Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature)

When we think of breaking images, we assume that it happens somewhere else. We also tend to think of iconoclasts as barbaric. Iconoclasts are people like the Taliban, who blew up Buddhist statues in 2001. We tend, that is, to look with horror on iconoclasm. This book argues instead that iconoclasm is a central strand of Anglo-American modernity. Our horror at the destruction of art derives in part from the fact that we too did, and still do, that. This is most obviously true of England's iconoclastic century between 1538 and 1643. That century of legislated early modern image breaking, exceptional in Europe for its jurisdictional extension and duration, stands at the core of this book. That's when written texts, especially poems, rather than visual images became our living monuments. Surely, though, the story of image breaking stops in the eighteenth century, with its enlightened cultivation of the visual arts and the art market. Not so, argues Under the Hammer: once started, iconoclasm is difficult to stop. It ripples through cultures, into the psyche, and it ripples through history. Museums may have protected images from the iconoclast's hammer, but also subject images to metaphorical iconoclasm. Aesthetics may have drawn a protective circle around the image, but as it did so, it also neutralised the image. The ripple effect also continues across the Atlantic, into puritan culture, into twentieth-century American Abstract Expressionism, and into the puritan temple of modern art. That, in fact, is where this book starts, with mid-twentieth-century abstract painting: the image has survived, just, but it bears the scars of a 500 year history. Contents......Page 10 List of Illustrations......Page 11 List of Abbreviations......Page 14 Introduction......Page 16 1. Iconoclasm in Melbourne, Massachusetts, and the Museum of Modern Art......Page 33 2. Learn to Die: Late Medieval English Images before the Law......Page 64 3. Statues of Liberty: Iconoclasm and Idolatry in the English Revolution......Page 100 4. Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm and the Enlightenment......Page 131 Conclusion......Page 170 Notes......Page 174 Bibliography......Page 211 A......Page 224 B......Page 225 C......Page 226 F......Page 227 H......Page 228 I......Page 229 K......Page 231 M......Page 232 O......Page 233 S......Page 234 T......Page 235 W......Page 236 Z......Page 237 Iconoclasm is not a barbaric act which takes place somewhere else but is instead a central strand of Anglo-American modernity. Our horror at the destruction of art derives in part from the fact that we did, and still do, that. This is most obviously true of England's iconoclastic century between 1538 and 1643, which stands at the core of this book.--[Source inconnue] Summary: Iconoclasm is not a barbaric act which takes place somewhere else but is instead a central strand of Anglo-American modernity. Our horror at the destruction of art derives in part from the fact that we did, and still do, that. This is most obviously true of England's iconoclastic century between 1538 and 1643, which stands at the core of this book.