Iconoclasm in the Low Countries

In August 1566, Protestant Dutch iconoclasts entered Catholic churches, destroyed statues and defaced tombstones. The event is usually remembered as the Beeldenstorm (e.g. Storming the Statues).

Beeldenstorm occurred in the aftermath of a tense period when the new King of Spain, Philip II, attempted to impose Catholic conformity in the Low Countries. Yet beginning with 1560, Protestants began to assert their faith in spite of possible repercussions. In particular, "field sermons" or open-air sermons (hagepreken) that were held outside towns helped spread Protestant beliefs. 

The tensions boiled over in August, when iconoclastic acts spread like wild fire through Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Maastricht. An English Catholic theologian, Nicolas Sander, thus described the destruction in the Church of Our Lady in Antwerp:

... these fresh followers of this new preaching threw down the graven and defaced the painted images, not only of Our Lady but of all others in the town. They tore the curtains, dashed in pieces the carved work of brass and stone, brake the altars, spoilt the clothes and corporesses, wrested the irons, conveyed away or brake the chalices and vestiments, pulled up the brass of the gravestones, not sparing the glass and seats which were made about the pillars of the church for men to sit in. ... the Blessed Sacrament of the altar ... they trod under their feet and (horrible it is to say!) shed their stinking piss upon it ... these false bretheren burned and rent not only all kind of Church books, but, moreover, destroyed whole libraries of books of all sciences and tongues, yea the Holy Scriptures and the ancient fathers, and tore in pieces the maps and charts of the descriptions of countries.

Iconoclastic riots were not confined to the Low Countries alone: they also occurred in France, Germany, Switzerland, England and Scotland. 

The destruction eventually led to a programme of redecorating churches in the Catholic lands, with many being given a Baroque makeover. 

Credit: Georgiana Hedesan (June 2018)