In JB Macdonald's masterpiece Lochaber No More, he bids farewell to Scotland with a swash and buckle worthy of Mel Gibson. Even in his own lifetime, though, poor Charlie never stood a chance. But if it's truth you're after, despite the exhibition's title, you won't find it in the images of the Prince currently on view at the National Army Museum. From biscuit tin to contemporary engraving, they tell a tale of iconographic invention and ideological conflict. Our image of the prince has been coloured by time and fancy The Victorians loved him. we brake down 1000 pictures superstitious; I brake down 200; 3 of God the Father, and 3 of Christ, and the Holy Lamb, and 3 of the Holy Ghost like a dove with wings; and the 12 Apostles were carved in wood, on the top of the roof, which we gave order to take down; and 20 cherubins to be taken down; and the sun and the moon in the east window, by the King's arms, to be taken down."n Andrew Graham-Dixon's `A History of British Art' is published on 25 April at pounds 25 (copies can be ordered, post free, from 01624 675137).
It's Bonnie Prince Charlie, who 250 years ago today was routed at Culloden That much at least is fact. His BBC2 series of the same name starts this Sunday at 7.30pm. You know the man on the shortbread tin. We brake down a picture of God the Father, 2 crucifixes, and pictures of Christ, about an hundred in all; and gave order to take down a cross off the steeple; and diverse angels, 20 at least, on the roof of the church."At Clare... Dowsing's record of his image-smashing activities in Suffolk in the early 1640s is the baldest and also the most haunting account of the progress of the iconoclastic movement.
His diary is the record of a vanishing, a curt tale in which, behind the proud officious enumeration of tasks accomplished, we can hear tearing and smashing and can see the fabric of medieval culture going, going, gone under the hammer of a new faith.Dowsing, rapacious devourer of art and enumerator of his own conquests, was both the Don Giovanni and the Leporello of the English Reformation He was particularly active in January 1643 He wrote:"Sudbury, Suffolk Peter's Parish... A man with a pickaxe in one hand and a pen in the other, he kept a tally of his destructions as he went along. The parishioners of Ufford in Suffolk saved the great wooden font-cover in their church by the simple expedient of pretending to lose the key to the church door when the Church's agent charged with its destruction arrived in the village. He left, cursing, vowing to return, but somehow never got around to it. But although the process of Reform was resisted, the logic and the vigour that lay behind it proved ultimately irresistible and the man locked out at Ufford was to have the last laugh.His name was William Dowsing and he was one of the most vigorous of the last English iconoclasts. The unexhibited and apparently unwanted property of the Church of England, they have long been kept in several old wooden vegetable crates marked, inaptly, "They're fresh, they're British"...In other paradoxical cases it seems that Catholic recusants ensured the survival of images by defacing them, but just a little.
In many cases it is impossible to distinguish between failed iconoclasm and deliberate partial defacement.Even the annals of the final, Puritan phase of Reform, the last mopping up operation of English iconoclasm, are full of stories of local resistance to the visitations of the destroyers... The half-hearted act of iconoclasm, the act of going through the motions of Reform by tamely scratching out part of the figure but leaving the rest intact and reparable, proved among the most effective methods of resistance. Their original colouring is remarkably intact, and it enhances the pathos of these vibrantly alive heads of stone. They still await restoration and are still almost unknown, these English prophets with their faces of Hellenistic dignity. Among the most remarkable is a stone Tree of Jesse (right), carved sometime in the 1470s, which was hacked to pieces by the Reformers in the 1560s. The pieces were swept up by an anonymous sympathiser in the hope that, one day, someone might attempt the jigsaw puzzle which would restore them to their former glory. The potent realism and the beguiling presence of the most affecting art of the pre-Reformation period may partly explain the violence of the reaction against it Destruction can be seen as a kind of back-handed compliment.
To deface or smash an image is to acknowledge its power.The idealistic Protestants saw their destruction as a means of disproving the power of images and loosening the chains of superstitious belief which they felt had tightened around the minds of the laity. During the most extreme phase of the Reformation, the Puritan moment of the 1640s, the abolition of Christmas and the destruction of Stonehenge were temporarily discussed as ways of furthering the cause. The pagan festival and the pagan stone circle were to be done away with because, just like the images of the Catholic faith, they were part of the dangerous, misleading, ancient superstitious history of the nation, a history that needed to be unwritten.But there was, also, much resistance to the Reformation throughout the long century of destructions. There are many stories of doors locked against the destroyers, of bands of devout Catholic women barring the entrances to their churches, of treasured images being hidden or buried against the day when the Catholic faith might, just might, return.
