Just Stop Oil have spent the past year vandalising their way through the National Gallery in the over-orchestrated manner of a Cluedo suspect. Once it was Constable’s Hay Wain in Room 34 with a bit of glue. Then van Gogh’s Sunflowers in Room 43 with a Warholian can of tomato soup. The newest casualty is Velázquez’s seventeenth-century Rokeby Venus, its protective glass smashed in several places by miniature safety hammers.
Readers may at this point catch onto a sense of déjà vu. The nude Venus had already been victimised in 1914 by suffragette Mary Richardson in the National Gallery with a meat cleaver. She aimed to avenge the government’s treatment of Emmeline Pankhurst – ‘the most beautiful character in modern history’ – by destroying a resounding depiction of physical beauty. The Just Stop Oil connection is intentional. ‘Women did not get the vote by voting,’ explained one of the protesters. ‘It is time for deeds, not words.’
In all their enthusiasm over this clever reference to the painting’s political past, the protestors overlooked two details of the initial act.
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