http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/10344483/Art-Under-Attack-Tate-Britain-review.html
The exhibition starts with the familiar story of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, then moves on to sacrilegious annihilation of religious imagery by the government of Edward VI. So effective was the order to “utterly extinct and destroy” religious images, that the first gallery is relatively empty, apart from a sad miscellany of mutilated fragments of sculpture, shards of stained glass, and savagely defaced paintings – each and every one a sickening reminder of how much of this country’s visual culture was lost during the Reformation. The deliberate destruction of any work of art is distressing, but since the reformers focused on sacred images, the sense of violation is even more acute. In front of a decapitated Madonna or the viciously scratched face of Christ, your instinct is to avert your eyes as you’d do in front of a mutilated corpse.
As it happens a mutilated corpse (or the representation of one) is the most eloquent work of art in the entire show, a limestone figure of the Dead Christ carved by a Netherlandish sculptor working in this country in the first quarter of the 16th century. No reproduction can begin to suggest the overwhelming power of the realistically carved torso and head of Christ’s body in transitu (that is, during the period between His death on the Cross and the Resurrection when the flesh was subject to corruption like any other corpse). We look down not on a divine personage but on a human cadaver in the early stages of rigor mortis. After the reformers had hacked off the figure’s right arm, legs, and feet they stopped their foul work. I’d like to believe that it is a tribute to the artist’s skill that they could not bring themselves to smash a face that with its half -closed eyes and open mouth is so expressive of vulnerability, suffering and resignation.
The only part of Islam that comprises that puritan fundamentalist sect is the part that reads the Koran.