Iconoclasm is all the rage. Majority-black Memphis just removed statues of two of the most odious figures in American history: the leaders of the Confederacy (Jefferson Davis) and Ku Klux Klan (Nathan Bedford Forrest). A statue of Theodore Roosevelt at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History was accused of exerting “dominance and superiority” over figures of Native American and African attendants and vandalized, though it was allowed to remain after a commission reviewed “symbols of hate.” As the woke extend ever more exacting scrutiny to historical figures, heritage groups (including some white nationalists) claim that statue removal is an assault on their identity.

Elites always erect monuments to signal what their inferiors should venerate, and new regimes always order the demolition of the old. At New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, artworks on display illustrate iconoclasm across the millennia—and show that you can’t escape the past forever, even when you physically destroy it.

Click the first thumbnail below to begin a guided tour of iconoclasm, past and present.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently ordered the removal of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from the Hall of Fame at Bronx Community College, leaving a mysterious gap in its semi-circle of 98 bronze busts.

Hatshepsut, one of Egypt’s few female pharaohs, would understand. Twenty years after her death, her nephew and successor Thutmose III smashed her statues and erased her name from the public record, to the consternation of early 20th-century archaeologists reconstructing Egyptian chronology. The Met’s simulacrum of Hatshepsut’s temple is filled with her pieced-together images, including this Large Kneeling Statue (ca. 1479–1458 B.C.E.), which depicts her as a male pharaoh.

In Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, a 76-foot-tall monument commemorates the discoverer of the New World. The explorer has been attacked for despoiling supposedly idyllic indigenous civilizations (pay no attention to those Aztec piles of skulls!), but Mayor Bill de Blasio will allow the statue to remain after placement of new explanatory markers.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall? In sixth century B.C.E. Athens, aristocratic families attested to their power by erecting elaborate funerary monuments. Among the tallest is this 13-foot marble stele of a young athlete and a little girl (ca. 530 B.C.E.). When the aristocratic families lost power to the tyrant Peisistratos in the second half of the century, many of their tombs were destroyed, possibly including the one that this stele marked.

Centuries later, the Roman Empire systematically eliminated images of dishonored emperors through its practice of damnatio memoriae. During the empire’s Third Century Crisis, emperors thriftily recut earlier busts of the baddies, such as this marble portrait of an emperor wearing the corona civica (ca. 250-284 C.E.). The front features a short hairstyle popular in the third century, but behind the ears, where few people were likely to notice, the flowing locks of (probably) first-century emperor Caligula were left untouched. The recut emperor was soon erased himself: few of them survived long in the chaos of the Third Century Crisis, and we don’t know his name.

Today we do digital damnatio memoriae. Actor Kevin Spacey was accused of sexual assault after completing his work in the film All the Money in the World. He was left on the cutting room floor and his scenes re-shot with Christopher Plummer, including a bit of digital tweaking. Neither actor sports an impressive corona civica.

The Western Roman Empire fell in 476 C.E., but the eastern segment (which we call the Byzantine Empire) partially recovered. The Byzantines, whose state religion was Christianity, were shaken by the rapid rise of the Islamic Caliphate, culminating in the siege of Constantinople (717-718 C.E.), which was followed by a massive Aegean volcanic eruption and tsunami (726 C.E.). Seeking to restore the simplicity of early Christianity, Emperor Leo III emulated Islam and barred the veneration of religious images (icons) as idolatrous — the first movement actually called iconoclasm. Few icons survived the waves of destruction lasting more than a century. Most of those remaining are on small gold coins or jewelry, such as this sixth-century clasp with intaglio medallion of the Virgin and Child. Once iconoclasm ended in 842 C.E., the Byzantine Empire produced new icons in vast numbers.

Today’s progressives target their own former icons, and the Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinners are disappearing before the assault. New Hampshire honors a different kind of assault: instead of slaveholders Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, its renamed Clinton-Kennedy Dinner venerates sexual predators. University of Virginia students shrouded a Thomas Jefferson statue in black, while contemporary progressive icon Al Sharpton has called for the defunding of Washington DC’s Jefferson Memorial. When Jefferson is finally erased, will Americans, like Byzantines, furtively turn their nickels into bracelets to commemorate the author of the Declaration of Independence?

Reformation-era Calvinists also sought a return to the purity of the early Church. In 1566’s Breaking of the Images, Protestants in cities across the Low Countries rioted against what they viewed as idolatrous Roman Catholic Church art, launching the Dutch Revolt against Habsburg rule and the Eighty Years War. Dutch Golden Age paintings of churches in the United Provinces (today’s Netherlands) illustrate the impact. Hendrick van Vliet’s Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft (1660) shows clean white interiors with their former religious statuary removed, and tall clear glass windows in the painting’s upper register — medieval stained glass was destroyed. But in what is now Belgium, Counter-Reformation Catholicism triumphed and filled refurbished Baroque churches with dramatic sculpture and religious art.

Stained glass is again under attack. Maintenance staffer Corey Menafee smashed an image of cotton-picking slaves in a dining hall at Yale’s Calhoun College. The university then hastened to remove other images glorifying pro-slavery ideologue John C. Calhoun and the antebellum South, and renamed its Calhoun College. Washington, DC’s National Cathedral performed a more orderly deconsecration of its Lee and Jackson windows, which, like the Jackson bust at Bronx Community College, had been installed during the Civil Rights Era at the behest of the Daughters of the Confederacy.

In its utopian quest for an egalitarian secular republic, the French Revolution destroyed huge amounts of religious imagery. Mistakenly believing that the crowned heads on Notre Dame’s portals represented medieval kings of France, the revolutionaries decapitated them. This head of King David (1145), originally from Paris’s Cathedral of Notre Dame, was among the victims.

Revolutionary War hero Col. William Crawford, who died in 1782, suffered a similar fate. His statue in Bucyrus, Ohio (seen here in happier days) was decapitated by people apparently believing he was a Confederate.

Europeans sailed the globe starting in the Age of Exploration, bringing Christianity to polytheist regions such as Polynesia, where missionaries demanded the destruction of nearly all images of native gods. (They kept a few for themselves as art.) This foot-tall Hawaiian Akua Ka’ai (stick god) could be inserted into the ground or a structure and used for domestic worship.

Worship of the old Polynesian gods has been making a comeback in our multicultural age. After massive flooding in Hawaii’s narrow Iao Valley (a significant area in the indigenous religion) washed 3,000 tons of rocks downstream, causing over $900,000 in damage, Maui County crushed some of the rocks and dumped them at the local landfill. When Native Hawaiians protested this desecration, iconoclastic Mayor Alan Arakawa responded, “There’s no such thing as sacred rocks,” adding that 19th-century King Kamehameha had declared Christianity to be Hawaii’s official religion. “In Christianity, if I remember the Ten Commandments correctly,” ‘Thou shall have no false God before me.’” South Maui Rep. Kaniela Ing denounced Arakawa’s “colonized, theocratic approach,” while the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs issued a fatwa: “Pohaku (rocks) are a cornerstone of Native Hawaiian material and living culture, providing . . . immense spiritual and political importance. . .” To date, the sacred rocks have failed to offer oracular flood control advice.

The Islamic State (ISIS), seeking to restore the purity of the early Caliphate, brought iconoclasm to the site of ancient Palmyra. This Roman Empire crossroads between East and West, located in modern Syria, thrived for more than a millennium under Islam, and in modern times became a tourist destination and UNESCO World Heritage site. After occupying the ancient city in 2015, ISIS beheaded the city’s retired director of antiquities, 83-year-old Khaled al-Asaad, and destroyed restored monuments until its final expulsion in 2017. This funerary relief (ca. 50–150 C.E.) entered the Met’s collection before nationalist laws barred foreign institutions from acquiring newly unearthed antiquities, which preserved it from iconoclasm or black market looting. Whenever the civil war ends, archaeologists will attempt to put the pieces of ancient Palmyra back together again. ∎ Close slideshow