On 10 August 1566, the Reformed preacher Sébastien Matte delivered an inflammatory sermon at the village church of Steenvoorde in the westkwartier (west quarter) of Flanders, which led some of the congregation to attack the religious images, paintings, and other liturgical items at the nearby religious house of Saint Laurent. This was the start of the beeldenstorm (image storm) or iconoclastic fury, which spread rapidly through Flanders and across the Habsburg Netherlands. Ten days later, the churches and religious establishments in Antwerp were sacked and, by the end of the month, the image breaking had moved northward to the Holland towns of Amsterdam, Delft, Leiden, and The Hague, as well as to Le Cateau, Tournai, and Valenciennes in the south. The beeldenstorm caused alarm not only because of the scale of religious violence, but also the speed with which it spread across the Low Countries.

The 450th anniversary of the beeldenstorm was commemorated in 2016 by a series of exhibitions, talks, and cultural events (together with a website, http://www.beeldenstorm450.eu/) held in the region where it began. The Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap (Royal Netherlands Historical Society) devoted a volume of the BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, titled Beeldenstorm: Iconoclasm in the Low Countries, to exploring various aspects of the beeldenstorm, with essays by established historians and early career researchers. The Rijksmuseum and the University of Amsterdam also held a two-day conference entitled “Iconoclasm: Beeldenstorm and Beyond,” which sought to consider the events in a global perspective. It was a conference that addressed not only the destruction of 1566, but also considered these events within the broader context of iconoclasm and the cultural destruction of subsequent centuries.

The anniversary of the beeldenstorm coincides with a period of increasing interest in iconoclasm in general. Over the last decade, more than a dozen books have been published looking at different aspects of the subject during the early modern period. Some of these studies have provided detailed examinations of particular periods of iconoclasm, focusing on the extent and character of the destruction, as well as the motivations of its perpetrators. Other publications have raised questions about the terminology used in discussions of iconoclasm, the broader chronological context, and its aftermath.

Published in 1973, Natalie Zemon Davis’s article “The Rites of Violence” remains a seminal text for studying the character and motivation behind the iconoclasm and massacres of the French religious wars of the late sixteenth century. While it would be too simplistic to characterize the religious violence as just being Catholics who kill and Protestants who smash religious images and altars, there was, to a degree, a confessional distinction to the religious violence. Forty years later, Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France reflected on the article’s influence and current scholarship. Although the essays in this volume focus more on violence against people than property, there have been other studies looking at aspects of early modern French iconoclasm. These include Eric Nelson’s study of the Loire Valley and mine on Orléans, as well as pieces on neighboring frontier territories, such as my essay on Cateau-Cambrésis and Kristine Kolrud’s on Piedmont. Another dimension of this research has been the focus on the memory of iconoclasm. This is something that Nelson examines in relation to relics, while Kendall Tarte has discussed how the devastation of churches by the Huguenots was conveyed in François de Belleforest’s Cosmographie Universelle (1552). Besides the description and language used, the Cosmographie includes the striking depiction of the devastated churches of Angoulême occupying a void within the city walls.

Publications on the Low Countries have included earlier studies of the beeldenstorm as well as new research exploring different aspects of the destruction. Solange Deyon and Alain Lottin’s classic text on the outbreak and course of the image breaking—Les casseurs de l’été 1566—first appeared in 1981 but has been reprinted with a new preface and suggestions for further reading. Coinciding with the 450th anniversary, Jozef Scheerder’s previously unpublished doctoral thesis of 1971 provides a comprehensive account of the events at Ghent during the late summer of 1566. It is accompanied by a useful historiographical overview of its significance and works that have since appeared. The iconoclasm at Ghent as well as at Ypres and Antwerp form a chapter in Peter Arnade’s monograph on the political culture of the Dutch Revolt to 1585. Arnade also briefly considers the destruction that took place during the so-called Calvinist republics of the late 1570s and early 1580s. Although this later iconoclasm was significant, as Geert Janssen argued at the Amsterdam conference, the beeldenstorm of 1566 has overshadowed later periods of destruction during the revolt against Spanish rule in the Netherlands.

Recent research has highlighted the extent of the destruction that took place during the beeldenstorm. Alastair Duke pointed out that the iconoclasts were not solely image breakers but destroyed other items associated with the celebration of the Mass, which were denounced as idolatrous by those professing the Reformed faith. The authorities accused the perpetrators of devastating church interiors, not just smashing images but also damaging paintings, attacking sacrament houses, and overturning altars. The Reformed antipathy to the Catholic Mass made the elaborate sacrament houses evoking the real presence particularly vulnerable to attack during the late summer of 1566, as Anne-Laure van Bruaene has shown for Ghent and other towns. The destruction extended beyond images and items associated with the Mass to include relics, books, manuscripts, vestments, and sometimes altarpieces and paintings.

More consideration is now being given to the Catholic response to the iconoclasm. In her monograph on Catholic identity during the revolt of the Netherlands, Judith Pollmann drew attention to those who challenged the iconoclasts and attempted to protect and recover church furnishings. In some towns, the measures taken by the magistrates averted the iconoclasm, but this depended on the cooperation of the civic militia as well as the willingness of the authorities to take further steps to maintain order. Nonetheless, as Ruben Suykerbuyk has shown, there was no guarantee that such measures would be successful. Although the iconoclastic fury spread rapidly, some religious institutions still had sufficient time to conceal or rescue statues and other religious items ahead of the image breaking. However, the removal of these images sometimes caused anxiety among those who witnessed it or its aftermath, believing that the iconoclasm had already begun. As David de Boer and Charles Ford have shown, some important paintings were removed to safety, such as Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb at Ghent. The altarpiece was dismantled and hidden in the church tower in 1566, restored in 1569, and then removed in 1578 to the town hall where it remained during the Calvinist republic. Similar measures can be seen elsewhere in the Netherlands, but it was not always possible to save works of art. Ford’s analysis of Karl van Mander’s Schilder-boeck (1604) showed that the contemporary Flemish artist and writer recorded some of the paintings lost during the beeldenstorm and the revolt.

A different perspective on iconoclasm and its enduring impact is provided by two studies relating to the British Isles. The publication of David McRoberts’s Rhind Lectures delivered some forty years ago, expanded by Stephen Mark Holmes, illustrates the rich material culture of some Scottish churches before the destruction of the Scottish Reformation. A similar sense of what has been lost can be found in Margaret Aston’s magisterial (and monumental) survey of English iconoclasm, which follows on from her England’s Iconoclasts (1988). The first part of this 1,100-page monograph examines the image controversy and the destruction that took place from the time of John Wycliffe in the late fourteenth century, through the Reformation period to the English Civil War. (A useful complementary text to this section is David Davis’s collection of documents on the image debate in Reformation England, while the catalogue Art under Attack includes a number of related color illustrations and essays.)

The iconoclastic assault in England was a combination of official destruction, accompanied in some cases by the public burning of images, and the sometimes more reticent, parochial engagement with purging church interiors. Under Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and during the Interregnum, parliamentary legislation targeted religious imagery. Aston’s detailed assessment is supported in parts 2 and 3 with case studies across the early modern period. They illustrate the different ways in which saints, such as Saint Thomas à Becket and Saint George, were dealt with as well as attitudes toward the cross and images of the Trinity.Footnote ¹ A fascinating chapter in part 3 looks at the tension that existed over the survival of religious imagery in medieval stained glass, which was sometimes retained through necessity and because of the expense of replacing it. Case studies by Tabitha Barber on the fate of the stained-glass windows at Canterbury Cathedral and Christ Church, Oxford, during the Interregnum can also be found in Art under Attack.

For Aston, while the English Reformation followed its own distinct course when compared to the European Reformers, “its genetic make-up certainly belonged to a family in which the iconoclastic gene was prominent.”Footnote ² The extent to which religious imagery was eradicated from English churches varied, but over the centuries gradual attrition and indoctrination established an antipathy toward such visual display that could be seen in the travelers’ descriptions of Lutheran places of worship and later nineteenth-century resistance to Ritualism in the Church of England. James Simpson has also emphasized the lasting importance of this century of “legislated iconoclasm,” which he considered to be “unique in Reformation Europe for its jurisdictional extension and duration.” For him, it lies at the core of an Anglo-American tradition that “insistently and violently repudiates idols and images as dangerous carriers of the old regime. The repudiation takes different but analogous forms across the centuries from the sixteenth to the twentieth.”Footnote ³ In her detailed study of the translation of iconoclasm to colonial North America, Susan Juster has shown that it was more often Anglican places of worship and religious practices that were branded as idolatrous and became the focus of iconoclastic attacks. However, this was on a relatively small scale when compared to Europe.

Generally, early modern iconoclasm was directed toward religious objects, but there were instances where there was a political dimension to the destruction. The dismantling of the shrine of Saint Thomas à Becket under Henry VIII represented more than an attack upon the cult of saints, it was part of the dismartyring of the former archbishop, identifying him as a disobedient rebel and traitor to the king’s ancestor and namesake. In France, the tombs and funerary monuments of Louis XI and Francis II in the Orléanais were destroyed by the Huguenots during 1562–63. The kneeling statue of King Louis was systematically dismembered by the iconoclasts in a manner resembling a judicial punishment, representing what Mark Greengrass has described as a virtual regicide. (Later parallels can be seen in the damage done to statues of British monarchs such as James II, William III, and George III, discussed by M. G. Sullivan in Art under Attack.)

During the French Revolution, as Richard Clay has shown, political as well as religious images and symbols were attacked. As he discusses in his monograph, in 1792–93, for example, measures were taken to remove statues of Louis XIII and Louis XIV from beside the high altar at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, while other monarchical symbols were removed or concealed. The subsequent de-Christianizing decrees saw religious images taken away and replaced by revolutionary symbols. Elsewhere in the capital, steps were taken to remove or reconfigure reminders of royal authority or Catholicism in places of worship. Public spaces across Paris were transformed by the toppling of royal statues as well as the suppression of monuments that the Commune regarded as promoting religious prejudice. While there were spontaneous outbursts, much of the revolutionary iconoclasm was authorized and undertaken by officials: inventories were drawn up, depots housed items of aesthetic or historic significance, and bills were tendered by workmen for concealing or transforming images, etc. This was a bureaucratization of iconoclasm.

Consideration of revolutionary iconoclasm highlights not only the parallels with the late sixteenth century, but also the significant differences. A broader chronological perspective for studying iconoclasm is evident in several volumes of essays. Iconoclasm and Iconoclash discusses early modern iconoclasm primarily in the context of earlier Jewish and Christian debates over images together with some essays on the post-Reformation period. Different disciplinary approaches and this wider historical framework are also evident in Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present and Iconoclasm from Antiquity to Modernity, with contributions ranging from prehistory or late antiquity to the twenty-first century. These volumes contextualize early modern iconoclasm, but Simpson has gone further in Under the Hammer. In asserting an Anglo-American tradition, he has rejected the periodization of iconoclasm as hindering our understanding of the intense and violent responses that can be activated by images.

Iconoclasm also has a contemporary resonance, according to Stacy Boldrick: “Iconoclasm is no longer a subject that any of us can afford to ignore or avoid. Images of damaged or destroyed art and artefacts are part of the contemporary world.”Footnote ⁴ Since 2000, a series of well-publicized acts of cultural destruction have heightened public awareness of both the power of images and ideological reactions to them. These include the dynamiting of the sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in March 2001, the tearing down of mausoleums and damaging shrines at Timbuktu by Malian forces linked to al-Qaida in July 2012, and the destruction of Shi‘ite mosques and Christian churches since 2014 in territories held by ISIS, along with the smashing of artifacts in the Mosul Museum, bulldozing buildings at Nimrud, and blowing up temples at Palmyra. Alongside the destruction of religious items and ancient sites, there have been instances of political iconoclasm—the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, might be included in this repertoire. While these are powerful images of cultural destruction, Jamal Elias has urged caution. The stark black-and-white terms by which the Western media have portrayed the destruction of Bamiyan Buddhas, for example, has negated the local context and complexity of the situation that lay behind the Taliban’s actions.

Parallels have been drawn between this more recent destruction and early modern iconoclasm. For Simpson, the actions of the Taliban resembled those of the clerical elite who lay behind the legislation and destruction in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England: men driven by their own particular convictions and religious texts. Examining modern instances of cultural destruction may, as Jens Braarvig has argued, further our overall understanding of iconoclasm. According to Koenraad Jonckheere, watching recordings of artifacts being smashed in the Mosul Museum creates in the viewer an iconic memory of the cultural destruction of our own era. Similarly, the witnesses to the beeldenstorm developed their own iconic memories, which underlay the visual culture of the later sixteenth-century Netherlands.

These broader chronological studies and divergent forms of cultural destruction have raised questions about the terminology used, particularly what constitutes iconoclasm and whether it is the most appropriate term. Derived from the Greek eikon (image) and klastes (breaker), the literal definition of iconoclasm as “image breaking” has been regarded as too narrow because the violence extended beyond images. Some historians have sought an overarching term that links antipathy toward Byzantine icons, Protestant assaults on Catholic images, the revolutionary destruction of royal statues, and the actions of the Taliban and ISIS. The definition of iconoclasm is discussed in Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms. The volume raises questions about whether the word should be merely confined to the destruction of images or be conceived of more widely to relate to a range of objects. As has already been noted, the term beeldenstorm was not confined to the destruction of images. For the Reformed, it was framed in terms of the broader assault on Catholic idolatry. The foundational text of the Scottish Reformation, the First Book of Discipline (1560), contended, “By idolatry, we understand the Masse, invocation of Saints, adoration of images and the keeping and retaining of the same. And, finally, all honouring of God, not conteined in his holy word.”Footnote ⁵

A less pejorative and more flexible term for the subject was proposed by an exhibition held at Karlsruhe in 2002: Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. According to Bruno Latour, iconoclasm refers to the action of breaking where the destructive intent is clear, but iconoclash is defined as when there is ambiguity or uncertainty over the motivation for violent actions and whether these are intended to be constructive or destructive. This is not a term that appears to have lasted and, as Margaret Aston pointed out, Joseph Koerner, who co-curated the exhibition, has a different definition for iconoclash from Latour.

Richard Clay has proposed an alternative approach that more accurately encompasses the destruction of the French Revolution. Representational objects should be considered as visual signs that were decoded and interpreted by Parisians according to their backgrounds, beliefs, and cultural experience. In revolutionary Paris, “breaching the physical integrity of a visual signifier, either by removing part or all of it or by adding new signifying elements to an otherwise intact signifier, ensured that the object could be made to point to new meanings legible in relation to contemporary discourses. Thus, acts of iconoclasm could be used to point to the dominance of particular discourses and to their sympathizers’ control over, and ability to act purposefully within, public spaces in which communities of belief were reproduced, and represented visually by signs.”Footnote ⁶ Iconoclasm therefore amounted to something more complex than the destruction of an image. A statue might be altered rather than either removed or smashed to pieces, thereby remaining unbroken but transformed in a manner that conveyed an alternative message to the viewer. Furthermore, Clay poses the question of when the moment of iconoclasm occurred—for example, in relation to Edmé Bouchardon’s statue of Louis XV: “When it was toppled but left largely intact? When it was broken into pieces? When those pieces were melted-down and, supposedly, turned into cannon?”Footnote ⁷ Iconoclasm could therefore be defined as “a moment in ongoing processes of discursive sign transformation that precede, accompany and proceed from moments of physical breaking.”Footnote ⁸ In this context, “sign transformation” principally relates to images and statuary. Clay has argued for “the comparable treatment of objects that are not readily categorisable as images,” such as the destruction of the relics and reliquary of Sainte Geneviève in 1793.Footnote ⁹ In the late sixteenth century, these devotional objects would have been regarded as part of the material destruction of the iconoclasts.

Approaching this debate over nomenclature from another direction, Jan Bremmer has explored the genealogy and use of iconoclast, iconoclastic, and iconoclasm. He has demonstrated that these terms only gradually came into use during the early modern period. The Latin term iconoclasta was used from the early fifteenth century in England to defend images against the critical writings of Wycliffe and Hus; Catholic theologians and polemicists later employed the term during the Reformation. Bremmer argues that iconoclaste first appears in French in 1557; variations of the term beeldenstorm were used in the sentences imposed on those found guilty of perpetrating the destruction in the Low Countries. Ford has noted that while Karel van Mander used terms such as beeld-stormingh (image storming) or church breaking, he more often referred to the destruction indirectly rather than as an event.

Further research shows that the Latin term was being used in English works from the mid-sixteenth century. In 1565, Thomas Stapleton’s translation “Of disagrement in doctrine from amonge the protestants” in The Apologie of Fridericus Staphylus referred to the Byzantine image controversy and provided the following definition: “Iconoclastae, Imagebreakers, which caste out of the church the images of Christ and all sainctes. … Our gospelling protestants practice it daily.”Footnote ¹⁰ Catholics used iconoclastae in early seventeenth-century English texts in a pejorative manner, linking Protestant actions with the Byzantine image controversy. In 1603, Matthew Kellion’s A Survey of the New Religion argued that “Leo the third Emperour, Constantine ye fifthe, and Leo the fourth with the adherentes called Iconomachi, and Iconoclastae, were condemned as heretikes for denying honour to Images, and for breaking and defacing them, & how can our ghospellers shew their faces amongest Christianes, who exceed those Image-breakers by many degrees.”Footnote ¹¹ Five years later another tract stated that “Iconoclastae (that is, such men as denied the Images of our Saviour and his Saints be set up in Churches, yea that brake downe and cast them out thence) were by 600 … adjudged Heretikes: what be then our Protestants?” The transition from the Latin to an English term can be seen in an additional Catholic tract of 1609 that described the Byzantine emperor Leo III as “the Protestanticall Iconoclast.”Footnote ¹²

Iconoclasm appears in English during the early eighteenth century, first in Alban Butler’s Lives of the Primitive Fathers, Martyrs and other Principal Saints and then, in 1731, in The Rise and Fall of the Heresy of the Iconoclasts; or Image-Breakers. Again, the term is used in relation to the Byzantine controversy over images. These citations are earlier than Bremmer’s attribution of “iconoclasm” to one William Taylor in 1797. However, writing against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Taylor did use the term in the context of the Protestant resistance toward imagery.

Iconoclast and iconoclasm were therefore terms that only emerged during the early modern period and were used in relation to the Byzantine controversy rather than the contemporary destruction of images. The Byzantine debate over images was utilized by both confessions in the early modern period. Jean Calvin used it to justify his own stance following the rediscovery and publication of the Carolingian text Libri Carolini in 1549, which—based on a misapprehension—attacked the perceived Byzantine adoration of images. For Catholic polemicists, the term iconoclast could be used to discredit the Protestant confessions and associate them with this earlier controversy. Historians therefore need to be cautious in using iconoclasm when describing the destruction of the late sixteenth century, which was not solely confined to breaking images but was more broadly an assault upon what was perceived as Catholic idolatry. In developing a longue durée approach from Byzantium to Bamiyan, a more flexible definition of iconoclasm is needed.

Recent research has gone beyond the shattered remains of religious images and the trappings of Catholic devotion and worship to consider its aftermath, particularly in relation to artistic production and the restoration of the religious landscape. The implications of the beeldenstorm for painting in the Low Countries has been the focus of several studies, including an overview of the current state of research by David Freedberg in his keynote lecture (and subsequent essay) at the 2008 Amsterdam conference “Art after Iconoclasm: Painting in the Netherlands between 1566 and 1585.” His research on the role of images as presented in contemporary pamphlets and other publications has been revisited in studies by Jonckheere and Thijs Weststeijn on Netherlandish art theory. There has also been a renewed interest in artists working in the aftermath of the beeldenstorm, such as Michiel Coxcie. Anne Woollett has discussed Coxcie’s contribution to the revitalization of religious art in the Southern Netherlands after 1566. The artist was also the focus of an exhibition at Leuven in 2013 accompanied by a collection of essays, edited by Jonckheere, on his work.

Alongside these individual studies, Koenraad Jonckheere’s monograph surveys the art of Antwerp in the period after the iconoclasm until 1585, when the city fell to the Spanish forces of the duke of Parma. Although artists from across the religious spectrum continued to ply their trade in the city after 1566, Jonckheere argues that a confessional encoding of images developed that he has labeled as “experiments in decorum.” This represented a “quest for pictorial ecumenicism,” a means by which religious coexistence could be achieved in the city’s artistic community.Footnote ¹³ He argues that artists with known Reformed sympathies such as Adriaen Thomasz. Key and Frans Pourbus the Elder portrayed saints with dirty feet or filthy fingernails, so that they were no longer perceived as being flawless individuals worthy of veneration. Another method was “omission iconography,” the editing or exclusion of elements from a painting that were nonscriptural or offensive to Reformed adherents. Although not all of these approaches were necessarily new or consistently applied, the different ways by which artists experimented in their rendering religious scenes after the iconoclasm provided the means through which they could continue to operate during a period of continued confessional uncertainty.

Besides religious art, the restoration of the material culture of worship and the sacral landscape has also been the focus of attention. Michal Bauwens has examined the response of the Catholic community at Ghent to the beeldenstorm, while my current research looks at the francophone dioceses of the Southern Netherlands. This demonstrates that the restoration and reconstruction of churches following the iconoclasm began against the backdrop of continued political and confessional conflict of the late sixteenth century. In the Dutch Republic, Mia Mochizuki’s detailed examination of the Bavokerk at Haarlem has focused on the century after the destruction of 1578. As the flyleaf notes, “Debunking the myth of the stark white Protestant church interior, this study explores the very objects and architectural additions that were in fact added to Netherlandish church interiors in the first century after iconoclasm.” In France, there has been a similar interest in the reconstruction of Catholic churches following iconoclasm and the religious wars. Barbara Diefendorf has written on restoring communities during the wars and more recently, in a forthcoming article in Past and Present, has looked at the religious landscape of Montpellier. Philippa Woodcock has examined the challenges of refitting rural parish churches after iconoclasm and during a period of continuing conflict for the diocese of Le Mans.

In the immediate aftermath of the beeldenstorm, Frans Hogenberg, exiled from the Netherlands, published at Cologne in 1570 what has become a well-known and frequently reproduced engraving of the destruction at Antwerp, which has been examined in detail by Ramon Voges. Although this was a momentous event at the early stages of the revolt against Spanish rule, it was not one that was frequently recorded in artistic circles. The calm dismantling of Catholic fittings portrayed by Dirk van Delen and Hendrick van Steenwijck II are relatively unusual within the broader field of church interior paintings from the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Angela Vanhaelen’s insightful study of this genre argues that the works of Pieter Saenredam, Emanuel de Witte, and others illustrated more than a portrayal of Calvinist churches but represented the aftermath of iconoclasm. They offered the opportunity for remembrance: “To contemplate carefully the bare walls of an emptied church was a means of remembering an attack on the spiritual and political beliefs of one’s ancestors and the assault on their most sacred forms of material culture.” These artists employed various strategies, such as the inclusion of imaginary or incongruous elements “that effectively drew attention to the changed status of the visual image after iconoclasm.”Footnote ¹⁴ (Vanhaelen also considers the print series satirizing the reverse iconoclasm of the Catholics “scourging” the Dom at Utrecht of its Reformed furnishings and its resanctification after the French invasion of 1672.) There is a sense from these paintings of the unease and embarrassment that, according to Judith Pollmann, has characterized the historiography of the beeldenstorm until the twentieth century.

Over the last decade our understanding of the European iconoclasm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been significantly broadened both by individual studies as well as different approaches to the subject. Recent research has helped to contextualize early modern iconoclasm and to reevaluate what it encompassed and its aftermath. In spite of the extensive work that has been done, there remain periods that have not been studied in great depth, such as the iconoclasm under the Calvinist republics in the Southern Netherlands. It is also perhaps time for a reappraisal of the iconoclasm associated with the Scottish Reformation. Furthermore, new interdisciplinary research offers the potential for enhancing our understanding of the motivation that lay behind iconoclasm. Kate Giles and Pamela Graves, for example, have called for further research into the sensory environment, relating the appearance and decoration of places of worship with the religious practices performed within them. With the recent interest in the emotions and senses, there is the prospect of improving our understanding of how images were—literally—seen and why they provoked such strong reactions. It is also time to rebalance the confessional bias that has generally equated early modern iconoclasm with Protestantism. Megan Holmes’s ongoing research for a monograph titled Scratching the Surface focuses on the deliberate marking and scraping of late medieval and early modern panel paintings: the gouging out of the eyes and scoring of the faces and limbs of the principal figures in these religious works. This pre-Reformation defacement of altarpieces, frescoes, and devotional paintings raises important questions about the popular relationship with representational imagery. From another perspective, why is the Catholic destruction associated with the European expansion into the Americas and Asia generally excluded from the historiography of iconoclasm? The ideological convictions of the conquering powers led them to brand indigenous religious practices as idolatrous, raze their sacred sites, and destroy ritual images and artifacts. It indicates the need to conceive the motivations for iconoclasm much more broadly than simply in confessional terms. So while more recent cultural destruction has heightened awareness and has made a contribution, it is also important to research and understand early modern iconoclasm on its own terms.