King David
Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1938
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.
Published on: January 22, 2018