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Iconoclasts have never known quite what to do with the ruined fragments that they leave behind If we imagine the first English iconoclasts in action as they undertook to rid churches of images and holy objects in the sixteenth century, images of grim-faced fanatics wielding hammers and flaming torches are likely to spring to mind But if iconoclasm is loud and violent in its fury, it is haunted by its quiet aftermath, in which the meanings that it releases prove troublingly difficult to control One response might be to leave nothing behind at all In 1547, as iconoclasm in England assumed new ferocity under Edward VI, a royal injunction urged the clergy to remove and destroy all ‘monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition; so that there remain no memory of the same’   This enforced forgetting, however, was a dangerous strategy If superstition were utterly purged and its memory obliterated, there was the risk that it might be repeated The overcoming of error needed to be remembered if its repetition were to be guarded against In many churches broken statues or desecrated images were accordingly left in situ, as salutary reminders of a reviled past This too had its risks, however Even in their broken form, such idols might continue to inspire reverence rather than revulsion After all, if the fragmentation of relics in the Middle Ages in no way reduced their sanctity – a splinter from the True Cross was as holy as the whole – then the sacred remained sacred even in its ruined state Iconoclasm, which seemed to aim at absolute and irrevocable change, turned out to be torn between forms of remembrance and forgetting that it could not fully control   Art Under Attack is the first exhibition devoted to the history of British Iconoclasm, and it is in many ways the realisation of an iconoclast’s nightmares If the iconoclast wants the object to vanish and be forgotten, the exhibition reveals the stubborn tendency of defaced objects to linger and accrue new meanings The first two rooms, devoted to the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth century,