A SELECT HISTORY OF ICONOCLASM SINCE 1500
1531: Mexico. Father Zumarraga, the chief inquisitor under the Conquistadors, reports the Franciscan order destroying numerous Aztec temples and that “more than 20,000 figures of the devils they worshipped have been broken to pieces and burned.”
1547: England. Decree of Edward VI launches a wave of iconoclasm against statues and religious imagery in English parish churches.
1566: Belgium. The self-styled ‘Beggars of the Wood’, a group comprising dissident noblemen, struggling artisans and Calvinist vandals, wreck Antwerp Cathedral and then proceed across Flanders into Holland in an image-smashing frenzy in the name of the Protestant Reformation.
1643: England. A Parliamentary ordinance declares that all “monuments of superstition and idolatry should be removed and abolished”. Iconoclast William Dowsing destroys images and angels in 250 churches in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, destroying 80 “superstitious images” of the Blessed Virgin and the saints in Woolpit Church in Suffolk alone.
1791: France. Revolutionaries launch attacks on images, statues and symbols of the ‘Ancient Regime’ and the Church.
1860: China. British and French soldiers loot and burn down the Imperial Summer Palace in Peking. One witness stated that “Officers and men seemed to have been seized with temporary insanity.”
1914-1918: Belgium and France. Religious imagery is targeted by British artillery officers irritated by stories in the press of the miraculous power of religious statues and images (see Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1929).
1917: Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia embarks upon a series of anti-religious campaigns and persecutions which continue until 1964. Numerous shrines, churches and religious institutions are closed and obliterated.
1936: Spain. During the Civil War, Republicans and anarchist groups smash images in Catholic churches and Cathedrals and disinter the bodies of monks and nuns.
1937-1945: Germany. The Third Reich purges 16,000 works of art from museums and art galleries; numerous Jewish synagogues and other cultural treasures looted or destroyed across Germany and in occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945.
1948: England. Desecration of a church altar in Yarcombe, Devon, marks the start of sporadic acts of vandalism in churches and graveyards, typically attributed to witches and Devil worshippers. By 1970 it is claimed that there have been at least 300 copycat incidents across England.
1966-1976: China. The Cultural Revolution is unleashed by Mao Ze Dhong, destroying numerous religious and secular objects and works of art.
1989-1991: Former USSR and Eastern Europe. With the end of Communism in the USSR and former Eastern Bloc, crowds target statues of Communist politicians and Marxist philosophers.
1991: Albania. Crowds topple statue of former Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha in Tirana; his regime previously destroyed mosques, minarets and shrines in an attempt to create an atheist state.
2006: Afghanistan. The Taliban militants use explosives to destroy giant statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan, central Afghanistan.
2011-2016: Syria and Iraq. Islamic State militants target sites and shrines venerated by Shia Islam and systematically destroy pre-Islamic and pre-Christian statues at archaeological sites.
Waves of iconoclasm typically seem to occur whenever perceived authority – whether secular or spiritual, local or national – is questioned or when a new order and ideology is forcibly imposed. Dario Gamboni in The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution
(1997) distinguished between iconoclasm and vandalism by characterising the second as a senseless, gratuitous act perpetrated by the uneducated, in contrast to iconoclasm, which indicates an intentional, dominating act aimed at change. See also: WH Holmes, ‘Examples of Iconoclasm by the Conquerors of Mexico’ in The American Naturalist (1885) Vol. 19, No. 11, pp. 1031-1037; Alain Besancon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, 2000.