The protests that began with the murder of George Floyd on the last 25th of May brought with them sensitive issues and topics. Also from the point of view of street furniture and public art. In this way, American and European cities have been invaded by new murals and street art works, as a sign of support for the cause of the protests, and at the same time, in Europe as in America, many statues have been “defaced” or even removed, because of a colonial or slave past of those portrayed.
10 statues famous for being removed or vandalized throughout history
Statues and monuments placed in the public space have been the subject of discussions and protests. From Babylonian gods to colonialists and slave traders.
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- Romina Totaro
- 24 June 2020
First in Europe to receive this honourable treatment was the statue of Edward Colston, in the centre of Bristol, UK. The statue, after being knocked down and smeared with paint by demonstrators, was rolled down Anchor Road and pushed into the port of Bristol. Piet Hein, King Leopold II of Belgium, Winston Churchill, and even Christopher Columbus, all followed the same fate.In Italy the most talked about and discussed example is the statue dedicated to the famous journalist Indro Montanelli, placed in the historic gardens of Milan that now bear his name, and smeared for the second time. The story has been much debated in recent years: Montanelli participated in the war of Eritrea at the time of Fascism and during his stay in Africa he married a twelve-year-old Ethiopian girl. In the United States, on the other hand, among the various removals of the faces of slave traders during the demonstrations, there are also proposals for the transfer of these monuments by the administrations themselves and cultural instiuations. The first citizen of Philadelphia Jim Kenney, for example, has ordered the removal of the bronze statue depicting Frank Rizzo, controversial mayor for two terms and former authoritarian chief of police, while the Museum of Natural History in New York announced the removal of the bronze depicting the twenty-sixth president Theodore Roosevelt, not for his political ideas, but for the “hierarchical composition” of his representation.
Despite the resonance and clamour of the latter cases, it is certainly not the first time that statues and monuments dedicated to characters or certain historical moments are destroyed or vandalized. Moving from the recycling of Roman bronze statues, to the complete elimination of the Gallery of the Kings of Notre-Dame during the French Revolution, to the more contemporary cases involving the statues of football champions, the statuary representation has hardly let people talk about it only for artistic or material qualities.
The ancient city of Babylon, capital of a kingdom that was gradually extending its rule throughout southern Mesopotamia, was also considered the city of the god Marduk, victor over the forces of chaos and creator of the universe, and designer of Babylon itself, literally the “gate to heaven”. In the year 689 B.C., however, during the destruction carried out by Sennacherib, the statue of the god was deported, an event considered by literature as a sacrilegious act.
The gilded bronze statue, originally located in the vestibule of the Domus Aurea, depicted the Roman emperor in the guise of a god. There are many hypotheses made about his disappearance. Some scholars hypothesize the destruction due to an earthquake that Rome suffered in the fifth century, while according to other theories the Colossus was melted down by Pope Gregory the Great, who could not stand the presence of a pagan God, so he had it dismantled and melted down, in order to reuse it in the production of the cannons of Castel Sant'Angelo. For centuries, in fact, the bronze was recycled from the only available deposits: monuments and works of art.
The David was commissioned to Michelangelo in 1501, to decorate one of the buttresses in the apse area of the Florentine cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The problem of its location sparked a real conflict in the city. During the debate, the existing disputes between the various creators had emerged, that inevitably took on a political significance. When in 1504, in fact, they took the statue to Piazza della Signoria, it was stoned by a group of young faithful of the faction ousted from power.
In the devastation of Notre-Dame during the French Revolution, all precious metal objects were sent to the mint to be melted down and, from October 1793, all the statues on the facade, both those in the Gallery of the Kings and those on the portals, were destroyed as they were believed to represent the kings of France. These were later found during restoration work in the basement of the Banque Française du Commerce Extérieur in 1977, and are now on display at the Cluny Museum.
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was an anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary, which began with a peaceful student demonstration, but soon turned into a revolt against the dictatorship of pro-Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi and the Soviet presence in the country. During the event the statue of the dictator Stalin, eight meters high, was knocked down by the population, and only the boots remained in place. The rest of the body was torn to pieces and taken away as souvenirs, and Hungarian citizens still keep a fragment of that statue at home. At the end of the 1980s, when the communist dictatorships began to collapse, a massive removal of all the statues in public places, now either disappeared or kept in museums where they are piled up, started throughout Eastern Europe.
In the Bamiyan Valley, in Afghanistan, two statues of the Buddha, sculpted by a Buddhist religious group in the rock walls, were destroyed in 2001 by Afghan religious, a few months after the attack on the Twin Towers, following the declaration of the construction works to the principles of Islam, which in fact prohibits the representation of the gods. Unique monuments in the world, one 38 meters high and dating back 1800 years, the other was 53 meters high and 1500 years old, it is thought that the two statues were built in the 3rd and 5th century by the Kushans and the Ephthalites at the height of their empires. They were destroyed in a few days, and attempts by world associations to save them were useless.
A monument celebrating the Soviet army built in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, has been vandalized many times. The group of anonymous artists Destructive Creation, in fact, has repainted the work on several occasions, with different colours and themes. In 2011 the military figures were transformed, in a pop key, repainting them into characters such as Superman, Ronald McDonald, Santa Claus and Wonder Woman. Under them was scribbled “At peace with time”.
An example of how the sculptural work can become an active part of a protest is the ironic case of the statue dedicated to the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, a tribute by Carl Jacobens to the famous fairytale figure, without any patriotic or political value. Beheaded in 1964 by the Situationist Movement and repeatedly targeted by vandalism and colored paint, in 2012 she was dressed in a pink mask and a sign that read “Liberate Pussy Riot Now”, as part of the countless demands for release from captivity of the Russian punk group, arrested on charges of “hooliganism” after a performance in a cathedral in Moscow.
A protest born in 2015 as a call for a reform of the academic program, considered too Eurocentric and not pertinent to the needs of students, led to the removal from the University of Cape Town of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, British settler who arrived in South Africa in the late 1800s and inspired segregationist policies. Even then, there was a great debate about the removal from public places of the monuments of people commemorating the years of white supremacy in the country, and their transfer to special museums.
Even the statues of footballers are often victims of vandalism, targeted by disappointed fans. Besides Messi, Ronaldo and Chilean Sanchez, this January also included the golden statue of Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović near the Malmö stadium. Inaugurated just last September, the figure was vandalised and fans set fire to its base. What caused their anger was the purchase by the Swedish striker of 25% of his rival club, Hammarby.