Leutard, realizing that he had been completely overcome and deprived of the adulation of the people, threw himself to his death in a well. (Wakefield and Evans, Heresies, 72–­73) The story is as paradigmatic as one could wish, in its ascription of madness to the assailant of an image, the terror his deed arouses (even now it is not difficult to understand the horror at the destruction of an image of Christ and the consequent breaking of its power and aura), the fame or notoriety he subsequently achieves, and finally the awareness of failure of aim, here culminating in suicide. 39. Neue Kronen Zeitung, October 11, 1975; cf. Het Parool, September 16, 1975 (two days after the attack): “Hij zei niet alleen dat hij de messias was, maar sprak ook nog over Adam en Eva. Adam was volgens hem Christus en Eva de Satan” (He didn’t only say that he was the Messiah, but also spoke about Adam and Eve. According to him, Adam was Christ, and Eve the devil). 40. I am grateful to Dr. P. J. J. van Thiel of the Department of Paintings in the Rijksmuseum for providing this gloss on firsthand reports of the assailant’s words at the time he was apprehended, which confirm newspaper reports. 41. “Had je, toen je Vrijdagnamiddag de deur uitging, het plan De Nachtwacht te beschadigen?” “Neen! Ik was zoo aan’t wandelen en kwam in ’t Rijksmuseum, en toen ik daar eenmaal was, kwam in eens het idee in mij op, me op dat ding te wreken, mijn woede op dat stuk te koelen. Ik dacht dat het ding van het Rijk was . . . Ik had de bedoeling niet het schilderij te verknoeien. Ik wilde alleen maar een paar krassen er over geven.” “Maar waarom koos je juist De Nachtwacht uit?” “Omdat’t naar mijn weten’t duurste stuk van ‘t Rijk was . . . Och, als ik kribbig ben, ben ik tot alles in staat.” (De Echo, January 17, 1911, 4814) 42. London, National Gallery, no. 2057. Attacked on March 10, 1914. 43. The Times, March 11, 1914, referred to her as “the prominent woman Suffragist”—­a rather more tactful description than her subsequent one, “Slasher Mary.” Her attack on the Rokeby Venus took place during one of the periods in which she was released from Holloway Prison in order to recover from a hunger strike; it followed an extraor-

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dinary career as a protester on behalf of the feminist cause. As her obituary in the Sheffield Telegraph of November 8, 1961, recalled, she held the suffragette movement’s medal record—­ten bars for forcible feedings in prison, hunger strikes, and arrests. She appears to have been arrested, released, and rearrested a remarkable number of times under the so-­called Cat and Mouse Act—­in a few weeks between July 8 and October 12, 1913, she was detained for at least ten separate incidents of more or less petty violence (the “Cat and Mouse Act” was used to send prisoners out of Holloway when their lives were threatened by prolonged hunger strike). 44. The Times, March 11, 1914, 9. Implicit in this statement is the notion—­among others—­ that if one is to make a political protest then it would be better to assault a “dead” picture than a living being. Cf. the statement made by the assailant of the Night Watch in 1911: “En dan, een menschen leven is meer waard dan dat ding” (then too a persons’s life is worth more than that thing; De Echo, January 17, 1911—­words that immediately followed those quoted in n. 41 above). 45. In an interview—­aged sixty-­five—­with the Star (London), February 22, 1952. 46. Interview, Star (London), February 22, 1952. 47. Held (“Alteration and Mutilation,” 8–­12) gives some of the best-­known examples from the past, including the well-­nigh classic cases of Paul IV’s instructions to Daniele da Volterra to cover up the offending nudities of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (on which see also De Tolnay, Michelangelo, 98, and Camesasca, Sistine Chapel, 248–­50) and Louis of Orleans’s mutilation of Correggio’s Leda and the Swan (Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, no. 218) on the grounds that it was too sensual (cf. Mrs. Jameson’s comments, cited by Held, “Alteration and Mutilation,” 8, that “the memory of Correggio would surely have been fairer had he never painted them”). Held (“Alteration and Mutilation,” 6) rightly notes that the other side of the coin—­the mutilation of sexual parts—­may well be motivated by “the subconscious compulsion to possess” the figure represented (usually the female figure). Many other examples in Clapp, Art Censorship. For the sixteenth century, see Freedberg, “Johannes Molanus,” which also contains many instances of earlier objections to indecent imagery. But see also Freedberg, “Hidden God,” especially 133–­35. 48. Abundant examples of iconoclastic attacks on works regarded by the assailant as somehow improper or indecent are collected in Clapp, Art Censorship. 49. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, no. N M 8670. See Leeuwenberg and Halsema-­Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst, 241, no. 318. 50. I am grateful to Dr. J. W. Niemeyer and Dr. W. Kloek for telling me of this otherwise unrecorded instance of the relationship between an ostensible desire for decency and decorum on the one hand and iconoclasm on the other. For the sentiment, cf. the classic reproach by Clement of Alexandria to the Greeks that “you are not ashamed in the eyes of all to look at representations of all forms of licentiousness which are portrayed in public places” (Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, 189). 51. As Leeuwenberg and Halsema-­Kubes (Beeldhouwkunst, 241) noted of her finely sculpted garment: “Evenals de voor de borst samengespelde mantel laat het een groot deel van hals en schouders onbedekt.” Here it’s worth recalling the traditional association between mirrors and vanity or lasciviousness, on which—­for the Netherlands in the seventeenth century—­see above all De Jongh, Tot lering en vermaak, 190–­93, no. 47, and, in the same volume, Abraham Janssens’s picture in Brussels of a buxom Lascivia gazing at herself in a mirror (168, fig. 40b). 52. National Portrait Gallery, London. Attacked on August 29, 1981 ( just six days after being put on show), by a twenty-­year-­old student. 53. Times, September 17, 1981.

N o t e s t o P AGE 1 4 4 54. Times, September 17, 1981. 55. This attitude is reminiscent of recurrent objections to images on the grounds of their

cost and financial value. From St. Bernard through Martin Luther, we are familiar with the feeling that the huge sums spent on paintings, sculptures, and other ornaments would be better spent on the poor, on other more socially worthwhile causes. St. Bernard’s views are succinctly expressed in the well-­known letter to William of St. Thierry, in Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, vol. 182, cols. 915–­17: “Fulget ecclesia in parietibus et in pauperibus eget” (the walls of the church glitter and the people are in need). For Martin Luther, see D. Martin Luthers Werke, 1:236, 556, 598; 10:3:32 (“Man thet auch Got kein dienst noch wolgefallen darinne wenn wir jm ein bilde mache, und theten besser, wann sie einem armen menschen einen gulden geben dann gotte ein gulden bilde” [we neither serve nor please God when we make him a picture, and we do better when we give a poor person a golden guilder than when we give him a golden image]). For other Protestant expressions of this view see Christensen, Art and the Reformation, 43–­44. Still more references in Freedberg, “Hidden God,” 149–­50n56. 56. Times, September 17, 1981. 57. The locus classicus is Athanasius of Alexandria’s illustration of the unity of Father and Son by “the example of the Emperor’s image which displays his form and likeness. The Emperor is the likeness of his image. The likeness of the Emperor is indelibly impressed upon the image, so that anyone looking at the image sees the Emperor, and again anyone looking at the Emperor recognizes that the image is his likeness. . . . He who worships the image worships the Emperor in it. The image is his form and likeness” (Oratio contra Arianos 3.5; Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, vol. 26, col. 332; Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova, vol. 13, col. 69B–­D). Cf. John of Damascus, De imaginibus oratio 3; Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, vol. 94, cols. 1404–­5. 58. The classic theological statement insisting against this elision is of course by St. ­Basil: ἡ τῆς εἰκόνος τιμὴ ἐπὶ τὸ πρωτότυπον διαβαίνει (the honor paid to the image passes through to its prototype), in De spiritu sancto 18.45 (Migne, Patriologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, vol. 32, col. 149C). For a discussion of the theological implications of this statement (which comes, like Athanasius of Alexandria’s cited in the preceding note, in a passage illustrating the relation of the Son to the Father in the Trinity), see Ladner, “Concept of the Image.” But the fundamental article in this whole area still remains Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 85–­150 (on Basil and Athanasius, see especially p. 91); see also Freedberg, “Hidden God,” for further general reflections and references concerning the whole question of elision. 59. Counsel for the defense said at that trial that “it was an attack on a portrait of someone who was extremely popular in Britain, and there had been a sense of outrage” (Times, September 17, 1981). For the question of the financial value of an image, see n. 55 above. 60. Cf. the comment of the sailor cook who attacked the Night Watch in 1911: “En dan, een menschen leven is meer waard dan dat ding” (and then too, a person’s life is more valuable than that thing). De Echo, January 17, 1911, 4814. 61. This in itself may account for the many attacks on images of royalty, even when they are not symbols of a repressive order (as they were in cases such as those of Alba in Antwerp in 1567, of the nobility during the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany, of the czars during the Russian Revolution, and so on). For example, there have been attacks on statues and paintings of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. In 1970 another painting of royalty in the National Portrait Gallery in London—­that of the queen by

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Annigoni—­was assailed. When the painting had been on display for only three days, a woman shouted abuse and hurled a Bible at it (recalled in the report in the Times of August 31, 1981, on the attack on the painting of Princess Diana). 62. London, National Gallery, no. 5597, 154 × 214 cm, attacked on April 3, 1978, by a recent Italian immigrant who was unemployed and had a history of mental illness (Times, 4 April 4, 1978, and Guardian, June 20, 1978). 63. Daily Telegraph, June 20, 1978; Sheffield Star, June 19, 1978 (on pleading guilty). 64. Cf. the headline “Die Zerstörung der Gemälde hat mich befriedigt” (The destruction of the painting satisfied me), in the Munich Abendzeitung of October 10, 1977. For further details of these attacks, see n. 71 below. 65. Evening Standard, June 19, 1978: “Three psychiatrists who interviewed him since his arrest agreed he was schizophrenic. Dr Jack Shaby, medical officer at Brixton Prison, said that Borzi slashed the painting when he was suffering from delusions and hallucinations. ‘He was living in a world of fantasy,’ he said.” The Daily Telegraph of June 20, 1978, reported that “sentencing Borzi, Judge Friend recommended that he should be taken to a prison specializing in psychiatric treatment until deportation papers were served.” 66. Evening Standard, April 3, 1978. 67. Liverpool Daily Post, April 4, 1978. 68. The biblical source is Exodus 32; after Moses delayed his descent from Mount Sinai, the Israelites exhorted Aaron, “Up, make us gods” (32:1); they contributed their golden ornaments, from which he fashioned a molten calf and built an altar before it; and they rose up early on the morrow and offered burnt offerings . . . and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play” (32:6). God was angry, as was Moses; the new tablets of the law were broken, and the calf was destroyed. In 1 Corinthians 10:7 this episode served as the basis for the admonition “Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.” A crucial sixteenth-­century representation of the subject is Lucas van Leyden’s Adoration of the Golden Calf (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, no. A3841), painted at just the time (ca. 1525) when the relation between image worship (especially Catholic image worship) and idolatry was being spelled out in no uncertain terms. For more on the implicit irony of a painting representing this particular subject, see Silver, “Sin of Moses,” 406; but see especially Parshall, “Visual Paradoxes.” 69. Clapp (Art Censorship) gives a listing up to 1972 that is by no means complete but is probably fuller than anything else available. Most of Clapp’s citations, however, have to do with works destroyed or mutilated as a result of objections to their putative immorality or their high cost, or because of the increasingly frequent allegation that modern work is not “art” at all. For the period after 1972, see, inter alia, Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne, 114–­17. 70. Compare the case of the chisel attack on Raphael’s Sposalizio in the Brera in Milan in 1958, where the assailant left a sign reading “Long live the Italian Revolution” (cited by Held, “Alteration and Mutilation,” 4). It has become a common journalistic practice to survey instances like this whenever a well-­known work in a major museum is attacked. Thus for a useful overview of most of these examples, see the report in the Guardian, April 4, 1978, the day after the attack on Poussin’s Golden Calf discussed above. For these and further examples from 1956 on, see Held, “Alteration and Mutilation”; Geerds, “Kunstvandalismus,” 132–­33; Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne, 19–­21, 114–­17; and Kinnane, “Kunstvandalismus,” 25–­27. 71. All the attacks were by one Hans-­Joachim Bohlmann and were widely reported in the German newspapers. Bohlmann’s acid-­throwing activities began with Klee’s Goldfish in the Hamburg Kunsthalle on March 29, 1977, and continued through the

No t e s t o Page s 1 4 5 – 1 4 6 Kassel attacks on October 7, 1977. He remained unapprehended until his confession on October 8, 1977. His trial took place in Hamburg and lasted from January 16 to February 1, 1979. There it emerged that his wife had died after a fall while window cleaning just a few days before the first of his assaults on pictures. Like other assailants, he had already had a long history of severe mental illness; he felt he had been “cheated and disappointed by life,” wished to become famous, etc. The last straw was his wife’s death. At his trial he expressed regret at his actions (they occurred at “einem einmaligen kritischen Moment meines Lebens” (a uniquely critical moment in my life) and declared that he would not do such things again (press cuttings provided by the Deutsche Presseagentur, ref. bsd 251 311705 January 1979 263 vm). 72. The painting was knifed by a painter who resented the termination of a city subsidy to painters; apparently for similar reasons, another painter attacked van Gogh’s Self-­ Portrait in Grey Hat in the Van Gogh Museum just a short while later (Gamboni, Un iconoclasme moderne, 115, with references). Similar resentments may occur in the case of artists who are moved to destroy that which they see as not worthy of being regarded as “art” at all. On 15 March 15, 1953, an expatriate Hungarian artist destroyed Reg Butler’s prizewinning model for his sculpture The Unknown Political Prisoner, temporarily on display in the Tate Gallery—­it had won a substantial prize and seemed too simple, too abstract, and too easy (cf., for example, Daily Sketch, March 16, 1953, and New York Times, March 16, 1953). 73. To it could be added the whole range of works judged by the assailant to be unnecessarily or unfairly expensive, or to fail to conform to personal notions of what constitutes a work of art. For examples, see the preceding note as well as n. 55 above. 74. “Ons kostbaarste nationaal schilderstuk, De Nachtwacht, is door de moedwillige hand van een gedegeneerd sujet, met boos opzet in vrij ernstige mate verminkt. De bedrijver van dit laaghartig schandwerk [is] een gewezen kok der Marine, zekere Arnold Sigrist” (Our most precious national painting, the Night Watch, has been been attacked by the impulsive hand of a degenerate subject who seriously mutilated it with evil intention. The agent of this cowardly act is a former marine cook, a certain Arnold Sigrist; Het Leven, January 17, 1911, 74). 75. “Schijnbaar volmaakt kalm . . . met een onverschilligen grijnslach . . . blijkbaar zonder eenig besef van den omvang van zijn daad, een indruk welken in der loop van het onderhoud zelfs versterkt werd. . . . Toen wij den man nog eens wezen op het ongemotiveerde van zulk een laagheid, antwoordde hij met de grootste onverschilligheid. . . . Menschen, als de welke hier geschetst wordt, zijn een gevaar voor de maatschappij. Totale afwezigheid van een geweten spreekt uit zijn woorden. Ook in het Indische leger zou zoo iemand kwaad kunnen stichten. Men behoeft daar dus niet rouwig te zijn dat hij voor den dienst in de tropen is afgekeurd” (De Echo, January 17, 1911, 4814–­15). 76. As in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, September 15, 1975. 77. Indeed the police are reported to have maintained that they regarded it as their duty to protect the assailant against “unhealthy” publicity (“‘Wij achtten het onze plicht deze man tegen ongezonde publiciteit te beschermen,’ aldus een zegsman van de Amsterdamse politie”; Het Parool, September 16, 1975)—­although the statement may here have an element of expediency as well (“the less said the better” being a characteristic stance, as I observed earlier). 78. Examples of this reaction are legion. Of the twentieth-­century instances cited here, one may begin with De Echo of January 17, 1911: “We hebben zelfs enkele uitdrukkingen geschrapt, die ons te stuitend voorkwamen” (we have even deleted some expressions which seemed too objectionable to us) is how it prefaced its interview with the sailor who slashed the Night Watch; it concluded that “Menschen, als de welke

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hier geschetst wordt, zijn een gevaar voor de maatschappij. Totale afwezigheid van een geweten spreekt uit zijn woorden” (People such as those sketched here are a danger to society. Complete absence of conscience is evident from his words). On the other hand, the foulness of the deed could—­for this newspaper—­only be conveyed by insisting on the apparently cold normality of the man: “Maar wat we afdrukken is voldoende om te doen zien dat men werkelijk niet met een beklagenswaardig mensch te doen heeft” (but what we print is sufficient to show that one really doesn’t have to do with a pitiable person). The analytic conflict/confusion is altogether typical of reports of such cases. 79. Much journalistic mileage is self-­evidently to be gained simply by citing the supposed monetary value of the assaulted work. The value given is often entirely notional and sometimes exaggerated, but the inflated prices paid in auction rooms provide—­for journalists and others—­the only possible comparative bases for making the kinds of estimates that cause people to gasp. One would have thought the phenomenon to be especially common in the postwar years, when the spiral of prices has gone ever higher; but see n. 81 below for an early instance of this obsession. The need—­a little abated these days—­to assess the exact financial extent of the damage is also exemplified by reports on the attack on the Rokeby Venus cited in n. 81; but even in 1978 after the attack on Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf in the National Gallery in London (see pp. –­above), the Daily Telegraph of June 20, 1978, reported that the court heard that the value of the painting “was now halved” (in its report on the trial of the ­assailant). 80. Indeed Het Leven, January 17, 1911, even commented on the cost of the gallery that had been built specifically for the Night Watch. The caption of its photographs of the hall referred to “De Rembrandtzaal die indertijd voor de som van 70.000 gulden speciaal voor de Nachtwacht werd gebouwd” (the Rembrandt Gallery, which in the meantime is being built for the sum of 70,000 guilders). 81. In the course of its report on the attack, the Times of March 11, 1914, insisted twice on the purchase price of the picture (£45,000) and added two other characteristic elements. First it produced an estimate of the amount by which the value of the picture had decreased as a result of the attack (£10,000–­15,000); and then it made this revealing statement: “It was universally recognized by good judges as one of the masterpieces of the great Spanish artist,” and the width of the circle to which it appealed was shown by the subscription list, which contains names of lovers of art of every class, from the very rich to persons of extremely modest means. The list was headed by “An Englishman” who gave £10,000, then followed Lord Mickelham with £8,000, Messrs Agnew (who had been the vendors of the picture) with £5,250, the late Dr. Ludwig Mond with £2,000, and many others who gave £500, £250, £100, £50, and so on, till we come to “A Young Student” who contributed 2s. 82. Cf. the Daily Telegraph of April 12, 1978, in its report headed “Stricter Gallery Security,” after the attack on Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf: “Security arrangements are being reviewed by the National Gallery following the slashing last week. . . . In keeping with its policy, gallery officials declined to elaborate on the security review. . . . One said: ‘Security ceases to be security if we talk about it.’” In an article headed “Tralies voor de Nachtwacht?” (A barrier in front of the Night Watch?) following the 1975 slashing of the Night Watch, the Algemeen Dagblad of September 1975 reflected: “Blijft de vraag: zijn dit soort daden te voorkomen? . . . Dit “openbaar kunstbezit” zal altijd een zeker risico met zich meebrengen” (The question remains: can one prevent such deeds? This public art patrimony will always brings a certain degree of risk with it). On the other hand, Geerds (“Kunstvandalismus,” 140–­44) emphasized the value of security arrangements—­a variety of which he reviewed and analyzed—­even if only as means of discovering and detecting rather than actually deterring the assailants

No t e s t o Page s 1 4 6 – 1 47 of works of art; but he realized that given the large number of different cases and objects one should never have the illusion that there could be a generally useful concept of security that applied to all of them, or that one could ever discover an always perfect system that applied to each case: “Allerdings sollte man sich bei der Vielfalt der in Betracht kommenden Tatobjekte und den sich aus ihrer konkrete Funktion u. U. ­ergebenden Grenzen einer Sicherung keinesfalls der Illusion hingeben, ein allgemein brauchbares Konzept oder doch eine im Einzelfall stets perfekte Sicherung zu erzielen” (142). 83. “Duidelijk ziet men op onze foto hoe de dader het mes heeft gezet op de linkerknie van de figuur van kapitein Banning Cocq, en blijkbaar met de bedoeling een groot rond gat uit het doek te snijden, met het mes schuins links naar boven bewoog. Na een oogenblik schijnt het mes in zijn hand gedraaid te zijn, zoodat het plat over het doek streek en de, nu breedere, kras met een hoek naar boven ging om met wilden zwaai over de borst van Banning Cocq gaande, te eindigen op het lichaam van luitenant Willem Ruytenburg” (In this photo one can clearly see how the attacker began by putting his knife on the left knee of Captain Banning Cock, and then moved it diagonally upward, with the apparent intention of cutting a large round hole out of the painting. But it looks as if suddenly the knife turned in his hand, so that it moved flat over the surface, made a much wider slash, and swinging wildly over the chest of Banning Cocq ended up in the body of Lieutenant Willem Ruytenburg). Cf. the Times’s account on March 11, 1914, of the movements of Mary Richardson’s hand, in a report whose second sentence ran as follows: “She mutilated the picture with a small chopper with a long narrow blade, similar to the instruments used by butchers.” A similar obsession with the instrument used to attack a painting was shown by a large number of reports on the attack on the Night Watch in 1975; the press seemed to be particularly concerned—­diverted, amused?—­by the fact that the assailant had used a knife stolen from a restaurant where he had dined earlier in the day (cf. De Telegraaf, September 15, 1975). 84. Het Leven, January 17, 1911, 75: “Een onzer lezers uit de Museumbuurt was zoo beleefd ons telefonisch te waarschuwen, zoodat we binnen enkele minuten ter plaatse waren, en onzen lezers van dit vandalisme eenige fraaie opnamen kunnen aanbieden, zeker eenig in hun soort om haar actueele en typeerende waarde” (one of our readers in the museum neighborhood was so kind as to alert us by phone, so that we could be on the spot within minutes and offer our readers some excellent photos, certainly unique of their kind for their topical and representative value). 85. “Lacerated by a madman’s knife, the masterpiece has come gloriously back to life under the restorer’s touch,” ran the subheading of the article by Francis Leary. “How They Saved Rembrandt’s Nightwatch,” Readers Digest, April 3, 1977. Its second paragraph began thus: “Nightwatch! Rembrandt’s masterpiece . . . one of the most famous in the world! Hijmans was stunned. He hurried to the Nightwatch Gallery and stared in horror at the immense painting. Long strips of canvas hung limply from several deep gashes. There were 13 knife cuts. The two central figures had slashes two feet long while one triangular piece of canvas 12 by 2½ inches was completely severed.” 86. National Gallery, press notice, April 6, 1978: “Five pieces of canvas were cut and ripped from the stretcher, leaving very little of the 5 : 7 foot picture in the frame.” There is, of course, some justification for providing the press with precise details of the damage to a major work of art, but notes 83–­85 above make very clear how prurient interest in such details may turn out to be. Even in apparently straightforward reviews of iconoclastic activity, this kind of interest belies an element of real Schadenfreude. When Janet Watts surveyed the “chain of outrages” that preceded the attack on the Poussin, her article was headed “Knives, Acid, Ink: The Weapons of Art Vandals”;

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after assessing the financial extent of the damage caused by the North German acid thrower in 1977, she returned to the case of Michelangelo’s Pietà: in 1972 “Laszlo Toth hid a hammer under his mac, climbed over an altar rail in St Peters, and started to smash the face of Michelangelo’s Pietà, knocking off the nose, damaging the left eyelid, chipping the veil. Then he knocked off some of the fingers of the left hand and finally severed the left arm” (Guardian, April 4, 1978). Cf. Geerds, “Kunstvandalismus,” sec. 2 (“Praktiken der Tatausfuhrung” (Practices of the deed), divided into “Mechanische Praktiken” (Mechanical practices) and “Physikalisch-­chemische Praktiken” (Physico-­chemical practices), with several specific instances (134–­36). 87. As in the charming account of the four girls from Worcester who saw the attack on Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf and were rewarded by being taken to see the final stages of its restoration. “‘It should be quite an experience because we thought it would be impossible to repair the painting after the attack,’ said Jacqueline Laurence, aged 17. . . . They were accompanied by the art teachers who took them on the original visit. ‘There was so much small detail on the painting that the restorers were dubious whether they could ever repair it,’ said Mr Jellyman. ‘Although it will never be the same again, they must have worked miracles’” (Worcester Evening News, December 1, 1978). Popular awe at the renewing capabilities of restorers is exemplified, mildly, by headlines like “The Dedication of the Invisible Menders Who Will Restore the Golden Calf to Its Rightful Place” (Daily Mail, April 12, 1978, over a photo of the chief restorer of the National Gallery standing beside the damaged picture). 88. For an exemplary general presentation of the process of restoration in 1975, together with a selection of photographs of the work involved, see Hijmans et al., Rembrandt’s Nightwatch, 97–­121. The official published report is Kuiper and Hesterman, “Restauratieverslag.” The same number of the Bulletin contains further relevant reports and articles on the damage, technical examination, and repair by P. J. J. van Thiel; G. van de Voorde; E. van de Wetering; C. M. Groen, and J. A. Mosk; and C. J. de Bruyn Kops (all articles translated into English). 89. The classic case is, of course, that of Herostratus (Eratostratos). Valerius Maximus, 8.14.5, Aulus Gellius, 2.6.18, Aelian, 6.40, Strabo, 14.1.22 (640), Cicero, De natura deorum 2.69 and De divinatione 1. 47, and several other writers all record how he burned down the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, specifically in order to ensure that posterity would not forget his name. Although the Common Council of Asia decreed that no one should ever mention that name, it was handed down by Theopompos. 90. As Beenakker (Breda, 72) noted: “Primitieve gevoelens van haat en vernielingszucht hebben hierdoor toen meer kans gekregen, al gingen deze radicalen misschien ook tekeer om de katholieke cultus voor altijd onmogelijk te maken” (primitive feelings of hate and desire for destruction then had more of a chance, even though these radicals perhaps also went wild in order to make Catholic worship impossible forever). Cf. the judicious comment in Duke and Kolff, “Time of Troubles,” 322 that “the term beeldenstorm usually conjures up a scene of indiscriminate destruction with wreckers and looters running amuck in the churches. In fact, such outbreaks were comparatively rare in the northern part of the Netherlands, but because the image-­ breaking in Antwerp had taken this form, with Europe looking on, the exception was taken for the rule. In Holland the disturbances in Amsterdam, Delft, Leiden and Den Briel conform most closely to this pattern.” 91. As in n. 17 above. 92. Wils, “Beeldenstorm in Heenvliet,” 464: “De achste getuygen die baillieu van heenvliet . . . seydt dat hij des sondaechs na sinte bartolomeeusdach in ’t jair van 66 . . . , sach dat eene huch de smit hebbende een hamer alle dingen om stucken slouch” (the eighth witness, the bailiff of Heenvliet . . . said that on the Sunday after St. Bar-

N o t e s t o Page s 1 4 8 – 1 4 9 tholomew’s Day . . . he saw Hugo the smith smashing everything into pieces); from the Archives du Royaume, Brussels, Papiers de l’Etat et de l’Audience, no. 522, also containing further details of the destruction by this Huych de Smit and his accomplices). 93. Even though—­as we have seen—­iconoclasm is often planned, organized, and supervised, this loosening of social and psychological restraint is precisely what many of the commentators insist upon bringing to the fore. Thus, not surprisingly, Van Mander (Het schilder-­boek) frequently refers to the “rasende,” “onverstandighe,” “uytsinnighe,” “ontsinnighe,” “woest,” and “blind” (raging, crazy, senseless, savage, and blind) behavior of the iconoclasts (e.g., fols. 210v, 213v, 224v, 236v, 244, 244v, 254, 254v), while Motley, brilliantly using many of the elements of the sixteenth-­century descriptions he knew, provides a kind of omnium gatherum of contemporary attitudes: “The statues, images, pictures and ornaments, as they lay upon the ground, were broken with sledge-­hammers, hewn with axes, trampled, torn and beaten into shreds. . . . Nothing escaped their omnivorous rage. . . . The noblest and richest temple of the Netherlands was a wreck” (Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1:473–­75). A contemporary account of the Antwerp iconoclasm gives a list of the most notable works destroyed in the Cathedral and concludes: “Want haer verwoetheyt en namp gheen respect nerghens aen” (because their rage showed no respect anywhere; Van Loon and Ullens, Antwerpsch chronykje, 88). The evidence for “abdication of self-­control” (aside from the kind of isolated individual act analyzed in this lecture) is abundant in the South Netherlands but not in the North. Nevertheless in many places—­as in the case of Heenvliet cited in n. 92 above—­the matter does seem to have gotten out of hand and led to more or less promiscuous image-breaking. Despite the many efforts in Groningen and “de Ommelanden” to control the stripping of the churches and save works of art, there remains plenty of evidence to suggest that many individuals got carried away by their enthusiastic destructiveness (Kleijntjens, “Beeldenstorm,” 171–­216). 94. Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Pinacoteca, no. 38; oil on panel, 237 × 238 cm. 95. Padua, Eremitani, Ovetari Chapel; destroyed in 1944; left wall, lower row, right. For a good reproduction of this detail, see Fiocco and Pignatti, Frescoes of Mantegna, pl. xv. For other instances of damage to the faces of “figures representing villainous or detestable characters,” see Held, “Alteration and Mutilation,” 7. 96. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, no. A 2815; each panel 101 × 54/55.5 cm. 97. De Bruyn Kops, “De Zeven Werken,” 214: “Merkwaardig is dat alles niet in het wilde weg gebeurde, maar kennelijk nogal doelgericht” (it’s notable that all this didn’t happen in a wild and random way, but apparently rather purposefully). Cf. the English summary on 250: “Nor had all this been done at random, the intention clearly being to concentrate on the figures, faces, eyes, or even attributes of the persons performing the works of mercy.” 98. Attributed to Dirck Jacobsz., Toledo Museum of Art, no. 60.7; panel, 62 × 49.3 cm. 99. As appears from the photographs of the painting in its stripped state, which were made by William Suhr in 1959, immediately before he undertook restoration and repairs. The photos show severe X-­shaped cuts on the eyes and mouths. I am grateful to Dr. J. P. Filedt Kok for drawing my attention to this aspect of the painting’s history. With this example of the mutilation of the eyes in a portrait that seems extraordinarily and powerfully present, one may align that of the vastly more compelling and arresting 1500 self-­portrait by Dürer in Munich, Alte Pinakothek, no. 537, which has also been subject to various attempts at scoring out the eyes. 100. Düsseldorf, Kunstakademie; on loan from the Bentinck-­Thyssen collection. For a remarkable series of photographs revealing the stages in the removal of acid and the

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subsequent restoration—­as well as an account of the procedures involved—­see Peter, “Zur Restaurierung.” No one would fail to recoil with horror at the obliteration of the eyes and the consequent deprivation of the felt life of the image. 101. Perhaps the most telling of the loci classici is the story from the life of St. John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople (d. 595) by his disciple Photinus, telling of the way in which an image of the Virgin cured a severe case of demonic possession. The story ends with the absolutely telling statement that cure was wrought by the image, which was ο τόπος ο τύπος δε μάλλον της παρθένου μητρός (the place—­or rather the type—­of the Virgin Mother; Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 13, col. 85C)—­“a last minute withdrawal from the abyss of sheer animism,” as the most distinguished modern commentator on these matters puts it (Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 147). Cf. also Trexler, “Florentine Religious Experience,” for several striking Florentine instances of the location of the Virgin or saint in the particular image, of the operativeness of the image as Virgin or saint, not of the image as image of Virgin or saint. Freedberg, “Hidden God,” 139–­40, has a further analysis of this phenomenon. 102. This, of course, lies at the root of all iconoclastic acts and movements where representations of rulers or those in one form of authority or another are destroyed. But even in such cases—­often and erroneously termed “symbolic”—­this is only part of the story. In the Revolt of the Netherlands, in the English, French, and Russian Revolutions—­to take only the best-­known examples—­images of the deposed authority (or the authority that has to be deposed) were assailed with great vigor; but the explanation in terms of an attack on the authority itself is, as we have seen, only a superficial one. This essay has attempted to raise the deeper issue of why it is felt that by damaging images one somehow damages the authority they either denote or connote. For striking instances of the way in which damage to an image may be felt or seen to affect the powers of the authority itself, see the excellent study of iconoclasm in Münster in 1534–­35 by Warnke, “Durchbrochene Geschichte,” 84–­90 (“Der Angriff auf der Herrschaftssymbole”) and 91–­98 (“Deformationsformen”), where appropriate punishment was visited upon the images themselves, as if they were real bodies, by mutilating organs and limbs—­in the manner of judicial procedures of the time. 103. “Ich musste zerstören, was andere verehrten” (I had to destroy what others honored), said Hans Joachim Bohlmann when finally taken into custody. Words exactly like these, or to this effect, were reported by several German newspapers on October 10, 1977 (e.g., in the comprehensive report in Die Welt, October 10, 1977). But see the comment by Geerds (“Kunstvandalismus,” 139n25) on this same assailant: “Der Tater begründete sein Verhalten u.a. mit einem Aggressionstau der bewirkt habe, dass er etwas zerstören musste, was andere Menschen verehren, nach den Presseberichten über seine Taten sei Eitelkeit über die seinen Taten gezollte Aufmerksamkeit hinzugekommen” (among other things, the offender justified his behavior on the grounds that a logjam of aggression that made him destroy something that others honored; according to the press reports on his deeds, vanity should also be added to the attention paid to them). See also nn. 32, 36 above. 104. Admittedly Scavizzi (Arte e architettura sacra, 3) does attempt to shift responsibility for the equation by referring to its vulgar usage (“L’Idolatria, o per parlare in termini communi, la fede nelle qualità magiche dell’oggetto” (idolatry, or to speak in common terms, faith in the magical quality of the object; my italics;), but no real alternative to “idolatry” is offered in the general overview of his book. 105. Although there is much in Marcel Mauss’s general theory of magic that appears to me to be untenable or in need of revision, the following of his caveats seem to be appropriate in the present context: “These values [magical ones] do not depend on the intrinsic qualities of a thing or person, but on the status or rank attributed to them by

N o t e s t o Page s 1 5 0 – 1 9 2 public opinion or its prejudices. They are social facts, not experimental facts. . . . Magical ‘judgments’ are not analytical judgments. . . . We have no wish to deny that magic [not an ontological entity in Maussian terms] does not demand analysis or testing. We are only saying that it is poorly analytical, poorly experimental and almost entirely a priori” (Mauss, General Theory, 120, 122, 125). It is regrettable that claims about magical “properties” do not usually begin with the rigorous theoretical framework offered by Mauss—­especially his insistence on the a priori nature of magical judgments and on the fact that they are by no means individual, or inherent in the objects themselves, but are rather social and collective in origin. This aspect of his theory should lie at the foundations of any analysis of individuals—­like the iconoclasts discussed here—­who transgress socially acceptable norms while at the same time acting upon collective assumptions about that which they threaten to destroy. Chapter VIII 1. Ortalli, La pittura infamante. 2. It inspired large portions of my articulation of the broader political and psychological

functions of images in Freedberg, Power of Images. 3. Ortalli, La pittura infamante, 7 and 13. 4. “Colpire

l’individuo attraverso la sua immagine significava utilizzare il simbolo per giungere ad un fine concreto, seguendo una via molto congeniale ad un ambiente nel complesso ancora largamente illetterato ed analfabeta ma (in parte proprio per ciò) assai attento alia rappresentazione figurata, in grado di cogliere in essa un ricca serie di messaggi ed informazione.” Ortalli, La pittura infamante, 25. 5. See, for example, Newbury and Sachs, Defiant Images; Williamson, Resis­tance Art; Peffer, Art and the End of Apart­heid. 6. Peffer, Art and the End of Apart­heid. 7. Peffer, Art and the End of Apart­heid, 219–­40 (in Peffer’s chapter on censorship and iconoclasm). 8. The literature is now vast. For an overview, see, for example, Bolton, Cul­ture Wars; Freedberg, “Censorship Revisited.” 9. Ortalli (La pittura infamante, 67–­70) was prudently noncommittal about their identification and use—­pornographic insult or apotropaia? Of course they could have been both. 10. David Smith, “Zuma Sues Art Gallery over ‘Offensive’ Portrait: Explicit Image Vio­lates His Dignity, Says President; Painting’s Supporters Hail ‘Democracy at Work,’” Guardian, May 22, 2012. 11. Smith, “Zuma Sues Art Gallery.” 12. Jackie May and Andrea Nagel: “Ban the Spear, Stone Its Maker,” Times (South Africa), May 22, 2012. 13. “Art Attack,” editorial, Cape Times, May 21, 2012. 14. Marianne Merten, “Cosatu Says ‘Yes’ to Call to Boycott Spear ‘Purveyors,’” Star (South Africa), May 26, 2012. 15. Andrew England, “Painting of Zuma Defaced as Anger Rises,” Financial Times, May 23, 2012. 16. Gillian Schutte, “The President’s Penis,” May 21, 2012; see the website of the South African Civil Society Information Service: http://​sacsis​.org​.za​/s​/story​.php​?s​=1​ 302 (accessed April 24, 2015). 17. For a recent guide to the now-­large bibliography, see Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman. 18. Stephen Grootes, “Spear Rhetoric Puts ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ Back in the Picture,” Business Day (South Africa), June 1, 2012. 19. Freedberg, Power of Images.

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N o t e s t o Page s 1 9 3 – 2 0 9 20. Solly Maphumulo, “Strangers Who Ruined Portrait; 2 Men, Red Paint, Black Paint . . .

And Zuma Vanishes,” Star (South Africa), May 24, 2012. of the mullahs offered the argument that the images were idolatrous; others acknowledged that they had been blown up for the sake of publicizing the Taliban cause. In the case of the attacks by the Islamic State (ISIS) on the great early sculp­ tures in Nimrud, Mosul, and elsewhere in late 2014 and early 2015, one finds the same conflation of motivations and pretexts. The attacks, recorded on video, are accom­ panied by commentaries saying that the idolatrous monuments of the past must come down; but at the same time it is clear that the element of publicity for the Islam­ic State cause may play an even more significant role. ISIS has shown itself to be all too aware of the propagandistic use of images of terror and destruction. Its videos of the destruction of ancient art are calculated—­even staged—­to offer the maximum of visual and emotional effect. For more on this see the first and last chapters of this book. 22. For all these examples, see Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives. 23. Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives, 15. 24. Maphumulo, “Strangers Who Ruined Portrait.” 25. Freedberg, Iconoclasm and Painting. 26. David Freedberg, “Damnatio Memoriae: Why Mobs Pull Down Statues,” Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2003 (appendix 1 here). But see also –­above for further discussion of the orchestration of the removal of Saddam’s statue. 27. Haffajee’s original apology is no longer available on the City Press website, but is quoted in several sources, such as Mandy de Waal, “City Press Buckles to ANC Demands—­and Threats,” Daily Maverick (South Africa), May 29, 2012. 28. David Smith, “Jacob Zuma Goes to Court over Painting Depicting His Genitals,” Guardian, May 21, 2012. 21. Some

Chapter IX 1. For this series of axioms and reflections, as well as their continuation and elaboration,

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see my contribution to 23 Manifeste zu Bildakt und Verkörperung (Freedberg, “Iconoclasm”). 2. See Alan Blinder and Audra D. S. Burch, “Fate of Federal Monuments Is Stalled by Competing Legal Battles,” New York Times, January 20, 2019, www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​ /01​/20​/us​/confederate​-­­monuments​-­­legal​-­­battles​.html. 3. For “attentive to current political sensibility” read “politically correct,” a lightning rod of a phrase at this point in American history. 4. For a listing, see Jess Bidgood et al., “Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down across the United States: Here’s a List,” New York Times, August 28, 2017, www​.nytimes​ .com​/interactive​/2017​/08​/16​/us​/confederate​-monuments​ ­­ -removed​ ­­ .html. 5. Bidgood et al., “Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down”: “Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, called for its removal earlier this week, reversing a previously stated position that removing symbols like the statue would be tantamount to political correctness.” 6. Bidgood et al., “Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down.” 7. The governor took this position even before the events of Charlottesville; see Kyle Scott Klauss, “Charlie Baker Supports Removing Massachusetts’ Only Confederate Memorial,” Boston Magazine, June 9, 2017, www​.bostonmagazine​.com​/news​/2017​/06​ /09​/charlie​-baker​ ­­ -massachusetts​ ­­ -­­confederate​-­­memorial/. Media attention to the issue was renewed after Charlottesville; see Spencer Buell, “Massachusetts’ Only Confederate Monument Has Been Boarded Up,” Boston Magazine, August 16, 2017,

No t e s t o Page s 2 0 9 – 2 2 4 www​.bostonmagazine​.com​/news​/2017​/08​/16​/massachusetts​-­­confederate​-monument​ ­­ -­­boarded​-­­up/. 8. See William Neuman, “Ordering Review of Statues Puts de Blasio in Tricky Spot,” New York Times, August 30, 2017, www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/08​/30​/nyregion​/ordering​-review​ ­­ -­­of​-­­statues​-­­puts​-­­de​-­­blasio​-­­in​-­­tricky​-­­spot​.html. Cf. Edward Helmore, “New York Mayor Considers Christopher Columbus Statue Removal,” Guardian, August 25, 2017, www​ .theguardian​.com​/us​-­­news​/2017​/aug​/25​/new​-­­york​-­­christopher​-­­columbus​-­­statue​-­­de​ -­­blasio. 9. New York Times, August 25, 2017, A21. 10. David Nakamura, “Trump Mourns Loss of ‘Beautiful Statues and Monuments’ in Wake of Charlottesville Rally over Robert E. Lee Statue,” Washington Post, August 17, 2017, www​.washingtonpost​.com​/news​/post​-­­politics​/wp​/2017​/08​/17​/trump​-mourns​ ­­ -­­loss​ -­­of​-beautiful​ ­­ -statues​ ­­ -and​ ­­ -monuments​ ­­ -in​ ­­ -wake​ ­­ - ­­of​- ­­charlottesville​-­­rally​- ­­over​-­­robert​ -­­e​-­­lee​-­­statue/. Jennifer Schuessler, “Historians Question Trump’s Comments on Confederate Monuments,” New York Times, August 15, 2017, www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/08​/15​ /arts​/design​/trump​-­­robert​-­­e​-­­lee​-­­george​-­­washington​-­­thomas​-­­jefferson​.html. 11. Rick Lyman, “Political Rage over Statues? Old News in the Old World,” New York Times, August 18, 2017, www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/08​/17​/world​/europe​/european​-monuments​ ­­ -­­statues​-­­communism. 12. Eric Foner, “Confederate Statues and ‘Our’ History,” New York Times, August 20, 2017, www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/08​/20​/opinion​/confederate​-­­statues​-­­american​-­­history​.html. 13. Holland Cotter, “We Need to Move, Not Destroy, Confederate Monuments,” New York Times, August 20, 2017, www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/08​/20​/arts​/design​/we​-­­need​-to​ ­­ -­­move​ -­­not​-­­destroy​-­­confederate​-­­monuments​.html. 14. “Though to be truly useful schools they must be willing to identify themselves as historical halls of shame as well as halls of fame,” he continues. 15. Blinder and Burch, “Fate of Federal Monuments.” 16. Blinder and Burch, “Fate of Federal Monuments.” 17. Blinder and Burch, “Fate of Federal Monuments.” 18. See above, sections 6 and 11 of chap. 2, and chaps. 7–­10, esp. –­, , and , as well as Freedberg, “Censorship Revisited.” 19. From hammer blows to poking out of the eyes, there are, after all, only a limited number of ways in which the human species can visit particular forms of punishment on their enemies. Chapter X 1. Roger

Rosenblatt, review of Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir by John Banville, New York Times, February 19, 2018, https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com​/2018​/02​/19​/books​/review​/time​ -­­pieces​-­­john​-­­banville​-­­memoir​.html. 2. Rosenblatt, review of Time Pieces. 3. It’s perhaps worth recording that Nelson’s Pillar went up in 1805, while Napoléon was placed on top of his column in the Place Vendôme one year later. 4. In fact, an effort had already been made to destroy it in 1922. 5. See Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, 192. 6. James Hall, “A History of Sculpture in Painting,” Art UK, June 21, 2016, https://​artuk​ .org​/discover​/stories​/a​-history​ ­­ -­­of​-sculpture​ ­­ -in​ ­­ -painting. ­­ 7. See “Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc,” PBS​.org, Flashpoints, https://​w ww​.pbs​.org​/wgbh​ /cultureshock​/flashpoints​/visualarts​/tiltedarc​_a​.html. 8. Grace Glueck, “An Outdoor-­Sculpture Safari around New York,” New York Times, August 7, 1981.

299

N o t e s t o Page s 2 2 5 – 2 3 2 9. Much

has been written about this entire episode; see among others Jordan et al., Public Art; Senie, Controversy. 10. The argument is not so far from that of the iconoclasts at the Bienne triennial in 1980 (see above, p. , and described at length by Gamboni in Un iconoclasme moderne). 11. See n. 10. 12. For the origins of the idea of the idea in art, see, most famously, Panofsky, Idea (first published in German in 1924). 13. See my contribution to 23 Manifeste zu Bildakt und Verkörperung (Freedberg, “Iconoclasm”). 14. I will deal with this topic in my forthcoming book, Vision’s Reach. 15. “Regular reality is just so, uh, real. That’s why virtual reality, or VR, devices have ignited our imaginations in the past couple of years.” See http://​crunchwear​.com​/virtualizer ​-­­vr​-­­treadmill​-­­makes​-­­great​-­­use​-­­oculus​-­­rift/ for an advertisement for an immersive VR-­ enabled treadmill, with obvious potential both for exercise and for physical therapy. 16. The neuroscientific material on this topic is now vast. To cite only two of the most important writers in this domain, see the many works of Vittorio Gallese (e.g., “From Neurons to Phenomenal Experience” and “From Mirror Neuron Systems to Interpersonal Relations”) and Tsakiris, “Multisensory Basis,” as well as the useful recent survey by Schettler et al., “Embodiment of Objects.” 17. See pp. –­above. 18. As in the case of the trial of Dennis Barrie and the Cincinnati art museum in late September and October 1990; see also pp. –­above.

300

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Index

Abbey Church of Cluny, 125 Abu Ghraib, 40; images of, xv, xix, 40; and selfies, 40 adiaphora, x, 117 Adoration of the Golden Calf (Poussin), 144, 147, 248n27; attack on, 145–­46, 292n79, 292–­93n82, 293–­94n86, 294n87 Adoration of the Golden Calf (van ­Leyden), 89 Adoration of the Magi (Rubens), 145 Aertsen, Pieter, 80–­82, 84, 92, 94 aesthetics, xii, 43–­44, 228, 234–­35 Afghanistan, xi, 25, 36, 243–­46 Africa: iconoclasm in, 25–­26 African National Congress (ANC), 182–­84, 186–­91, 195–­96, 199–­201 agency, 47–­49, 231, 233 Aisha, 245 Alabama, 207 al-­Asaad, Khaled, xix, 14 Albert and Isabella, 112 Allegory of Iconoclasm (Gheeraerts the Elder), 92 Allston, Washington, 252n1 Alva, Duke of, 76–­77, 100, 107–­8 American Craft Museum, 170 Amphilochios of Ikonion, 117 Amsterdam (Netherlands), 9, 46, 61–­63, 67, 76, 80, 82, 87–­88, 92 Anabaptists, 62, 73, 121, 252n24; uprising, 118 Aniconism, xviii Annapolis (Maryland), 209 Answer to Valentin Compar (Zwingli), 56

antiquities: international traffic in, 37; and looting, 37 Antwerp (Netherlands), xxiii, 41, 61, 66–­67, 69, 102, 104–­6, 111–­12, 119, 125; Beeldenstorm (of 1566), 20, 127, 138; iconoclasm, 99–­100; sack of, 107–­8 Antwerp Cathedral, 4, 26, 69, 100, 196 apartheid, 182–­85 Apologia of vant schouwender afgoderije (Philipsz), 59 appropriation, 44, 46–­47, 188 Aquinas, Thomas, 108, 217–­18, 278n82 Arab Spring, 25 Archduke Albert (Rubens), 145, 148–­49 Arnautoff, Victor, xx–­xxi art, 48, 76, 167, 206, 225, 230, 233, 237, 240–­41; aesthetic judgment, 234–­35; and ambivalence, 245; assault on, 146; and aura, 175–­76; and censorship, 171, 174, 177; concepts of, 154, 226; definition of, widening of, 42–­43, 45–­47; ­description of, 175–­76; destruction of, 36; digital reproducibility, 236; history of, 137; institutionalization of, 172; as investment, 228, 235; judgment, ­authentic autonomy of, 176; loss of force, 176–­77; lure of, 243; meaning of, 175–­77; and money, 146; and morality, 174, 234–­35; and object, 216; play of imagination, 234–­35; and pornography, 169–­70, 193; power of, 174, 176, 246; in public space, 42–­43; role of, in society, 43, 49; sacred, destruction of, 244; and science, 155; ­social act, 68; viewer, role of, 172–­73. See also images

Index Asia, 4 Aston, Margaret, xiii Athanasius of Alexandria, 289n57, 289n58 Austin (Texas), 209 Australia, 37 authenticity, 112, 162, 176 automaticity, 233; and reflection, xxv, 234; and restraint, 231

322

Baartman, Saartije, 191 Babylonia, 31, 58 Baghdad (Iraq), 28, 30, 197, 216, 239, 241 Bahrani, Zainab, xv Balkans, 25 Baltimore (Maryland), 209 Banksy, ix, 44, 47, 228, 235 Barber, Charles, xv Barentsz, Dirk, 82 Barère, Bertrand, 129 Baronius, 109–­11, 271n62 Barrie, Dennis: obscenity trial, 156–­57 Bataclan Theater, 15 Bataille, Georges, 4, 44, 255–­56n53 Bauhaus, 155 Baxandall, Michael, xii, 15 Becket, Thomas, 120, 277n54 Beck, Hans-­Georg, xii Bednarik, Peter, 255n41 Beham, Barthel, 56 Beham, Sebald, 56 Bel and Baalshamin temples: blowing up of, 3 Bellocq, E. J., 31–­32 Bell, William A. Sr., 207, 214 Belting, Hans, xiii, xv–­x vi, xix, 228 Benedict XVI, 34 Benjamin, Walter, 162, 172, 175, 236, 241 Berceuse (van Gogh), 145 Berlin Wall: fall of, xi, xiv, xviii Bernard of Siena, 124 Besançon, Alain, xv Bevan, Edwyn Robert, 249n39 Bijns, Anna, 63, 260n54, 280n129 Bildakt project, 48 Black Lives Matter movement, ix Black on Maroon (Rothko), 44 Blocklandt, Anthonie, 82–­84 Bohemia, 63 bohemianism, 130 Bohlmann, Hans-­Joachim, 290–­91n71 Bolandists, 112 Bonami, Francesco, 44

Bonaventure, 278n82 book burnings, 124, 130, 188, 194 Bosch, Hieronymus, 83 Boston (Massachusetts), 209 Boydell, John: Shakespeare Gallery, 135 Bredekamp, Horst, xiii, xvi, 48 Brooklyn (New York), 154 Brooklyn Institute, 154. See also Brooklyn Museum Brooklyn Museum, xxiv, 154–­55, 157–­61, 165, 167, 177. See also Brooklyn Institute Brown, Peter, xii, 125 Brusius, Mirjam, 9, 251n16 Brussels (Belgium), 65, 70, 82, 103, 157, 163, 215 Bryer, Anthony, xiii, xxiii Buddhas of Bamiyan, 35–­37, 240, 243; blowing up of, xvii, xxii, 9, 25, 195, 246 Buechner, Thomas S., 154 Bugenhagen, 57 Bullinger, 57 Bumibhol, King, 37 Burlington House Cartoon (Leonardo), 145 Bush, George W., xix Butler, Reg, 291n72 Byzantine iconoclasm, xii, 21, 33, 54, 115–­16, 118–­19, 130–­31, 194, 240, 244–­45 Byzantine studies, xii–­xxiii Byzantium, xii–­xiii, xvi, 117, 119, 123, 127, 281–­82n9 California, 217 Calvinism, 59, 61–­62, 64–­65, 73, 100, 107, 118, 194, 244 Calvin, John, 23–­24, 57–­58, 91, 116–­17 Caminero, Maximo, 45 Camphuysen, Didericus, 117 Canonge, Hector, 45 canonocity, 9 Carrying of the Cross (Francken), 102 Cathexis (Kosuth), 161–­63 Catholic Church, 4, 20, 61, 63–­64, 130, 147, 244, 283–­84n17 Catholicism, 33, 54, 65, 86, 89, 100, 107, 112 Cat and Mouse Act, 287–­88n43 Cattelan, Maurizio, 256n54 Cavalieri, Giovanni Battista, 273n82 censorship, xi, xviii, xxii, 23, 36, 41, 176, 182, 187, 195; and art, 171, 174, 177; and digitization, 216; and iconoclasm,

Index xxiv–­xxv, 12, 19–­20, 26, 33–­34, 42, 183, 192, 194, 196, 219, 231; of images, 39; ­information, control of, 35; and institutionalization, 177; and politics, 35; and repression, 188; women, as threat, 35 Chalfant Site, 37 Charity and Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian, The (Francken), 97, 102 Charlottesville (Virginia), x, xx, 207, 209, 211–­14, 226–­27, 232 Chicago Armory Show, 155–­56 China, xiv, 25, 195 Christianity, 63, 122; Christian use of images, 22; incarnation of Christ, 22, 54 Christensen, Carl, xiii Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center trial, 156–­57, 165, 167, 169, 171 Circignani, Niccolò, 111 City Press (newspaper), 187–­88, 195, 199–­ 200 Civil War, 212–­13 Clark, Larry, 167–­69, 171, 174 Claudius of Turin, 274–­75n12 Clay, Richard, 247n1 Clement of Alexandria, 129, 280n129, 288n50 Coa, M. Blair, 156 Cock, Hiernonymus, 90 Coeberger, Wenzel, 105–­6 Cole, Michael, xv–­x vi Colijns de Nole brothers, 106 colonialism, xx, 25–­26 colonization, xvi, xxi Colored Vases (Weiwei), 45 Columbus, Christopher, ix–­xx; statues, removal of, 209–­10 Committee of Young Communists, 199 Communist Party of South Africa, 183 Compromise of the Nobility, 65 Concetti Spaziali (Fontana), 44 Confederate statues, xx, 208, 210; aesthetic status of, 232; ambivalence toward, 214–­15; as history lessons, 225; materiality of, 214; and museums, 225, 232; objecthood of, 214; taking down of, xxv, 207, 209, 211, 213 Congregation of the Oratory, 111 Constable, John, 38 Constantia, 116 Constantine V, 121, 124–­27 Constantinople, 118 contextualism, 30

Coornhert, Dirck Volckertszoon, 75, 91, 284n21 Corcoran Gallery, 167 Cormack, Robin, xiii Cornelisz, Jacob, 78 corporeality, 12, 40, 211 Correggio, Antonio da, 35 Cosmographia Universalis (Münster), 33 Cotter, Holland, 212–­13 Council of 815, 122, 274n7 Council of Elvira, 129 Council of Nicaea, 127, 130 Council of 754, 121–­22, 129, 274n7 Council of Trent, 64–­65, 85, 99, 107, 109–­10, 130 Council of Troubles, 76, 138 Counter-­Reformation, 108, 111, 130, 194 Courbet, Gustave, 223, 225 Courtauld Institute of Art, x Coxcje, Michiel, 103–­4, 107 Cranach, Lucas the Elder, 165 creativity, x, xxii–­xxiii, 26, 49, 229, 234; aesthetic, 43 Crew, Mack, 258n21 Cromwell, Oliver, 125 Cromwell, Thomas, 125 Crucifixion with the Thieves, The (van Scorel), 84 culture wars, xi, xxiv, 34–­35, 187, 215, 232 Dabiq (magazine), xix Daesh, xi damnatio memoriae, xii, 23, 41, 200, 240, 249n35 Danae (Rembrandt), 35 Dathenus, Petrus, 64 Deane, Nicola, 184 Death and Burial of St. Francis, The (Blocklandt), 82 de Buyzere, Jacob, 66 decolonization, xvi del Sarto, Andrea, 196 Delft (Netherlands), 62, 67–­68, 71, 81–­82, 84–­85 de Kooning, Willem, 44, 49 Delacroix, Eugène, 45 Delen, Dirck van, 30 Den Briel (Netherlands), 72–­73 Descent from the Cross (Oostsanen), 82 destruction, xvi; aesthetics of, 46; as creativity, xxiii, 43–­44, 45–­48; performative aspects of, 41 Destruction of the House of Baal, The, 91

323

Index Destruction of Form, The (Rainer), 44 Destruction of the Statue of Bel, The (Heemskerck), 26 de Vos, Maarten, 99, 101, 104 de Vries, Vredeman, 105 de Wael, van Vronensteyn, Adriaen de Wael, 71–­72 Diana, Princess, 143–­45, 245 digitization, xviii, xxvi, 3–­4, 38, 47, 217; and censorship, 216; digital imagery, 34; digital reproduction, xxii, xxv, 14, 236; digital revolution, 200–­201; ­immortality, ensuring of, 230 Diocletian Condemns St. Sebastian to Death (Francken), 97 d’Orleans, Louis, 35 Dowsing, William, 282–­83n10 Dred Scott decision, 209 Dublin (Ireland), 223–­24 Duchamp, Marcel, 43, 47, 226 Dudek, Antoni, 211 Duffy, Eamon, xiii Duncanus, Martinus, 85 Durham (North Carolina), 209

324

Early Days (sculpture), xx Eck, Johannes, 63 Edward VI, 118–­19, 277n66 Egypt, xv, 23, 25, 31, 36, 240 Egyptian Museum, 36 Eighty Years’ War, xxiii Eire, Carlos, xiv Elizabeth I, 118, 120, 127–­28 Elsner, Jas, xv, xvi embodiment, xiii, xxii, 21, 37, 41 Emin, Tracy, xxiv Emmens, Jan, 92 Engebrechtsz, Cornelius, 83 England, 24, 63, 65–­66, 83, 115, 118, 121, 123, 125–­29 Epiphanius of Salamis, 116, 129 Erasmus, 53, 59, 61, 91; eyes crossed out, 33, 194 Europe, xiv, xviii, xxiii, 4, 25, 53, 57, 125, 130, 194–­95, 211, 240; iconoclasm, 115–­16 Eusebius, 116 Everswaert, Marinus, 59 Execution of St. James the Greater, The (de Vos), 104–­5 extrastriate body area (EBA), 12 Fabriano, Gilio da, 131, 226 Facebook, 231–­32

Fall of the Damned (Rubens), 140 Fall of the Rebel Angels (Barentsz), 82 Fall of the Rebel Angels (Floris), 103 Farnese, Alexander (prince of Parma), 100, 104, 107–­8, 112 Farnese, Alessandro, 111 Fasti sanctorum (Rosweyde), 112 Ferrar, Nicholas, 250n56 fetishism, 38–­39, 158–­59, 161, 175, 235; of art, 160, 176; and iconoclasm, 40 figuration, 25 Finley, Karen, 156 First Time Shooting Up (Clark), 174 Fischer, Bram, 183 Flanders (Belgium), xxiii, 20, 80; Catholic faith, reestablishment of, 112 Flood, Finbarr Barry, xvi–­x vii Florence (Italy), 115, 118, 122, 196 Floris, Cornelius, 86 Floris, Frans, 84, 103 Foner, Eric, 211, 213 Fontana, Lucio, 43–­44, 48–­49 Foucault, Michel, 30 France, xv, 63–­66, 107, 115, 125, 129–­30, 244, 283–­84n17 Francken, Ambrosius, 97, 100–­102, 104–­5, 107 Francken, Frans, 100–­101 Francken, Hieronymous, 100–­102 French Revolution, 4, 24, 101, 115, 118–­20, 125, 129, 138, 240, 244 Freud Museum, 157 Freud, Sigmund, 161–­62 Friberger, Balthasar, 58 Gagosian Gallery, 44 Galle, Philip, 90 Gallonio, Antonio, 110–­11, 272n81 Gamboni, Dario, xiv–­x vi, xix, 26, 44 Gardiner, Stephen, 277n66 Garetius, Johannes, 108–­9 Gasa, Nomboniso, 191 Geisberg, Max, 252n24 gender, xxii, xxv, 173, 191; gender politics, 189 George Washington High School, xx–­xxi Germany, 4, 23, 62–­63, 66, 107, 115, 129, 145 Gerrit, Schele, 71 gesture, 30, 32, 48, 239; aestheticization of, 44 Gheeraerts the Elder, Marcus, 92 Ghent (Belgium), 61, 83, 102, 105, 108, 122 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 131

Index Gilray, James, 135 Giovanni, Matteo di, 148 Girardon, François, 24–­25 Girl with Balloon (Banksy): autodestruction of, ix, 44, 228, 235 global capitalism, 37 Golden Legend, 109 Goldfish (Klee), 145, 290–­91n71 Goldmann, Lucien, xiv Gombrich, Ernst, 216, 249n39 Goodman Gallery, 186–­87, 189, 192, 196, 199–­200 Goodman, Nelson, 227 Gordon, Robert, xv Göring, Hermann, 235 Goya, Francisco, 251n17 Grabar, André, xii Gramsci Monument (Hirschhorn), 225 Grapheus, Willem, 58 Greek Slave (Powers), 153, 165 Gregory the Great, 54, 108, 194–­95, 217 Gregory III, 271n62 Gregory of Nyssa, 108–­9 Grounded I (Taylor), 184 Grounded II (Taylor), 184 Groys, Boris, xvi Guiliani, Rudolph, 254n36 Haacke, Hans, 162 Haarlem (Netherlands), 63, 68, 75, 81–­82, 85, 91, 94, 104 Haarlem Guild of Bakers, 94 habituation, 3–­4, 228, 233; and reflection, 236 Haffajee, Ferial, 199 Hague, The (Netherlands), 64, 67, 72–­73 Hail to the Thief (exhibition), 186 Hail to the Thief II (exhibition), 186, 189 Hamburg group, xiii Hapsburg Empire, xxiii Harper, Stephen, 188 Haskell, Francis, 111 Hätzer, Ludwig, 54, 56–­57, 117 Hay Wain, The (Constable), 38 Heavenly Prophets, 56 Heemskerck, Maarten van, 81–­82, 84, 90–­ 91, 94, 253n21; print series, 26, 28–­30 Heidelberg Catechism, 63 Heidelberg Confession, 64, 260n55 Heiman, Ralph, 38 Held, Julius, 281–­82n9 Henry VIII, 118, 120, 127; monasteries, dissolution of, 23, 125–­26 Herbert, George, 250n56

Herostratos, 23, 287n38 Herrin, Judith, xiii, xxiii Heyden, Cornelius van der, 59 Hilberseimer, Ludwig, 155 Hill, Mike, 214–­15 Hipper, Mark, 183 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 225 History of Ahab and Elijah, The, 90–­91 History of Bel and the Dragon, 90 History of King Josiah, The, 90 Hitler, Adolf, 25, 123, 155, 256n54 Hoffman, Werner, 26, 43–­44 homosexuality, 35, 156 Hughes, Holly, 156 Hussein, Saddam statue, 28, 226, 240; toppling of, xxii, 25–­26, 39–­41, 195, 197, 216, 239, 241 Hypatius, 116 hyperreproducibility, 229 Iconoclash (exhibition), xv, xviii–­xix iconoclasm, ix, x, xi, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 4, 15, 22, 24, 25, 29, 38, 39, 41, 45, 49, 53, 55, 59, 61, 68, 69, 81, 84, 88, 89, 121, 149, 150, 174, 188, 205, 215, 218, 233, 236, 237, 240, 295n93, 296n102; as aesthetic, 43; ambiguities toward, 128–­29; art history, x, xiii; ­attacks, as spontaneous or organized, 196–­98; attention-­seeking act, 147; bodily disdain, 216; books, destruction of, 123–­24; buildings, attacks on, 124; and censor­ship, xxiv–­xxv, 12, 19–­20, 26, 33–­34, 42, 183, 192, 194, 196, 219, 231; as controlled and systematic, 72; and creativity, 26; and destruction, 36, 72, 75, 83, 243; destruction and preservation, 10, 14; Dutch art, flourishing of, 94; Dutch art, and innovation, 85; effects of, 85–­86; emptying of churches, 77 and fetishism, 40; of 1566, 107–­8; and gesture, 48; and idolatry, 249n39; and images, 210, 211; ­images, fear of body in, 195; impropriety, 143; individual acts, 139–­40; kinds of, 147, 243–­44; lessons of, 232, 235; l­ iturgical accessories, attack on, 123; material body, 47–­48; material gesture, 48; and memory, 23; monks, 126; motivation, 117–­19, 138, 147, 196, 213; mutilation, 30; new age of, 228; object, agency of, 47; objects, attack on, 123–­25, 146; as organized, 76; outbreaks of, xix, 19, 21, 23, 56, 62, 67, 71, 74, 80,

325

Index

326

iconoclasm (continued) 115–­16, 118, 122; paradoxes of, 131, 206, 225, 235; people, persecution of, 125–­ 26; Platonic idea of, xvii; populace, resent­ment of, 118; and pornography, 193; and preservation, 212; question of art, 47; relapse of, 127–­28; and representation, 227; rulers, ordained by, 118; rulers, presence of, 91; secular, 255n41; short-­term effects, 77; silent, 99; as supervised, 72–­73; as term, 247n1; and vandalism, 36; violence, 70, 137, 140; visual art, 213; works of art, damaging of, 78, 82; works of art, saving of, 83, 213. See also images Iconoclastic Councils of 754 and 815, 116 Iconoclasts in a Church (van Delen), 30 iconography: religious beliefs, 87–­88 idolatry, 22, 24, 34, 56, 58–­59, 116, 150, 244; Christian images, use of, 89–­91; and iconoclasm, 249n39 Idolatry of Nebuchadnezzar, The, 92, 94 images, xv, 53–­55, 85, 89, 92, 94, 115, 128, 136; agency of, 48; as alive, 194, 205, 219, 245; ambiguity of, 213, 215; ambivalence toward, 230–­32, 234, 245; of arousing body, 35–­36; antipathy toward, 131; attacks on, 3, 21, 25, 29–­30, 32–­33, 39–­42, 46–­47, 70, 72, 120–­21, 205, 245–­46; attention-­seeking acts, objects of, 140; aura of, 201; auto­maticity, 231, 234; and beholder, 205; canonical ­status, 149; Catholic ­defense of, 90; censor­ship, 39; Christian, 116; church fathers, moralistic attitudes toward, 129; as constructive, 236; contempt for, xi; and corporeality, 12, 211; cult of, 117–­18; cult of saints, 108; as dead, 5; defacement of, 44; ­defamatory, 181–­82, 196; defense of, 99, 108, 118; defilement of, 26; denouncing of, 119; destruction of, ix–­xi, 5–­6, 9, 14–­15, 20, 24, 26, 30, 33, 38, 43, 49, 62, 66, 69, 80, 82, 90–­91, 118–­ 22, 139, 148, 192, 205, 213, 215, 218–­19, 226–­27, 234–­35, 244; destruction of, by artists, 119–­20; in digital age, 228, 230; and discrimination, 121–­22; disrespect toward, 76; ­ecclesiastical supervision, 130; elimination of, 20, 23–­25; as embodied, 206, 219; entrained by, 233; erasure of, 22, 25, 192, 194; eyes, ­removal of, 12, 30–­31, 33, 148, 174, 194, 205–­6; faces, mutilation of, 31–­33; fear and

antipathy ­toward, 199, 245; female body, m ­ utilation of, 34; as ­fetish, 149–­ 50; as frightening, 201; gesturality of, 48; graven, injunction against, 57–­58; helplessness of, 119; holy, 118, 213, 244; hostility to, xvii, 20–­21; hyper­ abundance of, 229; and iconoclasm, 210–­11; idolatrous connotations of, 117; image making, 194, 228; imagination, hold on, 131; and indifference, 232–­33; on internet, 39–­40; of leaders, attacks on, 37–­38, 40; as living, 34, 240–­41; and magic, 150; as manipulable, 39; as material object and beholder, relationship between, 137; meaning of, x–­xi; memory, reinforcing of, 212–­13, 228–­29; memory, ­removal from, 227; and metaphor, 206; and mimesis, 230, 234; miracles, working of, 118; mouth, mutilation, 31, 33, 205; mutilation of, 12, 23, 30–­33, 42, 78, 82, 120, 148–­49, 181, 192; need for, 230; as objects of indifference, x; orthodox reactions to, 129–­31; political, 183; and pornography, 35, 206; power of, xi, 5–­6, 147, 150, 174–­75, 199, 205, 227, 236, 241, 243, 246; and propaganda, 206; Protestant criticism of, 99–­100, 107; [and prototype, conflation of, 144, 149, 241; psychopathic behavior, 245; religious, 206; removal of, ix, 25, 33, 56, 60, 62, 67, 72, 74, 118, 213, 217, 227; replacement of, 126–­27; and representation, 194, 211; reproduction and transmission of, 39; resistance to, 22, 37; ruling class, symbols of, 118; of saints, 64–­65; saving of, 122; and selfies, 230; semiotics of, 206–­7, 211, 218–­19; sensuality of, 37; as signifiers, 227; as signs, 211, 215, 217–­18; sociology of, 181; statues, beating of, 25, 30; superabundance of, 39; and super­ natural, 131; suppression of, 130; ­suspicion toward, 194, 230; symbolic value of, 211–­13, 244; vandalism, 43; viewer, body of, 216; violence toward, xvi–­x vii, 33; vitality of, 241; of women, 37; works of art, saving of, 122–­23. See also iconoclasm; and individual works of art image theory, 149 imagination, xviii, 129, 131, 147, 177, 206, 216, 218, 231–­37

Index immagini infamanti, 200 Immortality Acts, 183 Index of Prohibited Books, 194 India, ix, 4 Inquisition, 68 International Conference on Byzantine Studies, xxiii Intoxicated Ascetics, 168 Institute of National Remembrance, 211 Iran, 25, 240, 245 Iraq, xi, xv, xix, 3, 25, 36–­37, 39, 195, 241 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 223, 245 Iron Curtain: fall of, xviii, 4 ISIS, xi. See also Islamic League of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) Islam, xii, xvii, 37, 243 Islamic League of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), xi, xvii, xix, xxii, xxv, 3, 25, 30, 36, 232, 298n21; beheadings of, 15; ­executions of, 8; images, effective use of, 14–­15; videos of, 6, 14 Italy, ix, 65, 108, 112 Ivanov, Viktor, 185 Jackson, Andrew, 210, 212 Jacobsz, Dirk, 78, 148 Jacobsz, Laurens, 69 Jamal, Mawlawi Qudratullah, 243 Jan of Nassau troops, 76–­77 Jansenism, xiv Jefferson, Thomas, 210 Jesuits, 111–­12 Jim Beam—­J. B. Turner Train (Koons), 47 Jim Crow, 212–­13 John the Grammarian, 120 John of Nassau troops, 74 Johnson, Alfred Sidney, 209 Jonge Handboog: guild of, 105–­6 Jorisz, David, 62 Josiah’s Destruction of the Temples of ­Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Milcom (Heemskerck), 26 J. Paul Getty Museum, 170 Judaism, xii Jud, Leo, 57 Juliana, Queen, 289–­90n61 Julian of Atramytion, 116, 121 Justin, 130, 280n128 Kaganof, Aryan, 184 Kahn, Ernest, 281n8 Kandinsky, Vassily, 155

Kant, Immanuel, xii, 216, 218, 231–­32; ­aesthetic theory of, 234 Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein von, 23–­24, 54–­55, 57 Kazhdan, Alexander, xxiv Kendall, William Sergeant, 168–­69 Kentridge, Sidney, 183 Kentridge, William, 183 Kippenberger, Martin, 34 Kitzinger, Ernst, xii, 117 Klee, Paul, 145 Knights of Columbus, 210 Koch, John, 165 Koerner, Joseph, xiv, xix Koons, Jeff, 47 Kops, Bruyn, 148 Kosuth, Joseph, xxiv, 154–­55, 157–­60, 163–­ 64, 166–­70, 174–­77; and Freud, 161–­62; high formalization, 171–­72; viewer, constitutive role of, 173 kraak, 86; iconography of, 87 Kruger, Barbara, 165 Lachanodrakon, Michael, 125 Lactantius, 129 Ladner, Gerard, xii La Grange, Barend, 192 Lamentation (Massy), 102–­3 Lanzinger, Hubert, 256n54 La pittura infamante (Ortalli), 181 Last Judgment (Michelangelo), 34, 288n47 Last Judgment triptych (van Leiden), 78 Latour, Bruno, xv, xviii–­xix Laurence, Jacqueline, 294n87 Lauretano, Michele, 111 Law and Order League, 156 Leaden Legend, 109 Leda and the Swan (Correggio), 35, 288n47 Lee, Robert E., 207, 209–­12, 232 Left, 232 Leiden (Netherlands), 67, 72–­73, 78, 80, 83 Leiss, William, 160, 166 Lenin, Vladmir, xiv, 25, 28, 42, 185, 195, 245 Lenoir, Alexandre, 24 Leo III, 125–­26 Leo V, 127 Leo the Elder, 127 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 48 Lexington (Kentucky), 209 Liberty Leading the People (Delacroix), 45 Liesvelt Bible, 87 Life of St. Stephen the Younger, The, 126

327

Index Linen Workers’ Guild, 104 Longbowmen’s Guild, 104, 106 Louis XIV, 24–­25 Louvre, 123 Low Countries, 99 Lucretia (Cranach the Elder), 165 Luther and the Consequences for Art ­(exhibition), 26 Luther, Martin, 20, 22–­24, 42, 56–­58, 63, 91, 117, 213, 244–­45, 253n13, 289n55; ­religious imagery, abuse of, 55 Luyken, Jan, 26 lynchings, 217

328

Mabokela, Louie, 192–­93, 196 Mabuse, 83 Malema, Julius, 184, 189 Makuala, Nana, 183–­84 Mandela, Nelson, 183 Mango, Cyril, xii Mann, Sally, 165 Man in a Polyester Suit (Mapplethorpe), 187 Mantashe, Gwede, 191 Mantegna, Andrea, 148 Mao Zedong, 195 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 35, 42, 157, 165, 167–­68, 171, 187, 254n36 Marat, Jean-­Paul, 124, 127 Marcos, Ferdinand, 251n8 Margaret of Parma, 65–­66, 77 Marot, Daniel, 66 Martin Luther (Rembrandt), 145 Matisse, Henri, 155 Mary, Queen, 128 martyrdom: representation of, 100–­102, 104, 106–­10; of saints, 108–­9, 111; ­torture scenes, 110–­12 Martyrdom of Saint George (Pourbus), 103–­4 Martyrdom of Saint James (Mantegna), 82, 148 Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian with Their Three Brothers, 174 Martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, The (Francken), 97, 102, 268n1 Martyrdom of St. Catherine (van Mander), 104 Martyrdom of St. George (Coxcje), 103–­4, 107 Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (Coeberger), 105 Marx, Karl, 25

Massacre of the Innocents (Giovanni), 148 Massy, Quinten, 102–­3 Master of Alkmaar, 148 Matte, Sebastian, 66 Matthijs, Jan, 63 Mauss, Marcel: theory of magic, 296–­ 97n105 McKim, Mead & White, 154–­55 mechanical reproduction, 162, 241 Melanchthon, 57, 117 memory, xix, xxvi, 23–­24, 38, 54, 211, 213, 216–­17, 227–­29, 240; folk, 144; images, reinforcing of, 212; long term, 218; ­narrative, 11 Menozzi, Daniele, xv Menzl, Walter, 286n33 Merula, Angelus, 59 Mesopotamia, 4, 23 Michalski, Sergiusz, xv Michael II, 127 Michelangelo, 34, 131, 140, 145, 226, 246 Michiels, Pieter, 73 Middle Ages, 54, 130, 181 Middle East, 4, 9, 25, 36 Miedema, Hessel, 86–­88, 91 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 155 mimesis, 226–­27, 230; and imagination, 234 Mississippi, xx Moderation of April 9, 65 Modern Devotion, 117 modernism, xvi; and power, 25–­26 modernity, xvi Molanus, Johannes, 109 Mona Lisa (da Vinci), 145 monotheism, 22 Monuments Commission, 123 monuments and museums: spoliation of, 36 Mostaert, Jan, 82 Mosul (Iraq), xxv, 3, 9–­11, 14, 30, 205 Muhammad, Prophet, 245 Muller, Harmen, 90 Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes (Francken), 102 Münster (Germany), 118, 120–­21 Münster, Sebastian, 33 Müntzer, Thomas, 24, 57 Murray, Brett, 34, 42, 44, 185–­89, 194, 200 musealization, 25 Musée des monuments français, 24

Index Museum of Islamic Art, 36 Museum of Mosul, xix; destruction in, 3, 6 mutatis mutandis, 21 Napoléon I: toppling of statue, 24–­25, 223 Nashville (Tennessee), 209 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 156–­58, 165, 167, 171 National Gallery, 144, 245 National Gallery of South Africa, 184 National Museum of Iraq, 36 Native Americans, 210 Nazism, 188, 240 Nelson’s Pillar, 224, 226; dynamiting of, 223 Netherlands, x, xiii, xxiii–­xxiv, 21, 58, 61, 94, 103, 115, 117, 120, 126, 129, 131; 1566 revolt, xxiv, 4, 14, 19–­20, 24, 53, 55–­56, 59, 62, 64–­66, 68, 72, 75–­83, 85, 90, 92, 99–­100, 102, 104–­5, 107–­8, 118–­19, 127, 138, 148, 196; iconoclasm in, 24; North Netherlands, 57, 66, 80, 83, 138–­39, 148, 295n93; South Netherlands, 80, 83, 85, 92, 110, 112, 148, 295n93; works of art, saving of, 122. See also Revolt of the Netherlands Newman, Barnett, 46, 195, 248n27 New Orleans (Louisiana), 31–­32, 207 New York City, 43, 209–­10, 215, 224 Night Watch, The (Rembrandt), 9, 38, 292n80; attack on, 136, 140–­42, 145–­47, 195, 248n27, 288n44, 291n74, 291–­ 92n78, 293n83, 293n85` Nijmegen (Netherlands), 75, 76 9/11 attacks, 45 Ninevah, ix, xix, 9 Nitsch, Hermann, 44 Norwich (England), 59 objectivity, 160–­61 objects, xi, xvi, 12, 15, 25, 32, 71–­73, 77, 86, 129, 139–­40, 154, 167–­68, 173, 176–­77, 213, 225–­26, 240, 243; ambivalence ­toward, 216; attacks on, 123, 146, 148; as buildings, 124; conservation of, 137; emotions, charged with, 136; holy, 123; as idolatrous, 9; of hostility, 20–­ 21; inanimate, 125; of indifference, 3; magical quality of, 150, 158; material, 137–­38, 150; and meaning, 164; moral and political significance of, 212; as

objects, 158, 160; polyvalence of, 216; preservation of, 123; protection of, 36; for safekeeping, 70; saving of, 232; secular, 117; supernatural forces, 128; as symbols, 215; texts, juxtaposition of, 162–­63 Oecolampadius, 57 Ofili, Chris, xxiv, 254n36 Omar, Muhammad, 243–­44 100 Degrees (Canonge and Yang), 45 Oostsanen, Jacob Cornelisz van, 82 Organ, Bryan, 143 Ortalli, Gherardo, 181–­82, 186, 200–­201 Oudenhoven, Ineke van, 83 Paleotti, Gabriele, 131 Palmyra (Iraq), xxv, 3, 9, 14–­15, 205 Pan African Congress (PAC), 182 pandemic, ix, 217 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 142, 195 Paul IV, 288n47 Peasants’ Revolt, 289–­90n61 Peetersen, Hendrick, 87 Peeters, Natasja, 101–­2, 268n1 Peffer, John, 183 Peloponnesian War, 23 Pencz, Georg, 56 Pensacola (Florida), 214 performative action, 218 Philips, John, xiii Philipsz, Dirk, 59 photography, 25, 30, 39, 41, 200–­201, 241 Pickshaus, Peter Moritz, xiv Pietà (Michelangelo): attack on, 140, 145, 246, 293–­94n86 Pietersz, Pieter, 94 Pioneer Monument, xx Piss Christ (Serrano), 34–­35 Plantin, Christoffel, 108, 271n62 Play of the Unmentionable, The (Kosuth), 154, 157, 163, 165–­66, 168–­69, 171–­72, 174, 176–­77 Poland, 211 political correctness, xxv, 207, 215 politics: art, idea of, 45; and pornography, 184; and theology, 21, 26 Pollock, Jackson, 49 pornography, 6, 168, 187, 190, 206; as art, 169–­70, 193; and iconoclasm, 193; moral, xxii; and politics, 184, 189; ­reason of state, 189; religious imagery, 206 poster art, 183

329

Index Pourbus, Frans, 103–­5, 107 Poussin, Nicolas, 144, 147 Powers, Hiram, 153, 165 Protestants, 4, 14, 23, 33, 56, 60, 63–­67, 70–­71, 73, 75–­76, 80, 83, 85, 88, 90, 92, 125–­27, 139, 194, 196, 284n21; iconoclasm of, xv, 24; image worship, criticism of, 99–­100, 107 Protestant Reformation, x, 19, 194. See also Reformation public morality, 156 public space, 42, 43, 225, 227; history, ­remembrance of, 211 Puritanism, 156; iconoclasm, 24; Puritan revolution, 121, 127 Quinisext Council, 129 Quirijinsz, Huych, 73

330

race wars, xx racial justice, ix racism, 217 Rainer, Arnulf, 44 Rape of Lady Justice (Zapiro), 186, 200 Raphael, 145 rationality, xvii, 160 Rauschenberg, Robert, 43–­44 Reagan, John, 209 Réau, Louis, xv Reconstruction, 207 Reformation, xiii–­xiv, xv, xxiii, 4, 14, 20, 22–­23, 56, 115–­17, 119, 121, 123, 125–­26, 130, 188, 194, 244, 252n3, 281–­82n9; iconoclasm, 33, 40; printing, invention of, 19. See also Protestant Reformation Reformed Church, 64, 86 Reinhardt, Ad, 223–­24 relics, 54, 57, 64–­65, 116, 128 Rembrandt, 35, 38, 141, 145, 195 remediation, 233 representation, xvii–­x viii, xxi, xxxiv–­xxv, 4, 10–­11, 22, 24, 30, 32, 35, 41, 158, 169, 174–­75, 183, 194, 205, 211, 218, 227–­28; abstract, 206; ambivalence toward, 234; the body, 195; figurative, 182; and reality, 15; satirical, 194; sexual, 156, 169, 173, 189–­90; and signifying, 226 Revolt of the Netherlands, xxiii–­xxiv, 19, 33, 53,254–­55n37, 296n102 Rhodes, Cecil, 226 Richardson, Mary, 142, 195, 293n83 Richmond (Virginia), 209

Ridley, Nicholas, 119 Rijckens, Adriaen, 76 Rijksmuseum, 136, 142–­43 Rivera, Diego, xxi Robert of Lecce, 124 Rockwell, Norman, 174 Rodin, Auguste, 168 Rokeby Venus, The (Velázquez), 35; attack on, 142, 195, 246, 292n79 Roman Empire, 240, 245 Rome (Italy), 105–­6, 110–­12, 120 Roscio, Giulio, 111 Rosweyde, Heribert, 112 Rothko, Mark, 44, 49 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 165, 176 Royal Museum of Fine Arts (Antwerp), 97 Rubens, Peter Paul, 105, 107, 112, 140, 145, 148–­49 Russia, 25. See also Soviet Union Russian Revolution, 4, 25, 195, 240, 289–­ 90n61 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 163 Saint Bernard, 20 saints: Christ, as living images of, 117; cult of, 107–­8; images of, 117; martyrdom of, 108–­9, 111 Salvator Mundi (Leopardo), 235 San Antonio (Texas), 209 San Francisco (California), xx San Francisco School Board, xx, xxi Saussure, Ferdinand de, xxv Savonarola, 117, 122, 130; bruciamenti of, 115, 120, 124 Sayings of the Father, The, 124 Scenes from the Martyrdom of St. George (Francken), 97 Schenck, F., 266n170 Schnitzler, Norbert, xiii Schutte, Gillian, 190–­91 Schutz, Dana, xx–­xxi Schwartz, Gary, 247–­48n13 scientism, 161 Scotland, 63, 283–­84n17 Scribner, Robert, xiii, xv Sculptor, The (Koch), 165 Sea Beggars, 67 Secrecy of Information Act, 183 Self-­Portrait in Grey Hat (van Gogh), 291n72 semiotics, xxv, 215, 227 Sensation: Young British Artists from the

Index Saatchi Collection (exhibition), xxiv, 254n36 Septimius Severus, 41 Serra, Richard, 43, 215, 224–­25 Serrano, Andres, 34–­35 Settis, Salvatore, 41 Seventh Swiss Sculpture Exhibition, 43 Seven Works of Mercy, The (Master of ­Alkmaar), 78, 148 Seven Works of Mercy (Oostsanen), 82 Shaby, Jack, 290n65 Shakespeare, William, 135 Sherman, Cindy, 174 signs, 23, 206, 215, 217, 233; and signification, 211, 226–­27; and signified, 218–­19 Simpson, James, xvi Sisulu, Lindiwe, 183–­84 Sisulu, Walter, 183 Smith, Howard, 183, 190 social constructionism, 30 social media, 38 Sontag, Susan, 241 South Africa, ix, xiv, 4, 25, 42, 182–­83, 185, 187–­88, 191, 196, 199–­200 South African Communist Party, 182 Soviet Union, 25, 38, 244. See also Russia Spain, xxiii, 19, 57, 64, 68, 81; revolt against, 118, 138–­39 Spear, The (Murray), 185–­87, 189, 195–­96, 198–­201 Sposalizio (Raphael), 145, 290n70 Stalin, Joseph, 195 statues, 219; ambivalence toward, 216; bodily disdain toward, 216, 218; as ­living bodies, 216, 218; and memory, 211; and museums, 212–­14, 227; pulling down of, 30, 207, 209–­10, 212, 216–­ 17, 240–­41; signification of, 211; as symbols, 211, 213, 240; viewer, aesthetic judgment of, 216 Statuette, A (Kendall), 168 St. Basil, 118, 120–­21, 289n58 St. Bernard, 130, 244, 289n55 Stellenbosch (South Africa), 42; Art for the Public program, 225 Stellenbosch Institute, 184 Stendahl syndrome, 6 Sternberg, Thomas, 253n13 St. John’s Episcopal Church, 212 St. Matthew and the Angel (Pourbus), 103 Story of Daniel, Bel, and the Dragon, The, 91

St. Paul’s Cathedral, 125, 128 Strother, Zoé, xvi structural phenomenology, xxiv Suhr, William, 254n128, 295n99 Surius, Laurentius, 109 Suttner, Raymond, 183, 191 Swanenburgh, Isaac Claesz van, 80 Swiss Reformation, 23 Switzerland, xiv, 23, 63, 66, 129 Swordsmen’s Guild, 103 Syria, 3, 36 Taliban, 35, 37, 195, 243, 245–­46, 298n21; iconoclasm of, 244 Taney, Roger, 209 Tattoo Artist, The (Rockwell), 174 Taylor, Angus, 184 Tea Party, 214 Tempesta, Antonio, 111 Temple of Artemis, 23 Temple of Baalshamin, 9 Tertullian, 22, 34, 129, 252n7 Thailand, 37 Thatcher, Margaret, 38 Theophilos, 127 Till, Emmett, xx Tilted Arc (Serra): as intrusive, 224–­25; ­removal of, 43, 215, 225 Tinguely, Jean, 44 Titus, 91 Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 157 Trattato degli instrumenti di martirio (Gallonio), 110 Tridentine decrees, 107–­9, 130 Triptych of the Holy Sacrament (Francken), 102 Triumphus martyrum in D. Stephano in Monte Coelio expressus (Roscio), 111 Trump, Donald, 210, 215, 232 Tudor, Mary, 124 Ukraine, 25; uprisings in, xiv Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the People), 182–­83, 187 United Daughters of the Confederacy, 214 United Nations (UN), 244 United States, ix, 207, 209, 226–­27, 232; culture wars in, xi, xxiv, 34–­35, 187, 215, 232; hangings in effigy, 217; public monuments, removal of, xi, xx, xxv; puritanism of, 34–­35

331

Index Universal Exhibition, 153–­54 University Art Museum, 170 University of North Carolina: Silent Sam monument, 214 University of Pennsylvania: Institute of Contemporary Art, 170 Unknown Political Prisoner (Butler), 291n72 Utrecht (Netherlands), 67, 71–­72, 74, 82–­83, 85 van Bleyswijck, Dirck, 71, 83–­85 Van den Propheet Baruch (pamphlet), 58 van der Goes, Hugo, 80 van Gogh, Vincent, 145 van Haeeht, Willem, 61–­62 van Leiden, Jan, 63 van Leiden, Lucas, 78, 89 van Lier, Joos, 120 van Liesvelt, Jacob, 86 van Mander, Karel, 68, 80–­85, 89, 104, 120, 126–­27, 138 van Oostanen, Jacob Cornelisz, 148 van Pallandt, Floris, 73 van Scorel, Jan, 66, 82–­84 van Sint Aldegonde, Marnix, 73 van Tetrode, Willem Danielsz, 84–­85 van Toutenburg, Frederik Schenck, 85 van Vaernewijck, Marcus, 83 van Veen, Otto, 105–­6 van Zuylen van Nyevelt, Willem, 75 Velázquez, Diego, 35, 142, 195, 246 Veldman, Ilja, 91 Verhulst, Rombout, 143 Vermeyen, Jan, 82 Versteghe, Jan Gerritsz, 60–­61, 264n125 Verstegen, Richard, 107, 111 Vienna (Austria), 81, 157, 163 Violieren, 61 virtual reality (VR), 300n15 Vlieghe, Hans, 105 Volterra, Daniele de, 288n47 von Manteuffel, Zoege, 102 von Végh, Julius, x Vosterman Bible, 88 Vorsterman, Willem, 87 332

Warburg, Aby, 30 Warnke, Martin, xiii, xvi Washington, George, 210 Watts, Janet, 293–­94n86 We Are Notifying You of a Change of ­Address (Kruger), 165

Weibel, Peter, xviii–­xix Weiwei, Ai, 45 whiteness, 56 Whitney Biennial, xx Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (Newman): attacks on, 46, 195, 248n27 Wildmon, Donald, 156 William of Orange, 68 Williamson, Sue, 184–­85 Winston-­Salem (North Carolina), 214 Wittenberg (Germany), 119 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 157–­58 Wittgenstein: The Play of the Unsayable (Kosuth), 157–­63, 174 Wojnarowicz, David, 156 Woodfin, Randall L., 214 Wool, Christopher, 46 Wyclif, John, 277n54 Yang, Chin Chih, 45 Yellowism, 44–­45 Zapiro (cartoonist), 186, 200 Zarandona, González, 255n41 Zeri, Federico, 111 Zorach, Robert, xv–­x vi Zuerst die Füsse (Kippenberger), 34 Zuma, Jacob, xxiv–­xxv, 34, 42, 44, 185–­92, 196, 199 Zurich (Switzerland), 122 Zwingli, Huldrych, 23, 56–­58, 116–­17, 121–­22