Introduction
When, upon visiting a European art museum, the visitor stops short at the sight of a beheaded virgin, or a low-relief whose apostles have been hacked with chisels, or yet before a painting on wood where the characters of a biblical scene have been purposefully defaced, their feelings generally veer between sorrow at such a wreckage, and resentment before the violent behaviour of people devoid of any cultural sense. It so happens that Europe, in its Renaissance and Humanist flowering, oversaw successive waves of iconoclasm responsible for much dismay among today's mediaeval art specialists and amateurs. There is little point in blaming or defending the image breakers (as European historiographers were still largely inclined to do in the 19th and early 20th century) rather than seeking to understand, in so far as it is possible, the motivations behind such actions. To this end, a preliminary observation is called for.
Nowadays, mediaeval and early 16th century imagery has an aesthetic value in many people's eyes. It was not ever thus. In an attempt to understand – through a loose parallel – one of the drivers of 16th century iconoclasm in Europe, let us consider for a moment the destruction, in Central Europe and Russia, of the statues of Lenin or other Soviet Communist memorials in the years following the Fall of the Berlin Wall[1]. The fact that Stalinian art is noted more for its ideological lumpishness than for its artistic elegance is a subjective appreciation best left undiscussed here... just as it never weighed in the considerations of post-Soviet iconoclasts. The point was for them to eliminate from their urban environment the marks of a regime detested by the vast majority of the population who had been kept under its yoke. Had an art historian seeking to salvage Lenin's statue intervened, informing the demonstrators that the statue illustrated the artistic values of its era that he would obviously have failed abysmally. Things were no different in the 16th century in the case of iconoclasts destroying religious objects. Be it Soviet imagery post 1989 or devotional images in the 16th century, it is the image's symbolic and ideological, as well as socio-political dimensions that motivates the iconoclasts' destructive intent.
