When the millennium-old stone Buddhas of Bamiyan were destroyed by the Taliban in the spring of 2001, there followed an international outcry castigating the militant Islamists for their callous disregard of art and religious history, and one must believe that, partly owing to this pathetic act of religious zealotry, there was a certain amount of satisfaction worldwide in watching the US and its allies topple the Taliban regime and send it scurrying into the tribal borderlands.
But, of course, destroying offending images—especially religiously significant ones—is not the exclusive preserve of militant Islam. Indeed, its origins are much, much older: one man’s veneration is another’s idolatry. In fact, our first significant example of it is found in the Book of Exodus, when Moses descends from the mountain to find that his brother Aaron had fashioned a calf of gold so that the Israelites might worship it, whereupon “he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.” Notable, too, as an aside, the story of the golden calf also contains the (partial) origins of the Levite priesthood, for they were the tribe of Israel that stood firm with Moses (and in fact was the tribe of Moses) in what can only be interpreted as an internecine conflict, a civil war, during which “there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.”
The one story elicits praise, the other contempt, for the Bamiyan statues were neither erected nor venerated by Afghan Muslims, but so it goes.
Christianity, too, has a rich—if that be the proper adjective—history of destroying religious art. The first of these examples can be found in the 8th and 9th centuries in the Eastern Church, during which the heresy of eikonoklasmos, or image-breaking, was then ascendant. It is, therefore, from the Greek word that we derive iconoclasm, which naturally in English has strayed far into the fields of figuration. The 16th- and 17th-century Wars of Religion in Western Europe also witnessed a good deal of destruction, particularly as austere Protestants sought to remove so-called Papist vestiges from their midst.
And then there was the French Revolution, which pursued destruction of some religious art due to the Catholic Church’s comfortable relationship with the French monarchy and the House of Bourbon, as well as for its political intractability. It is this instance of iconoclasm—albeit a quite secular manifestation of it—that has partially inspired the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s special exhibition titled “Set in Stone: Faces in Medieval Sculpture,” which is running through February 19. The exhibition has on display many of the severed heads formerly attached to statuary of religious significance, but were the victims of iconoclasts of one stripe or another.
The Met’s exhibition podcast provides an outstanding quote from the French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David, who remarked concerning some of the destroyed artifacts:
Thus in Paris, the effigies of the kings and the remains of their foul attributes will be piled up in a jumble and will serve as a pedestal to the emblem of the French people.
Of course, as alluded to earlier, many of these effigies were located on church buildings. As the podcast mentions, the monument David spoke of was never built, and the jumble of stone became instead a kind of outdoor latrine, which provides, for me anyway, an excellent Burkean commentary on the Revolution itself.
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