Handout for Week 11: Against Images?

Iconoclasm

Terms and Concepts

• Iconoclasm: “breaking of images”

Ø instrumental iconoclasm versus expressive iconoclasm (Finbarr Barry Flood)
• Idolatry/Iconolatry: veneration of images

• Aniconism: rule/law against images

Ø Mostly in monotheistic religions
Ø Aniconism in early Buddhist art (Buddha not represented as a figure but as empty throne, stupa, wheel, footprints)
Ø Second Commandment in the Old Testament: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”

Case Studies:

• Destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and the question of “Islamic Iconoclasm”

• Iconoclasm during the reformation in 16th -century Europe and the question of who believes in the power of images: those who pray to the images or those
who destroy them?

• Iconoclasm during regime change (e.g. communist monuments in Eastern Europe and their afterlives)

• Controversies about statues that commemorate figures associated with colonialism, slavery, and genocide

• Attacks on artworks in the museum, such as on Leonardo’s Burlington House Cartoon or Velazquez’ Rokeby Venus; recent attacks on artworks by climate
activists

ARTH 101: Ways of Seeing 1

Study Images

The Great Buddha at Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Before destruction (photo from 1963) and after the destruction by the Taliban in 2001 (photo from 2008)

ARTH 101: Ways of Seeing 2

 Princely Feast, from the Khamsa of Nizami
(Khulasa I Khamsa), Persian (Safavid),
illuminated manuscript, 1574-1575, British
Library

ARTH 101: Ways of Seeing 3

 Master Seewald, Mass of St Gregory,
1491, oil on panel, Municipal Museum
Münster

ARTH 101: Ways of Seeing 4

 The monument in 1991:
“No Violence”

Nikolai Tomsky, Lenin

Monument, 1970, East Berlin

Display of Lenin’s head at Zitadelle

Spandau in the exhibition Unveiled:
Berlin and its Monuments (Enthüllt.
Berlin und seine Denkmäler), since
2016

ARTH 101: Ways of Seeing 5

Diego Velazquez, Rokeby Venus, ca. 1647–51, oil on canvas, After the attack by Mary Richardson in 1914
122 x 177 cm, National Gallery, London

ARTH 101: Ways of Seeing 6