Images of Deposed Fall on Ceremony

When regimes are toppled, their statues often quickly follow, public-art historians said Wednesday, placing the sacking of Saddam Hussein’s likeness within a tradition that has touched leaders from Caligula to Ceausescu.

Statues “become recharged” in times of strife, said John Pollini, a professor of classical art and archeology at USC. Assaulting a fallen and resented leader’s image is “instant gratification. Whenever you have a regime change, that’s what happens. It goes back to the beginning of political institutions.”

In fact, when Egyptian troops seized control of the Suez Canal in 1956, they celebrated at Port Said by blowing up a 40-foot-high sculpture of the canal’s builder, 19th century French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps.

More recently, Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders in 2001 chose a statuary target to make their contempt for the outside world plain. Over the objections of historians and art experts, they used explosives to destroy a pair of 1,500-year-old Buddhas sculpted into a cliff.

Yet if history is any guide, Pollini said, “there are probably people in Iraq who will now keep images of Saddam hidden, and venerate him. This happened in antiquity too.”

One irony in Wednesday’s images from Baghdad, said Christine Knoke, assistant curator at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, is that the statue-destroying Iraqis and U.S. soldiers were collaborating on the destruction of an idol -- an act endorsed, in certain contexts, by fundamentalist Muslims and Christians alike.

Historians also say that statue-toppling comes in various forms -- grass-roots uprisings, state-sponsored campaigns and outside invasions.

“In the Roman period, when they had the ‘damnation of the memory’ of an emperor, for example Caligula or Nero, what they often did was destroy the images,” Pollini said. “And in some cases, they would re-carve portraits -- changing the image into the face of the successor.”

Thus, to conserve marble and signal prevailing sentiment after the death of the unpopular Caligula in the 1st century, scores of his statues were recut to represent Augustus (a more popular predecessor) or his successor, Claudius. But of all re-sculpture candidates, “Nero was the best,” Pollini said, “because he had a nice, fleshy face, and you could cut it down more.”

In the era of 24-hour cable news, symbolic sculpture-smashing surged in the late 1980s, with the close of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall, though not intended as a sculpture, had gained so much symbolic importance by the time it came down in 1989 that thousands joined in its celebratory dismantling as a sort of spontaneous creative act. Indeed, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich came to play at the scene while the hammers swung.

In Romania, the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu (also in 1989) prompted citizens in Bucharest to attack a 30-foot bronze sculpture of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The statue resisted -- it took three days of work with wrecking balls, blowtorches and industrial cranes to bring it down.

By 1991, emboldened citizens throughout the dissolving Soviet Union were tipping, dragging, bashing and beheading Lenin statues. (The slaughter of the Lenins was preceded, in the late 1950s, by the felling of Joseph Stalin statues.)

When Chinese dissenters needed a symbol to display in Tiananmen Square in 1989, they came up with an effigy of the State of Liberty in Styrofoam, plaster and wood. Last month, to protest the U.S. attack on Iraq, French protesters seized upon a 7 1/2-foot-high copy of the Statue of Liberty in Bordeaux, spattered it with red paint and tried to set it on fire.

In the 1978-79 revolt that bought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power in Iran, revolutionaries pulled down a tall statue of Reza Shah (father of the last shah, Reza Pahlavi).

But history doesn’t necessarily end for a downed statue when it is pulled from its pedestal. In Budapest, local leaders have created a Statue Park Museum, featuring more than three dozen deposed statues, including Lenin, Marx and Engels. The idea, one said, is to create “a memento of an unfortunate era.”