Are you a creative or a destructive?

There is a stage direction in The Glass Menagerie in which Tennessee Williams describes a tune that will recur through the play. Like a piece of delicately spun glass, he says, it should summon the thought of ‘How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken’.

I think of that line often. Not least this week when two young protestors from Just Stop Oil took their hammers to the ‘Rokeby Venus’ of Velázquez at the National Gallery. Last year their cohorts threw soup over Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’. Others glued themselves to the frame of another Van Gogh and others still to the frame of Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain’. The culprits responsible for that crime were fined the non-princely sum of £540 each – which was merely the cost of restoration.

If you let such people get away with one thing they will get away with something more, testing the limits each time to see how much they can get away with. So it was with a certain inevitability that these two went at the Velázquez this week with hammers.

Perhaps we are becoming desensitised but I found myself watching them with a combination of rage and resignation. If the National Gallery does not care to protect the national collection, if it cannot be bothered to employ guards who will actually guard the works, or there are not members of the public who will tackle these people, then what exactly is to be done?

Still the sight of these two young people going at it with hammers was quite something. They managed to smash through the protective glass in many places and I suppose we shall see if they have damaged the canvas itself. The pair’s online supporters are pointing out that this is the same canvas that Mary Richardson attacked in 1914 in the name of women’s suffrage.