1985 Monographs
Iconoclasts and Their Motives
This book aims to counteract the overall scholarly neglect of the phenomenon of iconoclasm. Rather than analyzing the history of anti-image movements, the author discerns broad commonalities in the motives of many disparate individual acts of iconoclasm. Beyond their role as attention-getting gestures, acts of iconoclasm depend on the power of the conflation of image and prototype; iconoclasts are either disturbed by this conflation and reject it by mutilating the sign, or exploit it to enable a form of resistance to the prototype. Most generally, iconoclasm reinforces the necessity of attending to the dialectical relationship between works of art and their beholders.
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More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Art History and Archaeology
- Published Here
- April 6, 2010
Notes
This work is available in "Iconoclasm" by David A. Freedberg, The University of Chicago Press, Fall 2020.