Since ancient times, people not only create images or worship them, but also attack them: they break them, burn them, and sometimes deliberately mutilate them - behead them or blind them. Most often, violence falls on the images of (alien) gods and (overthrown) rulers. It accompanies most religious and political revolutions, as well as many armed conflicts, but at the same time it is built into everyday life - into the relationships that a person builds with the invisible world, power and other people. Damage and even “killing” of images is apparently just as ancient practice as well as worship of them. Depending on the size and material, the images were mutilated or broken into pieces. Often, after such an attack, the image continued to “live”, and the wounds inflicted on it were reminders of its powerlessness and the triumph of those who mutilated it. This book is dedicated to the various motives that prompted the attack on visual images in Europe of the long Middle Ages... From revenge on the demons and sinners painted on sheets of manuscripts, to the beating of statues of saints in order to force them to help. From the iconoclastic war that Protestant iconoclasts waged against Catholic idols, to moral censorship, which hastened to cover up or hide from view images of naked bodies. By piercing, cutting off, crossing out the eyes of the depicted, people broke eye contact with the image, in a sense, “killed” » him or demonstrated that he was already dead.

FeaturesAbout 200 illustrations. Some of them are medieval miniatures that have never been published in Russia.