Vandal Smashes Saintly Venice Statues with Hammer

VENICE, Italy (Reuters) - A vandal smashed the arms and beard of a 15th century statue of Moses in St Mark's Square in Venice, and other religious statues in the city lost their hands in similar hammer attacks over the last four days.

AGH! If there is one thing that really pisses me off, its mindless destruction. Book burning, statue smashing, graffiti, etc....I wanna find whose doing this and kick them!!

Link

I remember as a child reading in Life Magazine about the nose being chipped off of Mary's face in the Pieta statue and being horrified - even at that young age - as to the mindless destruction of so beautiful a sculpture.

I went on to get a degree in Art History - so it must have been 'in' me to revere fine works of art..

I hope it was the work of a single unbalanced individual and they find him and not the work of some 'group' trying to destroy Judeo/Christian symbols.

Edit: PS: By the same token, I have worried that beautiful and irreplacable works of art might be destroyed by bombings in Iraq - the very cradle of civilization! Sumerian art and architecture is really impressive.

[edit on 30-6-2004 by Mystic7]

It's like when the Taliban blew up the Buddhas. Doesn't matter what the statues represented, but that such historical art was just blown up. Gone. Never to be recovered by later generations who might not agree with such extreme thinking. Such destruction is so unfortunate in its permanence. Thankfully in this day and age we can at least have photographs of these things before they're destroyed so there will be an accurate record, but what a loss.