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<\/p>\nConjure an act ofvandalism in your mind, and you probably think about it happening to an artwork hanging in a museum. In fact, the tradition predates Western art institutions, and was even in some cases state-sanctioned. The Byzantine Iconoclasm, which technically refers to two separate instances, was one such example. The emperor Leo III the Isaurian issued a spread of edicts to end the veneration of religious images, or icons, by calling for their destruction. The move was intended to solidify his reign by wiping out any pictures of God, forcing people to think of his own persona as the ultimate embodiment of power. As a result, various mosaics, sculptures, coins, and other artistic creations were struck, damaged, or destroyed altogether in the lands under Byzantine control. Successive emperors called for a similar measures<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n Sometimes, vandalisms are tied to larger political strife, as was the case when a suffragette took aim at a painting held at London\u2019s National Gallery. That painting, Diego Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s\u00a0Rokeby Venus<\/em>\u00a0(ca. 1647\u201351), was slashed by a knife-wielding Mary Richardson, who was moved to action by the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst, a fellow suffragette who had been protesting at Buckingham Palace in an effort to get British women the right to vote. \u201cI have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history,\u201d Richardson once said. Although Richardson only managed to cut Venus at her hip and back, she had done enough damage for the museum to close for two weeks while it restored the piece. She was given a six-month prison sentence, during which time she led a hunger strike and got herself freed after no more than a few weeks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n Robert Rauschenberg was many things: a painter, a sculptor, and, in a sense, even on one occasion a vandal. In 1953, he began a project that would involve erasing a preexisting artwork. He tried it first with his own drawings, but no dice: he found the result inert. So he approached Willem de Kooning, a vaunted Abstract Expressionist painter, and asked him for a work to wipe out. De Kooning somewhat reluctantly agreed, leaving the young artist with a drawing that he deemed forgettable. Using an eraser, Rauschenberg scratched away at it, leaving behind just some faint traces of it. The resulting work,\u00a0Erased de Kooning Drawing<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1953), is an example of what happens when the vandalism of an artwork constitutes a piece unto itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n How many strikes from a hammer does it take to severely damage a Renaissance masterpiece? In the case of Michelangelo\u2019s\u00a0Piet\u00e0<\/em>, it was just 12. In a 1972, Laszlo Toth, an unemployed geologist, dealt those dozen blows, knocking off the Virgin Mary\u2019s nose and leaving her head covering pocked with indents. The Vatican Museums then undertook a painstaking 10-month restoration process in which conservators reassembled the three fragments of her nose and the 100 remaining shards that flew off during the hammering. (In some ways, those conservators werelucky\u2014contemporary experts have said that if Toth hit the work at a different angle, he would have snapped Mary\u2019s head off.) Ultimately, the piece was made good as new and exhibited behind bulletproof glass. Toth was deemed socially dangerous by a Roman court and put in a mental hospital, then released after two years and deported from Italy to Australia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s\u00a0Mona Lisa<\/em>\u00a0simply cannot catch a break<\/a>. In the past 110 years alone, she has been stolen, hit with a teacup, nearly sliced, and\u00a0caked. But the most memorable vandalism of the piece involved a Japanese woman named Tomoko Yonezu and a can of spray paint. In 1974, the work had gone on tour from the Louvre in Paris to the National Museum in Tokyo, which had instituted crowd control measures that disability activists deemed discriminatory. Enraged by what she believed was an instance of ableism, Yonezu attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to spray-paint the\u00a0Mona Lisa<\/em>. Her resulting trial following her detainment became a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre in Japan. She was ultimately made to pay 300,000 yen, and the National Museum was forced to set aside a day when the disabled could pay a visit to the painting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n Tony Shafrazi is now known best as the early dealer of works by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, but back in 1974, he became the talk of the art world for an entirely different reason. That year, he marched into the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Picasso\u2019s\u00a0Guernica<\/em>\u00a0had been on long-term loan, and spray-painted the words \u201cKILL LIES ALL\u201d on the modernist masterpiece. The phrase was, in fact, a reference to a protest regarding the release of William Caley, a lieutenant who had been convicted for his role in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War; Shafrazi had also been involved in antiwar actions led by the Art Workers Coalition. Shafrazi was charged with criminal mischief, and the painting was spared because its thick layer of varnish \u201cacted as an invisible shield,\u201d William Rubin, then the director of MoMA, told the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n In 1975, Rembrandt\u2019s biggest painting,\u00a0The Night Watch<\/em>\u00a0(1642), was targeted by a man wielding a bread knife. He had been sent to Amsterdam\u2019s Rijksmuseum, he said, by \u201cthe Lord,\u201d who had ordered him to slice the piece. Although guards had initially attempted to hold him back, a dramatic scene transpired when he successfully cut a foot-long piece from the painting. \u201cWe must conclude the canvas is badly damaged,\u201d P. J. Van Thiel, the museum\u2019s acting director at the time, told the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>. Because the work was in such good condition prior to the vandalism, restorers at the museum were able to get the painting back to its original form in four years\u2014though that didn\u2019t stop another man from targeting the same work, this time with an unknown chemical, in 1990.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n Here is a particularly rare case of an artist taking aim at another\u2019s work without seeking permission first. In 1981, David Hammons paid a visit to Richard Serra\u2019s sculpture\u00a0T.W.U.<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1980), a hulking mass of Cor-Ten steel installed in Tribeca.\u00a0T.W.U.\u00a0<\/em>had already been defaced with graffiti, but Hammons was determined to add his own mark. He unzipped his pants and began urinating as the photographer\u00a0Dawoud Bey snapped pictures<\/a>. In the resulting images, a police officer stands idly by. In fact, this was no ordinary act of disobedience\u2014it was also a Hammons performance that has now become known as\u00a0Pissed Off<\/em>. Hammons also lobbed dozens of sneakers over the sculpture, for a performance titled\u00a0Shoe Tree<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n If at first you don\u2019t fully succeed in vandalizing a masterwork, try again. This seems to have been the approach taken in 1985 by a man\u2014described in some contemporaneous reports as a \u201cdeviant\u201d\u2014who visited the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and defaced Rembrandt\u2019s painting\u00a0Dana\u00eb<\/em> (1636), one of the crown jewels of the institution\u2019s collection. He first knifed the work, slashing open a portion of the painting that depicts Dana\u00eb\u2019s stomach. Then, when that was not enough, he threw a putrid liquid that some at the time believed was sulfuric acid. Whatever the substance was, it ate away at Rembrandt\u2019s paint, leaving some wondering if the picture would ever be the same. Miraculously, after a painstaking 12-year process, it was fully restored and put back on view.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n Hammons, who is no stranger to vandalism himself, found himself on the receiving end in 1989, when his public artwork\u00a0How Ya Like Me Now?\u00a0<\/em>was damaged. The work remains one of the most controversial ones by Hammons. It pictures a white-skinned version of the Black politician Jesse Jackson, whose image is cast at 14 feet wide and 16 feet tall. When it was exhibited outside in Washington, D.C., vandals took sledgehammers to it. Some said this showed a clear lack of understanding of what the work was really about\u2014Hammons was testing how race colored perceptions of politicians, according to curators who knew the artist\u2019s oeuvre well. Once the work was repaired, Hammons added a new element to the piece: the very weapons that had once been used to deface it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/GettyImages-3092180.jpg?w=800\")
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Robert Rauschenberg, 1966.<\/figure>\n![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/GettyImages-526243874.jpg?w=800\")
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