On monuments

Abstract

Iconoclasm has, of course, a more constricted meaning than the destruction of objects. As the word’s Greek root εἰκονοκλάστης indicates, and as the actions of seventh-century Byzantine image breakers attest, iconoclasm denotes the smashing of an icon (εἰκον) specifically, which is to say, of portrait likenesses of personages. Even within that narrower definition, however, iconoclasm vents its fury against icons because they are mere things that, due to their imagery, are treated—or responded to—as if they were persons. Among the gestures that image breakers habitually employ, one of the most telling is this: having removed the putative idol from its hallowed spot, the iconoclast presents it dramatically to the agitated crowd and cries: Look! Can’t you see? It is nothing but wood. The idea is that the eye, previously bamboozled into perceiving the inert thing as a god, can now—soberly, critically, and factually—glimpse the thing as merely this or that inert material. “Look!” cried a weaver in sixteenth-century Tournai, snatching a consecrated host from a priest during the celebration of the Eucharist: “deceived people, do you believe this is the King, Jesus Christ, the true God and Savior? Look!” Then, with all eyes on his prize, he crumbled the wheaten disk and bolted from the church. “Look,” exclaimed an iconoclast in the confessionally divided French town of Albiac, holding up saints’ relics he had removed from their sacred shrine: “look, they are only animal bones!”6 These Protestant agitators borrowed their gestures from the Old Testament. Scripture mocks and vilifies the idols—those false, man-made deities who incite God’s jealous, destructive wrath—by referring to their underlying substance as merely “the work of man’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell” (Deut. 4:28).