ABSTRACT
The iconoclastic riots of 1566 mark in the view of most historians the onset of the revolt of the Netherlands. Thanks to the oft-reproduced engravings of Frans Hogenberg and Jan Luycken, which depict the systematic destruction of statues and altars, the Calvinist onslaught on the churches that year must also rank as one of the most familiar episodes in the history of the Revolt. Yet it is an event about which the Dutch feel some embarrassment. Nor is this embarrassment limited to the exponents of art history, understandably dismayed by the wholesale destruction of religious artefacts and paintings. The Protestant authors of a fairly recent textbook on the history of the Church described the events of August 1566 as ‘a calamitous event’ and they condemned ‘the people’s passion for destruction’ in terms reminiscent of those used a century earlier by the foremost Dutch historian of the nineteenth century, Robert Fruin.1
