The destruction of iconic images and monuments—iconoclasm—carried out today by extremists representing a wide range of political and religious views, makes many recoil in horror. This response, however, is in part derived from the fact that our Western cultures have themselves been fiercely iconoclastic. James Simpson discusses the six classic phases of iconoclasm in European history and highlight the role that museums have played in protecting objects from major iconoclastic events. From this history, he will put current iconoclasm into perspective.
James Simpson, Chair, Department of English and Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Harvard University
Co-sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and Harvard Semitic Museum
Recorded March 1, 2016
Transcript
[00:00:05.67] Professor James Simpson and I met only last December, when he and I and some other colleagues sat together in a roundtable discussion on iconoclasm organized by the Harvard standing committee on archeology. I referred to him on that occasion mistakenly as Professor Smith, a blunder he graciously corrected sotto voce. Here I make aloud an apology for that lapse. Professor, I'm so sorry.
[00:00:26.96] The impetus of that December roundtable was the ongoing cultural calamity in Syria and Iraq, which involves, as from media reports, startling acts of violence perpetrated by the Islamic State, or to use the acronym in Arabic, Daesh, aimed not only at human beings, but also at human artifacts. Typically these targets have been works of ancient representational art, and the museums and archaeological sites containing them. The stated objective is the suppression of the worship of idols, in short, iconoclasm. Which brings us to tonight's topic.
[00:00:59.98] Now, I'm an archaeologist of the ancient Near East, and I come by my knowledge of iconoclasm from only a passing acquaintance with the later historical periods of that region, periods which some of my colleagues find post interesting. That's not my opinion. Though the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium are hardly my areas of expertise. I am vaguely familiar with the Byzantine struggle over iconoclasm and iconophilism-- the iconophiles won that one, by the way. And even more vaguely, how much later the Roundheads despoiled Catholic churches and monasteries in old England, and how their spiritual descendants, the pilgrims, brought with them to New England austere churches, austere manners, and austere habits of dress.
[00:01:46.58] This shift in time brings us into territory, if not post interesting, certainly to me, mostly unknown. But herein lies the expertise of tonight's speaker. James Simpson is the Douglas P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University, an appointment he has held since 2006. He took his first degree at the University of Melbourne. And his advanced degree, first at Oxford and then at the other Cambridge where he also previously taught. He has published prolifically on a wide range of topics in medieval language and literatures, including translations of medieval texts. And he has lectured widely in the US, the UK, Canada and even, I note, in Iceland, as well as in his home country of Australia. He has been an editor, coeditor, or editorial board member of numerous scholarly journals and series, as well as the founder and developer of Metro, Middle English Teaching Resource Online. Who knew medievalists could write code?
[00:02:45.99] He has received many fellowships and awards in the US and abroad, both for his research and for his publications, most relevant for tonight, in 2010, he published Under the Hammer, Iconoclasm in the Anglo American Tradition. I will leave it to the speaker to explain the delicious double entendre of that title. Given where we find ourselves in 2013, it offers a very prescient analysis of the phenomenon of iconoclasm. As he will explain, iconoclasm, the destruction of iconic images and monuments, has in the past been carried out by extremists espousing a variety of political and religious views. He will spell out what he discerns as the six phases of iconoclasm in European history and highlight the role that museums have played in protecting objects from iconoclastic attack. Finally, in the light of that history, he will draw into perspective the modern iconoclasm we regard with such horror. Professor Smith.
[00:03:43.10] Thank you, John, for that kind introduction. You've introduced a new term for me-- post interesting. A term which I will certainly use, but an area which I will try studiously forever to avoid. It's 12 years since I've been at Harvard, but only twice have I come to the Geological Museum. It's wonderful, fascinating, to see all these rocks, but much more interesting and delightful to see all of you.
[00:04:18.37] Not a word. You read the newspapers. You see what's gone on over the last couple of years. Let us just look and remind ourselves of what's been going on. The Temple of Baal and Palmyra destroyed in September 2015.
[00:04:47.64] A mosque-- Shiite mosque in Mosul destroyed by ISIS in 2014.
[00:05:01.67] A Christian monastery in Iraq, seventh century, destroyed again. 2014. September.
[00:05:18.95] Assyrian palace. Ninth century, before the common era. Destroyed in March 2015.
[00:05:35.41] And here it is again, the Temple of Baal in Palmyra, with I think the flag flying atop, before it's been destroyed.
[00:05:50.35] When we behold these images, we fall silent. We fall into that black well of horror that the cultural heritage of our world is being destroyed as we speak. We know how precious these buildings are, and we know that they're irreplaceable, and we know that they have been destroyed forever. We fall into a kind of blank mute horror. We also feel a kind of aggression, terrible hostility, towards the idiocy of those groups that are destroying these buildings. The word barbarian comes to the mouth very easily. We regard these people as absolutely other to us.
[00:06:48.64] In this talk, I want to step back from those feelings of mute horror, step back from the idea that the people doing this are wholly other, by referring to our own cultural history. When we do look at our own cultural history, we understand, I think, better, our own sense of real horror at what we have observed in those images of what's been going on over the last couple of years, as Shiite, as Christian, as Assyrian cultures are demolished.
[00:07:28.24] When we look at cultural history, we can stand back from that. We continue to feel the horror. We continue to feel the sense of, in my case, intense hostility to what's going on, but we understand it better. We understand where that horror is coming from, where that hostility is coming from, because we ourselves have been there. We ourselves have been in this situation.
[00:07:59.69] Our own cultures, if we're Anglophones, if we're Europeans-- I only speak for those cultures I know about-- our own cultures have themselves being iconoclastic. And it's through the agonies of iconoclasm that we ourselves experienced in the 16th and 17th centuries, agonies that had, as I'll show, a kind of ripple effect going forward from the 16th and 17th century right up into our present day. If there's iconoclasm going on in the Middle East of a horrifying kind, the ripple effect of iconoclasm is still present in our own cultures. So by looking to cultural history, by referring to cultural history, we can practice what I'm calling a kind of cultural etymology.
[00:08:59.48] We'd look at the experience of the present, we'd look at a word iconoclasm or an experience in the destruction of buildings, and by excavating it, we understand where it came from. We understand the sources, the precise sources, of our own horror. And as I say, to recognize the sources of the horror, we need to recognize that we have been here before, that such acts are not at all wholly other to us.
[00:09:38.17] Where do we start with such an excavation? We might start with the Book of Kings, because there too, if we're thinking about the destruction of the Temple of Baal, we see multiple attacks on the Temple of Baal in the Book of Kings. "And it came to pass, when the bird offering was ended, that John commanded his soldiers and captains saying, Go in, and kill them, let none escape. And the soldiers and captains slew them with the edge of the sword, and cast them out, and they went into the city of the temple of Baal, and brought the statue out of Baal's temple, and burnt it, and broke it in pieces. They destroyed also the temple of Baal, and made it jakes-- a lavatory-- of it in its place unto this day."
[00:10:32.82] The narrative of the Book of Kings, just as the narrative of Deuteronomy, recounts a fierce struggle for control of the ancient land of Canaan. The key aspect of which is not to fall subject to the religions of competing ethnic groups. So the key narrative of the Book of Kings is to destroy the temples, the statues, the cultic places, all of those competing religions and so on. It's that geographical territorial competition in the ancient land of Canaan that produces not only prohibitions to marry people from different ethnicities, but also, above all, to destroy their Celtic places and images. And failing to destroy them will cause God's punishment down to the seventh generation. God is really, really serious, and very consistent about the need to destroy the images of competing peoples.
[00:11:51.21] Now, you might say, oh well, that is the ninth century, before the common era. And so it is. But look, if you will, how this same territorial need to destroy the cultic places of competing religions-- not necessarily ethnicities, but certainly competing religions-- look, if you will, how that is still alive and kicking or hammering in the 17th century. This is Henry Ainsworth. He's the leader of a Puritan breakaway splinter sect. He's living in Amsterdam, he's going to be part of that very culture that is going to produce pilgrims coming to New England within a very short-- within a decade. And so here he is saying that Manasseh, who is the son of King Hezekiah, in the early seventh century before the common era-- "Manasseh, his son, repeated all the former evils."
[00:13:09.21] The narrative of the Book of Kings is a narrative of constantly going back and forth, going to iconoclasm on the one hand, but then the sons of the iconoclastic King will characteristically be seduced by the foreign gods, go whoring, to use the metaphor of Deutoronomy, go whoring with the foreign gods. And so it is with Hezekiah and Manasseh. "Manasseh, his son, repeated all the former evils and added more unto them, if ought mought-- might-- be. For he went back, and built the high places which his father had broke down."
[00:13:54.03] So he sets up the temples which had been destroyed by his father. We're going to see this later on in more recent history. "He built the high places which his father broke down and set up altars for Baalins." Manasseh rather likes Baalin, he worships him. "And made groves and worshiped all the host of heaven, and served them, and built altars to them in the Lord's house, and made strange Gods, and caused his sons to pass through the fire, and gave himself to witchcraft, and charming, and sorcery, and used them that had familiar spirits."
[00:14:36.11] It sounds like the Book of Kings. Sorry, it sounds like the Book of Kings. Sorry, we're here. But this is the 17th century author William Henry Ainsworth encouraging his Puritan sect to break the images in the early 17th century. And he is encouraging them to destroy the temple of Baal. So already, we've looked through a few quick leaps from the Book of Kings to the 17th century. We can see that the temple of Baal is, and its destruction, is built, rather surprisingly, rather shockingly, deep into our own culture.
[00:15:27.13] So you might say, OK, but it stopped there. It stopped in the 17th century with Puritan extremist iconoclasm. And it certainly was, as we'll see in a moment, very intense in the 16th and 17th century, but I'm going to talk about what I'm calling a kinesis of iconoclasm, a kind of propelled movement of iconoclasm. Iconoclasm, once started, is actually, we'll see, very difficult to stop. And the resources which a culture draws on to stop it turn out to be very interesting. But that kinesis of iconoclasm goes from the 16th and 17th century right up to our own times. It goes from the noisy destruction of idols, images, statues, regarded as idols, being hammered and destroyed in a kind of carnivalesque way in the 17th century. It goes from there right up to the quiet solemnities and protected spaces of museums, does this story of iconoclasm.
[00:16:55.02] So if we're to think about the classic stages of iconoclasm, this is the way in which I would articulate them. These phases are not necessarily in this order. There will be periods of history in different places where one phase will jump ahead of another, but I think it's worth articulating these classic phases by way of understanding standard, historical, cultural patterns of destruction, control of destruction and ongoing ripple effects of destruction.
[00:17:38.70] We start with unlicensed iconoclasm, instances of people who break images in sporadic, unlicensed and unauthorized ways. Unlicensed iconoclasm tends to give way does characteristically give way to licensed iconoclasm, when the power that be agree with iconoclasm, agree with its impulse, as they start legislating, as we'll see.
[00:18:15.59] The problem with breaking all images is that the job is impossible. If I were to say, we've got to break every advertising, publicity logo-- there's one just here, we've got to rip it. Look this bottle has Arcadia Natural Spring Water. This is an idol. That must be destroyed. You would think I was completely crazy, because the job could never be ended of destroying every advertising logo. I can see various logos as I speak. They all have to go. It's roughly similar, saying in the 16th century, we've got to destroy every religious image. They're all over the place. It's really hard work.
[00:19:07.54] The standard psychological feature of the iconoclast is always exhaustion. The iconoclast is always saying, look, one last push, we've been at this for 100 years, but come on, there are still images around. We've got to get them all this time. The iconoclast is a sad, at this stage-- the early iconoclast is full of energy. The carnivalesque iconoclast. He or she really takes to the hammer work with a certain joy and thrill and energy. But by the time we reach stage three, the iconoclast-- this is 50 or so years later-- the iconoclast is feeling really tired.
[00:19:55.34] And one of the reasons why the iconoclast class is feeling so tired is because the images have sprung back. Not only are there plenty more images than can possibly be destroyed, but people love the images. We love images, you love images, I do. Everyone does. We're worried about them right now, but we love them. And we don't like them being broken. When they're broken, people go to great lengths to restore them. That's precisely what happened in England, as we'll see.
[00:20:27.19] So you've got lots of undestroyed images from the prior past, and then you've got lots of restored images, remade images, reinstituted images, which are trying to replace the broken ones. A resurgence of the images. And then, the classic phase four. You get a new phase of legislated iconoclasm. This is when you really screw up all your powers and you say, we've been at this for a long time and this time, it's going to be fine, and we're going to take the hammer and make an absolute clean sweep, a tabula rasa of this idol filled landscape.
[00:21:13.38] But this doesn't tend to work for the same reasons I've already said. In 17th century England, it didn't tend to work because the Italian economy in the 17th century was really going badly. The British economy, the English economy, was going terrifically well. As power moves westwards in Europe. And so it is that the grand tour begins the practice thereof. Englishman and women start going to Italy, and, having broken images for 100 years, they suddenly go to Italy. And they discover two things. One, the images are actually rather beautiful. Most embarrassing. Awkward. And two, they're really rather cheap. We can buy them. We can take them back and put them in our home.
[00:22:09.09] So at this point, you really need to do something differently. We've been at the job of breaking the images for 150 years, and it just hasn't worked, so we can't give up on the idea that these images are captivating, that they enslave, that they capture the credulous, that they are very different, very difficult, and dangerous for the ill educated to deal with. But we have the cultivated aristocrat, we shall not fall victim to these Catholic images. We'll buy them, we'll frame them, we'll put them in our house, but even better, we'll put them in a museum. We'll call them-- what shall we call them-- we'll call them art. We'll define a new category for these things. They are not religious images. They are artistic. Look at the form. Look at the colorwork, the shading. That is so beautiful.
[00:23:15.03] We're going to invent, indeed, the word "beauty" to describe these things. So we get museum culture, we get ascetics as a discipline-- remember, Kant's critique of judgment is 1789, and that's at the very end of two centuries of cultivation of taste. And we get a new class for the image. The class for the image is no longer the credulous peasant who will fall victim to the idol. The class now is the cultivated aristocrat who has made this object his or her property, that so far from being subject under the hammer, under the iconoclast's hammer, the cultivated aristocrat has seized this image from under the auctioneer's hammer. That's the delicious pun that to which Joe kindly referred.
[00:24:20.97] So under a different kind of hammer. You've bought it. It's yours. The thing doesn't stop. I've already said that iconoclasm is a process full of the kind of kinesis movement. What we then go on to find, once the museum has neutralized the work of God, the work of religious art, once it calls it a work of art, as distinct from being a religious idol, once it's protected in the museum-- then, unfortunately, the museum itself becomes the site of the sacred, which is inevitably going to call forth acts of iconoclasm. And we'll see how that works when we do look to the Museum of Modern Art.
[00:25:20.67] Let's do some pictures. We love pictures. We can use them, so let me exemplify my stages of classic stages of iconoclasm with some images. Excuse me. So we start, as I say, with unlicensed iconoclasm. I couldn't find any images of this from England, but certainly in England, we had heterodox groups, so-called Lollards in 15th century England, sporadically attacking images. No one quite knew what to do about it, except to try and punish them. But in the 1530s, we get Protestant iconoclasm. Remember that Lutheran texts have come into England in the 1520s. It's really taking off in a very powerful way, and we have unlicensed iconoclasm in England. We have similar instances in central Europe. Germanic Europe. Zurich in 1523. Copenhagen 1530. Munster in 1534.
[00:26:41.01] Unlicensed iconoclasm. And we have an example from Zurich, where it's obvious what's happening. That the iconoclasts are up on a ledge as they are pulling down the statues. They going to pull down the high altar here, and they're taking everything out. Some of them are down here. They take them all out. And here are the statues being martyred, if you will. Again, the picture can't help, despite the fact that the images are all in favor of the iconoclast, the picture can't help nevertheless evoking what the iconoclasts are trying to destroy, which is memory of the saints being martyred. Here they are, the images being martyred. We can't help, or perhaps we can't help, I'm not sure, feel a certain pathos at the images as they're being martyred.
[00:27:36.91] There's a wonderful tract by [? Busser ?] the Lutheran figure who's imported into England in the 1530s. And [? Busser ?] says, when you take the hammer to stone statues of Christ, don't for a moment feel any pity. You must wind yourself up and break the face. You must exercise the kind of pitiless hammer work of the figure. So we have this unlicensed iconoclasm here, which gives way in England to legislation.
[00:28:20.86] This is a really exceptionally important moment. England experienced 100 years, just over 100 years, of legislated iconoclasm between 1538 and 1643. In 1538, faced with unlicensed sporadic illegitimate acts of iconoclasm, Archbishop Cramer says, OK, here it is. This is the new legislation. All visible cult of the saints, before their images was forbidden. And all images that are a beauty-- sorry that's my word-- all images that are, quote, "abused with pilgrimages or offerings, ye Shall, for the avoiding of that most detestable sin of idolatry, forthwith take down and delay-- from Latin delare, meaning to destroy." So in 1538, we get this crucial piece of legislation, which says you will destroy all the images that have been subject to the "detestable sin of idolatry."
[00:29:31.66] The sin of idolatry is to treat the material object as if it were divine. And so here is Cramer thinking he can solve the problem. But notice the weak spot in it. Only those that have been "abused with pilgrimages or offerings, for the avoiding of that most detestable sin of idolatry." It sounds fine. But any lawyer-- I'm sure you have lawyers-- will spot the weakness. It turns out to be very difficult to work out which subject-- which statues' images have been subject to the detestable sin of idolatry and which haven't.
[00:30:15.87] So you end up trying to make distinctions, get stories. It just gets terribly complicated, impossibly difficult to distinguish almost straight away. So that by 1547, when we have the new King, young King Edward the Sixth, pictured as Josiah, the boy King of the Old Testament, who is a very vigorous iconoclast. Edward the Sixth-- in the beginning of the reign of Edward the Sixth, Cramer was still archbishop. Puts it this way. This is legislation.
[00:30:55.26] In almost every place is contention for images, whether they have been abused or not. And this is the lawyer's problem. And so, all the images remaining in any church or chapel, all the images, simple, shall be removed and taken away. So, we're just getting-- treat this in a kind of simple way. Now we're not going to make distinctions. We're just going to destroy all the religious images. That sounds easy. But listen to this statute in 1550. This is only four years later. It's clearly not working, is it? Because here is a statute from the third and fourth years of Edward the Fourth, that "persons having any images of stone, timber, alabaster-- very little legalistic language-- or earth, graven, carved or painted shall, deface and destroy, or caused to be defaced and destroyed, the same images and every of them."
[00:32:02.82] It's interesting that little piece of legislation also makes a distinction for the images of nobles. Images of aristocrats and their families and so on. On their tombs, they should be OK, they should be left. But all the religious images, every single one of them, carved, painted, engraved, et cetera, they are all to be defaced and destroyed. So this is the really high point of English iconoclasm in the reign of Edward the Sixth.
[00:32:40.96] That doesn't look very sharp to me. It's not sharp to you, is it? Let me not pause over for too long if it's not very sharp. This is Fox's Acts of Martyrs. First published in 1563, infinite editions, the most popular book, along with Pilgrim's Progress in English households, right through to, and including, the 19th century. Every household had one.
[00:33:13.93] And what we've got here is the-- in the upper panel, is the iconoclasm. At the beginning of the reign of Edward the Sixth, people coming out of the church, the papists packing their poultry away as this little caption says. Ready to hop in their boat back to Rome. There's a figure pulling down a statue. Here, in a kind of niche, there's another one of those classic fires with bits of crucifixes sticking out. Here-- down here, we have the new dispensation. Edward the Sixth is distributing the Bible to his lords and prelates down here. And in this panel, we have the newly formed Protestant Church, with all images to strip away. These are bare walls, and with only two sacraments. We've got baptism and the Eucharist. These the two sacraments that have remained.
[00:34:18.03] And what we have, instead of images, is words. We've got the preacher here, preaching to a congregation down here. There is a mighty fight going on in England in the 1520s and 30s, and right up to the 1640s. A mighty struggle to the death between the image and the word. And the word, at this stage, the word of God, word with a capital W, is winning. Hands down.
[00:34:52.65] I just pop in some images that you'll recognize. If we think of legislated iconoclasm, serious, systematic iconoclasm-- you will remember the statues of Bamiyan in southern Afghanistan from February 2001 which were destroyed. Here is the image. Hands up if you remember this image. This was the first-- we all remember it-- this was the first time I suddenly realized that this topic was happening now. And here it is, being blown up. It's interesting that when the structures were blown up, the Taliban were described as medieval.
[00:35:44.20] Here's just-- if you just Google Bamiyan statues, you'll find all the news releases of that shocking act, of which we've seen so many further examples since 2001. Medieval Taliban lashed over Buddha demolition. Taliban militia was internationally lashed as medieval vandals of the world's cultural treasures. The Indian foreign minister condemned the Taliban action as a regression into medieval barbarism.
[00:36:18.04] It's interesting, in our cultural history, the way in which we project what we most fear and are most disgusted by in our cultural history on two previous dispensations. I think modernity has so much to be shocked and embarrassed by our own early modernity, that one of our classic cultural resources is to displace that by which we are shocked onto the prior dispensation. So iconoclasm is described as late medieval. No. I would rewrite these news releases. Early modern Taliban lashed over Buddha demolition. Taliban militia was internationally lashed as early moderns. And so on. You get my point.
[00:37:15.70] There was very, very early medieval iconoclasm. In the fourth century, we see exactly the same cases as we're isolating right now. There were museums formed by cultivated Christians who sympathized with polytheism and certainly thought the polytheistic structures were gorgeously beautiful. In fourth century Gaul, you'll have Christians forming their own museums to protect the statues. There is, I can see, very early medieval, late antique iconoclasm, but until the 16th century, we're not dealing with iconoclasm.
[00:38:06.80] There's no period in Western history when the image hasn't been seriously threatened. It's always an extremely problematic category, but it wasn't broken up to the 16th century. The Taliban-- this is kind of bad news and good news-- the Taliban are not medievals, they are early moderns. They're us. I don't know if he's here but I have a friend who explained-- from Yemen-- who explained the etymology of Taliban. "Talib" In Arabic means student. Arabists, correct me if I'm wrong. The plural is Taliban. Students. These are the educated. So we've got this legislated iconoclasm as the second stage.
[00:39:01.59] But that takes us on to stage 3, which is the resurgence of images both material and mental. In the England of Charles I, Archbishop Lord is shocked by the destruction of images and tries to restore that worship of beauty, that beautiful practice of liturgy in statues, and images which had been destroyed. But at this point, Puritans get very nervous, obviously, about this restoration of the actual images, but even more nervous about the fact that the iconoclasm or the images have now moved. They have migrated from the physical world into their own psyches.
[00:40:00.20] Our psyches, as we all know, love the image. It's very difficult to eradicate images from our psychic practice. It is impossible. It is a way of going completely crazy to try. And after that initial stage of convalesced destruction of images, after the rather exhausted recognition that the images are resurgent, you wind up with this stage, which is that not only are the images resurgent in material reality, but the images have migrated into your own mind. Here, the iconoclast discovers that it's incumbent upon himself to take a hammer to his own psyche.
[00:40:54.17] "If the idols are removed from-- typo, sorry-- the churches but steal into the mind and statues are erected in the heart, that is deformation not reformation. A change of place, not a driving away of the thing, and so much the more dangerous because it is interior and personal." This is already in 1559. This fear of psychic inhabitation, of invasion of the psyche by images, I think, becomes the dominant fear and anxiety from the 1580s forwards. A lot of English poetry, particularly the poetry of Edmund Spenser, that expresses that terrible dependency on the image, dependency on the image which simultaneously one must absolutely destroy. If
[00:41:51.20] You'll permit me and indulge me, I'm just jumping forward again to see the way in which the image does take up inhabitation in the psyche. Now the Taliban did a very efficient job, I think you'll agree, at destroying the image. But after the fun is over, look what's left. It's this jolly, great hole. The Taliban left the job undone, because this hole provokes in us the spectral memory of what had been destroyed. The job-- it's only about an eighth done. We're going to remember what was there.
[00:42:29.78] So if the Taliban had done the job properly, they really should've put explosions on all this and should have blown the mountain out, really. They should have taken the whole thing away. But then, of course, you've got the problem of the hole where the mountain was. It's really hard work. You can see how exhausting it is, especially when you've got this kind of thing.
[00:42:54.31] This is a wonderful Chinese project to reinstate the Buddha, with a kind of light show. The images always come back. I think this is just a glorious image that suggests the way in which the Taliban and ISIS can actually one way or another be beaten. But the image comes back, and it's there. It could be in your psyche. It could be a source of fear for you. But for others of us, it could be a source of celebration.
[00:43:38.81] OK. So we've got the images now have migrated to the psyche. You've got images being restored to churches. So what we need is an evolution. Let's have an English evolution. And that's exactly what we do get in the 1640s. So in the 1640s, we get a massive period of unlicensed and then licensed iconoclasm. Here is the Lady Chapel in Ely and all you'll notice that all the heads are missing. Someone's gone around the Lady Chapel-- it's still there-- someone's gone around and systematically smashed the heads off. It's more effective to smash the heads off and leave the statue, because it leaves the trace of this really exceptionally aggressive act.
[00:44:31.51] In the English Revolution, here is Bishop Hall, the Bishop of Norwich, who was imprisoned in the English Revolution in the early days of the Civil War. "Lord, what a work was here, what clattering of glasses-- this is Norwich Cathedral-- what beating down of walls, what tearing of manuscripts, what pulling down of seats, what resting out of irons and brass from the windows and graves, what defacing of arms, what demolishing of curious stonework, what tooting and piping upon the destroyed organ pipes, and what hideous triumph on the market day before all the country. We need a kind of sacriligious-- it's obviously sort of carnivalesque again-- sacrilegious and profane procession. All the organ pipes, vestments, together with the leaden cross, were carried to the fire in the public marketplace." And there, burned.
[00:45:34.16] So, this is the last push. We're almost there. We're going to destroy all these images. We're going to clean them out from our mind. We get the likes of the good William Dowsing, who left a very minute account of his iconoclastic work. Tremendous scholarship recently done on iconoclasm in East Anglia, particularly thanks to the wonderful notes, very precise notes, numerical notes, left by William Dowsing, who is calculated to have destroyed upwards of 90% of the religious imagery in East Anglia.
[00:46:18.10] It's interesting, isn't it, that Dowsing should have his own picture painted. He didn't mind that. This is one image with regard to which I do feel an iconoclastic impulse. It's true. And here's another person to whom I feel an iconoclastic impulse, our great John Milton, who himself writes a book called none other than Eikonoklastes, in response to the execution of Charles I. Charles I publishes his book, a book is published about Charles I-- what's it called-- the Baslica con Dora-- sorry, I just can't remember the title at the moment. And Milton replied straight away with Eikonoklastes, saying that the King has become an idol. We must destroy him. The fact that we executed the King was absolutely fine. Milton is part of this life and death struggle of the word and the image. He's obviously in favor of the word against the image, and a striking iconoclast.
[00:47:44.07] So we move then to stage five, that stage where we say, look, we've got to think of some other solution here. Breaking images is just not possible. We're always tired. We're going to Italy, discovering that these images are buyable and beautiful, and so what we get is images like this-- these are a series of paintings painted in the early 16th century. This is from southern Netherlands. The Archduke Albert and Isabelle are visiting a collector's cabinet. So all of a sudden, we get a new world. Here we get a world of art. We get a world of the museum.
[00:48:32.82] And what we notice about the museum is that it's a place of protection for the image. Just notice down here. We get, I think, what might be the first representation of museum guards in a painting. It has to be protected. But if this is a place of protection, then there's one image, and it's this one down here, which is exceptional to the other images, which is bleak to all the others, and that is this image here, which represents a scene of iconoclasm. In 1566 there'd been a period of unlicensed, savage iconoclasm in the Netherlands, and here are the iconoclasts painted as donkeys destroying musical instruments, destroying paintings.
[00:49:25.91] In the top painting here, we've got the figure of painting being helped up by fame. Here, with her wings, is Minerva. And this figure here is a donkey figure, the iconoclast. What's also interesting about this is the fact that this is true museum culture, where religious images are set side by side, juxtaposed, pyrotechnically, with secular images, lots of secular images. You can't see them very well, anyway. Here's a mother and child. Here's a virgin and child. Here is the visitation of the Magi. I've got religious images set side by side with landscapes, with still lifes. You've got bits and pieces, by the way, here, of broken statues down here. This is clearly a post iconoclasm, certainly not post interesting, you'll be glad to note.
[00:50:25.31] It's the scene of art, this is the scene of a new class of aristocrats, a new category, a new space. The museum being protected. And this leads into the 18th century, where we have a museum culture in full flight. This is the Duke de Choiseul, who's the French ambassador to the Vatican in the 1750s in his Roman gallery. And here is the kind of perfect image of where we arrive at.
[00:51:07.18] This is in the Museum of Fine Arts. I'm sure you will have seen it. Where we arrive at with iconoclasm. No longer is Moses here an iconoclast. He is, instead, good for you not because he's an iconoclast, but rather because he sculpted by Michelangelo, just as Bernini here, Bernini's David is good for you, because he's got-- he's a great work of art.
[00:51:34.15] Rome has been divided up into teeny segments. St. Peter's, the source of so much fear and hostility in the 16th century, can be bought as a beautiful little cityscape church painting. Notice that Rome has been framed, as it were. These are all exterior things. There's no danger of falling victim to idolatry. The chromatic range is extremely cool, and if there's a little wreath of salvation being handed down here, it's not the salvation of the saved Christian, but the salvation of the art collector.
[00:52:20.46] The space, by the way, is completely impossible. This art should be-- this art should be on the same plane as that art. It's a trick, isn't it. It's not on the same plane at all. This is an unreal space. It's the space of the imagination of aesthetic pleasure. So, I'm still dealing with stage five. Here, this is museum culture. This image does not look as if it's dealing with museum culture, but if the story I'm telling so far takes kind of 150 years to sort itself out, in later periods, there's a much more rapid alternation between the destruction and the formation of the museum.
[00:53:14.27] This is in the French Revolution, where Alexander the Noir, this figure here, is stopping the iconoclast. And Noir is one of the revolutionaries, but he's stopping the revolutionary iconoclast. And le Noir is the key figure in the foundation of the Museum of Historical Monuments in Paris, which still in one way or another exists. When I last saw her, it was quite a while ago, I was in the hall, and you've got all these plastic casts and images of facades of French churches. I didn't realize then that it had this extraordinary history, because the French Revolution, like the English Revolution, is obviously the time period of extraordinary iconoclasm.
[00:54:00.61] But the point I'm making is that the museum culture forms almost immediately in response to that. We finally move to the last stage. Just not the last stage. There is never a last stage in the kinesis of iconoclasm. We move to the Museum of Modern Art, which, by my reading, and you won't be surprised to hear me say this now, is a Puritan temple. Look at those white walls. Look at the iconoclast principles which have formed every aspect of the Museum of Modern Art. The windows, which have nothing in them. They're just plain churches.
[00:54:42.53] It was New England churches that inspired Puritan churches, that inspired the architecture and design and form of the Museum of Modern Art, a building like those New England churches that tries desperately not to be a building, not to be a special place. It's nowhere, even as it is clearly somewhere. And even in the first floor, you remember Barnet Newman's broken obelisk in the Museum of Modern Art. The first artifact that we see that strikes us as we walk up the first flight of stairs is a broken obelisk, referring back in my reading to the Book of Kings.
[00:55:32.80] So, this temporarily ends our kinesis of iconoclasm. In conclusion, I offer you good news then bad news. The good news is that it does stop after a while, and it can stop. OK. In English history-- it took English cultural history-- takes 150 years. Revolutions, true revolutions, in my view, take 150 years to settle down, and that's exactly the length of time it took the English Revolution to settle down till 1688. It does settle down. The culture does reach into itself and reach for ways of modifying, translating iconoclastic impulses into ways which save and protect the image. That's the good news. The bad news is, as I say, that in our case, it took 150 years. Thank you very much.