A glimpse of the lost art of painted wooden synagogues popularized among Eastern European Jewish communities in the 17th and 18th centuries
ARCHES: iconoclasm
Learn why the Byzantines argued about images for over a century.
Byzantine Iconoclasm and the Triumph of Orthodoxy
Not all tangible cultural heritage is in need of preservation, and sometimes a community requires, even celebrates, the destruction of cultural objects.
Submerged, burned, and scattered: celebrating the destruction ...
Manuscripts have complex lives—learn about the mutilation, dispersal, and framing, of two important Iranian manuscripts
Making and Mutilating Manuscripts of the Shahnama
Alexander, the Mongols, and the great epic of Iran.
Folio from a Shahnama, The Bier of ...
Producing this lush miniature involved many Persian artists—and likely some familiarity with Chinese sources.
The Court of Gayumars
How can the destruction of an artifact also be an act of preservation?
Destruction as Preservation: Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a ...
Rewriting history in ancient Rome.
Erased from memory: the Severan Tondo
There are many examples of damnatio memoriae throughout the history of the Roman Republic and Empire.
Rewriting history: damnatio memoriae in ancient Rome
Metaphorically therefore, it could be argued that Rauschenberg was erasing not just a drawing, but this very idea of artistic, masculine authorship.
Erasing Art: Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning drawing
Controversy over the nature of religious images was not new in the sixteenth century.
Iconoclasm in the Netherlands in the Sixteenth ...
Two medieval Spanish monasteries make their way to the United States, and survive to be reconstructed — barely.
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