Slightly metaphorically, this article deals with the subsequent waves of dramatically different ideologies and their impact on existing value-systems. The transition from one prevalent legal system to another, laden with central notions at variance with the previous one, destroys the old order to build up a new order. An example is taken from the modern history of Germany: starting from the Weimar Republic, through to the Third Reich with its Nazi-ideology, to the division into the democratic Federal Republic and the socialist-communist German Democratic Republic and their reunion in 1990. This article depicts the strategies put into place to accomplish and implement subsequent iconoclasms, and sketches successes and failures. Each iconoclasm finds its origins in the previous legal system and leaves its traces in the next one.

This article discusses the chryselephantine statue known as the Palaikastro Kouros, which was recovered in the excavations at Palaikastro in eastern Crete in the 1980s. The statue and the sanctuary building in which it had stood had been deliberately destroyed c. 1450 bc. It is probable that the motivation for the destruction was iconoclastic. This situates the fate of the Palaikastro Kouros within a broader context of iconoclasm in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean area.

After a long quarrel scattered with persecutions, uprisings, dismissals and replacements of religious authorities, deaths, military expeditions, confiscations and attempts of assassinations in Greece, Italy and other European areas, the Council of Nicaea, in 787, imposed the victory of the iconodules in the Byzantine Empire. The West, especially the Kingdom of the Franks and the Lombards ruled by Charles, later known as Charlemagne, tried to take an official position in the synod of Frankfurt in 794 and in an odd and complex treatise, comprising four books, entitled Opus Caroli, or Libri Carolini, which were recently attributed by Ann Freeman to Theodulf of Orleans, one of the greatest intellectuals of his time. In this work, which we could call the first western treatise on images, the icon is freed from its ritual and cult value, and returned to its artistic use, thus determining, according to some scholars, the larger freedom of figurative representation that characterizes western religious art as compared with the Orthodox one. This stance is followed by a lively debate, involving many authors, the materials of which have not yet been translated and put into full circulation in historical-artistic research.

Pope Gregory the Great (s. 590–604) wrote two letters to Bishop Serenus of Marseilles, reproaching his acts of iconoclasm that had led to schism in his community. These short documents are considered to contain Gregory’s theory of art as a book for the illiterate and have been criticized for destroying the aura of sacred art to all subsequent Western developments. Here, I argue that the pope’s fundamental contribution is to offer instead a theory of iconoclasm. Relying on previous ideas about the pedagogical and communicative power of art and its ability to reach a larger audience beyond the elite, Gregory defends the rights of the community of ‘gentiles and illiterates’ who find in portable painted panels an expression of their identity in the church at Marseilles. Serenus’s wish to impose a superior orthodoxy on the pious if incorrect habits of his flock cannot justify his resorting to iconoclasm. The pope’s vigorous condemnation protects the vulnerable minority and sets an important precedent against any acts of iconoclasm in the West.

My point of departure is a conflict over images in the churches in Bergen, Norway in the 1560s, around 30 years after the Reformation. This introduced a brief period of iconoclasm in Denmark–Norway, inspired by Reformed theology. Soon, however, mainstream Lutheranism took over and statues and pictures were reintroduced. The different views on images in the two Protestant confessions – Lutheranism and Calvinism – are, of course, well known, as are also the various theological arguments in the debate between them. More interesting is the practical question of how it was possible to manage without images when addressing a largely illiterate audience. Here, Lutherans seemed to have basically the same attitude as Catholics, although they differed in the exact way the images were used. Both were ‘mass religions’, aiming at including the whole population and using whatever means necessary for this purpose. By contrast, Calvinism was an intellectual and elite religion, creating tight communities of true believers in accordance with the belief in Predestination. It has therefore been regarded as an important factor in modernization theories, from Weber’s explanation of capitalism to later theories of the link between Reformed Protestantism and modern science. Although there is little to indicate that pictures are an obstacle to science, the intellectual and elitist character of Reformed Protestantism may have contributed to the scientific revolution in the early modern period. Generally, the history of iconoclasm illustrates the fact that images are a powerful medium, particularly when most people are illiterate, and that a religion that abstains from this medium is faced with the challenge of finding a replacement for it.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch colonial past is still visible in a number of statues and street names. Increasingly, however, this past has come under critical scrutiny. The benefits of Dutch colonial rule now seem to pale in view of the various crimes against humanity committed during the colonial era, such as slavery, the violence used to supress rebellions, and – more recently – the Dutch war crimes in Indonesia during the war of independence.

Historical interpretation of Portuguese Overseas Expansion has changed considerably from the late nineteenth century to the present. Ideological appropriations of historical events are commonplace. The propaganda of the regime of Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar extensively used the topic of Portuguese Overseas Expansion as a founding myth for justifying its own colonialism, even in times when decolonization processes were the common trend. Damnatio memoriae, on the one hand, and apologetics, on the other, were strategies spread from primary school textbooks to university programmes. They were responsible for the exclusion and even persecution of many Portuguese scholars, who had to ask for refuge in other European Universities. It created myths, for example around Henry the Navigator or the Nautical School of Sagres. Key-personalities, such as Magellan, were long defamed as anti-heroes. This article will show how these myths and twisted interpretations are still commonplace today. Even now, many Portuguese feel that, in times of crises, these fictions are used to create a sense of national identity and self-confidence.

When the political needs of governments, political parties, armed groups, etc., demand the making up of a past that justifies their specific present, their respective organs often seek to propagate a discourse that permeates the national social structure and allows the memory of the causes of past violence to be reinvented, through a strong perversion of history. In these situations, a trend known as historical presentism tends to emerge, i.e., the malformation of history and historical knowledge in the service of totalitarian projects, such as those of the Nazi and Soviet regimes in twentieth-century Europe, or identity-based nationalisms, sponsored by violent guerrillas, as in the case of the FARC-EP in Colombia. Two scenarios that exemplify singular manifestations of historical presentism in Europe and Latin America are given.

Cultural landscapes of Central-Eastern Europe have been devastated by the Second World War and its consequences. Thinking of demolished cities and destroyed historical buildings, one can easily forget about the intangible part of the landscape, so to the narratives standing behind what we see. These were more affected by the unprecedented mass forced migrations that happened after the military actions had ceased. Among the territories that almost completely changed their population over a very short time after the war were the so-called ‘Recovered Territories’, i.e. former German lands attributed to Poland after the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. New inhabitants, who in the majority came there from former Polish territories in the East, found themselves in a ‘land without landscape’, where everything needed new names and reinterpretation.

Stunde Null – this expression is used to indicate the end of the German Nazi regime in 1945 and the beginning of a new Germany. This historical turning point was marked by the re-naming of the former Germany in both East and West, and Nazi symbols, institutions, values and paraphernalia were taken to the tip. Naming and re-naming were part of this iconoclastic attempt to undo a recent past by turning the memory of it into a negative memory soon to disappear out of sight. However, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a cumbersome process in which iconoclasm acts both as a singular event and as a moment in an ongoing historical process. The iconoclastic destruction in 1562 of the cathedral in Lyon opens a discussion of the interdependence of event and process in iconoclasm as an intervention in collective memory. Using re-naming to exemplify this cultural dynamic, the motto of the French Revolution, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, serves as a brief illustration of how revolutionary iconoclasms were exploited later to redesign French history. To finish, post-colonial India sets the scene for a demonstration of the ambiguities embedded in iconoclastic processes in the short story ‘Lawley Road’ (1956) by R.K. Narayan, an ironic account of a back-and-forth process of re-naming of streets and places in the aftermath of Indian independence.

This article examines the significance of some recent architecture and urban demolitions in Berlin. As an example of present-day iconoclasm in the heart of Europe, the relevance of these cases lies not only in the destruction of politically-charged artefacts, but also in their replacement with replicas of eighteenth-century architecture, thus materializing a Prussian revival and a nostalgia for the country’s royal past. In 2006, Berlin initiated the demolition of the Palace of the Republic (Palast der Republik). The Palast der Republik occupied the site of the original Berlin Palace, or Berliner Schloss, the residence of the Hohenzollern dynasty between 1701 and 1918. The demolition of the Palast has been followed by the construction of a replica of the eighteenth-century Schloss, but now intended to house the new Humboldt Forum, a museum dedicated to non-Western art. In recent years, both Berlin and neighbouring Potsdam have witnessed several integral reconstructions of historical buildings. This series of architecture demolitions and replicas therefore appears as a calculated and well-orchestrated operation to redefine the presence of the past through built artefacts, deserving to be examined from the broader perspective of iconoclastic precedents in art and architecture.

Central to this reflection upon the interconnectedness between the destruction of a monument in Norway after the Second World War and iconoclasm will be work by Swiss art historian Dario Gamboni who, in The Destruction of Art (1997), argues that any understanding of modern and contemporary iconoclasm must be contextualized via the redefinition of art and its actual autonomy. In so doing, this article will open a twofold reflection concerning iconoclasm as an act of destruction, while also reflecting as to whether or not the very term ‘iconoclasm’ is perhaps best understood by what Dutch scholar Mieke Bal (2002) has called a ‘travelling concept’. The latter will hopefully allow for a consideration of iconoclasm through interdisciplinary cultural analysis, and, as such, enrich our understanding of the term and its practices in both historical and contemporary perspectives.

This article contributes to debates concerning slavery and slave museums, taking as inspiration historical novels and archives from the Schwarz-Bart Library in Goyave (Guadeloupe). I question, in particular, the passing over of black or mulatto female heroines, in sharp contrast with béké figures who, even if they have been temporarily(!) beheaded, remain the more famous icons in the collective mind of the French Caribbean and Caribbean population at large. I could indeed measure that Martinicans, in particular, are proud to have ‘given Napoléon’s wife’ and to have erected her beautiful body into white marble ‘posture’ at the Fort-de-France Savanah. My survey touches on the counter-example of ‘La mulâtresse Solitude’, a statue erected in Guadeloupe, but without any indication of its source: the best-selling novel La mulâtresse Solitude by André Schwarz-Bart. Why does Édouard Glissant’s project for a ‘Centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions’ on no occasion mention Solitude as the only female heroine such a Centre national could and should have staged? What does this tell us about the gender bias that continues to wreak havoc to the West Indies in all fields? Solitude remains a central, pivotal poteau mitan in Caribbean iconography. In spite of recent successful innovations, there is still much to sort out before leaving the dominant tendency to ‘statufier sur son sort’ and to promote male heroes instead of female ones.

Two iconoclasms took place in twentieth-century Russian history: the iconoclasm after the October revolution, and the iconoclasm after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. These two (ideologically opposite) phases of iconoclastic actions (dismantling, destruction) were incited by programmes concerning the abolition of tsarist monuments of 1918 and met by controversial reactions to the removal of the statues of the former Soviet politicians in the 1990s. The revolutionary demolition of the symbols of the imperial past was executed in accordance with a clear-cut plan and included the erection of new monuments for outstanding communist activists. The official aim of the post-soviet removal of these monuments, to delete traces of a problematic past, was confronted with a revitalized communist ideology on the one hand and with the reaction of the Human Rights Organization Memorial on the other, which criticized the insufficient demolition of soviet symbols. This multifaceted situation is complicated by the reconstruction of destroyed pre-revolutionary monuments of Russian (predominantly religious) history.

Iconoclasm mainly concerns the destruction of icons, based on the Commandment of the Bible ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image…’ (Exodus 20:4). Iconoclasm can be presented in two different ways. One is that of an ‘inside aspect’, taking place within a given religious system. The other is an ‘outside aspect’, through which a religious system destroys the religious symbols of another religion. Dealing mainly with the ‘outside aspect’, one may find many religious sites which were destroyed or had their functions changed while these were occupied by another religious group. The holy city of Jerusalem, which lived under different religious regimes, can present this phenomenon, as each regime changed the landscape of the city according to its own perspective.