Oliver Cromwell reportedly paused over the body of Charles I – freshly liberated of its head – and muttered, “Cruel necessity.” No doubt he saw many of his cruelties as necessary: not only regicide, but also dismantling England’s rich liturgical heritage. Like the Crown, the Anglican Church’s ecclesiastical splendour stood as an impediment to his radically Protestant vision. Iconoclasts seldom hate art itself, but rather what particular artworks represent.

We saw this recently at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. On January 20 – Martin Luther King Jr. Day – CNN reported that the school had decided to cover a dozen 130-year-old murals depicting Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the New World.