Why everyone’s talking about... Statues

LORD Baden-Powell. Slave trader and Bristol benefactor Edward Colston. Belgium’s King Leopold II. Never before have passions run so high over cold lumps of iron and stone.

Actually, they have. Icons have been toppled since Old Testament times, with God telling the Israelites to ‘destroy all moulded images’. More recently, a muchmocked comically misshapen bust of footballer Cristiano Ronaldo at Madeira airport had to be replaced.

Then there is Michelangelo’s David, perhaps the world’s most famous statue. Goliath’s slayer lost his arm just 20 years after the marble beauty was made when, during a rebellion against Florence’s ruling Medici family in 1527, rioters threw a bench and broke the left arm into three pieces.

At least that was an artwork rather than a self-aggrandising politician seeking some form of immortality. You don’t mean Turkmenistan’s first president Saparmurat Niyazov, who erected a 270ft monument to himself with a goldplated statue that rotated to face the sun?

Or all those figures of Lenin and Stalin which have since been pulled down and which now fill theme parks such as so- called Stalin’s World, founded by a mushroom magnate in Lithuania?

Surely there’s no statue of Donald Trump? There was one but it was burnt down in January. It had been erected – to highlight the dangers of populism – in his wife Melania’s homeland of Slovenia. It was fitted with a mechanism that opened its mouth to reveal shark-like teeth.

Melania has one, too, in the same country – made out of a tree trunk carved by an eccentric artist using a chainsaw.

Are statues always hated for political reasons? No. Sometimes they are just aest het i c a l l y bad, such as the 22ft Baby Jesus, right, unveiled in Mexico last year that looked like pop singer Phil Collins. Then there was the time a Windsor resident put two 12ft heads of the Queen ( said to l ook more l i ke Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi) and Prince Philip, both with green plastic grass for hair, in his garden.

And the oldest? It’s believed to be The Lion Man, made out of ivory from the tusk of a mammoth 40,000 years ago. It was found in a cave in southern Germany and is the oldest known evidence of religious belief in the world.

Perhaps the last word on this tricky subject should go to the Greek philosopher Plutarch, who said: ‘ I had rather men should ask why my statue is not set up, than why it is.’